Social Issues
Disputes over social issues distill down to disputes about the culture of a society. Modern culture has become hostile to America's traditional and religious values. Americans at the turn of the last century enjoyed comparatively healthy families, meaningful popular music, active churches, strong local communities, thriving downtowns, and aesthetically pleasing architecture. The multicultural chaos of postmodern America would be unrecognizable and repulsive to them. Conservatives are losing the culture war, and libertarians tolerate or even celebrate cultural decay. Because conservatism is inherently reactive, it can offer only a fighting retreat against the coordinated cultural onslaught of hostile government policy, atheistic mass media, sinister Madison Avenue marketing campaigns, and an entertainment industry that openly embraces spiritual evil.
Nationalism aspires to a more virile culture, based on patriotic group identity, as opposed to conservatism's ineffectual complaining and moralizing. Libertarians and free-market conservatives refuse to engage the state in cultural debates, and American nationalists would agree that the government should not legislate morality, but it must legislate morally. Christians would observe that God gives us free will, and we should extend the same to our fellow man, but there are boundaries of public decency that only the state can define and enforce.
Patriotism begins with reverence for our founding as a free republic, which was led by Western European men. The norms and traditions of America's founders and settlers could cure the postmodern malaise, and government has a role to play in cultivating those norms. Public decency and strict child harm laws should be passed and enforced to prevent the presentation of degeneracy or sexuality to minors. These laws would put an end to public parades and events that celebrate sexuality, television and radio broadcasts with inappropriate imagery, and the excesses of pornography industry.
The state cannot and should not attempt to control the romantic lives of individuals, but it should take measured steps to defend healthy family structure, which is fundamental to the continuity of the American people. A certain percentage of the population seems to have a persistent inclination to aberrant sexual behavior. They should be approached with compassion, but it is not compassionate to encourage people to engage in behaviors and lifestyles that indisputably cause physical and psychological trauma to themselves and others.[1] Nor does it benefit society to allow them to spread harm to others, especially minors. For these reasons, most states should choose not to recognize same sex marriages or allow such unions to adopt children. There can be a small number of "safety valve" states with more liberal laws on such matters to relieve societal pressure on the majority, and consenting adults should be allowed to live their romantic lives in private how they wish.
The healthiest psychological environment for raising the next generation is an intact, natural family of a man and wife, but we should have compassion to families for whom this model becomes disrupted for various reasons. To support a consistent national identity and its healthy character, government policy should encourage natural population growth through reproduction of married citizens. Economic policy plays a critical role toward this end. Families naturally thrive when the cost living is stable, and the purchasing power of income is relatively strong. Monetary inflation and boom-bust economic cycles do great harm to the natural growth of families. Policy prescriptions to smooth out business cycles are listed in the Monetary Policy section. Tax policies and subsidies should encourage natural family growth, such as those recently enacted in Victor Orban's Hungary. It makes economic sense to invest in the growth of families, as healthy children grow up to be productive citizens and reliable taxpayers.
Nationalism embraces the state's role in the regeneration of the public aesthetic, which is a cornerstone of culture, common experience, and the national spirit. Modern, postmodern, and brutalist art and architecture undermine our societal concept of beauty. Local governments should use building codes and project approval authority to promote art and architecture that is traditional, localized, and beautiful. Government grants and awards for art and literature should celebrate the beautiful rather than the profane. Nationalism rejects the libertarian and economic conservative argument that the state has no role to play in promoting the arts because culture must be cultivated intentionally, and abandoning the field is not a path to victory.
The term "nationalism" is controversial to some because it can invoke a distasteful form of racialism. Critical race theorists are correct to point out that we should not pretend that race does not exist, but they deploy it cynically to divide and control the population, while conservatives and libertarians studiously ignore it. Pure civic nationalism and purported race blindness truncate important aspects of identity. It is statistically proven that people who identify more strongly with their own race tend to be happier[2]. Everyone has the right to have a healthy affection for their ancestors, with the important distinction that this affection does not imply harm to any other races. Race and identity in America are complex issues, but not ones we can afford to ignore.
To grapple with policies affecting race, we must first come to terms with the racial history of the country. America's founders were largely British, and during the nineteenth century, settlers from other Northern and Western European countries gradually changed the abstract identity of the nation, while maintaining its essentially Northwestern European character. These majority German and Irish immigrants brought non-British customs and beliefs to the Midwest and Appalachia, but they generally assimilated into the evolving American identity within a couple of generations.[3] Each successive wave of immigrants brought increasingly disparate cultures and religions into the fold, and today there are enormous immigrant settlements that are unrecognizable as American in any meaningful way. These settlements are at odds with America's historic regionalism, which supports a sense of community and unity, such as the polite hospitality of Southerners or the hardworking earnestness of the Midwest. These are coherent American identities that support the strength of the nation as a whole, but we now are asked to absorb millions from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The vast majority of these non-European immigrants have little to no knowledge of our traditions and systems of government and no incentive to assimilate. Even if they eventually assimilated, it would radically change the character and identity of the nation. The children of immigrants are more susceptible to committing acts of terrorism than other groups[4], further spoiling the fantasy of peaceful multiculturalism. It is reasonable to conclude that the greater the genetic and cultural distance an immigrant is from America's traditional Northwestern European stock, the less equipped he or she is to assimilate unobtrusively.
As described in the Immigration section, policies should be enacted to protect traditional American culture by encouraging the repatriation of immigrants whose racial and cultural identities differ too greatly to assimilate. The desire for their repatriation is not motivated by a disdain for immigrants but by the best interest of all affected. Immigrants deserve to enjoy the authentic sense of identity and community that only their own people and homelands can provide, and it is natural to want the same for America. America should maintain its character as a majority Western European nation, an outpost of broader Western Civilization.
While American nationalism is rooted in the broader history of Europe, not all inhabitants of the country are racially European. It means something somewhat different to be a nationalistic African American, for example, than it does to be a nationalistic Italian American. Americans' differences, as well our commonalities, affect racial identity and therefore policy. Policies toward minority groups should allow for the development of their own authentic identities as minority groups with certain rights. The individual rights of all minorities should of course be respected, but America's form of meritocratic nationalism cannot accommodate special rights for any group. It is an affront to our founding ideals to statutorily privilege any group by race, gender, or other categories. As such, nationalism opposes nondiscrimination laws, hate speech laws, the Civil Rights Act, Title IX, the Equal Rights Amendment, and all other legislation in that vein.
If the national patriot movement is going to succeed, it must strike at the root of America's cultural rot. Enormous leftwing grant-making foundations are a fountainhead of ideas and policies that are choking the American national spirit. Some of these foundations have metastasized for over one hundred years, promoting moral degeneracy, religious liberalism, racial animosity, and countless other social ills. They operate as tax shelters for leftwing plutocrats who use these funds to buy influence and undermine America's interests. These foundations need to be investigated for their anti-American activities and made to pay their fair share in taxes. The annual distribution requirement of grantmaking foundations should be increased from 5% to 10%, effectively sunsetting the oldest among them and encouraging actual philanthropy in the process.
[1] Dr. John R. Diggs, Jr., Corporate Research Council, 2002
[2] S.C.Y. Yap, Michigan State University, Cultural Diversity and Ethic Minority Psychology, 2011
[3] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, 2009
[4] Mirella L. Stroink, Lakehead University, Peace and Conflict Journal of Peace Psychology, 2007
