There has never been a nation created based on the supposition that common genes are sufficient to build a government around. Most nations throughout history under all systems of government have ruled over regions which are mostly consanguineous, not just owing to the relatively low level of transportation technology available in the past. It’s also because people who are genetically similar tend to prefer the company of their fellows.

Knowing this, and knowing the errors of multiculturalism, it’s easy to proceed with just trying to argue one’s way back to an ethnic nationalism based mostly on common genetics. The most vulgar versions would be the American ideologies of black and white nationalism, which are both arguably rooted in prison culture. Prisoners separate themselves into ethnic factions because it’s a common denominator that can’t be faked.

When average Americans think of a ‘white nationalist,’ they think of a prison convert with swastika tattoos. They don’t think of the genteel, heroic Klansmen praised by Woodrow Wilson from Birth of a Nation — they think of the character played by Edward Norton in American History X.

In history, nationalism coincided with the decline of aristocracy and the rise of the nation-state. It was in opposition, often strongly so, even up to this day in nations like Spain, with governing ideologies related to ethnicity. Spain suppresses the Basques because the Basques assert their ethnic, regional identity against the national identity pushed down from Madrid.

France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia are all patchworks of different ethnic groups with differing traditions and language dialects. Part of what made nationalism an unusual historical development was that it often involved the bulldozing of local ethnic cultures and their supplanting with new, national cultures.

That meant out with the local folk-story-teller and in with the national-great-novelist and national-composer and national-playwright and national-poet. You can’t just dispense with those people when you’re trying to ‘do the whole nationalism thing.’

It also coincided with a fair amount of ethno-religious in major and minor countries as the absolute monarchs struggled to consolidate their authority.

In the modern context, ethnic nationalism emerges amid ethnic conflict, driven by the state, in its attempts to further consolidate its own concept of nationalism. In France and the United States (along with other nations which mimic those countries), the nation-idea consists of a nationalism of the spirit, rather than one of the blood. People who affirm the national creeds of the French revolutionary state or the American revolutionary state as understood today, and go through the legal hoops, become labeled citizens, regardless of who they are and where they come from.

In this way, Barack Obama is a radical American nationalist, according to the tale told by the American nation-state which defines what it means to be such a nationalist. All of the propaganda published by the American state affirms that it is a multicultural nation which takes great pains to create a super-diverse state tolerant of all races and creeds.

It wasn’t always precisely so, but that’s the way that it is now.

Part of what’s generally positive among dissenting blood-and-genes nationalists of today is in recognizing that a nation formed on ever-mutating ideals is not a stable one, and a citizenship available to anyone with no standards (as Aristotle understood) is not a citizenship that is worth holding. No polis that refuses to maintain standards for citizenship can maintain cohesion for long.

So, while some measure of consanguinity is necessary to use nationalism as a political tool, it’s far from the only thing which is necessary.

The American political opposition, whether on the right or the left, tends to adopt a ‘savior mindset.’

The general model that they operate under is in thinking that if only enough people hear ‘the truth,’ enough people will be converted over to the new way of thinking, and the day will be saved. Happiness will return to the country, the budget will be balanced, social justice will come to the land, everyone will be equal, the income tax will be eliminated, and the mountain will come down to Muhammad.

You get the idea. The spiel tends to be “listen to what I have to say, eat my red pill, and you’ll get everything you want.”

This tends to ignore how effective political change tends to happen. Effective political change happens through conflict and displacement. It just about never happens through internal reform, because, as a rule, most people have little ability to change their ways, even when there is a strong desire to do so.

The savior mindset leads to an indiscriminate way of speaking and acting politically — the leaders speak endlessly to the crowds in an attempt to convince the crowd about what is and isn’t righteous. Whom they speak to is less important than growing the size of the crowd. There’s often also a strong tendency to want to debate and convince people that they are wrong and that the ways of the savior-politico are correct.

In the real world, the rhetorical part is only really important insomuch as it builds up a large enough crew of supporters to use to clobber the other group’s supporters through physical and legally repressive means. Shay’s Rebellion did not succeed because George Washington’s gang was bigger and stronger. However right Shay’s men might have been in a cosmic sense from a certain perspective, Washington could muster more and better guys when the conflict came up, so the rebellion failed.

