THE DEMISE OF NATIONALISM (PART 2: THE WESTERN IMPERIAL TRADITION)

by James Lawrence

In the first part of this post, we started an assault against the Alt-Right position on nationalism. Then we somehow got sidetracked, and ended up on a long stroll through Chinese and Mediterranean antiquity. 

 

Bear with my argument here. It didn't really wander off-topic; it just went the long way around the Alt-Right hill. And it picked up some materiel along the way: the iron logic by which feudalism dissolves into nationalism, and nationalism coagulates into empire.

I'm using these three Western terms in a rough, analogical way, so as to encompass all their variants in different times and places. By feudalism, I mean a loose political organisation, based on a thin elite network spread out over the top of society. At this stage, both political power and military force can be commanded by a minority of noblemen. The feudal network extends too widely for them to be excessively parochial, and so the distinction between themselves and the common people is more important than the difference between one region and another. 

Nationalism, i.e. populist petty-statism, emerges when the centre of the feudal order loses control. Multiple centres of power emerge, and the logic of their position compels them to struggle for supremacy. To survive this struggle, rulers must centralise power at home, and assemble mass armies to project it abroad. In both cases, the effect is to squeeze out the nobility and raise up the commoners. The patriotic people become the focus of society, but the escalation of war exacts a high price in their blood.

This state of affairs is not permanent. If the logic of division is competition, then the logic of competition is the selection of a winner. So one of the power centres ends up subjugating the others, and restores the breadth of the feudal order, while retaining the depth of the nationalist state. This, of course, is empire.

An empire no longer needs, or wants, large armies of commoners in its interior. Nor does it want its regions controlled by rival groupings of elites. So nationalism goes into decline, and a new elite network comes into being. Central power remains strong. The elites do not go back to aristocratic autonomy, and nor do the people go back to political irrelevance. But even if the state falls, or the empire is pulled apart by regionalism and elitism, the likely result will be a new contest for imperial power. Much more damage would be needed to thrust society back to an earlier stage in the process.

Note my use of the word 'logic' for this process – not fate, destiny, inevitable progress, etc. Note also that I do not reduce its ideological shifts to a puppet-show animated by the state. Ethnic feeling, popular interests, and xenophobia are perennial human realities. So are elite snobbery, cosmopolitanism, and universalism. What I'm trying to shed light on is not which of these is 'real', but which is most likely to find expression in state power and successful application to reality.

Armed with this reasoning, we can finally approach the history of the West. This is a more treacherous landscape than antiquity, because whole swathes of it lie under a fog of democratic mysticism. But as regards nationalism, we can make out two rival vantage points. One of them is modernism, a shaky structure erected by globalist court scholars. The other is primordialism, the hill on which the Alt-Right prometheally dies as it waits for the nationalist resurgence.

Modernists say that nationalism is a recent construction, disguised as an ancient tradition. They attribute it to railroads, newspapers, bourgeois propaganda, Latin American influences, all of these and more – anything but draw the obvious connection between nationalism, mass warfare, and populist rule, because this would not please a globalist establishment bent on shedding its nationalism while titivating its democracy. If you want some idea of the bullshit content of modernism, here's one of the leading modernists getting the Augean stables treatment at Counter-Currents.

'Primordialism' refers to the opposite view, that nations are constant and ancient. Those who defend this position do a good job of rebutting the modernists, by showing that ethnicity was politically important before the modern era. But they cannot say why nationalism has been so much more important in some times and places than in others. At best, they can resort to organic metaphors: an incipient nation as a seed, which then grows into a tree, etc. etc. Note that this assumes a human social body with no distinct parts, developing by the blind destiny of the vegetable kingdom.

In primordialism, we see an illusion of stability; in modernism, a whirl of trivia. In this respect, the two theories resemble the static earth and chaotic planets in the geocentric model. And I would take the analogy further, and say that these theories are just flip sides of political geocentrism – by which I mean the assumption of democracy as a ontological fact. That is to say, modernists and primordialists both assume that popular forces exert more traction on the state than vice versa. They just disagree on whether those forces are constant or fluctuating, primordial or modern.

What happens when you get the basics wrong

By making the opposite assumption – that state power exerts more traction – we can come up with a basic logical progression that actually makes sense. But we will still go wrong unless we distinguish between two centres of social gravity: political power and religious authority. Western civilisation can be compared to a binary star system, as it divides two types of power that were much more closely united in other civilisations like China.

