Anthropologist Peter Frost writes:
Conservatives, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church, were pointing out that liberalism would eventually destroy all traditional identities—the family, gender, kinship, ethnicity. Since these identities are nonconsensual, they violate liberal principles of personal freedom and individual choice. People do not get to choose their family, gender, kinfolk, or ethnic background. Thus, sooner or later, liberalism would cause these identities to dissolve away, under the influence of universal education, the increased mobility of people, and the ability of the market economy to offer more lucrative ways of organizing one’s life…
Fascism failed to make a lasting push-back against liberalism. One reason was that fascist regimes were just as likely to fight each other as their liberal and communist opponents. Within the social environment created by fascism, nationalism tended to radicalize, leading to idealization of the nation and desires to expand through military adventurism.
We think of WWII as a struggle between liberal democracy and fascism, yet it began as a war between two conservative authoritarian states: Germany and Poland, both of which had a record of repressing national minorities and grabbing land from weaker neighbors. When the war was over, fascism had perished not only on the Axis side but on the Allied side as well…
Today, the word “nationalist” is applied to parties like the Front National in France or the PVV in the Netherlands that are more properly called anti-globalist or perhaps anti-replacement, since their main goal is to halt the demographic replacement of native Europeans.
This was not the meaning of “nationalist” in the early 20th century and even less so in the 19th. Back then, nationalists had initially allied themselves with liberals in a common project to emancipate the individual from parochialism—emotional attachment to little regions that often had their own dialects, customs, and sense of belonging. The individual would henceforth identify with a much larger nation-state and be able to circulate over a much larger territory thanks to a common citizenship, a common language, and a common identity. Nationalism was thus the first step in a process that would lead to today’s globalism…
It would in any case be difficult to resurrect nationalism or traditional Catholicism within the time available. For now, it may be better to focus on measures to push back against the most serious and irreversible component of the liberal project, “The Great Replacement”:
– halt an immigration surge that is already spinning out of control. We’re in the early stages of a demographic tsunami, and the word is not too strong.
– create stable kin-based communities where people can develop high levels of trust in each other. There would be no need to impose such a way of life. Many people would jump at the opportunity.
– preserve the genetic heritage of Europe not because we completely know what we’re trying to save, but because we often don’t know. The human genome is largely a black box, and we are only beginning to understand how human populations differ from each other. The burden of proof is on those who seek irreversible change.
– preserve the genetic heritage of Europe because of what we know we will lose: a unique schema of physical features whose purpose seems to be largely aesthetic. These features did not arise by chance, nor did they arise over a long period of time through weak selection. They arose over a relatively short period through intense selection pressures that acted primarily on women, most probably sexual selection.
