How Civic Nationalists Think – American Renaissance

Greg Johnson, Loving Our Own, Counter-Currents Publishing, 2025, 216 pp.

Greg Johnson, Ph.D., has been involved with white nationalism for more than 25 years. Since 2010, he has been editor-in-chief of Counter-Currents Publishing and the Counter-Currents website. Loving Our Own is his 25th book. Earlier titles include White Identity Politics, New Right vs. Old Right, Truth, Justice, and a Nice White Country, In Defense of Prejudice, Toward a New Nationalism, Against Imperialism, and The White Nationalist Manifesto.

Loving Our Own is a defense of white identity politics and, like many of Dr. Johnson’s books, is an anthology. Most of this volume consists of his reviews of books written by opponents of white nationalism.

Presenting an argument in support of one’s position is only half the battle. The other half is responding to criticism. Accordingly, the argumentative approach of Loving Our Own is to defend white identity politics by responding to the strongest arguments against it. And the authors with whom Dr. Johnson crosses swords include public intellectuals and best-selling authors. Perhaps the most famous is Francis Fukuyama. Others include Yoram Hazony, Michael Anton, Jan-Werner Müller, William Galston, Neema Parvini, Eric Kaufmann, and Mark Lilla.

Reading Dr. Johnson’s refutations of these authors’ arguments is likely to lead one to ask, “Is this really the best our opponents can do?” In particular, Dr. Fukuyama’s case is one of the weakest. This is surprising, because I found his The End of History and the Last Man (1992) so impressive I taught it in university classes.

These authors occupy various positions on the political spectrum, but all are civic nationalists, globalists, multiculturalists, and advocates of “liberal democracy.” And they take white identity politics very seriously. Intelligent liberals have now gotten beyond the stage of dismissing us as ignorant cranks. They now recognize that white nationalism poses a threat to the establishment, and many acknowledge that our spokesmen are literate, well-informed, and capable of powerful arguments.

The folly of civic nationalism

To some extent, these books even show a surprising amount of self-criticism. In particular, Drs. Fukuyama, Lilla, and Galston put the blame for the rise of white identity politics on the liberal establishment. As Dr. Johnson writes:

They argue that Left-wing and anti-white forms of identity politics are creating white identity politics. Thus they advise our rulers to retreat from Leftist identity politics and to accommodate elements of nationalism, populism, and white identity politics, lest these forces sweep them out of power.

Prof. Fukuyama, for example, manages to feign some concern for the white working class long enough to argue that the Left needs to go back to fighting for the working man rather than promoting identity politics. Why? Because he believes that white nationalism is a bigger threat than the old school, class-obsessed Left.

Philosopher and political economist Francis Fukuyama. (Credit Image: © Ruslan Kaniuka/Ukrinform via ZUMA Press Wire)

All these authors want to curb the excesses of the new, identitarian Left, but Dr. Johnson argues that this will not work. First, “the Left has no brakes.” Moral fanaticism tends not to be self-correcting, and Leftists have made it clear they would rather burn the world down than rethink their ideology.

Second, these authors all present civic nationalism as an alternative to identity politics, and some of the most impressive parts of Loving Our Own argue that civic nationalism is unworkable. Further, the case these authors make in support of it is often astonishingly weak.

In discussing Michael Anton’s defense of civic nationalism (in The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return), Dr. Johnson makes a fundamental point: “The only reason a society would entertain the idea of a purely civic unity is if it has lost or thrown away its racial, cultural, and religious homogeneity and is grasping at straws to prevent itself from dissolving completely.”

All societies start out racially, culturally, and religiously homogeneous. Civic nationalism is not even conceivable until that homogeneity begins to break down and, along with it, social trust, cooperation, and fellow feeling. Civic nationalism is the idea that everyone and anyone can be American, English, French, Swedish, or what have you, so long as he professes the liberal creed of pluralism, tolerance, and individualism. This is supposed to hold together the fragments of a once unified society.

