White identity movements are racist and fascist, and I don’t use those terms lightly. Their names alone tell the story: Klansmen, Hammerskins, Aryan Brotherhood, neo-Confederates, RAM, the Volksfront, White Aryan Resistance, Proud Boys and the Phineas Priesthood.
We take it for granted that white identity is inevitably based on the hatred and oppression of other groups. But is that true? Could white people construct an identity which is not based on the violent domination of others? That does not include an assertion of inherent superiority?
Some young whites are clearly drawn to white nationalist movements because they lack a “sense of purpose,” which means a lack of historical or social purpose. They do not know their place in history, nor in society.
As Deeyah Khan puts it:
“I tried to understand the core psychological draw of these movements. I found that a sense of belonging or purpose was a major factor. These people join these groups and suddenly they have a sense of meaning in life, a belief that they matter, that their voice matters. It’s as though they were once invisible and now they’re seen.”
https://www.vox.com/world/2019/1/14/18151799/extremism-white-supremacy-jihadism-deeyah-khan
A white identity, minus fascism, might help ground young whites and give them a sense that their lives have meaning. Much would depend, of course, on the content of that identity.
So, who are whites? The latest work in paleogenetics show that Europeans are descended from three main prehistoric groups: the Yamnaya, who came from the steppes; Neolithic farmers from the Middle East; and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, native to Europe. These groups are so remote from us that their very names have been created by archaeologists.
This introduces an important point: identities are forged by historic circumstances, and these identities disappear or become unimportant as circumstances change. No identity is permanent, no identity is inherent. At one time the difference between the English and Danes was a matter of life and death, like the difference between Hutu and Tutsi, but now people just laugh at all that.
The Neolithic and Bronze Age groups responsible for our genetics are not relevant to our modern identity, as odd as that may sound. Their concerns are not our concerns.
We can also view modern identities this way—none of them are permanent, and some of them may prove extremely temporary.
So where do we start with white identity? For reasons that will become apparent, I choose the period from the Norman Conquest to the Year of Revolutions, 1066 to 1848. This period includes the High Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, the Reformation and the religious wars, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
People in this era were deeply concerned with questions of social order, human dignity and the life of the spirit.
Braudel points out that the intellectual and spiritual history of Europe is turbulent in the extreme. In the Middle Ages, heresies were frequent and in some cases at least (e.g., Meister Eckhardt) reflected a need to make Christian practice less dualistic and more intimately subjective.
This milieu also included movements and practices not strictly heretical, but which betrayed a discontent with orthodox belief: astrology, alchemy, the beginnings of science, freemasonry, Neo-Platonism, and above all the revival of classical learning. An interest in the classics—nearly universal among the educated—implied a sympathetic study of Greek and Roman mythology, religions which had attempted to stifle Christianity in its cradle.
Not surprisingly, the social and political structure was also turbulent, even chaotic. There were three major forces in the Middle Ages: church, monarchy and aristocracy, but there was seldom any balance-of-power. The kings and aristocrats made war on each other almost reflexively, and the church was often seen as oppressive and parasitical. Anti-clerical sentiment was widespread, and yet there was no effective way to oppose the Church before the Reformation.
Peasant rebellions were a regular feature of medieval life, but rarely did any good come of them. Private warfare was common. As Marc Bloch put it:
“The Middle Ages, from beginning to end, and particularly the feudal era, lived under the sign of private vengeance.”
This then, was the situation: an autocratic church, parasitical and corrupt, opposed to a people who seemed always in a state of spiritual ferment; a violent and grasping aristocracy, nearly as parasitical as the Church; and monarchs who often seemed addicted to warfare.
Most people were unhappy with this situation, but no alternatives existed, even conceptually. They did not have the intellectual framework needed to develop a better system, starting with the idea of a system. A professor I knew once said that there are people in Afghanistan who don’t know they live in Afghanistan—or any country, for that matter. The sun comes up, the sun goes down. And so it was in Europe in medieval times—no one knew they lived in a system. It all just happened to them, century after century, war after famine after plague after war—and all they could do was pray for better days.
