Dominion Society of Canada - September 11, 2026


Loyalism vs Liberalism, the Philosophy of Canadian Nationalism ｜ John Carter at DOMCON26


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Length

30 minutes

Words per minute

172.26

Word count

5,292

Sentence count

223

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

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Hate speech

18

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I'm going to talk to you today about loyalism and how that contrasts and intersects with
00:00:04.120 liberalism. That word loyalist gets thrown around a lot lately. We've adopted it as a
00:00:09.860 Canadian counterpart to the American patriot, dropping it in the replies when our friends
00:00:14.240 make good tweets, usually accompanied by a salute emoji. It's great. I love it. We all love it. But
00:00:20.660 what does this mean? What is a loyalist in the modern world? Loyalism is of course Canada's
00:00:26.880 founding ideology. Upper Canada was settled by the United Empire Loyalists, who held their oaths
00:00:31.880 of fealty to the British Crown, the British Empire, the British Constitution, and the Church of
00:00:35.440 England to be more sacred than the sacred liberties our American cousins initiated
00:00:39.220 their world-shaking revolution in the name of. French Canada followed a parallel track, 0.52
00:00:44.920 rejecting the French Revolution in favor of traditional Catholicism and their own feudal
00:00:48.660 attachment to the English monarchy, which they might not have seen as ideal, but was preferable
00:00:53.060 to the madness of the terror. Canada's reactionary origin makes it almost unique in the New World.
00:01:00.280 Every other large state in the Americas was founded upon revolutionary liberal ideals.
00:01:04.420 The United States was the prototype for this, and the Bolivarian revolutions of Latin America
00:01:08.440 explicitly took the American Republic as their model. In contrast to this, Canada explicitly
00:01:14.660 rejected liberalism, opting instead for tradition, hierarchy, and fealty. It probably sounds a bit
00:01:20.700 weird to paint Canada as a reactionary liberal country. Modern Canada is the liberal state
00:01:25.420 par excellence. Decades of patient social engineering have steadily abraded Canada's
00:01:30.260 loyalist past. It's barely even a memory now. Most Canadians understand ourselves as being
00:01:35.400 defined by our passionate advocacy of liberalism, and everyone else in the world understands us as
00:01:40.200 the gayest country on the planet. So before going any further, it's necessary to define
00:01:45.640 just what we mean by liberal. That isn't something we usually think about, because
00:01:50.240 are all liberals. Liberalism's triumph has been absolute. We swim in liberalism like fish in
00:01:55.900 water. Liberalism is the ideological scaffolding that holds up the firmament of our political
00:02:00.940 theology. The left are liberals, but conservatives are classical liberals. To be fiscally conservative
00:02:07.540 but socially liberal actually means to be fiscally liberal in the old sense, that is to say,
00:02:12.140 to favor an economic model based upon free markets. Dissidents to the liberal and conservative
00:02:16.700 mainstream often style themselves as libertarians, who are really hyper-liberals in a right-wing
00:02:21.960 direction. In the other direction, leftists will often call themselves communists or even anarchists
00:02:29.480 who simply take liberalism to its logical conclusions in the other direction. Even those
00:02:36.280 of us who consciously reject liberalism per se tend to call themselves illiberal or post-liberal,
00:02:42.540 which is to say that they define themselves in reference to liberalism. Some call themselves
00:02:48.760 reactionaries, and they are reacting against what? That's right, liberalism. None of these labels
00:02:53.340 really tell you, or more importantly, anyone else, anything about the positive content of
00:02:58.040 these ideologies. This brings us to a branding problem. Conservatism sounds stuffy and unimaginative,
00:03:04.780 raising the obvious questions of conserve what and why. That's beyond the fact that conservatism
00:03:09.860 hasn't actually conserved anything, not even, as the old joke has it, the women's restroom. So
00:03:14.640 conservatism also has the stink of long failure about it. Meanwhile, to call yourself illiberal
00:03:20.620 is to imply that you hate liberty. People like liberty. It's good to be free. Why do you hate
00:03:27.700 good things, Mr. Post-Liberal? I'm sure you have a 5,000-word essay explaining that, but can you
