Dialogue with Lafayette Lee, Scott Greer, and Ben Roberts on race and American identity

One of the things that happens when you do this writing/podcasting thing is that, whenever you put out content that catches on and makes the rounds, you inevitably get a flood of requests from other podcasts and publications asking you to speak on the same topic. I don’t enjoy rehashing the same conversation over and over for different audiences, and don’t want to be pigeon-holed as the such-and-such guy, so I usually turn the requests down. I’ve turned down a lot of requests from major shows and publications for that reason, and when I accept an invitation it’s usually just because I know and like the people involved. And I like the guys at IM-1776, so I agreed to participate in a dialogue to follow-up the one I had with Lafayette Lee in January, about the past, present, and future of American identity.

Read the discussion here, else this response will probably not make sense

The mag’s editors might have expected me and Lee to disagree more than we did, but in the end we agreed on almost everything. We discussed the limitations of trying to reconstruct an identity based on ideology, but also expressed our shared skepticism that a racialist approach was any better or more likely to succeed. The latter skepticism riled up some of IM-1776’s right-wing readers, and the editors asked Lee and I to participate in a continuation of the dialogue with two more interlocutors - Scott Greer and Ben Roberts - who would present the racialist position (there was no need to include any civic nationalists, since their views can be heard from any GOP politician or mainstream conservative).

I only wrote four paragraphs of the ten- or eleven-page dialogue - partly due to scheduling constraints, partly because Scott filled up two or three pages with each of his responses - but nevertheless I managed to rile up the same people even more. Lee managed to take up most of the slack for me, though. There was a lot more I would have said in response, given unlimited time and space to write, but alas, print magazines have hard deadlines and page limits, so I’ll have to do it here.

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In the first dialogue, Lee and I both gravitated toward some form of localism as the shortest and most likely path for atomized Americans to rebuild sustainable group identities and collective affinity for one another. I pointed out that, throughout most of its history, America has been radically-open (in the context of each era) and rapidly-changing, and, as a result, group identity has always been primarily rooted in the local and familiar. Most European nations existed for centuries as ethnically- and culturally-homogenous societies. They formed their identities under those conditions, and it has only been in the last few decades that mass immigration is altering the demographic balance. But mass immigration has been altering the demographic balance of America since the beginning. Our national identity has always been in flux, usually taking a backseat to local ties except in times of mass enthusiasm (usually war). The result was that the American right developed differently than the European right, and its reaction to demographic change has been more flexible and more confused. Each wave of immigrants faced resistance from the native-born, but within a generation they were lining up with their former opponents to resist the next wave. The local and familiar provided the only stable basis for identity in a society undergoing constant transformation. Looking ahead, the pace of change seems certain to only keep accelerating, and building a meaningful group identity based on anything beyond what people can see and touch seems to me a wasted and doomed effort.

In the second dialogue, Scott came out of the gate with a straightforward statement of his own racialist perspective: “I think it’s unrealistic to expect a colorblind national identity to thrive in a minority-white America. America is great because of the people who made it. Those people were whites with an Anglo-Protestant culture.” Whiteness, he says, is intrinsic to what it means to be an American, and he points out that the Left seems to understand that, which is why whiteness is the prime evil, the enemy of all mankind, in Leftist demonology. Yet already in his first response, Scott expressed the racial paranoia that seems endemic to all such ideologies:

We’re quickly heading towards a future without a racial majority.  Non-whites, raised up on anti-white history, will bitterly resent the honors afforded dead white men and the relative prosperity of whites. They will cling to their racial and ethnic identities to distinguish themselves from the shallow consumer culture of the mainstream. Colorblindness doesn’t appeal to them. Colorblindness really only appeals to whites. They will prefer anti-whiteness.

Ben, his ally in this debate, fleshes out the theme:

Identities often form and strengthen as a result of specific conflict or opposition. Americans are not being attacked based on their regional identity, they’re being attacked on a racial basis… In many ways the Left’s vociferous anti-White hatred is actually a boon, because it catalyzes the organic process of identity formation that has played out time and time again…  A vast amount of the 20th Century GOP’s platform consisted of thinly veiled White grievances.¹