Is Carl Benjamin Wrong About Nationalism? Is Keir Starmer a Nationalist?

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:05][music] Well, hello everyone and welcome. I have a guest here today. It is Mike from Imperium Press. Uh, back again.

[00:00:19]Fantastic publisher, publisher of many, many great books, including, of course, my own best-selling uh, Populist Illusion.

[00:00:28]Buy it now. and and of course uh Applied Elite Theory, which even more people should buy now. But uh other than those, there are also many many other great books, past and present, in the uh Imperium Press catalog. So, it's always a privilege to have Mike here. He's a serious thinker in his own right as well. How you doing, Mike?

[00:00:50]Yeah, I'm doing very well, actually.

[00:00:52]It's um I know it's getting warmer where you are, but it's getting cooler where I I am down in Australia, and I love it.

[00:00:59]This is my favorite time of year actually.

[00:01:02]>> So recently here in the UK, the question of nationalism has come up again. Okay.

[00:01:09]And uh I I have a buddy, famous guy, Carl Benjamin, who basically started trending on Twitter uh a while back after uh this reply. Let me let me just share this reply, Mike, because you have a book on nationalism. Uh it's kind of a a I guess um fair-minded look at what nationalism is, what its good points are, and maybe what its bad points are as well from broadly speaking a you know a folkish perspective. Um but let me just give you what Carl Benjamin said and see if we can use this as a jumping off point for talking about nationalism.

[00:01:51]So this actually trended on Twitter and in in fact he was um roundly haranged by many many nationalists uh for this post.

[00:02:00]So this was actually uh this guy Wolf uh who started off as a as a big Rupert Low fan as a big kind of restore fan on Twitter. Uh but over time he has become more critical. And this is a little clip of Rert Low uh talking about how legal uh immigration is more difficult and contrary to what Ferrar blah blah blah.

[00:02:25]And then uh basically at one point Lo says in the interview, well the thing is he's a true Tory. Okay. And this was then used to attack him, you know, as being like a covert conservative or something like like a member of the Conservative party. And Carl just came straight in with this reply here. And you'll see why it's relevant in a second. He says, "Jesus Christ, man.

[00:02:50]Knock this nonsense off. The true Tory is the most right-wing perspective of duty and patricianship that England can produce. Quote unquote nationalism is continental [ __ ] And you are bewitched by ephemeral words rather than realizing that we have our own homegrown nativist leader here. He is for us. the language he uses is imperfect but the essence is true. Okay. Now like let's sort of track the you know parochial everyday politics and us of Rupert Low and the rest of it. What that led to on Twitter uh that day and in fact that week was Carl batting off many many attacks coming from you know broadly speaking nationalists all around the world and him [clears throat] saying uh sticking to his guns basically and saying like actually nationalism is a late continental postFrench revolution development and really we our heart should be somewhere else. So, as a starting point, Mike, how do you respond to this kind of thing that's uh this talking point that does the rounds once in a while uh here by Carl Benjamin, >> right? Well, I mean, Carl's absolutely right that nationalism is something that comes a bit later uh in the historical record. Now, this is something that I've shifted on over time a little bit. one of the few things that I've kind of changed my mind on since I wrote my book, The Culture Thug Handbook, a couple of years ago where I basically said that nationalism is something that's ancient and there's a yes and no. I don't want to get too nuanced about it, but basically the nation is something that is deeply ancient, but nationalism is something that is kind of modern actually. Um it's not that people didn't identify with the nation earlier. It's that nationalism as a doctrine comes in yes as a result of modernity. So nationalism I think we have to kind of talk about what it is to understand why that why Carl's right here. Nationalism is more than just loving your people. It is actually the elevation of the nation to the primary political identity. Now there are a lot of uh identities that we have you know um one of them is my family. Another one is you know being a member of my locality or living in my neighborhood.

[00:05:23]And in earlier times not that long ago actually for certain peoples in the British Isles uh we had things like plants or tribes and folks like we still have folks. people can be Wessex men or North Umbreans or uh you know Cornish that sort of thing. Um what nationalism says the what the part in it that's new is that you as a Cornish man uh need to subordinate that identity to being English specifically. right now. I think Carl probably means this in the sense of British identity because I know he identifies pretty strongly as an Englishman also as a a British person but his English identity is a bit stronger I think. Um I don't want to put words in his mouth but this idea that like nationalism elevates the nation to being the central object of political loyalty over and above all of the other smaller loyalty. That is new. That's something that was basically unintelligible uh throughout most of human history until the modern era. So yeah, I think that that in it is actually quite new and it could not really happen. it was structurally something that couldn't really exist until the modern era like you know it was very difficult to um achieve that under say feudal conditions for example um so that is the sense in which nationalism is something new >> yeah I I I mean I was thinking about this from a slightly different perspective the other day when it just kind of came up when I was reviewing a conversation between David Starky and Tommy Robinson. Right during the course of that conversation, they accused Kia Starmer, who's the prime minister of the UK, of being a globalist who wants to destroy Britain. And I thought during the course of is this actually a fair characterization of of a character like Star. Um because it feels to me and I'm not the only person who said this.

