Elon Musk Misses The National Question
Elon Musk wants America to take in more legal immigrants, and he also wants Americans to have more kids, and he also wants to rein in America's out-of-control debt. What he misses is that the first of those desires conflicts with the other two. Our friend Kevin Dolan nails this in his guest post today.
Our leaders call America a "propositional nation", meaning Americans are bound by certain ideas or propositions, rather than by blood. As Kevin notes, this isn't quite true--there are no propositions we all agree on--but even to the extent it is true, propositional nations fail at fiscal discipline, and they fail at raising families. Elon should read Kevin's excellent post to understand why.
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Now on to Kevin's excellent post.
Why the Westphalian system will collapse - and what comes next
In the middle of Elon Musk’s fiery defense of H1B workers in America this week, German newspaper Die Welt ran his op-ed endorsing the German nationalist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), explicitly for their anti-immigration stance:
“This isn’t about hatred of foreigners, but rather ensuring Germany doesn't lose its identity in the pursuit of globalization. A nation must preserve its cultural inheritance to stay strong and unified.”
This came as some surprise to those of us who were told to “go fuck yourself in the face” for advocating (as we saw it) exactly the same position.
Elon would perhaps argue that there is no conflict between his immigration position for Germany and for the US; and over the course of The Late Unpleasantness he has moderated his position on US immigration considerably (or “clarified the moderateness of his position” — take it as you like).
But the disconnect hints at the very different conventional moral intuitions that people have about nations like Japan or Germany, versus America as a “nation of immigrants” and a “nation of ideas”
This difference is generally framed positively: America is something higher, purer, more advanced, more spiritual, because it isn’t defined (and therefore limited) by mere flesh and blood.
In this view, America is a kind of universalizing religion: a city on a hill, to which the elect may gather from every kindred and tongue.
Among the problems with this view of America:
There is no general agreement about what set of values or qualities makes you a Real American, and no one who has authority to decide.
Even if we had consensus on those values or qualities, no one is performing brain scans at the border to detect them in new immigrants (perhaps a future use case for Neuralink.)
Virtually any enforced ideological criteria for Americanness would exclude a huge portion (50% or more) of current Americans, as the right- and left-wing suite of values and priorities are increasingly disjoint.
Even if these values and characteristics could be identified, maintaining cohesion on that basis would require a continual effort to monitor and probe and propagandize and exclude on that basis — a regime far more invasive and insecure than any nation based on lineage.
More to the point, no one has any serious interest in pursuing any of this. These beliefs and policy priorities are not sincerely held by anyone. There are no civic nationalists.
All of which is to say: America is not presently a nation of ideas.
One could argue about whether it once was, or could be, or ought to be — but it isn’t.
This is the same argument generally levied against a racial construction of American identity — that American identity is already mongrelized beyond recall — but as heterogeneous as we may be genetically, we’re far more heterogeneous in our values, virtues, and beliefs.
Under these circumstances, civic or values-based nationalism is purely imaginary, and the only purpose it serves is rhetorical: to deny the existence of a coherent American people, with reciprocal claims on one another and the American state.
Elon’s version of this broader civic-nationalist argument is that America is specifically a land of winners.
He likes the analogy of America as a professional sports team that recruits for the “best”, by which he means specifically the smartest, the hardest-working, the most productive. (In other words, America is whoever is most useful to a tech employer.)
The analogy is apt, as professional sports teams are generally owned by billionaires with no connection to the city in which they’re based, and staffed by mercenary armies of imported criminals.
But more importantly, if America is just “the set of people most profitably deployable at a tech company”, this implies that there are multitudes of non-Americans who are more American than the average American.
It even suggests the possibility that there may be whole peoples and nations who are more American than America.
(China as a whole appears to be much more American than America lately — except for their lack of an H1B program, that is.)
A further corollary of this belief, articulated this week by Vivek Ramaswamy, is that an immigrant possessing the True Spirit of America may actually be obligated to reject assimilation into America as it is.
