Separating from America 2.0; creating the seed of America 3.0

While I am not geared to be an activist/martyr in the mold of Ann Barnhardt, here is a step short of martyrdom that is necessary and doable: composing a catalog or bill of particulars of the salient things about the present society and regime—the things that are normal, approved, and dominant in today’s America, both on the level of politics and on the level of culture and behavior—that we denounce and reject and will have no part of. I am thinking both of the first principles of liberalism, and of the concrete manifestations of those first principles which surround us with their demonic evil and are increasing in their evil and their power week by week. The catalogue would serve both as an intelligible picture of the wicked nature of the present society, also known as America 2.0, and as a seed of a community of separatists that will come into existence in the very act of their shared spiritual rejection of that society. It may take generations or centuries for this new community to create an independent polity as the political expression of its ideals and as the practical means for securing its existence, and in the meantime the United Socialist Sodomist States of America will have disintegrated and gone to hell as it deserves, but eventually the non-liberal people of America will have a country again—their own country, from which the poison of liberalism will be forever excluded, and in which a decent, civilized, and free life for Western men and women will become possible again.

Also, here is the passage from the above-linked entry where I introduced the concepts of America 1.0 and America 2.0. It is a comment in which I am replying to a reader:

You are suggesting that the prevailing belief in the white moral debt to blacks will lose its power over society as nonwhite immigrants and their descendants gain political power. I don’t agree. At present, blacks, Hispanics, and other nonwhites form a coalition with liberal whites against whatever remains of traditional, constitutional, and white America, which we could call America 1.0. I see no reason why that should change in the coming years. In the 1960s, white guilt over real and imagined mistreatment of blacks took over the American mind; that guilt was then quickly expanded to include imagined white mistreatment of all nonwhites in the world. The belief in that universal and unappeasable white guilt is the core of the ruling liberal system which is aimed at the total destruction of America 1.0 and its replacement by a new America, America 2.0, which will be ruled (as I’ve put it) by a coalition of nonwhite parasites and white leftist scum. The 2012 presidential election marked the historic moment when the ongoing replacement of America 1.0 by America 2.0 first became explicit in the national consciousness. The belief in the racist evil of America 1.0 that fuels and legitimizes America 2.0 is not going to change in its fundamentals until it has completed the destruction of America 1.0.

Here is a simple way of understanding America 1.0. I have been saying for the last year that the America symbolized by George Washington, the America of which George Washington is the Father, is gone and is not coming back. That America was America 1.0.

- end of initial entry -

LA writes:

Let critics try to say, after reading this, that by declaring “It’s their country now,” I am counseling despair. We are at the beginning—the beginning of creating an America and a West without liberalism, because now we’ve completed the American Experiment, and we know the ruin that liberalism brings and must bring on Western people.

LA writes:

A reader has suggested that my proposed catalogue would be like the bill of particulars in the Declaration of Independence. In fact, it is not intended to be anything like the Declaration of Independence. To avoid misunderstanding, I will try to explain later what I mean.

Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:

You wrote:

“[E]ventually the non-liberal people of America will have a country again—their own country, from which the poison of liberalism will be forever excluded, and in which a decent, civilized, and free life for Western men and women will become possible again.”

I think this is a great addition to your: “It’s their country now.”

There is a lot of (albeit, now mostly historical) beauty in America. It may be “their country now,” but it once belonged to all Amercans, who have invested a lot over all the centuries by building it. And these Americans are capable of reclaiming it.

The way to re-build the new America is not from ashes, but from an incremental rejection of “the salient things” that have progressively acted in destroying America, and an inclusion of, and improvement on, what has made America good and beautiful.

There is something (a lot) to build upon. And like you say, it may take generations or centuries to get it to the ideal state. I think the work is a combination of distilling out the worthwhile of what is already here, rejecting what has caused the path to the destruction, and the addition of new entities.

