Let us imagine some hypothetic world, in which the demo-
graphic transformations now altering the face of the West did not exist — a world in which the traditional majority ethnicities of all European countries were well-established and unthreatened, and in which mass immigration from non-Western countries did not menace the overthrow of these majorities, nor the disruption of their traditional ways of life. What would be the status then of “race” in our discourse today?
It is clear in the first place that certain men should not now be speaking of “white nationalism” and “race realism” and like terms with their present insistency. These terms would be simply redundant, insofar as our countries would already be “white nationalist” to all effects and purposes. No man should dedicate time to profiles of the races, nor to plumbing scientific research into them, often against the prejudices of the researchers themselves, not to speak of the time itself; and no one should trouble his rhetoric nor his chances with the controversial and alienating business of soliciting racial awareness amongst men who are scandalized by it. All men should have else to attend to.
This is not to say that the racialist ideas some are now attempting to instill in the West would already exist. It is clear in fact that the opposite should most likely be true: the confusion regarding the idea of race, perhaps even on the part of its present purveyors, would be every bit as rampant as it is today, particularly as there would be no practical need pressing anyone to clarity on it. The idea of the “White Race,” so far from commanding the destiny of our societies, should be utterly extraneous to them — for, in the absence of the racial question, the “cultural” one would rule unchallenged. The national, linguistic, ethocal differences between different Western groups would in all likelihood be taken as the quintessential qualities of these groups, and the difficulties with this proposition would rarely trouble our consciences. Not race, but ethos would guide all conversations and govern all theories. Race would not pose so much as a question — save to those odd individuals whose natural predilections press them in its direction.
Now, in such a world, would the New Right exist at all?
Indeed, it must. For while the racial question has without doubt precipitated and hastened the coming of the New Right in the modern day, while the crisis of immigration has been a kind of catalyst to its birth, and while the problems it brings have been at once the sounding bell to awaken many of us, and the thrilling alarums to keep us to our work — despite all this, the need for the New Right derives from profoundly other sources. In the first place the New Right rises to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the conventional right, and that collapse should be well underway even if there were no visible or comprehensible “racial tensions” between human groups in the West at all. For the collapse of the conventional right is brought inexorably by the unfolding essence of Enlightenment liberalism itself. The New Right would be called into existence, would be proposing a new vision of politics and of the life of man, whether or not our societies were ethnically homogeneous. But this means that, counter to a vulgar opinion, the New Right does not have its vital core in the question of race.
This is sure to be regarded by many on both sides of the question as inadmissible. The liberals, who are accustomed to thinking in the faux psychologizing suitable to their ideology, aver that the New Right is nothing but the sophistication of bigotry; while some on the part of the New Right itself — some of its proponents, adherents, or sympathizers — believe that the question of race is the unique grounding for any authentic resistance to Modernity, by which alone the true dissident might be distinguished from the false or the fashionable.
A question of conscience, then, for this latter group. Were your “white ethnostate” to be attained tomorrow, would this really mark the end of your theoretical and indeed practical work? Is it not clear that this would in point of fact be but the beginning, merely the establishment of one condition for a true and organically unified political order? Is it not clear that in and of itself the idea of a European ethnostate is rather the outline of a society or a regime, than anything like its detailed portrait?
As clear as it is that the idea of race seems everywhere to debouch from every corner of contemporary discourse, we must be very conscious of both the limitations and the abuses of the same.
