American Nationalism Is Civic Nationalism Pt.2

I’ve been eagerly anticipating Benjamin Garland’s White Racialism and American Nationalism Pt. 2 because I was under the impression that he was going to seriously address the issues raised by critics of American Nationalism. Unfortunately, we will have to keep waiting.

It’s clear now that he has no response to our arguments. Instead, Garland sets up and attacks the straw man that we are “Southern Nationalists who want to bring back the Confederacy and think Yankees are worse than Jews” in order to AVOID addressing uncomfortable aspects of American history which plainly contradict his narrative that the Founding Fathers were White Nationalists.

The United States really was based on Enlightenment principles. The American Revolution really was about civic nationalism. The Founding Fathers thought of themselves as republicans rebelling against tyranny, not as White Nationalists. Now, it is true that whiteness was important in the American Founding, but this is because White racial consciousness is older than the United States.

At the inception of the United States, American national identity was composed of 1.) the English language, 2.) Protestant Christianity, 3.) whiteness and 4.) republican ideology. The “American” was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant who subscribed to republican political principles. It was this latter ideological element that was introduced by the American Revolution. The other elements of Americanism were rooted in the colonial era along with slavery and white supremacy.

I’m not pointing this out because I hate Yankees. I’ve taken pains to point out that BEFORE the American Revolution, which is to say in the colonial era, the Northeast was more in line with the rest of the country. The Northeast had slavery and white supremacy. It was common knowledge in the Northeast in Cotton Mather’s time that blacks and Indians were inferior races. Yankees had struggled to come to this conclusion and initially had tried to integrate Indians into their Puritan and Quaker utopias, but after King Philip’s War their racial attitudes hardened until the American Revolution.

During the American Revolution, John Locke’s theories were seized on to justify the rebellion in New England and the implication of their victory over Britain was that his ideology became central to Americanism. Previously, Locke had been unknown in the American colonies, but Yankees swallowed his theories about the blank slate and from that point forward began to argue that racial differences were environmental in origin and that any differences between the races were the legacy of slavery and oppression. This is why the Northern Founding Fathers like Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Franklin were arguing with Thomas Jefferson about the nature of racial differences in the 1790s.

From the beginning, blacks were not only considered human in the Northeast, but were emancipated and became citizens and voters in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Pennsylvania. They lost their citizenship and voting rights in Pennsylvania in 1838 because of shifting demographics due to Irish and German immigration. How does Benjamin Garland think Frederick Douglass became such a celebrity in the United States? How did he marry a White woman?

The truth is that from the outset Yankees wrestled with the contradiction between their leveling ideology of civic nationalism and inherited racial, cultural and gender hierarchies. The most obvious example is slavery which was swiftly abolished in New England and Pennsylvania before the Constitution was even ratified. Benjamin Garland brings up the fact that suffrage was initially restricted to a tiny minority of White male property owners, but this isn’t as significant as the long term collapse of the Federalist Party and the inexorable shift toward universal manhood suffrage.

Led by the Quakers who were America’s original egalitarians, Pennsylvania was the first state to repeal its anti-miscegenation law in 1780. It was followed by Massachusetts in 1834. New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan never had anti-miscegenation laws. Iowa repealed its anti-miscegenation law in 1851. Kansas repealed its anti-miscegenation law in 1859. How does Benjamin Garland explain this shift in sentiment toward miscegenation?

Nothing illustrates how advanced the disease of civic nationalism had become in the Northeast as much as the controversy over the Dred Scott decision in 1857. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote the decision which settled the question of whether blacks were citizens of the United States. Several New England states had black citizenship which wasn’t recognized by other states. Benjamin Garland glosses over the fact that the Dred Scott decision was considered outrageous in New England. William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as “a covenant with death.” Harriet Beecher Stowe popularized the magic negro in her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin which the best-selling book of the 19th century.