The insecurity of life for all classes can only be illustrated by example. When William Rufus was killed hunting in 1100, many of the peers of England were with him. Without the king, they believed that no one’s life and property were safe, and they fled to their homes in such panic that they left the king’s corpse lying where it fell! Mind you, these were the most powerful men in England.
One possible solution to this chaotic insecurity was to strengthen the monarchy, which bore ultimate responsibility for the law. Even a warlike king might prefer an orderly kingdom that could pay taxes on time and in full, and not kill off potential soldiers in interminable feuds. People might have thought: if only the violence could be limited to wars between kings…..
But the kings often over-played their hands. Like the aristocracy, they were constantly pushing for more taxes and more power. This was not a society that bred moderation.
Then too, succession to the throne was sometimes disputed, and this could lead to catastrophes like the War of the Roses and the Hundred Years War. It was reasonable to doubt whether strengthening the monarchy was in fact beneficial.
Another possibility was a state in which the peasants, craftsmen and merchants had more power. The Swiss Confederation was a successful example, but to establish their independence the Swiss had to develop a military system that could defeat armored knights in the field. Their tactics were widely imitated, but not their political institutions, which were almost anarchic at times.
The merchant class, the urban artisans and the peasants all had an interest in peace and a fair legal system, but it took a long time to develop the concepts and institutions needed. For example, a legal system that applied to all classes and vocations equally, with rational rules of evidence, with torture, trial by ordeal and spectral evidence excluded was literally inconceivable. The entire civilization was unable to answer the question “how do we know what is true?” without resorting to the supernatural. Legal judgments had to be God’s to be fully trusted.
Efforts to guarantee a clear signal from the Deity included the following: participants in trial by battle had to swear an oath that they were not using witchcraft or sorcery to influence the result, and seconds checked clothing to ensure there were no prayer scrolls or written spells hidden inside. Sometimes gloves were exchanged before the combat as a way of cancelling out any magic applied to the hand that wielded the weapon.
A society that struggled with these issues was unlikely to come up with a secular, constitutional democracy without an immense intellectual effort.
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There were two strains of European political culture from medieval times on, and both were a reaction to chaotic and parasitical social conditions. First, there was a desire for greater control from above, initially expressed as a desire for a more powerful monarchy—and by implication curbs on the aristocracy and church—and later for a more powerful state. Second, there was a persistent opposition to church, monarchy and aristocracy which was as much a spiritual and cultural movement as it was political, and it came to be associated with a tradition of rebellion: the Swiss, the Hussites, the Reformation and ultimately the American and French Revolutions. This spirit of rebellion is important for our discussion of white identity.
Both the impulse to control and the impulse to rebel were mapped onto American history at its founding—and indeed onto the entire world. And both were refined as time passed—from the brutal control of medieval times to the sophisticated legal systems of today, and from the inarticulate violence of the Jacquerie to the dignified arguments of Jefferson in the Declaration. Of, if not refined precisely, at least there was constant change, with a general but not universal trend toward greater complexity.
The people who were conquered and colonized by Europeans had therefore a dual experience. At first they experienced subjugation, the trauma of the defeated and enslaved. The victims of the Romans and Macedonians, of the Mongols, Arabs and Turks would all have recognized this experience.
But after the immediate conquest the Europeans offered something different from other conquerors. They didn’t offer it consciously of course, but once their subjects got to know them, it was quite obvious: the European spirit of rebellion and the ideologies and institutions that eventually formed around that spirit. The Europeans brought chains, but they also brought the ideas of liberty and human dignity, of “inalienable rights” and democracy, of religious liberty and free speech.
The ideas proved more enduring than the chains.
These concepts were the product of centuries, and their development reached a kind of critical mass in the Enlightenment, which was in essence a movement against the ancien regime as a system.
To generalize the concept of ancien regime beyond its specifically French and European context, to make it relevant globally, we need a new definition. I define an Ancient Agricultural Regime (AAR) as a system with a monarch, an official priesthood and religion, and a peasant or slave class. This society often includes an aristocracy, the function of which can vary. Peasants or slaves comprise the bulk of the population. The ancien regime of France was an AAR, for example.
Although an AAR may include merchants and artisans, the economy is mostly based on agriculture, the methods of which change very slowly—hence economic growth is likewise nearly static, which is an important point.
