On White Nationalism's Conquest of Conservatism

A review of Whitepill, by Scott Greer

I review Scott Greer’s book Whitepill for UnHerd. The book is a victory lap taken over the fact that mainstream conservatism has basically adopted the racial obsessions once limited to white nationalists. Unlike Greer, I don’t think that this is something to celebrate. And the book inadvertently demonstrates how empty this worldview is, which can’t be separated from the sad intellectual and ethical state of modern conservatism.

It is important to note that Greer rejects the label of white nationalist. To him, though, this rejection simply implies that he accepts the American system and doesn’t aspire to form an ethnostate. However, this is precisely what I would call a worldview that prioritizes maintaining white demographic dominance and cultural primacy. Why else consider every single form of immigration a threat, and why else should anti-white racism, especially after the vibe shift, remain such a high political priority? Greer doesn’t explain, but it all makes sense in the context of a racialist worldview.

To Greer, the victory chronicled in Whitepill means that today we can just call this conservatism. It follows that white identitarianism has so successfully swept the Right that Greer doesn’t even feel the need to make the first-order case for his beliefs.

But that leaves him vulnerable to all sorts of counterarguments (which, again, he doesn’t even bother acknowledging). Even as white identitarianism has ascended, one justification after another for limiting immigration has fallen by the wayside. It was once said new arrivals would boost crime. But crime has consistently fallen – despite some localized disorder and anecdotes that the Trump 2024 campaign pointed to as representative of the effects of immigration – except for a brief spike beginning in 2020 that was driven by higher rates of violence among inner-city natives.

Then there is the argument about migrants pushing the electorate to the Left. In her 2015 book ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third-World Hellhole, Ann Coulter argued that nonwhites can be expected to vote Democratic indefinitely into the future; hence, conservatives had to close the border if they hoped to win on any other issue. In 2024, however, naturalized immigrants may well have voted majority-Republican. Now, conservatives are reduced to complaining about competition for tech jobs, despite tech workers not making up any significant part of their coalition, and the American tech industry being such an overwhelming success that it is powering the rest of the economy and putting us at the forefront of the most important industry in the world.

Some of the MAGA faithful may not see such points clearly, but Greer does. Still, he refuses to intellectually tackle them. Instead, the emotional response to immigration comes first, and justifications are simply put forward on an ad hoc basis. As the intellectual case for restrictionism gets weaker, conservative attachment to nativism only becomes more firmly entrenched.

Read the whole thing here.

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