‘Patriotism Is Racism!’

Adapted from remarks given at the American Renaissance conference, November 15, 2025.

A few years ago, during the Summer of George Floyd or thereabouts, I came across a photograph of some antifa demonstrator proudly holding a sign that declared “Patriotism is Racism!” This image seems to have been posted in the spirit of “Libs of TikTok,” without comment, to provoke laughter at the expense of the obviously crazy demonstrator. And that is probably how most people took it.

I wasn’t so lucky. In my case, this picture was the beginning of a long train of thought. I want to suggest that this statement “patriotism is racism” is neither absurd nor even obviously false. Patriotism means loyalty to one’s tribe, normally the tribe into which one has been born. It is an extension of one’s family duties, since tribes are themselves essentially extended families. Such loyalty, even going as far as a willingness to sacrifice one’s life if called upon, has for most of human history been considered among the most sacred of moral obligations.

Racism, of course, is a word that can mean almost anything, and therefore means almost nothing. But one of the meanings attached to it has certainly been the preference for one’s own tribe, that is, for people one is more closely related to. Nations and races are simply very extended families. This preference finds expression in a willingness to accept obligations toward fellow-tribesmen greater than one would assume toward outsiders, and these obligations may extend as far as individual self-sacrifice. In other words, this selfsame thing — loyalty to one’s tribe — may indeed be the common ground of the two words “patriotism” and “racism.” But if this is so, then that crazy antifa in the picture I saw must have been right. Was he?

Linguists distinguish between connotation and denotation. Denotation is the bare, literal thing a word refers to, while connotation includes everything a word implies. Denotation is evaluatively neutral, whereas many words have positive or negative connotations. It is connotation that makes language such a useful manipulative tool. Most political discourse consists of such manipulation, using words with positive connotations to promote ideas, and words with negative connotations to attack rival ideas. If you want to convince people that a central moral virtue such as devotion to one’s tribe is something bad, you had better not refer to it as “patriotism.” The positive connotations of that word make it unsuitable for changing the way people think. You have to find a synonym with negative connotations or, if none already exists, make one up.

Obviously, “racism” is the made-up word here. It is nowhere attested before the 20th century, because no one had ever imagined that indifference to one’s own people could possibly be a virtue. The distinction between patriotism and racism is, then, entirely one of connotation rather than denotation.

The verbal shift from the ideal of patriotism to our present endless crusade against so-called racism is thus merely the outward symptom of a much more significant underlying transformation in our moral thinking, a true revaluation of values going well beyond a mere shift in priorities or emphasis. If we want to understand the threat antiracism poses to the survival of our European tribe, we must understand how and why this change occurred.

Tribal loyalty is an important virtue because we live in a world of competing groups. Other things being equal, the tribe that commands greater loyalty from its members will be more successful in competition with other tribes. No Roman thought himself obliged to avoid discrimination against Hannibal and the Carthaginian Army. On the other hand, we are also individuals, and it is in our personal interests not merely to belong to a successful tribe but also to gain status within that tribe. These two sets of interests, tribal and individual, can come into conflict.

In recent years, this conflict has been highlighted by moral foundations theory — a way of analyzing human moral reasoning, best known to the public through social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind. This theory proposes that our moral reasoning is governed by five or six basic concerns called “foundations.” For our purposes, the particular moral foundations are less important than their distribution under two more general headings: binding and individualizing foundations. Binding foundations are concerned with strengthening the social bond and ensuring the tribe’s success in competition (peaceful and otherwise) with other tribes. Individualizing foundations are concerned with preventing harm to individuals and ensuring fairness in the competition for status within tribes.

Prof. Haidt and his fellow researchers discovered that the distinction between binding and individualizing moral foundations goes far toward explaining the differences in moral reasoning between those we commonly call conservatives and liberals. I do not mean to treat these popular political categorizations as God-given, timeless, or independent of historical context; they are not. Still, it is significant that most people who would be described as right wing or conservative stress the various moral foundations about equally, while those we would call themselves liberal or left wing have almost no interest in the binding foundations. They are almost exclusively concerned with individualizing foundations.