[00:07:36]Morgoth made a video along the same lines uh recently as well that a figure like Karmama is actually just the embodiment of the British state as it stands. And from a strange perspective, Kastarma exists for whatever it is the British state has become. And he he is almost like the perfect instrument instrument instrument of this state. The law as it stands right now is almost like a kind of sacred duty to him. Okay. Yet it would feel very odd to call Kristama a nationalist, right? Because Kristama obviously has no love for the [snorts] people of Britain. Kastama has no love it seems for anything apart from the full force of the law and the state as it is and the institution which must be protected at all costs. Um, so I'm wondering if we can use a figure, a weird modern figure like Kia Starmmer to tease out a little bit, right?

[00:08:44]Because I think you'd agree with me, Mike, that Starmmer is not really a nationalist despite the fact that he's so closely identified with the British state. Or is he a nationalist? This is a this is a genuine question.

[00:08:59]Well, I don't think he's nationalist because he has explicitly said famously that he identifies more with Davos than with Westminister.

[00:09:08]So, I don't think we can call him a nationalist. But there are people certainly in his orbit that might be called civic nationalists. Now before we go down the route of um explaining civic nationalism, I think we need to make a distinction between the nation and the state because the nation and this is how I define it in the book is a historically continuous self-recognizing human collectivity. It's a people basically and the state is an apparatus of rule. So it's a structure that ad administers um it it gives law. it wields coercion and so on and so forth. So the nation is and this is another formulation from the book the nation is the thing and the state is the instrument used to govern that thing. Here Starmer is loyal to the state but he's not loyal to the nation.

[00:10:02]Um, >> so and I I mean it's important to make this because nations can exist without states, right? You could think of the Jewish people historically or Kurdish people and so on and so forth. And uh states can preside over nations that or over more than one nation, right? You might think of an empire like the Austrian Hungar AustroHungarian Empire and so on and so forth. So actually Kierst Star is very useful here because he illustrates this distinction very clearly because he obviously is loy like he's not like he has no loyalty. He's loyalty to institutions. he's loy lo loyalty to an administration um and perhaps we could say a constitutional order although yeah it's it's complicated because the English constitution is unwritten but he basically is kind of speaking the language of the state rather than the language of of nationalism so he's very state centric he tends to treat Britain more as a kind of administrative society than as an organic people um and so that I think that's where he makes that the distinction basically and we might get into this uh dichotomy a little bit later. He is loyal to thin identities but he's very disloyal to thick identities. He kind of seems to distrust them and so does the you know uh globalist um the elites basically they they they see thick identities as suspect and and and morally questionable and um possibly dangerous. Well, definitely they see them as dangerous.

[00:11:42]Um, so that's where he kind of sits in there. I would not characterize him as a nationalist.

[00:11:48]>> Yeah, that's uh yeah, I think that's a good way I I thought Starama might be an interesting figure to try to encapsulate exactly what we're talking about here.

[00:12:00]So given that, so you're you're making you're starting to make nationalism sound quite good in a way with this kind of thick kind of uh characterization you might want to put it or you know and for the reasons that Starmer wouldn't like it. Okay, a lot of people may be thinking, well those sound like good things, right? And not just because he doesn't like them.

[00:12:23]But when I was talking to you before the stream, you said, "Well, actually, you have some, you know, you have some, I guess, uh, nuances that you want to put around this." Um, and this will bring us back around to K Carl Benjamin's critique of nationalism as well. What is the issue with nationalism, Mike? uh if it if it becomes the top level identity like what is the fundamental problem here?

[00:12:55]So I mean nationalism is actually quite attractive and for a long time I called myself a nationalist. I don't anymore actually. Um because it is attractive though because it it really solves real problems, right? Um it it it's it's good at bringing a large number of people under a single polity, right? It's it reduces factionalism. Um it's able to act at an international scale. Basically what nationalism does is it promotes uh national unity and organization at scale which is obviously very very adaptive in a geopolitical environment like when you have effectively an anarchctic system with uh power vacuums and you have to act in your own interest or make alliances with others who can. The nation is very useful there. This is a this is a mere shimer point.

[00:13:51]>> Um so that's what's good about it. But um there's a trade-off.

[00:13:58]National unity, the stronger it gets, the more it tends to undermine the pre-political social capital that underlies the nation. And I think those are points uh those are terms that might bear some definition at some point, but I'll just make the point first.

[00:14:15]um when nation when when nationalism uh when it tries to stand above the lower identities that I mentioned before like family, clan, tribe, folk, and so on. Um, it begins as something that doesn't compete with those, but then it ends up actually trying to undermine them and compete with them because they command loyalty much more naturally uh than the nation actually does. Most of us are more loyal to our locality, certainly to our family, than we are to the nation. But the nation asks us to put that aside, right? Like if your brother say for example was to commit a crime um it would be expected like polite society expects that you would turn him in and that you wouldn't hide him or you know what I mean like you you'd put the the good of the nation before the good of your own family. Um and this is quite reasonable right like it makes sense and it's intuitive and everything partly it's intuitive because this is what we've lived on lived under for centuries. But the fact is that people are more loyal to their family.