Maybe it is true that Southern Nationalists dwell on the War Between the States and our opinion of American Nationalism is colored by that experience. When a quarter of all Southern White men died in that war, it is hard to gloss over that fact and pretend it is all the fault of the Jews when the Union armed the slaves to conquer the Confederacy. During Reconstruction, most of the South was put under black majority rule. The Radical Republicans passed the Reconstruction Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Force Acts of 1870 and 1871 and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

Politically, it took the South until the first decade of the 20th century to throw off the legacy of Reconstruction. Economically, the South didn’t recover from the War Between the States until the 1940s. The North, however, never recovered from Reconstruction. As I have already shown, the North was not “well on our way to correcting the racial blunder of the Civil War.” On the contrary, the North was integrated during the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s and remained integrated down to the present day. Jim Crow was a a Southern system that also existed to a more limited extent in the West until the aftermath of World War II. The Northeast and Midwest were integrated in Madison Grant’s time.

Madison Grant and Charles Davenport are not proof of a revival of Northern White racial consciousness in the early 20th century. Instead, Grant and Davenport illustrate just how different Northerners and Southerners thought about race. Northern racialists were focused on class and ethnicity in the Jim Crow era at a time when blacks were flooding into Northern cities during the Great Migration. They were obsessed with preserving the Nordic race by excluding all the Slavs and Italians who were immigrating to the North during the Great Wave. The Klan of the 1920s was focused on European Catholic immigrants. Similarly, the eugenicists were focused on dysgenic reproduction of poor Whites.

Contrast Madison Grant in New York with Walter Plecker in Virginia. Plecker’s obsession which resulted in the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was identifying and weeding out mulattoes to preserve the purity of the White race. There was nothing like the Virginia Racial Integrity Act in any of the Northern states. California’s sterilization law targeted poor Whites.

The forward march of civic nationalism had continued in the 1920s which Benjamin Garland is trying to disingenously present as some kind of Golden Age of American Nationalism. Garland doesn’t mention the fact that the United States had just passed through another one of the greatest social revolutions in American history – the passage of the 19th Amendment which extended voting rights to women. He doesn’t bring up the fact that newly emancipated Northern women who were known as flappers began to reject childbearing and flaunt social norms and have interracial sex with blacks in Northern speakeasies during Prohibition where they danced to swing and jazz music.

Oscar Stanton De Priest was elected to Congress in Chicago in 1928. Blacks were moving to the North at the time where they were allowed to vote in elections and gain political power. De Priest was the first in the return of black congressmen to Washington and the rise of black political power in Northern cities. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 extended American citizenship to all American Indians born in the United States. It was also during the 1920s when psychologists began to attack the concept of inherent mental differences between racial groups. Racial science was losing respectability in Britain and the United States in psychology, genetics and anthropology.

By the 1920s, Jews had already become very influential in the United States. The ADL went after both Madison Grant and Henry Ford. Grant’s book The Conquest of a Continent was a commercial failure. Louis Brandeis had been appointed by Woodrow Wilson as a justice of the Supreme Court. Walter Lippmann had become incredibly influential Jewish journalist. Jews had created Hollywood and rose to power in the Democratic Party when FDR became president in 1933. Far from being compatible with fascism, it was the United States which waged war against the Axis powers and destroyed fascism in Italy!

The United States under FDR waged war against the Third Reich in the name of civic nationalism. American wartime propaganda contrasted the American tradition of civic nationalism with the Nazi program of racial nationalism. “Racism” became stigmatized in the United States between 1938 and 1945. American racial attitudes, particularly in the Northern states, softened during this period. It became dogma that blacks were equal to Whites. How was any of this possible in Garland’s account of American Nationalism?

Benjamin Garland blames it all on the Jews. Why were millions of Jews let into the United States in the first place though? Why were they allowed to hijack our institutions? Why were they allowed to become so culturally, politically and economically powerful? Why were they praised by George Washington who said that the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance”?

