The totalitarian impulse of today’s anti-white racists is reflected in their push for a “revolution of nihilism.”

In a witty, Learned Response in the November 1997 issue of Chronicles to both white and black nationalists, then-Editor Thomas Fleming distinguished between racial and national loyalties:

The great mistake made by black and white nationalists alike—the mistake that ensures their failure—is to confuse the categories of race and nation. A race is more or less a subspecies, a set of genetically determined characteristics. Even though it may be true that no pure races exist on the planet, the basic types and subtypes are still distinguishable. A nation, on the other hand, is defined by language, culture, and shared experience. A man will fight and die for a nation, “for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods,” but for a race, the most he will do is to subscribe to a newsletter that makes him feel less like a loser.

Fleming is stressing in this passage the artificial nature of white nationalism. A movement that is going nowhere, white nationalism appears to be a public relations flop, one that, as David Horowitz noted years ago, arose as a clumsy response to a much better subsidized black nationalist movement. Our society is now drowning culturally and politically in the latter far, far more toxic movement. To whatever extent races are taken seriously, remarks Fleming, it is as a subspecies of national identity, an attachment that is organic and historical, and not the creation of an isolated political sect. People will die for an ancestral nation, but no more for a race than they would for the gross domestic product. 

While white and black nationalisms in the U.S. are both constructions of our late-modern, post-Christian culture, they are quite different in terms of their relative popularity. White nationalists have been marginalized and have about as much clout as flat-earthers or those who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens. Self-described white nationalists do crop up as perpetrators of violent acts every now and then, but in these cases, we are dealing with psychopaths, not theoreticians or magazine editors. Whenever they emerge, white nationalists are gleefully targeted by leftist organizations and recently and repeatedly in the propaganda of the Democratic Party.

By now, however, the left’s casual use of the phrase “white nationalism” usually signifies nothing more substantive than the fact that the individuals or groups under attack oppose the present woke agenda or may have donated money to the Republican Party. Conservative organizations typically screen for those giving evidence of white racialist sympathies—and even discriminate against those who have been associated with white “extremists.”

Black nationalism, of course, is (pardon the pun!) a horse of a different color. Those who glorify blackness and correspondingly demean the white race can expect to go far in academia, the media, and politics. Jeremy Carl’s essay in this issue on the war against whiteness abounds in examples of both the exaltation of blackness and the degradation of whites. It seems that white people are disappearing from both television advertisements and popular entertainment—unless a white is depicted as attached to a black, who bestows higher status on his or her racially inferior companion. Although one can conceive of some hypothetical form of black nationalism that is not anti-white, encountering that construction is about as likely as running into a unicorn. Black nationalism is about dehumanizing white people and disparaging their achievements. 

Any scholar who suggests, however obliquely, that whites on average have higher natural intelligence than blacks should expect to become unemployable outside of low-paying menial jobs; at the same time, academics and publicists who call for the extinction of the white race, as did one professor recently at the University of Pittsburgh, can count on stellar academic careers, even if the anti-white racist happens to be white. Politicians who praise whiteness will be savaged by the media; by contrast, blacks with black nationalist backgrounds, like Barack Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, and Raphael Warnock enjoy the drooling admiration of the same media and educational establishment. Leonard Jeffries, Hakeem’s much beloved uncle, was an honored and well-paid figure at the City University of New York for decades. There Professor Jeffries received an astronomic salary for expounding his cockamamie theory about whites belonging to a sun-bleached, cretinized race.

If black and white nationalisms are both political rallying points, only one of them has made headway as a public creed. Even more remarkably, this particular creed with its dehumanization of whites has thrived in what is still a majority white country, one in which blacks account for no more than about 13 percent of the population. Rendering this situation even more bizarre is the fact that most American blacks have at least some Caucasian blood and hardly exhibit the pure racial characteristics of, say, the Ashanti or Ndebele tribes. “African Americans,” moreover, are descended not only from African blacks but also from whites. Their black nationalism is therefore being directed against those with whom American blacks have cultural and even biological ties. 

Allow me to note that I have never viewed either American black nationalism or the demeaning of whites in this country as primarily a black practice. These tendencies issue from a war being waged mostly among whites in which blacks have been enlisted by one side against the other. This doesn’t mean that blacks who rage against whites or burn down cities in riots, are to be treated as “victims.” They are really the victims of their own personal destructive natures. Nor should we sympathize with those blacks who vote for Soros-funded district attorneys to abolish bail laws and allow criminality to go unpunished. These black voters are reaping the whirlwind caused by their infantile behavior and voting patterns.  

But our inner cities have not produced the poisonous anti-white ideologies that are being drilled into the employees of white-run corporations and into the consumers of our popular culture.  The writers of bestsellers attacking the white race—complaining about “white fragility” or deploring the survival of white people—often turn out to be white. The same “whiteness” was evident in the George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, while anti-white whites are also highly visible in most other “demonstrations” centered on white racism or black victimization. 

Although whites are now treated in popular culture with nearly the same contempt as Jews were in the art products of the Third Reich, unlike German Jews in the 1930s, American whites, and certainly their more opulent representatives, are now bankrolling the war against their own race. Indeed, it may be impossible to analyze this situation without being led to this bewildering conclusion. 