00:03:33.560 lay it out in a five-second elevator pitch? I can't, which is why you're hearing a 5,000-word
00:03:39.480 essay. Liberalism is usually understood as being defined by a few core propositions. The first and
00:03:47.000 most axiomatic is the moral equality of man. Originally, this didn't mean equality in the
00:03:52.360 modern sense, where we have to pretend that everyone is exactly the same, although it
00:03:56.180 inevitably developed into that. Instead, it started by reducing the category man to a sort of abstract
00:04:02.980 wireframe model, stripped of all identifying characteristics of race, class, sex, nation,
00:04:08.460 language, age, ability, and so on. What you're left with is a featureless androgyne whose only
00:04:13.660 characteristics are the basic drives to seek pleasure and avoid pain, together with a certain
00:04:18.580 facility for reasoned logic, which our abstract entity applies in the service of maximizing
00:04:24.000 pleasure and minimizing pain. From this beginning, liberalism posits the existence of inalienable
00:04:33.100 and universal, natural, or human rights. As with the concept of equality, this concept of human
00:04:39.040 rights has been expanded dramatically over the centuries, but in its original conception,
00:04:43.140 as laid out by John Locke, the primary rights were the right to life, in other words, to not be
00:04:48.920 murdered, the right to property, that is, to enjoy the use of one's possessions and the fruits of
00:04:54.000 one's labor, and the right to liberty, that is, the right to do as one pleases with one's life
00:04:58.340 and one's possessions. It's his last right to liberty, from the Latin libertas, from which
00:05:03.160 liberalism takes its name. To be liberated is to be free from constraint, to be unbound from
00:05:12.820 obligation. Charles Hayward likes to characterize liberalism as the emancipation from unchosen bonds,
00:05:19.120 and indeed those were the first forms of bondage that liberalism sought to dissolve,
00:05:22.820 as obligations that you haven't chosen are interpreted as axiomatically despotic in liberal
00:05:27.760 thought. For example, serfdom consists of hereditary attachment to the land. You are a serf
00:05:33.160 because your father was a serf and his father before him. Nothing you do yourself can change 0.97
00:05:37.580 that fixed condition. Liberalism promised, and delivered, freedom from serfdom throughout the 0.95
00:05:42.900 old world. It later applied the same principle to emancipate the chattel slaves toiling in the 0.99
00:05:47.400 plantations of the new. As liberalism proceeded, however, even chosen obligations have been 0.99
00:05:53.940 gradually dissolved. Marriage is no longer an irreversible vow to form an irrevocable bond
00:05:59.680 through good times and bad until death do both parties part, but can be dissolved at a whim,
00:06:05.360 for any reason or no reason at all, and at a moment's notice. Marriage is not an unchosen bond.
00:06:12.540 To the contrary, lovers enter into it freely, even joyfully, and always have. Yet liberalism
00:06:18.700 came for marriage regardless. This was baked into the premises. Liberalism directly implies
00:06:25.640 the freedom to choose. An irreversible decision, as for instance to enter into an unbreakable
00:06:30.920 contract, imposes a constraint upon choice, and ultimately that constraint must be removed if
00:06:36.660 liberty is to be maintained. To this foundation of moral equality and natural rights, Locke added
00:06:44.000 a thought experiment borrowed from Hobbes, which he called the state of nature. This posited a
00:06:49.800 pre-cultural state of dissociated human atoms with no pre-existing social connections between them, 0.89
00:06:56.240 who then sit down and have a nice civilized negotiation, as autistic Anglo philosophers 0.88
00:07:01.620 are wont to do, about how they should organize their interactions. From this, Locke derived the 0.99
00:07:07.640 social contract, the idea that society should be constituted as a broad agreement to accept some
00:07:12.940 minimal restrictions upon natural rights in order to ensure that no one would infringe upon the
00:07:17.640 rights of another. Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. That's where we get
00:07:22.620 that idea. Under social contract theory, the state's legitimacy is founded upon its ability
00:07:28.320 to safeguard these natural rights. All of this sounds great, of course, you know, for all that
00:07:34.220 we like to style ourselves as post-liberal. I don't think that there are all that many of us
00:07:38.560 who dislike the idea that we have rights and that the state should respect and guarantee them.
