Our e-pal Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has a post up about “white supremacy”, a loosely defined term that is very much en vogue just now. Dr. Vallicella quotes Robert Paul Wolff:

Hatred has fundamentally very little to do with White Supremacy. White Supremacy is a policy of domination and economic superiority of Whites in a multi-racial society. African-Americans are not worried about whether White people want to be friends. Most of the African-Americans I know have quite enough friends, thank you very much. African-Americans demand legal, economic, and political equality. And that terrifies many Whites, who do not want to give up the superior legal, political, and economic position in American society that they acquired through being born White.

Well, this may be a good definition of “white supremacy”; I don’t really know much about it. I can certainly say that it does not describe the views of anyone I know, or would care to know, in neoreactionary circles, or in what is sometimes called the “dissident Right”. It doesn’t even describe the views of people like Jared Taylor, who is often slandered in the mass media as a “white supremacist”.

Consider: a generation of identitarian politics across the West has deliberately cultivated tribal resentments among non-whites. For decades white people have been blamed in media and academia for all the world’s ills, while aggressive immigration policies have openly sought to make them minorities in every one of their homelands (a prospect that is widely celebrated in our mainstream institutions). In colleges and universities, white applicants are disfavored for admission, while curricula feature pugnacious courses on eliminating “whiteness”. At the Academy Awards, a black actor says of his latest film “I get to kill all the white people! How great is that?”, and the audience laughs and cheers.

Is it any wonder, then, that in this toxic climate, many white people are developing a sense of identitarianism themselves? This is not “supremacy”; it is nothing more than a perfectly natural (and, therefore, easily predictable) sense of unity and belonging, in an explicitly and increasingly hostile environment. Express this readily understandable sentiment in public, however, and you are now a “white supremacist” — and your sense of identity is not mere attachment, but can only be “hate”.

“White supremacist”, then, is nothing more than a cudgel, to be used without mercy against anyone who says, however reluctantly, that: yes, we are white, and we are not ashamed of it, and if you are determined to divide all of society into competing racial groups, then our people will have to play the game too. It is a truly awful state of affairs, and it will all get much, much worse before it gets any better. “Diversity is our strength”? Rubbish. As we are already learning to our sorrow, it is anything but: it is the death of peace and order and comity, and, at last, of nations and cultures.

In his post, Bill said this:

Perhaps Malcolm Pollack will comment on this definition over at his place. He tilts in the alt-right direction; I reject the alt-right.

As do I. The term has become irretrievably tainted, and the self-described “alt-right” is now a gathering-place for actual white supremacists (as defined by Wolff, above), actual Nazis, virulent anti-Semites, and others who quite fairly can be described as “hate groups”. I want nothing to do with them.

Bill then adds the following:

Here are some preliminary thoughts/questions of my own. 1) If White Supremacy is a policy, who is implementing it? The government? Is the government insuring the economic superiority of Whites? How? By what programs? 2) Blacks have every right to demand legal and political equality, but they cannot reasonably demand economic equality. That is something they have to work for. 3) Whites are in an economically superior position to blacks, no doubt, but one cannot validly infer from this that Blacks have been unjustly discriminated against. 4) It is false that Whites enjoy by birth legal and political privileges denied to Blacks. If you think they do, name the privileges. 5) Suppose a white Southerner considers slavery a grave moral evil and is glad the Union was preserved. He opposes, however, the Left’s iconoclasm re: statues of Robert E. Lee, et al. Is this person a White supremacist? 6) If ‘white supremacist’ is not to be just another smear word like ‘racist,’ then it has to be defined. How ought it be defined? 7) Suppose Whites as a group are superior to Blacks as a group in some respect R, and suppose Jones points this out. Is Jones a white supremacist with respect to R? This raises the question: How can White Supremacism with respect to R be a bad thing, which it is supposed to be, if it is true? 8) Wolff’s decoupling of White Supremacy from hatred suggests that he is thinking of it as something ‘institutional’ or ‘systemic.’ Are our institutions white supremacist? What might that even mean given that our institutions allowed for the elimination of slavery and Jim Crow?

These all reflect, quite exactly, my own thoughts and questions, and so my own impression is that Bill and I agree about all of this with near-perfect congruency.

What a miserable era this is becoming. What a sad decline — with, I think, much worse on the way.