My parents, who were born in the 1930s, were ardent civic nationalists who believed that this was what America was all about. It was easy for them to be civic nationalists, for in their youth American society was cohesive and Americans were more neighborly and cooperative than any of us younger folk can even imagine. However, this was not because Americans had absorbed some civic nationalist creed, but because America was overwhelmingly white.

American civic nationalists want to reverse cause and effect, claiming that the American nation is more or less a construct of the US Constitution. Dr. Johnson points out, however, that the truth is just the reverse: “The Constitution — like the various declarations of independence, state constitutions, and the articles of confederation before it — was a construct of the American people, an experiment in self-government.” And he notes that “the US Constitution is a document suffused with the character of its Anglo-Protestant creators.”

Michael Anton, like the other civic nationalists, manages completely to miss this, despite quoting those famous lines by John Jay to the effect that America is a product of “one united people,” a people “descended from the same ancestors . . . very similar in their manners and customs.” Similarly, Mr. Anton ignores the Founders’ directive in the 1790 Naturalization Act that American citizenship be open only to “free white person[s] of good character.”

Arguing in bad faith

For the civic nationalist, the Constitution and its ideas are what are essential to the nation. The people become, in Dr. Johnson’s words, simply “replaceable raw material.” America would still be America, they claim, even if its founding stock were entirely replaced by non-white foreigners — so long as they paid lip service to the Constitution.

This is such a self-evidently absurd claim it is hard to believe it is put forward in good faith. It is difficult to see how a Japanese-American like Dr. Fukuyama, for example, could advance any other position than civic nationalism. He takes the position that his own ethnic self-interest requires that he take.

The case of Eric Kaufmann is rather sad. He is half Jewish, and his other half is a mixture of Costa Rican and Chinese. Dr. Johnson calls him a classic case of the “tragic mulatto.” Yet he identifies with whiteness and seems genuinely to value Western culture. His book Whiteshift: Immigration & the Future of White Majorities argues that people who are biologically non-white can still identify with whiteness.

Dr. Kaufmann doesn’t care that much about white demographic decline or race mixing, but because he likes white people, he wants to reassure us that isolated pockets of whites will probably survive. He cites the Amish and the Hutterites. It is small comfort.

Dr. Kaufmann and the other civic nationalist think ideas and cultural forms are free-floating abstractions that may be embodied by (or imposed on) any people. This is exactly what we would expect of the folks who brought us Operation Iraqi Freedom. It does not seem to have occurred to them that cultures are an expression of specific, genetically distinct peoples living in unique historical, geographical, and climatic conditions. Culture evolves as a people evolves.

Unsurprisingly, the civic nationalists all believe in the “blank slate” model. Dr. Johnson explains Dr. Fukuyama’s view:

The individual is just a tabula rasa on which society writes. Of course if society is just a collection of blank slates it is hard to figure out where the determinate content it imposes on us comes from. Fukuyama does not argue for this radical form of social constructivism. He simply asserts it.

Though Dr. Fukuyama is an opponent of identitarianism, he recognizes that a people must have an identity. Instead of one rooted in history, ancestry, religion, and shared culture, he proposes that the identity of brave, new, deracinated Westerners should be “liberal democratic universalism.”

This is, in Dr. Johnson’s words, “the original anti-identity politics, now rechristened in a truly breathtaking bit of brazenness, as itself a form of identity politics.” To make liberal democratic universalism the new identity of the West is essentially the same thing as declaring that our identity is “openness to demographic annihilation.”

Greg Johnson

It reminds me of something I was told years ago by a teacher at an expensive private school in Manhattan. He said that all the different ethnic groups in the school had their own club, even the white students. Their club was “White Students United Against Racism.”

