National Conservatism

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Here is Peter Thiel’s keynote address at the National Conservatism Conference, if you haven’t seen it yet. His accusations about Google’s disloyalty are front and center. I’m not sure what to think about that particular part. There’s no doubt that Google has a socially liberal, internationalist bent that favors cooperation with China at the expense of domestic interests. On the other hand, if we’re singling out companies and industries that have pursued profits that undermined American values, there are plenty to go around.

Most of his other points are spot on. As a nation we chose bits over atoms, and it did not turn out well for a large segment of America. He has some scathing comments about the American dream and higher education that are hard to argue with, while approaching a nihilism that we don’t normally associate with conservatism.

The conference was organized by Yoram Hazony, political philosopher and author of the excellent book The Virtue of Nationalism, that I highly recommend.

9 thoughts on “National Conservatism”

  1. On the other hand, if we’re singling out companies and industries that have pursued profits that undermined American values, there are plenty to go around.

    Bill Clinton and Loral made it OK. The rest just follow along the birdseed trail.

  3. Yoram Hazony Really Hates The Right; Zionist Attempt To Co-opt National Conservatism Will Fail.

    That is hilarious. Who is co-opting whom?

    Look, there is no such thing as “White Nationalism”. “Whites” are not united as either an ethnic group nor a national movement. It’s a fringe concept that vaguely has something to do with yahoos originating from Nordic regions or the North European Plain. There’s no broad support for it all. It doesn’t even register with most people who share that already narrow ethnic background. If it did, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula would be hot beds of support, instead of what they are, Democrat party strongholds.

    Zionism, on the other hand, is a real national political phenomenon that has actually created a real nation that is indeed the homeland of the Jews, but also a place where other ethnic groups and religions flourish. It’s not only possible to be both against racism and be a Zionist at the same time, but it’s essential to the existence of the nation. There are Jews from all over the world who have moved to Israel and continue to move to Israel. They are a vital link to Israeli relations to other countries, most notably in recent years Russia and Central Asia, but also Africa.

    And no, hell no, Judeo-Christian is not a code word for servile stooges. It’s a recognition that Christians were once Jews and will be united with them again, somehow. God only knows how or when, I certainly don’t, but somehow.

    Go read the Acts of the Apostles or Paul’s letter to the Romans if you don’t believe me.

    And go read Hazony’s book too. Nations are built on things much more robust than kinship or genetics. The modern world rests on bedrocks of national ideals way beyond skin color.

  4. As a nation we chose bits over atoms, and it did not turn out well for a large segment of America.

    That’s because our educational systems have been creating good factory workers. Dullards as much as possible, unthinking unquestioning unrealistic.

    All good for factory workers, not so hot for knowledge workers.

    The other part, of course, was to get all americans a piece of the pie — to rig the system so they had their own piece as it expanded.

    But no one taught them to argue in the salary rooms for stock options, not an extra day’s vacation.

    So once more, we come back to our ab-crappy eddimakashinal system.

    Blame the admins and the teachers of America. They failed dismally.

  5. Excellent speech by Thiel.

    The comments about college education got little media play, but were especially good — and actionable.

  7. Islamists are apparently as misguided and as obsessed with race as Nordicists.

    It’s possible for two very different people with two very different worldviews to both be very stupidly wrong. In fact, it’s usually the case that there are only a few right answers and a cacophony of wrong answers.

    Here’s the thing with Israel. The Multicultural One-World Governmental Order hates Israel not because it practices apartheid (it doesn’t, all minorities have equal rights), but because it practices nationhood independent of their tyrannical mandates, specifically the most important one which is to surrender control of Jerusalem. Whoever controls Jerusalem has their hands on the lever that moves three civilizations.

    The original 1947 partition plan had the UN ruling Jerusalem. They lost it when the war started and have been trying to get it back ever since.

    There is no racial majority/minority aspect to this. It’s all about deep national sovereignty vs shallow transnational interests.

    The other error of all of these White Power whiners is they didn’t read Hazony’s book. They’re totally misreading this conference and dreaming up some hidden paranoid motives. Look at that video again. The organization that Hazony and his colleagues formed that is putting on the conference is the Edmund Burke Foundation. Burke was an Old Whig who believed in natural law and individual liberty. He supported the American Revolution and reform of the East India Company who he saw as exploiting India.