00:07:44.000 The events of the last few days in which the Canadian government and the municipal government
00:07:47.800 of Hamilton have done their level best to interfere with our rights to freedom of assembly
00:07:52.080 and freedom of speech are illustrative enough of this disposition on our part. We assume as a matter
00:07:58.040 of course that, as free men, we possess these rights, and we become outraged when those rights
00:08:04.040 are violated. Do you want to give up your rights? I sure don't.
00:08:11.440 The problem, however, with all this good stuff, is that all of these abstractions and thought
00:08:16.060 experiments upon which they're based are so much airy nonsense. Locke's state of nature never
00:08:21.040 existed. Perhaps if he'd had access to the anthropological research of subsequent centuries,
00:08:25.640 he wouldn't have made his little thought experiment in the first place. There was never
00:08:29.500 some Edenic state in which men existed alongside one another and free from some set of custom
00:08:34.520 social mores and laws. Every society, every Neolithic tribe, even our hominid ancestors
00:08:41.260 had some kind of nomos by which they organized themselves. From this it also follows. The
00:08:46.680 abstract model of the generic universal man is also nonsense. Every human who has ever existed
00:08:52.300 was born to specific parents who came from specific lineages, speaking a specific language,
00:08:57.240 belonging to a specific tribe, professing a specific religion with its own specific mythology,
00:09:02.380 history, customs, rituals, laws, sexual mores, parenting practices, technologies, and so on.
00:09:08.460 These specificities are not accidental features that can be stripped away from the model,
00:09:14.260 but absolutely mandatory elements, the very foundations of identity without which a human
00:09:19.420 does not and indeed cannot exist. These are necessary constraints, because they are what
00:09:25.680 define a human as who he is rather than some other person. The universal man in the state
00:09:33.320 of nature never existed, but what's interesting is that as liberalism has proceeded, it has
00:09:38.200 probably inevitably formed the world in the image of that state of nature inhabited by
00:09:44.040 those formless generic human atoms. Liberal man is profoundly deracinated. Without any of the
00:09:50.520 strong attachment to a specific place tying people or country, he is not a member of any
00:09:55.280 community organizations, volunteer groups, or fraternal societies. People move in and out of
00:10:00.220 his life like phantoms. He has few close friends, certainly none so strongly bonded to him that they
00:10:06.020 would die for him if need be, and kill for him if asked. His romantic relationships are similarly
00:10:12.040 tenuous. He dates girls, he breaks up with girls, and if he gets married, he gets divorced and
00:10:16.000 married again and divorced again. Or, you know, these days he doesn't even bother dating because
00:10:20.860 even that's too much trouble. In work, he has no particular loyalty to his employer, nor does he
00:10:26.360 expect any in return. In religion, if he has any interest in the subject, which he usually doesn't,
00:10:31.020 he floats from one cult to another, trying on ersatz spiritual traditions from wherever and
00:10:35.920 whenever, mixing and matching as his fancy takes him. His only strong convictions are that no one
00:10:40.960 should tell him how to enjoy himself so long as his enjoyment does not directly harm someone else.
00:10:47.560 But really, how does this affect you? Liberal man is a gooner.
00:10:54.960 The dissolution of the social order into this Lockean state of nature presents a profound
00:11:00.340 practical problem. Society is in practice formed from interwoven webs of mutual obligation.