In 1419, when the European expansion began, most of the world’s population lived under some variation of an AAR. Only the remaining hunter-gatherers and pastoralists escaped its yoke, and even a pastoral people who lived close to an AAR would often be drawn into its orbit, as the Turks were absorbed into the Islamic world—first as slaves, then as soldiers, and finally as generals and kings.
Wikipedia notes almost with shock that Benito Juarez rarely spoke of his origins, but “identified” as a Liberal. But how could it have been otherwise? Every political and social problem of his time was explained by the Enlightenment and its political arm Liberalism. Mexico was dominated by medieval or ancien regime institutions, classes and labor practices, and the pre-Conquest system had been quite similar—most people tilled the soil, and the small surplus that each farmer produced supported a class of priests, aristocrats, soldiers and of course the monarch. That surplus also funded massive architecture. The Aztec Empire was unquestionably an AAR.
AARs had been in place for millennia, with only minor changes. The main difference between 16th century Spain and ancient Egypt, let’s say, is that Egypt seems not to have had a landed aristocracy. But the monarch, the church and the peasants all had the same roles. Of course, Spain had a more differentiated economy, with merchants and fishing fleets, and large numbers of weavers and other craftsmen. The Spanish economy was more varied and productive, but its peasants were no freer than those of ancient Egypt. Nor was its monarch any more constrained than a Pharaoh, nor its priests any less grasping or cruel.
So the grim opposition of many Europeans to rule by king, aristocrat and bishop was something that many non-Europeans could share, because their own social structures were also AARs. Where the political structure of the native people survived the initial contact with Europeans, it was often transformed by modern Western ideas—just as the West itself was being transformed. The Manchu Dynasty fell and was replaced by a republic, not another Emperor surrounded by Mandarins. Japan changed in two stages: first from a feudal state to an absolute monarchy with a modernizing agenda, and then a century later to a democracy. Turkey was transformed in the early twentieth century into a secular state, and the slaves in Haiti adopted the rhetoric of the French Revolution and of Haitian nationhood. (And in crisis, they reverted to absolute rule, just as the French did under Napoleon.)
When Latin Americans revolted against Spain, they made no effort to restore pre-Columbian institutions. People who had a deep antipathy to Spanish rule walked right out into the sunlight of the Enlightenment and of 19th century Liberalism; the pre-Columbian systems were no more acceptable than Spanish colonialism. This is quite clear with Benito Juarez, for example.
Another point is that Spanish colonialism was not an invention, not a new creation. It was simply the ancien regime adapted to American conditions. Perhaps there was an extra burden involved in taxes and labor due the Spanish crown, but otherwise the grito de Delores could have been delivered in many places in Europe, where in 1810 serfdom was still a living institution. The Spanish had imposed the same system on the New World that existed in Castile or Andalusia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
When we view this process through a nationalist or ethnic lens, we miss the similarity of the West with the lands it colonized. This is a critical point that modern identity politics misses completely.
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I have said that the Enlightenment was in opposition to the ancien regime, which is true enough, but what was the scale and intensity of this opposition? When the Americans rebelled against George III, were they objecting to him alone, or to bad kings in general, or kings unconstrained by law? In fact, they rejected not just George III but all English monarchs, even the respectable ones, such as Alfred the Great or Queen Elizabeth.
And they did not limit it to England: they objected to every king and emperor in history and pre-history, known and unknown, good, bad or indifferent. They rejected Nero and Marcus Aurelius; they had exactly the same attitude toward Pharaoh Crocodile as to King Solomon.
And likewise for the landed aristocracy and the official priesthood. Any clergy had to be supported by private donations; there would be no state church. And titles of nobility, however amusing or harmless, were completely forbidden.
They rejected all of it—practically the entire political, social and religious history of civilization. They rejected AARs, root and branch.
In effect, they believed that 99% of what had happened after Abraham left Ur was an enormous and tragic mistake. Their revolutionary self-confidence was impeccable.
This was a staggeringly radical rejection of the past, and it would have come to nothing if the Founders hadn’t had a workable alternative: a society composed of farmers, artisans and merchants, governed by a republic with a strong constitution, with no established church and no aristocracy. The constitution guaranteed broad civil liberties. Many of their ideas had been tried out in the Dutch Republic, the Swiss Confederation and Cromwell’s England, but the Founders put it all together in a unique way.