    Hazony has nothing to say in his book about fighting to preserve racial privileges. He describes Israel as a shining example for the world. He believes it embodies the same values of moral virtue and liberty as the United States with a constitution originally derived from Mosaic law. An example that has been the foundation for Western Civilization

    Here’s a relevant quote from his book,

    Much of what has been written about nationalism in recent decades asserts that a state constituted as a national state will be less cohesive, and therefore both less stable and more oppressive, than a neutral or civic state. According to this argument, a national state entails special privileges for members of the majority nation in the state, thereby inciting resentment, resistance, and violence on the part of minority nationalities. The majority is then forced to respond with oppression in order to maintain its special status. In this way, there begins a “cycle of violence” that cannot be broken.

    Experience, however, teaches the opposite. The overwhelming dominance of a single, cohesive nationality, bound together by indissoluble bonds of mutual loyalty, is in fact the only basis for domestic peace within a free state. By this I do not mean that the entire population must be drawn from a single nationality, for no such thing exists anywhere on earth. Moreover, there is no evidence that such a complete homogeneity is necessary for the cohesion, stability, and success of the state. Rather, what is needed for the establishment of a stable and free state is a majority nation whose cultural dominance is plain and unquestioned, and against which resistance appears to be futile. Such a majority nation is strong enough not to fear challenges from national minorities, and so is able to grant them rights and liberties without damaging the internal integrity of the state. Similarly, the national minorities that stand against such a national majority are themselves largely reluctant to engage in confrontations that they know they cannot win. For the most part, they therefore assimilate themselves into the system of expectations established by the constitutional and religious culture of the majority nation, learning its language and resorting to violence only on rare occasions. This has been the case in the most successful national states such as Britain, America, France, and other countries in Europe, in addition to national states such as Australia, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Turkey, India, and Israel. In each case, the overwhelming dominance of a single majority nation has produced states that are dramatically more stable, prosperous, and tolerant than neighboring states that have not been constituted as national states.

  8. >There is no racial majority/minority aspect to this. It’s all about deep national sovereignty vs shallow transnational interests.<

    OJ Simpson verdict. Tribalism exists. Whites in America need to acknowledge this fact going forward.

  9. Here is Yoram Hazony’s speech at the conferance. Give it a listen

    https://youtu.be/4cpyd1OqHJU

    That entire school that’s dominated the Republican party and a large part of the Democratic party, all it wants to do is to reduce every political phenomenon to some kind of economic theory of the free equal choosing individual, but the real political world does not consist of those atomic free choosing individuals. The real political world is one of competing tribes and nations. It’s the real existence of tribes and nations that generates political phenomena such as national borders, independent national governments, national traditions, national cohesion, and national dissolution.

    Imagine if you see the world through that libertarian lens, through that economic lens, you cannot understand what a border is for. You can’t see cohesion and disillusion. You can’t see nations. You’re completely blind to the central political phenomena that are taking place in the world. That is, in fact, the clash between the elites and the broad public is that the broad public has a traditional view of what the political world looks like, and they listen to the elites that have been trained in university who are completely blind. You don’t see anything without a clear awareness of what these things are. These truly empirical political phenomenon.

    This is a theme in ‘The Virtue of Nationalism’, that a competing, balance of power of nations is what keeps peace and order and rule of law and civilization intact. Order imposed above by an internationalist/transnationalist authority must in some way use imperialistic power and eventually warfare.

    The mistake of libertarians he’s talking about is a common one, not just to them. There is a fundamental change at each scale. A nation isn’t just a collection of individuals. An empire (like the United Nations) isn’t just a collection of countries. The whole is different from the sum of the parts. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Nationhood is a middle ground between internecine conflicts of tribalism and imperial tyranny.

    This is also a mistake of so-called White Nationalists. To reduce political cohesion to one single element – skin color – is to believe that human behavior progresses in a straight line and social affinity moves outward in tidy circles. The real world is messier than that, and this simplistic model will get everyone into trouble.

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