Nicholas J. Funetes is a Liberal

Contrary to popular belief, there are no fascists in the United States of America. There are no communists either. Far from being a polarized and ideologically heterogeneous land, the USA is distinguished by the near total hegemony of a uniquely durable and peculiarly intense political cult that takes on one or another articulations misleadingly referred to as "left" or "right."

American political culture proceeds from a basically protestant religious eschatology. Liberalism is the political mode of that eschatology, and the modern race concept is unthinkable outside the theological innovations of Liberalism. Though it has some expressions that evoke the Cultural Revolution and others that resemble the final solution, the logics that produced those are as foreign to the U.S. as the Lada. Instead, America is a singularly Liberal country, and what polarization there is occurs completely within that terrain.

The recent national prominence of figures like Nick Fuentes and Vice President J.D. Vance who larp, respectively, a meme-inflected neo-Nazism and vague Catholic integralism has caused many Democrat party affiliates and fellow travelers to stridulate about "MAGA Fascism" and a rising religious or white nationalism allegedly opposed to "liberal" principles. Such proclamations express a mendacious amnesia. America is a liberal nation because it is a white supremacist and protestant Christian nation, and insofar as there is any fascism it is a liberal fascism to be sharply distinguished from the organicist and patriarchal forms of classical Italian fascism and Nazism. Fuentes is a Liberal, not a Nazi, and Vance is definitely still a Protestant.

Instead, Fuentes' ethno-nationalism is an eccentricity of the ellipse formed by the fundamental liberal conundrum. That conundrum is the conundrum of an abstract, universal equality of liberty and political participation guaranteed and afforded by belonging to a definite and exclusive political community. The conundrum is obvious: the universality and abstractness of the liberal concept annihilates any exclusive particularity yet requires that very same exclusive particularity for its being.

The fundamental problem, then, becomes how to coherently draw the boundary between member and non-member, between citizen and non-citizen (slave, migrant, debtor). No solution is possible, but a predictable suite of erratics are sloughed off again and again in the attempt. There are two basic types of solution, each of which proceeds from different emphases placed upon the protestant eschatology of which Liberalism is a transmutation. The curious blend of libertinism and social worker-ism that characterizes the American left proceeds from an emphasis on Protestantism's patronizing re-interpretation of the Christian duty to charity and its insistence on a personal, unmediated relationship to God. On the other hand, the elitism and racial populism that characterizes the American right proceeds from Protestantism's discourse of the preterite and elect.

It is no coincidence that the nation-state, Liberal political philosophy, capitalism, and protestant Christianity all emerged at the same time in the same place. What ties these four developments together is a new concept of the individual subject and the innovation of a political community, the nation-state, seen as at once the expression of universal ideals and of a definite ethnos.

The new concept of the individual subject finds its daily expression in those forms most characteristic of modernity: commodity and citizen. Where in most social formations the disposal and access of land, means of production, and labor were regulated by a patchwork of overlapping duties, obligations, and social norms, the commodity is that property which is construed as the sole, absolute property of a juridically defined subject who may dispose of that property as he sees fit. The basic legal relation has its origin in the Roman Iure ex Quiritum, which defined the Roman citizen's absolute right of disposal and alienation over his slaves. The development of this relation and its cementing as the basic principle of society, however, required no mere legal flourish but the invention and aggressive evangelization of a new subjectivity, the subjectivity of the autonomous and sovereign individual. The necessary political-juridical complement to this new private property-owning subjectivity was the "citizen." The citizen too is an individual, self sufficient and distinct from all other citizens, yet at the same time the citizen is identical to all other citizens. The "citizen" is the numerically distinct yet undifferentiated abstract bearer of rights who, in virtue of this abstract status, may participate with security and liberty in the "non-political" sphere of market exchanges and private contract.

The creation and mass enforcement of this new subjectivity required the destruction of those forms that had structured subjectivity in the past: the shifting and parcellated sovereignty, negotiated through blood and marriage, of feudal nobility, the collective bonds of peasant tradition and village economy, and the spiritual world that formed the essential framework for both of these-- the communal and mediated relationship to God prescribed by the Catholic Church.

