Men in the City are coalescing into nationalist movements. What is a nation? Such a question has always been elusive. However, while a nation will always be an ethereal, even meta concept on some level, nations until recently have been unambiguous human organizations to masses of men. Historically, the nation equaled its people, an aggregation of the unique racial-cultural-linguistic-religious blocks embodied in distinct founding peoples. However, the nation so defined has been decimated by Western elites and intellectuals, journalists and educators, bureaucrats and technocrats, and even pop culture icons who evangelize something anathema to the nation – pluralism.
Pluralism and nation cannot coexist, they inhabit fundamentally different worlds, both foreign and hostile to one another. Pluralists regard the farm towns, founding cities, historical cites and culture, and the people who built them as replaceable like decorative furniture or coats of paint, one as good as the next. Whereas the nation, as Isaiah Berlin described, rests on “the realization that cultures are many and various, each embodying scales of value different from those of other cultures and sometimes incompatible with them.” National culture springs from a non-fungible demography and cannot survive without it. Conversely, the pluralist lives a cosmopolitan fantasy, perhaps traversing the globe as Nomad Capitalists or Davos Men, or as activist outreach to foreigners, immigrants, and refugees. Pluralists welcome all comers as the new crop of malleable voters whom they can rally against the superfluous originals.
National culture springs from a non-fungible demography and cannot survive without it.
Pluralists believe the trends towards the dissolution of national borders, the subordination of governments to corporations, and the complete erasure of pesky old-world customs and identities embedded in founding peoples cannot be reversed. Such a hollowing out process is the objective of pluralism, and its instrument has been democracy. The toxic mix of democracy and open borders has empowered foreign voting blocs against the nation, rendering the restoration of national identity impossible, and the new pluralist regime unchallengeable. Or so they thought.
Yet as democracy falls the nation reawakens. After decades of bludgeoning at the hands of deindustrialization, feminization, globalization etc. masses of Western men are rejecting slow death and gathering for a counterstrike. Pluralism is fragmenting into Hobbesian Balkanization and the demos have lost faith in democracy as the West enters a state of emergency. Once again, “the eternal recurrence of the same” is reviving nations and nationalism, and the revolt of young men is coalescing into a Leviathan, a meta-political force poised to fill the void and reset the system.
The revolt of young men is coalescing into a Leviathan, a meta-political force poised to fill the void and reset the system.
A Nation Diluted
Nations are living things because the people who make them are living beings. Overtime, however, long after the founding peoples have constructed the grand cities and citadels, sovereign borders and institutions, legal codes and customs, cultural norms and traditions people discard the past, some out of disdain, most out of negligence. Like the Chinese proverb states: Fu bu guo san dai' – “rags to riches in three generations,” recursions of this sort are part of the lifecycle of civilizations and one of the reasons empires rise and fall. The nation, however, endures so long as its people do.
The nation endures so long as its people do.
The perversion of democracy has come to negate the essence of a nation – it’s people. Democracy and the evangelicals of pluralism have embraced a new concept of nation, the anti-nation, society as a dehumanized system, a “nation of ideas.” A proxy to describe such a divergence is Ferdinand Tönnies delineation between "Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft," Community and Society. The German Sociologist noted the profound disconnect between human relations that emanate from “common genetic and cultural identity” versus more spurious ones based on “economic relations,” or legal-political procedure. The latter defines the mechanistic bonds of democratic pluralism.
Unanchored democracy (democracy stripped of its national character) has come to choke off the oxygen to the nation by compressing the founding population. In a sense, Tönnies delineation between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft is somewhat of a mischaracterization because gesellschaft is really a parasitic system, it cannot exist or function without gemeinschaft, much like the relationship between communism and capitalism. Without capitalism, communism destroys itself, whereas without communism capitalism can thrive. A similar dynamic exists between unanchored democracy and nation; as the founding population has been demographically erased democracy itself descends into disarray.
Unanchored democracy has left a barren wasteland of Third World lawlessness, narcissistic materialism, corporate conformity, and the ruins of a decrepit State.
The breakdown of democracy goes well beyond a collapse in public trust. Hegel described 19th century America as a “civil society without a state.” By civil society Hegel meant the same thing De Tocqueville meant: religious community, municipal organization, patriotic associations, and local self-governance. Today, the erstwhile fertile ground for democracy has gone fallow; what’s left is a barren wasteland of Third World lawlessness, narcissistic materialism, corporate conformity, or the ruins of a decrepit State. Why? Because the citizenry has been replaced by foreigners and strangers, by immigrants, refugees, and special interests, the tribes of pluralism. The nation has been diluted.
