We are continuing our expansion of my proposed intellectual foundation for the right. In that proposal, I said there are five things an intellectual right must provide:
A critique of democracy
A justification for maintaining heritage Americans demographic dominance
An explanation for why hierarchy is socially necessary
An account for racial and sexed differentiation and why this matters politically
A strategy for gaining institutional power
A critique of democracy was given in our last post, arguing that sovereignty does not derive from the people, but from above. Now it is time to move on and provide a justification for maintaining heritage Americans’ demographic dominance. If you have found your way over to Scattered Roses you are almost certainly aware of the demographic shift in America’s population. Hell, with it being only two months away from 2022 it is pretty much common knowledge at this point that heritage America is on its way out. What is heritage America? You already have a picture in your mind, you know that if I said “Indonesians” I would be lying, yet the question remains. A heritage American is someone who comes from the founding stock, a unified stock that, as argued in Federalist Two, is crucial to America’s national strength:
“With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people--a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.”
This stock of majority Anglo Christians, with a peppering of Germanics, Scotts, and Nordics, and their descendants, is what is meant by “heritage Americans”, and it is this stock that is rapidly being replaced by Hispanics, Africans, and Indians. Preserving this stock, and encouraging its growth, has been a concern of both paleoconservatives and nationalists since the 1980s, right-libertarians with the rise of Lew Rockwell and Hans Herman Hoppe, the Alt-Right since 2014, and is now a key concern of the America First faction of the GOP, which includes prominent voices such as Tucker Carlson and Darren Beatie. Preserving heritage America’s demographic dominance is a concern found in all corners of the right, but there is of yet a moral justification for this dominance that fits in with a larger intellectual foundation. Yes, Hoppe, Sam Francis, and Andrew Joyce have all given moral justifications and arguments, but these have either been detached from a larger moral framework or have been reducible to the Will to Power (which we have shown cannot be a basis for the right).
If the right is to have an intellectual foundation, it will be based upon Providence. For things to have natures or essences, for things to have teloi, there must be some Providence that made these things so. What Providence wills a thing to be is that thing’s nature. If Providence wills that there be man and woman and that these two pairs will marry and procreate, then this is the nature of the relationship between man and woman as well as the nature of marriage. If Providence does not exist, if the world is a result of chance, then no thing was created with a telos, a purpose, and all purpose is socially constructed. Marriage and the relationship between man and woman (and even the very categories “man” and “woman”) are, in the absence of Providence, mere human constructions and, thus, can be re-constructed as we wish.
How does this relate to demographic dominance? In the context of this conversation, the demographic shift from heritage America to Nu-Amerikans is the result of mass immigration. Immigration, letting the other into one’s country, is an act of hospitality. One people is letting another enter into their home. Hospitality, by its nature, requires that the welcomer owns the space into with the welcomed is being invited into. If I were to welcome you into a house that is not mine, I would not be hospitable. Maybe I am inviting you over to a friend’s house, and if he knew about it and was okay with it then it is really him becoming hospitable, not me. It would certainly not be hospitable if I invited you over to someone’s house who was not aware of the invitation and, if he did know, was not okay with it. Furthermore, if I invited a number of people over and they, even if allowed by me, proceeded to assume ownership over my house then this would also not be hospitality, it would either constitute me giving away my house or an invasion.
Note that for this argument to work hospitality has to be a real thing, that is, independent from any social construction. Only if there is a nature to hospitality, which requires the existence of Providence, can these statements be made with any certainty. Since Providence does exist, hospitality is real and has limits. If the United States is to allow immigration, if heritage Americans are to open up their home to the other, then heritage Americans either need to maintain a demographic or political dominance over these United States. Seeing that political dominance is, in a voting society, strongly connected to demographic dominance, if heritage America is to maintain political dominance then she needs to maintain demographic dominance.
Unlike previous iterations of a religiously grounded right, this argument does not rely on any interpretation of Scripture, but simply takes the existence of Providence as a founding for teleology. It is in the very nature of hospitality, of which immigration is one instantiation of, to preserve the demographic dominance of the welcomer’s people.
Lest anyone object that this argument creates antagonisms between the peoples, or that by desiring the demographic dominance of heritage Americans, we are taking away the dignity of the other, let us look at a passage from Vladimir Solovyov’s The Justification of the Good:
“Every man, if only he lets Christ be formed in him, i.e. if he enters into the spirit of the perfect man, and determines all his life and activity by the ideal revealed in the image of Christ, participates in the Godhead through the power of the Son of God abiding in him. For the regenerated man individuality, like all other characteristics and distinctions, including that of nationality, ceases to be a limit, and becomes the basis of positive union with the collective all-embracing humanity or Church (in its true nature), which is complimentary to him. According to the well-know saying of St. Paul, the peculiarities of structure and of function which distinguish a given bodily organ from other organs do not separate it from them and from the rest of the body, but on the contrary are the basis of its unique value to all of the other organs and the body as a whole…The all embracing humanity (or the Church which the Apostle preached) is not an abstract idea, but a harmonious union of all the concrete positive characteristics of the new or re-generated created. It therefore includes the national as well as the personal characteristics.”
Solovyov is not sacred writ, but his vision as laid out above provides an account for how it is that distinctions between nationalities, which is what is trying to be maintained when the right speaks about limiting immigration, is not divisive but a source for a common humanity. There is a reason why the Orthodox Church is made up of a number of national churches. A Serb, Russian, Ethiopian or Copt are my brothers because we belong to the same Church and are bound together by the same Blood and Body received each Sunday, but we are clearly distinct and it would be sophistry to claim that wanting to maintain those distinctions is somehow hateful. We are to cooperate and love each other in our common humanity, which Solovyov identifies as being a member of the Church, but we are also to respect our differences and not pursue policies that would destroy these differences. If we take Solovyov seriously, erasing national differences (mass immigration being the most expedient means to do so) is the same as destroying any other positive characteristic, including personality.
What has been said here is nothing new. Since I am a Traditionalist, I thank God for that. Coherency, not novelty, is being offered in this series on an intellectual foundation for the right. From a belief in Providence we have arrived at a critique of democracy, an account of sovereignty, and a moral justification for maintaining the demographic dominance of heritage America. Next time we will be looking at an explanation for why hierarchy is socially necessary.
Good article, but why do you include the miaphysite Ethiopians and Copts as "belong to the same Church" as we do?