The impulse of control was still present in property rights, including chattel slavery, and in a patriarchal family structure. But control was now channeled into laws, democratically enacted and impartially enforced. This was an extraordinary transformation: control was abstracted away from personal power and domination to impersonal laws. Even if personal domination played an outsize role in slavery and family relationships, it was at least in theory constrained by law.
There was no longer the heft of monarchy, aristocracy and priesthood behind the impulse of control, which was an enormous improvement.
And the spirit of rebellion had finally found institutional and social form. It had been transformed from a spirit of rebellion to a spirit of change, just as the Furies were transformed into the Eumenides.
After five thousand years or so of being hagridden by kings, priests and aristocrats, a single century we call the Enlightenment created (or pulled together) the concepts needed for fundamental change. And not just concepts, but a sense of opening upward, a sense of vastness.
When did the Enlightenment begin? Spinoza’s work was published posthumously in 1677, and Principia Mathematica was published ten years later. Voltaire was born in 1694. I like 1677, because Spinoza’s benevolence and tolerance seem to sum up the spirit of the age so perfectly.
There is of course no clear beginning, but if the publication of Spinoza’s works wasn’t the dawn, it was at least a grayish smudge in the eastern sky. Something different had happened—a major work of philosophy had been published that asserted God was not an entity, but the sum of the universe.
Of course there will be objections to this version of history. The American Revolution didn’t end slavery, it didn’t admit women to full citizenship. The Native Americans were still invaded and murdered; their lands stolen. The Founders were just selfish, hypocritical white men.
First, let’s set the record straight. The Founding generation did end slavery in the northern states, although in some places with extreme slowness. And in the South, a number of slaves were freed by their owners, including Washington’s. This movement had a measurable demographic impact:
“In the first two decades after the Revolutionary War, the percentage of free blacks rose in Virginia, for instance, from 1% to nearly 10% of the black population.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colonization_Society
Their actions in relation to the slave trade are also worth noting. In 1794, outfitting and sailing a slave ship from an American port was prohibited, and the penalty was confiscation of the ship plus a substantial fine. George Washington signed that law. In 1800 Congress further prohibited American citizens from investing in or working on foreign slave ships, even if they never touched American shores. In 1808 all importation of slaves was outlawed. The Founders consistently opposed the international slave trade.
Did they solve the issue of slavery? No, but they clearly were aware of the problem and took some measures against it. They did not have a vision of a multi-racial, multi-cultural society, but they saw the injustice of slavery and most particularly the slave trade.
In evaluating the American Revolution, we must avoid the naïve anachronism of assuming that the Founders were members of a modern, educated and secular society—which did not yet exist. They had the vision of the modern world, perhaps a clear vision in some respects, but certainly “through a glass darkly” in others; but still, they were all born and grew up in an AAR—or an AAR mixed with pre-modern capitalism
Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706, thirteen years after the Salem Witch Trials. He grew up in a world in which those trials were very much a living memory, and in which rational legal processes were only just emerging.
And the idea that agricultural workers should and could be free was an unusual idea in the eighteenth century. In England and the Netherlands farm workers were “free” in the sense they were not bound by law to a piece of land or a particular master. In practice this freedom was highly restricted—except during planting and harvest, farm workers lived by begging, odd jobs and thievery. The workhouses provided some support, and those willing to brave the high mortality rate of the cities could sometimes find enough day labor to eke out a living. Few were able to manage any sort of family life, and many of the women worked as prostitutes. They were in a sense free to be poor.
In the rest of Europe, and indeed most of the world, even this dubious freedom was denied. Serfdom was a living institution in Germany until after the French Revolution, and in eastern Europe until the mid-1800s.
From an AAR perspective, agricultural workers could never be free. What we call “food security” was established in ancient times by compulsion, by binding workers to the land through serfdom or slavery. These workers were of course the vast majority of the population; it is terrible to contemplate their lives. To spend one’s life cultivating a few acres of barley or corn, with no education or political power, with no hope for anything better, generation after generation, is the original and most enduring injustice in human history; it lasted for millennia. And paradoxically, this injustice was the basis of civilization.