Although whites are now treated in popular culture with nearly the same contempt as Jews were in the art products of the Third Reich, unlike German Jews in the 1930s, American whites, and certainly their more opulent representatives, are now bankrolling the war against their own race.

Entirely typical of those who have benefited from the race-hustling industry largely advanced by affluent whites is Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 48-year-old, mixed-race black author of the “1619 Project.” The 1619 Project, published in the New York Times Magazine, is a tear against America as having been founded to advance black slavery. Hannah-Jones also gives profitable lectures in which she demonizes whites as malicious racial oppressors in the kind of vivid invective Hitler reserved for non-Aryans. 

This effusive hater is also a highly paid “journalist” for The New York Times, where she rants in print against the demonic white race as “murderous” and “rapacious.” Her background, however, may be revealing. Hannah-Jones grew up in a (far from poor) racially-mixed family in Waterloo, Iowa where she enjoyed the benefits of a caring Czech mother and a Catholic education. Opinion leaders like her, not inner-city blacks, are the beneficiaries of the anti-white racist industry that is now booming in the United States. 

Are the whites who subsidize such activities truly masochistic and, like contemporary Germans, indulging in Sündenstolz (“pride in one’s sins”), that is, taking morbid pride in confessing their sins endlessly? In my book Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, I strongly suggest that white effusions of social and racial guilt are a transposition of the Judeo-Christian idea of man’s fallen state and the need for spiritual redemption. But perhaps I went too far in highlighting this connection. At the time I produced my book, I could have been overly affected by working at a liberal Protestant educational institution. There my colleagues thought and acted exactly as my book described. 

Since then, I have been struck not by the social guilt of demonstratively anti-white whites but by their malevolence and will to power. Clearly those who incite anti-white hysteria and use it to further their control of black voters and demonstrators hardly share the lifestyles or living conditions of those whom they influence. Do the corporate capitalists, professors with endowed chairs at Ivy League institutions, or media magnates—all of whom advance anti-white racism—share the often self-inflicted poverty and violence of those whose hatred they’re whipping up? 

Pedro Gonzalez’s identification of these actors with a “counterrevolution of the left” hits the proverbial nail on the head. What we’re observing is a prolonged civil war, which only intermittently turns violent, and it is transpiring between culturally radical elites and what is left of the white resistance. And this white resistance is not entirely white, because it is periodically supplemented by nonwhite allies; just as the anti-white whites depend on black mercenaries to work their will. 

Most whites, we may assume, avoid taking sides and try to lead their lives while staying out of the line of fire. Other whites, particularly young college students, recite all or most of the woke left’s litany of anti-white grievances. They do so either because they are following the path of least resistance or because they wish to be identified with those exercising power and enjoying social acceptability. Although these young people form a critical voting bloc for the ruling class, along with college-educated suburban women, they do not contribute anything of importance to woke leftist thinking or demonology. At most they provide the woke left with voters and demonstrators.

It may also be useful to view this counterrevolution of the left, one that in the U.S. has already reached the media, educational institutions, and the deep state, as something taking place throughout the Western world. Here we are speaking not only about anti-white racism in the U.S. but also about related fixations and phobias that have been aroused and rewarded by what seem by now our irremovable Western elites. The designated victims vary from place to place. In Europe, Muslims, gays, feminists and, until recently, Jews supposedly endangered by fascism have all played similar roles as blacks in America. Victim groups in Europe as well as here are still fighting over the highest place in this victimological pecking order; and those who run the political and cultural show are adept at playing off competing victim clients to increase their own power.

The end game for the already powerful is to maintain control, marginalize and, if necessary, wreak destruction upon those who challenge their sway. This ruling class is also fighting to extirpate the very foundations of human civilization, which depend on established social loyalties, gender distinctions, and a sense of the holy. All such remnants of the white Christian male past must be mercilessly effaced, and any group that will assist in this project can expect to receive special favors as privileged victims. 

Woke elite rule requires this Kulturkampf for two reasons. One, the white anti-white racists wish to remove the beliefs and presence of any prior elite in order to impose their own view of reality and their own moral preferences. In this action, our elite behaves like Communists, Nazis, and other modern totalitarians—but does so in a more thoroughly nihilistic fashion. No other totalitarians of the last century, certainly not in the West, have warred against all previous human conventions and customs as relentlessly as the present woke ruling class.

Two, the members of this ruling class feel a deep revulsion for those they are replacing and trying to subdue. They are not just about power or personal advancement, any more than the Nazis killed Jews and Poles just to flex their muscles. They have a special appeal to those who felt marginalized in a previous order, especially those who bring with them ancestral grievances against whites, Christians, or “the patriarchy.” Although this leadership, which is both aggrieved and power-driven, is not Marxist, former Communists and Communist sympathizers have embraced the project. What has attracted them to this task in most cases is neither Marxian economics nor classical socialism, but the opportunity to destroy a hated “reactionary” society that is now under assault. Those who feel socially insecure or were turned off by a bourgeois Christian, predominantly white society have joined this revolution of nihilism masked as a crusade for justice.

Please note the term “revolution of nihilism” comes from the German conservative thinker Hermann Rauschning, who coined it to characterize Nazi rule. This term applies to the activity of woke leftist hegemons as much as it does to the Nazi transformation of Germany in the 1930s. Although anti-white racism plays a critical role in the current politics of cultural nihilism, it is only one aspect of a much larger war against human decency and the standards of civilized society.