This duality gives rise to conflicting accounts of nationalism, even in those who have escaped the modernist-primordialist trap. For the political side, we can refer to The Origins of Nationalism by Caspar Hirschi. For the religious side, we will look at The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony.

 

Hirschi's book goes deeper and answers more questions. Its author was a believer in the modernist theory, until he specialised in Renaissance humanism. He noticed that the humanists, writing in the 14th and 15th centuries, obsessively disparaged foreign nations and glorified their own. Here was a nationalist discourse, long before the emergence of the modern nation-state.

That's not to say that Hirschi is a primordialist. He distinguishes the principle of nationalism from the fact of ethnicity (as one would distinguish liberalism from liberty, feminism from femininity, etc.). He also distinguishes it from the ingroup-outgroup distinctions of tribes (kinsmen vs. outsiders), religions (believers vs. infidels), and empires (the civilised vs. the barbarians). Nationalism implies a multipolar order, a set of independent states in competition with each other.

We see this order everywhere on modern maps of the world. But according to Hirschi, it was born out of the special political culture of Europe:

"My exploration of theory...relates the origins of nationalism to the legacy of the Roman Empire in the Middle Ages, describing the mediaeval political culture as secondary Roman imperialism within a fragmented territorial structure. It attributes the emergence of nationalism to the particular tensions created by this contradiction. Nationalism, in a nutshell, is here conceived as a political discourse constructed by chronically failing would-be-empires stuck in a battle to keep each other at bay. It is treated as highly competitive, transforming the monarchical quest for universal dominion into an all-encompassing contest between abstract communities."

 

Nationalism, then, is the fragmentation of imperialism. It would not be difficult to apply this theory to the warring states of China. But to show that it is true of Europe as well, we'll have to take a closer look at this "legacy of the Roman Empire in the Middle Ages".

Mediaeval Europeans believed that they still lived under the Roman Empire. (Dante, for one, wrote a book on the subject.) Moderns, following the example of Voltaire, think of this as a comical instance of mediaeval ignorance and superstition. And yet, technically, they were not exactly wrong.

 

The Western Roman Empire certainly collapsed in the fifth century, under the barbarian migrations. Its territories were overrun, its provinces were carved up into kingdoms, the city of Rome was sacked, and the last figurehead-emperor was deposed. But the Empire had long been divided into eastern and western halves, and Rome had ceased to be the political capital of either. So when the Western Empire fell, sole emperorship reverted to the ruler of the Eastern Empire (who proceeded to cause much more damage than the barbarians in the course of his attempt to reconquer Italy).

The Eastern Roman Empire could not recover its lost territories. But by the eighth century, the Franks were absorbing most of them into a barbarian empire to match the old Western Roman one. The bishop of Rome (i.e. the pope) needed a strong protector for the Church. So the Western Roman Empire was revived, on Christmas Day 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charles the Great as its emperor.

Charles' successors did not manage to keep his empire together. So it fell apart, and the title of emperor (still bestowed by the pope) reverted to the rulers of Italy. About a century later, it was recovered by Otto the Great, who ruled the German-speaking half of the old Frankish imperium. The imperial title had arrived in Germany, and it would stay there for nearly a thousand years afterwards.

So the shell of the Roman Empire was preserved. But its content had changed dramatically. Most of Western Europe had always been Rome's barbarous backyard, and the shocks of the early Middle Ages shattered the order imposed on it by the Empire. The barbarian migrations were just the beginning. On top of this came the devastation of Italy; on top of this came the Muslim invasions of North Africa; and on top of this came the Norse and Magyar barbarians to ravage the areas outside the Muslims' reach.

The effect was to turn Western Europe into a feudal order. In most areas, authority became a decentralised network, based on lordship and vassalage. Society divided into traditional classes: "those who pray, those who fight, those who work". Chariots remained obsolete, but heavy cavalry developed into an analogous role, allowing noblemen to command military force as well as political power. 

Nations, i.e. ethnicities, existed in this order. They could take on political importance: the Danes massacred by the English on St. Brice's Day never got the memo that nations did not exist in premodernity. At the same time, this was not a nationalist order, because it was run on quite different principles. Universal empire was still the ideal, and division seen as a temporary misfortune. And the ideal was put into practice: religion was catholic ('universal'), dynastic interests cut across ethnic lines, and nobles and priests were 'cosmopolitan elites' within the boundaries of Christendom.