The only identity white people are allowed in the liberal, democratic, universalist state is antiracism — which always amounts to being anti-white. Dr. Johnson gets to the heart of the matter:

To make liberal democracy the “identity” of any society is basically to adopt a suicide pact. Imagine if Norway were to drop anything specifically Norwegian from its national identity and commit itself instead to liberal democracy, including maximum openness to strangers and immigrants. Imagine every other nation doing the same. Then wait a couple centuries for migration, miscegenation, and commerce to work their magic. In the end, there will be no Norway or Sweden or Denmark. . . . There will simply be a Universal Homogeneous State, populated by a Universal Homogeneous Favela-Dweller, because the global average IQ will be too low to sustain a modern First World civilization. But like every Third World society, it will be able to sustain a small but fabulously wealthy and utterly sociopathic oligarchy that will preach liberal democracy to the serfs on its global plantation.

Minority rule and the rise of populism

Liberal democracy actually amounts to minority rule — not a particular racial or ethnic minority but the group that presents itself as championing such minorities: the affluent, university-educated liberal elite. This minority is hostile to the majority. It enacts globalist policies that are economically devastating to the white middle and working classes, and that destroy their communities with “diversity.”

“Liberal democracy” is a rigged system in which a minority of liberals continually thwart the will of the majority. The “liberals” are on both sides of the political spectrum. They include “liberals” such as William Galston and “conservatives” such as Francis Fukuyama. Liberals are individualists, anti-nativists, civic nationalists, and racial egalitarians.

The reaction to liberal democracy is populism, which is fundamentally a people’s rebellion against elites. The authors critiqued in Loving Our Own are united in opposing both white nationalism and populism, though they are not the same thing. Dr. Johnson argues that white nationalism should be a populist movement, one that sets itself against the liberal-democratic, anti-white establishment.

William Galston and Jan-Werner Müller both attack populism as “anti-pluralist.” Both argue that populism, in setting itself against the elites, posits a homogeneous people with common interests that only populists can perceive and champion.

These authors attack populism by challenging the idea that such a people even exists. They also attack the idea of a “common good.” Dr. Müller claims that “the idea of the single, homogeneous, authentic people is a fantasy.” But this claim is a straw man. If a nation must be absolutely homogeneous, no true “nation” ever existed.

Dr. Johnson points out that the identity of a nation is primarily normative, not statistical. The American Founders knew that there were Negro slaves and Amerindians within their borders. But they were merely in America, not part of it. The United States was understood to be the homeland of the American people: a white people.

The purpose of the United States was the common good of the American people and their posterity. It was an exclusive club, open only to free white people of good character willing to assimilate American folkways.

In his book The Populist Delusion, Neema Parvini argues that popular sovereignty is a delusion because everywhere we look, we see rule by elites. Dr. Johnson argues that this argument also fails by conflating norms with facts. Popular sovereignty is a norm. It means that the common good of a people is the fundamental goal.

As Aristotle pointed out, the common good can be pursued by many different regimes: monarchy, aristocracy, or popular government. Therefore, one cannot decide if a government is populist simply by counting the number of people involved in running things. Instead, one must ask if they are running things for the common good or for factional or even foreign interests.

Liberals reject the very idea of a common good. They see society as an agglomeration of individuals, each of whom pursues his own voluntarily chosen goals. To ask that individuals recognize a “common good” beyond their own personal ends and, if necessary, sacrifice for it, is anathema to liberalism.

Thus “pluralism” means affirming and celebrating multiple “goods” and not seeking to impose a single vision of a good common to all. The liberal political order ostensibly promotes pluralism. In fact, it imposes the values of the liberal elite on the entire society, and it does this in ways that are often openly authoritarian. We see examples of this daily from Canada, Europe, and Australia.

Dr. Johnson writes:

Name one liberal democratic politician who does not hesitate to ignore the expressed preferences of voters on such matters as immigration, globalization, diversity, abortion, gay marriage, the death penalty, etc. Populists and liberals have very different goals, but both groups feel entirely justified in ignoring the voters when they make the wrong decision. [Populists would ignore voters if their choices threaten the common good.] Populists are merely honest about this, while liberals hypocritically denounce them.

Christopher Lasch’s defense of populism

There is one book that Loving Our Own reviews positively. Published posthumously in 1995, Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites is a defense of populism. It argues that the real threat to democracy in America comes from a new, rootless, managerial elite that disdains Middle America. It is remarkably prescient.