[00:15:26]they are more loyal to their locality.

[00:15:29]They are more loyal to um all of these smaller, more close pre-political identities.

[00:15:37]And so what the nation has to do is it it uses a number of different means to make its the identity of the nation stronger than any of those. Some of them are, you know, symbolic means, things like national anthems, flags, um, and and, you know, even things like myths and legends and founding stories and and you know, people like, uh, pointing to heroes like King Alfred or George Washington and things like that. Um, it uses these symbolic means, but it also is not afraid to uh revert to coercive means basically to put these lower level identities in their place because they are basically juvenelian rival castles. Anybody who's read the populist delusion will understand what that means. They're basically these intermediary structures that the system depends upon but are always sort of threatening to overtake the larger system. the nation kind of has to spend the social capital that these uh lower level identities produces in order to keep them in check. So nationalism seems like you could put it this way there's like a reservoir of social capital which in a very rough sense is something like trust. um there's a reservoir of this social capital that or arises organically just by the way that these smaller identities operate. What nationalism does is it draws from that reservoir and says um you should treat the nation like a family. Uh but nationalism doesn't actually replenish those uh that that reservoir over time.

[00:17:24]in a healthy state it does or it tries at least not to draw from the reservoir too unsustainably.

[00:17:30]But over time it seems to be inevitable that it will actually do that that it will weaken say the family identity which is you know we see what's happened with the denigration of the family father the denigration of the family antiatalism all of these things um the the the system seems to be pretty anti-family I think most people can agree with that and part of that is just basically this juvenelian in mechanism of trying to um tamp down on anything that could possibly challenge it. So over time the nation tends to undermine these uh lower level structures but because the na the nation depends upon things like family feeling or you know clan or ethnic solidarity um at least analogously for it to hold together over time essentially it's kind of sawing away at the branch that it's sitting on. it's under man undermining its own foundation and I think that this helps to explain where we are today and and why although on one hand uh nationalism seems to be enjoying a resurgence on the other hand things seem to be moving in a bit of a more tribal direction which is something that we talked about in an earlier interview so I think nationalism is it seems to be coming back but it's also much more fragile than it ever was. So, it's a bit of an unstable situation.

[00:19:04]>> You know, it it would be remiss of me not to mention, you know, as a as a Welshman, Mike, right? Uh I have to I have to mention the fact that there are real historical examples of the bigger nationalism uh trampling on smaller identities. In the case of Wales, okay? And I'm not and I'm not doing this in some kind of like performative Welsh nationalist thing or to you know this is like just a historical fact. The English and the British state at various times in history went as far as to ban and to punish Welsh. The language of Welsh, the language of Welsh was basically resurrected in like uh you know over the past hundred years it was resurrected after being actively oppressed in France.

[00:19:56]Napoleon literally went around on horseback and sword trampling on the smaller regional French identities and dialects bringing it all under one banner of you know the this is going to be the French now. So these things actually happened as a historical fact.

[00:20:17]So there you can see like nationalism being used in a way to trample on local what you'd call local identities.

[00:20:26][snorts] Um so that is something that I think is worth bearing in mind. Uh you can also see when nationalism became a real thing uh various uh theorists and political figures grappling with these problems when they basically create national myths. uh in the case of Italy this was a problem because the and still even today I mean it the history of Italy is the history of city states and also very much the history of north the north versus the south. So I think the guy's name was Mazini.

[00:21:05]uh he uh you know basically had to be like what's a unified national story that we can tell ourselves that's not too centered on Rome that doesn't privilege the north over the south and you know this is something the Mussolini had to had to kind of contend with as well uh in the case of India obviously India is a massive massive country Gandhi literally had to sat sit down and be like what are the unifying national things that we can call Indian where it's not just like Punjab or not just you know this area or that area uh you know and in that case they've got tons of ethnicities tons of languages tons of different religions so you know Gandhi had a pretty difficult task ahead of him uh but Indian nationalism remains a thing today currently India has a nationalist leader called Modi uh you Uh so uh the but these are kind of genuine serious questions that uh I I think a lot of nationalists don't either don't consider or don't take seriously enough.

[00:22:17]>> Yeah, I agree. And um this is [clears throat] part of why you know we wanted to put out this book. This the book in question is just called nationalism and it's part of a new series that we're calling fundamentals which is basically introductions to different topics. So on the one hand um the book is intended to take nationalism seriously to give it a fair hearing and um to explain why it actually works and and and not just as a sort of lamentation about um you know that it's it's bigoted or or primitive or anything like that. But on the other hand, uh, taking it seriously means looking at it for what it is and and and doing, as you say, a value-free analysis of nationalism. And there are some serious issues with it, right? Because basically, I mean, the overall problem, there's a number of trade-offs, but the main trade-off that I wanted to talk about today is the trade-off between scale and cohesion. essentially um because you know nationalists often you know a lot of people sort of in the you know in the right-wing um sphere shall we say people who would be in favor of restore or maybe even just reform um are they they they see the nation as essentially kind of like as a people right as in the in the way that I've I've already laid out and that is the right way to see it But when you see the nation as an organic people, then we have to ask ourselves how the how it actually holds together.

