WHAT THE WEST HAS LOST – JAMES THE OBSCURE

Notes on the disappearance of Western ethnonationalism

If you have spent significant time outside the Western world, you may have noticed that non-Western peoples retain many of the traditional cultural traits that Westerners have abandoned. One of these traits is ethnonationalism: the basing of the nation upon a supermajority core ethnicity or cluster of related ethnicities.

The retention of ethnonationalism by non-Western countries is fortunate for Western tourists who value “experiencing other cultures.” If all countries were made of the same gray, global blend of ethnicities, there would be—almost by definition—little to differentiate one from another. Westerners also tacitly idealize ethnonationalism whenever they sympathize with the plight of some Amazonian rainforest tribe threatened by modern ranchers, or lament what was done to Native Americans, or take the side of ethnic minorities anywhere. The principle underlying these sentiments is that a grouping of people of at least broadly shared lineage—a family at the smallest scale, a clan or tribe at medium scale, an ethnicity or nation at the largest scale—has an inherent identity and worth, so that its preservation, and its ability to exercise a meaningful degree of autonomy, are desirable, and its deliberate dissolution is something like murder.

It is surely one of the most remarkable developments of modern human history that in the near-century since World War II—in schools, in media, in legal and political discourse—the West’s educated elites have done their best to discourage their peoples from applying this principle to themselves. “Discourage” is putting it mildly: Mainstream public opinion in the West now typically frames Western ethnonationalism as a harmful outdated attitude that lives on only in the hearts of a few embittered racists (“white nationalists”). Even “right wing” thought leaders now commonly reject the old ethnonation model and accept the new model of a heavily polyethnic, “contractual” nation.

In practice the term [“self-government”] seems most commonly to refer to “government by persons of the same race, culture, language, or social class or as oneself.” Since I am not, in fact, a bigot, it’s quite unclear why this should matter to me. (Curtis Yarvin, “Democracy as an Adaptive Fiction,” 2007.)

The Whys

What prompted the West’s elites to want to discard this ancient, basic element of culture?

We can’t experiment on societies to resolve such questions conclusively, but there are some broad influences that—at least to me—seem obvious:

The principal religion of the West, Christianity, essentially was conceived as a fork or update of Judaism that, among other innovations, would not be limited to ethnic Jews but would instead hold in its “catholic” embrace the many distinct peoples of the world—particularly those of the Roman Empire. In that sense, Christianity has always been at least mildly pro-globalist and anti-ethnonationalist. In modern times, that “we’re all God’s children” sentiment has remained as an influence on Western peoples even as the rest of Christian theology and ethics has mostly been eroded away.[1]
In the World War II era, the development of malignant forms of ethnonationalism in Germany, Italy, Japan and other Axis countries served broadly to discredit this traditional model of nationhood and encourage a more globalist mindset.
That turbulent wartime era also brought large refugee flows, which reduced the dominance of core ethnicities in many Western countries, directly and by adding foreign-born intellectuals—many of them leftists who detested ethnonationalism—to the ranks of Western elites.
The United States, throughout its history and largely for reasons of political expediency, has admitted to its citizenry a wider and wider range of ethnicities, including even a large West African-derived population for the past 150+ years. This demographic reality—a fait accompli—is plainly incompatible with ethnonationalism, even though the U.S.’s founders (e.g., the anti-German Franklin, the anti-French, anti-Irish Hamilton) would be considered intensely and narrowly ethnonationalist by today’s standards. Americans didn’t really have to confront this incompatibility until their extensive racial segregation system was disbanded in the 1960s. When that happened, they began embracing the post-ethnonationalist, contractual-nation ideal in earnest, and the enormous influence of the U.S. ensured the spread of that new ideal to other Western countries.
Over the past several decades, the unprecedented increase in the presence (and therefore influence/power) of women in public life in the West essentially has given women an opportunity to review and remodel Western civilization in accordance with their own distinct set of preferences. Women, on average compared to men, are more easily moved to compassion by stories of desperate refugees, etc. They also seem more vulnerable to feelings of guilt and shame over the West’s financial and technological supremacy and the related inequalities they observe between European-heritage whites and other ethnicities in daily life. All this has made them more susceptible to and supportive of the pro-polyethnic—or even anti-white—mindset.
As political (the left) and demographic (non-whites, women) centers of support for the polyethnic, contractual-nation ideal grew, these proponents learned to use labels including “racist,” “white supremacist,” and even “Nazi” to marginalize their opponents and suppress debate, and this moral bludgeon was very effective.

So what?

Does it matter that the ancient cultural trait of ethnonationalism has been rejected or at least suppressed in Western countries? Can’t we live without that potentially malignant mindset?

Perhaps the best way to answer, at least initially, is with a simple invitation to look around. What do you see? Are things going well? Do Western polyethnic societies seem healthy?

Surely it’s fair to say that, to most Westerners, the most prominent and meaningful social trends here in early 2025 are profoundly negative ones—often plainly featuring the decay of traditional Western social structures and cultural traditions.