Protestantism's doctrine of faith, scripture, and grace alone took aim at the foundation of this most essential barrier to the new subjectivity. With its new theology, Protestantism interpellated the autonomous, self-sufficient, and sovereign individual essential to citizenship and commodity ownership. That which God relates to is real and holy, so the sovereign individual could not be sanctified and universalized so long as one's relationship to God was mediated through priests, works, and community. The protestant privatization of the relationship to God was the essential moment in the sanctification of that new individual subjectivity.

A new "eternal" and "universal" subject thus invented, a new political form was required to effect this subjectivity as a real force in the world. The old forms of parcellated sovereignty, papal empire, peasant household, or barbarian clan obviously could not do, predicated as they were on a fractalized and personally mediated form of political authority anathema to the new individualism.

The new political form had to satisfy the following requirements: First, it had to have a centralized monopoly on violence sufficient to enforce contracts and a uniform set of rights and laws. This in turn required that the new regime exert its power over a definite, circumscribed, and reasonably stable territory. Second, it had to proceed from and be seen as an expression of, rather than an illegitimate constraint upon, the new universal individual. The solution was the liberal nation-state.

Ideologically, the liberal nation state was construed as emerging from an agreement, a social contract, between sovereign individuals to give up a portion of their "innate" (God-given) natural liberty in exchange for the assurance of that liberty against external interference by foreign powers or neighboring individuals. Thus was the nation state suitably construed as an expression rather than a limitation of the new individual. This ideology of the social contract also made it exclusive. It could not simply admit all individuals to the fold as this would undermine the basic purport of an agreement between otherwise absolutely unconstrained individuals. For the new social arrangement to remain legible as a contract it had to exclude some as non-parties. This exclusivity as well as the practical demand for territorial integrity was answered by the construction of a national identity. The national identity was an imagined ethnos, or mythic community of blood and language, built on an illicit analogy to the family. Thus was born the incoherent but dynamic splicing of abstract universalism to ethnic particularism that defined the liberal state.

This solution, like the individual subject itself, was sanctified by the psychic economy of protestant theology. In contrast to the Catholic theology of redemption through works and practice and of potentially universal Christian community, Protestantism emphasized the exclusivity and innateness of the Christian community. The new Christian community was an "elect," membership in which depended on an obscure blend of unverifiable spiritual purity and divine destiny.

In his treatise On Secular Authority Martin Luther, in a sort of subliminal metonymy of the just described contradiction between the liberal individual and national particularism, addresses himself to the apparent contradiction between the punitive violence and retributive law of the political state and the doctrine of self-sacrifice and unconditional love apparently propounded in the Gospels. That the "secular sword" is to serve the will of God by "punishing the wicked and rewarding the just" seems obvious but:

..what Christ says in Matthew 5 [38 & 9] sounds as if it were emphatically opposed to this:'You have heard what was said to your ancestors: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you: resist no evil. Rather, if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn him the other cheek. And if someone will dispute with you at law, to take your coat, let him have your cloak also. And if a man should compel you to go with him one mile, go two miles etc.' To the same effect, Paul in Romans 12 [19]: 'Dearly beloved, do not defend yourselves, but rather give place unto the wrath of God. For it is written: Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.' And again, Matthew 5 [44]: 'Love your enemies. Do good unto them that hate you.' And 1 Peter 2 [error for 3:9]: 'No one shall render evil for evil, or insults for insults etc.' These and others of the same sort are hard sayings, and sound as if Christians in the New Covenant were to have no secular Sword.

Luther's solution to this potentially revolutionary problem is to distinguish between "true Christians," amongst whom the new testament doctrine reigns, and the rest:

Here we must divide Adam's children, all mankind, into two parts: the first belong to the kingdom of God, the second to the kingdom of the world. All those who truly believe in Christ belong to God's kingdom, for Christ is king and lord in God's kingdom, ... And indeed he calls the Gospel a gospel of the kingdom of God, in that it teaches, governs and preserves the kingdom of God. Now: these people need neither secular [weltlich] Sword nor law. And if all the world [Welt] were true Christians, that is, if everyone truly believed, there would be neither need nor use for princes, kings, lords, the Sword or law.