In the first place — as the critics of “racial realism” never tire of pointing out — race is a “social construct.” Now, this is taken by egalitarians to mean that there is nothing natural about race, or that all racial characteristics are merely conventional and artificial. Such a view could only be uttered seriously in a day which dogmatically asserts the equality of all human beings, for it is refuted constantly by our very eyes. No amount of “convention” could ever change the color of a person’s skin nor the distinct morphology of his facial features. No amount of “convention” could make a Norwegian sun-resistant or a Zambian lactose-tolerant. The assertion must then be that these objective physical differences are only superficial, corporeal, and do not extend to the brain of human beings (to use an imprecise modern term), or to their intellect, spirit, mind, soul (to use exacter older ones). “Under our skins” we are all identical in some fundamental sense. What this “fundamental sense” might entail is of course little enough clear; but as a bare minimum it must mean that the potential of any given human being at his birth, is supposed to be roughly equivalent to that of any other human being, no matter to what rank or class or race the two individuals pertain. Or put otherwise: it is upbringing and environment, and not heritage and soul, which is the paramount determining factor in the inner life of man.
This is on the face of it a startling claim. It asserts a difference in kind between the inner spiritual or mental life of the human being (determined in large part, most counter-intuitively, by external things, by environment and education) and the outer physical form of the human being (determined in large part by an inner “law,” by heredity or genetics). Such a view obviously turns the natural understanding on its head, which would hold that the outer life of a human being should be more subject to outer influences, and the inner to inner. Yet philosophical or at least scientific demonstration for this inversion has never been furnished; one merely asserts it with an increasingly dogmatic and sometimes fanatical perseverance. One continues to assume the difference between the inner and the outer, as if it were a thing patent to all intelligent and decent men. Indeed, one does not even articulate this dichotomy, though the most superficial review of modern ideas of race demonstrate such a dichotomy to be logically necessary given the premises of our raceless modern philosophy.
When we say that race is a “social construct,” we certainly do not mean this. We do not mean that all racial attributes are conventionally bestowed, or are the merest inventions of society or of the “collective mind.” We mean rather that the real and objective external or internal differences pertaining to the races can be categorized in a variety of arbitrary ways. What is real are the differences; what is conventional is their classification and nomenclature. To take but an example — the Hutus and the Tutsis can from certain Western standpoints of the not-too-distant-past be categorized as belonging to a single race, the black race. Yet they themselves, on the basis of differences which are equally evident to them, believed themselves to belong to two different races, to the point that they were even willing to murder one another en masse in their late massacre. The traits which led these two groups to the slaughter formed actual differences, and to that extent they are real; but in another context these same traits might have been considered nugatory, and to that extent they are conventional.
Modern progressive egalitarianism conceives of all purely racial traits as being nugatory (at least when such a conception serves its agenda), and it therefore posits a human nature which transcends any specific racial distinctions. This queer idea derives at least in part from the Hobbesian proposition that any given human being can kill any other, so that there is and must be a fundamental equality between human beings with respect to life or death.15 And since life and death are taken by Hobbes (and consequently by much of our godless modernity) as the criteria, and are tacitly adopted as the same by the entirety of our faint-hearted modernity, the ability of any human being to kill any other appears to be the fundamental measure of man. Against which it should suffice to utter a single phrase from a nobler tradition, which alone must shame all these unworthy notions to silence — had they any longer any sense of shame: “[The magnanimous man] does not run into trifling danger, nor is he fond of danger, because he honours few things; but he will face great dangers, and when he is in danger he is unsparing of his life, knowing that there are conditions on which life is not worth having.”16 There are questions of an infinitely higher order than whether a mental sloth or a common scoundrel can murder an artistic genius or a first-rate statesman. There is even — as Socrates reminds us in his entire life and death — a question as to whether certain men can be murdered at all. To accept that all human beings are equal is already to reveal the measure of one’s own soul.
Ethnos — understood as the common way of life of a people, its traditions and its customs, its characteristics and traits, its inner and outer manifestations as a people, what might broadly be described as the intersection of culture and race — is proposed by the New Right, not as a counterargument to the Enlightenment or progressivist ideal (the true counterargument must go deeper than that), but rather as the expression of a contrary ideal — an ideal which holds Western man at his highest to be among the noblest exemplars of the human ideal. Ethnos is a means of moving toward the reclamation of the fallen glory of the Occident. Ethnos is implicated necessarily in the attempt to establish a new Occidental culture, and helps to pave the way to that unified ethnos.