Presumably the globalists, the anti-ethnonationalists, would blame such negative perceptions on racism, their go-to bogeyman, or would aver that a certain amount of social upheaval is necessary in the transition to a globalized, Benetton-ad utopia.

But I think that if we specify the problems of contemporary Western countries in more detail, it becomes clear that the post-ethnonationalist program, while it may have created enormous economic benefits for non-Westerners and (via cheaper labor) some Western business owners, is just unsustainable:

Economic:

Higher costs of scarce/non-producible resources such as real estate.
Higher costs of goods and services due to higher crime, dishonesty and other difficulties associated with having non-Western customers and employees (and a lower-trust society generally).
Suppression of wages due to increased labor-market competition (at all levels) from immigrants.
Loss of economic opportunities (and efficiency) due to (politically inevitable?) policies that favor non-Western peoples over legacy populations in hiring, contracting, academic placement etc.
Colossal fiscal burden from welfare programs that essentially exist to buy the votes of the less industrious non-Western residents of Western countries.

Political:

Increasing fracturing of politics along racial/ethnic lines as one or more parties scramble to capture the votes of immigrants and/or different non-Western ethnic groups—corrupting and destabilizing electoral systems, and making consensus impossible in many areas.
Increased favorability of extreme political parties and policies, authoritarianism, and police-state practices—essentially the only ways to hold a polyethnic society together.

Psychological:

Greater fear, uncertainty, and discontent due to the loss of the sense of community and steep declines in social trust.
Depression, apathy and despair from the sense that “my country doesn’t belong to me anymore,” “the leaders/elites of my country have sold my patrimony to foreigners,” etc.
Loss of national identity, which may lead legacy citizens to seek alternate sources of identity, e.g., Israel—and of course many immigrants will alleviate their own sense of disconnectedness by flocking together with members of their own ethnicity or by joining social/religious movements that are mostly based on shared ethnicity (e.g., militant Islam).

Behavioral:

More selfish and less communitarian behavior.
Greatly reduced collective ability to solve problems and endure hardships.
Greatly reduced birthrates, family formation and other pro-social behaviors.
Reduced “provide for the future” behavior.
Violent lashing-out by the least stable members of society.

As real and as dangerous as these problems are, it feels odd to have to list them like this. I am old enough to remember a time when we all just implicitly knew that bad things would happen if our ethnonations were dissolved.[2] We also implicitly knew the positive aspect of ethnonationalism as a trait that was ancient because it was good for us, nourishing and empowering us as any collective does, but on the greatest possible scale. That implicit knowledge, that broadly shared (but seldom explicitly articulated) feeling of how things should be, is how a major, long-established cultural trait tends to manifest. The West with its imperial and catholic history, its elevation of the status of women, its cultivation of high verbal intelligence, above all its hubris, has talked itself into rejecting this healthy primordial feeling as the dark sin of racism.

A higher order

The existence of this primordial feeling in our past, and throughout the non-Western world in the present, should remind us also that a strictly reductionist, individualistic approach to cultural traits may be missing something important—”missing the forest for the trees.”

Suppose, for example, that some biological experimenter knocked out a certain gene in a lab animal, and found that this always led to the lethal invasion of the animal by microorganisms. It wouldn’t really be adequate to conclude simply that “the absence of this gene is bad for cells,” would it? To understand properly, we would need to have the concept of an organism as a meaningful collective of cells, and we would need to identify the role of the gene in some organism-level system—such as the immune system—that normally defends against infectious invaders. Moreover, once we had this concept of an organism as a thing with its own properties, we would be able to grasp intuitively that destroying the integrity of the organism would not “free” or “empower” its constituent cells but would simply doom them.

The analogy that compares an organism and an ethnonation is only a rough one, of course. But it should clue us in to the likelihood that the destruction of a human collective will harm its members in ways that cannot be seen from a strictly individualist point of view. From there it’s no great leap to conclude that, if only out of caution, we should treat ethnonations with more respect—indeed, in the absence of signs that they have become malignant, our first thought should be to preserve and nourish them as distinct entities with their own inherent worth.

Without this higher-order perspective, how could we make sense of this famous lament by the African-American writer James Baldwin?

[Western white people] have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.

Similarly, without grasping the importance of ethnically rooted identity, how could we understand the ongoing collapse of what is perhaps the world’s oldest major political party, the UK Conservative Party? For well over a decade since 2010, this party was dominant over its increasingly feminized and leftist main rival, the Labour Party. Then, after a series of stumbles by its prime minister, it chose as its new leader and prime minister—in an internal process among party elites—a man of Indian heritage, Rishi Sunak. Despite the fact that Sunak was an intelligent and perfectly likeable technocrat, everything collapsed. Labour, under the whiter-than-white Keir Starmer, was swept into power in a historic electoral landslide. The Conservative elites, doubling down, replaced Sunak with another nonwhite leader—Kemi Badenoch, a woman of African heritage—and despite her preaching of conservative policies on matters such as (ironically) immigration, popular support for the Conservatives continued to bleed away to a new, white-led Reform Party, which now looks set to take the Conservatives’ place.