There you have it. The articulation of an embattled community of the true Christians against a savage and deceptive external horde. There's no way to know for sure who is a true Christian, and it may be that no one is, but if anyone is it will not be due to any concrete practice capable of universal embrace but due to a special and scarce spiritual and moral quality.

This basic pattern laid down by Luther was picked up on and articulated more pointedly by John Calvin, whose doctrine of double predetermination made salvation and damnation a matter entirely of God's predestination of each person into either the "elect" or "preterite." What is more, Calvin made explicit the connection between the true Christendom and the new national forms. God had both chosen people and chosen nations. As Calvin puts it in Institutes of the Christian Religion:

All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death. This God has testified, not only in the case of single individuals; he has also given a specimen of it in the whole posterity of Abraham, to make it plain that the future condition of each nation lives entirely at his disposal.

Thus, Protestantism's particularization of the relationship to God and articulation of a new, exclusive and innate concept of Christendom formed the necessary psycho-spiritual language for the mass uptake and radicalization of the twin rocks of Liberalism, the abstract individual and the nation-state. Liberalism is in no way antagonistic to religion. In fact it is the political expression of a very definite religious eschatology. What is more, as we have seen in the Luther quoted above, even seeming counter evidence as the much vaunted "separation of Church and state" is a corollary to, not a check on, the very theological innovations just investigated.

In America this Protestant political eschatology took root and flourished like nowhere else. With the systematic extermination of America's indigenous peoples and the colonization of the New World by protestant religious zealots from Europe, the new ideology found a soil uncrowded by former social classes, political institutions, or rival politics. That early rooting and proliferation has never really been dislodged, and it has proven remarkably adaptable to new circumstances and objectives. As a result, still today, Americans, no matter what their ethnic or religious origin or expressed political orientation, basically travel within this ideo-eschatological universe.

While Fuentes' religious nationalism and racism are decried as novel deviations from liberal principles, in fact both religious fanaticism and racialism are never far below the surface in mainstream American thought. An analysis of how the Protestant-Liberal eschatology is adapted to the American left will have to await a future investigation, but the right-wing articulation to be described here takes place entirely within the problematic of Liberalism. It is not opposed to liberalism, but is entailed by it. More specifically, the lineage to which Fuentes belongs is a sublimation of the discourse of preterite and elect as a solution to the basic problem of membership in the liberal-democratic political community.

If you actually pay attention to what Fuentes says, you will notice that he positions himself as a defender, not a destroyer, of democracy and liberal rights such as freedom of speech. Fuentes simply thinks that democracy and rights require an ethno-culturally unified and exclusive community for their realization. For Fuentes, the admission of large numbers of outsiders, particularly poor or transient ones, with a "foreign culture" and "undemocratic values" can only erode democracy and bring the danger of uneducated mob rule. These ideas are not just Fuentes'. They suffuse American political thought. In fact, the idea that democracy is no simple rule of the majority vote but requires a certain ethic or culture for its realization can be found on the American left too. Jane Adams, for example, expresses a progressive articulation of this idea in Democracy and Social Ethics.

If we look to the debates within the American political elite prior to the American Civil War we can observe an earlier articulation of the possible responses to the basic liberal problematic. Today John C. Calhoun's thought is neglected due to his defense of slavery and association to the Confederate cause, but at the time he was a very important member of the American political and economic elite, and his thought is firmly inside the tradition of Liberalism. For Calhoun, the Confederate cause was a defense of democracy and liberty.

