Interacting with Liberal Thought
A brief guide to operating in the murky world of Liberal politics
Written by Elias Priestly. Find all his previous articles on the Australian Natives Association website and more of his content on 𝕏 @Aussie_EliasP
Recently, there has been much talk by readers and listeners of the National Observer on the topic of political entryism, particularly entryism directed at the Liberal Party. In this guide, I would like to suggest a few ways that nationalists can interface with liberal ideas and institutions in order to further the nationalist cause. These approaches to interfacing with liberal thought are broken down into three strategies:
Emphasising Pre-Liberal Elements
Positioning in terms of Western Civilisation
Using Tactical Libertarianism
Each point will build on the previous ones to form the skeleton of an approach to working with or within liberal institutions. The fully fleshed out detail to go with this skeletal framework should be worked out pragmatically as your particular situation calls for.
Emphasising Pre-Liberal Elements
Many people who are involved in what could be called “dissident fringe politics,” both left and right, have a low view of our current form of democracy with its electoral system. I think that we should actually take a much more nuanced approach, particularly because often we are not complaining strictly about the democratic elements, but of oligarchic distortions of the system which actually functions as a mixed regime rather than as a pure democracy. There are elements of our historical and even current political system that create conditions favourable to our cause. In this section, I suggest we emphasise pre-liberal elements borrowed from Plato and Christianity.
Plato is often remembered as an authoritarian absolutist and political utopian due to his promotion of a philosopher king monarchy in his work The Republic, but this popular view of Plato is not entirely accurate. Misconceptions about Plato’s position have developed largely because few go on to read his other political works such as Crito, The Statesman, and The Laws. Glenn R. Morrow, in a 1940 presentation on Plato’s politics to the American Philosophical Association, sought to rehabilitate Plato for liberals who had abandoned his thought due to its favourable reception by both Nazi and Soviet intellectuals.
The central thrust of Morrow’s defence is that Plato’s great respect for the rule of law tempered his absolutism and made him a more balanced political philosopher than many have been led to believe. In one of his late dialogues, the Statesman, Plato lays out two options for political leadership. Either you have the ideal of a virtuous scientific ruler who stands above the law due to his superior knowledge, or you have the second-best option of the absolute rule of unchanging traditional laws. At the end of his life Plato was working on a reasonable middle ground between these positions in the Nocturnal Council of his book The Laws.
In the Statesman, Plato also laid out an analysis of the different possible regimes that were later taken up and systematised by Aristotle in his Politics. These regimes are virtuous and vicious versions of rule by the one, the few, or the many. The virtuous regimes are monarchy, aristocracy, and polity. The corresponding vicious deviations are tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. Much of what dissidents dislike about the modern West is not rule by the many per se, but the specific faults of a regime built on a mixture of elements taken from both oligarchy and democracy. Of course, these two go together quite well because the masses are easily influenced through control over media messaging, but the ultimate blame here must be laid at the feet of the oligarchs. These oligarchs create a situation where the law is not enforced, or unjust laws are imposed contrary to true natural law. The solution to this situation is not just the replacement of these oligarchs in their positions of power, but rather as Plato saw, exposing the sophists for the charlatans they are.
In our own context, we need to spend less time imagining exactly how we would structure society given ideal conditions, and more time working on the second-best model that we have an actual chance of creating. Too often, by over-emphasising anti-liberal ideas of leadership such as the “Führerprinzip,” we throw out the baby with the bathwater. Plato only advocated the absolutism of the absolutely virtuous ruler. Under a system of tyranny, democracy can act as a brake on powers that might otherwise have outright obliterated their opposition. These brakes need not interfere with the legitimate exercise of unilinear power, a King’s demand in time of crisis for example, the monarch’s decisions need only be exceptions to a system of just laws.
What Morrow’s liberal defence of Plato reveals is a Platonic defence of aspects of democracy and the rule of law. In our present circumstances we must not make perfection the enemy of good, we must not discard of the useful & accessible powers democracy has afforded dissidents to affect change. Focus should be placed on working our way into the legal professions, through which we can approach our current liberal democracy as a stepping stone towards an ideal system that may be a mixed regime drawing upon elements from monarchy, aristocracy, and polity.
The other main pre-liberal source drawn upon by liberals is more familiar, so I will spend less time on it. It is the Christian religion, which has shown signs of returning to the political sphere in the form of Christian nationalism. We are all familiar with leaders like Tony Abbott with his Roman Catholicism and Scott Morrison with his Pentecostalism. While neither of these leaders were exactly shining examples of what we would like to see in terms of political change, they do show that Christianity is certainly acceptable in the party and to the electorate.
Liberals typically appeal to Christianity in order to ground the dignity of the “autonomous individual”, the subject of liberal politics, in the idea of the person as an image of God. Rather than using Christianity in this instrumental fashion, what is now needed in interfacing with liberals is to stay faithful to the entire worldview and its “conservative elements,” such as the rejection of homosexuality and other forms of degenerate behaviour. Historically, liberalism focused on maintaining an economic system of amoral free rational actors, and “subcontracted” the job of upholding moral standards to the Christian churches. We now need to introduce the traditional worldview of Christianity directly into the system instead.
