Folkishness Q&A, Part I

Ten Questions Asked and Answered

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Folkishness has begun to make waves in the radical right, especially in the last year or so. First, it was set upon by its opponents, then it was the subject of questions by curious onlookers, and now it is the subject of internal debates among its proponents. This is a sign that folkishness is a worldview on the rise.

The latest development in this has been Arthur Powell’s article Questions for the Folkish. This article was prompted by a video called Why Folkishness? that I posted on Hearthfire Radio, on my channel The Outlander, where I gave some pithy definitions of folkishness and explained why it is warranted.

In his response to this video, Powell poses a number of questions for the folkish worldview. His article was then responded to by Esotericist, a proponent of folkishness and one of the best writers on Substack, in his article What is Folkishness? where he offers his own take which departs from mine on a few substantial points. In the next two articles I will address the questions raised by Powell and Esotericist as well as others that have been asked in public and private.

Groundwork

Before we get to the questions, I will say a few things about what folkishness is.

Folkishness has a history—it is not something I or anyone working today made up. The Völkisch movement was a cultural and political movement that emerged in late 19th-century Germany in response to the rapid onset of modernity. It blended nationalism, mysticism, agrarian romanticism, and racialism, taking its name from the term Volk, cognate to our “folk”, implying not a mere civic community but an organic, quasi-sacred ethnic unity tied to blood, soil, and ancestry. Völkisch thinkers tended to idealize peasant life, rural landscapes, and pre-Christian Germanic heritage, and often opposed the Enlightenment, rationalism, and cosmopolitanism. This is historical folkishness, or what I will call pre-Weimar folkishness, which later came to inform National Socialist ideology, though it is distinct from it.

Folkishness also has a conceptual definition, which is contained in the name—folkishness is an attitude of being “for the folk”. It is important to understand this as pre-ideological in the same way that nationalism is pre-ideological—just as nationalism is an attitude or disposition toward the nation, so folkishness is that toward the folk. Folkishness certainly does have an ideological dimension, which is what proponents are currently in the process of working out.¹ But it is more and deeper than that.

Finally, folkishness has a functional definition, what people generally take it to mean—folkishness is functionally “in-group preference”. When you say you are folkish, that means that you are exclusionist along the lines of identity, usually ethnicity or ancestry.

All of these definitions are deficient in important ways. The historical definition is of limited use because we do not live in pre-Weimar Germany. We do not live in a largely agrarian economy which is rapidly trying to industrialize. We do not live in countries which have become a single nation in the last few decades, and which need to foster a sense of unity in order to survive amid much older nations. While pre-Weimar folkishness is a rich and fascinating phenomenon whose depths have only begun to be mined, we are in a very different place today.

The conceptual definition does not recommend itself immediately. The folk is one layer of identity among many, and it’s not readily apparent why this is the one we should care most about, though that can certainly be defended. And the functional definition is too broad. “In-group preference” is a wonderful thing, but this encompasses too much. We need to say not only which groups to prefer, especially when they conflict, but what the whole basis of in-group preference is. Liberal humanism has historically had in-group preference, but this ideology has also historically corroded all in-group preference, so clearly such preference is just one piece of the puzzle.

Is there something we can point to that is behind all these definitions of folkishness? What unites the historical pre-Weimar notion to the conceptual definition to the functional usage of the term? This is the question I addressed in my video on Hearthfire Radio. This something is what I want to draw out. It is what makes folkishness unique, vital, and interesting, and is what recommends it as a cure for what ails us.

Behind all definitions of folkishness is the aim to foster pre-political identity.² Pre-Weimar folkishness wants to foster one specific level of identity—the folk. And so do I. But we can go further. What unites all uses of the term folkishness is, firstly, the aim of fostering pre-political identity in general. But secondly, in the uses of the term folkishness, we can detect an implicit bias toward more fundamental layers of identity. The folk is distinct from the nation, and is a sub-national identity. It can exist apart from the nation, or any nation—the British are a nation; the English are a folk.³ Pre-Weimar folkishness biases itself toward the sub-national identity over the national. In-group preference as such tends to favour the family over the clan, the clan over the tribe, and the tribe over the folk. This is very similar to the old Bedouin proverb “I against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin; my cousin and I against the world”. This is, essentially, what the Berber scholar Ibn Khaldun called asabiyyah.

As a working definition, folkishness is an earthward disposition toward pre-political identity. If we sacrifice a bit of precision we could say that folkishness is asabiyyah writ large. This is really just a generalization of the principle of putting one sub-political identity before the political. It departs from the historical definition of folkishness, but we are justified in doing so because the term is relatively unknown in English, and where it is known, this is already what it means functionally. We are justified in breaking with the historical definition because we need to develop a folkishness for our time. Marx was not the first to develop socialism, nor were the National Socialists, but each took an existing term and developed it for their own purposes. This sort of conceptual reframing is not only valid, it is an important part of the broader project of radical politics, which aims to repurpose liberal frameworks to the benefit of our friends and to the hurt of our enemies.