I don’t think we can know exactly how the final form will be; it is unchartered territory (literally and metaphorically), but we should get those initial steps of rejection and inclusion as right as possible. The addition of newe entities is an ongoing process.

December 8

Thomas Bertonneau writes:

Establishing a new polity is, of course, a long-term goal probably unrealizable in the lifetimes of those of us born in the middle of the last century. It is something of a paradox that traditionalists, who venerate the past, must from now on be future-oriented. [LA replies: While valuing and venerating past expressions of order and beauty that have formed our civilization and ourselves is an essential part of traditionalism, I have never defined traditionalism as veneration of the past per se, an approach which can lead to a kind of dead conservatism. I define it as participation in a living continuum uniting the present, the past, and the future, as a particular tradition’s way of expressing the truth, of orienting itself to the natural, historical, and transcendent realities that form it. The past is a part of traditionalism, not the entirety. New traditionalist societies may form, which are consistent in their own way with the heritage that formed them and also with new conditions.] We traditionalists do now has as its aim the future restoration of a coherent, just society founded in truth, in which good things might be reborn. (Ours is now the duty of Aeneas in Vergil’s poem: Troy is dead and burnt; we carry the household gods of our old city and seek a place to give them a new home.) [LA replies: Or Yeats: “Hector is dead and there’s a light in Troy. / We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.”] In the first phase, traditionalists ought—as it seems to me—to begin identifying one another in their present localities; they should seek neighbors and nearby co-citizens of like mind and begin associating with them. Farther out along the time-line, the like-minded will need to congregate. This will mean that some will need to remove themselves from one place to another and that will mean effort and sacrifice. Those already domiciled in the destinations will need to aide those who undertake to resettle. Now media like the Internet facilitate something resembling conversation among people of minority conviction in scattered places, but finally there is no substitute for daily face-to-face contact and discussion; there is no substitute for shopping in the store of the likeminded merchant rather than in some other; there is no substitute for living next door to someone likeminded rather than some other—and so forth. Resettlement and congregation are unavoidable elements in the traditionalist survival-strategy; otherwise we will remain voices crying in the wilderness.

The model of resettlement and congregation is the classical polis, the city-state, which, as Eric Voegelin puts it, acts like a subject that organizes itself. For a long time, these “virtual polities” will have to remain unofficial and low-profile. Once traditionalists have sufficiently nucleated themselves, even on an unofficial and low-profile basis, they will be in a position to begin establishing effective alternate institutions—like schools. I imagine also all sorts of cooperative ventures.

When people scoff at such long-term thinking, the response should be something like this: What was California in 1960 and what is it today and how did it get that way? Or what was Detroit in 1950 and what is it today and how did it get that way? The purely formal answer is that likeminded people resettled in those places, congregating and altering the character of those places. That it is possible to resettle, congregate, and alter the character of a place is proven absolutely by the alterations of character of places that have already taken place. Moreover, in thinking about California (my native state), the time needed to effect the change was not all that much—fifty years. Fifty years is beyond my mortal potential, but it is well within my son’s. [LA replies: Yes, and not only does a certain likeminded group congregate in a certain place, but other groups leave.]

I began by referring to “a new polity.” It need not be a single polity, however, as my invocation of the polis would suggest.

LA to Alan Roebuck:

This catalogue is not meant to be some all-purpose document, it’s just one document fulfilling one task. Other and more substantive documents, such as your Traditionalist Manifesto, would still be necessary.

Carol Iannone writes:

I like what Kidist said at your site, not consigning the whole thing over to the leftists, but holding on to what is still good and beautiful and rejecting the bad and ugly.

December 10

Jeremy G. writes:

I don’t have the ability to describe fully my level of appreciation for you. I pray that you live until 120.

I was thinking a lot about what you said about spiritually turning away from society and joining into a small group of likeminded individuals to retain a remnant of Western civilization that could emerge sometime after America 2.0 collapses. The ultra-religious Jewish community is a cohesive remnant of an earlier nation. They’re a successful example of what you are looking for. In the small rural community where I live, I know that many ultra-religious Christians are seriously thinking and even beginning to act along these lines. So it is going to happen.