00:11:06.140 With those obligations dissolved, the only way for society to function is for bonds to be reimposed
00:11:10.300 via the force of the state. Take marriage again. In a pre-liberal society, marriage was an
00:11:14.760 indissoluble bond in which the husband was expected to provide for his wife, a wife was
00:11:18.680 expected to serve her husband, and both of them were expected to cooperate towards the end of
00:11:23.020 protecting and nurturing their children. Liberal man does not feel himself to be bound by these
00:11:28.060 obligations, if he doesn't want to be bound, and which taken to its natural conclusion would result
00:11:33.840 in large numbers of starving homeless children. Thus the state intervenes to force divorced fathers
00:11:38.920 to pay child support, and when the father cannot pay, or when paternity simply cannot be determined
00:11:43.620 to support the single mother's children directly via social welfare programs paid for, of course,
00:11:48.160 by taxes taken from primarily, of course, fathers. Obviously, the problems with liberalism go well
00:11:55.860 beyond this. DEI in the universities and the workplace, the fertility collapse, replacement 0.97
00:12:01.500 migration, all of these are downstream of the acidic effects of liberalism, proceeding from
00:12:06.560 and justified by the discourse of rights and the doctrine of equality. I could go into this in
00:12:10.600 detail, but you've heard it all before. And one of history's greatest ironies, the rapid societal
00:12:18.100 dissolution precipitated by liberalism is forcing liberal elites to behave in an increasingly
00:12:23.520 illiberal fashion in order to maintain a semblance of a functioning society. Again,
00:12:28.280 well-trod ground. You've heard all of this before. The elites of liberal democracies no longer believe
00:12:34.740 even liberalism themselves. Liberalism has transcended itself, liberating itself from
00:12:40.540 the tyranny of unchosen bondage to its own foundational ideals.
00:12:47.440 Let's go back to that notion of rights and its connection to the concept of libertas.
00:12:52.660 Liberalism's blind spot is that every right implies a responsibility. If you have a right
00:12:58.020 to free speech, such that no one can compel you to say something or not to say something,
00:13:02.520 then it follows that you are the only one who is responsible for your own words.
00:13:07.980 Liberalism is completely silent with respect to responsibilities. It recognizes the concepts of
00:13:13.680 what one is allowed to do, what one is free to do, what one cannot be prevented from doing,
00:13:18.920 but says nothing at all about what one should do, what is right to do, what one must do.
00:13:24.980 The result of that is a lot of terrible behavior and a lot of ad hoc efforts to
00:13:29.880 impose order on this by means of utilitarianism or critical theory or effective altruism or
00:13:35.640 whatever the current moral fad happens to be, most of which tend to result in just more
00:13:40.380 terrible behavior. So if we take this concept of responsibility, duty, obligation, you go back to
00:13:48.540 Latin because that's, you know, that's where liberalism came from, libertas, you know. So
00:13:53.280 let's go to the back to the Latin. What do we have? We have officium. That's duty in Latin,
00:13:57.560 officium that's terrible that gives us officialism that's terrible branding so okay we're not going
00:14:01.880 to do that okay okay english maybe you could say dutism or obligationism but that's that's that's
00:14:07.720 also no one's going to sign up for that there's a lot another latin root that captures our
00:14:13.080 essential meanings though is fides which is faith trust confidence honesty belief or loyalty
00:14:19.000 not necessarily faith in like a religious sense but like faithfulness faith to one another right
00:14:23.240 and that of course gives us loyalism which rolls off the tongue very nicely particularly here in
00:14:30.880 Canada but what does it mean what does loyalism mean right so we started talking about at the
00:14:36.020 beginning of this and I don't think it can really mean like attachments to the old symbols of crown
00:14:42.020 and altar although I don't think we should discard them but it's not it's not that alone you know
00:14:48.540 those have been hollowed out you know you look at the king and you know and you know does anyone
00:14:55.320 really think mark carney is a loyalist because he invited charles iii for a throne speech
00:15:01.260 i don't think so you know or are members of parliament are they loyalists because they
00:15:06.700 pontificate about westminster democracy come on you know like they don't they don't really believe