Calhoun's best known idea is his notion of "concurrent majority." Calhoun considers the rule of a simple numerical majority to be undemocratic and tyrannical. By identifying the general will with the will of the numerical majority "the whole is mistakenly identified with one of its parts." Instead, Calhoun proposes what he calls "concurrent majority." On this model, what is required is consensus amongst the various interest groups affected by a policy. So, for example, a new tariff bill would require not a simple numerical majority but a numerical majority within all of the affected interest groups. This way, no one interest will dominate. This is not just an opportunistic defense of a complicated system to ensure the persistence of slavery. According to Calhoun, the foundation both of the social contract's legitimacy and of the nation's wealth is the protection of the individual’s liberty to pursue their interests, especially their economic interests. Thus, if individuals could not guarantee that the "fruits" derived from the exercise of their liberty would be protected against the incursions of a numerical majority, the liberal social contract would be illegitimate and individuals would have no incentive to productive exertion.

Besides the subtext of support for chattel slavery that runs through all of Calhoun's writings, Calhoun begins to more explicitly presage the concerns of people like Fuentes when he describes the further benefits of a system of concurrent majority:

Among the other advantages which governments of the concurrent have over those of the numerical majority—and which strongly illustrates their more popular character, is—that they admit, with safety, a much greater extension of the right of suffrage. It may be safely extended in such governments to universal suffrage: that is—to every male citizen of mature age, with few ordinary exceptions; but it cannot be so far extended in those of the numerical majority, without placing them ultimately under the control of the more ignorant and dependent portions of the community. For, as the community becomes populous, wealthy, refined, and highly civilized, the difference between the rich and the poor will become more strongly marked; and the number of the ignorant and dependent greater in proportion to the rest of the community. With the increase of this difference, the tendency to conflict between them will become stronger; and, as the poor and dependent become more numerous in proportion, there will be, in governments of the numerical majority, no want of leaders among the wealthy and ambitious, to excite and direct them in their efforts to obtain the control. … The case is different in governments of the concurrent majority. There, mere numbers have not the absolute control; and the wealthy and intelligent being identified in interest with the poor and ignorant of their respective portions or interests of the community, become their leaders and protectors. (from Disquisition on Government)

Wonder of wonders! The concurrent majority actually enables a "safe" extension of the franchise to even the landless and illiterate male citizens. Like Fuentes, the essence of liberalism and democracy lies not in the mere rule of a numerical majority of residents but in the protection of "liberty." Therefore, the admission of large numbers of unsuitable types to the democratic community without proper safeguards would actually endanger democracy and liberal society. In a system of concurrent majority, this tendency towards mob rule and populist demagoguery can be tempered by a tendency for the lower classes to identify with their natural superiors on the basis of their diverse interests rather than as a bloc directed against the property of the upper classes.

Democracy and liberty, then, requires a certain kind of society and a "harmonious" social order. The enfranchisement and empowerment of large numbers of "ignorant" or "dependent" persons would tend to threaten Democracy and liberty, not expand it. Thus Calhoun's exclusionary impulses are not opposed to liberal principles but entailed by it. A little later, Calhoun emphasizes his belief that democracy requires the right kind of people:

But some communities require a far greater amount of power than others to protect them against anarchy and external dangers; and, of course, the sphere of liberty in such, must be proportionally contracted.... A community may possess all the necessary moral qualifications, in so high a degree, as to be capable of self-government under the most adverse circumstances; while, on the other hand, another may be so sunk in ignorance and vice, as to be incapable of forming a conception of liberty, or of living, even when most favored by circumstances, under any other than an absolute and despotic government. (from Disquisition on Government)

Such themes are also articulated poignantly by Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. Tucker was a generation younger than Calhoun and one of a group of prominent southern secessionists who saw the North as a threat to liberty, true democracy, and the southern "way of life." In his Discourse on the Dangers that threaten the Free Institutions of the United States Tucker begins by drawing an explicit connection to the cultivation of religious duties and the defense of the Unites States' "Free Institutions." After this opening rhetorical move, Tucker echoes many of Calhoun's bugbears, including the danger to liberty and democracy presented by an ignorant and propertyless mob:

In every country, the first successful aspirant to supreme power has always been a favorite and flatterer of the people. He can never hope to put himself in condition to proclaim his contempt of the multitude but by first affecting the most unbounded deference to its will.