What this means, in plain English, is that those who identify with today’s political Left are uninterested in duties to those closest to them (their tribe), but only in moral considerations directly relevant to themselves. Like everyone else, they would prefer to rise in status and gain resources, but they have no concern for the larger human grouping into which they were born and of which they are a part. They are the sort of people who would happily see their country destroyed as long as they could rule over the ruins. They will gladly form alliances with strangers or even declared enemies of their tribe if this helps them rise. As Ed Dutton has phrased it, such people are born traitors. This class of people overlaps considerably with those whom psychiatrists refer to as “sociopaths.”

Again, I want to emphasize that this has not been true of every historical form of the Left. The old progressives who organized trade unions and fought for improved working conditions were not normally sociopaths; indeed, most were quite patriotic. But today’s nation-destroying antiracist Left largely consists of people without tribal loyalty. Dr. Dutton has theorized that they may have become so common today due to relaxed group selection. However true that may be, they clearly form much of the political and cultural elite that has been ruling over us for the past several decades. Our tribe is being run by people indifferent to it. In a world that still consists of competing tribes, this is a clear and present danger.

Like all of us, these people want to think well of themselves, but for them this requires a kind of revolution in moral thinking. It is not easy to make out that born traitors are admirable. It is not natural to elevate those with no loyalties above those capable of self-sacrifice for the greater good. But this moral revolution has in fact largely been carried out. This can be seen in the transformation of the old virtue of patriotism into the new crime of “racism.” It can be seen in the replacement of loyalty by “tolerance” in the peculiar sense that word is understood by our friends at the SPLC.

Followers of the new political morality base their claim to righteousness on the accusation that traditional patriots exclude too many people from the sphere of their affections. They even accuse them of “hating” those outside their own tribe. They style themselves as champions of a universal love of humanity. But love does not work like this: the vaster its object, the less intense it becomes and the less prepared we are to make sacrifices for it. Psychologists have found that what genuinely motivates men in battle is not love of country, as popularly maintained, but a fear of letting their buddies down — the men in their own platoon. A country is simply too big, the soldier’s idea of it too vague and abstract, to motivate him in the same way as the men actually around them. The alternative to tribal loyalty is, therefore, not universal love but universal indifference.

The behavior of our current elites demonstrates this. They most certainly do not love the faceless mobs of Africans and Asiatics they are importing. A few years ago, the humanitarian mask slipped when a British politician acknowledged that the Blair government wanted mass immigration to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” Hatred of their political rivals and a determination to solidify their own status and power were their true motives, even if it meant sacrificing the tribe.

It is men like him who now govern most Western nations. They are grotesquely unworthy trustees of a civilization, the sources of whose greatness lie beyond their comprehension. Our survival demands their speedy and systematic replacement by men capable of recognizing duties to kin and countrymen.

* * *

Next, I would like to consider the vexed question of how all this relates to “democracy.” We know that our opponents, the current antiracist elites and their apologists, like to claim we are a threat to democracy. Germany is about to outlaw its most popular political party on the grounds that democracy requires forcibly preventing people from voting as they please. And as with the silly antifa who proclaimed that patriotism is racism, I am going to play devil’s advocate here by maintaining that our opponents do have a point. Democracy is, after all, an equivocal term. Things that are democratic in one sense may be undemocratic in another. I’ll come back to this in a moment.

Last Friday, American Renaissance posted my review of Vol. 3 of Claire Ellis’s book The Blackening of Europe. She has a very good grasp of our opponents’ mentality, and makes a number of points relevant to this talk.

Patriotism has been defined as an attachment to blood and soil. Incidentally, that phrase was not coined by the German National Socialists, as legend has it, but goes back to 19th century nationalism. Now, I have already spoken of our opponents’ lack of concern for blood ties. Dr. Ellis also offers some keen observations about the different way they view soil, that is, the national territory. People with an ethnic awareness and loyalty view territory as bound up with their identity and thus with group survival. This attachment, Dr. Ellis points out, is entirely independent of the territory’s objective value as real estate; a desert can command such loyalties as easily as the most fertile and resource-rich environment. The national homeland has a symbolic significance for the patriot that transcends all economic considerations, and especially in wartime this significance is powerful enough to motivate self-sacrifice on a grand scale. According to information quoted by Dr. Ellis, almost three-quarters of all ethnic wars between 1940 and 2000 were about the control of territory.

