Questions for the Folkish

Looking for answers

Folkishness is a concept and idea that I have been following with great interest. Mike Maxwell of Imperium Press is perhaps the greatest proponent of this idea today and has been developing it steadily in recent years. It is tied strongly to his own Heathen belief system and thus many adherents or those interested in Folkishness are also Heathens but I don’t think, from what Mike has explained of it, that Folkishness is necessarily a Heathen only thing. My interest in this is borne from wanting to better understand Mike’s own thought and the ideas central to Folkishness. This is intended as the start of a dialog questioning elements of Folkishness that perhaps have not been well explained and there may be some criticisms - but it is an argument in good faith. At the end of each section will be a set of direct questions to Mike and any Folkish thinkers to unpack and answer, hopefully they will benefit from this as much as anyone.

What is Folkishness?

Mike has talked about Folkishness at length on his substack but it is in this video I have found his most succinct points about what it is at heart so we will use this - unfortunately this is paywalled but I’ve done my best to crib almost exact quotes from it for this essay.

Mike defines Folkishness simply as an idea that places the pre-political before the political.

To unpack this he explains that the political is effectively the highest state of human organization possible and he gives us the example of the root of the word Polis and the Greek City State as the first conception of this. For the Greek their City State was the highest form of order for humans. For us today it is seemingly the Nation state.

Mike then defines the pre-political as lower order organizations - I believe starting at the bottom and going upwards they would be:

• The Family unit - (Father, Mother, Children)

• The extended Family (Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins)

• The Clan - (2nd and 3rd cousins, looser blood relatives who retain strong ties)

• The Tribe - (Collections of clans that are unified in some way)

These are the pre-political units. Already we encounter somewhat of a problem - the clan has largely died away in much of the wider European society. We are not alien to them entirely but as fertility has shrunk, as people have moved around, as loyalties have changed the idea of clans has fallen away. In America we might say the most clannish people were the Scots-Irish. Of those the borderlanders who came from the border of Scotland and England were the most clannish and their settlement of Applachia has given rise to a distinct culture that still exists today. Scottish Clans are probably the best known example of this as well - in theory today someone with a clan name is no matter how loosely connected by a kinship tie to another with that clan name.

Before that even with our low fertility rates the extended family itself is vastly shrunk. As someone with 14 first cousins I regularly encounter people of a similar age who have maybe 3 first cousins - and even in my example we are scattered about the place. These are not insurmountable problems of course but we are effectively starting over in terms of attempting to build the loyalties to units that don’t always exist or have been replaced.

To return to defining Folkishness then we now understand that it is the idea that there ought to be more importance placed upon these pre-political human groupings. Mike goes on to talk about how many of the problems that exist with the political Nation state stem from the fact that the course of recent history has been to devalue and deconstruct these smaller groups to make them not stack together. Thus for example we end up with the notion for the modern liberal that a black Welshman is an actual thing. To accept a black Welshman it is necessary to abandon the nested pre-political circles that originally formed the Welsh as a National identity

So far so good but here some clarification is requested:

Does Mike consider that Folkishness is a tool to recover the Nation or is it rather an end in itself?

It appears to me that this is worth asking because Mike, and others, speak in positive terms about a return to tribal loyalties in other places. This is a component of the Folkishness they espouse but at some point such tribalism is usually brought to order by the larger grouping (and exertion of power) to get to the Nation. So do the Folkish adherents in the future seek reborn Nations that have successfully rediscovered the importance of these pre-political nested organisms OR do they reject the very notion of the Nation as they believe it will erode those pre-political elements?

Shared Identity

Now that we understand Mike’s Folkishness as these smaller pre-political groupings it is worth unpacking how the individual in this system interacts with them.

The idea is of nested loyalty and identity in effect.

I am my father’s son and have primary loyalty to him, my mother, my brother, my sister.

At the same time I am also existing as part of my extended family - should someone at school attempt to fight my cousin I would side with him.

At the clan level in this system I have now a higher loyalty to them should another clan threaten my clan - in this example the boy who would have fought my cousin is now my ally as we are in the same clan.

Lastly we arrive at the tribe - now multiple clans are united and we function together against another tribe. At any point in this system there can be devolution though and conflict can break out. Clans can be strong enough and hostile enough to effectively weaken the tribe.

Within this system there are still questions:

If my father enters into conflict with the clan who do I side with?

Mike in the video at one point states that Nationalism asks that you become an American instead of a New Yorker - but are there not times within the pre-political system that you are asked to put aside clan differences and become more fully a member of the tribe?

Identity can be fluid, people can hold multiple identities even within modernity. Just recently I saw this explode on X with a bunch of East Coasters cheering the fact Trump’s HUD pick was now going after Federal Land to expand housing availability. Almost universally the issue was not split so much along ideological lines but by where you were from and your loyalty to your regional identity. Idahoans, Montanans, and people from Wyoming were united in their scathing disgust - these people want to keep the public (federal) lands as they are instead of having them privatized. It was both ideological split BUT driven mostly by a form of folkishness. East Coasters are not accustomed to the luxury of public land hunting out West.

We can already both be American and New Yorkers and even right down to Brooklyn residents. Within modernity there is a fluidity of identity that does not seem different from Folkishness as it is dependent on circumstance - is this not the case?

Power and Ideology

One of the things that I didn’t hear Mike discuss in his video about Why Folkishness is the existence of ideology. Ideology in effect appears to be one of the greatest enemies to a Folkish view of the world in that it challenges the implicit pre-political conformity that exists.