Christ bestows a lower type of power on the emperor

But we know that a feudal order can divide into a nationalist one. In Europe, it was easy for power to sluice into the regions, because the centre was divided between Church and Empire.

Theoretically, the emperor in Germany was at the top of the feudal hierarchy. Dukes (i.e. warlords) and kings were his subordinates, and only the emperor could promote a duke into a king. In reality, however, the territories outside the Empire were independent. Even within his own lands, the emperor ended up holding less power than the kings outside the Empire (for one thing, he had to be elected by a college of princes and crowned by the pope).

One reason for this was that the Church wielded much greater universal authority, and had no intention of sharing too much of this with the Empire. It was in Rome's interest to preserve a balance of power, which meant preserving permanent political division. One thing that made this easy was the power of the pope to excommunicate the emperor, which released his vassals from their feudal oaths and allowed them to rebel with a clear conscience. One emperor who courted too much papal opposition had to grovel barefoot in a blizzard, put down rebellions by his nobles and his own son, and suffer public defamation by an absconded wife who accused him of forcing her into orgies.

So the emperors could not create a true empire. But the popes could not turn Europe into a theocracy either. The division at the centre began to cause a leakage of power, away from both the pope and the emperor and into the hands of the kings. The French king Philip the Fair blazed the path for others, by using Roman law to turn himself into a central monarch on the model of the classical Roman emperor. He beleaguered the papacy with more and more demands for concessions, and eventually took the brutal step of uprooting it from Rome altogether.

This is the context in which the Renaissance humanists created modern nationalism.

In mediaeval political theory, distinct nations had claimed universalist roles. After the Roman imperial title had ended up in Germany, its new holders justified this by a doctrine called translatio imperii. According to this, the Germans east of the Rhine were worthy to inherit the Empire, because they had resisted Roman conquest and eventually triumphed over Rome. The French could not rival these claims, so they concentrated on another doctrine, translatio studii. According to this, the Roman Empire may have passed to Germany, but Roman learning and civilisation had ended up in France.

The humanists rejected all of this. The first of them were Italians, based in the Italian city-states, which had long served as ideological battlegrounds for the Church and Empire. They strived to restore the language and culture of ancient Rome, and generally larped harder than a Renaissance Faire. They would address high-ranking nobles as equals, orate in Latin to audiences who didn't understand a word, and pretend to the role of classical Roman citizens despite possessing no political rights. 

This 'classical fundamentalism' induced a contempt for mediaeval deviations from classical models. Petrarch viewed the order of his time as degenerate, and its translatio theories as nonsense. The Roman Empire belonged to the Italians, as did the Roman Church, and both had been stolen from their rightful owners. The only thing the Germans and French deserved to inherit from Rome was the classical Roman description of these peoples as barbarians. Petrarch was not shy about airing these views, and nor were the other Italian humanists.

The steady flow of insults from Italy caused French and German humanists to respond in kind. That is to say, they defended their nations, and threw back some insults of their own. Before long this had developed into a literary competition for national honour. The old universalist theories served as a point of departure: the French defended their culture, the Germans asserted their purity, and the Italians claimed a monopoly on all things Roman. This part of Hirschi's book is very enlightening: it shows us the lines of thought that ended up at French civic patriotism, German ethnic nationalism, and the Italian dream of reviving the Roman Empire.

 

At first it was just writing, and larping. State politics continued to turn on dynastic interests. The humanists had built a community of learned men, modelled on the ancient republic, but this alternative society had no official standing. And yet, in the course of centuries, the feudal order receded into a dream and the fantasies of national citizenship became real. By this time, the humanists were long gone, but their roles survived in the 'national priesthood' of writers, historians and journalists.

 

In Hirschi's words, "the illusions of Renaissance humanists ... released a utopian energy that eventually came to shape the reality of modern Europe".

 

Perhaps we can shed some light on why this happened. The classical order of city-states had its differences from the European order of nation-states. But the two paralleled each other, in the sense that both were populist multi-state orders, so the concepts of one could easily be turned to the purposes of the other. Moreover, if the classical order had survived in mediaeval Europe, it was in the towns and cities inhabited by the 'burghers' or 'bourgeoisie'. Centralising kings tended to raise up this class against the feudal nobility. Unbeknownst to them, they were setting in motion a process that would eventually lead to kings being dumped as feudal relics as well.