Positioning Within Western Civilisation
Positioning your politics as being in continuity with “Western Civilisation” flows on quite naturally from my discussion of Plato and Christianity in the previous section. You must be careful not to overdo the “High Tory” element of our politics, but there is still a reasonable amount of room in Australian liberalism to emphasise the importance of maintaining Western Civilisation. The clearest example has been the close connection between former Liberal Party leaders like John Howard and Tony Abbott and The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. Similarly, the Institute of Public Affairs, a libertarian-style think tank for the Liberal Party also puts out articles supporting Western Civilisation with relative frequency. For the young political careerist, the first thing I would suggest is trying to take advantage of the opportunities institutions like these offer for building your political network, your own reputation and your influence. A scholarship from the Ramsay Institute is nothing to sneeze at if you are interested in influencing the Liberals.
Unfortunately, much of what these Liberals try to pass off as foundational aspects of Western Civilisation are the very things destroying Western Civilisation: individualism, anti-collectivism, negative freedom (“freedom from restraint”), free market economics, etc. They also seek to define Western Civilisation in terms of key ideas or a canon of Great Books which can theoretically be adopted by a person of any ethnic background. This framing is used to further reinforce notions of Western nations being “propositional” rather than states developed by real concrete ethnic communities. There is a careful course to steer between the liberal use of Western Civilisation (which is now essentially a palatable way to sell the deconstruction of Australia), and the authentic aspects outlined above in the previous section.
What is necessary is to promote discourse centred around the defence of Western Civilisation, and to slowly reassert the understanding of Western Civilisation as a concrete manifestation of our own Australian Anglo-Celtic and broader white culture. We also need to constantly steer Western Civilisation back to its authentic place of being the heritage and property of European peoples, rather than something that belongs to all races indiscriminately. Constant attacks on Australia as a “settler-colonial” nation and upon Western Civilisation as uniquely evil and racist make this area of discourse a permanently hot topic within the culture war, and a space that we desperately need to occupy as much as possible with our own messaging.
Deploying Tactical Libertarianism
Finally, it is necessary to discuss tactical libertarianism. This is because it will be almost impossible to challenge the dominant economic paradigm maintained by the liberal party due to the weight of the influence of wealthy donors who wish to ensure that their interests are represented. Recall that the entire purpose of the IPA being created by George Coles and Charles Kemp in 1943 was to establish a free market de-regularisation politics that could challenge Labor following the collapse of the original United Australia Party. In some respects, you could argue the Liberal Party originated as an arm of the IPA rather than the original appearance of the IPA being an arm of the Liberals. Certainly, Robert Menzies strongly approved of their policies as laid out in their original document on post-war reconstruction, Looking Forward. This powerful and ongoing influence of business and its interests will most likely need to be left alone by those seeking to use the Liberal Party, it can be challenged by other elements in the broader nationalist movement as part of what should be our full-spectrum approach.
Tactical libertarianism is the use of libertarian principles not out of any belief in them, but simply as a pragmatic approach to destroying the power of our political enemies. An example of this is the IPA’s interest in repealing Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 on free speech grounds, something also in the interest of nationalists. Another area where tactical libertarianism is useful is in defence of school choice. Whether or not school choice, i.e. the freedom for parents to choose the school they believe is best for their children, is actually best for education, is questionable. What is not so questionable is the policy’s usefulness for nationalists; if schooling is less regulated we can prevent our own children from suffering indoctrination in the woke “education” system, and have the option to build our own educational alternatives.
The last aspect to consider with tactical libertarianism is that libertarianism can also be used not just against our enemies but as part of a pipeline to nationalism for our allies. The original success of the alternative right in the 2016 period was built upon the foundations of both anti-war isolationism and the rising libertarian movement with its influential key figures like Ron Paul, later Stefan Molyneux and perhaps Carl Benjamin (“Sargon of Akkad”). As nationalists, we understand that ethnic collectivism is necessary for our people to survive and it is a large problem that foreign ethnic groups are collectivising in Australia while white Australians are expected to act as individuals. From the libertarian perspective, however, white Australians are closer to the ideal while the problem is that foreigners are attempting to impose collectivist and welfarist politics. The pipeline to nationalism requires highlighting the contradiction between wanting to establish libertarian politics while simultaneously importing people who consistently act as collectivists. Obviously, we need to eventually wean our people off libertarian and even classical liberal ideals, but in the meantime, we should use these ideas tactically as a pipeline to our actual position.
To conclude this article, I must briefly mention my own belief that practicing entryism in the context of the Liberal Party and its associated institutions is not a comprehensive strategy or something that I believe will lead to victory on its own. I do believe, however, that if it is carefully thought out and well-executed it could be part of a comprehensive strategy, and it could certainly give our movement access to more power than it currently has. Each element of a full-spectrum approach to achieving victory will strengthen other elements of the struggle. Activist metapolitical radicalisation of the electoral base will create more opportunities for entryists. If entryists succeed in achieving key objectives like repealing Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, activists will face less legal persecution. The important thing is that you, dear reader, undertake to contribute to some part of the nationalist struggle. How you go about contributing, is your decision.
For further reading on alternate political strategies, I recommend learning more about how the Australian Natives Association is building an independent nationalist community and how the British Australian Community is engaging with Australia’s cultural institutions.