[00:24:00]Like what are what is the glue? What is the force that actually holds it together? And really what the nation does in order to hold like millions of people together is it does it by extending um it scales kinship basically, right?

[00:24:19]Because for there to be millions upon millions of people, I I forget how many people what the population of of Great Britain is right now, what somewhere like 50 million people or something, 70 million people, what?

[00:24:31]>> More like 80 >> 80 million people.

[00:24:33]>> 70 or 80.

[00:24:34]>> That's a lot of that's a lot of strangers to have inside of your um core identity like that's a lot of people to say us about, right? So the nation has to solve a problem and the problem is that people can only really hold about 100 to 300 personal relationships in their head at once. So what it needs to do is it needs to actually scale these smaller loyalties into symbolic and in institutional forms. I gave some examples of symbolic forms before flags, national anthems, uh this sort of thing, right?

[00:25:15]So sorry to interrupt sorry to interrupt Mike but because I know what commenters are like I should qualify what I just said. When I said 70 to 80 the official stats are about 68. Okay. But friends of mine have done analysis on sewage pipes and things like that suggesting that there's probably about 10 million extra people in the country if you look at the electricity grid sewage etc. So that that's where my figure is coming from just to just to be clear otherwise all the comments will be you know he doesn't know how many people there are in the country anyway go on carry on.

[00:25:50]>> Yeah. Um but however many people there are it's way too many to hold in your head all at once. So the nation has to sort of borrow the emotional force of family basically and it has to in order to basically in order to make this relatively thin identity and I know people are going to get mad about me calling national identity thin but certainly compared to familial identity compared to like extended family ident all these things it is quite thin you know by comparison certainly thicker than racial identity thicker than the species level identity or whatever it is. These things are on a scale, right?

[00:26:31]So, >> um it basically and and maybe we should talk about that first. Maybe we should talk about what what's meant by thick identity and thin identity.

[00:26:41]>> I I want to get into that, Mike. I also want to get into a few a few other topics as well after my uh break here because I want to get into I want to this is one of the things that I've been going on about for years actually was is the relative thinness of you know British national identity. I call it biscuit tin traditionalism, right?

[00:27:02]Morgoth also coined the term bulldog nationalism as well where you know in this country there's a set of markers and it's like you know a a tin of shortbread biscuits with a queen's face on it. You know what I mean? Um and it's like so I want to get into exactly what these thin or thick markers are in a second uh and some of the potential problems with them. I also want to talk about the issue from the other end, the empire part, which is one of the reasons I've never I have never at any point, despite what lies you might read about me, ever said I'm a nationalist because I, you know, I've always seen all of these things uh from both ends, from the from the from the super local point of view and from the just the power imperial imperial point of view as well.

[00:27:53]But we we'll get into both of those topics and much more. But first, I must remind people that I have a sale on at the moment at the academic agency. It's 25% off all courses. Promo code cool. Uh watch this ad and then we'll just come back straight away. Everybody wants to be cool. Like this guy. This guy is cool. [music] You know who else is cool?

[00:28:16]People who do courses at the academic agency. And you too can be cool by getting a course today with promo code cool, which gets you 25% off all courses. Tada. [music] Promo code cool.

[00:28:34][snorts] That's how Mike is hanging out uh right now in his his uh funky jacket. Um just before we get going, Mike, where can people buy this book? We should mention that >> you can get this at imperionpress.org.

[00:28:48]Um, it was released a couple of weeks ago, but by Imperium standards, it is now, um, on well, it's it's not one of the featured releases because we've had like three since then. So, we just are going at an absolutely insane pace, but if you click on the titles, you'll find it. It's just called Nationalism, and it's part of the fundamentals series.

[00:29:10]>> I'll put I'll put a link down in the uh down in the notes here. Um, okay. So let's let's get back to this question of a thin and thick identity because in I mean it you know o over the years and I I've been kind of involved uh you know in online politics in general for about a decade at this point. So I've seen many cycles come and go. I've seen all the different, you know, I've been able to map all the different factions of the all the different sides, the right and the left, and all the douchebags in between. And, you know, over the years, my least favorite kind of creature has been what I generally call the Tory boy. Okay? And there are all sorts of kind of cultural and national markers that they cling to.

[00:30:03]It's I mean, okay, you can picture your your tin of Scottish shortbread with a Queen's face on it. Um maybe you've got um uh you know, Winston Churchill, right? Winston Churchill's another one with his big cigar. Uh maybe there'll be like the symbol of the lion uh with a flag over his face.

[00:30:28]I mean, what else do they point to? But you know and and then you know they share them in really quite boomer quite a kind of boomerrific manner and all I can think of when I look at these is like literally everything that you're doing is just furthering liberal hedgemony right every single aspect of this constructed identity is just used to sell the brand of UK plc and it is not actually getting to the root of what it means to be British. And of course, part of it segways into this notion that anybody, regardless of where they come from in the world, can simply become British just by, for example, having high tea and playing cricket.