00:15:12.180 any of this stuff doesn't mean anything to them and then there's the church of england you know
00:15:16.260 okay well that's let's be honest it's dead it's it's it's a mausoleum of empty churches haunted
00:15:22.980 by elderly lesbians and you know maybe we can reclaim this one day but that day is not today 0.97
00:15:31.340 you know maybe tomorrow but it's not today so we have to do without them we have to find something
00:15:35.880 sort of a little deeper than those symbols specifically so if you poke into the thought
00:15:42.500 of the early Canadian loyalists you actually can extract something from the kind of taking the
00:15:48.340 trace of their thought a bit more abstract if you will which is kind of a perverse thing to do with
00:15:53.300 the ideology that is very concrete but you can you can do that and this has actually been done
00:15:58.900 not by me by this guy Robert Passfield who wrote a book called The Upper Canadian Anglican Tory
00:16:05.160 Mind that was his PhD thesis in like 1975 or something but he didn't get around to publishing
00:16:10.200 it until 2018 and i found out about it like a year ago from fortisax who will go into a lot of the
00:16:16.440 details about this yes he's been shilling this book hard to anyone who will listen very interesting
00:16:21.720 book so what what passfield did is he went back through like all the the sermons and correspondence
00:16:27.480 and memoranda left by our early intellectual elites and you know these guys were like you know
00:16:34.520 They were jurists and colonial administrators and churchmen, you know, most prominently Bishop John Straughan that like, you know, I never was told about this guy when I was, you know, learning Canadian history.
00:16:48.080 Turns out he educated basically our entire elite in the first half of the 19th century and like put like a deep stamp on this country's personality.
00:16:59.000 They kind of airbrushed him out, you know.
00:17:01.200 So I mean, these were busy guys, they didn't have time for like abstract political philosophy,
00:17:06.780 their hands were kind of full, you know, you've got like these thinly scattered illiterate
00:17:11.580 settlers who were, you know, like in these tiny settlements across a frozen wilderness
00:17:16.820 and you're trying to like organize them and carve out civilization from that.
00:17:19.580 They had their hands full with the practical matters.
00:17:22.200 But you can kind of like read between the lines and see the little comments they make
00:17:25.000 and Passfield did a lot of hard work.
00:17:26.440 Okay, so what comes out of that?
00:17:30.580 emerges from that is that is kind of some basic principles loyalism is not
00:17:35.440 universalist it is particularist it's not abstract it's concrete it's not
00:17:41.820 revolutionary or disruptive it is continuous and and I this is what I
00:17:46.960 think is kind of the core of it and it kind of comes out of the word itself
00:17:49.580 loyalism if you think about it for like half a second that it prioritizes the
00:17:54.880 formation and maintenance of bonds rather than celebrating emancipation
00:17:59.340 from bonds so it's that fundamentally different relationship to bonds to constraints to rules
00:18:06.380 that actually tip that that that distinguishes loyalism from liberalism
00:18:12.220 everything kind of flows from that actually and you say like constraints you know the modern
00:18:17.100 era that sounds like imprisonment slavery bondage you know it's like why would you want to be
00:18:21.180 constrained it's claustrophobic but constraints are necessary because without them you can't define
00:18:27.500 things you can't make one thing something and not something else um you think of poetry for a second
00:18:34.780 something that's bothered me for a long time poetry traditionally like before 1920 uh always involved
00:18:42.540 like putting yeah mark is laughing here and he knows exactly what i'm gonna say so it all you
00:18:47.100 know you needed some kind of meter or rhyme or scheme of alliteration some kind of structure
00:18:51.100 for the language and then you get, you know, after T.S. Eliot, you get free verse poetry
00:18:56.860 which is the typical liberal poetry where that's just like, there are no rules, you
00:18:59.660 just do whatever you want.
00:19:00.940 And that ends up with like, you know, words vomited onto a page without even, you know,
00:19:05.100 grammar.
00:19:06.100 If you take away grammar, you don't even have language anymore, by the way.
00:19:10.020 And the effect of that was that poetry, which was like the queen of the arts, going back
00:19:13.920 to like probably the Paleolithic, suddenly is like this irrelevant thing that no one
00:19:18.680 cares about.
00:19:19.680 Right?