The idea that democracy and liberty can only be realized in a community with the right sort of culture and psychology:

...it may be confidently affirmed, that where the love of freedom is the master feeling of the heart and the main-spring of action in the great body of any people, freedom is ever found. Where this has given place to baser passions, or to inglorious sloth, no form of government that the wit of man can devise, can tempt her to remain.

And, most importantly, the equation of liberty with the unfettered enjoyment of property, up to and especially including the possession of slaves:

...liberty itself is only valuable as it permits the pursuit and secures the enjoyment of property. Property thus becomes the measure of the value of liberty...

In the strand of Liberalism represented by Calhoun and Tucker we find a certain resolution of the basic contradiction at the heart of liberalism. The contradiction, in more detail, is that the liberal subject is an abstract subject. The subject of a liberal political order is self-sufficient and sovereign over himself and his possessions; he enjoys an unrestricted right to dispose of these things as he sees fit. In this, he is exactly like every other abstract individual, and a liberal political order, insofar as it is liberal, does not make any formal distinction between individuals. All laws are addressed to this abstract individual devoid of any distinguishing marks of family, status, race, land, or class. Yet, at the same time, this abstract equality can only be secured by membership in a definite political community, by citizenship. How, then, to delimit the bounds and conditions for membership in this community? The abstract universality of the liberal subject implies a radical extension of the political community to all, regardless of nation or class, but the necessity of a definite political constitution prevents this.

The myth of the social contract can get us part of the way there, but not all of the way. For the social contract is founded upon individuals' agreement to give up a portion of their natural liberty in exchange for the assurances of lawful property, that is, for the security of one's possessions against the threat posed by the natural liberty of others. Thus, the problem persists: on what basis may those not party to the original contract be admitted into the contract? Given that the contract itself is not an actual contract but a postulated or mythical contract, the problem becomes even more vexing. Those who might threaten the conditions of the social contract, namely, the sanctity of lawful property, cannot be admitted to the political community. Thus, some criterion needs to be established for carving out from the universal class of abstract persons various generic sub-classes who may and may not be admitted into the political community. The abstract non-determination of the citizen necessarily resolves itself into various specific determinations of the universal class.

Hence, the racial concept, an abstract determination of general types within the universal category, is only thinkable in connection with the abstraction of the liberal subject. These determinations emerge with necessity from the above described problematic.

In Calhoun and Tucker the resolution of the contradiction is clear: the liberal political community is restricted to those who have the right culture or psychology and to those who are propertied and therefore have a stake in the liberty given up at the foundation of the social contract. These exclusionary distinctions are not in opposition to liberal principles, but are required by them. In this, they reproduce the discourse of the preterite and the elect articulated by Luther and Calvin. The democratic society is the society of the elect. This society is exclusive, membership in it is not universalizable to all, and it is only inside this community that the law of Christ, or democracy and equality, reigns. Outside the community of the elect, the law of the sword must necessarily reign. What is more, this distinction must be jealously guarded if God's will is to be done. To extend the franchise to the ignorant and the black would be to bring the preterite into the Kingdom of God and Satan back into Heaven.

Fuentes' ethno-nationalism is a resolution to the contradictions of Liberalism that follows the same basic pattern. While it borrows the 20th century language of Volk, its logic belongs to Calhoun's Liberalism. Fuentes draws his circle according to the imagined cultural and psychological unity of whiteness. Only whites have the right "love of freedom," and only the bonds of this shared cultural identity and liberal psychological constitution can secure liberty. Democracy, rights, and freedom, for Fuentes, are only realizable in an America purged of immigrants, blacks, and the propertyless. In Fuentes' America, let it be written at the Gates: Weiße macht Frei.

Sources and Related Recommended Readings:

Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government
N.B, Tucker, A Discourse on the Dangers that Threaten the Free Institutions of the United States
M.I. Finley (ed.) et.al. , Studies in Roman Property
Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism
Orlando Patterson, Freedom Vol. 1
Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism a Counter History
Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract