As I continue to make my way through the archives of the Revolutions Podcast I have been struck by some similarities with our own day. Right now I am on the cusp of the great revolutions of 1848, which were brought about by social changes resulting from industrialization and a rising sense of nationalism among the peoples of Europe. I have written before on the rise of nationalism and how it is a preferable alternative to the encroaching globalism that is being pushed by our elite bureaucrats. Nationalism was a driving force for change in the mid-19th century and it continued to be a factor through World War II a hundred years later. But there are some distinctions that I have noticed with regards to the nationalism that we advocate today.

Before getting into those I would like to examine the difference between the nation and the state. 21st century Americans don’t often think about that distinction, taking it for granted that the United States is a single nation made up of many different ethnic groups. Our educational and media establishments push the idea that this has always been the case and always will, but students of history know that this is not necessarily true. A nation, from the Latin “natio” meaning birth, is a group of people united by a shared ethnic heritage. The English are a nation. The Arabs are a nation. The Afrikaners are a nation – though descended from the Dutch, they developed uniquely in South Africa over several centuries. On the other hand, a state is a government implemented by or over a nation. (Hence the term “nation-state”.) The United States is an empire of several nations, all coexisting within the same state. (Follow this link for a much more in-depth discussion of this phenomenon: http://www.colinwoodard.com/americannations)

Nationalism in America today means a recognition that we are a state composed of several nations, and that we might be better off if each nation governed itself rather than fighting to control each other. The same thing is happening in Europe as Britons, Italians, Hungarians, and others are wondering if subsuming their national sovereignty to technocrats in Brussels and Strasbourg is really the best thing to do. This sort of nationalism was in vogue following World War I as several great multi-national empires disintegrated. The premiere example of this was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had ruled over more than a dozen different nations including Germans, Hungarians, Slavs, Greeks, and more. After the war leaders such as US President Woodrow Wilson advocated for self-determination, that is, for ethnic nations to govern themselves. This led to the creation of several smaller states such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

This sort of nationalism – a desire for self-rule – is distinct from many of the nationalist movements of the mid-19th century. Whereas American Nationalists desire to be free to rule ourselves without interference from globalist bureaucrats or DC busybodies, 19th-century nationalists often wanted unification with their ethnic brethren. Germany, for example, did not exist as a state until 1870. Prior to that, ethnic Germans lived in Prussia, Austria, and dozens of smaller kingdoms and states throughout what remained of the Holy Roman Empire. To a German of that era, nationalism meant erasing the borders of these states and forming a new nation-state of Germany. This was partially accomplished by Chancellor Otto van Bismarck of Prussia, but his beloved German Empire still excluded Austria, which was ruling a multi-national empire of its own and had no intention of joining another.

It was this style of nationalism that motivated history’s favorite bogeyman Adolf Hitler. He was born in Austria, and from a young age dreamed of the same unified Germany that motivated Bismarck a generation before. The victorious allies of World War I feared a unified Germany, and so did their best to divide ethnic Germans up between various states in central Europe. Hitler’s actions in the late 1930s were aimed at unifying those scattered groups under his Nazi flag. Hence the annexation of the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, the Anschluss with Austria, and finally the invasion of Poland, which had been ceded East Prussia after World War I. This is how the concept of nationalism became associated with Hitler and the Nazis, and is how modern globalists slander and silence modern nationalists. When we say “We want to be left alone to rule ourselves” they hear “We just can’t wait to invade Poland.” We say we want self-determination, and they accuse us of advocating genocide.

19th-century nationalism still exists, of course. Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt had a Bismarckian vision of pan-Arab nationalism, hoping to create an Arab nation-state that could rival the US and USSR in power. He managed to unite Egypt and Syria under one government but even that small union did not survive his death. In America today, some racial nationalists like Richard Spencer desire some sort of pan-European nation-state made up of white people without regard to ethnic heritage. His views are often used to tar those of us who advocate the other kind of nationalism. Globalist media either does not care about the distinction, or they simply do not have the vocabulary to articulate the difference.

