A new view of VFR and of the traditionalist mission

Dan M. writes:

I’m very grateful to you for your writing and clarity over the years. Several times while reading your recent commenters’ letters, I’ve come to tears. That’s not a normal occurrence—I’ve just been very touched by the outpouring. I wanted to lend my voice and my support to you, but have struggled to find something more to say than “me too.” In several recent exchanges with friends and family, I’ve had occasion to explain why I value your writing so much. Those exchanges have finally helped me to express what I’d like to say to you.

You are a particularly unique author in that the vast majority of your work and insights takes place in an open discussion/blog. When John Derbyshire complimented you recently and stated something to the extent that you have a following that is disproportionate to your literary achievements, it got me thinking. It’s ironic that someone so well read and influenced by the literary tradition would become one of the best examples I know of an author who eschews traditional book writing/publishing for the immediacy and format of new media.

Many authors and academics can write if given endless time to coalesce their thoughts in private or in study, organize endlessly, editing, re-editing and finally releasing their work, often after years of lerefinement. But that doesn’t really give the reader an insight into the author’s process, his evolution, command of the material and his thinking. By contrast, to be able to deliver high quality insight day in and day out, building your audience, issue by issue issue and argument by argument seems another thing altogether. As a result you are often labeled, “blogger extraordinaire,” or some such thing that really doesn’t do you justice. You are a thinker and an impassioned one at that; one who raises his voice whenever a commenter or other writer attacks a first principle. Oftentimes, other writers and your readers don’t realize the principle and as a result we fail to understand what we sometimes perceive to be a nitpick or the alienation of a useful ally. But in articulating your reasons, you bring us along and help to ballast positions that feel right, but for which we often don’t have a clearly articulation or root. Without that articulation and connection to a principle, we inevitably drift leftward.

As a Jew, I’ve noticed a number of commenters of VFR taking a position of either atheism, agnosticism, or Judaism. I appreciate that there’s room for us in your world view. I’ve explained to friends and family who sometimes balk at your religious Christian writing that what is primary to your position is not a universal belief in Christianity, but a historically rooted, cultural belief in a white Christian-majority country; one that places expectations of tolerant assimilation on newcomers with caveats that they do not attempt to undermine the traditional culture. Culture matters and without some ethno-religious consistency, it disappears.

I’m a little murky on how we go about resurrecting that, but I think it’s a positive ideal. I don’t know how you institute such a thing. As you’ve pointed out, it didn’t need institutionalizing in the past, it just was. And you’ve reminded many of us too young to have ever experienced it of that fact. Many conservatives embrace the concept of American exceptionalism—but they rarely define it except by using the most banal abstractions. You’ve helped me to see American exceptionalism in an entirely new light. I don’t seek to draw you into an articulation on how one institutionalizes cultural self-esteem in a society that has lost it. You’ve done so many times. Now it’s up to us. But I do know that your writing about what we have lost and your writing about how we might go about renewing that ideal will continue to affect my thinking and that of so many others.

Thank you so much, courageous teacher.

Dan in Berkeley

LA replies:

Thank you very much. I think you have articulated things about VFR that have never been articulated before.

As for how we get to a white Christian-majority country in which the good qualities of the white race and the ways and institutions of Christianity will flourish without being beset by crippling obstacles, the most important point is that it begins in the minds and spirits of those who aspire to it, who recognize that it doesn’t exist now, and who are determined to have it, though they recognize that its creation may take generations or even centuries. That is not a hopeless prospect. There is so much to be done and realized now—the building of an internal dissident society within liberal America. Many elements of such a dissident society or societies already exist. For example the area of Pennsylvania where I am now residing. It’s just twenty miles from the black-dominated jungle of Philadelphia, yet it is all white, and its all-whiteness is reflected in the extraordinary pleasantness, peacefulness, freedom from disorder and crime. The people here are clearly drawn to such a white environment, but they never state openly that that’s why they’re here. In fact they are ultra liberals in their politics.

So they are divided beings: they passionately prefer to live in an all-white community, and they pay exhorbitantly to live here, but they would never say that.

Such Whitopias, as VDare calls them, are essential to the health of our society and the health of the white race, but they’re not enough. They need to become consciously white communities, and ultimately to grow and coalesce into a nation-wide movement that aims at creating a white society, a white America, in which the free development of white Christian civilization will be possible.

Again, this is a very far away ideal. But if people hold that ideal and that hope firmly in their hearts and their bowels (using that word in the Hebrew Bible’s sense of “guts,” of one’s inner being and deepest feelings), I firmly believe that it will be ultimately realized. And to what better hope could we devote ourselves than to the rebirth of the white Christian West, no matter how long it takes—our civilization, our peoplehood, the matrix of everything we are?

— end of initial entry —

March 13

Bill Carpenter writes:

Your reply to Dan M. includes a fine, pointed summary of what white Christian America and its allies must do to survive. Thank you for continuing your work even in the face of mortal illness.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 12, 2013 08:59 PM | Send