Free Articles on the IP Substack
Some of the content on this Substack is paywalled—this platform helps people support us and keep us independent of payment processors, since we can say what we want without having to worry about losing PayPal or something. Please consider a paid subscription if you like what Imperium Press is doing.
But we do post some free articles. Below you’ll find links to all of them:
What On Earth Is Going On In This Blog?
It’s been a year since we started the Imperium Press Substack. With no real plan other than to provide something of value, it has become a vehicle for working out a folkish worldview for the 21st century, and people are paying attention. In an overview of this project, Mike lays out in plain language what that looks like.
Karl Ludwig von Haller is one of the strongest Counter-Enlightenment voices and yet has remained inaccessible to the English-speaking world for two centuries until we published him last month. In this article we unpack his thought and explain why he matters to us today, which he absolutely does, maybe even more than a Maistre or a Filmer.
The main alternative to liberal ethics is often thought to be teleology. But teleology suffers from the same problem as liberalism, a problem that has been pointed out by rightists like Nick Land and Adam Katz—it simply creates a new battleground that can be fought over indefinitely—now "ends" as opposed to "rights" or whatever. Alasdair MacIntyre's project of opposing Nietzsche to Aristotle fails because both ultimately give men a menu of rationalizations for whatever they already want to do.
Communism a Fortiori: A Response to BAP’s GNC
Bronze Age Pervert recently detailed his GNC concept as a genealogy of wokeness. I found GNC to be a useful concept and to dovetail with some of my own thinking. In my response I locate GNC in the broader narrative of the Axial origins of liberalism itself.
The Third World is Going to Cop It
White birth rates have been declining for generations but are starting to level out, whereas non-white birth rates are higher but are falling much faster. This is no accident, but the result of non-whites encountering an ideological virus they have no natural defenses to. I look at the hard numbers and the TL;DR is that they are going to cop it.
Greenblatt and the Limits of Soft Power
Greenblatt vs. Musk shows us that soft power can only get you so far if you run up against someone who says no. Soft power has limits, and in this article I draw out the implications for us, who have no hard power and who seem to have hitched our wagon to developing ideology.
Greg Johnson made a welcome reply to my comments on his debate with Mark Collett over Ukraine. It seems his position turns on popular sovereignty, so I address whether a bottom-up view of social change is tenable and its implications for nationalists.
The Johnson vs. Collett debate was not just a disagreement over strategic and defense interests, but between competing visions of what nationalism even is in the first place. And these visions are not created equal.
Was the Third Reich Civic Nationalist?
Was the Third Reich civic nationalist? Of course not. But someone responded that our last article on propositional identity as civic nationalism makes the Third Reich out to be civnat. This article explains why Third Reich nationalism was anti-propositional, and cites as yet untranslated primary sources to make the case.
No one can argue you out of being your father’s son. If your foundational identity is something you can be argued into or out of, you are a civic nationalist. In this article, I introduce the concept of propositionality as the basic form of civic nationalism.
I take Morgoth's article The Disenchantment Of The Rhine (And Europe) as a starting point for thinking about the long term direction of European peoples. Identitarianism and environmentalism did not just come from out of nowhere. They are extremely archaic, and are struggling to be reborn in modern times. And reborn they will be.
The roots of liberalism are much deeper than we thought. The Axial Age is thought to be the big bang of everything good and true and high in the world. And so it seemed—for a time. But civilizations work on very long time scales, and what seemed great and true and high back then had long-term consequences that only began to be felt a few centuries ago.
We use all kinds of political distinctions: left/right, liberal/conservative, globalist/nationalist, etc. But there’s a distinction so foundational to our thinking as Indo-European peoples that it generates all these distinctions and more. This is the Odinic/Tyrrhic. Far more than a mere political concept, it’s the most basic paradigm for understanding who we are.