Twelve Years After

I cannot say, 12 years later, that it has had tremendous impact, and that in no way suggests a criticism of AR or of Jared Taylor or anyone who has ever written for AR. At the end of 2002, whites in the United States are an even smaller majority than they were in 1990; their racial consciousness has not grown appreciably, and the political and cultural threats to them and their nation and civilization are as powerful today as they were 12 years ago.

Samuel Francis.

The Democratic Party is even more tightly controlled by and dependent on minorities than ever. The Republican Party is even more frightened of racial (and even of simple cultural) honesty than it was in the days of George Bush I. The best racially tinged political issue and the best issue for the Republicans is immigration control, but after winning a governorship and several congressional seats on the issue in California in 1994, the Stupid Party was apparently so frightened of its own success that it completely dropped immigration and is now indistinguishable from the Democrats on this question (except that the Democrats move ever further to the left on it).

The same is true of affirmative action, hate crimes legislation, multiculturalism, and white Southern heritage symbols. When Mississippi voted overwhelmingly to retain its state flag with a Confederate flag design in its corner in 2001, the state Republican Party refused even to take a position. In California last year, Gov. Gray Davis came close to endorsing reparations for slavery, but his Republican opponent refused to take a position on that issue as well. The Republican Party, far from becoming an ally, even obliquely, of racially threatened whites, has become either useless or an actual enemy.

Yet no racially conscious third party has emerged to fill the void, and virtually no substantial portion of the dwindling white population seems to want or demand one. Pat Buchanan, after three presidential campaigns in which he avoided even indirect racial appeals, has decided that nothing can be done to save the life of the white West. Ross Perot has vanished and never showed any sign of dealing with any racial issue, directly or not. David Duke has retired to self-imposed exile in Russia. The National Alliance’s William Pierce is dead. Wilmot Robertson has ceased publishing his racially forthright journal Instauration. There is the Council of Conservative Citizens, a growing grassroots organization of racially conscious activists, and there are a few (generally low-subscription) periodicals that deal, more or less gingerly, with race-related issues. But by and large racially conscious whites have little reason to celebrate substantial progress.

To all appearances, then, American Renaissance is something of an evolutionary relict, rather like the platypus or the coelacanth. Its continued existence seems not to betoken the arrival of a triumphant new species or some sudden leap forward on the evolutionary ladder but rather a surviving curiosity of natural history, a living fossil that should have vanished long ago but which somehow managed to persist in the strange, deep waters of a primitive ocean. Certainly that is the most charitable view of AR that its enemies on the left like to take.

But it is not an accurate view. What attracted me to Jared Taylor and AR is what seems to attract most of their other readers—not that AR is the last, quaint representative of a dying breed gnashing its fangs at a world that has passed it by but that it is in fact the harbinger of a new breed. The left senses this truth about AR (and for that matter about the CofCC) when it tells us that such publications and groups are “Klansmen in coats and ties” or “more dangerous” than Timothy McVeigh. Both have succeeded in learning how to discuss, and in teaching others how to discuss, the scientific, social, and political realities of race without reliance on the old rhetoric of what was called “white supremacy” and “hate.” The older rhetoric may have been appropriate for its time, but just as conservatives in the post-World War II era of the 1950s needed to adopt a new rhetoric in place of that of the political right of the pre-Depression and pre-World War II era, so racially conscious whites today need to learn a new rhetoric about race. In so far as American Renaissance has accomplished any significant achievement, it is that it has begun to develop and disseminate just such a rhetoric, and it is largely the absence of such a rhetoric in American political culture that makes white racial consciousness so weak.

The older rhetoric of race among racially conscious whites assumed that the political and cultural dominance of whites was secure or at least intact, and that non-white racial consciousness was weak, non-existent, and not a serious political or cultural force. Hence, the older rhetoric could rely on a broad base of agreement among whites—about such matters as the importance and meaning of the U.S. Constitution, the danger of communism, the heroic stature of such figures as Washington and Jefferson, and a whole universe of assumptions about human nature, human society, science, religion, ethics, and cultural values—assumptions that can no longer be taken for granted. So secure was this cultural consensus among almost all whites that racial consciousness really did not need to appeal to race itself very much or very directly. Today, that shared cultural (and political) fabric is in tatters, and appeals wrapped in it no longer work.

