Jeff Costello's recent review in American Renaissance (June 12, 2026) of Greg Johnson's Loving Our Own: Nationalism, Populism, & White Identity Politics (Counter-Currents, 2025) captures the book's core strength: it is a clear-eyed philosophical defence of white identity politics against the dominant civic nationalist consensus. Johnson, a Ph.D. philosopher and longtime editor of Counter-Currents, has produced his 25th book as an anthology of responses to critics. It systematically dismantles the idea that Western nations can or should survive as purely propositional entities based on abstract liberal values while their founding European-descended populations are demographically and culturally transformed.
The book's central claim is straightforward and difficult to refute on its own terms: white identity politics is not an aberration or moral failing. It is inevitable, necessary, and moral, because every other people on earth practices some version of it, and because liberal universalism, when applied asymmetrically, functions as a suicide pact for historically white nations.
The Double Standard at the Heart of "Diversity"
Johnson and Costello both zero in on the key question: If non-whites are permitted, and in many institutions actively encouraged, to maintain explicit racial and ethnic identities, form advocacy movements, and pursue collective interests, why is the same right denied to whites?
This is not a call for supremacy. It is a demand for consistency under the very rules of identity and diversity that elites claim to champion.
Non-white groups organise openly around ancestry and interests without automatic condemnation: Black advocacy organisations, Hispanic/Latino groups, Jewish defence and cultural organisations, Asian American caucuses in universities and corporations, and indigenous movements worldwide all receive mainstream legitimacy. Their identity is treated as a source of strength, resilience, or even moral authority.
White Europeans and their diaspora, by contrast, are told that any positive collective identity is inherently suspect or "racist." The only acceptable white identity under the current regime, as Johnson notes, is "antiracism," which in practice often reduces to anti-white activism, historical guilt, and demographic self-effacement. Civic nationalists and liberal universalists celebrate this asymmetry as progress. They insist that America (or Britain, France, Sweden, etc.) remains "the same" even if its founding stock is replaced, so long as newcomers affirm the Constitution or liberal platitudes.
Johnson calls this claim self-evidently absurd and often advanced in bad faith. The Founders themselves understood the United States as a nation of a particular people. The 1790 Naturalization Act restricted citizenship to "free white person[s]." John Jay described Americans as "one united people" descended from common ancestors, language, and culture. Treating the Constitution as a magical document that can assimilate any population regardless of compatibility ignores both history and human nature.
Civic Nationalism as a Post-Homogeneity Cope
A major contribution of Loving Our Own is its diagnosis of civic nationalism itself. Johnson argues that civic nationalism only becomes necessary after ethnic and cultural homogeneity has already eroded. It is not a robust alternative to identity politics; it is a desperate holding action that substitutes abstract principles (pluralism, tolerance, individualism, "our values") for the real sources of social trust and continuity: shared blood, culture, language, and history.
Once homogeneity is gone, the civic nationalist project tends to accelerate the very dissolution it claims to prevent. Openness to mass immigration, combined with the suppression of the host population's identity, leads to what Johnson calls the "Universal Homogeneous State," a low-trust, lower-capability society shaped by global average cognitive and cultural patterns rather than the specific inheritance that built high-trust Western institutions.
Data on rising anxiety (roughly 20% of American adults affected, with today's children scoring higher on psychiatric measures than 1950s patients) and Robert Putnam's findings on diversity and declining social trust are consistent with this analysis. Multiculturalism does not automatically produce vibrant harmony; it often produces withdrawal, suspicion, and elite contempt for the native population's concerns.
Equality Under Diversity — or Demographic Disappearance?
If diversity is a strength and identity movements are legitimate for non-whites, then denying whites the same right is not equality. It is a hierarchy in which one group is singled out for deracination.
Some versions of progressive ideology make this explicit. "Whiteness" is framed as a problem to be deconstructed or abolished. Demographic change is celebrated as inevitable justice or moral progress rather than a profound transformation of the historic character of Western nations. Johnson's warning is blunt: commit fully to liberal universalism plus maximum openness, and after a couple of centuries of migration, miscegenation, and commerce, there will be "no Norway or Sweden or Denmark… simply a Universal Homogeneous State, populated by a Universal Homogeneous Favela-Dweller." Easy for the elites to control.
This is not hatred of other groups. It is recognition that peoples require secure homelands: ethnostates or strong nation-states with real continuity, if they are to flourish without being reduced to interchangeable economic units. Johnson extends this right universally: every people deserves such a haven. The double standard arises when that right is affirmed for everyone except Europeans and their diaspora.
Why Johnson's Approach Matters
What makes Loving Our Own valuable is its engagement with mainstream and semi-mainstream thinkers (Fukuyama, Hazony, Lasch, Kaufmann, Galston, Lilla, etc.). Johnson does not merely assert; he dissects their arguments on their own terrain. He shows that civic nationalism repeatedly fails to offer a viable alternative once identity politics has been unleashed by the Left. It either accommodates anti-white identity politics or collapses into the very universalism that erodes the nation.
The book also separates healthy populism (a revolt of the people against unaccountable elites imposing policies against their interests) from caricatures of it. And it defends the moral legitimacy of loving one's own people without requiring hatred of others.
Conclusion
Greg Johnson's Loving Our Own is one of the clearest and most philosophically grounded statements yet that white identity politics is not an atavistic error but a rational response to an asymmetric ideological regime. It refuses the false choice between crude supremacism and self-erasure.
The question remains: If every other group is allowed to say "we exist, we have interests, we have a right to continuity in our historic homelands," on what coherent principle are whites uniquely forbidden from saying the same?
If the answer is "because you are the majority/historically powerful," then diversity and equality are revealed as temporary tools rather than consistent principles. If the answer is "because your identity is uniquely tainted," then we are no longer talking about equality at all, we are talking about a moral hierarchy that demands one people's diminishment, and replacement.
Johnson's book makes the case that loving one's own is not only permissible but necessary for any people that wishes to have a future as itself rather than as raw material for someone else's universal project. In an era of open double standards, that argument deserves to be engaged on its merits rather than dismissed by fiat.
https://www.amren.com/features/2026/06/how-civic-nationalists-think/