According to Dr. Lasch, modern elites view themselves as “world citizens” with loyalties to international markets and institutions rather than a nation or to fellow countrymen. Their shared culture is liberal individualism. It pleases them to advocate multiculturalism and globalism, but they are rich enough to shield themselves from their consequences.

Christopher Lasch

These elites live in gated communities and have regular contact mostly with others like themselves. Those few that have children send them to private schools. They regard the rest of the country — i.e., those who must live with the deleterious consequences of multiculturalism and globalism — as provincial, backward, and racist.

The rise of this elite was made possible by the modern American emphasis on upward mobility. Dr. Johnson writes:

Social mobility became central to the American self-image only in the mid-twentieth century. Should it really surprise us that throughout most of American history, trappers, farmers, ranchers, and sailors were not dreaming of raising doctors, lawyers, and dentists? The idea that a society is redeemed by offering the “best and the brightest” the ability to go to college and train for the professions is a brahmin prejudice, an expression of a traditional caste system that disdains labor and exalts learning — that prefers ink on the fingers to dirt on the hands. But if society can only be redeemed by its professional classes then work is forever degrading and unclean.

It was not always this way. Dr. Lasch argues that the promise of America was not originally seen as misery for the majority and upward mobility for the few. Instead, America was supposed to be a nation that recognized the dignity of all men, no matter their station in life. America promised all working people a good life, the opportunity to interact on an equal footing with men of all social positions, and the right to take part in the affairs of the nation.

In effect, the promise of America was of a classless society. This did not mean equality of wealth, but civic equality and the absence of hereditary privilege. America also originally stood for what Dr. Lasch calls “the democratization of intelligence,” rather than rule by experts.

Dr. Johnson writes:

Americans believed that popular government required appropriating and democratizing the functions of the higher castes. Hence the First Amendment to the US Constitution bars a state church and establishes freedom of religion, the press, speech, and assembly. In short, the goal is to prevent rule by priests and experts to ensure that all citizens have a say in government.

How different things are today! We are now routinely told by establishment intellectuals that we must defer to official “experts” in all matters. Ideas and opinions that do not emanate from these experts are “misinformation” that must be combated by censorship and ostracism. Debate is discouraged.

The behavior of the elites during the COVID-19 pandemic exposed their contempt for ordinary people, and their overestimation of the people’s willingness to obey and submit. Conformity was widespread (especially among over-socialized Democrat voters) but so was resistance. And resistance stemmed from the populist movement that has had such an impact on American politics since the rise of Trump in 2016.

The Revolt of the Elites reads like a prophecy, and Dr. Johnson even calls Christopher Lasch “our prophet.” He concludes:

In short, today’s populism is nothing new but instead the return of something very old and deeply encoded in American culture. It is the voice of the American people, demanding accountability from the rich, powerful, and connected.

Of havens and clouds

The essays in Loving Our Own are not all book reviews. The volume also includes three original essays on political philosophy. The central thesis of “Havens in a Heartless World” is that liberal societies generate profound insecurity by destroying stable social bonds through continuous change, individualism, and by fetishizing voluntary choice.

By making all relationships voluntary and consensual (as in financial transactions), liberalism makes one’s status conditional on pleasing others. This breeds insecurity and conformism. People become fungible, replaceable units in a society in which everything — including human relationships — is modeled on the market economy.

Dr. Johnson writes:

What is it about modernity that melts all that is solid? The root of modern insecurity is the central role that liberalism gives to freedom of choice. Liberalism’s ideal is to replace all unchosen relationships and obligations with chosen ones. For the liberal, if you don’t choose a relationship, if you don’t consent to it, if it is not voluntary, then it is illegitimate. The only legitimate relationships are consensual. Liberalization is equivalent to making all of society into a marketplace, because market transactions are the model of liberal relationships.

The solution is to safeguard and restore non-liberal “havens” such as the family and the nation, in which one’s status is unconditional and based on blood rather than on consent and being pleasing to others. The family provides unconditional love and loyalty. Children who grow up in a loving, close-knit family become secure and mature adults who understand that a relationship does not have to be voluntary to be valuable, and that there are such things as unchosen obligations.

