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What I Believe Political Philosophy, Nationalism and the Ideal State
May 19, 2024
I think the most common question I get is what political ideology I identify with. More specifically, I get asked about my ideal form of government.
Typically, my one word answer is “nationalist”, but this obviously leaves a lot unanswered. Over the past few years, I’ve gotten a bit less interested in sketching out the particulars of a utopian vision, and more interested in what we can actually do to affect real change.
Still, it is important to have an alternative vision and devote some thought to the ideals we should be aiming at. As nationalists, we are proposing that we have the best vision of how things could be, and we should be able to explain why we have the best answers to some of the perennial problems of politics, especially if we want to attract intelligent people who are thoughtful about these problems. With that said, this is my attempt to explain my worldview as succinctly as possible.
Questions of political philosophy are moral questions. In our time and especially on the radical right, there are people who think they can skip over this fact and answer fundamental questions of political philosophy in a value neutral or “realist” way. They think that by just describing relations like a dispassionate scientist, they can arrive at prescriptions. The irony is that this mode of thought which is typically found among self-described reactionaries is actually a very modern way of looking at politics. I reject this approach and subscribe to the approach of classical political philosophy.
More specifically, I am a Platonist. I reject the naturalist or materialist explanation of the world which is the popular metaphysics of our age. Instead, I am a philosophical monist, and believe the world is an emanation of supersensual ultimate reality, with man’s ultimate end being to transcend his egocentric and partial view of reality and draw closer to ultimate reality in wisdom and love.
I believe the world evolves with an intrinsic drive toward greater unity and integration and I believe man’s primary means of drawing closer to the real is by moral action, love, wisdom, and religious and mystical experience. Universal love is an ideal, but for all but a few mystics the means of expanding our capacity for love and care comes through our particular relationships, through our family and our folk.
The purpose of the state, as I see it, is for a people to secure their existence and allow for the flourishing of these relationships of growth. It is also to foster freedom; not the “negative liberty” cherished by libertarians, but the positive freedom from the internal restraints of ignorance, greed and selfishness. On this Platonic conception of freedom, I cannot do a better job of presenting it than this passage from D. C. Schindler:
“If freedom is conceived in terms of fruitfulness, it will always tend to properly social expression…Law ought to be interpreted itself as an expression of goodness; we might think of it as the extension of freedom into the social sphere. Such an extension is natural to freedom in its original sense, which relates generativity to the notion of belonging to a people.
We might say that the golden thread that binds us to God necessarily passes through others, so that one cannot receive goodness, and so be free, as an individual except as bound to others in community. Indeed, the principal community for Plato is the family, because of its own foundation in nature.
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The very individualism that Locke understands as the essence of freedom in the political order is just the opposite for Plato…The “root cause of sin,” he says, “is excessive love of self”. This excessive love is a disorder, an offense against the good, which is the very principle of generative generosity. But for that very reason, it is a loss of freedom. In short, Plato identifies unfreedom with opposition to the community that law creates.
Since I believe the purpose of the state is the good life and the collective flourishing of a people, this takes us to the question of man’s nature. These are philosophical questions, but man is a rational animal, and before we sketch out any ideals we must begin with an understanding man’s animal nature. So many of the bad ideas and conflict of our time come from ignoring this and trying to bend human nature to fit political ideals. Part of that nature is to be a tribal, territorial creature with a deep need for community and belonging, and I believe this collective sense is central to politics, since the political is always informed by groups and their interests, friends and enemies.
