Decline of Whites

Frank Rich’s Triumphalism

Frank Rich, writing in the NYTimes, thinks the battle is over and his people won. (Not for the first time. See here.) The basic idea is that it’s a bit too late for all those middle and working class White folks all up in arms (some literally) and saying that they want to take back their country. Rich is happy to report that in 2008 Whites represented only 52% of the births, and by 2012 they will be a minority. And that means that the Republicans can decide to be an all-White minority party — “That’s their  right.” (Thanks!)  But, according to Rich, what they can’t do is encourage the “mass hysteria” among Whites who see themselves being dispossessed.

Rich presumably sees this as a moral imperative that is so obviously true there is no need to explain why White people have no right to be extremely angry about what is going on and to try to change things as they see fit.

According to Rich, Republicans have every right to be the party of the White folks as they peacefully head off into the political sunset. The main role for Republican elites should be to quell the rage and prevent things from getting out of hand. Republicans should strive to make their members into a new model minority that accepts their minority status and rejects any claim to having a right to hold onto the country as their ethnic possession as it was only a few short decades ago — until people like Rich, who dominate the most prestigious and powerful positions of our media, academic, and political culture, prevailed in their long campaign to displace the traditional people and culture of the US.

Sadly, I have no doubt that the Republican elites will do their best to comply with Rich’s marching orders. After all, they wouldn’t want to be called racists by people like Rich.

Rich:

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory [of White rage]. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and, as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.


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Kevin MacDonald: Ethnic Diversity and Multiculturalism in Wisconsin

Kevin MacDonald: Simon Krajsa’s current TOO article “Racial Diversity and Crime in Green Bayhits home with me because I grew up in Oshkosh, 50 miles to the south. It’s sad to see the transformations of the area since I was a kid; it’s a lesson that the revolution is not confined to Southern California, Texas, and New York.  The whole Fox River Valley was completely White when I was growing up. People noticed it when a Black person came up from Milwaukee to go fishing. There were maybe one or two Jewish families in town. The only Mexicans were migrant workers who lived outside of town on the farms and left after the harvest.

The only mildly significant diversity was religious. There were various Protestant denominations and there were still ethnically Polish Catholic congregations that were separate from the other Catholic churches. I think we Catholics did feel a bit separate from the Protestants, especially the well-off Protestants. (They were more German than WASP.) But the divisions didn’t seem very important (ethnicity wasn’t an issue) and there was a certain amount of mobility among the groups. In any case, no one felt like an outsider. We certainly did not have the intense hostility toward the WASP elite that has been so typical of Jews.

I have gone back to Oshkosh regularly in recent years and at least on the surface nothing much has changed. The non-White population seems invisible, but, as in Green Bay, there is in fact a substantial non-White population there.  In Oshkosh the main non-White group is the Hmong, a clan-based group from Southeast Asia with very high fertility, originally brought in as refugees by high-minded Christians from Wausau. Women begin having children at an early age and  have as many children as possible. Oshkosh now has Hmong Service Centers, churches, advocacy groups, festivals, and student groups at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. They have a long history in Asia of retaining their culture and not assimilating.

It’s a very adaptive culture that has been given a strong boost by generous social service benefits provided by the state. Indeed, the Hmong population in Wisconsin is exploding. Based on state estimates, these are the increases in a 5-year period for the main counties settled by the Hmong in Wisconsin:

Winnebago (Oshkosh) 20%; Marathon (Wausau) 13%; Brown (Green Bay) 54%; Outagamie (Appleton) 80%; Dane (Madison) 130%; Milwaukee (34%); Manitowoc (43%); Sheboygan (69%)

This is a very high rate of population increase by any standard. Whatever else one might say, the Wisconsin I grew up in is on the way to oblivion.

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The Kvetcher, the ADL, and David Duke

Patrick Cleburne over at VDARE.com has done a great job publicizing the Kvetcher’s comments on the enthusiasm of the organized Jewish community for displacing Whites. The oddity here is that Kvetcher is not only Jewish but rather blatantly Jewish.  Kvetcher gets it — he understands that people who advocate for Whites have absolutely normal human concerns about their future and that the ADL and the HIAS are pushing a hostile and aggressive Jewish ethnic agenda that should be abhorrent to every White person in America.

The ADL advertizes this quote from Duke as symptomatic of Duke’s vicious hatred:

As America is transformed from a 90 percent European American nation, as it was in the 1960s, to one where we will soon be a minority, should we not ask some pertinent questions? Is this racial diversity enriching, or will it be damaging to our social fabric?

The Kvetcher writes:

How is this not a good question? What does this say about the ADL and its donors that they cite this as a proof of how evil David Duke is?

Is this about “fighting anti-semitism,” or is this about the ADL’s attempt to smear anyone who questions the ADL’s fanatical goal of a white minority (as soon as possible) as a white supremacist?

