This is one of the clearest summaries I’ve seen of why “white nationalism” never really escapes the liberal frame it claims to reject. Trading, as the author pointed out, the liberal individual for the liberal racial category, it still treats identity as something abstract, standardized, and administratively manageable.
I think that the section on Ireland particularly illustrates and lands the point: when Irish history, faith, language, and law are flattened into generic “whiteness,” you don’t get a recovery of peoplehood, you get another version of internal multiculturalism, just built on a different spreadsheet.
And that seems to point to a deeper crisis of moral imagination, where we’ve forgotten that real peoples are formed by substantial cultures, institutions, and shared rituals that create civilizational depth, (not just via genetics or talk of rights etc.)
It all leaves me wondering whether our present order is even capable of recognizing that kind of embodied, memory‑bearing community, without immediately translating it back into the same abstractions that this essay dissects so well.
Superb deconstruction. The argument that whiteness is itself a modern liberal abstraction, not a pre-modern identity category, cuts through so much confusion. When Clann Éireann reduces Gaelic histor and Catholic particularity to generic whiteness, they're basically doing liberal multiculturalism with different branding. I've noticed this pattern where movements claim to oppose abstraction but then build entire worldviews on bloodlines alone, which is just biologized liberalism.
Sharp dissection of how these splinter movements reproduce liberal logic while claiming to oppose it. The Clann Éireann example really underscores this becuase they took Irish nationhood (which historically meant very specific things like Gaelic language and Catholic tradition) and reduced it to just a genetic category. Reminds me of how tech platforms fragment political movements into these modular idenitty pods that can be copy-pasted across borders but lose all the cultural substance in the process.
This is one of the clearest summaries I’ve seen of why “white nationalism” never really escapes the liberal frame it claims to reject. Trading, as the author pointed out, the liberal individual for the liberal racial category, it still treats identity as something abstract, standardized, and administratively manageable.
I think that the section on Ireland particularly illustrates and lands the point: when Irish history, faith, language, and law are flattened into generic “whiteness,” you don’t get a recovery of peoplehood, you get another version of internal multiculturalism, just built on a different spreadsheet.
And that seems to point to a deeper crisis of moral imagination, where we’ve forgotten that real peoples are formed by substantial cultures, institutions, and shared rituals that create civilizational depth, (not just via genetics or talk of rights etc.)
It all leaves me wondering whether our present order is even capable of recognizing that kind of embodied, memory‑bearing community, without immediately translating it back into the same abstractions that this essay dissects so well.
Superb deconstruction. The argument that whiteness is itself a modern liberal abstraction, not a pre-modern identity category, cuts through so much confusion. When Clann Éireann reduces Gaelic histor and Catholic particularity to generic whiteness, they're basically doing liberal multiculturalism with different branding. I've noticed this pattern where movements claim to oppose abstraction but then build entire worldviews on bloodlines alone, which is just biologized liberalism.
Sharp dissection of how these splinter movements reproduce liberal logic while claiming to oppose it. The Clann Éireann example really underscores this becuase they took Irish nationhood (which historically meant very specific things like Gaelic language and Catholic tradition) and reduced it to just a genetic category. Reminds me of how tech platforms fragment political movements into these modular idenitty pods that can be copy-pasted across borders but lose all the cultural substance in the process.