This notion of America falls apart in your hands as you try to take its measure.
That’s because America, by this definition, is actually the photo-negative of a nation: an active void of nationhood, a state defined by its freedom from the constraints of nationhood. (Free to be the best.)
Of course this isn’t a coherent or durable way to run a state, for reasons we’ll discuss below — but it has the advantage of being high-entropy. It’s a more efficient short-term allocation of resources — which is why these people are in charge and you aren’t.
If the bedrock meaning of your life is monomaniacal tech autism, national attachments and prejudices (to say nothing of children and families) are clearly in the way.
It’s also much easier to advocate for “freedom” than to insist on boundaries.
Especially when those boundaries are already very complex, full of exceptions, discontinuities, gradients, exclaves.
There was a time when the populations coming to America were more similar, and building a life here demanded and cultivated a characteristic set of virtues.
Even then, there were conflicts over which new immigrants were authentic Americans; but the recognition of those conflicts is hardly an argument in favor of importing an even more heterogeneous population, with even less reason to unite and assimilate.
In any case, the historical and technological conditions that bound “American values” to a particular people and place are no longer operative, so the definition of the nation has become unworkably complex.
This means we’re not making any new Americans, whether we want to or not.
Elon isn’t an American: he’s a Reddit libertarian. Like AOC or Rashida Tlaib, he assimilated into one of the many American sub-identities that rejects American identity as such — and these are really the only “American” identities still on offer to immigrants.
This isn’t exactly their fault, and it isn’t our fault either. Ironically, in the absence of “American conditions”, Heritage America has been forced to draw arbitrary conceptual lines around itself: how many grandparents were born here, which wars your ancestors fought in, which boats they came over on.
Which is to say, even Heritage America has become an idea.
And this problem goes much deeper than immigration, because it applies to our own children as well.
I can teach my kids to salute the flag, to revere the Founding Fathers, to recite the Constitution; I can even try to inculcate American virtues like optimism, courage, enterprise, ingenuity — but teaching these as a rote catechism is obviously not the same as learning them by digging a sod house in Comanche territory.
And more importantly, I can’t give them a cooperative equilibrium with a group of other people called “Americans”, in a state governed by Americans, that represents American interests. That equilibrium is broken.
The physical borders are defensible, but the conceptual borders are not.
This is occasionally used by open-borders types to justify further mass immigration — after all, the cat is already out of the bag.
But obviously more heterogeneity, more defection, more betrayal of existing Americans’ interest will only make the coming conflicts more vicious, and harder to sort out.
The civic nationalists are right that Americans are no longer an ethnos. We have to become one again.
But ethnogenesis, like desire, cannot be negotiated.
No amount of talk will bind the current stock of US citizens into a nation with common feeling again. Likewise, no matter how many videos they post of white kids getting beat up on school buses, white nationalists are not going to meme the world’s white people into a coherent tribe.
A people is forged through bonds of shared necessity and struggle which establish loyalty and trust. You don’t actually know which bonds will hold under fire until they actually come under fire.
There are intense trials that can prove out a friendship in this way outside of literal warfare — but in general, at historical scale, war is how this happens: a years-long immersion in opportunities to demonstrate friendship at great cost.
Fictive kinships forged in the crisis produce marriages, which establish kinship in fact — and then you’re a people. Which is to say, an extended family.
All human government is built on this psychological architecture.
At the risk of stating the obvious, there’s a reason that the simplest and most fundamental governments — gangs, warbands, mafias, etc. — are always characterized as “brotherhoods” (often literal brothers.)
“Crime families” exist because heedless, irrational, non-negotiable loyalty is very hard to find — generally not even in families, but more often there than elsewhere. If you’re in real trouble, your father and brothers are the natural place to look. If you need intense loyalty in disloyal times, you start where the biological infrastructure shortens the distance.
This sense of common interest and will (called asabiyyah by Ibn Khaldun) becomes more and more difficult to maintain as society grows beyond the scale of personal kinship and friendship — but the technological returns to scale create constant pressure to test the limits of that constraint.
