What Southern Nationalists Can Teach The Alt-Right

Over at Counter-Currents, Patrick Le Brun has some thoughts to share this morning on what the Alt-Right isn’t and one of those things is Southern Nationalism:

“In the early days of GRECE, the think tank of the Nouvelle Droite (New Right), which included such luminaries as Alain de Benoist and Pierre Vial, it was considered necessary to make a clean break with the failures of the past, totems that many on the Right still clung to. This new generation of writers, mostly in their 20s during the cultural revolution of ’68, felt that nostalgia for a lost cause — and there were several — stood in the way of their values finding political and cultural support from the majority of their countryman. This left a void which the Left exploited without hesitation or limit. …

This article seeks to create an understanding as to how these other schools of thought understand better than the mainstream narrative what is wrong with our society, but they fall short of providing a holistic view or a manageable solution. …

North is a direction; the South is a place, a culture, and a source of pride. It is no surprise that many descendants of the heroic soldiers of the South cherish the memory of their ancestors. This strain of Albion’s seed, the traditionalists, are far less culpable than their Northern cousins, the moralists, in allowing the United States to be subverted by the eternal enemy of our people. The culture distorters who control the media of the US have done all they could to discredit the Southerner, both the aristocratic and down-and-out archetypes. When these proud and demonized Southerners observe the recent evils of the Federal government noted above, the same Federal government that made war upon their ancestors, it is no surprise that many would dream of a renewed separatist struggle. …

The struggle to preserve a future for our people will be an all or nothing struggle. The empire cannot allow for a separate peace, and it certainly won’t be based on reverence for a political economy that was dysgenic and anti-nationalist. …

He goes on for a minute or two before arriving at this conclusion:

“Conclusion

While articles like this have a certain impact on the thinking of a small number of people within the movement, ultimately, it is those who speak in poetry rather than prose who have the broadest impact. As RamzPaul stated, following the Bastille Day attack in Nice, “White Nationalism is about our need for a home, a home of our own.” All of these movements that the Alt Right is not, whether they are centuries old or are simply YouTube channels that have been around a couple years, they diagnose some of the problems of our civilizational and racial decline, but none of them have the whole story or the proper prognosis.

White People need living space separate from the other races to survive and thrive. Jews of all political stripes are a parasitic element that will stand in the way of that goal. Achieving these goals requires a broad movement that seeks total victory and the resulting peace and order will only be maintained by a strong state. Our historic religious commitments, enlightenment ideals, and family values will be reinterpreted through the lens of racial survival . . . we are free to keep what works and discard what doesn’t work well with this goal.

We are also free to maintain our commitments to these Dead Ends that lie outside the Alt Right, but we do so at the peril of securing the existence of our people and a future for white children. What could be more important than that?”

What shall we make of this?

In my article “What Is The Alt-Right?”, I said the movement has three hallmark characteristics: a radical sense of realism, an emphasis on identity, and a strong streak of iconoclasm. That’s as far as I was willing to go. I didn’t say it was White Nationalism because my sense was that the Alt-Right was broader than that.

When I think of the Alt-Right, I think it in terms of taxonomy as being like a “genus” that encompasses a multitude of “species.” So for example, I think of The Daily Stormer as clearly being of the genus “Alt-Right” and the species “National Socialism.” I’m not a National Socialist myself, but I recognize their radical realism, their emphasis on identity, anti-liberalism and iconoclasm, and that is why I classify The Stormer in the Alt-Right box. It is undeniably part of the same phenomenon.

Jared Taylor and Kevin MacDonald are also part of the Alt-Right. American Renaissance is focused on race realism. The Occidental Observer is focused on Jew realism. Both websites consider the interests of Whites to be paramount. Both websites are focused on analyzing a taboo subject. Both websites are iconoclastic in their approach to the issue. Jared Taylor and Andrew Anglin might be polar opposites on the “searching for respectability” question, but both are part of the same broader phenomenon.

Moving on down the list, the Mens Rights Activist community is also part of the Alt-Right, but it is coming at it from a different angle. Instead of racial realism, the emphasis is on sexual differences and gender roles. There is the same focus on identity. In this case, it is male interests instead of White people as a whole. You also have the same iconoclastic streak that is a hallmark of the Alt-Right. Many people on the Alt-Right are not a part of that scene, but it is part of the same phenomenon.

The White Nationalists are part of the Alt-Right. A sense of radical realism on race and Jews. Check. An emphasis on identity. Check. A strong streak of iconoclasm. Check. A rejection of liberalism. Check. There are many varieties of White Nationalists. Just on the subject of religion, there are Christian Identity White Nationalists, neo-pagan Odinist White Nationalists, atheist and agonistic White Nationalists, Orthodoxy-or-Death White Nationalists. There are your garden variety White Nationalists – the sort of people you would never be able to distinguish in a crowd – as well as the more exotic costume fetishists and those who like to be covered head to toe in tattoos.

