This is the speech given by Prof. Fraser at the Inverell Forum on Friday the 17th of March. With the kind permission of the Professor we publish his speech, in full, as a "World Exclusive".

Reversing the Racial Revolution: A Classical Republican Case for Regime Change

by Andrew Fraser


Introduction

My career as a thought criminal began once I developed an academic interest in applying the theory and practice of classical republicanism in contemporary circumstances.

My academic colleagues seemed to recognize before it occurred to me that the classical republican tradition was not of universal relevance to all mankind. Indeed, I have come to understand that it was the unique product of European man.

The contemporary eclipse of the republican tradition is linked to decline of racial consciousness among white Europeans as consequence of managerial revolution.

Reversal of that revolution will require a revival of Anglo-American republican tradition. In effect, we need “regime change.”

But “regime change” does not mean the violent seizure of state power aimed at imposing a counter-revolution from the top down. Instead we require a republican reformation designed to rebuild civil society from the bottom up.

In my talk today, I will discuss the nature of the classical republican tradition. Secondly, I will explain how and why the contemporary managerial regime has undermined republican tradition. Thirdly, I will examine the impending crisis of the managerial regime. Then I will outline briefly and in principle the republican reformation of the family and the household; the legal profession and the judiciary; and the modern business corporation. Finally, I point to the role of churches, colleges and universities in the transmission of the fruits of that republican reformation to future generations.


Classical Republicanism

For Aristotle, the polis (what Romans call “republic”) was an “association of persons formed with a view to some good purpose.”

Not surprisingly, my post-modernist colleagues spotted something suspiciously “sexist,” “fascist” and “racist” about that idea.

Why? Only free citizens possessed “power of reasoned speech.” Aristotle excluded women, children, and foreigners (not to mention “barbarians”) from citizenship because they lacked the “power of reasoned speech” essential to public discourse about the nature of the good life in a particular community. Even Aristotle himself was denied Athenian citizenship because he was a metic or foreigner.

The Greeks understood that the survival of a stable republic presupposes a community of language, memory and blood.

Classical republicanism was marked by 3 central themes:

1. Citizen rises out of private realm into public sphere in pursuit of common good;
2. Search for public good demands civic virtue; the one, the few and the many each possess their own distinctive virtues and vices.
3. Fear of corruption in a pure democracy, aristocracy or monarchy led many classical republican thinkers to advocate the principles of mixed and balanced government.


Managerial Regime

In this paper, I argue that a revival of the constitutional principles of the classical republican tradition offers a solution to the problems created by managerialist regime.

That regime has destroyed the three foundation principles of classical republicanism:
1. It has become a system of no-man rule, eroding the public/private distinction; promoting centralization and a concomitant civic passivity in both the corporate sector and the state; it also breaks down mixed and balanced government;
2. the system has no goal beyond its own endless growth and enhanced vitality;
3. civic virtue has been displaced by pragmatism and a breakdown of public and private morality;
4. managerial elites-far from cultivating the virtues of the classical few deny the very existence of ruling class, claiming that they “only work here;”
5. we therefore bear all the burdens of arrogant, self-interested and exploitative ruling class without any of the benefits of “noblesse oblige;”
6. managerial multiracialism replaces community of language, memory and blood. An all-pervasive momentum towards separatism replaces momentum towards connection.
7. In Oz, this required the dismantling of the Australian Settlement

The convergence of economic, ecological, social and demographic catastrophes paradoxically offers some hope that, at the very least, the European peoples may be forced to make a virtue out of necessity, challenging the open borders of the last four decades as a matter of sheer economic survival. It may be possible to achieve a moratorium on non-white immigration, perhaps even the restoration of our historic freedoms of thought, expression and association along with the rights of private property.


The Possibility of and Need for Regime Change

But no one should believe that moratorium on non-white immigration or a rollback of anti-discrimination law can be set in concrete under present regime.

After all, such victories were achieved earlier in the twentieth-century in Australia, Canada and the United States. The White Australia Policy and the American immigration restriction act of 1924 were adopted by the same centralized governments that opened the floodgates to mass non-white immigration in the 1960s.

One can be sure that the curious coalition of Christians, cultural Marxists and corporate capitalists at the centre of the open borders lobby will regroup asap to take back any ground lost to immigration restrictionists in the aftermath of an economic collapse and political crisis Should good times return, they will be back with a vengeance.

Therefore the operating constitution of the managerial regime must be transformed whenever and as soon as the opportunity arises. This requires the reinvention of a ruling class prepared to accept responsibility for its actions (and failure to act).

Returning to the original principles of the classical republican tradition as they were once embodied in Anglo-American civil societies would revitalize our people, creating nations vastly different from the “proposition nations” so beloved of contemporary neo-conservatives.

Anglo-American civil societies must, once again, foster a sense of ethnic kinship rulers and the ruled. Shared membership in community of blood and memory must transcend class differences.

National identity must be akin to membership in a family. But, by the same token, the family must take on some of the attributes of body politic.



The Household as Civil Body Politic

Family not the individual is the basic unit of society, a principle until the rise of mass democracy and universal suffrage.