Perhaps a new word is needed for our brand of nationalism that is opposed to globalism and empire, but I cannot think of any so succinct and self-explanatory. We are in favor of nations as distinct political entities. We are not seeking to dominate other nations, as Hitler did. On the contrary, we are more like the Slavs who sought independence from the Hapsburg Empire or the Greeks who fought for their independence from the Ottomans. Our globalist masters share neither our values nor our concerns. They believe that people are interchangeable cogs in their GDP machine. We reject this, and we reject the globalist push to erase national borders. We reject globalist propaganda that says we are all simply citizens of the world without a unique heritage. When they praise diversity, what they are really advocating is the sublimation of our ethnic distinctions. We reject the false equivalence that says modern Nationalists are all Nazis and that nationalism leads to genocide. We recognize that different nations have unique traditions and histories that are worth preserving. We recognize that people are ruled best when they rule themselves. We do not desire for the the English to rule over Africa, Germany to rule over the Slavs, or Japan to rule over the Chinese. We believe in the right of self-determination for all.

Men of the West is a blog that “seeks to clarify the issues of the day and build a community of like minded men who worship Jesus Christ. To unify them across Christendom to steel them against the barbarians who are either at the gates, or already inside them. We will celebrate, defend, and expand Western Civilization and the values and traditions that created it.” I was honored when they asked to republish my recent post “Choose Greatness” there. I hope my readers will check them out as well.

I have been catching up on Mike Duncan’s “Revolutions” podcast. I am about a year and a half behind, having just begun Series 7 on the revolutions that reshaped Europe in 1848. The mid-19th century saw the rise of nationalism as a political ideology. The nationalists of that time were reacting against multi-ethnic autocracy of the sort that characterized the Austrian Empire and Napoleonic France. 19th-century nationalism was often about building a nation out of disparate kingdoms, whereas I would suggest modern nationalism is about resisting the efforts to subsume individual cultures under Globalist governance. Anyway, check out the podcast if you’re interested in history.

Tucker Carlson continues to impress me as a spokesman for American nationalism. Last week he published an article in The American Conservative blasting the neoconservative elites who are continually pushing for more foreign wars, yet refusing to hold themselves accountable for their past failures. The whole thing is worth reading.

Imagine if American news media wrote about American politics the way they do about other autocratic regimes. “After populist firebrand Donald Trump unexpectedly won the presidential election against the government-backed candidate Hillary Clinton, powerful oligarchs concocted a coup attempt against the president using their apparatchiks in the American secret police.”

Bernie Sanders has officially entered the 2020 race, despite being nearly a century old. I have mentioned before that he once espoused nationalist views, albeit with socialist ideology. Ever since he dropped out of the 2016 race and endorsed Hillary Clinton, however, Sanders has toed the party line of invade-the-world / invite-the-world. At this point he offers no distinction from the rest of the Democratic Party, which is fully embracing the twin pillars of socialism and identity politics. He is just an old white man, which is not going to win the coalition of aggrieved minorities that is the Democratic constituency today.

It is a sad fact that nearly everyone running for president next year go out of their way to represent everyone but the posterity of America’s founding fathers. Most of the Democratic field has a higher opinion of illegal immigrants than they do white Christian men. The one exception might be Tulsi Gabbard, Congresswoman from Hawaii. She is the only one to speak out against the endless wars that we have become involved in. For that she is tarred as a Fascist and a thrall of Bashar Assad. Time till tell if she will hold her ground or give way to the Globalist zeitgeist.

My podcasts page has said “Coming soon!” since I first published this site two months ago. I have not forgotten though – I recently acquired a reasonably good microphone, so as soon as I get over this cough I’ve been fighting I’ll sit down and record a podcast.

Last week President Trump gave his second State of the Union Address after signing a temporary order to reopen the government for three weeks. The theme of the speech was America’s past and future greatness, which aligns with the president’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”. To illustrate this theme, President Trump filled the gallery with representatives of America’s past heights: World War II veterans who stormed Normandy and liberated concentration camps, the second man on the moon Buzz Aldrin, and others from America’s golden age.