[00:31:26]Right? But we know and you know and everybody watching this knows that no amount of you know drinking uh tea and eating Victoria sponge and watching Paddington Bear and playing cricket is going to turn I don't know like a Somalian into an English gentleman right so how do we navigate this so how do you like is there more to it am I selling national identity short by by you know pointing to these derisive things cuz when it actually manifests in real life or on Twitter or on social media or in a Tommy Robinson march or something, it's all this [ __ ] all the time. It's always the same symbols.

[00:32:08]Mike, take it away. Yeah. Well, um I think the main distinction here to be made between what we might call like a valid uh British identity versus something that's relatively superficial is that the valid British identities tend to be something that's inherited.

[00:32:29]Um whereas the superficial identities tend to be something more portable, right? Um, so for example, we, you know, as and in a way I I consider myself maybe spiritually British be being Canadian and part of the Commonwealth, which is something that I actually uh take seriously. You know, my my Canadian national identity identity is historically essentially loyalism to the British Empire. That's what it means to be a Canadian conservative. I mean >> that wouldn't be what you know Pierre Pair would not agree with that today the head of the Conservative party in Canada but that is historically what it means.

[00:33:10]So anyway um I feel like I can maybe speak a little bit on British identity for that reason but the the real like thick British identity is something that's inherited and historical. It's something that you can't step in and out of. You couldn't leave it if you tried, you know. uh pointing to something like um the consolidation of the the the British peoples um under the Anglo-Saxons and uh in in the early you know m medieval era that would be something that's an important part of British identity is an important part of British identity king Alfred is an important part of British identity identity uh the the Arthurian cycle is something that's important to British identity that's something that we we share as people's who are part of this sort of collective endeavor. Of course, a collective endeavor can absorb people's over time and it has to it part of it. And what hap tends to happen is the, you know, the Tommy Robinsons and the Tory boys and the uh, you know, Americans would say conservatives tend to focus on these these portable identities uh, more than the essential identities. So I'm talking about things like beliefs, you know, as a British person, you know, we believe in in freedom, we believe in the rule of law, we believe in X, Y, and Z. And that's all wonderful. But there if that is what it means to be a British person, then at the end of the day, there is no reason to distinguish Great Britain from America because America believes in those things too. There's no reason to dist distinguish it from South Korea because South Korea is liberal and believes in the rule of law as well. So there must be something thicker that is more inherited and embodied. in particular, we are engaged in this historical project that is the nation.

[00:35:18]Now, I think this is important because >> some nationalists will tend to view the nation as something that's more too static, something that never changes and is just primordially has been the same since the beginning of time. And I don't think that's good because things that are static tend to be dead. uh there has to be a dynamism where the nation can change while um retaining its essential character basically but in order to do that it has to be part of this historical project and it's not something that you can just kind of believe your way into or it's not it's not a I mean it is a set of customs being British is um in many ways very customary but that's not all it is and people who are more like on civic nationalist end of things tend to look at those things and say that's actually all that it is and that's a huge mistake and that's why you know something like store has been popular.

[00:36:18]>> This is this is quite a tricky area because let me let me try to like make this more concrete. Let me give you an example of of a tweet that I saw the other day. Can't remember who this was but it was you know one of the reasonably big kind of British right accounts. I think it was a guy called Ukiper who's got like a Nigel Farage Avatar like eating a sandwich or something like that. And he put up a picture of a bag of um fish and chips.

[00:36:46]Okay. Bag of fish and chips in a newspaper. Okay. And he just said, "This is my politics." Right? And it was like like a picture of some fish and chips.

[00:36:58]Okay? Now, here's the thing. The fish and ships obviously does not have the long history of going back to King Alfred. Uh in fact I think it was brought over in the 19th century possibly, don't quote me on this, but possibly by uh the Jewish community in North London. I could be wrong about that, but I I I've got it in the back of my mind that it came in in the 19th century and it was brought over by a group like that. Okay.

[00:37:30]However, it is also true that anybody who grew up in this country will know what he's talking about because it is embodied and it is something that everybody does and it's something that people in this country do that they don't do for example in Spain or in France or in Germany or elsewhere. Okay.

[00:37:50]So there is a part there's like you you see that image and you you know what he's talking about but at the same time in the back of my mind I'm thinking well this is not like the long history going back to King Alfred. So how do you deal with that? Like as this is like a live this is like a typical thing that you'd see on you know British right Twitter on any given day. So how do you pass that image? How do you pass that tweet? This is my politics. The bag and fish and chips.

[00:38:22]>> Well, on the one hand, it's kind of do doing something good. Like I I can endorse it in a um qualified way, right?

[00:38:32]Because what it's not doing is it's not affirming a proposition, right? It's not saying you know diversity is our strength or even something like you know the rule of law is uh you know affirming the rule of law right it's it's not affirming something that can be true or false which is the weakest and thinnest kind of identity really because by definition anybody can affirm anything as being true or false right like truth is something that is universal inherently so there's not much of an identity to be built upon affirming propositions. So that's good. I like that. But also at the same time, it's affirming something that is very abstract, you know, something that is a little bit far away from the ground, you know, for what I would what I would prefer, right? And I think here to understand what what's going on here um [clears throat] we need to introduce another distinction and this is between civic nationalism, ethnic nationalism and cultural nationalism which is kind of a continuum really. Um they're really positions on a spectrum of abstraction.

