America is part of the West, and as both a political andcultural order, is not “based on a creed” or “derived from aproposition.” America is neither a “universal nation” nor an”experiment” concocted by ideologues. America is the unique andirreplaceable product of centuries of specific racial, historical, andcultural identities. America and its cultural and political identitywill endure only so long as the identities that created it and sustainit endure, and when they die, America will die. We do not wish this tohappen and will work to ensure it does not. –The Editors, The Occidental Quarterly, A Statement of Principles.
This quote in particular, and the Occidental Quarterly’s Statementof Principles in general, go a long way towards capturing the essenceof American White Nationalism. White Nationalists believe that westerncivilization is a product of the peoples who created it, rather than aproduct of luck or happenstance.
White Nationalism is linked in the minds of many to white”supremacism”. Many modern White Nationalists explicitly deny beingwhite supremacists, arguing that they merely wish for each group ofpeople with shared heritage, including white people, to be allowed topromote and preserve its heritage, and do not desire to oppress ordominate other races as racial supremacists do. Many of their criticscharge that White Nationalism is simply white “supremacism” in disguise.
There is of course an exceptionally easy litmus test fordistinguishing between White Nationalists and white supremacists: whitesupremacists are by definition unable to accept at face value any datathat evince non-white superiority (e.g. relatively higher East Asian orAshkenazi Jewish average IQ, lower East Asian propensity for violentcrime, West African dominance in short distance running, etc.).
Critics of White Nationalism (or, more accurately, those who smearWhite Nationalism – honest criticism is hard to come by in themainstream media) often tar all White Nationalists with the same brush,conflating a wide range of thought and opinion with into a singledemonized “group,” when in fact the lion’s share of White Nationalistthought is not currently generated by National Socialists or the likesof the Aryan Nations, but by conservatives.
The racial left often asserts that racism is a morally bankrupt beliefsystem that bases identity on surface racial differences like skinpigmentation, that “racism is based on skin color.” This assertionapproaches the status of mantra in the public consciousness. In truth,there is no basis for the idea that White Nationalists elevate surfaceracial differences beyond their proper domain. Racial realists ingeneral see these surface differences essentially as markers for race,not as the important substance of race. On the other hand, socialidentity theory tells us that these surface differences are sociallyvery important in and of themselves.