Together we can break decades of political stalemate, we can bridge old divisions, heal old wounds, build new coalitions, forge new solutions and unlock the extraordinary promise of America’s future. The decision is ours to make. We must choose between greatness or gridlock, results or resistance, vision or vengeance, incredible progress or pointless destruction. Tonight I ask you to choose greatness.

For President Trump, these reminders were supposed to inspire us to believe we can achieve such greatness once again. However, for this blog they instead demonstrated that the United States peaked long ago and is steadily and inexorably declining. I was reminded of another speech from many years ago that also implored its listeners to choose greatness. In 1964, the United States was nearing the end of its peak, which I mark from victory in World War II through the Apollo Program. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona was running against the incumbent President Lyndon Johnson, who had surrounded himself with the aura of the late John Kennedy’s Camelot. Goldwater was destined to lose in one of the largest landslides in American history, but his campaign is remembered for the emergence of a former actor onto the political stage.

Ronald Reagan’s speech that year echoes through history. The future president asked America if they would prefer the comfort of peace through surrender or the hardship involved in fighting for their liberties. Framed within the Cold War dynamic of Soviet socialism vs American free enterprise, Reagan warned that the easy choice could be the wrong choice:

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

During the speech, Reagan told a story of an acquaintance who had escaped Castro’s Cuba and counted himself lucky that he had a place to escape to. Reagan warns that if the United States falls then there will be no more places to which we can escape. More than fifty years later, this warning appears to be coming true. We had an opportunity to choose greatness in the 1960s, but instead we chose welfare, big government, and endless wars. When it gets really bad we turn to populists like Reagan or Donald Trump, but they are only able to slow the decline, rather than stop or reverse it.

Today President Trump signed a bloated budget bill that not only does little to build his long-promised border wall but actually makes it harder to secure the border at all. This is, of course, in addition to the billions of dollars our federal government wastes every year on ineffective programs, foreign aid, and payoffs to various lobby groups. For all his tough talk, even President Trump seems unable to stand against the Globalist swamp. That is the nature of a swamp. It engulfs whatever it touches, and its tentacles entangle themselves in everything. Like a hydra it cannot be simply killed by attacking one tentacle or another. It is likely our federal government is beyond saving, because the actions needed to destroy the swamp hydra would probably destroy the last vestiges of our constitutional government at the same time.

So what can be done? The deep state bureaucracy has made it impossible to change the federal government. The Globalist Party remains firmly entrenched in Washington, and their invade the world / invite the world agenda seems unstoppable. The decline of our civilization is evident everywhere you look:

With regards to health, we are all sick and dying. The nutritional advice given to us by our government for the last three generations has increased obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Government subsidizes unhealthy foods like corn and grain while demonizing the very meats and butter that our ancestors once ate. The nutritional tide is slowly turning, but it is too late for tens of millions of people who thought that forgoing meat and eating whole grains would save them from a painful and early death.

With regards to money, we are broke. Our government is more than $22 trillion in debt, and politicians don’t even talk about fixing that problem anymore. The average American is so in debt from college, credit cards, and car payments that the idea of digging out seems impossible. Most Americans don’t know how to budget or save money, and most Americans waste their money on gadgets and conspicuous consumption. Their only hope for retirement is an increasingly-insolvent Social Security program.

With regards to entertainment, we are selling our souls. Hollywood is filled with degenerate people who desperately want to normalize their degeneracy. They strive to steal the souls of our children and pervert them into their midst. Everything from children’s cartoons to the evening news to Hollywood blockbusters are full of propaganda: White people are evil. Christianity is evil. Men are evil. Women are stronger than men. Homosexuality is superior. Transgenderism should be celebrated. Islam is peaceful. Yet what happens when you look closely at the men and women pushing this propaganda? The stories of sexual assault by powerful media figures is probably only scratching the surface.