In a more contemporary context, it’s mostly a waste of time to attempt to convince people who have no interest in being convinced of something. Vestigial ideas of national unity also tend to get people trapped into mystical ways of thinking, because to win elections, democratic politicians have to promise impossible programs to compete with the rival political parties which are also promising impossible programs.

Syriza in Greece was never going to be able to both keep the Greek welfare state intact and regain Greek independence from the dictates of the European Union and the European Central Bank. An American politician will have to promise that taxes will be cut, there will be no resort to inflationary policy, entitlement programs will be expanded, crime will be suppressed, infrastructure will be constructed, forward progress in technology will be made, pollution will be reduced, and aggressive wars against evil will be fought.

Bismark called politics “the art of the possible,” but in the case of universal suffrage democracy, winning elections is the art of pre-selling every childish voter a unicorn that excretes gold.

By comparison, it’s more achievable to form a competitive faction and focus on breaking away from the people dazzled by incredible promises. That’s why it’s better to emphasize exit over voice.

The competition in the ‘voice’ space is all around puffing up imaginary futures, whereas ‘exit’ is wholly practical… if a bit rougher and more dangerous, but perhaps no more so than sitting tight and waiting for your unicorn to come in the mail.

It would be shocking to rightists of the 19th century how common it is for rightists of today to have made their peace with socialism. The fighting hatred for terms like ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ that persisted even through much of the 20th century made it so that, in the West, it became necessary to redefine different planks of the socialist platform as ‘democratic’ or, for people who did not know how Communism was referred to in Russia, ‘progressive.’

One of the reasons for this is because socialism tends to be so dogmatically, militantly secular. When people say ‘militant atheist’ today, they usually mean a guy in a fedora who posts a lot on reddit. In the earlier 20th century, they meant a man who used rifles and whatever else he had on hand to kill religious believers, deprive them of their property, torture their priests, rape their women, criminalize worship, and scourge religious influence from the culture at large.

So, the militant atheists of the time were members of militaries or guerrilla groups, with a mandate from their superiors in the international Communist conspiracy to do what needed to be done.

In the earlier 20th century, before the late 1960s, the culture was still by and large profoundly religious in a way that most younger Americans would have a hard time understanding. They may have been marginally less religious than the typical European of the 17th century, but they tended to believe that the Bible was a sacred text, and that religion was the moral basis for contemporary philosophy.

Imagining that the Nazis won World War II is a popular jumping-off point for a lot of speculative fiction. The reader is supposed to feel glad that the Nazis did not in fact, win.

Unfortunately, a more brutal, cruel, and anti-human government won World War II — the Soviet Union. The United States at the time, and for a long time afterward, was substantially honeycombed with people who were either sympathetic to or reporting directly to the Soviet government.

One of the main effects of this is that the Western world, despite the collapse of the USSR and the implosion of its sphere of influence, came to resemble what conservatives of the earlier 20th century would readily recognize as a secular socialist state, with Christianity relegated to vestigial or subordinated status, the living faith reduced to a way to spend a Sunday, with sincere Christians repeatedly harried and legally attacked when trying to practice their beliefs in a sincere way.

If you don’t believe that the Communists won World War II, ask yourself whether or not it’d be easier to argue Paul the Apostle’s position on marriage in any of America’s most conservative magazines with a circulation above 50,000 subscribers. You would be likely to be lynched if you did so under your real name. If you related this fact to an average American man from 1895, he would feel appalled, regardless of whatever there might be in the Constitution around the prevention of the establishment of a state church.

Another sign of the enduring appeal of socialism is that it is nearly impossible to make strong arguments against it, even in venues labeled as rightist, without receiving endless whines and quibbles from people sympathetic to this or that socialist position. That is how complete the socialist victory in the realm of culture in particular has been, even if the progress that they have made on issues of economic policy may not have been as complete as some have hoped it to be.

Consider that Americans today will tend to learn that the implementation of plank after plank of the socialist platform represent progress, rather than the destruction of what our ancestors had considered their sacred way of life. Only the terrible quality of state education is a source of salvation there, because even the most ardent drones tend to be less than perfectly indoctrinated.

This is the reason why it should not be given an inch: there aren’t all that many inches left to give.