http://inverted-world.com/index.php/feature/feature/the_decline_of_american_renaissance/When he held the first American Renaissance (AR) conference in 1994, Jared Taylor seemed to be on the cusp of bringing into being a major new paradigm in American politics: a race realism that could appeal to moderate conservatives. Taylor and his fellow speakers spoke forthrightly about racial differences in intelligence and criminality, as well the inevitability of racial conflict and the need for whites to defend their interests. However, Taylor’s race realism came with none of the extremist, conspiratorial, anti-Semitic baggage that had previously characterized American racialism. Here, it seemed, was someone who was forging a vision that could appeal to the mass of moderate and sensible Americans, rather than a handful of marginal cranks.
Thirteen years later, Taylor has failed to make good on his original promise. Through his refusal to denounce the blatant anti-Semitism of many of his followers, Taylor has proved that he either never understood what it would take to build a mass movement or never wanted to. Taylor appears at last to have thrown in his lot with the cranks, and the task of building a mass movement must fall to others.
Taylor emerged on the conservative and libertarian intellectual scene in America in the 1990s. He had worked before as editor of PC World, and had authored a book on Japan in the 1980s called Shadows of the Rising Sun (1983). Taylor grew up in Japan, where his father worked as a missionary. He was educated at Yale and the Sorbonne.
Taylor’s articles on race appeared in various mainstream conservative quarters in the 1990s, including National Review and the paleoconservative Chronicles. In 1992, he published the crucial book Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. The book was reviewed and praised in such center-right publications as the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and The Washington Times, as well as by syndicated columnist Walter Williams, among others. While remaining neutral on biological differences among the races, Taylor was able to make a convincing argument that poverty and social dysfunction among American blacks were caused by black culture rather than white racism..
While Taylor’s book was receiving critical praise in the mainstream, he was leading a “double life” so to speak, by publishing American Renaissance under the name Samuel Taylor. Samuel is Jared Taylor’s first name, so this wasn’t too much of a stretch. However, it is interesting that Samuel Taylor was outspoken about innate racial differences while Jared Taylor was silent on that subject. This would not be the last time Samuel Jared Taylor would communicate two different messages to different audiences. From the newsletter’s beginnings in 1990, Taylor displayed none of the reticence that characterized his book. He explored the biological basis of racial differences in intelligence and other traits, and called on whites to fight for their own racial interests.
Taylor seemed the man to crystallize the growing dissatisfaction with liberal views on race into an explicit white racial consciousness that would have mass appeal. However, if he was to achieve this, there was a barrier that he would have to surmount: the association between race realism and Nazism, which had been solidly established in the American mind by the career of David Duke, as well as by lesser white supremacist figures and groups.
It is a truism to point out that Nazism represents the epitome of evil in the American mind. While demonization inevitably involves simplification, there are few people who better fit the bill of demon than Hitler. Of course, there is the Holocaust and the immense destruction that World War II wrought on Europe. Americans also have a tradition of freedom that rightly abhors Hitler’s totalitarian police-state. Moreover, Hitler was a demagogic liar who falsely blamed a minority group for the misery and humiliation of his country. Americans are justly on guard against the stirrings of a movement analogous to Nazism. Since race realism had never fully separated itself from Nazism, it had been easy for the Left to consign to the margins those who support this movement or attempt to diminish its evil.
American Renaissance, however, was susceptible to none of the usual criticisms directed against American racialists. Forthright though the magazine was, Taylor and the other writers published in the newsletter wrote in the crisp, lucid, and objective tone that is the hallmark of intelligence and education. Taylor understood that his views had to succeed by substantive, rational argument, rather than through muscular assertion or demonization of a conspiratorial enemy. Thus, his views on racial differences, racial conflict, and immigration were founded on a solid understanding of the best research available in those fields.
Just as important as what Taylor put into his magazine was what he left out. There was no hint of the demagogic anti-Semitism and the other cant issues that had characterized previous incarnations of racialism. The columnist Samuel Francis, who was closely associated with the magazine from the very beginning, summed up its achievement on the twelfth anniversary of its inception:
For the most part the older rhetoric of “white supremacy” and what was called “hate” never talked about race at all—at least not seriously. It talked about the Constitution, communism, the common cultural framework that most Americans, white and black, Southern and Northern, shared. When it did talk about “race,” the result was often simply a pathetic litany of cliches, racial horror stories, often pseudo-science mixed in with a certain amount of fundamentalist (or pagan) religion, and outright drivel laced with plenty of racial epithets and insults. Not a few racially conscious whites seemed to do and say virtually everything to confirm the claim of their enemies that they really were filled with hatred and engulfed in ignorance. Some—skinheads, “neo-Nazis,” etc.—still do; for them, making themselves as repellent as possible and inciting fear and disgust rather than doing something constructive on behalf of their own race seems to be their chief purpose.
