Racism is not something the right should endorse. It is easy for those of us who want to preserve and maintain our traditions to adopt isolation. I’m an explicit fan of closed borders and excluding politically undesirable and criminal elements from society.
But there is an important distinction here. These policies have a point. Closed borders keep out those who do not agree with the values of a community. Ostracism and physical removal play a role, alongside enforced restitution, in protecting the vulnerable while preserving the NAP (as opposed to the social democratic habit of incarcerating undesirables in a “correctional” system).
The fundamental flaw in racism is that it is a degenerate activity. In part because of this, and in part because of other factors, it has major negative implications for society.
Voluntary Parasitism
Degeneracy is a voluntary form of parasitism that particularly deals with moral failure. Children, for instance, are not degenerate merely because they impose requirements on others. That they need the support of an adult is merely a consequence of their capacity.
We correlate degeneracy with crime, which is voluntary parasitism in economic action. These are both forms of undesirable high time preference behavior.
What makes high time preferences undesirable in this context is the long-term costs associated with them. We can understand these as being a priori consequences of the natural conditions which create scarcity.
A person is not a criminal if they “steal” a non-scarce asset. I cannot bring legal proceedings against someone for breathing my air, even if I may validly prosecute them for trespassing on my property.
Likewise, a racist would not be a degenerate if they didn’t impede future prosperity for the sake of short-term benefit. I am not concerned with vulgar language or even deliberate attempts to offend people so much as the social policies that are favored by certain nationalists and racial separatists.
Against Racial Separatism
The argument that someone who is a fan of racial separatism would make is that they are considering the future prosperity of their own against outside forces.
If racial purity were the only desirable quality (and I am not intending here to concede that it is even desirable), this might be the case.
But we live in a world with ordered hierarchies of value. Even were racial purity to be highly desirable, it must still compete with other definitions of prosperity.
It is much more important to me that my children live in a social order that permits them to be free from the aggression of the state and the erosion of their moral values. I would, of course, prefer that they share my Christian faith and cultural background, but these are both matters of belief and not something exclusive to a particular racial background.
The inherent gatekeeping for desirable qualities that comes about through the enforcement required in a libertarian social order form an explicit and voluntary social contract.
When an individual refuses to agree to or violates the covenant of a community, we exclude them because of this violation, rather than an arbitrary biographical detail.
Every right-winger would point to ideas as important. Degenerate behavior from left-wing individuals negatively influences society regardless of their background.
Who would prefer a hundred progressive Ivy League graduates to a hundred conservative semiliterate foreigners?
The problem with racial separatism is that our ideas are precisely what make us of value to society. Excluding people from our ideas and our community because of their race is a high time-preference behavior. Even if it were to be argued that a Spanish-speaking indigenous Mexican Catholic would hold different views than an English-speaking European-American Protestant by merit of their background (a case of fallacious polylogism), I cannot seek to convince someone I refuse to associate with of the validity of my ideals.
Ignoring race and other biological factors lets one focus on the ideas and actions of an individual, which are what determine their value to society and their natural ranking in the social hierarchy.
Against Protectionist Immigration Policies
A common refrain of the leftist is that many productive economic activities are mere rent-seeking. This is because they do not understand factors of production and the chains of production involved in bringing about the standard of living that they demand without being willing to work for it.
This criticism would be valid if left-wing understandings of the world were valid, because it is an understanding of the same principles that make fraud criminal.
That it is wrong to seek advantage at the cost of another is part of the traditional Western canon. Any voluntary exchange is, of course, permissible given the natural qualities of any voluntary action. We can trace this, through a priori methodology, to its roots as a choice to pursue profit by both parties.
But any legal or social system built on arbitrarily disenfranchising people for the hierarchal benefit of an in-group is going to lead to degeneracy.
We can see this in the basic form of democracy itself. The welfare state’s moral hazards are only a step away from racially preferential policies.
Just as with economic protectionism for foreign trade, being against immigration for economic reasons is asinine when followed to its fullest logical extents. A small subset of foreigners may outperform native residents of a region, but it is certainly not true that they would even compete with natives of an equivalent skill level. These people would either be the natural elites of an area, in which case they are likely filtered for competence and character by the stresses of obtaining their position, or they would have to have an artificially induced advantage through economic manipulation like income taxes or unionization that disparately impact native residents.
The desire to exclude people from society on the mere basis of origin alone (as opposed to creed or criminality) is actively harmful for the ability of the native inhabitants.
Anti-Racist Degeneracy
“Anti-racism” is itself a racialist theory and is identical to racism when evaluating its degeneracy from an a priori standpoint. It is worse in practice because of its social acceptance and its followers’ typical lack of any other guiding values, but this is not a field of competition that one wants to take part in.
Ludwig von Mises, in his analysis of polylogism in Human Action, drew warnings about the class consciousness theories of Marx and the racial consciousness theories that were the foundation for the Third Reich.
The issue with polylogism is two-fold.
First, it requires a shoddy understanding of the human psyche, since it follows from axiomatic first principles that people act to satisfy their needs, and these biological necessities and social necessities are qualitatively universal. Such confused thinking leads to misunderstandings.
Second, it is an excuse to justify the poor performance of one group because of oppression. The social justice movement is inherently nothing more than an attempt to blame all failures on a single source. While such things undoubtedly have a negative impact on people, it is impossible to gauge. The pursuit of equality becomes the source of bureaucratic profit and leads to policies that enforce high time preferences.
To be an anti-racist is to engage in blatant polylogism of a brand that only a small subset of even self-avowed white supremacists would consider because of the implicit denial of reality it involves.
Conclusion
The result of racism is a vicious cycle of degeneracy and suffering for all people involved. There is no benefit to these policies from an economic perspective, which are little more than glorified attempts to protect poor performers and subsidize waste and graft or cover for state ineptitude.
The attempt to preserve social orders through physical removal is better pursued without a racialist lens, since we can find the adversaries of traditional morality and ethics in no small number among any racial demographic.
Assessing individuals on their merits is the only way to avoid a great number of errors. Using race or ethnic background as a factor for discrimination hurts everyone in the long run.