 

It should go without saying that the blood price was exacted for this populism. In late-mediaeval Europe, mass infantry tactics were already on the rise, as pikemen and archers defeated heavy cavalry. The appearance of bombards, which could level aristocratic castles, was another hint of what was to come. The tide of corpses would ebb whenever conservative feeling allowed some breakwater to be erected. But it would rise to flood point in the religious wars, the revolutionary wars and finally the nationalist wars – which, looking past the ideological differences, can be viewed as the three cataracts of multipolar violence during the European warring states era.

But we've outrun Hirschi's narrative by this point. It ends in the sixteenth century, in the lands of the Empire, now called the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Martin Luther is smashing the keystone of universal religion, and Charles V abandons the last hope of universal empire in the face of nationalist outrage and Protestant rebellion. It is a portrait of the historical moment at which the new order became a visible fact. 

What's slightly disappointing is that Hirschi doesn't take his theory to its logical conclusion. If nationalism is inherently competitive, then it should end up selecting a winner. If it is fragmentary imperialism, then each fragment should contain the potential to become a new empire. This should lead us to ask whether or not such an empire has already come into being. 

 

But Hirschi doesn't ask this question. He just says that the nation-states struggling over Europe cancelled each other out, whereupon nationalism spread outwards to replicate nation-states everywhere else in the world. A strange thing, this civilisation that conquers the globe after fighting itself to a standstill!

Humanist larping for the masses

Hirschi's book focuses on the European heartland: Germany, and its immediate neighbours France and Italy. This goes a long way toward explaining his perspective. On the one hand, when we look at Europe in the heyday of nationalism, it is easy to see the ghost of the Roman Empire. It is there in the French Empereurs and the German Kaisers, the Third Rome of Mussolini and the Thousand-Year Reich of Hitler, and more importantly in the general drive to unify Europe through force. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how anything came of all this, except failure and permanent division.

But aren't we forgetting something? All of these Romes and Caesars fall into the tradition of translatio imperii. That is to say, they descend from the Empire, which was the weaker power in the divided mediaeval centre. But what became of the stronger power, i.e. the Church? Are we to suppose that the centre of political power has shifted all over Europe, but the centre of religious authority has wasted away in the Holy See? 

It seems more likely that there was (and I hope this is right!) a translatio ecclesii. That is to say, a transposition of the role of the Church. And the obvious place to start looking for such a development would be the Protestant Reformation.

Hirschi, as usual, has some helpful things to say on the subject. He points out that Martin Luther built upon humanism, by transposing its fundamentalist mentality from the classics to the Bible. He also says that Luther put a new twist on the nationalist literary discourse: he extended it to mock and critique all peoples including his own. He also explains why the Reformation found a receptive audience in Germany: the Roman curia had long been siphoning money away from the imperial lands, to finance its own pomp and splendour. 

 

We can add that the Church in this era had lost much of its credibility, and acquired a reputation for corruption and hypocrisy. Much of this resulted from the flow of power to centralising kings. The popes made the fateful decision to imitate them, by using cynical power politics to carve out a place for the Church among the secular states. No longer able to rule by its religious authority alone, it chose to jeopardise it further in a doomed attempt to jump the ladder to political power.

But Hirschi does not go beyond the sixteenth century. And this is where Hazony's book on the virtue of nationalism comes into play. Bear in mind that this is a moral treatise, not a deep history. It is also, to put it bluntly, wrong. But it provides enough material on the other side of nationalism for us to fill in the gaps.

According to Hazony, nationalism comes from the Jews. Or rather, from the Hebrew Bible in the Christian scriptural canon. Most civilisations have strived after universal empire, and mediaeval Christendom followed this pattern under the Church and Empire. But the Biblical example of Israel, an ancient nation-state chosen by God, created a nationalist tradition within Christianity that subverted universalism.

I'm not sure how, or whether, ancient Israel fits into the 'nationalist' category. But this is not the point. Hazony says that the example of Israelite national freedom inspired European nations to imitate it. This ethos of imitating the Old Testament – and, sometimes, declaring one's nation to be a New Israel – is mainly associated with Protestantism, and its ancestors and progeny such as Hussitism and Puritanism. Hazony takes to these anti-Catholic implications of his theory like a duck to water. He portrays Western civilisation as a battle of two ideals: Roman universal tyranny vs. Israelite national freedom.

