A Common Thread
The origin of the phrase “a thread runs through it”, or alternatively “there’s a common thread” like many other idioms, is debatable. If you’re a fan of Greek Mythology, you might credit the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. This myth, replete with examples of murder and supernatural bestiality (the Minotaur is the product of an extramarital affair between a magical bull sent by Zeus and a human queen) has the hero Theseus use a ball of red thread to trace his way out of a labyrinth once he’s killed the Minotaur. In the Christian bible there are a number of references to a “‘scarlet thread”, including the use of one by “Rahab the harlot” (not to be completely eclipsed by a salacious queen and bull story) to lower Hebrew spies down and out of her window — one situated up high on the “impenetrable” walls of Jericho — after they completed their scouting mission for Joshua to later take the city.
Whether its derivation is pagan or sacred, this idiomatic phrase describes a connecting element that exists within a story, idea, context or situation. Related, this essay is about an important thread that runs through several cultural and political movements associated with and embraced by those who now lead our government. Some of them will be familiar, and some may not; however, everyone will recognize the common thread I suggest exists in them all — one that “goes among things that change, but it doesn’t change”.
There are several ideologies that have bled over and into conservative Republican political thought, have in turn been openly embraced by some of its most important leaders and funders and these ideologies are now either being promoted or translated into political action by the current administration in Washington. While the motivations and inspirations of politics, politicians and political movements are always legion, I choose to focus here on four — the Anti-Immigration Movement, Nativist Natalism, Traditionalism and Neoreactionaryism.
One of these stares us in the face every day, and the other three are much less “out in the open” (and frankly, it’s difficult to believe they have serious traction). However, they are all ideologies in play in the moment in the halls of power in Washington, and in the minds of those who wield it. The common thread that runs through all of them?
An effort to protect and preserve the hegemony and “culture” of white America.
The Anti-Immigration Movement
Most Americans are opposed to unrestricted and undocumented immigration, but why the current administration’s literal anti-immigration frenzy — invoking images of clandestine cat-casserole immigrant dinners, and jack-booted brown-skinned killer rapist armies marching toward our southern border? Despite all the rhetoric and fear-mongering, the vast majority of the reasons offered up are simply not true, or grossly overstated — and those stating them are fully aware.
Undocumented immigrants do not commit crimes more often than the general population, as noted by Alex Nowrasteh, Vice President for Economic and Social Policy Studies at the Cato Institute…
This myth has been around for over a century. It wasn’t true in 1896, 1909, 1931, 1994 or more recently. Immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated for violent and property crimes and cities with more immigrants and their descendants are more peaceful. Some immigrants do commit violent and property crimes but, overall, they are less likely to do so.
The same immigrants also aren’t going to cause the country financial ruin. In 2022, they paid $96.7 billion in taxes and do not consume more government benefits than they generate in tax receipts. Overall, immigrants in the United States use less means-based welfare benefits (if all Americans consumed them at the same rate we would drop the national expenditure by about 60%) and have a net-zero government financial impact. Finally, while a great deal of fentanyl and other drugs do cross the southern border into the U.S., about 90% of it is ferried by American citizens — not undocumented immigrants.
In addition to these claims, the President, Vice President and others have repeatedly said asylum seekers are crazed murders and rapists who eat our pets, and both he and many other conservative politicians call the increased efforts to immigrate to American an “invasion” — suggesting it is all a “Great Replacement” conspiracy with goals to increase democratic votes, liberaly ideology and dilute “traditional white christian” culture. Using time-honored references to non-whites, the President also says immigrants have “bad genes”, are “poisoning our blood” and many come from “shithole countries”.
Why would government leaders make up frightening stories about crime and financial ruin they know are not actually true, and spread racist tropes? It’s not complicated — they do so because while they have a vision for America, it’s not more diverse and does not allow for those who pine for the foregoing “traditional white christian culture” ending up in a cultural or voting minority. Simply put, the vision they have is xenophobic, e.g., “the more of them… the fewer of us.
Nativist Natalism
What in the world can I criticize about a movement like “natalism” — one whose goal is to encourage the birth of more babies to avoid global economic collapse?
Well, at least two things.
Many believe the planet is already at a breaking point, as exhibited by global warming, a sixth “mass extinction” and other objective indicators of if not a breaking point, then certainly intolerable stress. Some who ascribe to these science-based views also think of the earth much like a living human cell — something called the Gaia Hypothesis. Pursuant, it is interesting (or maybe morbid) to note when many of our “real” human cells are infected with a virus that then replicates to make more of itself, once 2–5% of the volume of the cell is taken up by its millions of offspring, they then rupture and die (a “viral burst”). What percentage of the earth’s surface is now populated by humans? About 2–5%.
