Mytheos Holt writes: I’m no white nationalist (in fact, being Jewish, I’m pretty sure I’m disqualified), and I regard the ideology with just as much disgust as I do every other form of radical identity politics. That being said, I do have a fairly unique ability to answer this question, and with apologies to Lloyd Bentsen, it can be summed up this way: I know white nationalism. A white nationalist was a friend of mine. Trump is no white nationalist.
If he’s president, there might well be fewer of them. Why? Well, if you’ll indulge me in just a little more autobiographical navel-gazing, you’ll find out.
I once met a young woman whom I will call Sylvia, after her favorite poet, Sylvia Plath. At the time, Sylvia had been raised as a member of an infamous white nationalist organization. And I do mean “infamous.” These weren’t the comparatively well-mannered sorts that attend conferences led by Richard Spencer. These were the sorts of people who probably get raided by the FBI.
Where I met her was probably the last place you might expect to find white nationalists, closeted or otherwise. Now since I am, as already established, Jewish, this obviously made me initially regard the girl with something less than charity. I was almost afraid to speak to her.
That is, until I actually did speak to her, in the company of another friend, who had made it his personal mission to deconvert her from her ideology, a task with which I agreed to help, mostly out of morbid intellectual curiosity. When we first spoke to her, Sylvia was fairly careful with her words, and obviously seemed to realize she wasn’t among company who’d take kindly to open admiration of Adolf Hitler. She was, however, more than happy to enthuse about Pat Buchanan, VDare, and restricting immigration.
Now, at the time, I was fresh off having argued for the Gang of Eight bill until I was proverbially blue in the face, so when Sylvia started talking about immigration, I obviously pounced on this as a first opportunity to break down her worldview. I’m fairly certain that all I managed to do was scare her, though she did actually put up a far better fight than any white nationalist has a right to, probably because, despite her sheltered upbringing, she was off-the-charts brilliant. This instantly registered with me, and was later confirmed when she later revealed she’d learned a new language in only two weeks.
Over the coming weeks, I continued to send out feelers and message and speak with her online, keeping my ethnic heritage a secret at first so I could probe her ideology without sending up alarm bells. After a while, she got used to me, and we bonded over our mutual love of H.P. Lovecraft and dark internet humor. As a result, she began to open up about her more risqué beliefs. So, this time with more gentle prodding, I started to make her doubt what she’d been taught.
Of course, at some point I had to reveal that I am a Jew. Needless to say, this shocked her, not least of all because apparently her people train their children to recognize Jewish heritage in someone’s features, yet I had registered as pure Aryan. The realization that “they can look like us,” to use her words, set off something of a minor existential crisis for her, but I’m pleased to report that she got over it, and that my ethnic revelation actually made her open up more to me rather than less.
When Two Worlds Collide
That’s because what shocked her even more than my Jewishness was that I’d known she was a white nationalist and still willingly engaged with her like a human being and an equal. From someone who belonged to a group that she’d assumed held nothing but contempt and malice for people like her, this was the last thing she expected. The feeling was mutual on my end.
After that revelation, gently poking holes in her worldview was out of the question, as I’d just metaphorically sent a cannonball straight through its foundation. What happened instead was that, with the scales lifted from both our eyes about the other’s decency and humanity, we started dissecting the other’s culture as it actually existed rather than how we’d been taught to believe it did. To make a very long story short, she came away understanding that my people weren’t intentionally hurting her people, and I came away with an appreciation for how much, and how unfairly, her people really were hurting.
I say “unfairly” for multiple reasons: firstly, because people as brilliant as Sylvia is do not deserve to be written off as incurable white trash. Giving everybody the opportunity to succeed means everybody, even people who were raised in ways we find troubling. One doesn’t have to be willing to offer blanket pardons to the Aryan Brotherhood to see that someone who was merely raised with bad ideas is not necessarily a lost cause, no matter how repellent those ideas are. In fact, lifting people like Sylvia out of circumstances where they think white nationalism is the only solution seems like Americanism at its finest, not a betrayal of the idea.
The other reason I say the pain experienced by Sylvia’s community is unfair is because when you strip away the swastikas, imitation Hugo Boss uniforms, and Klan hoods, there are things that even rabid, clannish white nationalist society does better than our own. Ironically, given their loathing of other cultures, the biggest one is bilingual education.
One of the odder things I learned was that Sylvia and every other child in her community had to learn to speak German and English, and achieved total fluency in both by their teens. I’m from California, and our own education system wishes it were that good. We don’t have to excuse, or even tolerate, the massive amounts of bad behavior such people engage in to learn from the few decent things they do. After all, just because Mussolini made the trains run on time doesn’t mean punctuality in public transit is itself bad, no matter how hard the DC Metro system pretends.
Ultimately, the biggest reason the pain that drove Sylvia’s family and so many like them into the arms of white nationalism is unfair is a pain that I, as a Jew, can empathize with. After all, once many Jews turned to communism as a way of trying to get political rights they didn’t think they could get any other way, and as a way of lashing out at a society that unfairly disdained them and their culture.
Even though this ideological shift made many people hate Jews more, at least the communists were trying to do something. Only that kind of desperation can make a radical ideology like white nationalism attractive.
Nationalism Is Backlash to Hatred of Western Culture
This brings me to the first and, arguably, the most important lesson that Sylvia taught me about what drives people into the arms of white nationalism: that urge comes not from economic dispossession, nor spiritual dispossession, but cultural dispossession.
No, I don’t mean the sort of “where has my country gone” ignorance that I and my fellow coastal cosmopolitans like to mock over cocktails. I mean the sorts of people who are attracted to white nationalism are people whose own communities have been hollowed out by economic and cultural forces beyond their control, and who are now adrift in a society they perceive to be universally hostile to their heritage for no good reason.
That heritage, as white nationalists in America see it, is the heritage of Western civilization. If you wonder what that means (which is reasonable), let me spell it out: It means historically Western European cultural norms. Specifically, norms like respect for agents of the law, aspirational pride in work, willingness to accept the consequences of one’s actions, disdain for laziness and welfarism, and reproductive responsibility (i.e., not having children you can’t afford to keep).
They respect these norms not merely because these are what their own communities follow, but also because they think these norms make constitutional government, liberty, and classical republicanism possible. If you have to pick between the two, defend the norms every day, since temporary cessations of liberty will naturally recover if they’re still in place, whereas the institutions without the norms will become meaningless: the Constitution will become a pointless scrap of paper to which people pay only lip service, and constitutional government will become bureaucracy hiding behind the fig leaf of a separation of powers.