The evident problem with the idea of race, however, is that, thanks to the “socially constructed” nature of race, the historical or naked idea of race, without profound modifications, does not lead us to Occidental ethnos so much as to an irreconcilable or cacophonic variety of Western ethoi. The Germanic race leads us to the German ethos, the Anglo-Saxon to the Anglo-Saxon, the Latin to the Latin, and so forth — and even these prove to be but generic categories susceptible of finer subdivision. It is easy to arrive from here at wishing the revival, no longer of Occidental culture, but of Flemish, Welsh, Sard, Basque, or Austrian “cultures” — and even this in some cases is not specific enough. The trend of the last century was toward the agglomeration of ever larger political and social units; the opposite tendency is now beginning to emerge, which could lead in some geopolitical areas to ever more minute social and political fragmentation, toward the political reconstitution of each particularistic ethos. This tendency, for all manner of reasons, is not necessarily unhealthy. But today, as response to the unprecedented crisis facing the West as a whole, it has the unfortunate effect of dissipating the already debilitated forces of the Occident to the point of their vanishing, which is perilous as much on the social level as on the geopolitical. The unmitigated cultural fragmentation of the West today along identitarian lines could well lead of a course to the destruction of the whole through the parts.
One must then attempt to forge a new ethnic ideal: Occidental Man. By reformulating all the individual Occidental ethnic groups as pertaining to a pan-European ethnos, one begins to envision the kind of front which will be necessary to battle the influences, the powers, the hordes which are falling upon us. The idea of OCCIDENTAL MAN might elevate us to the heights of our task, might rekindle in us virtues long dormant, might bring us to urgent awareness of both our plight — and the strength by which it might be overleapt —
But this unitary pan-European ethnos, which is presently and utterly inadequately called the “white race,” is meant to revitalize a Western culture which is not and never has been unitary. That culture has thrived indeed off the interaction and intersection of many diverse ethnoi and their respective ethoi. An idea of a unified Occidental ethnos leads to the danger of an impoverishing and fatal reduction of the rich, versatile and super-complex West to a tepid, superficial, monotonous scientistic caricature of the glory it has been. It must indeed be recalled that precisely the idea of a “Pan-European Movement,” as conceived of for example by the meddling mongrel Coudenhove-Kalergi, has in no small part led us to our present straits.
It is easier to accomplish such a project in places like America, where “Americanness” is more clearly a juridical than an ethnic notion, and where individual European ethnicities have indeed been intermixed for generations in a genuine “melting pot.” There has never yet been an American culture in the the most exceptional sense of the word; in consequence it is neither superficial nor trivializing to posit the ethnic unity of all Americans of European descent. For this same reason, the idea of race is more easily accepted in the United States. America thus reveals itself once again as an experiment — but in this case, as an experiment of nobler substance, and more promising, if still ambiguous, result: the experiment of whether or not a unified Occidental ethnicity is possible.
Europe, on the other hand, was formed by a variety of ethoi which were united to some extent under the common banner of Christendom, and also to a lesser degree under the umbrella of the great empires of old, but which have historically always remained separate and discreet entities until very lately. In Europe therefore it will be necessary to reclaim in a new form the old idea of the “good European,” to understand this in a more explicitly ethnic way, to revitalize it in its original sense, and to bring it to term.17 And here again the trouble raises its head, the old eternal “European problem” — how to unify what has historically been sundered, without destroying or eroding what is best in it? How to constitute Occidental Man?
That is work enough for some of the best minds of our generation; more still for some of its best souls. But to some it would appear to be too much work, and increasingly attempts are made to resolve the question at a blow by sidestepping it altogether: one reevaluates the tentative relation between race and ethos: one supposes that not the culture of the West at all, but rather the race that created it, is the central issue — the fundamental concern and final aim of the New Right. Race is taken to be the vital core of our attempt: Occidental man does not have to be constituted, does not have to be prepared, because he exists already: white man is Occidental man.