Family—at their best—provided individuals with a firm sense of their ancestral roots and the genetic interests associated with an inherited identity.

Family is like a race in microcosm. Race like large, partly-inbred extended family

Those extended family ties are breaking down as whites are forced to integrate with a massive influx of non-white immigrants.

Ironically, it is the putatively democratic institution of universal suffrage that has smoothed the way for the replacement of white peoples by a population of atomised, deracinated individuals.

Combined with universal suffrage, a multi-racial society trivialises politics into a perennial quarrel over who gets what, when, where, and how, calling into question the very existence of a shared public interest.

Universal suffrage fragments the family, destroying its moral strength and political unity.

A classical republican form of household suffrage would help whites to recover a sense of their ethnic genetic interests by reconstituting the family as an autonomous, self-governing, civil body politic.

The right to vote or to win office in local, state and federal elections should be granted not to individuals but to the heads of each independent household.

This need not require the sacrifice of the republican principle of political equality; each individual could still carry equal political weight so long as heads of household received a number of votes equal to the number of souls subject to their jurisdiction.

In other words, single persons forming a household on their own would receive one vote. Childless couples on the other hand would have two votes on condition that the couple nominated a head of household to vote on its behalf.

Couples with children would receive three or more votes depending on the number of children in the household. Every additional child living at home, of any age, would entitle the head to an additional vote.

Any household unwilling to nominate a head empowered to cast a ballot as a surrogate for all its members would forfeit its right to vote. How the decision to select a head is made in any given household would be a matter for itself.

The person selected to serve as head for purposes of voting or holding office at the local level need not necessarily be the same person serving as head at the state or federal level.

The point of this arrangement would be to enable individuals to consider their social, political and genetic interests as members of a particular and united family.

The head would rise out of the private realm of the household into the public realm where he would represent not just his individual interests but the interests of the family as a whole.

Heads of household must not just represent the interests of their families; they must also be seen to be representing those interests, faithfully and well. Members of the head’s family have an interest in knowing just how the household vote is cast. So too do his neighbours since heads of household are obliged to consider the public interest.

In other words, the theory and practice of household suffrage may well be opposed to the secret ballot. Those who vote on behalf of others must display both their good faith and the courage of their convictions.

Most of the deep-dyed reactionaries here might hope that heads of household would be men, if only to rekindle a sense of manly responsibility among our people. But there is no reason to prevent any household from selecting a woman to hold that office.

Western societies have always been distinguished by the relatively high status they have accorded to women. Accordingly, each household should be free to govern its own affairs according to its own lights.

Restoring civic responsibility to the family and the household would be a significant step towards the reconstitution of autonomous, self-governing European civil societies.

Any such step would require significant legal and constitutional changes. The reality is that such changes would require support from within the legal profession and the judiciary—institutions which themselves have been corrupted by the managerial regime.


Reconstituting the Legal Professions

In the early American republic, lawyers were not just a learned profession but the closest thing to an aristocracy to be found in this country. Indeed, Tocqueville thought the aristocratic character of the legal profession was much more distinctly marked in both England and the United States than in other countries.

In those days, both the English and the Americans had retained the law of precedents; that is to say they continued “to found their legal opinions and the decisions of their courts upon the opinions and decisions of their predecessors.

The legal profession was the very model of a transgenerational community binding the interests of those of us in the here and now together with the interests of the dead and the unborn. Laws, according to Tocqueville, were “esteemed not so much because they [were] good as because they [were] old.”

In England in particular, lawyers and judges worked to preserve the traditional fabric of their society, bending every effort to ensure that changes would “square with the intentions and complete the labours of former generations.”

Because lawyers belonged “to the people by birth and interest” but “to the aristocracy by habit and taste,” they served “as the connecting link between the two great classes of society.”

Among the members of that natural aristocracy, the governing professional ideal was the image of the public-spirited lawyer-statesman.

It went without saying, therefore, that the lawyer was distinguished from ordinary men by the spirit of citizenship. Through an extended apprenticeship in judgement, the best lawyers acquired their defining character trait, prudential wisdom.

Their “special talent for discovering where the public good lies and for fashioning those arrangements needed to secure it,” gave lawyers a powerful awareness of the shared destiny linking the profession to their people as a whole.

That was then; this is now. Today, the law is no longer a “learned profession,” despite the long years spent in law schools. Instead, law is a business. Like any other business, law firms are now driven by the economic imperatives of billable hours and the bottom line.

Following the rise of the corporate law firm, legal practice has become commercialised, de-professionalised and bureaucratised. In place of the practical wisdom of the lawyer-statesman, we now have the “expertise” of the “transactional specialist.”

If we are to return to the original principles of the ancient British constitution, the legal profession must be reconstituted as a natural aristocracy of lawyer-statesmen. This could be done by restoring to lawyers the opportunity to act as independent, public-spirited citizens.

One way of achieving that end would be to allow all those lawyers admitted to practice in any given court to serve as an electoral college convened to elect the judges of that court. It might be prudent to restrict that franchise to independent members of the practicing profession, that is to say, to the partners of established firms or solo practitioners.