00:19:20.680 The rules matter. Rules actually matter.
00:19:22.680 In this case, they form a framework in which the poet's imagination can stretch itself.
00:19:26.680 It's necessary to the creativity.
00:19:29.680 In a social sense, we understand constraints,
00:19:32.680 not just as the rules and laws by which we govern ourselves, our nomos, of our society.
00:19:37.680 We can also think of it as, and this is kind of the primary meaning, I think,
00:19:41.680 as the bonds between people.
00:19:43.680 Friendship, love, loyalty, fealty, trust.
00:19:47.680 For the loyalist, this is really the primary thing.
00:19:52.000 Once you make a vow, that vow should be kept.
00:19:54.300 If you say you'll love another person until you die, you do.
00:19:57.260 You stay faithful to that oath.
00:19:58.920 If you say that you'll stand by your friend, you stand by him.
00:20:02.460 If you say you will show up somewhere on time, you show up somewhere on time.
00:20:05.880 If you make an oath of fealty to your king, you keep it.
00:20:09.300 A good man in the loyalist frame is not a nice man or a kind man.
00:20:14.160 He's simply a man who keeps his word.
00:20:16.420 For the loyalist, even an avowed enemy, can be a good man if he's loyal to his own.
00:20:21.020 There's a basis for respect there, right?
00:20:23.520 Like, that isn't necessarily there in the liberal frame.
00:20:27.600 This is why loyalists make such a big deal about holding fast to the crown.
00:20:31.900 It doesn't matter if the king was wise or kind or good-looking or funny or, you know, like, smart or any of that.
00:20:37.660 That's entirely beside the point.
00:20:38.900 What matters is that the monarchy is a common focus of loyalty.
00:20:41.880 So if you live in a society of people who stay faithful to those oaths, then you have
00:20:47.580 some assurance that they'll keep their word in other ways.
00:20:50.580 Since they've demonstrated their capacity for loyalty to one man, they evidently maintain
00:20:54.060 their capacity for loyalty in general.
00:20:56.980 That being the case, it's much easier to maintain and build the bonds of friendship and trust
00:21:00.960 that hold society together without needing to rely on the heavy hand of the state to
00:21:04.520 coerce some facsimile of trust between people who don't know one another.
00:21:08.320 Obviously this is why they didn't like the Americans very much because they
00:21:12.040 broke their word to the king, they broke their oath to him. They couldn't be
00:21:15.520 trusted. This was this was how they felt back then. Another aspect, another reason
00:21:23.180 they treasured the crown and everything surrounding it, everything that it
00:21:28.360 represented was that it was an institution that extends through deep
00:21:32.860 time. English royal family can trace the descent back to William the Conqueror
00:21:37.180 and ultimately the Anglo-Saxon kings.
00:21:41.020 And once you get into the Saxon era,
00:21:42.680 the genealogy gets a little dicey.
00:21:46.420 Eventually you end up with Odin.
00:21:49.540 But arguably you can go back about 1,500 years of legitimacy
00:21:53.460 and maybe even deeper,
00:21:54.840 because I'm sure the Angles, Saxons, and the Jutes
00:21:56.920 had their own Germanic traditions of elected kingship
00:21:59.580 that the Saxons inherited from them.
00:22:02.120 And that probably connected them in turn 0.64
00:22:04.040 through a chain of succession all the way back to the Yamnaya
00:22:06.140 on the Pontic steppe. There were disruptions along the way, conquests, wars,
00:22:11.660 succession, changes in the structure of governance and so on. The point isn't
00:22:15.860 that the Windsors or any other royal house necessarily possess some direct
00:22:19.340 line of descent from Perseus himself. The point is rather that you have this
00:22:24.320 attachment to your own history, to the continuity of the historical process the
00:22:29.380 crown represents. One of the pitfalls you often see I think with a lot of
00:22:34.820 conservatism is this attempt to kind of freeze time and amber like pick out one
00:22:39.960 particular moment and say oh that was society that was when society was good
00:22:43.940 you know we have to maintain that so a lot of American conservatives like oh
00:22:47.280 the 1950s you know we have to go back to the 1950s that's gotta be like that or 0.94
00:22:50.960 you know since these days like the 1980s and 1990s even or the Amish are like 0.92
00:22:55.160 we're gonna live in the 1850s forever you know and you get into like other
00:22:59.500 weird debates like you know it's like oh no we need to go back to like the
00:23:02.940 Middle Ages or we need to go back to like the Bronze Age, the Bronze Age mindset, you know.