With regards to education, we are being brainwashed. Public schools care more about social justice and diversity than education. Children are taught that there are infinite genders but cannot read or figure. Inner-city schools have been abandoned to chaos. Colleges are taxpayer-funded indoctrination centers that make it their core mission to turn traditionally-minded students into Marxist social justice warriors. The entire education system is run by people who want white Christians dead and their children enslaved to an ideology that hates them.

With regards to our churches, we have all become lazy heretics. Mainstream denominations are more concerned with the latest Globalist social justice cause than they are about the Truth of the Gospel, while evangelical churches drown out the Gospel with their rock band worship service while driving out any trace of masculinity from the pulpit and the pews. The Catholic Church can’t seem to figure out that letting gay pedophiles have access to children is a bad idea. The old Anglican Church is more respecting of Islam than they are of the doctrines of Christianity. Protestant seminaries in the United States turn out pastors and theologians who don’t believe that Jesus Christ really existed.

With regards to gender relations, we are terribly confused. Men are taught to be humble, meek, effete, emotional, and apologetic. Women are taught to be aggressive, outspoken, brash, and masculine. The qualities of masculinity that built our civilization have become pathologies according to the APA. Courage, honor, and leadership are derided. We are being turned into C.S. Lewis’ men without chests. Boys are even being propagandized to mutilate themselves and become “female”.

With regards to family, we are going extinct. Family formation is discouraged among white Americans. We are told that children are expensive, they make us unhappy, and they are bad for the planet. The posterity of America’s Founding Fathers is being eliminated while barbarians are being invited to become heirs of their country. If you do not cheerfully agree to your own replacement then you are branded a racist, deplatformed, and fired from your job.

How can we choose greatness when we are surrounded by such decay? I would suggest you do not let your hearts be troubled. There is a way out of this mess. Remember the old prayer:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Step back and focus on what is within your realm of influence. What things can you change? Start with yourself. Eat right. Get enough sleep. Lift weights. Save your money. Invest wisely. Make yourself the best you can be. Clear your environment of the things that would destroy you – Netflix, cable, advertising, and other bad influences. Read the Great Books. Fill your mind with the same things that the people who built our civilization pondered. Set goals and see them through. Stop living hand to mouth, day to day, and instead think of the future.

Next is your family. Take your children out of the indoctrination factories that are the public schools. Homeschool if you can. If not, find a classically-oriented Christian school, and vet it carefully. Your children are your future and your posterity, but our culture is trying desperately to drag them into degeneracy. You must protect them, and raise them in such a way that they carry on your work when they are grown. Don’t let media or daycare raise them. Stop letting cartoons and the internet consume their attention. Don’t feed the beast that wants to devour them. Teach them the stories of our ancestors that made our fathers’ fathers’ grow bold. Prepare them for a world that is worse than what you currently imagine. It will fall upon the next generation to rebuild when America finally falls.

Finally, your community. Build bonds with others who see the world in the same way. Find groups of people – in real life, not just the internet – who are preparing for the next hundred years like you are. Encourage each other and help each other. Protect each other. Share your skills. Teach each other to be self-sufficient if cut off from the rest of the country. Have yourself a tribe.

Above all, keep the long-term in mind. Don’t just live for today. Raise up your family in such a way that they will enjoy a reborn civilization rather than scrounging among the ruins of the old one. Remember that societies grow and flourish when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit. The future of western civilization is in your hands, and it starts now. Choose greatness.

The theme of this blog is that the United States of America is well into its decline phase, with the inevitable fall coming sooner than we would like to think. It is interesting to see other authors and commentators using the same terms. My recent post touched on the decline of the US military, specifically the Navy. Vox Day sees the same thing:

The USA is almost certainly going to lose its next major war. What we are witnessing here is nothing new, it is absolutely normal for an empire that has indulged itself in imperial overstretch for generations to fail to fund its military infrastructure prior to engaging in the conflict that fatally exposes the rot within.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-decline-of-us-navy.html

Read the whole thing.