I don’t believe White Nationalists are synonymous with the Alt-Right. Similarly, I don’t believe calling yourself an Exalted Cyclops, shaving your head and wearing boots and braces, or dressing up in a 1930s Stormtrooper uniform made in China is synonymous with White Nationalism. These smaller factions are part of the scene.

Is Milo Yiannopoulos part of the Alt-Right? Some would say the Alt-Right is defined by atheism and faggotry and that Milo as a drag queen is its avatar. Every reasonable observer would grant that Milo is iconoclastic and shares that much with us. Is he breaking with liberalism though? Is he uttering hard truths with no regard for the consequences? Is he identifying with Whites or criticizing identity politics? I would continue to place Milo on the “Alt-Lite” border with mainstream conservatism.

What about my people, the True Southrons of Southern Nationalism? Are Southern Nationalists part of the Alt-Right? Yes, I think of Southern Nationalists as being part of the Alt-Right in the sense that I have defined it. Southern Nationalists certainly agree with race realism. They agree with Jew awareness. They are unquestionably conscious of their own identity. They are extremely iconoclastic. They pioneered the rejection of liberalism in the United States. These are all the hallmarks of the Alt-Right.

Alt-Right is an umbrella term that encompasses a much broader movement. Every faction within that umbrella has disagreements with the other factions. Within those factions, there are a multitude of even smaller factions such as Orthodoxy-or-Death White Nationalists vs. Odinist White Nationalists.

While I consider White Nationalists and Southern Nationalists to both be part of the broader Alt-Right, there are some important disagreements worth exploring here:

1.) First, Southern Nationalists are ethnonationalists whereas White Nationalists are racial nationalists. We want Dixie to be an independent country like Ireland. We believe in staying put where we are, organizing and networking in the real world, and working toward the goal of Southern independence from the United States.

White Nationalists want to move somewhere, secede from the United States, and create a White ethnostate in North America. 20 years later, White Nationalists still haven’t decided where the White ethnostate will be located and there hasn’t been any mass migration of White Nationalists. The White ethnostate is an abstraction.

2.) Second, Southern Nationalists are deeply skeptical of the idea that a “White ethnostate” could work. Isn’t that what the United States was in the first place … a proposition nation for White people? White people from all over the world were invited to come to our shores and live under the Constitution. Clearly, that experiment was a catastrophic failure, so why are we so eager to give Americanism another chance?

3.) Third, Southern Nationalists believe the United States failed because race and constitutionalism wasn’t enough to prevent White America from destroying itself. The root cause of the failure was ethnic and cultural divisions among Whites. European immigrants came to the United States and assimilated into regional cultures.

4.) Fourth, Southern Nationalists believe that liberal democracy was another root cause of our decline, but it was compounded by these ethnic and cultural divisions which were established by settlement patterns. For centuries, American politics has been an unending contest for sectional dominance within the Union between two White coalitions in which non-White minorities hold the balance of power.

Blacks were the first minority to be enfranchised in order to hold down the South. Hispanic immigration is another means to flood the South and West with non-Whites in order to tilt the balance of power within the Union toward the Northeast.

5.) Fifth, while there has been much happy talk about how Whites have been successfully blended into a generic huWhite America, this is far from the truth. The interstates, suburban sprawl, and trashy pop culture have given us a false sense of our homogeneity.

Cultural geographers have charted these enduring divisions which run across seemingly homogenous areas in states like Pennsylvania, the Kentucky/Indiana border and through lily-White Iowa. As America’s mid-20th century common culture dissolves, these divisions among Whites over ethnicity, culture, class, religion and ideology are deepening and sharpening, not the other way around.

There was a moment in the primaries when these ethnic and cultural divisions began to dawn on the Alt-Right when it became clear that Deseret really, really did not like Donald Trump. Just by knowing the cultural geography of White America, you could predict in the primaries where Rubio, Kasich, Cruz and Trump would win or lose.

Where will we be a month from now? I predict the Alt-Right will have developed a new awareness of concepts like Greater Appalachia, Deep South, Yankeedom, The Left Coast, Tidewater, Far West, Deseret and The Midlands. Also, within these broad ethnocultural sub-nations, there will also be a new awareness of the divisions between The Urbanite, The Suburbanite, and the Rural American.

What’s more, if Trump loses the election, I dare to say that there is a strong possibility that Southern Nationalism could be a hot new thing a month from now. Far from being a Dead End of history, the result of the presidential election is going to produce a new awareness among all commentators of what Southern Nationalists have been saying on for years now, which is that White America is deeply divided into regional camps.