The more powerfully you can access the psychospiritual root of human loyalty — the bonds between family, and specifically fathers and sons and brothers — the easier it is to maintain the trust and alignment necessary to do great, daring, difficult things together.
Plutarch describes the naming of the patrician class at Rome’s founding as a conscious invocation and abstraction of fatherhood:
“Romulus thought it the duty of the foremost and most influential citizens to watch over the more lowly with fatherly care and concern, while he taught the multitude not to fear their superiors nor be vexed at their honours, but to exercise goodwill towards them, considering them and addressing them as fathers[.]”
One can argue about how sincere or cynical they were about this (it varied from one aristocrat to another), but aristocracies clearly made use of this primal circuit of human organization — the reciprocal love and loyalty expected between a father and a son.
With the power of this abstraction, a single tribe could command many multiples of its own number via the “filial” obedience of subject peoples: but the abstraction also meant a breaking down of primal, natural categories, because the demands of the new hierarchy transcended and conflicted with ties of blood.
Feudalism was one layer of abstraction deeper:
The feudal patron/client relationship was nested and fractalized, with lesser nobles bound to their own lords in bonds of fictive kinship — or, ideally, by marriage to a daughter or other near relation.
In a clan or tribe, the scale of the network was limited by the lifespan of the patriarch (one person can only have so many grandchildren and great-grandchildren and nephews and cousins).
But a carefully-organized fractal network of feudal bonds could tree up to a young and vigorous king who was pater patriae, the father of the fatherland — presiding over a people who could now number in the hundreds of thousands.
But as communications, transportation, and industrial technology increased the returns to even greater scale, feudal networks were inadequate to compete with entities capable of mass communication and mass mobilization — namely gunpowder empires, capital, and the church.
This forced a further level of scale and abstraction.
Instead of giving obedience to the king as “father”, nationalism turned the citizen’s duty toward the fatherland, or the land of his fathers.
Comparatively huge ethnolinguistic families unified as Germans, French, Italians, where before they thought of themselves as Bavarians, Burgundians, Neapolitans.
The connection of patriotism to patriarchy — to the duties owed by a son to a father — was now almost entirely abstract and symbolic and poetic; not invested in any person.
But there was still this notion of reciprocal obligation between people, bound by a shared land, history, and ancestry — a shared patrimony from shared (though distant) patriarchs.
As the state embraces larger and larger populations, it demands the breaking of local ties: the deliberate commingling and transmigration of peoples, the standardization of language and custom, and the subsumption of family interests and class interests to the interests of the nation.
And this political condition is roughly what we call the “Westphalian system of nation-states.”
This is the notion of political organization and sovereignty that the architecture of all modern states assumes.
Until very recently, that’s what it meant to be a nation: a particular people of common ancestry, governed by a state whose borders and sovereignty more or less circumscribe their ancestral homeland.
Now, global communication and transportation technology has rendered even this highly-abstracted definition of the nation incoherent.
We’ve made friends all over the world, while simultaneously becoming alienated from our neighbors, our countrymen, and our ancestors.
Even our parents’ experience is hard to derive much insight from. The way they got educated and employed, the way they found a spouse and raised their kids — it all might as well have happened on another planet.
Meanwhile, mass migration to and from all corners of the world have rendered nation-states incoherent as a practical matter — at least in the developed world, there are no longer any cohesive ethnolinguistic peoples controlling particular geographies.
In other words, all developed nations are rapidly becoming “propositional nations”.
But the German Values to which new entrants must conform sound a lot like Swedish Values, or British Values, or New Zealander Values: basically just a vague commitment to Western liberal ideals.
These nations are no longer defined by ancestry or ideology, and even the geographic borders are increasingly arbitrary. In other words, the nation is not anchored to any physical or metaphysical reality.
The nation is undefined — it does not exist.
This is the last stop of the process, in which “peoplehood” is fully abstracted, fully ideologized, and excludes nothing.