Exactly. For the ADL, David Duke is the supreme bogeyman. The very first move that Jewish activists (including the ADL’s Abe Foxman) made in their campaign to discredit Mearsheimer and Walt was to solicit Duke’s approval of their writing — and Duke’s approval was then dutifully published throughout the mainstream media, from the Washington Post to the New York Sun and the Wall Street Journal.

It’s simply ridiculous to go after Duke because he deplores the fact that a powerful set of interests like the organized Jewish community has a fanatical goal of displacing Whites. But using Duke is doubtless very effective as a fundraising tool for the ADL and the $PLC.

The pathetic thing is that we get excited when we find a Jew who has the temerity to stand up to his own community on an issue like immigration, much less race. Non-Jews are well aware of the very powerful forces that will come down on them if they advocate for the interests of Whites or defend anything that Duke has ever said. The vast majority of Whites tremble at the very thought of challenging anything the ADL says for fear of being branded a racist or anti-Semite and then having to wonder if they will have a job next week. Kvetcher presumably doesn’t have to worry about that.

It’s good that the Kvetcher is writing like this, but he obviously has a very long way to go to really change things in the organized Jewish community.

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Edmund Connelly’s "Farewell, My Dear WASP"

Edmund Connelly’s current TOO article “Farewell, My Dear WASP” again raises the conundrum of why the WASPs collectively abdicated their position of power in the US. He mentions the Stockholm Syndrome and other possibilities — all of which should provide for an interesting discussion here. What strikes me most is the quote from Scott McConnell’s review:

While trying to impress an older girl, his summer tutor in Greek, he blurted out something mildly anti-Semitic. The young woman dryly replied that she was in fact “a New York Jew.” Gilder was mortified. He relates that he has never quite gotten over the episode. It is the kind of thing a sensitive person might long remember. Variations on this pattern are not uncommon in affluent WASP circles to this day: guilt or embarrassment at some stupid but essentially trivial episode of social anti-Semitism serve as a spur for fervent embrace of Likud-style Zionism. Atonement.

This severe proneness to guilt has always struck me as the defining feature of the Puritan strand of American culture. And with excessive guilt comes moralistic aggression aimed at ingroups and outgroups alike. As I noted elsewhere, the Puritans have a unique ethnic background among Anglo-Saxons generally. They have a strong tendency toward moral idealism, whether expressed as opposition to slavery in the 19th century, or as anti-anti-Semitism in the 21st. Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own cousins — perhaps a form of altruistic punishment as the term is used in the scientific literature.

Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic—violations of communal norms . . . are punished by altruistic aggression.

And since Gilder has never quite forgiven himself for a minor ethnic slur, he has become a soldier on behalf of righteousness. Like a Puritan magistrate of old, he is ready to do battle against the sinners among his own people. Of course, in the current environment, people like Gilder also benefit in terms of fame and fortune. But their feelings of moral righteousness make them feel good about what they are doing. Happiness for a Puritan is when self-interest coincides with a feeling of moral righteousness.

Once Jewish intellectuals achieved the moral high ground in the US and elsewhere, people like Gilder lost their resolve to defend their own ethnic interests; the game was over. Fundamentally, we have to stamp out Puritanism among Whites, or at least find a form of therapy for people like Gilder:

Given this state of affairs, what sorts of therapy might one suggest? To an evolutionary psychologist, this moralistic aggression seems obviously adaptive for maintaining the boundaries and policing the behavior of a close-knit group.  … Groups of Angles, Jutes, and their Puritan descendants doubtlessly benefited greatly from moralistic aggression  because of its effectiveness in enforcing group norms and punishing cheaters and defectors. There is nothing inherently wrong with moralistic aggression. The key is to convince whites to alter their moralistic aggression in a more adaptive direction in light of Darwinism. 

The ultimate irony is that without altruistic whites willing to be morally outraged by violations of multicultural ideals, the multicultural New Jerusalem is likely to revert to a Darwinian struggle for survival among the remnants. But the high-minded descendants of the Puritans [like George Gilder] won’t be around to witness it.

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The 2008 election will increase the racial polarization in the US

The 2008 election is shaping up to be a watershed event—or at least that is a strong possibility. First, the Democrats nominated Barack Obama as the first black nominee for a major political party. During the Democratic primaries, it was obvious that white working class people supported Hillary Clinton rather than Obama.

Obama’s nomination meant that blacks would be even more inclined to vote Democrat than usual, and Republicans had no motivation to reach out to black voters. The result was that the racial breakdown at the convention was 2% black, 5% Hispanic, and 93% white. This compares with 85% white in 2004 (due to outreach by George Bush) and 89% white in 2000. The breakdown for the Democrats was similar to previous conventions: 65 percent white, 23 percent black and 11 percent Hispanic.