We can critique feminism for example simply from the Folkish perspective not on the merits of what it says but simply in the fact it asks women to abandon the pre-political loyalties that they have to family in the service of an abstract set of ideas about freedom.

This however does not make feminism go away or disappear. It exists in the ether as an idea of many that will forever be able to attack the Folkish project. This is not some kind of ‘gotcha’ example but it does seem to be a very real problem and we see the battlefield today of values suffers from much the same problem. For example recently in the UK some Muslim MPs are proposing what amounts to a blasphemy law - a number of the center right exploded at this from a libertarian perspective and of course showed their historical illiteracy. They claimed it was un-English to have such a thing ignoring the fact past blasphemy laws existed. These people make the mistake often of equating changing values with identity - to them being accepting of homosexuals is some kind of British value which ignores the fact 80 years ago the majority of the white monoethnic population would have opposed it and it does not make them any less British to have held a different value.

The Folkish heathen answer to this I expect will be based on religious grounds - that the importance of shared faith that keeps out competing ideologies of feminism is the protection and a natural part of what Folkishness is. To me it follows then that a centralized strong religious authority that provides the basis of a shared morality and ideas to help govern the pre-political is required. It also could follow that a religion such as Christianity could do this, and indeed did this in the past when pre-political bonds were stronger. It would be extremely interesting for Mike and other Folkish thinkers extend some analysis into more Folkish times when Christianity was the dominant force even if they themselves are non-believers in that faith it could offer something up to their broader ideas.

The questions here though become ones about how power and things like rule of law exist within this Folkish world and whether it precludes shared belief. In some ways I see Mike’s argument for Folkishness as a kind of instruction system for some kind of collapse of the modern world.

Naturally elements of Folkishness will arise as centralized power breaks down BUT in the world we live in because the bottom up units of these pre-political groupings are so weak and small is it not possible that something like ideologically driven groups will come to dominate instead?

Ideology is in fact seemingly as strong as ever today and the markers of conflict in some places are driven more by this than any folkish ones - just see recent attacks by people on Teslas - I don’t think this fits into a Folkish understanding of the world well.

Existing Examples

It is unclear to me from Mikes writing where the importance lies in some parts of Folkishness so this is now less about addressing what he has explicitly said and me making my own implicit conclusions. The first to address is that by placing the pre-political ahead of the political at this time we should be aiming to return to the past, except that this is not the past. There exists examples of more clannish religious societies today that to me seem to represent many elements of this Folkishness. It is important to not see this as a slight but rather an observation of what is today, and there is much to be said of racial differences. That being said the clannish tribal Muslims of both Pakistan and Afghanistan seem to be living real world examples of Folkishness.

Putting to one side that they are not European we know that their structure is similar to what Mike has explained. Many times in Afghanistan we know occupation forces were meeting with tribal elders and that these tribal elders were effectively representatives of their clans. It isn’t just there that they exist either, one of the great problems with the Pakistani Rape Gangs in England was that they were so effectively shielded by what seems to be Folkishness. The loyalty and protection extended all the way from the tribal to the clans to the extended and to the immediate family. We have in court examples of the family of Pakistani men who were convicted of raping white English girls crying out that they still support their father and love him. This is a total loyalty in the pre political sense, it is in a sense an expression of loyalty to family over the conventional morality that is the norm across society. Many relatives of white European men who have committed crimes are unafraid and unashamed to denounce them and side with their victims.

This kind of clannishness that we see is tied to their faith as well. It is bound up in both a religious understanding of the world alongside the loyalty to the pre-political units. This makes them effectively hostile and dangerous to the English majority because thanks to their effective Folkish behavior they are an organized minority in the way the English have not been in a while. The faith also functions to unite them in their Sharia councils as much as anything. It is always going to be those who can organize up to the highest level of group that will exert the most power and go on to rule over others - this seems inescapable.

Lastly there are some elements of Folkishness that I see Mike and others discuss that seem to represent more what I see as clannishness. It comes back to the first question I asked though, whether Folkishness is a vehicle to recover greater nations or an end in itself. In terms of how humans organize, gain, hold, and exert power the larger groupings seem to excel. If you read accounts of what life is like in some of these pre-political groupings that still exist today it sounds quite stifling and seems to clash with some elements of European desire to expand and assert independence. Imagine living in a massive compound, with maybe 20 servants laying about gossiping all the time, about 30 relatives coming and going and everyone watching you all the time. Such environments stifle individualism and it is my understanding that individualism is another enemy of Folkishness. I have my own qualms with it of course but I also think that it is individualism and the space for individuals to flourish that has produced the Great Men. They are in fact the men who have thrown off Folkishness and strived for something greater and more than themselves. They become carried along by the greater National - political identity that gives them space.

Concluding thoughts

To me the fact that European greatness existed for so long was that in fact was able to preserve the lowest pre-political unit so well: the family. It was the family that was most important but the removal of the troubling and meddlesome power structures of the clan and tribe. In this way individualism co-existed with the family and with a faith structure. Much of the expansion of the British Empire was driven by sons who would not inherit from their father. They struck out and pushed forward and were absorbed by the Nation to greater ends. Due attention was paid to the family but it was not necessary to entirely have competing tribes and clans at war forever these pre-political units were largely abandoned - the larger identity in a mono ethnic society created the sense of harmony and mostly peaceful societies that we enjoyed right up to the end of the First World War.

I remain interested in Folkishness and its development and hope my questions are taken seriously as they are asked in good faith!

I’ll leave the comments open on this one if any Folkish thinkers want to chime in they are more than welcome!