Is ethnonationalism recoverable?

As obvious as this ethnic factor seems from my perspective—and as obvious as it continues to be from non-Westerners’ perspective—it has been, to date, un-acknowledgable in mainstream public discourse in the West. Even among so-called conservatives in Britain, the unpopularity of Sunak and Badenoch are said—in the major newspapers and journals of opinion—to be only skill- and policy-related. To admit that these politicians are nationally unpopular and unsuitable as party leaders because of their foreign ethnicity—which is to admit that most British voters retain ethnonationalist feelings—would be too painful. The elites in Britain, the “chattering classes,” have been working for decades to erase such feelings, in part by pretending that they are harbored only by low-status types: skinheads and hooligans. If such feelings are still widespread despite this multi-generational brainwashing, then they are likely innate and resilient, which would imply that the post-ethnonationalist project was always doomed.

It would be nice if the collapse of this unsound edifice could happen in an orderly fashion, smoothly giving way to a new order—an improved version of the traditional order—in which everyone recognized ethnonations as the essential collectives around which countries and their governments form. It would be nice if self-determination for ethnonations were the first principle of our politics, and love of nation/country the first sentiment among citizens. The many large and culturally/ethnically distinct groups that are currently trapped as minorities in larger societies would at last be allowed to live in worlds of their own making. And in general, at an individual level, people would benefit from the reversal of the many problems inherent in polyethnic societies—and probably would feel significantly more content just from having a clearer national identity and sense of belonging. There would continue to be ethnic mixing, of course, but at a slower pace, dominated by the traditional process of intermarriage.

Unfortunately, a re-adoption of ethnonationalism still seems a distant prospect. It would require social surgery on a scale that no democracy would countenance except amid the most severe crisis. It would require full-throated support from Western elites who, so far, have never seemed ready to let go of the polyethnic ideal. In the United States, for example, the permissible focus of public ire over mass immigration is not the dilution of the legacy ethnonation, but instead the much narrower issue of illegal immigration—a law enforcement problem. Even in the current, supposedly “far-right” US administration, both the president and vice-president are effectively supporters of the contractual nation model, being married to non-Western-Europeans who obtained US citizenship or residency long before their weddings. And of course, in Western Europe, to speak publicly about non-European immigrants’ disproportionate lawlessness, welfare-consumption etc. remains socially verboten, and in some countries is treated as a serious criminal offense punishable by a lengthy jail term.

Even if an ethnonationalist party were somehow able to gain power in a major Western country, and attempted to reverse that country’s polyethnic transformation, it would be opposed fiercely, especially by the multitude of individuals and institutions who have helped shape, and now benefit from, the status quo. Thus, to take an obvious example, any attempt to treat African Americans as a distinct nation deserving sovereignty would be met with shrill cries of “racism” by their current masters in the Democratic party. And any encouragement of that old-fashioned sentiment, “love of country”—amor patriae, meaning love of ethnonation—would be condemned by the usual suspects as a form of “hate.”

And let’s not forget that in political systems with elections this also about math: In many Western countries, white people are well on their way to becoming minorities demographically. Moreover, half of whites—the female half—have, as noted above, an innately stronger sentimentality that makes them significantly more susceptible to anti-ethnonationalist messaging.

In short, then, the traditional ethnonations of the West are still a long, long way from recovering their traditional power of self-determination—that “separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” in the words of the American Declaration of Independence.

So, assuming that the contractual-nation model is unworkable, how will it ultimately fall apart in the West? The most obvious possibility, given the current situation, is that it falls apart in ways that chiefly benefit non-Westerners—Westerners having mostly psyched themselves out of having a future. In other words, the Western world, overrun with migrants, will splinter politically into states dominated by different non-Western or less-Western ethnic cores (e.g., Latinos/Mesoamericans take the American West and Southwest, MENA peoples control Western Europe), in a manner reminiscent of what happened ~1,500 years ago as the Western Roman Empire collapsed.

Of course, it remains conceivable that a political/social movement favoring a return to ethnonationalism by the peoples of the West—and validating the ethnonationalism still practiced by everyone else on our planet—will emerge and overcome the many barricades that have been put in its way; and I believe we and our descendants would be much better off if that were to happen. I can’t help thinking, though, that such an movement, if it were to have a reasonable chance of success, should have emerged and become popular long before now.

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[1] The somewhat related but narrower—and to me less persuasive—“WEIRD” theory of Joseph Henrich holds that some specific Church practices in the Middle Ages caused Western societies to evolve, culturally and even biologically, to be more individualistic and less communitarian than other societies.

[2]“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” claimed Lyndon Johnson when he signed the 1965 Hart-Celler Act liberalizing immigration law. “It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives.” He said this, obviously, because he knew that the legislation (which certainly would transform the country and provide the Democratic party with tens of millions of new loyal voters) conflicted with Americans’ essentially ethnonationalist feelings.