Anyone familiar with American Renaissance knows that … it avoids this kind of rhetoric entirely. Not only does AR avoid it, neither the publication nor Jared Taylor himself nor anyone who has ever written for it that I know of even has any disposition to use such rhetoric. Nor does AR appeal to states’ rights, the Constitution, or traditional segregationist practices. The rhetoric it has developed is the rhetoric of race itself, of what should be called “racial realism.”
American Renaissance attracted both moderate conservatives and old-style white supremacists; however, initially at least, the balance seems to have been slightly in favor of the former. In 1997, AR conducted a poll designed to gauge the views of its readers, which included questions about which foreigners had done the most to advance or damage white interests. Remarkably, the most frequent answer to both questions was Hitler. Whereas 112 readers thought Hitler had damaged white interests, only 75 thought he had advanced them.
The early years of American Renaissance were a time when it seemed race realism had a chance of entering the mainstream. What replaced the Cold War for many on the Right were the newer, messier issues of race and multiculturalism. The era of the “Clash of Civilizations” was just beginning. National and civilizational questions were becoming central: What is it to be a nation? Where do race and civilization intersect in the West? Are the races significantly different from each other in IQ and temperament? If so, what are the consequences for our policies on immigration, crime, bilingualism, multiculturalism, and affirmative action? Conservative and libertarian intellectuals of the 1990s were gingerly beginning to broach these subjects for the first time in a long while.
As Paved With Good Intentions was receiving praise in mainstream conservative media outlets, other important developments were occurring. Under the leadership of John O’Sullivan, then editor of National Review (NR), a brief era of glasnost was allowed on racial issues in their pages. Some articles by Jared Taylor were published there, as were Lawrence Auster’s devastating articles on multiculturalism and Peter Brimelow’s hard-hitting criticisms of American immigration policy. Sam Francis was allowed to write book reviews under O’Sullivan, and Steve Sailer published penetrating articles on race from a sociobiological perspective. NR reviewed favorably not only Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994), but also Prof. J. Phillipe Rushton’s race realist masterpiece Race, Evolution, and Behavior (1995).
At the same time, Lawrence Auster gained notoriety with his groundbreaking book on immigration, The Path to National Suicide (1990), the first serious critique of the disastrous 1965 Immigration Act. Samuel Huntington, a neo-liberal Democrat at Harvard rocked the establishment in the 1990s by publishing “The Clash of Civilizations,” first in the quarterly Foreign Affairs as the “X” article of its day, and then later in full, book-length form. Huntington’s book (far more impressive than his later, plaintive Who Are We?) discussed China and Islam as threats or “challenger civilizations” to the West. Huntington explored the role of unchecked nonwhite immigration to the West and its demographic impact, as well as the corrosive role of multiculturalism advocated by its elites. Peter Brimelow was another who took an unflinching look at the racial impact immigration was having on America. His landmark book, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster was published in 1995.
American Renaissance’s first conference, held in Atlanta in 1994, occurred at the height of this burgeoning new interest in race and civilization and gave those who hoped for a mainstreaming of race realism great grounds for optimism. It seemed as though Taylor had made a clean break from racialism’s unsavory past. Not only did requiring men to wear coats and ties, the mandatory dress code at AR conferences, probably discourage some skinheads from attending, but AR seemed to be courting a mainstream audience and marginalizing extremists.
The extent of Jewish participation in the conference made clear it was no neo-Nazi event. Four of the ten speakers were Jewish, including the traditional orthodox rabbi Mayer Schiller, who brought many of his rabbinical students with him. Some have estimated that up to a quarter of the 160 attendees were Jewish, and Rabbi Schiller received a Kosher meal at the banquet. Furthermore, Taylor did not allow David Duke to attend. (He came to the hotel that hosted the conference nevertheless, and his acolytes who were attending the conference gave him reports of what was going on inside.)
Two of the speakers who addressed biological differences among the races were Jewish: Prof. Michael Levin of City College of New York and Eugene Valberg, former professor of philosopy at the University of New Orleans. It is notable that this conference not only attracted Ph.D.’s, but even an actual academic. Levin, the author of the monumental Why Race Matters (1997), spoke on “The Policy Consequences of Racial Differences.”
Not only did a rabbi speak at the conference, but so did a Catholic priest, Fr. Robert Tacelli. These clerics were a nod of encouragement to the religious right, the dominant constituency of American conservatism. The conference also featured speakers who were more or less still a part of mainstream conservatism, such as Lawrence Auster and the syndicated columnists Sam Francis and Joe Sobran.