[00:39:45]So civic nationalism is the most abstract and cultural less so and ethnic nationalism almost entirely not abstract. Right? So, and by abstraction, what I mean is how closely does it map onto the pre-political identities beneath the nation that we talked about in the beginning, right? Ethnic nationalism uh very much maps onto those identities and as a result, it's the least likely to undermine the social capital that those identities build up. Cultural nationalism is kind of a middle form between that and civic nationalism. And it defines the nation mainly through things like traditions or customs like eating fish and chips. Maybe it might define it linguistically. Maybe it might define it in terms of like a shared history or symbols or literature and everything. When I say that, you know, Arththeran, the Arththeran cycle is really close to the root of British identity. Well, it is. It's closer, but it's not right down at the bedrock.

[00:40:52]Right? This is cultural nationalism. And of course, beyond that, in terms of abstraction, we have um civic nationalism, which basically basically detaches the nation from the pre-political identities that make nations have like thick identity, right?

[00:41:08]It's it's what Kier Starmer would endorse if he would endorse nationalism of any kind.

[00:41:15]um cultural nationalism sits in the middle of that and this seems to be this tweet is an expression of that. It's an expression of this cultural nationalism which is actually there's a strength to this cultural nationalism because it can kind of first of all it can integrate somewhat broader populations which is part of the reason why English identity was able to grow out and and eventually consolidate Scottish identity, Irish well Northern Irish identity, Welsh identity and so on and so forth, right?

[00:41:50]through a shared culture and now obviously there's a familial relationship between the British peoples as well but it was mainly done in terms of culture in terms of religion and and other things like that so it's very strong but it depends on culture being thick and authoritative especially if the culture deteriorates to being too thin or like aesthetic like eating fish and chips or consumerist or and or something that you can step out of then cultural nationalism M tends to kind of weaken. It can be it becomes this sort of museum nationalism, right? Or or like a um food truck nationalism where all you have in common with your folk are that you eat the same food, you speak the same language and all of these things. Now, shared like cuisine, we've done me and my podcast partner Dave Martell on Culture Dads. We've done several episodes on the importance of cuisine to cultural identity to being folk uh being part of a certain folk. Um it's important, but that's not all of it, right? And cultural nationalism can decay into civic nationalism pretty easily when it focuses only on those cultural trappings and not upon the sort of substrate that lies underneath all of it.

[00:43:15]>> So what one thing I mean this uh uh interview that we're doing will probably go out on May Bank holiday uh here in uh here in Britain. But we also have a pre like there's two bank holidays in May.

[00:43:31]There's tons of like it kind of drives me as a dad. It drives me up up the wall because it's two two days off school.

[00:43:37]The little one.

[00:43:38]>> Yeah.

[00:43:39]You know, another day off. Um but the first one is Mayday, which is an ancient festival. Okay. One of the oldest customs in the country is going around the maple. And I thought it would be really nice to take my family to place called Hea Castle and uh for my little one to do the to do the maple and we did it and it was a lovely day, really nice thing. Uh and I've talked about this on on other shows as well. But as I was watching the Maple and they had actors there who were kind of um you know kind of hamming it up for the kids and all that sort of stuff. But you know they had a king of the spring and a king of the summer and a king of the autumn and a king of the the winter and they they did the maple. They did it in the traditional manner. But as I was watching it play out with, you know, all of the parents with their phones out taking pictures of the kids and, you know, some bloke was there in his track seat and, you know, I was thinking some part of this is not living. This is, you know, you mentioned the phrase museum.

[00:44:49]This is not the embodiment of a living tradition. this is some act this is like some modern people doing it because it feels nice or something like that but it didn't feel like there was some part of me that was like this is not authentic okay and this is where it gets difficult like because there's some part of that fish and chips where I go back to when I was 80 or something going to that fish and chip shop people are genuinely there they're not thinking about anything else They're just living their lives and they're having some fish and chips. That in a strange way is living embodied and authentic. Whereas the Mayday, the maple thing, even though it had a longer history, in the moment it didn't feel authentic to me. It felt like people were, I don't know, doing a lap or even worse just kind of doing it as a bit of kind of antiquated fun. So, how do you deal with how do you deal with this particular problem? because it's something I've um something I've kind of meditated on and I don't really know the answer to it.

[00:45:56]>> Well, the maple example is is kind of interesting because it it feels old. Um it it gestures toward like a deep folk custom, folk continuity going back before, you know, England ever became Christianized. And it feels like it's kind of ours. And this oursness, I actually devote a section in the book to coining this term oursness sort of hideagarian. That is essentially the legitimating factor. It's it's it's sort of the core of legitimacy. But for most people today, um it it it doesn't have the resonance that it once did. Um because the world that produced the maple has in some sense disappeared.

[00:46:43]Now, I as a pagan revivalist am keen to revive that world or at least to revive the the underlying the substrate that sort of like underlies it. But it's important I think it the what you're sort of getting at here is that symbols can't carry a civilization if the forms of life that produce those symbols have disappeared. Right? And this is why restoration, and I use that term very um deliberately here, why restoring the nation is such a serious task because the maple is not at all meaningless.