So following, some believe we should begin to at least think about recreating society in ways that don’t require continual economic growth or the creation of more bodies to fuel it. Others believe the only possible way forward is more akin to something known as the Solow-Swan Model — one that suggests global economic health is only maintained by the creation of more capital (money and tools), labor (human bodies) and technology (innovations that make capital and labor more productive, like AI and robotics). Strong proponents of the latter model are Vice President J.D. Vance, and “special government employee” Elon Musk — but as it turns out there is something below that innocuous surface I mentioned earlier — their motivations are not purely economic, something politicals scientists and sociologists call Nativist Natalism.
Nativist Natalism is concerned with increasing the birth rate, but base their encouragement not on desire to preserve global economic health, but for the protection and maintenance of a dominant or empowered but shrinking cultural, racial or national demographic and most of the time — this demographic is white people of European descent. While increasing birth rates in other parts of the world could prevent the global financial collapse nativist natalists use at times as cover, convenient to conservative ethos this belief system is by definition obviously also opposed to homosexuality, abortion and non-native immigration.
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Notably, in addition to Vance and Musk, two other well-known proponents on the global stage are Victor Orban and Vladimir Putin — individuals not known for their altruistic concern for global financial health. In addition to calling out “childless cat ladies” in America, Vance has praised Orban directly for his efforts and Putin has implemented tax breaks and increasing financial incentives for numbers of children, including a “Mother Heroine” award of one million rubles — re-implementing a policy Stalin started in the Soviet Union.
If you believe the American version of Nativist Natalism is any more benign, then perhaps you should consider the movement’s first NatalCon meeting held in Austin this past December. The opening speaker and one of the conference’s organizers was Kevin Dolan — an individual who was fired from his consulting job at Booz Hamilton for his membership in the Deseret Nationalist (or DezNet) an extremist white nationalist alt-right organization, and the parting comment of NatalCon conference speaker Charles Heywood, of shampoo and far-right blogging fame, is also cogent…
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever”
The type of natalism being promoted by Vice President J.D. Vance and special government employee Elon Musk is not directed at simply creating more people… but creating more of the “right kind of people”, e.g. white ones.
Traditionalism
Until recently Traditionalism was considered somewhat of a fringe or underground philosophy, but its public embrace by Steve Bannon, former investor/film maker/executive chairman of Breitbart News/Chief Strategist to President Trump during his first administration and champion of populist movements worldwide has brought some of its concepts and beliefs into the mainstream of alt-right politics. Notably, Bannon shares this philosophy with Aleksandr Dugin, a man considered to be one of Vladimir Putin’s most important advisors and called by some”Putin’s Brain”, and his beliefs related to Traditionalism and his relationship to Dugin and other advocates were detailed extensively in Benjamin Teitelbaum’s 2020 book The War for Eternity.
Traditionalism is anti-modern and anti-liberal and favors religion over secularism, as well as cultural and racial homogeneity over diversity. It posits history moves continually through four cycles — golden, silver, bronze and dark (the latter also known as “Kali Yuga”, the cycle concept borrowed largely from Hinduism). In Hinduism, these cycles take place over millions of years, but in the Traditionalist version many now adhere to it is believed they can happen over a much shorter period of time and individuals can impact the timeline and influence the nature and pace of transitions. Bannon and others believe we are currently in the dark, or Kali Yuga phase — a period of decay and moral decline during which existing structures must be destroyed to allow a golden era to re-emerge, and Bannon is obviously aligned.
The transition he and others crave; however, is not necessarily good for everyone. While Bannon denies there is any connection between this ideology and racial prejudice, it is important to note the views of Julius Evola (1898–1974), the individual who succeeded René Guénon (1886–1951) as the patriarch of Traditionalism. Evola’s contribution to the ideology was there was a natural ordered hierarchy of “race” with Aryans at the top and darker-skinned individuals subordinate. Bannon is stridently anti-islamic, extremely critical of secular views and has suggested his ideal “golden age” would look a lot like some imaginary 1950’s white working class America. He has frequently made references to Jean Raspail’s 1973 book, Le Camps des Saints — one that describes a future fictional racial war between the white population of Europe and an invading army from India. The book is a decided favorite of white nationalists, and is considered the literary embodiment of the white genocide conspiracy theory.
i will leave it up to the reader to decide whether or not Bannon’s Traditionalism is in part aiming at the protection and promotion of white hegemony in America, but perhaps a comment he made while speaking in 2018 to the far right French National Front party (now known as the National Rally) in France is instructive.