 

The inheritance of these ideals is unequally distributed among European nations. The English, French, Scandinavians and Dutch are in the nationalist camp, while the Germans and Spanish tend to fall into the imperialist camp with the Catholic Church. After the imperialists were defeated in the Thirty Years' War, the nationalists created a new order in Europe:

"The period between the English Act of Supremacy and the Westphalia treaties gave a new, Protestant construction to the West. ... Although the settlement was not officially accepted by the Catholic Church ... it refounded the entire political order in accordance with the theory of the independent national state that had been advanced by English and Dutch Protestantism in the preceding century."

Unfortunately, Hazony goes on to say, the nationalists dropped the ball. In trying to reduce the Protestant construction to its underlying logic, writers like Locke boiled it down to the bare bones of liberalism: individual freedom, protection of life and property, and the theory of the social contract. These principles are inherently universalist. And they have allowed imperialism, once thrown out the door, to steal back in through the window under all sorts of disguises: 'openness', 'globalisation', 'pooled sovereignty', 'global governance', 'international community', 'transnationalism', 'American leadership', 'the end of history', etc., etc., etc.

Hazony dismisses two proposed alternatives to liberalism: Catholic traditionalism, because it harks back to universal empire, and state-centred nationalism, because it will hasten the advance of tyranny. The true Protestant nationalist tradition, he says, limits the power of rulers and the sway of foreigners over the nation:

 

"The third alternative to the liberal order is what may be termed a conservative (or traditionalist) standpoint, which seeks to establish and defend an international order of national states based on the two principles of the Protestant construction: national independence and the biblical moral minimum for legitimate government.

The conservative choice: half-baked and lukewarm.

It's common to equate conservatism with traditionalism, but these two concepts are very different. Conservatism is about mistaking a snapshot for the essence; traditionalism is, or should be, about tracing the essence through any number of snapshots. Hazony is blind to the reality of tradition, so he can only assume that his Goldilocks' porridge of Protestant nationalism is something different from the stuff on either side of it. He's also a lot fussier than Goldilocks, because he wants to preserve his porridge in a permanent transitional state.

As Hazony rightly says, mediaeval France carved out an early national identity, by imitating Israel and identifying the French as a new chosen people. He makes this out to be a pure subversion of Catholicism by the Bible. But in Hirschi's account, we see a more complex picture. The idea of a heavenly patria came down to earth in the crusades; then it moved outside the Holy Land, as crusades started to be declared in Europe; and finally, the French kings started using the same rhetoric to levy taxes for the defence of the kingdom. 

 

We do not hear of opposition to this from the Church. And indeed, the mediaeval popes bestowed similar accolades on France: "eldest daughter of the Church", "most Christian kingdom". Locked in a power struggle with the German emperors, they had no desire for their opponents to recover the Europe-wide sovereignty enjoyed by Charles the Great. Of course, they ended up forging a rod for their own backs, but that's diplomacy for you.

 

So the idea of a national balance of power has much deeper roots in the Church than Hazony thinks. And the same is true of his other Protestant principle, the "moral minimum for legitimate government".

 

According to Hazony, this means that the ruler must protect his people and uphold the moral order, which all sounds very reasonable. Elsewhere, he implies that it would be violated by anything "objectionable", such as keeping black slaves or obstructing the advancement of Jews. Welcome to the dreary limbo of conservative Goldilocks reasoning. Obviously none of it has any effect on the mainstream idea of the "moral minimum", which will probably be extended to ritual mass abortions within a decade or so. 

In any case, the mediaeval Church had a "moral minimum" as well. Failing to reach it meant being subjected to one of the intra-European crusades against heretics and heathens. And after the Church lost its political supremacy, and started mortgaging its religious authority in bids for secular power, this moral compass started to turn from vox dei to vox populi. In Patriarcha, Sir Robert Filmer traced the origins of liberalism to "those subtle Schoolmen, who to be sure to thrust down the King below the Pope, thought it the safest course to advance the people above the King". 