00:23:09.060 And then, you know, you get the same tiresome debates with religion. I was having this
00:23:13.920 conversation with one of you before the talk. And, you know, like some people would say,
00:23:19.620 okay, well, you know, we have to, you know, well, our fathers were secular humanists,
00:23:23.860 so we should be atheists. And someone else would come along and say, well, yeah, but
00:23:26.680 our grandfathers were Christians, so we should attend Mass. And, you know, the third guy
00:23:30.780 come along he'll be like well actually our great-grandfathers were pagans so we should you
00:23:34.540 know make blot to wotan and uh a fourth will reach back further still and note that our earliest
00:23:40.540 human ancestors were probably some kind of animist or whatever so we should just uh direct ourselves
00:23:45.500 to the veneration of stones and streams and i think all of those would be a mistake they would
00:23:52.620 uh they kind of they to pick one excludes the other you know if you pick the more recent one
00:23:58.380 then you're you're sort of cutting off a huge part of your heritage if more
00:24:02.780 the earliest part you're cutting off a huge part of what you've learned since as a people
00:24:07.580 it's the totality of it that matters it's the entire tapestry and weave that heritage that
00:24:16.380 you actually need to be loyal to and you know when you can when you contemplate all of that
00:24:22.140 as well you can start to extract you know certain common themes that tell you
00:24:28.680 a lot about how to revive the core elements of tradition in your own times
00:24:33.380 for example the animist the pagan and the Christian they all and the atheist
00:24:37.740 for that matter all experience the wonder of nature in their own way the
00:24:41.480 pagan and the Christian both honor our father who art in heaven
00:24:46.800 Loyalism implies faithfulness not to any moment in history but to history itself, in its totality,
00:24:54.800 because it's this unique chain of contingent and contradictory events, faiths, ideologies, traditions and customs
00:25:00.800 which we specifically gave rise to and which gave rise to us specifically and not to some other people.
00:25:05.800 This particularism was at the heart of the loyalist attachment to crown and altar.
00:25:10.800 English crown was important not because it was a crown, but because it was English.
00:25:15.200 And so, with all the rest of it.
00:25:17.480 There's not really a universal principle at work there.
00:25:20.900 They weren't saying, like, oh, this is the best system of government that all men should live under.
00:25:25.000 You know, the universal system, best system for all men in all times and all places.
00:25:31.780 They're just saying, this is our system.
00:25:34.540 And it's good for us.
00:25:36.880 It works for us.
00:25:37.920 It's what we made.
00:25:39.080 And it made us.
00:25:40.640 And the only universal principle there would be the principle of particularism itself.
00:25:44.440 But what is yours is valuable because it is yours.
00:25:49.220 It's also very concrete.
00:25:51.660 Loyalty is, first of all, loyalty between people.
00:25:55.080 Not to the people, not to all mankind, but to specific individual people in your own lives.
00:26:01.720 Your parents and grandparents, your brothers and sisters, your uncles and aunts, your wives and husbands,
00:26:05.720 your children and grandchildren, your friends and colleagues, your ancestors and your descendants.
00:26:11.640 It's an emotional personal relationship between actual people not an abstract and impersonal rule
00:26:16.520 set. So far I've presented loyalism as kind of implicitly opposed to liberalism and that's
00:26:24.200 not really true though actually it's more complicated than that. So the two are really
00:26:28.920 they're kind of orthogonal political axes forming a dimensions of a larger political space.
00:26:35.720 Which actually you have to kind of consider all of it to really understand like the Anglo-Saxon mind, I think, to understand who you are.