Nations are “extended families” rooted in blood, shared culture, and shared language. Like the family, the nation offers unconditional belonging. The basis for this belonging, however, is love of one’s own. We love other members of our nation because they are like us.

To use the language of science, this “fellow feeling” is based on “genetic similarity” (here Dr. Johnson draws Dr. J. Philippe Rushton). It follows that a multicultural, multiracial hodgepodge cannot be a genuine nation and cannot inspire the feelings of love and loyalty that we find in a racially homogeneous nation.

The multicultural society is no haven at all. Instead, it generates heartlessness. It is no accident that we are less trusting, less empathetic, less charitable, less cooperative, and less united than our grandparents’ generation. It is also no accident that about 20 percent of American adults suffer from anxiety. They called the 1950s “the Age of Anxiety” but it was nothing compared to the present. Children today score at anxiety levels higher than those of child psychiatric patients in the 1950s. Close to 40 million American adults are on some kind of anxiety medication.

The cause of this is the profound insecurity of modern life. Our havens are disappearing. Families are dysfunctional, and “diversity” breeds distrust and anxiety. As F. Roger Devlin notes in his essay “The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Race and Racial Differences”:

When white and black people are shown pictures of strangers, the amygdala region in their brains displays heightened activity, indicating vigilance or wariness toward unfamiliar faces. But when the pictures are shown a second time only the other-race faces provoke high amygdala activity: the brain perceives the same-race faces as “familiar” after only one viewing.

The material and psychological well-being of a people requires safe havens, and that includes a racially homogeneous society. Peoples need sovereign homelands — “ethnostates” — as secure spaces for their flourishing. This is a right, not a privilege.

Dr. Johnson’s essay “The Cloud” borrows its title from a phrase by Jonathan Bowden and builds on earlier works such as New Right vs. Old Right and Against Imperialism. He argues that a cloud hangs over nationalism, and especially white nationalism. It is the charge that nationalism will inevitably lead to war, imperialism, and genocide. He writes:

As soon as you say that nations should put their own citizens and interests first, people immediately raise the specter of wars and genocides. Since the Second World War, National Socialism and the Holocaust are always evoked. But before the Second World War, anti-nationalists evoked the horrors of the First World War.

Dr. Johnson argues that these horrors were not caused by nationalism per se but rather by states using power to aggrandize themselves at the expense of others. Contrary to received opinion, such predation is not an inherent or inevitable feature of nationalism.

Nationalists must dispel this cloud and address the specter of white “brother wars” by committing to a framework that minimizes the possibility of conflicts while preserving sovereignty. Dr. Johnson writes:

First, we must cultivate friendship. Thus white states need an intergovernmental organization to promote amity and resolve conflicts without violence. Second, since enmity is always possible, we must also be prepared to deter violence through counter-violence. Thus white states need a collective security agreement so that if one of them is attacked, all of them respond in force. Such a collective security agreement should be sufficient to deter most violence against white countries from inside or outside the white bloc.

In short, what Greg Johnson advocates is something like a white identitarian League of Nations, EU, or NATO. These organizations are imperfect. Indeed, the present European Union seems devoted to the abolition of Europeans. But we can do better, and the interests of white people everywhere demand such an alliance. “Let’s call our version the League of White Nations,” Dr. Johnson says.

* * *

Loving Our Own makes an extremely strong case for white identity politics. It can serve as an excellent introduction to the topic, and to Greg Johnson’s work as a whole. I will close with some of his inspiring words.

At the end of the book, he notes that the works he reviews show that some of the most intelligent people in the establishment are worried that left-wing multiculturalism is failing. This means, as Greg Johnson puts it:

that the identitarian dispensation is upon us. Anti-white identity politics is going to drive the further rise of white identity politics. The universalist center will inevitably shrink as people join one identitarian camp or another. What remains of the center will be pulverized by clashing identitarian blocs. Then the great battle of our time will be decided.