Moderates could be excused for thinking this historic conference was a serious break with the race neutrality of the modern-day right, and at the same time, a break with the extremism that had discredited race realism. It seemed that AR was going to be capable of melding the academic study of race with populist nationalism and religious conservatism into a powerful new political force. Some of us dreamed that AR would become the new NR, and that Jared Taylor was going to be our new William F. Buckley, Jr. Like Buckley, Taylor was a sophisticated, charming speaker and writer. Both had attended Yale, and both were fluent in foreign languages.
However, while the first AR conference was an important step in separating race realism from the old-style white supremacism, the break was not as clear as it initially seemed. While Taylor eschewed the rhetoric of white supremacism, moderates who were waiting for him to denounce it in the pages of AR were continually disappointed. Rather, Taylor adopted the strategy of simply ignoring the conflict between the two camps of his readers. When pressed about the matter in interviews and private conversations, he always said the issue was outside the scope of the newsletter.
Furthermore, while Taylor excluded David Duke from his conferences, he made no attempt to do the same to less notorious figures who held the same views. Requiring suits and ties was not enough to keep neo-Nazis out, and they always formed a large faction at the conferences. Kevin Alfred Strom, Don Black, Jamie Kelso, and Mark Weber were regulars at AR conferences, for the simple reason that AR never gave them any reason not to appear.
Finally, Atlanta attorney Sam Dickson, a close associate and supporter of Duke who has long been prominent in the Holocaust denial movement, spoke at the 1994 conference and at every conference since. Sharp-witted and insightful as his speeches have been, moderates who knew his associations and history could not but be disturbed by his presence. While he was popular among a large contingent of conservatives, Joseph Sobran had recently been fired from National Review for what William Buckley considered anti-Semitic articles. Sobran’s attacks on Israel and Jewish influence in America would become increasingly radical over the coming years; in 2001, he addressed the Institute for Historical Review, the world’s foremost Holocaust denial advocacy group. Sobran’s associations did not keep Taylor from inviting him to be the keynote speaker at the 2004 conference.
As the years passed, the extremist faction at the conferences waxed and the mainstream faction waned, decisive proof that Taylor was either not interested in, or not capable of, creating a mainstream movement. The 1996 AR Conference was the last one to feature a member of the clergy. And Sam Francis and Roger McGrath seemed to be the last two speakers with serious ties to the mainstream conservative movement. Jewish speakers were gone after 2002. The 2004 conference featured Paul Fromm, who had long been associated with the neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial movements, as well as Sam Dickson and Joe Sobran, who spent most of his speech attacking Israel. By 2006, a mere 12 years after the first AR conference, the audience consisted largely of non-Jewish, non-religious men without any ties to the mainstream conservative movement. Moreover, this was the first conference that Jared Taylor allowed David Duke to attend. A large contingent of devotees of StørmFrønt, the largest neo-Nazi website, were also present.
AR conference
Meanwhile, Taylor himself revealed a radical and disturbing hostility to America’s defense of Israel. Though he never published anything about Israel in AR, he did, as the Realist points out in “Why I Started This Website,” publish three articles at The Last Ditch that were crudely and lopsidedly anti-Israeli. For Taylor, the plain lesson of 9/11 was that America should abandon support for Israel—any other view was “dangerous nonsense”; furthermore, any American action to retaliate for the 9/11 attack would prove that we valued the Israeli national interest more than our own. Such views appealed to anti-Semitic extremists and alienated moderate conservatives.
Conditions were ripe for a showdown, and one duly occurred. David Duke’s presence at the 2006 conference brought the tensions between the moderates and the extremists to a boiling point. As The Realist says in “Why I Started This Website”:
Near the end of the conference, one of the speakers, Guillaume Faye, said, in a talk about the decline of the West, that Israel might soon get wiped off the map. He viewed the prospect of Israel’s destruction as one sign of Western cultural collapse, but that was not how the audience took it. Rather, there was a thunderous round of applause coming from at least half of the audience.
At the end of the talk, David Duke got up during the question and answer period and spun out a long-winded speech on the subject of Jews’ eternal enmity to the white race, accompanied by much sympathetic chuckling and egging on from the audience. Michael Hart, a Jewish AR subscriber, got up and yelled at Duke, “You’re a f*cking Nazi, and you’re a disgrace to this conference!” Then he walked out. He, however, got no support.
Afterwards, in the May 2006 issue of AR, Taylor tried to calm the waters with an article titled Jews and American Renaissance, the first article Taylor had ever published on the long-standing tension among his subscribers. The article came after a letter from moderate AR subscribers urged Taylor to distance himself and his magazine from Duke and his ideas. Unfortunately, the column did not do much to clear the air.
While Taylor included welcome statements like, “AR has taken an implicit position on Jews by publishing Jewish authors and inviting Jewish speakers to AR Conferences,” and “Gentile whites—without help from anyone else—have repeatedly shown themselves capable of egalitarian excess,” he avoided an opportunity to speak out once and for all against the neo-Nazis in the AR circle.
