Tribal Praxis vs. National Praxis

^[1]1,606 words

How does the Western diaspora become the Western diaspora? What does it mean to build a tribal network? What is all this Fifth Political Theory (5PT ^[2]) stuff supposed to be in practice? 

Offering the prescription is one matter, but filling it is another entirely. 5PT is about  studying, formulating, and applying this concept of the diaspora tribe in response to the challenges faced by European and Eurocolonial peoples. This will be a work in progress, permanently. There is no endgame to existence other than non-existence, which it ought to go without saying is something we would like to avoid.

Among identitarian and nationalist movements, especially in the United States, one of the foremost difficulties in developing the real-world institutions that would cement tribal identity and formation is the high degree of geographic dispersal. Too few people live too far away to interact regularly enough to constitute a “real” community, complete with all the social, economic, cultural, and spiritual benefits that arise from proximity and cooperation.

If everyone in our society is already “bowling alone,” why should we assume the situation is any different for those who believe in the perpetuity of their kind? The anomic problem cannot be solved with the ballot or the bullet. Nor can it be solved over a few beers.

There is too much focus on metapolitics (changing ideas) and politics (changing governments) and not nearly enough on changing one’s social environment to produce the outcomes sought. There are debates and “purity spirals” over orthodoxy, but a quiet indifference to orthopraxy. Being able to convince people to take an interest in your political program is all and well, but being unable to even produce a single geographic constituency at any level that would support it is a fatal flaw.

Now, 5PT dismisses nationalism ^[3] as the vehicle of salvation for Europeans and Eurocolonials. Our agenda is not to create districts that would “vote nationalist,” but to create a network of diaspora communities which remain connected to one another through changes in our political environment. A nation-state, while perhaps desirable given a range of options between it and the status quo, is not made any more plausible by one’s ability to argue for it or theorize its utility and qualities. Europeans and Eurocolonials who want to perpetuate themselves into future generations form a very minuscule sub-national and trans-national ^[3]demographic spread across dozens of countries, whose governments promote de-nationalized multiculturalism with the support of the demos ^[4]. We can call this neo-liberalism, mangerial statism, cosmopolitanism, or any number of labels which partially describe it but fail to capture its totality—but the political (and metapolitical!) reality is that this system of memes has mostly eradicated the robust forms of ethnic nationalism and in time will likely trounce civic nationalism as well.

A handful of rural counties or lone city councilmen or minority parties are not going to revolutionize the politics of the entrenched demo-bureaucratic system. More likely would be the latter’s retaliation against them and the destruction of all their efforts with a few swift executive actions and unanimous legislative decisions.

That being said, even if 5PTs rejects political nationalism as a viable option, it recognizes that those initially drawn to it have the most potential for integration into a diaspora tribe. So now what? Here we must draw a distinction between national praxis, which hardly exists, and tribal praxis, which 5PT wants to create with or without the state.

The standard argument for nationalism—and its core component of self-determination for recognized peoples with defined territories—is that it provides a space for the flourishing of a politically united people (typically on the basis of shared historical and ethnic ties) where they are unmolested by other peoples, who would be deemed as foreign imperialists, occupiers, oppressors, etc.

But without nationalist parties in power implementing nationalist governance, there is no national praxis. There is only theorizing on the future state and criticism of the status quo, propagandizing for the ideology, and the occasional real-world demonstration in defense of it. None of these are inherently negative and that is not the perspective I wish to convey, but on the other hand they are also not terribly productive in actualizing nationalist agenda of creating a space for the flourishing of a people. Nationalist politics has an extremely shallow ceiling of support in a de-nationalized society, and metapolitics (which tends to be more “extreme” than the formal politics) has an even more shallow ceiling. 5PT sees metapolitics as closer to its goals than politics, but where we must innovate is in what we do and not merely what we think.

Tribal praxis does not require political parties or the control of a government administration. It requires proximity and a sense of solidarity and cohesion. Let us imagine for a moment what possibilities there might be for, say, twenty Western families living within twenty minutes of one another, as opposed to one hundred bloggers and activists living between California, Virginia, and New York.

• Children could be homeschooled together.
• Consumer goods could be bought in bulk at cheaper rates from big-box stores and redistributed more efficiently than twenty atomized households purchasing exactly what each needed.
• Services could be provided to each other at cheaper rates and in such a way that economic activity is kept inside the community, such as home and auto repair, manual labor, tutoring, tech service, etc.
• Depending on the location (rural, ex-urban, suburban), housing could be bought and rented at non-exploitative rates and without the use of outside brokers or realtors.
• Public social events could be attended as a group with greater frequency.
• Internal social events could be held with greater frequency.
• Clubs, house churches, lodges, and other associations can be formed. Property can be bought or rented for them through the raising of “tithes.” There’s no temple without a congregation first.

The general principle of tribal praxis is to go outside of one’s network only as necessary. Resources should be kept internal as much as possible. Opportunities should be afforded to the in-group first. And so forth. All of these build a sense of cohesion and loyalty, and thus a stronger identity. And they are all impossible through the model of purely focusing on politics or metapolitics. Policies and ideas are important. But so are groceries and your social life. So is the education of your children. So is having a sense of ritual to your daily life. So is treating your money like the precious asset it is and being shrewd with it.

In capitalist democracy, shopping and voting are almost inseparable acts. There are many products that both “liberals” and “conservatives” mutually consume, but there are also plenty which are selected or rejected for ideological reasons. The Western diaspora must be even more radical in how we vote with our money. Who do we buy from and how much do we pay for it? Who do we rent from? Who employs us? What do we put that money back into? If more money flows out of the tribe than into it, growth will be harder, and it will start to assimilate.

The other essential feature of tribal praxis, beyond creating a parallel society, is to reproduce that parallel society. We cannot rely only on conversion or on disaffected young men with a cause—for even the Männerbund ^[5], the most ancient of virtuous institutions, is only part of a society and not the society itself.

In a recent post ^[6] entitled “Restoration: A Modest Proposal,” NRx blogger Quas Lacrimas writes how one might go about, well, breeding higher quality people. Mainly, one would want to identify families with high quality members—as he puts it, with “high[er than] average levels of the kind of traits you would want in a leader. (Or a king.)”—and try to bring them together and repeat the process generations over and over. The initial hurdle will be finding wives for the first generation:

You want the wives to come from families with similar qualities. They do not need to be exceptionally bright stars among their siblings; even if they are only “average,” they may well be too smart for their own good. Hold back your misgivings about whether such wives as these will make these young men happy: probably not, but oh well. In TCY, a woman from a talented family probably does not aspire to be the wife of a talented man and mother to five talented children. She will probably have attended (or still be enrolled in) college, for example; it simply cannot be helped. So long as the girls are not human rights lawyers or “community organizers” everything will probably turn out all right, and if you catch them young enough you (or more accurately, your budding Männerbund) may be able convince them that pretty girls don’t need to go to med school or apply for internships at Goldman.

And thereafter, grandchildren too must be guided towards good breeding, though this should be less difficult given their own quality and their parents’ generation.

While 5PT is not particularly interested in creating a new aristocracy per se, it would be wise of the members of the future diaspora tribe to look for certain traits in their spouses. Since political views are partially heritable ^[7], it may be possible to successively breed each generation to be more and more ethnocentric and clannish, that is to say more tribal. We are not Pashtuns yet, but if we do not become more like them, in the long run we will become even less like ourselves. Civilization, after all, boils down to memes and genes. Who will survive the managerial melting pot?

Source: https://fifthpolitical.wordpress.com/2017/05/21/tribal-praxis-versus-national-praxis/ ^[8]