May 28, 2009
Jared Taylor’s recent posting on Takimag has drawn a number of a responses, including from Paul Gottfried and Richard Spencer, both of which make some good points. I”m afraid, however, that neither really hits on the essential problem”although Gottfried does mention it in passing, almost as an afterthought”which is that Taylor’s call for whites to organize along lines of “racial solidarity” represents the most complete and abject surrender to multi-culturalism. His bid to become the white Al Sharpton is not only a massive contradiction, coming from someone who ostensibly opposes privileging individuals on account of their alleged race, it is downright pathetic.
To being with, he avers that “if you can”t beat them, join them””that is, if you can”t beat the multiculti rules and regulations that increasing afflict our lives, then the best policy is one of … surrender. He cites a case where the city of New Haven threw out the results of a test taken by aspiring firemen in which blacks didn”t do as well as the city would have liked. New Haven bureaucrats threw out the test results for all races, not just blacks, and did the whole procedure over again: this, claims Taylor, is anti-white “discrimination.”
While Paul Gottfried inexplicably claims that most of the white nationalists he has met are “libertarians,” it appears that their Maximum Leader is not among them: for the libertarian would argue that the entire procedure and the unfairness inherent in it could be eliminated by simply privatizing the fire department. Of course, it would still be possible to pursue the elusive goal of equality of results through enforcement of the so-called civil rights laws”yet that is precisely what Taylor would do on behalf of “oppressed” whites. This kind of scam is wrong when blacks try to pull it off, but right when engaged in by whites.
The Taylorite commitment to “white racial consciousness” is simply a cracked mirror image of the worst excesses of the “black power” movement”and it is advanced with much less justification. After all, whites can hardly point to a long history of “oppression” at the hands of non-whites: indeed, precisely the reverse is the case. It is whites who engaged in the slave trade, and some of them fought a war to keep blacks in chains. State-enforced racial segregation was the rule and the law in many Southern states, up until relatively recently: where oh where is the history of white “oppression” at the hands of black slave-masters?
Taylor and his acolytes are like those teenage boys who dress in baggy pants hanging down to their buttocks, carry boom-boxes, and “act black” because it’s considered “cool.” They want in on the multi-culti action, and, like “Vanilla Ice,” the wannabe white rapper, he’s baffled when people consider him a joke.
Yet it isn”t a joke. Taylor is dead serious, but what is he serious about? Ostensibly, he’s upset over those white firemen denied jobs in New Haven, but it quickly becomes all too clear that’s not his main beef: what he’s really against is miscegenation, or what his intellectual heirs used to call “race-mixing”:
He then cites a number of commentators who think this trend is desirable, from Michael Barone to the Socialist candidate in the French election for Prime Minister, and then snarks: “If those New Haven firemen got a raw deal, I guess their parents just married the wrong people. “
But what has miscegenation got to do with the issue he supposedly cares about, those poor oppressed white firemen? It’s not clear. What is all too clear, however, is that the real agenda of the “white nationalist” movement has zero to do with legitimate issues, such as the injustice of affirmative action. It is all about race-mixing”an “issue” that, in an age when a mulatto is president of these United States, has a certain explosive quality, as well as an aura of outright nastiness.
This is what has given the “white nationalists” a big shot in the arm, these days: the rise of Barack Obama. The neo-Nazi webmaster of “Stormfront” exulted that, as the election results began to come in, his web site, devoted to the rantings of losers living in their parents” basement, experienced a flood of visitors. David Duke, the heir to the George Lincoln Rockwell wing of Taylor’s movement, expressed grave concern”and similarly rejoiced in the expected increase in his audience.
As the white-collar wing of the same movement, Taylor and his American Renaissance crowd are salivating as the prospect of massive recruitment because one of “them” is in the White House. They hope to infiltrate what they call the “pseudo-conservatives” with their message of genetic determinism and white supremacy, imbuing the rightist critique of Obama and all his works with a racialist tinge.
This, of course, is just what the Obamaites ordered: they would love to marginalize their opposition and banish them to the fever swamps of race-obsessed neurotics and social misfits. Nothing would please them more than to see the rising resentment of their policies ascribed to the spreading influence of racist agitators. If I were the Democratic National Committee, I”d funnel millions into Taylor’s outfit, and like-minded groups, for the same reason that the interventionists encouraged Nazi infiltration of the America First antiwar movement in the run-up to World War II.
To those who want to know why I am taking the time and energy to take on Taylor and his racialist pals, check out the section in my Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement
on the life and career of John T. Flynn, who knew all too well what the War Party was up to.
What I don”t understand, and I doubt Taylor does either, is this: what do the “white nationalists” want? What is their program? They are “nationalists” without a nation. Do they want to expel all non-whites from U.S. territory? Do they want to carve out their own ersatz “nation” in, say, the nether reaches of Idaho and the Dakotas? Do they want to create a caste system based on racial heritage, as the Nazis tried to do, with whites on top and the “mud people””their disgusting term for non-whites”on the bottom? Or do they just want to abolish race preferences in law and custom”in which case they shed their “white nationalist” hoods and morph into white versions of Ward Connerly? Would Taylor outlaw miscegenation if he could? I have no doubt that he would, no matter what he says in public.
Americans don”t like racists, not because they have been indoctrinated by leftist professors and do-gooder social workers, but because “white nationalists” and their ilk are looking for the unearned: they want power, prestige, and money in the bank based on factors over which they had no control, that is, their genetic heritage. That’s why they spend so much time posing as amateur “scientists” and “anthropologists,” extrapolating entire theories of social organization from the results of “intelligence tests” that presume to measure the ineffable. It is a soulless, materialist, dogmatic view of life that has nothing in common with authentic conservatism, and which has all sorts of statist implications”not to mention a history of racialist-inspired statist measures”that make “white nationalism” antithetical to libertarianism.
Richard Spencer makes a big deal out of how “open-minded” and un-PC Takimag is in publishing Taylor’s tirade against “race-mixing.” I cannot share his enthusiasm. There is a good reason to avoid the Taylorites, and their even cruder brothers-in-spirit in the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi netherworld, and it has to do with maintaining the intellectual and spiritual integrity of the American Right. I agree with Pat Buchanan, who, in pointing out the disparity between his own ideas and those of David Duke, averred: “We come from different traditions.” Indeed we do. Taylor’s is the legacy of Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, the Count de Gobineau, and that failed portrait painter from Vienna: ours is the legacy of Christianity, which recognized the centrality of the individual soul, and rejects collectivism, including racial collectivism, as inimical to freedom, reason, and just relations among men.
“If you can”t beat “em,” says Taylor, “join “em!” The paleoconservative answer to this must be: Never!