To give an example, I recall in 1978 an occasion when Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith spoke to an audience of congressional staffers in Washington. Talking about the black terrorists led by Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe who then threatened his country, Mr. Smith kept saying to the mainly white audience that the terrorists were “communists” or “Marxists”—and so they were (at least they mouthed the slogans of Marxism and took weapons from the Soviet and Chinese communists).But using what was by 1978 a Cold War anti-communist rhetoric simply didn’t persuade anyone in Washington anymore except the most right-wing staffers and congressmen, most of whom (even then) regarded “white supremacy” or South African “apartheid” as far more evil and dangerous (or at least as more politically explosive) than communism.

Much the same kind of implausible rhetoric was common among Southern Democrats (and non-Southern conservatives generally) who opposed desegregation in the 1950s and ‘60s. Almost all of them appealed to the Constitution, to states’ rights, and to the alleged communist or philo-communist tendencies of the “civil rights movement” and its leaders (much of which was factually correct). In the 1950s and ‘60s such rhetoric worked, in the sense that most white Southerners and many white Northerners accepted its premises—if the “civil rights movement” really was influenced by Reds and if what it was demanding really was unconstitutional, then desegregation could wait. By the late 1960s, in large part due to the political and propaganda successes of the “civil rights movement” and its allies and the New Left, such rhetoric no longer worked.

Both Ian Smith and the Southerners might have argued that the civilization that existed in Rhodesia and the American South was unique to whites, that there was no evidence blacks are capable of either creating or sustaining it, that there was considerable evidence, scientific and historical, that they could not, and that “majority rule” in Rhodesia and “integration” in the South was likely to lead to the destruction or serious impairment of the civilization and to physical danger for whites. Even if such arguments had been no more successful in the 1950s or ‘60s than those that were actually offered, those who offered them would today at least be able to say that they had been correct. Much of the urban South, at least, has been destroyed by racial integration, and whites in “Zimbabwe” are facing utter economic dispossession and actual genocide by their new black masters. Meanwhile, the communist threat has largely vanished, and the U.S. Constitution is increasingly irrelevant.

More recently, a similar development has occurred with immigration. Not too long ago, an effective argument against immigration was that so many immigrants from such different cultural backgrounds in so short a time would not assimilate to American culture and would “Balkanize” the country. The pro-immigration response was always that the immigrants would assimilate, and various facts (or non-facts) were dredged up to bolster that claim. Today, neo-conservatives still give much the same argument, claiming that the immigrants are all on the path to college educations and middle-class affluence, will become doctors or lawyers or software engineers, and vote Republican. Liberals have long since dropped any such claims, and now generally admit that the immigrants are not assimilating. They argue that it would be “racist” to insist that they assimilate, and even glory in the “diversity” that mass immigration is importing into our dull and drab civilization. As the perceived legitimacy of the concept of “assimilation” and the very notion of a culturally unified nation dwindles, so does the effectiveness of a rhetoric appealing to it.

What is happening or has happened in almost all these instances is that the common cultural and political framework that enabled racially conscious whites to deflect non-white drives for power has eroded or vanished entirely. Its erosion has come about in large part because of its deliberate subversion by its enemies (not always for racial purposes), while at the same time the emergence of explicitly non-white racial consciousness and the political unity this subversion generates has rendered appeals to traditional white values and institutions ineffective. When blacks themselves regard Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and even Abraham Lincoln as well as all other early American icons as mere bigots, slaveholders, and white supremacists, when they dismiss the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as fraudulent documents that merely empowered racial oppression, then political dialogue and a shared political culture cease to be possible—unless whites themselves give up these icons as well, which is what seems to be happening. Those who seek to resist or defeat the non-white quest for power have no prospect of success if they appeal to a Constitution that non-whites respect only in so far as it can be exploited for their own purposes. What is happening, in other words, is that all the social, cultural, political, legal, and constitutional (as well as religious, moral, etc.) integument of the white race has been stripped away—delegitimized or “deconstructed.” What remains, of course, is the bare biological reality: race.