Neoreactionaryism
If you thought Traditionalism was a little weird, the two most prominent proponents of Neoreactionaryism (also known as NRx or the Dark Enlightenment) Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land have a couple of beers they want you to hold for them.
The ideology, conceptualized largely by Yarvin writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug in his blog Unqualified Reservations, follows concepts promoted in the past by Thomas Carlyle and Julius Evola (yes, the same Evola as above), and has been extended to include something termed Accelerationism by Nick Land — who also coined the term “Dark Enlightenment”.
Neoreactionaryism posits democracy has failed, that democratic structures actually make citizens less free, are functionally inefficient and promote moral and social decay. It favors monarchy over democracy, and Yarvin, who has a Silicon Valley software engineering background, has strongly suggested charismatic technology company Chief Executive Officers (most of whom are obviously white guys) who have exhibited the ability to create and sell useful products should be allowed to create city-state fiefdoms and govern them as they would a company. Related, he also floated an idea out in 2012 called “RAGE” that might sound familiar — it stands for “Retire All Government Employees”, with the idea being they could then be replaced by individuals who then were loyal to a more dictatorial monarch.
Vice President J.D. Vance, billionaire GOP funder Peter Theil and Michael Anton — Director of Policy Planning in the current Trump administration (as well as Steve Bannon) — are vocal adherents and Vance has quoted Yarvin on several occasions.
Land has linked Accelerationism to Neoreactionaryism — an ideology that suggests the pace of change in the modern world and the decisions that need to be made have both increased exponentially such that technologies like artificial intelligence should be developed in an unfettered way to more or less run the world as unflinching overlords and be allowed to function independent of human oversight and control.
Criticism of Neoreactionaryism has been fairly significant, and Yarvin has repeatedly been called out for either cherry-picking or exaggerating historical examples to support his positions. One of my favorites was when I heard him say on the podcast The UnHerd monarchy had been the dominant model of governance for 95% of historical time, oligarchy 4% and democracy 1%. It occurred to me that for 99.9% of history Homo sapiens had also defecated out in the open on the ground, but that probably shouldn’t encourage you take a crap on your front lawn when you get up each morning. It has been suggested as well the philosophy is anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic (of course) technologically deterministic (e.g. technology will run our lives no matter how we feel about it), and lastly — eugenic and racist.
Land has suggested that biological or scientific racism (the idea humanity is divided into biologically different “races”) is valid — that there is a natural predisposition among the the “races” either for or against intellectual capability (there is only one genetic human race, by the way — there are more genes that control height than skin color), and has said space travel and colonization would likely offer an effective filter that would likely choose white and asian people. Yarvin has claimed white people have higher IQs than blacks due to genetic reasons, that slavery and apartheid were not all that bad, and has expressed an interest in white nationalism.
These are four ideologies, some more familiar than others, that have all entered mainstream alt-right politics and have been incorporated into the ideas promoted by and actions taken by the current administration (I could have included anti-DEI sentiment as a fifth, but felt it was self-evident. My hypothesis is they all share a common goal of protecting and promoting white American culture and power.
Animosity regarding increasing diversity and the rising influence and increasing presence of minority populations has also affected large swaths of the general public — such that the application of these ideas in government in an attempt to facilitate a more homogenous society are embraced by many. In 2016, most who voted for the Republican presidential candidate cited economic reasons, but studies showed anti-immigration sentiment and racial resentment (the perception Black people, because of their race, unfairly receive enhancements that bring about racial equality, like scholarships, jobs and other advantages) were actually more influential than financial considerations. And while I credit the Pew Foundation for an optimistic title, a recent research survey is supportive:
The fact is America is diverse, becoming more diverse with each passing day, and no border walls or razor wire, efforts to increase white baby production or bizarre destruction and/or reorganization of society will change that fact.
Increasing diversity is even more evident on the international front, where the cow is not only out of the barn, but has strapped itself to a methane-fueled rocket and has left the solar system. China and India (not white people) are out-populating caucasian-nations by a huge margin, and the largest concentrations of young people are in Africa (where the fertility rate is about 3X that of North America).
Based on the arguments here, I believe my hypothesis is true, and that these four ideologies share a common thread — a desire to keep a shrinking white population in the political and cultural cat bird seat. You may disagree, and that is obviously your right. However, no matter how ardently you may wish otherwise “there is nothing you can do to stop time’s unfolding”, and while you may choose to not let go of this thread — it will inevitably not hold.