Knowing the subsequent development of liberal ideology, we are led to a disturbing proposition. The turn towards corruption and hypocrisy in the Renaissance Church was not halted by the Reformation. It continued, and accelerated, outside the Church. Eventually it ate away the fabric of Christianity, leaving only the naked tools of power used by the mediaeval popes. These were set upon the altar as the core religious doctrines of the new Church: a mystery cult of power.

 

What is liberalism, but a new set of rites from which heretics can be excommunicated? What is democracy, but the prerogative to release vassals from their allegiance to rulers? What is nationalism, in Hazony's sense of the term, but the balancing of powers and the encouragement of local rebellions? What is progressivism, but the declaration of endless crusades in which the Church can enrich and empower itself?

Let's not forget, of course, that Filmer was trying to work up English national feeling against the rebellious influence of popery. He didn't stand a chance, because England's Reformation had made it an ideal destination for the translatio ecclesii. None of the warring states of Europe stood to gain more from the old papal policy of balancing powers against each other. And in the coming centuries, England would make full use of the religious authority of vox populi, by stirring up rebellion and conflict everywhere else defending the glorious ideals of liberal democracy and national freedom. 

 

Don't take my word for it.  Here's Sir Humphrey Appleby on the subject:

 

Being an Englishman myself, I don't presume to know what the Euros thought of this. But I'm pretty sure they called us Virtuous Albion.

 

Admittedly, religious authority has its weaknesses against political power. Between the Great War and the World War, Britain was stumbling over its principles, driving away a potential ally and allying with a country that it could not defend. But by this time, the translatio ecclesii had shifted westward again, to the even more progressive United States. This state had also proven itself even more advanced in the ways of perfidy virtue. It had imposed a nationalist order on Europe, and then left the Europeans to find out that this can only lead to war unless some overarching state is keeping order.

 

And the US went on to become that state, by conquering liberating Europe from the Germans. By doing so, it received the translatio imperii, and reunited religious authority and political power in a single state. The British regime of division was a sort of 'hegemony without empire', which allowed for genuine national independence. By contrast, the 'free world' of the present day has much more of a masquerade quality to it. Ruled by Church-prescribed governments, and dominated by the Empire's military power, our nation-states are less independent than the feudatory kingdoms in the early Han Dynasty.

 

Of course, the two central powers struggle against each other, as they have done since the Middle Ages. But neither seeks to destroy the other. Moreover, one is permanently subordinated to the other for the first time since the classical Roman Empire, because the American Empire retains hardly anything of the Caesarist tradition. They are Moldbug's 'Bluegov' and 'Redgov', of course, but I don't think these names carry the requisite gravitas. Bluegov vs. Redgov = Church vs. Empire? Always has been.

This brings us, full-circle, back to the discussion of our present situation. But at this point, we should be much better equipped to fathom the depths of Alt-Right delusion. 

 

Alt-Righters chronically underestimate the empire, because they never consider both sides of the coin at once. Moreover, being political geocentrists, they see Church and Empire as two bodies in a kaleidoscope of irrelevancies revolving around the sovereign people. They look at the national dependencies of one or other side, and they see genuine national independence – something that has only survived in those nation-states (Russia and China) that exist on an imperial scale themselves.

So some will propose to imitate certain non-Western peoples, who are granted endless tolerance for petulant demands and violent terrorism. What they fail to understand is that these peoples are 'New Israelites' – darlings of the Church – whereas we will always be 'New Egyptians'. Thus, they can rob, extract and terrorise to no end, while we are not even allowed to hurt their feelings with rude words. If you want to be a 'New Israelite' nowadays, you had better be poor, brown, dull, amoral, dysfunctional, and – above all – dependent. If you don't tick all these boxes, you would be better off adhering to some sort of virtue that isn't located in your epidermis.

The vestiges of Roman Caesarism

Others will get confused by the role of those 'Egyptian Israelites', i.e. the Israelis. "Why do they get to have a Jewish ethnostate? We just need to lobby and conspire as hard as they do!" 

 

Well, the Jews do have good lobbyists, and an enviable prerogative to play both sides. But they get to have an ethnostate for the same reason as the Saudis get to have a fundamentalist monarchy, and Ukrainian wignats get to overthrow states while American ones go to jail for shit-talking. Israel is a frontier satrapy of the Empire, holding down a strategic region that would otherwise be full of Russian proxies (and maybe one day Chinese ones too). It has to put up with Church-sponsored Arab rebellion, but it's not going to suffer a full crusade anytime soon, and this would probably be so even if it were still called Outremer.