[00:47:27]It's very meaningful. It's it's tied to us as a people. It's something that no other people has produced. And it's the same reason why uh we need to restore and perhaps undo some of the um undo some of the precedent that has been uh accreted into the English constitution obviously an unwritten constitution based on precedent while there have been some horrific precedents that have been established in the last few generations.

[00:47:58]Um so we need to restore that. So this kind of um what you're gesturing I think is that this form of life doesn't feel authentic because it has kind of disappeared. And the question is can we regenerate that? Can we regenerate these thick bonds of identity? I think that we can, right? But I I also understand why people say, for example, call paganism a lar or why they they feel like it's kind of a performative thing because um rebuilding that world will take a lot of effort. Now, I don't want to get into pagan revivalism.

[00:48:40]That's not what we're here to talk about. we could just as easily and we should be talking about reviving Britain, restoring Britain as a uh you know a form of life as as what it was.

[00:48:53]And that doesn't mean that it can't continue into the future. As we said before, nations need to be living things. They need to be be dynamic.

[00:49:00]They're not fossils. But we do need to restore it because it's not healthy. Um there's nothing bad about going backwards. There's nothing bad inherently about restoring health with sickness. If you have cancer, you want to restore your earlier state and there's nothing wrong with that. And that's kind of what I think, you know, folks who are organizing these maple celebrations, they in their own way are trying to restore Britain. They're trying to restore their English and British identity by reviving these folk customs. So, [snorts] I think that that's actually very important work that they're doing, but it's just simply not accomplished yet and that that is why it feels a little bit inauthentic. But as my boy Dave says, um once like something might be a LAR, but then once you teach it to your children, it becomes tradition. And this is uh you know really important for us to understand that once we win and we will win whether it depend it the only question is at what cost. Will we restore Britain or we will will we restore a a patchwork of tribes. But when we do win and liberalism is, you know, somewhat into the rear view mirror, uh, these things will appear as though they are forever, like that they've been there forever to our children in just the same way that fish and chips feels like it's been there since we were speaking old English, right? So, this is this is the work that we have to do basically. Um, and it just seems that it's not done yet.

[00:50:43]>> Yeah. No, I I I I agree with that. I mean, obviously I have the I had the desire to do the maple and I think I'm going to try to do it every year so that it does become something that at least my six-year-old daughter becomes accustomed to doing every single year.

[00:50:59]Um, you know, and maybe by like the fifth year it won't feel like a lap or or whatnot, you know. Um, but last thing I want to touch on, Mike, uh, before we, uh, go is that one of the reasons I've never called myself a nationalist, uh, is because I'm I've, you know, from a pure realist point of view, I've never really been convinced that lots of nations kind of, uh, have the cap, like whether it's realistic for them to assert their nationalism, right, to spur that way. Um, and I'm I'm sure I'm pretty sure that you and I discussed this uh, you know, in one of our previous conversations.

[00:51:38]Um, you know, so when I look at, for example, you know, Russia versus Ukraine, I see a massive empire versus one tiny little, well, it's not tiny, but one relatively small nation. And you know, for a lot of people, they think like, well, okay, because I'm a nationalist, I I support Ukraine in that. Whereas me, as the as the kind of slightly colder realist just says, no, the the empire is always going to assert itself. And the history of mankind is the history of empires.

[00:52:10]But apart from the American Empire, which we need to park for a second, which I see as uniquely evil, and I'll tell I'll explain why in a second.

[00:52:19]I think that these two things that we've been talking about, the overarching empire, okay, and these little local identities can and have for hundreds of years coexisted.

[00:52:33]That is the imperial the imperial center if it's wise if it is judicious and if it is you know um done in the best possible way actually leaves these little things alone and is happy just to collect a couple of taxes from the local leaders and to devolve the power downwards and all the most successful empires in history have done this uh you know uh Persian Empire, Ottoman Empire, uh British Empire, fire to to some extent did this uh although it did crack down on you know burning widows in India and things like that in in many other respects it let it left a lot of places to kind of get on with it you know didn't meddle um uh you know even the Roman Empire you know didn't actually leave a kind of yeah okay they may have built some roads and put in some administration and so on but in terms of the actual local customs. It didn't trample on them in the way that let's say Napoleon did uh in in in France as we were talking about earlier on. So I've always thought that the ideal scenario would would would actually just be to I know allow the play of the great powers as Mia Shima talks about to play out but to hope that they are wise enough to kind of allow the local the local to flourish and to be you know relatively unmolested. Uh, my problem with the American Empire, and we do have to talk about this because we've all lived under it for our entire lives, is that the American Empire feels like it wants to destroy all locality, all quality, all manifestation and turn it into a theme park version of itself.