I’m seriously considering moving to Israel permanently. Hopefully I can find a job there. I don’t see why my family needs to go through the intense suffering that is the future of white America. This suffering is designed by G-d for white liberals. I don’t think its for those who already understand and do not need this type of growth.

Daniel F. writes:

I must respectfully disagree with some implications of the comment by Jeremy G., whom seems to be a highly intelligent and highly principled person. He speaks favorably of the ultra-Orthodox Jews as a model for those who want to establish semi-independent traditionalist communities as the West. The ultra-Orthodox are a very poor model for any such project, by Jews or anyone else. With the exception of the Lubavitch (who are a special case), Ultra-Orthodox communities, both in Israel and in the United States, could not exist without the welfare state. Their idea of protecting themselves from outside influence is to have as many of their people as possible avoid gainful employment outside of their communities. In the U.S., they have developed great skill in wringing every possible public assistance dollar out of the government to enable their men to study full-time in yeshiva, without working at all, almost into middle age (the women generally don’t work, staying home to take care of the numerous children). [LA replies: I wrote about the Hasidic Jews’ massive exploitation of our welfare system phenomenon at NewsMax in 2001.] In Israel, the situation is even worse than here, with even fewer men gainfully employed. [LA replies: Last week I saw truly shocking figures of the percentage of Hasidic (called Haredi) men in Israel who live off the state, but don’t remember the specifics.] Thus, though the ultra-Orthodox give the impression of an independent community, they are essentially tolerated wards of the larger society. If the welfare ceased, these communities would be unable to sustain themselves or perpetuate their way of life.

Nor do I see how one can escape the rising tide of leftism by decamping to Israel. Israel suffers from all the same lunatic leftwing trends we have here (partially excepting the matter of dealing with the Palestinians and the Islamic world, about which a majority of Jewish Israelis are still able to think rationally). Nobody in Israel has any general traditionalist moral agenda to speak of. For example, abortion, which is common in Israel, is not a live issue there. There is also a strident gay rights movement. The courts, which essentially choose their own personnel (and are therefore beyond political control), are openly contemptuous of Jewish tradition and seek to strike at it whenever they can. It is important to note that the secular Israeli right is in no way a traditionalist movement; they are most comparable to American neoconservatives (although there are differences on dealing with the Arabs, as you know). The Zionist religious parties are primarily concerned with territorial issues (i.e., settlements and Jerusalem) and security issues; the ultra-Orthodox parties are concerned with the parochial concerns of their communities (i.e., having their institutions funded and maintaining their exemptions from military service). All religious parties are concerned with preventing state recognition of the local franchises of American Reform and “Conservative” Judaism (the Jewish equivalents of mainline Protestantism).

But, as far as I know, the religious parties in Israel, apart from their sectarian concerns about borders/settlements, recognition of nontraditional forms of Judaism, and state assistance, have no general vision of how Israeli Jewish society should be changed to begin to realize the moral principles of traditional Judaism or to re-establish Jewish tradition as a presence in the lives of Israeli Jews generally. The latter goal is probably unattainable in any event, given the deep hostility of the secular majority to Jewish tradition, given that they know it only through the agencies of the obnoxious and corrupt official religious establishment, the parasitic ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community, and the settlement-obsessed Zionist religious parties.

The situation is not much better on economic issues. The Likud has had some success in getting through economic reforms to allow more of a free market, but, because of the crony capitalism that prevails in Israel, these reforms have largely hurt middle class Israelis by raising the cost of living. As a result, there has arisen a large, irrational reactionary-leftist movement to reverse such free market reforms as have occurred to date, rather than to eliminate remaining counterproductive statist distortions of the economy.

In sum, Israel is as much a moral and cultural disaster area as the rest of the Western world.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 07, 2012 05:17 PM | Send