Reports on the Reactosphere #4: Neoreaction and White Nationalism

I stole the idea for this Report from here

Today, I want to talk about what, exactly, is NRx's 'deal' with race. In particular, with its relationship with the European New Right and White Nationalism. This is probably going to end up going over territory I've passed over before, but seeing that race is probably the biggest issue that most of us will have with Neoreaction, it deserves special attention.

NRx, it has been often observed, is principally tripartite in its structure, it's major currents being Ethno-Nationalist, Techno-Commercialist and Theonomist (religious-traditionalist). Coupled with this is the 'biorealism' of Human Biodiversity (HBD) which is, at best, an honest attempt to question perceived contradictions and inaccuracies about our current understanding of heredity and ethnicity, and at worst an excuse to reaffirm already held racial prejudices. Although within the scope of Neoreaction, both its Inner and Outer territories, it's Monarchists and Neocameralists, we do fine people we could literally call 'white nationalists,' that wouldn't necessarily make them White Nationalists.

The Outer territory, being essentially Atlantean/Moldbuggian has less time for romanticised, neo-Fascist racial-nationalism, and is far more concerned with a kind of eugenicistic selectiveness when it comes to questions like 'Who can live in Shanghai, Inc,?'. It is, therefore, inclusive in a meritocratic sense, though it is a meritocracy that goes all the way down to the worth of your genes... The Inner territory believes that the clock can be turned back, and a mythical Volksgemeinschaft restored under a benevolent King (or some other, appropriate, regional variant); it insists on racial exclusiveness that is not necessarily informed by HBD in anything more than a superficial sense.

As Land puts it:
'...HBD-orientation is associated with cosmopolitan spirit of scientific neutrality, meritocratic elitism, and a suspicion of the deleterious consequences of inbreeding, often accompanied by a tendency to philosemitism and sinophilia. Racial solidarity does not follow necessarily from biorealism, but requires an extraneous political impulse.' [Own italics]

That extraneous political impulse is, of course, the essential populism of nationalist movements, its appeals to the people or the Volk. NRx is defiantly and, arguably, definitionally anti-populist, being inherently elitist, hierarchical, aristocratic etc. in its outlook. This problematises any and all attempts to conflate it with any any and all varieties of nationalism that aren't of a defiantly traditionalist flavour. This is something that those who are racial nationalists realise:

'In my opinion, the main concern of neoreaction is taking away power from the masses and placing it in the hands of an elite few, who are also the most intelligent members of society. You could call it a “geekocracy.”'

Although sympathetic towards it, NRx's Inner current does not want what is generally understood to be nationalism, even if they do want to create an ethnically homogeneous community, because of its tradition of opposition to central authority, privilege, aristocracy and so forth. Being essentially populist, nationalism almost always has some variety of egalitarian and anti-capitalist rhetoric to it, though only for those of the Volk. There simply is no room for either of those notions within Neoreaction. Although NRx wouldn't be likely to have any problem with the creation of racially exclusive zones on a local level in a mythical, post-Cathedral future (assuming that they've been right all along and the Great Collapse does occur...), and would probably be enthusiastic, even encouraging of efforts to bring about something like this right now, simply to undermine the Cathedral, it would largely only be as a tool towards the greater, general collapse on notions of human fungibility and essential equality.

Even with this being said, for the Outer territory of NRx, support for renewed interest in race as something beyond social construction might very well be off-set if heads in the wrong direction and results in something bad for business. Hence concerns about the resurgent extreme Right in Europe; to quote Land again: 'When [White Nationalists] speak of a ‘World Brotherhood of Europeans’ it strikes most neoreactionaries (I suspect) as scarcely less comical than an appeal for universal human brotherhood, since it blithely encompasses the most vicious and ineliminable antagonisms in the world.'

Wrapping this up towards a conclusion: White Nationalism may be useful for NRx, but it seems doubtful that they would ever put their intellectual weight behind it for fear of replacing one notion of fungibility (all humans) with another (humans belonging to ethnotype x). This being said, it is almost impossible to justify many sweeping claims about NRx, and if Land's long prophesied schism does occur, it might be a different matter- but, then, we'd have to redefine what we understand NRx to be in the first place.