The deduction from this view is that the mere founding of a “White ethnostate” is sufficient to provoke a rebirth of the West, because everything follows from it. The “racial qualities” of the “White race” in a “White ethnostate” would have free reign to express themselves in accord with their inner law. This point of view we may call racial determinism, and it is closely allied to the scientistic vision of man. It reduces to the proposition that the racial, or “genetic” component in the human soul is the determining factor of all social forms, both on the personal and on the social scale. But provide such and such human “genetic material” — runs the argument — and the result will necessarily be societies of a certain quality and tenor. Race is the justification for the tradition, for the ethos, and also for the culture, and not the other way around, because race generates these things and all that comes from these things. Race takes the place then of the gods on the one hand and of culture on the other. And a new morality, not to say religion, begins to develop around this idea of race — a morality by which whatever favors the race is good, and whatever injures it or opposes it is bad. Race gradually becomes the central concern, not only of politics, but of the the entirety of human life.
What favors the race is good, what opposes it is bad — but does this really suffice as a human morality? Does it not rather hurl us full into the arms of the most uncompromising relativism? For any and every action is justified by it, so long as it is done “for the sake of the race,” so long as it “benefits” the race. There can no longer be moral standards, nor any qualitative differences between “white morality” and “non-white morality,” for the unique measure of any act is the extent to which it furthers the material interest of one’s own race; and these same actions in principle can be performed by any given person for the good of any given race. Honor, nobility, honesty — what can these high terms mean any longer? What can they represent but the folly of the weak man who is afraid to proclaim his loyalty, afraid to dedicate his whole heart unconditionally to his “race” — afraid of what his “race” might demand of him? Perhaps these dusty old virtues have some meaning yet as splendid examples to inspire racial loyalty — but even that can only be in specific cases, and is always only “utilitarian,” for it depends decisively on what it is seen to benefit. One can easily conclude, for instance, that such and such a white person, for his acts or his beliefs, has become a “race traitor” — that is, one who refuses to view the good of the race as the summum bonum of human action, and that such a one has therefore forfeited every right to be treated as a human being, no matter how honorable, noble, or decent he might otherwise be.
The standards of such a morality, which we might call a racialist morality, therefore inevitably promote the barbaric qualities best suited to further a given racial clan amidst a myriad of hostile clans — namely, brutality and slyness. For all motive to care about anything higher is evidently lacking, if the “evolutionary” survival and propagation of the race is the sole and exclusive standard.18 Or perhaps it is understood that “we can talk about higher concerns later, afterward” — meaning, inevitably, after the creation of the “homogeneous white ethnostate.” How an “ethnostate” of any kind which has surrendered from the first all concern with moral excellence can hope to become anything but barbaric and cruel, how it can claim to have anything in common with that Western civilization which was in many ways was nothing other than the ever-renewed taming of barbarism and the mastering and transmutation of cruelty and all base energies by means of a higher law, and, finally what relevance it could possibly have to a European continent which has always defined itself on the basis of tolerably distinct and not always compatible manifestations of a central ethnic root — all of this is no longer of concern for the proponents of racialism. And the necessary corollary is that those Westerners who are not brutal nor sly — those who adhere to a virtue which is not merely martial, and a nobility which is not merely “genetic” arrogance, and who care for the particularistic cultural ground which gave rise to them — those men, put bluntly, who are the finest flowers of the Occidental ethnicity — find nothing to attract them in the idea of “white nationalism,” and recoil from the very mention of it. The best tend almost voluntarily toward becoming “race traitors,” and so are driven out of the fold; more, they are given no reason to mind. For if “whiteness” must produce but a smarter and more technological version of the ethos even now governing African warlords and fueling tribal squabbles around the globe, not to speak of the globalists with their greed and their ruthless Realpolitik — well, why care about whiteness at all?
As has been indicated, racialists of the determinist stamp like to promote their ideas on the basis of science — scientific findings, discoveries, studies, theories. Indeed, they commonly derive their idea of race from evolutionary theory. It is hypothesized, for instance, that the races emerged initially from the relation of certain proto-human groups to specific climes and geographies. One supposes, therefore, that the human race, in its origins, its developments, its present state, and its inner laws, can be exclusively reduced to the same terms which one applies to species in the animal kingdom, from shrews to chimpanzees. But this is to thoughtlessly substitute a dubious scientific category — evolutionary development — for an irreducibly human category — ethnos — without questioning whether a science of humanity based on the study of wild beasts (to say nothing of one based on the materialistic study of “DNA,” “genetics,” and “molecules”!) will not render man himself bestial and low. I call this an instance not of science but of scientism — the dogmatic attempt to understand the human exclusively through the lens of science alone, in the light of what is lower than the human. This very attempt reveals a fundamental precept to our eyes: racialism, and the special form of determinism which emanates from it, cannot aid us in the overcoming of modernity, because they are but the byproducts of the same; they are but “egalitarianism” and “democracy” once again, in disguise; they are but modernity in wolf’s clothes.
Indeed, it is most informative to hear how some of the theoreticians of the “ethnostate” even posit a future utopia founded on the basis of white racial homogeneity alone: given white-majority countries, it seems that all the problems with which our contemporary future is pregnant are destined to simply spontaneously abort. Such men will claim, for instance, that the technological revolution even now upon us, which might well wreak destruction in a multicultural society, will in the “White Ethnostate” somehow result in a nation of leisure, in which no one will any longer have to work, and the wealth of everyone will continue by economic magic to rise. Similarly, the crisis of democracy will be resolved by a sudden resurgence in civic sense and intelligent concern for the commonweal; idem the crisis of capitalism, of healthcare, of unemployment, etc. Countless elements of the European Enlightenment project evidently become at a blow tenable and even desirable, given only the “white men” to see them to their end.
Thus one fully preserves the fundamental sense of “progress” inherent in Enlightenment thought by limiting it to this or that nation of this or that people. Indeed, it is not rare to hear these kinds of discourses culminate in some more or less definite version of the dogma of progress itself: unbridled technology, given over to the right hands, will result in unbroken and limitless ascent. And from this the true nature of racial determinism involuntarily comes to light, albeit timidly, ashamedly, pretending to be something else altogether: racial determinism is but the last stand of modern conservatism, the last holdout of the “old right,” the last desperate attempt to “make modernity work.” And for this very reason, racial determinism, so far from being the essence of the New Right, is in point of fact opposed to its very spirit.
This contrast is clearly visible in the strange gyrations which the proponents of the racialist doctrine must make in order to salvage it from its internal contradictions.
Item: As a political and historical view, strong racial determinism necessarily implies that white societies are destined to produce liberal societies, replete with all the envenomed and degrading aspects of the same. For it is indisputable that the society of the West as it presently exists was the original and free production of white-majority countries. To save the white race from charges of some kind of bizarre and perverse self-destructive “racial” instinct, then, the proponents of strong racial determinism are constrained to posit a malign influence which has led white majorities astray. There is a dark force amongst us, a wicked star which has pulled us off our course; and only through the suppression of its gravity might we rejuvenate the better qualities of our people. This gravity is most consistently located in the disproportionate and hyper-liberal influence wielded by the Jews.
Now, no thinker today who has not had the wool of multiculturalism pulled strong over his eyes can fail to perceive the reality of disproportionate Jewish, and in particular Zionist, influence in the nations of the West. But the racial determinist cannot stop at merely observing this fact; he must also explain, in a way consonant with his system, how such an end could possibly have come about. For the Jews to have been so successful despite being so vastly outnumbered in our societies, already indicates either a glaring vulnerability in us, or else a nigh invincible superiority in them. Either this vulnerability is congenital, racial, and thus immutable to all practical purposes, or else it lies within the power of the “white race” to comprehend, to mitigate, and to compensate. If the first is true, then we are doomed precisely by our racial qualities to suffer our present disgrace unto perdition, notwithstanding the attempts of our better members to save us. But if the second is true, then the entire idea of “racial determinism” begins fast to unravel, for it is clear that “racial traits” are not so utterly determining as they are claimed to be, or that they may exist, locked away in a latent form in the human breast, to be liberated by a non-racial key. More indeed: it appears that racial determinism itself in such a case is one of the forces standing in the way of that unlocking, insofar as it promotes complacency or despondency in us and educates us to resentment.
We must then establish some clarity on this point. The proper genetic element is the necessary, not the sufficient condition, for any given ethos. Without the Western ethnoi, no Western culture could ever have arisen in the world, and without Occidental Man, the Occidental ethnos itself, and the Occidental culture which can grow from that ethnos alone, shall never exist. But if race and not ethos is taken as the final and overriding concern of the New Right — if the New Right confounds race with ethos, immolating the higher on the alter of the lower — then the result shall be as molten gold poured outside its form, which filthies itself and congeals slithering in the dust.
It is no accident that the strong racial determinist stance tends to culminate in hopelessness. It is not uncommon to hear its subscribers murmuring in tones of griping resignation about the irredeemable extremity of our plight. Whatever else it might be, however, resignation is not invigorating, and cannot be taken as a policy for the future — particularly in such times as these. It behooves us then to treat our nature as Socrates did — cogently aware of the limits of our knowledge with regard to it. The proposition that race is the prime or unique concern of the New Right denies to the New Right the dignity of being a political worldview — that is to say, a worldview which proposes certain concrete and consciously attainable ends for our societies — ends which certainly require a certain physiological grounding, but which cannot be reducible to that grounding alone.
What then is the true status of these ideas in the New Right?
In the first place, they mark the reappearance of “realism” amidst the absurdo-optimistic progressivist-egalitarian ideology which is presently strangling our societies. It represents the awakening of the idea of φύσις after a long modern slumber — the awareness that there are insurmountable barriers lain around this human life, established on the basis, amongst other things, of our birth. In our contemporary context, “genetics” are indeed the most salient example of Horace’s natura — the same nature which we chase out daily with a pitchfork, but which rolls back in through the window regardless. For “genetics,” together with gender, is given to human beings in a specific immutable way, which evident truth is presently being suppressed throughout the West on the pretext of “liberalism” and “rights” and “progress” — in short, of egalitarianism. The idea of ethnos — of race together with the customs rightly fit to it — is the antidote, not only to these execrable excesses, but more essentially to the ideology which has spawned them.
It is then also a potential means of encouraging solidarity amongst the fragmenting Occidental consciousness. To modern eyes, it is the clearest, because most “scientific,” ligature cutting through all the differences between the various peoples of the Occident, and thus the best means of binding them together in the coming pandemonium, in whose chaos they risk being numerically overwhelmed, systematically turned against one another and bred out of existence. The clarity of ethnos is owed in the first place to its simple and super-geographical visibility: in the majority of cases, one wears it somewhat more patently than on one’s sleeve. And precisely as the progressive left insists more and more flagrantly on the rights of minorities at the expense of the majority — which is almost always code for the rights of non-Europeans at the expense of men of European heritage — under guise of combating insidious “white privilege” and other such egalitarian bugbears, to this very extent it becomes easier to gather these scattered Occidental rods together against their common adversaries.
Put otherwise, due consideration of ethnos represents a key point of initiation into the New Right. By the development of ethnic awareness a great many can be inducted into our worldview. Given the contrariety of the New Right to the time in which we live, such a point of induction, such a portal of initiation, is indispensable to us. But it is characteristic of initiation that it represents the beginning, and not the end, of an inner metamorphosis. Whence then does or ought the question of ethnos carry its initiates?
Ethnic awareness represents for many their first or most decisive rupture with the egalitarian ideal, and with the various projects and concepts sponsored by that ideal — as, for instance, multiculturalism, diversity, “minority rights,” etc. — because, for anyone with his eyes even halfway open, it forces awareness of the necessary and insoluble contradictions into which the egalitarian ideal inevitably blunders. Liberation from all of this is essential to our project, but in and of itself it is insufficient; for so long as we limit ourselves to reactionary opposition we will necessarily remain feebler than those who promulgate a positive aim — even if that aim be so replete with contradiction, so self-destructive, and so erosive of Occidental identity, as is the Enlightenment or liberal.
Ethnic awareness, then, must be the first step toward a thoroughgoing rejection of democracy in the soul — democracy understood as both a social and a psychological order — or rather, disorder. Ethnic awareness is an initial form of rejection of egalitarianism, one particularly meet for a scientific age, and thus represents the preparation for the instauration of a new aristocratic ideal and sensibility which unabashedly promotes elitism. “Genetics,” though absolutely indispensable to us in this process, cannot be the sole basis for any new aristocratic order nor any new healthy elitist sensibility, because aristocracy and elitism are founded on the principle of excellence, and within any given “genetic pool” there are of course men of quality and others of scarcity. Moreover the obsession with “genetics” leads to an ideal of “racial purity” which if taken to extremes might undermine or obviate both the precious binding quality of the idea of ethnos, as well as the highest notion of breeding. “Genetics” too often returns one to the question of material origins alone; only insofar as it is mythologized and poeticized — only insofar as it is woven back into the folds of history, culture, and thus ethnicity — does “race” lead, as it must be made to lead, to superiority, excellence, and spiritual heights. And indeed race, when it is taken as central and sufficient in and of itself, betrays the question of excellence, because it tends to replace the eternally attainable ideal of excellence with the eternally attained reality of race. In cases like this, one no longer speaks of virtue so much as of “racial loyalty”; one no longer promotes nobility so much as “racial purity”; one no longer speaks of quality but of whiteness. Race can awaken certain men to the awareness of human excellence, but it cannot suffice for the same. All of this is the necessary preparation: it is the preparation on the one hand for the idea of the Occident — of the unified West, Septentrion or Imperium; and on the other hand it is the preparation for a renewed faith and joy in that greatness which the Occident, be its gods only willing, might yet embody.
In rejecting democracy, the New Right embraces aristocracy and the aristocratic principle. Aristocracy means the establishment of hierarchy, both in society and in the soul. The establishment of such a hierarchy in society is troubled by grave practical difficulties, generally summed up in the conventional objection, “If aristocracy is the rule of the best, who will determine who these ‘best’ are? Who will see to it that they will rule, and not some impostors who are in fact worse? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
This is the basic democratic objection to aristocracy, and it is taken to be unanswerable because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of power. The New Right agrees with the ancients, that the government should be fit to the people. Put as a general rule, which of course has its exceptions or qualifying cases, any given people is granted the government it deserves. Aristocracy might in some cases tend to descend into the arbitrary rule of bad men, but democracy always tends to descend into the despotic rule of vulgar and ignorant masses or of despicable and ineducable tyrants. Both these ends come about when the people is ripe for tyranny, when the people has degenerated and its vices have flowered, and the nauseating perfumes of such blossoms have inebriated the people’s senses. The preparation for aristocracy must then come, not first through the inauguration of a given political order, but first through the cultivation of the people, which means — the souls and the bodies of the people. Our primary effort must be in improving our ethnos.
The aristocratic order promoted by the New Right is based on awareness of excellence. Excellence means excellence for a certain kind of being. As the New Right proposes the ideal of Occidental Man, so excellence for it will mean primarily the excellence of Occidental Man. This implies Occidental virtue, virtue which emerges from the specific nature and needs of Occidental Man.
Supposing that the question of ethnos is therefore the beginning and not the end of our pursuit — then it begs the further question, what shall, what must, be the virtue the Occident?