[00:54:26]Um, uh, in in in a way that I find uniquely destructive. It is the, you know, when Eve talks about it as the anti-modderernity, as the uh, sorry, as the anti-tradition, right? What he's talking about is its capacity just to basically raise and eradicate and homogenize all in its path. Uh and this I find you know when I go around this country the thing that I presses me most not just around this country but around the world is if I go to a city or if I go to a town and I feel like it could just be any other town you know and you know I don't want to go to uh like Birmingham and be like well this this literally could be anywhere in the country because most high streets now are exactly the same with the same shops the same malls you know stand. There's a place down the road from here called Woking with this enormous shopping mall. Could be literally anywhere in the country. You just wouldn't know where you were. Could and you could even lift it up and you know other than the spellings of a few things, you could probably be somewhere in the Midwest because these things exist all over America as well. And I'm sure they exist in Australia and in Canada as well. So th this to me is the is one of the biggest challenges and I would love the uh the American empire to kind of not be like this to kind of allow the local to flourish a bit more under its uh under its hateful gaze. So what do you say about this?

[00:55:58]>> I would love to see that as well. Um because it seems that that is for better or worse what we live under right now.

[00:56:05]We live under that empire. Um, and there are historical precedents for it being able to work. I mean, the Persian Empire was a really good example of being able to tolerate local difference. Even the Mongols for the relatively brief period of time uh that they had their empire, they were quite religiously tolerant.

[00:56:25]Um, you know, you think of something like Christrysendom in uh the Middle Ages that sort of left local parishes and and villages and local lords and kingdoms more or less to sort of tend to their own, you know, affairs and everything like that. Rome to some extent, the British Empire to some extent, China, you know, there's all like, you know, historically China was able to do that within its own ambit. So, it's not like this is impossible, but I think that the issue is that um the logic of power and the the structure of imperialism sort of dictates that it will always go in the wrong direction, right? Because empire will tolerate local identity only so long as it remains politically weak and it will remain politically weak only so long as it's not thick. Right? So the American Empire or the quote unquote international community as it's sometimes called, it kind of speaks in this language of universality, but that the universality requires that it weakens these local and particular loyalties that are stubborn and and and won't sort of play ball and everything like that. Um and you know it it it basically does this by undermining the again the social capital and the pre-political identities that the larger identity relies upon. So all that's kind of left uh to bind people together is coercion and and naked force because geopolitical scale has to tend toward abstraction like the the the global empire or the the the global American empire or whatever you want to call it.

[00:58:23]um it requires a level of standardization and ideological simplification and and and all of this stuff that is just totally disconnected from real life. So empire in general like historically empire has begins as tolerant but then it tends to kind of unravel peoplehoods over time because then people get used to living under it and uh you know no longer are they grateful that the emperor is is letting them have the religion that they want but they actually get ambitions and and they want to sort of break away or they want to you know angle for more power. So it it tends to like empire basically has to tamp down on these local identities. It can tolerate them sort of but it can't really allow them to get too powerful. So it it over time empire tends to erase these more local identities and I that's what's happening now. And I think that the American Empire uh has now reached a point where is so coercive, where is so badly undermines the local identities that it effectively has um turned almost all of its vassal states against it. And this is why you see like a true revival happening in Britain rather than happening in America, right? Donald Trump, I mean, yes, Trump at one point did represent like a serious challenge to the system. Obviously, he's been um folded into it now, but this is always what happens in at the late stages of empire, which is that the the the provinces or the outlying areas, this is where trouble starts. And trouble for the American Empire looks like Rupert Low. trouble for the American Empire looks like um all of the like you know that it looks like the March for Australia and so on and so forth. All of these things spell the end of it basically and it the only thing that it can do basically is to um become more coercive and that makes things worse. It just starts a feedback loop that um essentially leads to imperial unraveling. So unfortunately that's what's happening but also in a way fortunately that seems to be what's happening. I just don't see a future for uh Tony Blair unfortunately for him. Um he's had his he's had his golden age I think. So for me that is a a white pill but I guess it depends on your perspective.

[01:01:08]>> I uh yeah I tend to I tend to agree Mike to be honest. I I I feel like something's happening. I feel like it is unraveling faster than we faster than any of us would have thought a few years ago. Um, and you know, I I I get the sense that people are ready for some like people in general. It's not just political anger anymore. They're ready for something else as well, I think. But, uh, I again, I could be wrong. Uh, anyway, Mike, uh, what is the name of the book again and where can people get it? It's called Nationalism and it's part of our new fundamental series and you can pick that up at imperiumpress.org.

[01:01:52]So check that out. We've um we've been very busy this year. We've got already dozens of books out. So um yeah, I hope you guys enjoy all that.

[01:02:02]>> Fantastic. And you want to keep Imperium Press uh busy, guys, because uh they're one of the few genuinely quality presses out there. uh you know publishing material like this. So yeah, do support uh them as much as you can. Uh also you can pick up a course the academic agency promo code cool and I'll catch you all next time. Cheers, Mike.

[01:02:27]If you like this video, be sure to like and subscribe. You can join the channel for thousands of hours of past shows in the archive and hundreds of videos. If you have any questions, you can leave a super chat or a super thanks and I'll be sure to pick it up during my weekly office hours which run every Tuesday afternoon.

[01:02:49]I also provide courses at the academic agency which I encourage people to buy.

[01:02:54]Thousands of students now have taken the trivia to improve their skills in writing, logic, and rhetoric. Just three of many courses available. Buy it now.

[01:03:06]But most importantly of all, friends, get out.