White pride really doesn’t have an honorable tradition to call its own. Its claims on Western culture are tenuous, and none of the other reference points (segregation and skinheads) are particularly admirable. So it really does seem reasonable to say that whiteness, although in no way shameful, is not per se a healthy source of pride.
Viewing the matter in this light, it’s somewhat unsurprising that our alt-right partisans actually seem to pride themselves on being brainy rebels and devil-may-care pranksters. They’re not traditionalists in any normal sense, because they stand outside the circle of ordinary civil discourse, and even take joy in the fact. They’re what happens when traditionalism meets expressive individualism, in a world with too many resentful loners and not enough churches. They brilliantly combine the worst of cosmopolitanism (its rootlessness) with the worst of provincialism (its narrow-minded tribalism).
Just as much as the progressives they loathe, alt-righters are the bad fruit of a collapsing culture, taking pride in whiteness because they’re too alienated from more-substantive cultural institutions (family, church, community) to find a more fitting link to their Western forbears. Will the real cuckservatives please stand up? I don’t think it’s the Paul Ryans of the world who are disgracing the legacy of the West.
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