Beyond Racism

We Must Be More Radical

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The last ten or so articles on this Substack were long, multi-part articles written in a dense and academic style.¹ They also brought in a large number of new subscribers. To those of you new to Imperium Press, welcome. This kind of content will continue, but punctuated with articles written in a more straightforward style. We like to keep things fresh around here.

There has been a longstanding trend in the radical right that seeks to marry some once-dominant ideology to “racism” in order to give it new life. One notable example of this happened back in about 2019, yielding the term racist liberal. Classical liberalism—with its methodological individualism, rights-based ethics, universalism, and natural law—maps only very clumsily on to “racism”; let us just say ethnocentrism to be more precise. Were the original classical liberals ethnocentrist? Yes they were. However, they also defended colonialism and slavery, and opposed women’s suffrage, and few if any ideologically serious classical liberals would defend those positions today, including ethnocentric ones. Ideologies don’t usually begin pure and degrade over time; more often, they begin as heterogeneous and pragmatic, and become more pure over time.

We have seen this over and over again. Take Platonism as a more recent example. As Platonism comes, for the first time, under serious scrutiny (rather than dull indifference) by the contemporary radical right, Platonists have publicly defended Platonism as likewise compatible with ethnocentrism despite sharing with liberalism most of the above traits that set the two in tension. Christianity has had its turn at the bat. Radical Traditionalism has had its turn. Even feminism got this “racist” makeover around the same time as classical liberalism. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I am not here concerned to argue against these as compatible with ethnocentrism. It is sufficient to note that each of these was at one point the dominant paradigm, but proved either unwilling or unable to prevent the rising tide of anti-folkishness. Some paradigms, such as Christianity, draw an account for this decline (and importantly, a myth of revival) right from their eschatological structure. Others, such as liberalism, simply wish to revisit a debate that they lost, bringing to it no new arguments.

None of this is good enough. The steady erasure of ethnic boundaries over centuries is not an incidental, historical, contingent accident. We didn’t “forget” how to love our own. Nor were we “tricked” into it. This was not foisted upon us by some alien element in our midst, at least not without our own complicity. To the extent that others helped this along, we were on board with it at a foundational level, and these others simply facilitated what our own consciences already dictated.

It is not enough simply to graft ethnocentrism on to an old worldview with which it never really fit. To drive this point home, we offer an extended metaphor.

The car comes barrelling over the rise. It hits the lip of the curb and the world tips sideways. One wheel lifts like a dying animal’s limb and then it flips—clean, weightless—for a breath, before it comes down howling. Metal on asphalt. A rake of sparks like Vulcan's chisel scoring the planet’s hide.

It rolls. Once. Then again. Windows burst like lungs collapsing. The hood peels back. A door comes off and slides away into the night, spinning. When it stops it lies canted on the roof, steaming, creaking, ticking like a machine winding down.

The passenger’s body is half-spilled into the glass. The others are worse. But the driver crawls out slow, like a creature half-born from wreckage. He lies there panting, blood at the corner of his mouth, watching the world turn again.

Time passes like weather.

Red ghosts stuttering across the wreckglass.

The paramedic steps down from the rig with the rain on his shoulders and the radio still muttering behind him. The wreck lies like a slaughtered animal in the street, frame twisted, engine steaming its last breath into the dark. He moves with practiced quiet, boots slick with oil. Blood runs in long threads from the car’s belly and pools black in the gutters.

The boy is half out the door, his back against the frame, face lit soft by the flares. One leg gone above the knee. The other pinned, folded under him like a broken wing. The femur high and bloated. The boot leather split from swelling. He’s still awake. Eyes wide and glassy, mouth moving, though no sound comes. Not screaming.

The paramedic kneels. No tourniquet on the gone leg. Nothing to tie. No bleeding. No saving. He touches the throat. Still there. Fast, light.

He cuts the pants on the crushed leg. The flesh purple and high with pressure. He checks capillary refill. None. He presses on the belly. Soft. Good. The airway is open. No chest rise irregularity. Good.

He keys the mic on his shoulder.

“One patient. Male. Late teens. Traumatic amputation. Crush injury opposite. Conscious. BP pending.”

He waits. The boy stares.

“Prep for rapid transport.”

He gives him a hand to hold and doesn’t say what parts of him are already gone. Not all at once. Just in the order that makes sense.

Days unspool without shape or name.

The man sits beside the bed in a chair with chrome legs and a clipboard folded against his thigh. Not a doctor. Not a priest. Something in between. Trauma counsellor maybe. Government badge. Quiet eyes.

“You remember any of it?” he says.

The boy nods, but not at him. Eyes on the window where the rain has started again.

“They said you were gone for a while. Not just in the car. Before that.”

The boy doesn’t speak. He watches the IV drip like it might stop if he stares hard enough.

“You were drinking. Hard.”

“Yeah.”

The man waits.

“Something happened,” the man says. “Before. You want to tell me?”

The boy turns to him slow.

“I already told someone,” he says. Then he breathes. “Didn’t do much.”

The man nods. He doesn’t write. Doesn’t move.

2020 and on represent a traumatic event for the West. The 20th century was a slow motion wreck the severity of which can only be understood in hindsight, even now incompletely, and to which effectively all onlookers are blind: conservatives, liberals, communists, religious leaders, men of prominence, academics, policymakers, statesmen—everyone.

The radical right is the first responder on the scene. The scale of the trauma is such that decisions must be taken, priorities weighed up, sacrifices made. The leg cannot be saved. Catastrophic bleeding must be stanched and triage principles followed. This is the radical right’s initial prescription: “racism can fix this.”

But why was the boy in the car in the first place? Why so reckless? Why stinking drunk? He had a death wish, and took down others with him. What brought him to it?

The prescription to graft ethnocentrism on to an ideology that brought us to this is absurd. Yes, we need to love our own—of course. But it’s not even in the same discussion as a foundational solution, no more than applying a tourniquet to a crushed limb is the solution to the deep psychological torment that led you to wrap your car around a tree.

Racism ain’t gonna cut it. The solution must be far deeper than that. We lost our sense of brotherhood because our worldview collapsed, not the other way around. The hard work of fixing our problems is only now just beginning, and the project must be one of reconstructing our ancestral worldview from the ground up. Anything less falls woefully, laughably short. The depth and scale of the problem cannot be overstated, and no worldview in historical memory is a serious candidate. Even just to begin to approach what needs to be done is such a sheer, forbidding cliff that only a few today will be able to scale it. But we must make a start.

The radical right has made that start. But it’s only a start, and nowhere near an end.

1. This material will be reworked into something more formal that you will see later this year.