Entries by Kevin MacDonald

Lothrop Stoddard’s “The French Revolution in San Domingo,” Part 1

This is a foreword that I wrote for Lothrop Stoddard’s The French Revolution in San Domingo, published in 2011. *  *  * Lothrop Stoddard on the French Colonists in San Domingo Historian Frank Moya Pons, writing in The Cambridge History of Latin America, describes Lothrop Stoddard’s The French Revolution in San Domingo as “a book now out […]

Thinking about Civil War II

Lately a lot of people—31% in a recent poll—have been thinking the previously unthinkable — a civil war. Specifically, they agreed that “it’s likely that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years.” Moreover: Women and those under 40 are more worried about a possible civil war than […]

The Puritan Intellectual Tradition in America, Part 3: Was the 1924 Immigration Law Too Little, Too Late?

Go to Part 1 Go to Part 2 Concluding Thoughts on the Puritan Intellectual Tradition in America An interesting feature of Puritanism is the tendency to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues—their susceptibility to utopian appeals to a ‘higher law’ and the belief that the principal purpose of government is moral. New England was […]

The Puritan Intellectual Tradition in America, Part 2: The Period of Ethnic Defense, 1890-1965

Go to Part 1. The early part of the twentieth century was the high-water mark of Darwinism in the social sciences. It was common at that time to think that there were important differences between the races in both intelligence and moral qualities. Not only did races differ, they were in competition with each other […]

The Puritan Intellectual Tradition in America, Part 1: Nineteenth-Century Optimism and Utopian Idealism

This is about a pernicious strand of European thinking that is an important component of the crisis we face today—the Puritan strand of American thought which dominated America until the 1960s counter-cultural revolution. The synopsis is that in the nineteenth century, Puritan-descended intellectuals engaged in utopian, idealistic fantasies, often with moralistic overtones. Then after the […]