Beyond this, the Alt-Right is simply demanding the impossible. It harks back to the populist nation-state, but disowns the history of 'fratricidal war'. It wants a harmonious order of nations, but objects to the external power that is needed to hold such an order together. In the present era, it is easier to assail Cathedral religious authority than American political power. But we cannot hope to do so with these sophistical, self-contradictory dogmas. We cannot even persuade the people, because deep down, they know that a vicious empire is preferable to another oubreak of slaughter.

And it is not even necessary for us to die on this hill. Empire is our basic political reality. Empire is also our heritage. Early postwar dissidents, like Mosley and Yockey, were willing to be led by this truth rather than be dragged by it. Those who followed, i.e. the Alt-Right in the expansive sense, might have improved on their baby steps towards a new imperial vision. But the seductions of conservatism were too great. So instead they decided to rake over decaying popular nationalism, and scrabble for a vision in the morass of Burkean stupidity and Romantic nonsense. 

This shirks our ultimate task, which is to solve the problem posed by Dante in De Monarchia: the proper ordering of religious authority and political power. Failure to solve this problem, or even to recognise it, has left us with an Empire that manages disorder and a Church fit for the Antichrist. All forms of conservatism, including the Alt-Right, are mental holding pens designed to ensure that we abandon both centres of command to the worst people in the West.

Obviously national attachments are important. I won't pretend that this is not so in my own case. But most nationalists today do not desire nationalism for its own sake. They see it as a means to the flourishing of their nations, and the individuals within them. It's debatable whether nationalism fulfilled this role when Europeans were butchering each other, and there's no debate about the fact that it has not managed to do so at any time since. For all we know, it may be doing us active harm.

 

As Oswald Spengler said in The Decline of the West, "on every path to Caesarism there is a Cato". He should have clarified that there can only be one Cato, who fights for a viable cause and dies with dignity. Every Cato that follows this one is a lout, a lunatic, a theatre-performer, or a slave whispering in the back of a triumphal chariot. Conservatism is the ethos of the second type of Cato; and in its Alt-Right form, this ethos seeks to imbue itself into entire peoples. These peoples will court the eternal hatred of the Caesarist state, and be disqualified from any positive participation in political ethnicity. The modern Church is an intellectual castrating parasite: once it has had its way with you, it renders you useless for any other purpose.

Working with the reality of empire would be a better strategy. I know this sounds crazy, but when a people establishes an empire, the result is not usually the racial extirpation of that people. Admittedly, there is a tendency for the state to make use of foreign soldiers, who may be set upon other states or end up controlling politics inside the empire. But in the modern Western Empire, we see this role extended to whole colonies of parasitic foreigners. Other than the degenerate teachings of the Church, this has much to do with the democratic system of selecting governments by ritual popular rebellion. In both cases, the solution is to restore the Caesarist tradition, not to erect more barriers against it.

But perhaps America is just too wedded to liberalism and democracy. Moreover, although the present order is an imperial one in the West, perhaps in global terms it has become a sort of large-scale feudal order transitioning into a multi-state order. But in that case, why not follow Mosley and Yockey, and seek to break off a united Europe from the American half of the empire? It's a good time to get started on unity; for one thing, Virtuous Albion has tripped over its own principles again. But the Alt-Righter is the epitome of a choosing beggar, and he wants nothing but a 'Europe of nations' – which means a weak, disunited, anarchic Europe for more viable states to wipe their various social body parts upon.

I'm not promoting a master plan here. These are just a few offhand suggestions for a saner dissident discourse. In the next follow-up post, we will look at the rights and wrongs of the pan-European variety of nationalism on the Alt-Right. Although this ideology goes beyond the myopia of petty-statism, it is still deluded on the workings of political ethnicity. 

As for a summary of my argument, the best I can do is to refer you back to the post title. The word demise carries a double meaning. In one usage, it is a synonym for death; in another, it means the passing of an estate from one holder to another. So the demise of nationalism could spell the end for Western nations; or it could signify the translatio of their interests from one political body to another. I won't say that the choice is entirely in our hands, because it isn't. But if we are to exert any positive influence on the future, it depends on our having the wisdom to evacuate the Alt-Right nationalist hill.