The Enlightenment, and the political movements to which it gave birth, had settled on a program of eliminating monarchy, church and aristocracy, or if that proved impossible, of drastically limiting their power.
However, it was uncertain how the rest of society should be organized once this had been accomplished. And that uncertainty has persisted to this day. The idea of a thoroughly egalitarian society surfaced early, but there were reasonable arguments against it. In the eighteenth century, the gap between the educated and uneducated was extreme, and the difference between those who understood the rudiments of capitalism and those who did not was likewise profound. Access to even modest amounts of capital and education conferred enormous advantages over those who lacked both. This reality demanded some social correlative, some reflection in terms of class structure. The severe inequalities of the ancien regime and of emerging capitalism could not be wished away—they had to be incorporated and moderated somehow. So a class structure with rights guaranteed for all seemed acceptable to people like Madison and Washington.
However, a class of people with no rights whatsoever—chattel slaves—was clearly not consistent with the Enlightenment vision, however normal it might be within an AAR. In fact, nineteenth century abolitionists often (quite rightly) made the point that tolerating slavery within a democratic society risked an ancien regime counter-revolution, or a “Slaveocracy.”
But the colonies, and particularly the South, retained economies that were primarily agricultural, and were bound to retain some traces of the ancien regime, particularly around agricultural labor; the harsh need for poorly paid agricultural workers was not eliminated by Spinoza or Voltaire. And no worker is more poorly paid than a slave.
So freeing slaves in North America was not “obviously” the right thing to do, and the failure of the Founders to do so is not evidence of hypocrisy or unusual greed. They lived in a world slowly changing from an AAR to a modern one, and they had to live with those contradictions. Their lives were more complex than we imagine.
Nevertheless, emancipation was in the air; early in the French Revolution slavery was abolished in the French colonies, only to be re-established later by Napoleon. And American slaves were freed in the North, where the economy was more diversified.
And after an immense struggle, slavery was abolished in Haiti. And in the aftermath, Dessalines submitted to the necessity of restoring agricultural production—-and forced most of the former slaves back onto plantations, into a kind of serfdom. No one could have been more serious about eliminating slavery or subjection than Dessalines, and yet his hand was forced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution
As far as the Founder’s record on women’s rights, there was no organized women’s movement and no feminist ideology to incorporate. This criticism of the American Revolution is anachronistic in the extreme; we might as well fault the Founders for not owning a time machine. Letters from Abigail Adams may have pre-figured feminism, but the movement itself did not exist.
And yes, the aggression against the Native Americans continued and even intensified. But a key point about AARs is that their economic growth is nearly static, due to the slow pace of improvement in agricultural productivity. This overwhelming constraint, the starting point for Malthus’ work, implied that for any expansion or improvement AARs were forced to seize land from their neighbors by force, or bring wilderness land under cultivation, and both were expensive. The hyper-aggressiveness of medieval and early-modern Europe was not a result of cultural factors, but of low productivity.
This chronic warfare often resulted in massacres, famine and epidemic disease. Of course, this reduced economic growth all the more, sometimes resulting in a downward spiral.
Along the American frontier, this ancien regime need and practice were unchanged. The frontier economy was plagued by lack of access to markets, due to under-developed infrastructure, and by extremely low productivity, due to the immense labor needed to clear land before a crop could be planted. Most people in AARs faced similar constraints: low agricultural productivity condemned the vast majority to lifelong poverty, and the only possible response was to obtain more land.
Telling people who lived within an AAR not to steal land was almost like telling them not to eat, and the situation on the American frontier was similar. The result was tragic in the extreme.
It’s important to note that a modernizing capitalist society, like early America, could retain features of an AAR. The transition was never simple, and by 1848 most of Europe was still ruled by absolute monarchs, aided and abetted by aristocrats and clergy—but with emerging capitalist and industrial economies beneath the old institutions. Sometimes, industrialization and progress only made monarchs more powerful. We see the same pattern in Austria, Prussia, Russia and even France.
The modernizing forces in these countries had to contend with an entrenched aristocracy and monarchy. As Otto von Manteuffel, the Prime Minister of Prussia said, the state could no longer “be run like the landed estate of a nobleman,” and this was in the 1850s!