The answer to all of the questions and more is one that Benjamin Garland refuses to entertain: it is because American Nationalism is civic nationalism. That’s why slavery was abolished. That’s why blacks were given citizenship. That’s why women were given the right to vote. That’s why universal manhood suffrage triumphed. That’s why husbands lost authority over their wives and children. That’s why Jews were accepted and treated as equal citizens from the beginning. That’s why traditional morality and religion has collapsed into this orgy of nihilism and consumerism.

We’ve simply taken the axioms and logic of American Nationalism to greater and greater extremes and we are living with the consequences. It is time to repent of civic nationalism.

Note: Just listen to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. It uses the music from John Brown’s Body.


About Hunter Wallace 12378 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

38 Comments

  1. you wrote:
    “The Founding Fathers thought of themselves as republicans rebelling against tyranny”
    —-

    now, I am all in favor of white nationalism. secession, etc, but I don’t go along with the idea that the founding fathers were anything other than greedy plutocrats who pushed the Revolution in order to enrich themselves.and then pushed the constitution (to replace the Articles) in order to enrich themselves. See the writings of Frank Beard, Dr. Jerry Fresia, and Dr. Woody Holton for some evidence to establish that assertion.

    • See the writings of Frank Beard

      Frank Beard was the drummer for ZZ Top.

      Did you mean Charles Beard? If so, while he did of course posit economic interests (obviously true of anything and everyone) “greedy plutocrats” is a simplistic and dishonest take on his writings.

      Have you ever actually read any of Beard’s work?

  2. This is one of those articles that I agree with completely. I am shocked that a WASP understands that the problem with usa is from the very beginning. The American treaty with the Moslems of Tripoli in 1796 and signed into law by President Washington and the Senate without any opposition is very interesting.

    Article 11 of the treaty that lasted until 1805 (I believe)

    “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

    Christina Romana

    P.S. Ranting and raving against me for pointing this out will not change what occurred.

  3. The United States really was based on Enlightenment principles.

    And?

    The American Revolution really was about civic nationalism.

    That’s obviously false, the American War for Independence was about a specific group of White people declaring independence from a different group of White people.

    The Founding Fathers thought of themselves as republicans rebelling against tyranny, not as White Nationalists

    The Founding Fathers thought of themselves as republicans rebelling against tyranny AND were White Nationalists.

    This isn’t difficult.

    The problem with “Southern Nationalism” is that Dixie was multi-racial and multi-cultural. It was the Southern planters that bred half breeds with their slaves and did their best to populate the entire North American continent with Africans.

    “Anti-slavery” was a code word for anti-black.

    Since Southern Nationalists have utterly failed to defend Southern heritage from the post-60s Jewish cultural onslaught, groups like the League of the South have retreated into retarded George Lincoln Rockwell style LARPing (how utterly un-Southern) and are now reduced to defending the WORST, as opposed to the BEST, of Southern culture.

  4. An educated person can use it in the wrong direction. Responsibility and morals are needed as well.

  5. So Sad. Cheer up! We are winning this fight. It won’t be easy, but nothing worth anything in life is.

    Keep up the good fight.

  6. Kind of ‘devastating reply’….Seems that even the good old Andrew Anglin is going ‘civic nationalist’..or is this one of his ironies ? Hard to tell the difference anymore

    • Anglin’s commentary is so full of David Letterman style snark and sarcasm that I don’t pay much attention to him any more. He’s become quite carried away with himself and appears to be developing a cult of personality. He is, imo, divisive and toxic.

  7. Not only are these Burger Nationalists ignorant of history but they try to force anti-solutions down everyone’s throat.

    They will go back 100 years or more to find a time when voting worked, and we just need to keep faith in democracy and wait for their internet shitposting and memes to pay off in terms of electoral victories.

    They are a bigger danger to undermining a White victory than Jews, how many White Nationalists would
    actually listen to a kike as opposed to an eceleb who claims to be prowhite. They can waste their own
    time all they want but the second they attack revolutionaries they become the number one obstacle.