00:26:42.720 Liberalism has been with us for centuries now.
00:26:45.720 It's too long to pretend that it's some kind of aberration.
00:26:48.720 It's just, it's actually just an organic parts of our own philosophical and political tradition,
00:26:52.720 every bit as much as Christianity, constitutional monarchy, paganism, all of it.
00:26:58.720 It's also something that emerged organically from the Anglo-Saxon mind.
00:27:03.720 kind of natural expression of our proclivity for abstract systematizing, and our insistence
00:27:09.180 upon fair play, and our jealous insistence upon our rights.
00:27:12.900 I mean, the rights of Englishmen are like an old thing, right, goes back a long time.
00:27:17.480 An Englishman of any age would have bridled the suggestion that he should not be free,
00:27:21.900 however he defined freedom, and he has always defined himself first and foremost as the
00:27:26.420 free man, par excellence.
00:27:29.620 the American Revolution was not so much a wholesale rejection of the English
00:27:33.940 heritage it was really kind of a reversion to an older Anglo-Saxon way of
00:27:37.600 life. The president is a sort of elected Saxon king, the Senate is a sort of
00:27:42.400 witton, the House is the new Commons and the Bill of Rights is the Bill of Rights 0.91
00:27:47.440 actually, they just kind of stole that from the English. Loyalism does not
00:27:54.100 intend, I think, to end liberalism but to eat it, to unfold it and take it into
00:28:02.260 itself, preserve its best aspects and temper its pathologies. We should not
00:28:06.700 want to give up our rights but we should not tolerate a mutant liberalism that
00:28:11.600 insists our nations commit suicide. Some of you probably thought that was all a
00:28:17.740 little bit too moderate. So let's say a word about our present leadership. The
00:28:22.960 women and men, and you know, the men are also women, 0.79
00:28:27.040 occupying positions of power and responsibility
00:28:29.860 throughout our society, I think it's fair to say
00:28:33.120 that they actually stand doubly condemned.
00:28:35.540 So from the standpoint of liberalism,
00:28:37.400 they've abandoned every pretense of defending natural rights
00:28:41.680 and to the contrary, they become more tyrannical every year
00:28:45.380 as they're pursuing this doctrine of forced equality
00:28:48.380 And that's kind of turned into this two-tier racial caste system.
00:28:54.360 But they also stand condemned from the loyalist standpoint. 0.82
00:28:58.080 They are hostile to our history, our culture, our customs, our literature, all of our ancestral faiths.
00:29:04.660 They are bent upon the replacement of our people with peoples from every corner of the world. 0.99
00:29:09.000 And even beyond this, even putting all of that aside, they are just known for being faith for their faithless treachery.
00:29:15.180 What politician keeps his word?
00:29:18.380 right? It is not only that they are disloyal, they're not even capable of imagining what loyalty
00:29:25.380 is. And to make matters worse, they wear the old symbols like a skin suit making a mockery of 0.96
00:29:31.740 everything that came before. Our present elites are faithless tyrants and they have exceeded the 0.92
00:29:36.960 mandate of heaven by any measure. Liberalism itself cannot and should not be discarded as an
00:29:43.440 collaboration, but the developments of recent decades absolutely can and should.
00:29:48.660 From within the liberal frame, that's probably impossible.
00:29:52.900 From within the loyalist frame, it may be the easiest thing in the world.
00:29:58.040 Our opponents are men without principle, men without truth, men without love, men who live
00:30:04.760 only for themselves, men who cannot even trust one another, men from nowhere who do not even
00:30:12.260 believe in their own professed ideals. They are men who are fit only to master
00:30:17.300 a monatomic gas of abstract humanoids, but against a body of men held together
00:30:23.660 by bonds of unshakable loyalty, men rooted in their country, inspired by
00:30:28.440 their ancestral gods, men who know the deeds of their ancestors and know that
00:30:33.440 the same spirit lives within their own nerves. Such men, such tyrants from
00:30:40.280 and nowhere are dust in the wind.