In jurisdictions where the profession is divided between barristers and solicitors, membership in the Electoral College might be limited to barristers. The object in either case would be to exclude employee solicitors who might be said to lack an independent will of their own.

These reforms would provide a constitutional counterweight to the pernicious influence of state and corporate power within the legal profession. To ensure that the legal profession and the judiciary retain a sense of shared destiny with their fellow citizens, provision should also be made for popular recall elections.

After a period of, say, ten years, the name of every judge elected by the profession should appear on the ballot at the next general election so as to give heads of household the opportunity to vote for their recall should they feel such a step is warranted by judicial errors, either of commission or omission.

But these reforms will not themselves suffice to roll back the managerial revolution in the corporate sector which contributed so greatly not just to the corruption of the legal profession but to the alien invasion of Western societies.

The modern business corporation itself must be reconstituted in accordance with its original design as a civil body politic.


Reconstituting the Modern Business Corporation

Few people are aware that the modern business corporation began its career as a “little republic.” As such, it was a distinctively Western and, more particularly, Anglo-American institution. Like the law of contract before it, the development of the business corporation presupposed a society based on non-kinship based forms of reciprocity, making it possible for strangers to band together in a joint enterprise.

In the early American republic, where the chartered business corporation began to appear in large numbers, the nature of the joint enterprises they conducted was not unequivocally economic in character.

Indeed, the great wave of incorporations that swept over New England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was a response to a political crisis, the rise of mass democracy.

The Old Standing Order of New England sought to reconstitute its hegemony on the terrain of civil society. The corporation became the favoured vehicle for that political objective.

That is why banks, insurance companies, and turnpikes were not the only recipients of corporate charters. Schools, colleges, hospitals and even churches were also chartered as “civil bodies politic and corporate.”

Corporations were created to achieve public as well as private purposes. For that reason, shareholders in a business corporation were conceived not just as owners but also as citizens of their own little republic.

If the corporate charter did not specify the voting rights attached to share ownership, it was not unknown for judges to hold that, prima facie, the rule ought to be “one voice, one vote.”

Such civic considerations also led many to take a dim view of proxy voting; the practice was condemned as an abdication of political responsibility.

The adoption of proxy voting, along with the “one share, one vote” rule were symptoms of the managerial revolution in corporate governance.

Ownership was separated from control. Managers were now in the driver’s seat in an impersonal system of organized irresponsibility.

As a system, corporate capitalism has become a form of no-man rule. No one person or group can be held responsible for the operation of the system as a whole.

It follows that denunciation of the managerial regime serves no useful purpose unless it helps to create a new ruling class.

Corporations must be reconstituted as civil bodies politic. Civic responsibilities must be re-attached to the proprietary rights of share ownership.

All shareholders who hold a substantial threshold stake in an enterprise should be entitled to participate in deliberative decision-making on the basis of one-voice, one-vote. In that way, share ownership could once again serve as a school of self-government and political responsibility.

From within the ranks of substantial shareholders, a new civic aristocracy could be selected or, as Hannah Arendt put it, “would select itself.” Whatever authority members of a shareholder senate acquired would rest “on nothing but the confidence of their equals.”


Conclusion

But even if a republican reformation were to succeed in reconstituting a responsible ruling class among heads of household, lawyers and corporate shareholders, its constitutional legacy would have to be transmitted to and preserved by succeeding generations.
Neither post-modern public universities nor the Christian churches seem ready, willing or able to perform that task.

In the universities, Gramsci’s resolute “optimism of the will” has become positively dysfunctional. The contemporary academic is the perfect exemplar of the weak-willed, other-directed character-type.

To climb the greasy pole in an academic bureaucracy, the well-adjusted personality must be sensitive to every shift in the prevailing ideological wind.

Pragmatic white elites, generally, go with the flow. They no longer believe that they can or should act to preserve their own peoples, much less to recover the will to power that made our ancestors the rulers of the world.

Meanwhile, Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intelligence” has been displaced by the power of positive thinking.

Fear of corruption is foreign to those embracing the cult of universal human rights. For them, the innate perfectibility of man is an incontestable axiom of political life.

The managerial regime has become a secular theocracy worshipping at the shrine of the divine economy. This is a false god and a corrupt religion.

Remember, the word religion derives from the Latin re-ligare, to bind again. The managerial state and the corporate economy are destroying the bonds that tie our people to each other, to their ancestors and to their descendants.

We need to recover the old-time civil religion that once fused the history and destiny of our people with the realm of the sacred. We need scholars and priests capable of laying the theological foundation for a revitalised folk religion.

That renewed faith must be handed down from generation to generation not just in the churches but in schools, colleges and universities throughout the Western world.

Like a stern and virtuous Roman paterfamilias, we respect the memory of our ancestors by rekindling the spirit of liberty in the hearts of our children—even though our head tells us that, sooner or later, every republic must perish.

The Greeks and the Romans believed that there was something divine and eternal about the polis and the republic. We need to maintain their rage against the dying of that ancient light.

Thank you for your attention.