  8. Clinging to USA & its symbols is the exact wrong idea. Should do the exact opposite. Passive aggression. Withdraw all support & do everything possible to subvert it 24/7. Lateness, malingering, lying, going on the dole. A million little things. Like people did in the USSR. Rome collapsed because people withdrew & quit giving a shit, not because they fought it

    • This.

      You either get a leader that can do great things (not trump, obviously), or you get lots of people doing small things. Anything like, not giving blood, not volunteering, only doing business with whites, hiring only whites, not smiling at non-whites, picking up garbage. Create dysfunction. Hell, shit on the street.

      It’s scorched earth policy. I will dump all my money in the ocean before it goes to non-whites. If I were childless, I would make sure there is nothing left behind.Give nothing. All must go towards the in-group.

  9. “Why were they praised by George Washington who said that the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance”?

    I might out George Washington was a Southerner, born and raised in Virginia. Otherwise, I agree, the founding fathers, try as they did, failed, because they did create an explicit racial state codified into law, such as the one the Jews have in the Middle East.

  10. Maybe there could arise a well-organized and highly-mobile group or groups of WHITE men who feared nothing but dishonor…who have never allowed their ranks to be infested with liberal bullshit…
    Wait, we already have that..its called “Outlaws MC”…
    Them and their peers already know the situation as a form of warfare and will likely fare quite well in the long run. (May actually need to go back to real horses at some point, though..)
    Gotta bring balls to a ball-game…
    Most white men still either fear or respect a badge too much to act on their instinct. That has to cease or we’ve already lost this.
    Collective Fear of punishment from authorities by white men has to be replaced with the fear of all that will befall us whites when the sapper hordes being sent against us are in full swing.

  11. Both Southern Nationalism and Northern Nationalism predate the founding of the United States. (see the book North Over South) However, they are multiple nationalisms now in play now. White, black, Hispanic, Heartland verses coastal, blue verses red, free trade verse fair trade, liberal verses conservative, straight verses gay, nationalist verses globalist……In other word nonviable and unsustainable in the long run. If a house divided cannot stand with merely two diametrically opposed ideologies what happens when they are multiple versions of America?

    • Balkanization…separation…conflicts over land and resources..basically, “THE STRUGGLE”,..as defined by most of man’s existence until artificial forms of governance of the tribal unit were introduced.
      Back to nature…in a very real sense.
      Let it come…

  12. I am going to respond to this essay and Hunter’s other essay that he linked in this article soon. In the meantime, most of the arguments that pertain to the Founders being civic nationalists is quite incorrect. I have written extensively about the great Pro-White tradition of the USA in my essay below. I respect Hunter’s involvement with Southern Nationalism, as White Southerners are apart of White America, and thusly apart of Western Civilization. I want nothing more to see the traditions and genetic composition of the White Southerners to be preserved, I want to make that abundantly clear.

    https://preservingeurope.wordpress.com/2017/11/23/a-new-white-american-republic-part-1/

  13. “Why did “they” let jews in”
    Seems you have never heard of jewish crypsis, Hunter.
    Jews have been jewing since the outset of America. and the suppliers of guns to the negros to overthrow the South were supplied by jews. Many in the Souths generals etc, Judah Benjamin ad an example were jews.
    Jews were all over both sides of this war. You glossing over this is just as bad as Garland not stating many of the points to make that he left out.

    You also leave out your goofy chris-cuckery for “letting” gods chosen people in.

    • Jews have a long history in the United States, this is true.

      But in many early cases they were operating openly, as Jews. And they were tolerated by the (civic nationalist) authorities.

      Jewish crypsis really becomes a major issue later on, when they blend in with the mixed white multitudes that were allowed in during white mass immigration and civic nationalism

      If the United States was a founding stock ethno-state, it would have excluded Jews who were open about their Jewish ancestry. But it didn’t.

  14. Id like to add, that you glossing over the jews jewing is just as bad as claiming the founders were White Nationalists. You have a bias for muh Souf and so what you should I guess, but this idea that either was better is nonsense. The jist, whites killed whites for jews profiteering. America was finished after this war. It lasted less than 100 years. When the civil war was over, the gates were opened. Most devastating were the eastern Euro jews which knocked down what was left of an WASP immigration control.

