Selection by Lot & White Nationalism

1,666 words

^[1]The white ethnostate exists at present only as a metapolitical idea in the minds of radical White Nationalists. Great intellectual efforts have been made, and will no doubt continue to be made, to describe how the political utopia will come about and what form it will take once it has been achieved. In my essay “Democracy Today ^[2],” I argued that the problems associated with democracy as it is currently practiced in the West are caused at root by trying to achieve democratic representation through mass voting in elections that are inevitably corrupted by partisan interests of one stripe or the other. 

The varied solutions offered by White Nationalists either do not properly address the apathy of the average man or they tend to disavow any element of popular accountability in their proposed constitution favoring the dictatorship of the one or the few, which leads to other problems and objections.

The political potential of sortition has been examined in both theory and practice, and what follows is an outline of an ideal constitution presented by Keith Sutherland in his book A People’s Parliament ^[3], which White Nationalists should seriously consider as the solution to the existing “democratic” regimes.

In A People’s Parliament, Sutherland argues for a modernized version of James Harrington’s constitution of Oceana. Primarily designed with the contemporary United Kingdom in mind, however, the constitution could be a template for any ethnostate. Sutherland argues for a mixed constitution; a monarch (or a President) should be given the right to nominate government ministers subject to scrutiny by a House of Lords, who are largely appointed for life, and approved by a House of Commons appointed entirely by sortition.

Sutherland prefers that the constitutional head of state be a hereditary monarch rather than an elected President, arguing that the key advantage of having a head of state selected by birth means that the head of state views the nation as his own personal property, and given that he can be confident that he will be succeeded by his children, he is incentivized to look to the long-term interests of the nation to insure the long-term survival and prosperity of his dynasty. This can be contrasted with an elected head of state who does not own the nation but merely rents it for the time he is in power, and, therefore, for his own personal interests, he will maximize his personal income and that of his supporters in the short-term through methods which will only impoverish the nation over the longer-term. Also an elected head of state will more likely be tempted to make his mark on history by engaging in reckless foreign adventures. The monarch, whose place in the history books is fulfilled with succession alone, will feel less of a psychological compulsion.[1]

The monarch would not, however, be a tyrant, and his constitutional powers would be limited to nominating the heads of the various government ministries, whose nominations would have to be ratified by a vote in a House of Commons, which would be taken following expert scrutiny of the candidate by the House of Lords. Hidden agendas would be exposed, and any nominee who proposed to take actions contrary to interests of the people would never be appointed in the first place, or, if he went rogue later, he could be summarily dismissed from his post by co-ordinated actions of the two houses. Giving a monarch the right to nominate government ministers would replace the current system in which government ministries are little more than a political spoils system where offices are handed out primarily on the basis of political loyalty and only secondarily on competence. [2]

The House of Lords should be remodeled as a place of informed advocacy, whereby “Lord Advocates” carefully scrutinize bills presented by government ministers and private members bills initiated within the house of lords. In accordance with Edmund Burke’s truism that there is no independence of mind without independence of means, Sutherland argues to ensure their independence, advocates should be appointed for life and receive a salary for the debates that they attend. They should represent all fields of national life such as industry, trades unions, education, law, religion, military, and culture, and all ideological groupings should have their advocates. Sutherland has not outlined how the appointment process would work to insure a fair and representative balance, and this requires further development.[3]

Sutherland argues that political parties would continue to have a limited role in order to represent group interests. He favors a small number of advocates to be elected periodically through by a system of proportional representation, although they would only represent a small fraction of the entire chamber. The party with the largest number of votes would be permitted to make legislative proposals which would be scrutinized by the rest of the chamber and then ultimately voted upon by the House of Commons, which is selected by sortition. These political parties may fool the electorate at the polls with their policies but they would be unable to steamroller through unpopular legislation by stealth as they would need to win the argument in the chamber and then obtain the approval of the House of Commons.[4]

The primary democratic element in Sutherland’s constitution is the House of Commons, whose entire chamber would be selected entirely by sortition and would have the final say on all government business. Sutherland argues that ordinary citizens should be selected at random by sortition in order to form a citizen jury. This jury, operating similar to a jury in any criminal trial though much larger, will play a passive role in the legislative and appointments process. These citizen jurors will be well-informed as they will not be allowed to vote until they have listened to the entire deliberation and every Lord Advocate who steps forward to participate in the debate. Furthermore, their vote will be by secret ballot to ensure that their judgment is not swayed by any influential third party. Having voted, the jury is dismissed, and a new citizen jury selected by sortition in time for the next bill in order that the House of Commons remains an exact portrait in miniature of the nation at large.

Like a traditional jury, service in the House of Commons would be compulsory, and ordinary citizens could realistically expect to serve on such a jury once in their lives. Furthermore, Sutherland argues that candidates entered into the jury pool should be vetted for intelligence and wisdom in advance, and he proposes using a psychometric test such as an IQ test in order to remove those who fall below a certain minimum threshold (the aim not being to select a cognitive elite but just to remove the retarded). Wisdom comes from life experience and therefore only citizens between the ages of 40 and 65 should be entered into the lottery pool.[5]

The mixed constitution Sutherland advocates is basically sound; however, White Nationalists may wish to consider further developing the appointment process to ensure that the House of Lords cannot be captured by a single ideological agenda. They should also consider the advantages of removing the electoral element entirely, and instead of using political parties to represent group interests, allow citizens to propose laws directly through public petitions in which a certain number of signatures will cause the bill to be debated and voted on by the two houses. Political associations will doubtless thrive outside the parliament, but they will not be dominated by the group-think mentality that drives the career politicians in political parties today.

If the White Nationalist movement adopted support for sortition in a constitution similar to that proposed in A People’s Parliament it would give it many advantages. It allows White Nationalists to engage in a critique of modern liberal (plutocratic) democracy as thorough and damning as the Old Right would without endorsing the Old Right antidote of dictatorship and their associated police states. Instead White Nationalism can offer a radical solution, which is far more democratic and yet possesses aristocratic elements that can deliver far-sighted, efficient, and competent government.

Also it would recognize that the White Nationalist movement is an ideological house with many rooms, and, while united in combating white genocide through mass non-white immigration and forced assimilation, it remains divided on other issues that are of secondary importance like drugs, homosexuality, religion, welfare, and whether the current banking system should be replaced by gold or social credit. Instead of pretending that these divisions are going to be resolved in the foreseeable future, the movement should instead adopt the Sutherland constitution to allow the divergent parts of the movement to co-operate in the political arena without having to enforce consensus and silence opinion on these factional secondary issues. These issues can be addressed once the constitution is in place and the various factions will be able to appoint their own advocates who will have the opportunity to argue the logic of their case before a citizen’s jury.

Finally, it is worth noting that even in the absence of a White Nationalist movement obtaining power, the adoption of sortition into the constitution of any majority-white nation can only help the cause of white survival as the anti-white movement is largely a top-down phenomenon pushed by our elites which have created a hegemony so powerful as to largely silence public opposition. The masses are passive, and ordinary whites do not want their countries filled with Third World immigrants, yet at the same time fear and apathy induced by the current system insures that they are too demoralized to take any action to stop it. If sortition is used to create a citizens’ jury in which decisions were made by secret ballot, the ordinary people would be a great block to further anti-white policies and create a powerful feedback loop receptive to pro-white policies. The White Nationalist movement would be wise to consider the virtues of adopting sortition as part of their main agenda.