Our connection to the people with whom we are governed has been diluted to infinity, like homeopathic medicine — there is nothing left of the biological substrate on which the state was built. The state encompasses a wholly arbitrary population with nothing particular in common at all.
The state can no longer justify itself by protecting the citizens from enemies outside, because there is no “outside”.
Instead, the state protects the citizens from one another.
Rather than taking the citizens’ part in conflict, the state goes to war with conflict itself, interposing itself as the defender of the weaker party in any hierarchy, breaking down the stronger. This is how the state eats.
Of course, at the scale of a modern state of millions, all distinctions and particularities generate hierarchies, inequalities — which, in turn generate conflict. So there’s nearly-endless fuel for the new engine of the state’s self-justification.
This process eventually reaches down to the most trivial details of our most intimate relationships: so the state, which once made use of the primal and instinctive architecture of human connection, is now busy shredding it.
This is what we colloquially refer to as “liberalism”, or “gay race communism”, or “globohomo”, or “the blob”.
The final ideology of the state at infinite scale, fully detached from (and at war with) all human particularities.
The central political question of our time is whether this condition of total abstraction and alienation is a durable mode of human organization.
The dystopian doomer hypothesis is that it is — there’s no limit to the level of deracination that human beings will accept, and so it can always, always get worse.
But I’m going to suggest a few reasons why I think that’s wrong, and we’re seeing it proven wrong in front of our eyes.
First: none of these propositional nations is capable of fiscal discipline.
At the current rate of deficit spending, the national debt will equal the total value of all US equities (essentially the entire US economy) by 2035 — and the US is doing far better than Europe or Japan.
Which makes sense: nobody in these countries has any notion of the state as the commonwealth of their people — a patrimony to which their children are entitled.
They have no sense that the people guarding the till have any reciprocal loyalty to them, and no confidence that their children will be the beneficiaries of the state.
So there is no reason for any constituency — not even a conservative and nationalistic one — to insist on fiscal discipline.
If you don’t spend it, your internal enemies will.
Second: propositional nations cannot recruit soldiers or fight wars.
As Pete Buttigieg said: “The world has never actually seen a large-scale, fully-functioning, fully-inclusive, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, democratic republic that represented everybody.”
The purpose of the imperial ideology of democratic liberalism is precisely to file off all the distinctions and particularities over which we might kill each other — attachments to blood or culture, shared history and geography, sincere religious beliefs.
The scale of globalism demands this and cannot function without it — but, for better or worse, those are the only things that young people can be persuaded to kill for — certainly the only things they’re willing to die for.
When a population has as little in common as ours does, it becomes impossible to pacify them internally without also rendering them incoherent and inert externally.
People might join the military for free college and healthcare, but they won’t actually fight a war for it.
Third: propositional nations do not raise families.
The global liberal world order is incompatible with human reproduction, because, like warfare, all of the reasons people “give their lives” to the task of raising children are buried in those particularities that have been filed off to accommodate the scale and diversity of our society.
Having children is not the optionality-maximizing, utility-optimizing, rational decision, so the people produced by liberal societies don’t do it.
So this system is clearly doomed and its failure overdetermined. These are all terminal failure modes for the state, and all possible solutions lie outside the scope of liberal modernity.
The question is, who and what will replace that system?
There’s a temptation in intellectual, tech-oriented spheres to confront a problem like this and immediately look for some scalable heuristic — what software product, what selection criteria, what sorting algorithm can we use to optimize for the kind of culture we want.
In my opinion, that kind of bloodless efficiency-seeking — the offloading of judgment to a system — is part of the problem.
I believe that the answer is human agency, human judgment, and human connection.
The societies that survive will be those that nurture, instead of attacking, the human instinct toward idiosyncratic, particular love — to prefer your wife, your children, your friends, your home, your tribe.