    The jews here at the outset were the Western goy presenting type.

    Either way whites lost the civil war just all the others after it.
    Souf were da based ones see facts! no Norf was da based ones see facts! Neither were, we all lost and have continued to lose over bickering.

  15. American Nationalism is what Hitler would term “dynastic” nationalism, and is something which he wisely rejected at the tender age of 15 in favor of “folkish/racial” nationalism. The dynastic nationalist is one who is focused more upon empire-building than upon uniting people into peaceful nation-states along racial lines based upon NS precepts. I saw this “dynastic” emphasis in DS from the very beginning, but I tolerated it because I also liked the fact that there was an equal emphasis put upon race, historical truth about WWII, and NS principles. However, I became increasingly less enthusiastic about DS as time went on, and as I began to see the emphasis on dynastic nationalism begin to supercede the emphasis on racial nationalism. The lauding of Trumpenstein, with all of his behind-the-scenes Jewish cronies, donors, and in-laws, I found particularly nauseating; and I certainly didn’t vote for this degenerate Jewish sockpuppet. But, nonetheless, I would continue to read DS primarily for the shits and giggles, and just to see how DS would deal with the fact (obvious to me from the get-go) that Trump would never do what he had promised to do. This last month, however, has finally completely eroded whatever lingering interest and hopes I had for DS and all of the other dynastic nationalists of the so-called “alt-right” movement. I must confess that I’m also beginning to get the strong feeling that this entire “alt-right” movement was Jewish in origin – albeit many good people have been sucked up into its vortex. So, for me, at least, its time to get back to basics and promote the only thing that the Jews really fear National Socialism (and also Southern Nationalism, of course). Enough time has already been wasted on this “dynastic dead end,” IMO. I fear, however, that some (perhaps many) of these flag-waving American Nationalist folks, unfortunately, may end up falling into the trap of becoming the next inhabitants of many US flagged-draped coffins in the next war that the US decides to fight for the Jews under Commissar Trumpenstein.

    • Yessir..I concur. For what it’s worth.
      Your comment mirrored my sentiments exactly, and I believe many others of us as well.
      We’ve GOT to find a way to organize and communicate OUTSIDE this zionist matrix, though…
      Until we can manage to do that, nothing will manifest that can survive and hold ground.
      When we disappear from their “radar”, yet still manage to make ourselves heard, seen, and listened to, THEN watch the mad scramble and the turning of the screws on the remaining herd, all of which should work out all the better for us in the long game…
      And keep your sons AND daughters OUT of the military for now. War and a depression IS coming. Make the niggers go fight this one.

    • I just call it mestizo nationalism, because that’s what this amounts to. These “American nationalists” already have no problem accepting non-whites like Nick Fuentes into their movement. “Neo-nazi white supremacist” Andrew Anglin has been promoting him on his site for months.

      The goal of American nationalism is not to have nationalism for American whites, but to preserve the American state by slowly expanding the definition of “white” to include those with mixed blood. First, those like Fuentes who are 20% mixed. Then it will be full 50% non-white mestizos, then quadroons, then mulattos and so on. Until you have replaced the one-drop understanding of white with the Brazilian definition where anyone who isn’t a 100% negro fresh off the boat from Africa is considered white. This is because they care more about the state than the nation.

      • So basically it is a civic nationalism based on White American middle class values. As long as the mixed person presents well, lives in a cul de sac with middle class sensibilities and votes republican, then they are “white.” They are using “white” as a mostly civic term with racial undertones rather than as a fully racial term.

  16. A very good piece Hunter. I am not 100% with you on every point you made here, but I agree that America was flawed from the beginning. I especially enjoyed your paragraph near the end where you showed the connection between “enlightenment” civic nationalism and: female suffrage, familial degradation, and the acceptance of Jews. Very true.