Despite the American and French Revolutions, and the success of the constitutional monarchy in Great Britain, much of Europe was still dominated by AARs until the end of WWI, particularly outside northwest Europe.
This is important: AARs never really went away. Their influence is still with us.
Now granted, the Founders did fail us in one important respect: they did not see the threat of capitalism to human well-being, even though there were glaring examples right under their noses: the Spanish silver mines and the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, where human beings were worked to death in massive numbers. They were aware of these horrors, but they did not see the role of capitalism…..but then, with far more experience, we also fail to see the role of capitalism in climate change, racism, sexism and in the corruption of our politics and the coarsening of our values.
Or if we see it, we’re afraid to mention it.
So perhaps we could cut the Founders a bit of slack? The sages of the Enlightenment, including our Founders, had a transcendent vision of what human life could be, given democracy, science and a kind of practical benevolence, and this vision sometimes—not always—worked for the good of the majority. And nothing else worked at all.
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Pre-modern Europe was a society in crisis, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it often seemed on the verge of collapse. It was obsessed with witchcraft, astrology and alchemy; afflicted with disease and a worsening climate, paranoid, grasping and cruel. And above all, it was tearing itself to pieces in religious wars. It seemed one more push from the Turks might destroy Western Civilization completely.
And our spiritual ancestors stepped out of this smoking ruin with something miraculous to offer: the brilliant light of compassionate rationality. They spoke as if they were angels.
Their vision—and it was only a prophecy at first—transformed not only the West, but the entire world.
What is the vision of today’s progressives? Not to twist the knife, but what is the vision of identity politics?
But surely our crisis is at least as dire as the one Spinoza and Voltaire confronted?
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Let’s return to our starting point, the issue of white identity.
Whites are the people of the vision, of the Enlightenment. It has shaped our history, our values, our education and our culture. Other cultures have valued the individual and the light of reason, but we created democracy and science to embody those values, and to give them function.
Trump and the billionaires who are attempting to destroy this vision are trying to destroy our identity and our civilization.
This vision is not racial; it is profoundly human. Anyone can share in this vision; anyone can make it their own, elaborate on it or extend it. “I have a good goblet. I will share it with you,” as the I Ching puts it.
The sages of the Enlightenment saw something beyond the oppression and endless war of the ancien regime, and their insights led to most of what is positive in the modern world. The word freedom would have no modern meaning without the Enlightenment.
It seemed that civilization couldn’t exist without monarchy, aristocracy and established religion, but our spiritual ancestors saw that those institutions were profoundly harmful, and they slowly created alternatives. This was the most profound political and social change in human history.
And since what is done is scarcely more important than how it is done, we should note their spirit in the midst of terrible danger. I am thinking of Washington, confronted by a British officer in 1776 who had been sent in hopes of negotiating an American surrender. The officer hinted at the possibility of a pardon. The war was not going well for the Americans at that point, and the British already had a list of those who were to be hanged.
No doubt many Americans were starting to think how they could escape or beg mercy from the British. Washington himself might well have felt a noose around his neck.
With firmness, Washington said, “Those who have done no wrong require no pardon.” The British officer appeared stunned. One American witness remarked that it was like witnessing a supernatural event.
Then again, there is Daniel Morgan at the Battle of Cowpens, which reads almost like complex prank played at the expense of the British. What general draws up his army with a river in flood at his back, to face a merciless and undefeated enemy? That sounds like something that might happen in a fairy tale, but not in history. And yet if Morgan or any of his officers had doubts about this plan, they are not recorded.
Much of Morgan’s army was composed of notoriously unreliable militia, infamous for firing two volleys and running away. So Morgan ordered them to fire two volleys and run away, but then to re-assemble in the rear. Once there, he praised them for their perfect execution and then led them in a counterattack that destroyed the British army. “The stone the builder rejected has become the cornerstone.”
And there was Molly Pitcher, fighting in her wounded husband’s place at Brandywine. One story relates that a British artillery shell narrowly missed her, passing between her legs and carrying away her petticoat.
“That could have been a lot worse,” she said, continuing to fight.
The Socialist Investor 