Difference is the precondition of there being things at all. Unity is real, but it is an achievement, not a beginning.
Folkishness is the metaphysics of the somewhere: rooted people, places, and forms of life as real things in themselves. Folkishness is a love of difference.
Folkishness rejects monist ontologies that reduce reality to a single substance, essence, or unitary first principle. In every monism, what is most real is what is most universal, and particularity becomes a defect. Differential ontology reverses that priority: difference is the precondition of there being things at all.
A thing can only be a thing insofar as it differs from some other thing. Etymologically, "existence" comes from the Latin for "to stand out"; "being" is rooted in "becoming, growing, appearing." Difference, boundary, exclusion, and contrast are the very ground of form.
Unity is real, but not primordial; it is an achievement. A thing is one only insofar as it holds together amid difference, contradiction, and motion. Heraclitus used the image of the vinaigrette: it has unity only while being shaken, while unlike elements are held in dynamic relation. So too with a man, a family, a tribe, a folk.