    • HW is constructing strawmen. There is no necessary connection between the phrase “all men are created equal” which was written at a time and with a meaning meant for the culture and issues of that time (essentially, no divine right of kings) that was later reinterpreted to mean something not intended when it was written (i.e. all races, women, etc.). Better to read Unwin/Glubb on prosperous societies grown soft and decadent. See: https://diversitymachtfrei.wordpress.com/2016/05/27/the-problem-with-feminism-why-feminisation-leads-to-third-worldization/

      Of course, HW, being a White Knight, does not want to deal with the FQ. He’d rather squabble on GAB over his hurt feewings.

      • “There is no necessary connection between the phrase “all men are created equal”

        There may not be a necessary connection… but there is an ACTUAL connection.

        It didn’t necessarily have to be used to destroy society. But it ACTUALLY was.

        So, next time let’s be a little more careful with that kind of language and those kinds of concepts, ok?

  17. I just don’t understand why Northerners who want to be “American Nationalists” give a dam one way or another if the South wants its own country? Surely if we are so stupid and useless then us cutting loose would be a benefit to them? These hypocritical liars never can explain WHY they oppose Southern independence.

    • Deep South, I know what you mean. I have no problem with people who wave the American flag if that’s what they want to do, but I feel forced to retaliate when they tell us we can’t fly our Southern Flags.

      An Independent South can and did handle its own business better than Washington D.C

    • @Deep South

      “These hypocritical liars never can explain WHY they oppose Southern independence.’

      They’re raised from childhood to believe that they and America are one and the same thing. They’re the living avatars of the Federal Government, which is the living expression of their personal will.

      (“The Government is the instrument of their personal will.’)–

      Consequently, America, all of it, is their personal property. The people living in the states outside of the sixteen traditional Northern states, to the extent that their existence is acknowledged at all, aren’t fellow ” Americans®”. They’re subordinate subjects, who’s only right is the right to subjection and obedience.

      Southrons, or people in Wyoming, insisting that they’re the polical and legal equals of people in Wisconsin or New Jersey, is high heresy. Even treason®, by the Yankee definition of it..

      Wanting to sucede deeply offends these people to the core of their being. It’s a grievous insult to their egos, which are necessarily inseparable from “America®,” physically and spirituality.
      Which is the only real identity they have. It’s also defiance of their will. Disobedience to the ordained masters and rulers and living embodiments of America®, is their definition of treason®. The Constitutional definition not withstanding. Nor relevant, either. Secession is also theft. The seceding states are taking these people’s personal property. Mississippi for example, belongs to the people of Massachusetts, or Ohio, not the actual native citizens of that state.

      Because these people’s identify and very personhood is entangled with America® and the Federal Government, the breaking up of the Union® is a matter of Life and Death.
      When Dixie seceded in 1860, they pronounced a death sentence on the Northern people. The Union® soldiers weren’t fighting for anything but their lives.They were fighting against the extinction of their egos. Without the South and West, the Northern people will die. So they thought at that time, and still think, today. Because they were taught to think it, in subtle terms, without even realising it.

      They oppose Southern independence because they oppose their own extinction. Physical, mental, personal, spiritual and national.

  18. “Southern Nationalists who hate Yankees and are still mad about the Civil War and the destructive racial policies that were imposed on them by the North.”

    He gets it. To a point.

    “the destructive racial policies that were imposed on them by the North.”

    In the present; It’s also the fact that the Southern states can’t hold elections or referendums without busloads of SJWs, Federal judges in tow, coming down from the deep North to subvert these elections, or overturn the results. Or protest the state governments in their respective Capitols, or overturn the legislation passed therein.

    Which is why we can’t legally and effectively govern our own states as we see fit. Or reign in the Niggers, or stop and throw back the Mestizo invasion.

  19. My grandfather was westerner he was born in denver, he was pretty much more conservative and tough than my grandmothers family who in fact were deep southerners… who can be explained? Taking account my grandfather was raised up in a west north enviroment

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