Carl Schmitt famously said that all political actions and motives can be reduced to the distinction between friend and enemy — and the distinction between friend and enemy is rooted in violence. Essentially, the friend/enemy distinction signifies the legitimate justifications for violence (my friends) and the legitimate targets for violence (my enemies).
This quote is often used to talk about how we should feel about our enemies, but I think its most important ramifications have to do with the way we feel about our friends.
GK Chesterton said “The soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him but because he loves what is behind him.” That’s true of soldiers, but also of love in general.
The things you love are the things for which you’d kill and die — the things about which you are blind, irrational, immovable.
This is almost the definition of love. If it can be bought from you at a price, it is not love. It is, at best, enthusiastic consumption.
And that’s what makes us gay liberal creatures of modernity: we have had that capacity for love amputated in order to make us Rational Actors in every domain of life — to subject all of our wills and desires and values to negotiation, and haggling over price.
We have no idea who we would kill or die for, or who would kill or die for us.
In other words, we have been trying to live without love. We don’t know who our friends are.
The good news is that we are entering a technological, security and surveillance environment where there are decreasing returns to scale, and sharply increasing returns to extreme high trust.
AI, crypto, drones, and robotics are offering formerly “state-level” information security, force-projection, surveillance, and computational resources to very small groups of people.
Increasingly, small groups are exercising technological leverage against global empires. Groups that can trust each other and leave a lot of things unsaid will continue to succeed at this.
For the first time in centuries, the technological environment may actually favor decentralized, high-morale, human-scaled tribes, and disfavor big, faceless, industrial incumbents.
If a person could figure out who his friends are, they could find opportunities that have not existed for any small group of friends in a very long time.
I can’t give my children a people — that will have to emerge naturally in the conflicts ahead of us.
But we can bring together good families, and cultivate the kinds of friendships that might survive that crucible — choosing the best materials, from which a strong people might emerge.
I can introduce my kids to mentors who can teach them things I can’t, peers who will support and challenge them, and families that I’d be happy to see them one day join.
We can be useful to useful people, get together, build things together, take risks together, make sacrifices for each other, and see what happens.
It has been said that you should choose a spouse that you want your children to be like. But your social milieu — your friends, the environments you live and work and play in — will determine what your grandchildren will be like.
To see that they arrive, and outlast the systems that are crumbling around us, I want to surround my children with the most admirable and excellent people I can find.
This is the purpose of EXIT.
We want to build sovereignty for ourselves as individuals, for our families, and for our growing tribe — because we have discovered that the system of global liberal modernity is hostile to our particular loves, and we want them to outlive it.
We have twelve weekly calls in which we work together on entrepreneurship, preparedness, investment, skill development, etc. In 2025, we will have quarterly meetups in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Salt Lake City, and Seattle, as well as meetups and retreats in many other cities.
We are launching our first clubhouse in Q1 2025 here in Austin, preparatory to building a community in the Texas Hill Country.
Join us at exitgroup.us.
EXIT News
On this week’s full group call we discussed The Christmas War, waking up from the Trump victory hangover, and getting back to work.
Next week (1/7/25) we will hear from a former lead technical recruiter at a Fortune 500 company on how to get a tech job. We’ll discuss how to defeat or bypass algorithmic gatekeeping, and how AI is changing the tech job market.
Members-only lunch meetup in Richmond 1/11/25. Check #DC channel for details.
Members-only lunch meetup in New York City 1/11/25. Check #new-england channel for details.
In January, we will have member Q&As with New Founding on their talent network and venture fund, Bog Beef on building patronage networks, and a strategic advisor for family offices on how they assess investments and donations. Recordings will be available for paid Substack subscribers.
EXIT will have a sponsor table at Coronation Ball, 1/19/25 at the Watergate in Washington, DC. I will also be speaking. We have sold out our table, but if you’d still like to attend, please DM right away.
Tickets are on sale for Natal Conference, 3/28/25 in Austin Texas. Use offer code NATALISM for 10% off.
RSVP link for pre-inaugural DC Cocktail hour (1/18), below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is right for you.