The Nation Strikes Back
Tension between nation and pluralism is rising as a result. While there are many proxies that point to escalation into conflict, perhaps demographic reshuffling is the best measure. Since the Civil War, wealth and power in the United States has primarily concentrated in the Northeast , New York and Chicago, and out West in Texas and California. The exodus of white Americans from foreign displacement in coastal cities in these areas has also tracked a hardening of racial-cultural-religious resistance to pluralism. Nothing less than a retrenchment of nation along racial-cultural, economic, and geographic lines is forming.
This is not about red states and blue states as most describe it, it is a battle between nationalism and pluralism. As foreign populations have massed in coastal areas, Americans have fled elsewhere in the hopes of finding safe havens, cultural, economic, and demographic zones where they feel a safe distance from the tribal Heart of Darkness, at home again inside a vestigial nation. Such a realignment is unsustainable because the State and the pluralistic forces that empower it feeds on the nation like a parasite feeds upon its host. So, redress of grievances at the ballot box, demographic retrenchment, and even secession are virtually impossible. While the details are different, across Europe and North America the trends are consistent. Westerners collectively are beginning to realize pluralism has entrapped them. They are beginning to ask: What do we do, what can we do?
Redress of grievances at the ballot box, demographic retrenchment, and even secession are virtually impossible.
The precarious situation we are entering could be referred to as the “State of Exception.” It is an interregnum, a transitory period in which the rule of law, the normal procedures of government, or the path of succession is broken, suspended or otherwise disrupted. When such moments arise, violence escalates and blood is shed but eventually the nation embodied in masses of men regresses to the mean and the national character rises again. Sometimes nations erupt in chaotic revolution (France), sometimes the State is reconstituted (Germany), sometimes there is total obliteration of the legacy structure (Russia), and sometimes there is a State secession that splinters off (America). In most cases, albeit with different forms the nation awakens.
In the English-Speaking world ours has been a process of direct challenge to the legacy sovereign. The Magna Carta imposed on King John by the Knights of Runnymede, the execution of King Charles I and the rise of Cromwell’s New Model Army, the Sons of Liberty and the “committees of correspondence” who scaffolded a breakaway State ultimately coalescing around Washington’s Continental Army. During the Civil War it was Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Jefferson Davis’s separatist regime based in Richmond, a split between Lincolnian and Jeffersonian America. However, the resolution of these revolutionary episodes is virtually always the same: a Leviathan emerges.
Return of Kings?
Thomas Hobbes is ill considered by many, perhaps most, in the Anglo-world today who discard him as a crude monarchist. However, Hobbes was a man keen on restoration of authority because he lived through seminal moments of English history in which State power was tested (the Gunpowder Plot) or destroyed (English Civil War). In Hobbes' schema, once State authority collapsed or was significantly disrupted it was not long before masses of men reverted to a “state of nature.” While not the same as the “state of exception,” both address the state of emergency that follows when order gives way. Both concepts anticipate the rise of new, powerful authority to fill the void.
Leviathan’s authority emanated from below not above.
Hobbes called this new authority the Leviathan, a biblical reference to a sea monster. Hobbes’ Leviathan was not necessarily a new King either, an authority ordained by God and mandated by heaven. Rather, the Leviathan’s authority emanated from below not above, empowered by a “social contract” with the citizenry to rescue society from anarchy and restore order. In effect, the citizenry empowers the Leviathan to form a new State whose first order of business is to crush violent instability and restore the nation. While names like Augustus Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, and Napoleon fit into this vein this time around will almost certainly look very different.
So what would a modern Leviathan look like in the modern West? Many might think of Donald Trump as a potential candidate, but a return of kings is unlikely in the Western World, at least not in that form. More likely, a Leviathan will emerge as national movements organized as networks, operated like parties, and led like corporations. Think of Uber, Amazon or even Bitcoin as organizational templates that could quickly cohere mass movements and spread them via the network effect.
Rather than a kind Trumpian figure, the Neo-Leviathan is a lot closer to Tyler Durden. Fight Club in many ways showcased the kind of organic network effect, unifying action, and party apparatus that in my view has already begun to manifest in the Manosphere. One of the main questions posed by Fight Club was how do you defeat a corporate structure? The answer Tyler Durden comes up with is to build better one.
What exactly does that look like in a contemporary political context? Can “digital fight clubs” as I call them scale into nationalist movements across the West? What realistic chance does a corporate structure(s) have against censorship or other coercive State measures? These questions and more will be addressed in "When Democracy Falls Part 3."
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