For the most part the older rhetoric of “white supremacy” and what was called “hate” never talked about race at all—at least not seriously. It talked about the Constitution, communism, the common cultural framework that most Americans, white and black, Southern and Northern, shared. When it did talk about “race,” the result was often simply a pathetic litany of cliches, racial horror stories, often pseudo-science mixed in with a certain amount of fundamentalist (or pagan) religion, and outright drivel laced with plenty of racial epithets and insults. Not a few racially conscious whites seemed to do and say virtually everything to confirm the claim of their enemies that they really were filled with hatred and engulfed in ignorance. Some—skinheads, “neo-Nazis,” etc.—still do; for them, making themselves as repellent as possible and inciting fear and disgust rather than doing something constructive on behalf of their own race seems to be their chief purpose.

Anyone familiar with American Renaissance knows that, whatever its flaws (Jared can tell you I am the world’s greatest expert on its flaws), it avoids this kind of rhetoric entirely. Not only does AR avoid it, neither the publication nor Jared Taylor himself nor anyone who has ever written for it that I know of even has any disposition to use such rhetoric. Nor does AR appeal to states’ rights, the Constitution, or traditional segregationist practices. The rhetoric it has developed is the rhetoric of race itself, of what should be called “racial realism.”

This rhetoric, in the first place, is grounded in a fairly careful scientific view of race—that race is indeed a natural reality and not just a “social construct,” that it includes not only gross morphological and physiological features but also affects IQ, personality, and behavior, and therefore that race is a socially and historically significant force. More than any other publication in the English-speaking world, AR has actually tried to explain and popularize the earth-shaking discoveries about race by major scientists and thinkers like Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, Michael Levin, Richard Lynn, the late Glayde Whitney, and many others. Similarly, the AR rhetoric of race also makes fairly sophisticated use of statistics to support claims about differences in racial achievement and behavior (education, crime, etc.).

But perhaps most significantly, the rhetoric of American Renaissance in a sense does the opposite of what the older rhetoric tried to do. Whereas the older rhetoric tried to defend the race in terms of the culture (e.g., desegregation should be opposed because it is unconstitutional, “communistic,” “un-Christian,” or “un-American”), the new racial rhetoric of AR defends the culture in terms of the race (e.g., the Constitution itself, as well the culture and nation, are important achievements of the white race; no other race has created anything similar to them, and there is no prospect of any other race creating them or adapting to them; similar ideas about the racial foundations of white science, religion, and other cultural achievements are common in AR). The meaning of this rhetoric is that in so far as white Americans still care about their culture—the Constitution, religion, science, art, language, literature, aesthetics, social institutions, and morals—they must care about the race that created them and sustains them and without which they cannot exist. It does not, as far as I can recall, argue that race by itself is sufficient to create and sustain our civilization, but it does insist, clearly and unequivocally, that race is necessary.

Certainly AR is not the only racially conscious publication ever to make such arguments, but it has made them perhaps more consistently, more deeply, and more responsibly than almost any other. And, finally, AR has developed this new rhetoric of race in an entirely civil and indeed humane way, never advocating at any point in its history the denial of the legitimate rights or humanity of any racial group but always firmly insisting on the rights, dignity, and accomplishments of the white race, on the centrality of the white race to the past and future of the American nation and the Western world, and on the dangers that our race faces from non-white and anti-white inundation, from virulent anti-white ideologies and movements, and from the guilt, fear, greed, corruption, and short-sightedness that today afflict whites themselves and especially their leadership class.

The extent to which American Renaissance has succeeded in spreading this new rhetoric of racial realism to other whites and in igniting and developing a more mature racial consciousness among whites is perhaps less important than the mere fact that the new rhetoric and the consciousness it seeks to communicate and build have begun at all. Sooner or later, regardless of the limitations that restrict the circulation and influence of American Renaissance, that new rhetoric and consciousness will spread, through means currently beyond the reach of this newsletter—or else whites and the collective achievement they created that we still call “Western civilization” will disappear.

Original article

(Posted on February 16, 2005)

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