The political state, however, need not share this attachment to the homeland. It seeks power and survival by controlling resources and territories. For the state, land is simply real estate, and the people who live on it are “productive resources.” When men with no tribal loyalty gain political power, they may rationally calculate that flooding the national territory with strangers will increase their power and the resources at their disposal. The land has no symbolic value for such men and forms no source of their identity. It would be irrational for them to sacrifice their lives to defend their native soil. In any case, the politically powerful usually have plenty of young men willing to do so in their stead. Such are our present elites: commanders of our political apparatus, but not national leaders.

Here’s another point Dr. Ellis makes: Many of us take a dim view of supranational organizations such as the UN and the European Union, but at least on paper these bodies acknowledge principles that ought to satisfy even the most ardent nationalists. In its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, adopted way back in 1948, the UN declared that “everyone has a right to a nationality” of which he must not be arbitrarily deprived. This sounds to me like a recognition of man’s tribal nature: we are not simply individuals. In 1966, the UN went on to embrace national self-determination, declaring that “All peoples have the right to self-determination” and, based on this right, “freely determine their political status.”

Now, to return to the issue of democracy, this is the context in which many of us understand it: Democracy is one way in which nations can make decisions and determine their own future. Aristocracies and even autocracies may well have advantages, but subjecting elites to some form of democratic control at least prevents them from running roughshod over the interests and wishes of a nation’s majority. No governing elite is so wise and good that it should simply be able to disregard the will of those it rules. This is why ancient political theorists, while usually skeptical of radical democracy, maintained that a well-governed state should enjoy a mixed constitution with a democratic element. The people ought to have some recognized, legitimate way of granting or withholding consent to the way they are being ruled.

Democracy in this sense operates within the context of a political community and presupposes some agreement as to what constitutes that community: Who is included and who is excluded. The community or tribe, in other words, comes first; only once its identity is established does the question arise of how it is to be governed, and that is when the issue of democracy vs. its possible alternatives first arises.

This seems consistent with the principles of nationality and national self-determination affirmed by the UN. Let us add that the treaty governing the European Union also commits that organization to respecting the “national identities” of its member states, as well as to ensuring that Europe’s “cultural and linguistic diversity is safeguarded.” If these organizations really acted according to the principles they have spelled out, we nationalists would have little ground for complaint. These are ringing endorsements of our own ideals. Instead, of course, we are called a “threat to democracy.” What is going on here?

What is going on is the rise of the human type sketched in the first part of this talk: the man without loyalties, concerned only with gaining a better position within his tribe regardless of the well-being of the tribe itself, the born traitors happy to ally with anyone who wanders onto the national territory as a means to advancing their own careers.

When this process gets far enough advanced, a point will necessarily be reached when the alliance of foreigners and ambitious moral defectives outnumbers the normal, patriotic natives. At that point, there can be no more national self-determination, as once endorsed by the United Nations. Democracy, however, can in a certain sense survive this tipping point, provided democracy is understood to mean nothing more than rule by a numerical majority. But such democracy will no longer be the way a nation expresses its will; it will be an instrument to ensure the destruction of the nation itself, its conquest by foreigners and sociopaths. Dr. Ellis calls this shift a substitution of political majority rule for ethnic majority rule.

While I am not opposed to democratic procedures or controls, I cannot endorse a merely political democracy capable of being turned against the nation itself. In this sense, our unworthy rulers have some justification for seeing in people like myself a “threat to democracy,” that is, to what Dr. Ellis calls political democracy. I would prefer to see loyal patriots wrest control from such a destructive alliance even after it has become more numerous than they are. And this ought to be possible precisely because groups that command loyalty, even if a bit smaller numerically, can usually outcompete groups that do not. And who is going to lay down his life for Keir Starmer or Angela Merkel?

Of course, the longer a resolution of this crisis is postponed, the more numerous the alliance against us grows, and the harsher the means that will be required for resolving it. We are in a race against time. But we must prevail, for the world still consists of competing tribes, and any tribe ruled by men who think they are morally superior due to a lack of loyalty is headed for oblivion. Our survival demands that the healthier fraction of our population remove the sociopaths from power and force them at least to act as if they knew the meaning of loyalty.