Another thing ethnonationalists miss is that often, when their countries were at the peak of their power, there were extraordinary class prejudices in society. Those elites were very insulated and out of touch as well, but it was the governing class' ideology and culture that helped them raise the state instead of tear it down.
One hundred years ago, the stodgy Tory MP may have been opposed to unions and minimum wage, but he had lost a son at the Somme. Now, the same Tory MP is still anti union but his son is in Ibiza.
I think the advice to focus on oneself in striving to be elite and to find and focus on a circle of elite and/or elite striving people is solid. Part of being elite is thinking beyond yourself. So, part of this striving is to be building things that will cultivate and expand a new elite. That is a cross generational project. Again, thinking cross generationally and planting trees for generational shade is the mark of an elite man.
Where this falls apart is the usage of the example of those who were expunged from Russia doing better after expulsion or fleeing. True they are materially better, but the societies they fled to are now circling the drain. It is in no small part that we are circling the drain because these people doing better did not arrive as fellow builders, but in many cases as subversives and self-interested termites, even if well meaning, that are doing better for themselves by having eaten away the already rotting foundations. That not to discount contributions that some have made, and maybe some who will contribute to a future reconstitution of a better order. To do well for oneself is not aristocratic. What is aristocratic is to do well for oneself in carrying out one's duties to all above and below you in the hierarchy. One's highest duty is to the order itself, and that may mean sacrificing one's personal well being in service to preserving and improving the order.
Someone who grifts off the welfare state with Medicaid scams or makes bank as an industrial ambulance chaser may be doing better than his forebears, but at what cost to the society he fled to? That is not an elite. The other problem with the analogy is, where are we going to flee to where we can do better?
Moreover, we don't want to flee. We want to dig in our heels and reclaim what is ours that we have been dispossessed of. We want to own up to our failures and begin to make things right for our posterity. We want to do it by cultivation and creation, not sucking the last vestiges of frigid, mildewed vitality from a corpse. The first thing an elite does is recognize the reality around it. It chooses the proper metaphors and analogies as part of an elite level sense making exercise to make strategic moves and tactical maneuvers that lead to victory. An American Asturias? Alfred's Wessex? What parts fit the puzzle pieces that lay scattered about? I don't think it is to be the people who fled Russia and the Eastern Bloc and arrived in a shopping mall of demoralized and abandoned people with a money spigot in full gear that was funding an opiate den of managed decline.
Let's be honest, most Americans are cretins. I should know, I am American.
Another thing ethnonationalists miss is that often, when their countries were at the peak of their power, there were extraordinary class prejudices in society. Those elites were very insulated and out of touch as well, but it was the governing class' ideology and culture that helped them raise the state instead of tear it down.
One hundred years ago, the stodgy Tory MP may have been opposed to unions and minimum wage, but he had lost a son at the Somme. Now, the same Tory MP is still anti union but his son is in Ibiza.
I think the advice to focus on oneself in striving to be elite and to find and focus on a circle of elite and/or elite striving people is solid. Part of being elite is thinking beyond yourself. So, part of this striving is to be building things that will cultivate and expand a new elite. That is a cross generational project. Again, thinking cross generationally and planting trees for generational shade is the mark of an elite man.
Where this falls apart is the usage of the example of those who were expunged from Russia doing better after expulsion or fleeing. True they are materially better, but the societies they fled to are now circling the drain. It is in no small part that we are circling the drain because these people doing better did not arrive as fellow builders, but in many cases as subversives and self-interested termites, even if well meaning, that are doing better for themselves by having eaten away the already rotting foundations. That not to discount contributions that some have made, and maybe some who will contribute to a future reconstitution of a better order. To do well for oneself is not aristocratic. What is aristocratic is to do well for oneself in carrying out one's duties to all above and below you in the hierarchy. One's highest duty is to the order itself, and that may mean sacrificing one's personal well being in service to preserving and improving the order.
Someone who grifts off the welfare state with Medicaid scams or makes bank as an industrial ambulance chaser may be doing better than his forebears, but at what cost to the society he fled to? That is not an elite. The other problem with the analogy is, where are we going to flee to where we can do better?
Moreover, we don't want to flee. We want to dig in our heels and reclaim what is ours that we have been dispossessed of. We want to own up to our failures and begin to make things right for our posterity. We want to do it by cultivation and creation, not sucking the last vestiges of frigid, mildewed vitality from a corpse. The first thing an elite does is recognize the reality around it. It chooses the proper metaphors and analogies as part of an elite level sense making exercise to make strategic moves and tactical maneuvers that lead to victory. An American Asturias? Alfred's Wessex? What parts fit the puzzle pieces that lay scattered about? I don't think it is to be the people who fled Russia and the Eastern Bloc and arrived in a shopping mall of demoralized and abandoned people with a money spigot in full gear that was funding an opiate den of managed decline.