In the rest of the article, Taylor was evenhanded in his criticism of both Duke and Hart, raising many disturbing questions: Did Taylor really think Hart’s behavior was comparable to Duke’s grandstanding, Jew-baiting display? Was Taylor afraid of offending Duke and his followers? Is Duke merely a man of “strong views” (as Taylor described him in the article) or is he an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi who drives mainstream whites away from any pro-white, racially conscious position?
Most disturbing of all, while Taylor treated Duke with kid gloves, he wrote angrily of the letter he had received. He called it condescending and said it had not influenced him at all; the subscribers had made a “mistake” by writing it.1
Taylor’s subsequent behavior has confirmed his bias in favor of the extremists. Recently, when a Holocaust denier e-mailed Taylor asking for his views on the Holocaust, Taylor refused to come down on the issue. The Holocaust denier then forwarded the exchange to Lawrence Auster who published the exchange on his website, “View from the Right.” Auster commented, “For Taylor, it’s equally possible that the Nazis did or did not carry out a program to dispossess, dehumanize, and exterminate the Jews of Europe, and it’s equally possible that the Nazis did or did not actually murder several million Jews.” When the Inverted World posted Auster’s commentary, a substantial discussion took place, in which Taylor himself participated. Taylor refused to affirm the occurrence of the Holocaust and ridiculed Auster and the other commenters on the thread for demanding that he take a clear stance on this issue.
This reaction was predictable. Taylor has always justified his failure to take a firm stand against extremism by stating that Jewish issues were irrelevant to American Renaissance. Nothing, however, could be more mistaken. Whites of good will everywhere are held back from joining race realist organizations by the fear that they will be associating themselves with nonsensical and extremist positions. And yet, for whatever reason, Jared Taylor is uncomfortable with the idea of reading extremists and Nazis out of the organization. Why? Do the 3,000 or so Neo-Nazi activists really add that much to the overall movement? What if AR could grow the movement ten times that amount by jettisoning the Nazis? Wouldn’t it be worth it? Just a few choice editorials and cues, as well as a different selection of conference speakers, would do the trick. Neo-Nazis don’t hang around Chronicles, for example, because they know they are not welcome there. But they do know they’ve been given a green light to participate within the AR community. Why? I’m not sure we’ll ever know.
Taylor’s behavior indicates he doesn’t mind if American Renaissance becomes a kind of “StørmFrønt-lite.” In all likelihood, the 2008 conference will draw an even larger crowd of neo-Nazis and a dwindling crowd of moderates. To paraphrase Gresham’s Law, the bad racialists will always drive out the good racialists.
Hispanics: A Statistical Portrait
AR still does good work …
Besides, what Western man needs is a moral framework that will stand between the Nazi exterminationists on one hand and the anti-white deracinated leftists on the other. This is why it’s important to accept and deal with what the Nazis did. Any non-racially conscious white is going to want to know why a new version of racial theory is any different from the extremist aberrations. We should be ready to answer them instead of sticking our heads in the sand.
It is time to recognize that American Renaissance will probably not create the kind of moral framework we seek. Indeed, aside from the encouraging 1994 Conference, it never seemed that interested in continuing on this groundbreaking path, which would have required more leadership, coalition-building, and clear statements about who was welcome, who was not, and, most importantly, why. As a result of Taylor’s inaction, while “mainstream” conservatives and whites are aware of AR, they keep it at arms length — just as AR keeps them at arms length.
Dead End
…but we think it’s a dead end.
American Renaissance may continue to do good work, though, just as The Social Contract and The Mankind Quarterly do. AR’s recent report, “Hispanics: A Statistical Portrait,” which documents Hispanic social pathologies, is useful and important. AR’s website and monthly periodical alert readers to events ignored by the rest of the media. The republication of Michael Levin’s long out-of-print Why Race Matters was a great service, as was Taylor’s recent debate against a Canadian multiculturalist.
American Renaissance will no doubt continue to make helpful contributions along those lines. It just may not lead us anywhere. The work of the Realist at the Inverted World and Peter Brimelow at VDARE represent a more productive approach than AR has taken. Both are just as savvy and sophisticated as Taylor, but seem more willing to draw boundaries and engage in coalition building for the good of the movement.
Sam Raymond, a pseudonym, is an attorney and longtime follower of American politics the race realist movement.
References
1. Jared Taylor published two versions of the “Jews and American Renaissance” article, one on his website, and another in the May 2006 issue of AR. The website version, which is linked to in the body of the article, contained the remarks on the subscribers’ letter that are referred to in the article. However, the newsletter version did not.
Topic: The Decline of American Renaissance (Read 10612 times)