So now that we understand the term folkishness as I intend it, we can answer questions about it.

What is the project of folkishness?

We have already said that folkishness aims to foster the pre-political, but we can sketch that out a bit more. Liberalism has undermined all pre-political identities, but some more than others. It has undermined the folk, but this is one of the relatively untouched identities. It was not until only relatively recently that liberalism took aim at the English as an identity.⁴ Long before that, liberalism undermined tribal and clan identities everywhere it took root.

Pre-political identities can be thought of like biological categories. The European red fox is of the species Vulpes vulpes, genus Vulpes (fox), family Canidae (canine), order Carnivora (carnivore), class Mammalia (mammal), phylum Chordata (vertebrate), and kingdom Animalia (animal). The higher-order categories (animal, vertebrate) ontologically depend on the lower-order categories (foxes, canines). You only have canines because you have foxes, wolves, coyotes, jackals, etc.

Pre-political identities have not only the same ontological relationship, but even their survival works the same way. Each level (let’s just say family, clan, tribe, folk) is only as strong as the aggregate strength of the prior level. You only have a strong folk if you have strong tribes; you only have a strong tribe if you have strong clans; you only have a strong clan if you have strong families. Each level of pre-political identity depends on the social capital of the prior levels.

Liberalism has harmed all pre-political identities, but it has erased the intermediate levels.⁵ The folk (to say nothing of the nation) can never have structural integrity until it “re-capitalizes” the pre-political identities upon which it depends. This involves the family, of course, and giving the family back its integrity is a foundational project. But perhaps more urgently, any folk which hopes to survive needs to re-tribalize and become more clannish, because these identities have sustained the most damage.

Is folkishness a tool to recover the nation, or an end in itself?

Now that we understand the difference between a nation and a folk, we can answer this: no, folkishness does not aim to recover the nation. But once we understand the earthward relationship of priority in identities (family > clan > tribe etc.), we understand that anyone who does want to recover the nation must first recover the folk; whoever wants to recover the folk must recover the tribe, and so on.

This question was posed by Arthur Powell, who in the same section points out that “at some point such tribalism is usually brought to order by the larger grouping (and exertion of power) to get to the Nation”, which leads us to our next question.

Doesn’t the folk need the nation to survive?

This question can be easily answered by looking at history: no, a folk does not need a nation to survive, since there have been many folks who have survived independent of nationhood.⁶ We could think of Jews, Armenians, Kurds, Basques, Scots, Tibetans, etc.

But let us not ignore the valid point this question raises. The point is that a nation is a useful thing. Later this week we will release a massive book of Arthurian legendry, which is set in a time when the Brythonic tribes could not unite against the invading Saxons, and the whole story arc of King Arthur is that he is the one man who could unite them all. Herodotus tells us that in his time the Thracians would have been the most powerful folk except they could not unite for all their tribal squabbling.

A family is naked and exposed against a clan, and needs to band together with other families—it needs to join a clan—to stand a chance. Is this not true of tribes vis-à-vis folks, or folks vis-à-vis nations? This is, after all, the argument of the liberal against “petty nationalism”. The Welsh are a fine people, but what chance do they stand against say the Russians?

The answer to all this is uncontroversial. But today, even the nation is no longer viable since it has no unity, and it has no unity because folkishness has been systematically erased. The British are more exposed than they have been since the time of King Arthur, precisely because their pre-political loyalties have been hollowed out, especially at the more fundamental levels. The British are not struggling to unite because they’re too clannish—that would be a wonderful problem to have right now. They’re struggling to unite because they’re atomized individuals beset on all sides by hostile folk within their borders, who are destroying them precisely because these people are folkish and they are not.

The British must learn to live as exiles in their own countries. They will not be storming parliament in a mass movement any time soon, nor voting their way out of this. They need to live as the Kurds, Jews, Tibetans etc. have in times past, as an imperium in imperio within a society which is not in their possession.

Isn’t folkishness what non-white people do?

Powell further points out that “the clannish tribal Muslims of both Pakistan and Afghanistan seem to be living real world examples of Folkishness”. And so they are, which is precisely why they are killing us. He says “thanks to their effective Folkish behavior they are an organized minority in the way the English have not been in a while”, and here we have hit upon something. There is a perception, even within the relatively tribally oriented radical right, that it is in the essence of the English not to be folkish. But does this stand up to scrutiny?