Meanwhile, McCain was the model neocon candidate (i.e., favoring whatever the Israeli right wants and a poster boy for massive legal and illegal immigration to the US). He became the Republican nominee after über-Zionist Joe Lieberman jump started his moribund campaign with a ringing endorsement that was picked up by the mainstream media, propelling him to the nomination.

But McCain, who has been a strong advocate for the ill-fated bill that would have granted amnesty for illegal aliens and a variety of other liberal causes, had a problem: Lack of enthusiasm from the grass roots of his own party and from leading Republican opinion makers like Rush Limbaugh. The Democrats had all the momentum of an historic candidacy, a bad economy, an unpopular war, and lots of brain-dead whites hoping for racial absolution.

The (rather brilliant) solution was to select Sarah Palin for McCain’s running mate—a solution that has energized the Republicans but will also further the racial polarization of American politics—a prospect that is certainly welcome for us atThe Occidental Observer. The image of Palin endorsing small town values and surrounded by her white children on stage at the Republican convention is absolutely nauseating to the hegemonic left. Gloria Steinem expressed her outrage in the L.A. Times. Steinem’s ideal woman is doubtless someone like herself: a childless post-modern intellectual railing against male hegemony and other injustices.

Needless to say, this image of white fertility and small town values is not going to appeal to blacks or Latinos either. Indeed, Palin’s  speech reminded Whoopi Goldberg of a German-American Bund rally(!). Way too many happy white people in one place.

German-American Bund Rally, Madison Square Garden, 1939

German American Bund rally at Madison Square Garden. New York, United States, February 20, 1939.

Palin is a personification of what I term implicit whiteness. She has a white political and cultural affiliation even if there are still taboos about saying so explicitly. As she stressed in her acceptance speech, she is unabashedly proud of being a small-town American—an advocate of hunting, fishing, hockey moms, and serious Christianity. (The downside is that Palin’s Christian beliefs seem to be the Dispensationalist variety. Dispensationalists believe that the preservation of Israel is a Biblical imperative and they have become closely allied with the neocons.)

And there’s a strong dose of populism—a word that strikes fear and loathing in the hearts of American elites. (Remember Pat Buchanan’s “peasants with pitchforks”?)

The prediction is that an even greater percentage of whites will vote Republican in the 2008 election than in 2004. In 2004, 58% of whites voted Republican, and their votes constituted 88% of all the Republican votes.

If and when this occurs, there will be much weeping and gnashing in the media. In fact, it’s already happening. Writing in the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson is particularly blunt, claiming that the Republicans are using identity politics in a last gasp effort to hold on to political power:

The GOP’s last best hope remains identity politics. In a year when the Democrats have an African American presidential nominee, the Republicans now more than ever are the white folks’ party, the party that delays the advent of our multicultural future, the party of the American past. Republican conventions have long been bastions of de facto Caucasian exclusivity, but coming right after the diversity of Denver, this year’s GOP convention is almost shockingly — un-Americanly — white. Long term, this whiteness is a huge problem. This year, however, whiteness is the only way Republicans cling to power. If the election is about the economy, they’re cooked — and their silence this week on nearly all things economic means that they know it.

This of course is ridiculous. Identity politics is what multiculturalism is all about. Meyerson doesn’t seem to notice that blacks are much more likely to engage in identity politics than whites: Well over 90% of blacks will vote for Obama. And he would never complain about Jewish identity politics in which the great majority of Jews vote Democrat (74% in 200479% in 2000) despite their elite economic status and despite the fact that the Bush II administration was dominated by foreign policy operatives whose main allegiance is to Israel. Just imagine the angst of people like Meyerson if 75% of whites voted Republican.

Meyerson’s scorn and contempt for “the American past” is a scorn and contempt for white people—not at all surprising in a member of the ethnic group responsible for opening the flood gates of immigration to the US. He would doubtless agree with fellow Jewish intellectual activist Ben Wattenberg that “The non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality.”

Unlike the explicit ethnic identifications of blacks and Jews, white ethnic identification remains implicit. But white ethnic identification is bound to become increasingly explicit as the election returns show whites stubbornly attempting to cling to political power —not to mention the other signs that most whites—like Sarah  Palin—still pledge allegiance to the traditional culture of America.

The danger, of course, is that this artful move by McCain in selecting Palin will not have any effect on policy should McCain be elected—that a McCain administration would be yet another neoconservative administration with all the dangers (war and massive legal and illegal immigration) that that implies. McCain has surrounded himself with neoconservative Jews, and there is a real possibility that Joe Lieberman could become Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense in a McCain administration.

(My favorite of these Jewish McCain supporters is Marshall Wittmann: “A former self-confessed Trotskyite, radical Zionist and labor organizer, Wittmann served in the elder George Bush’s administration, then went to work in the mid-1990s for the Christian Coalition of America despite being Jewish.” We’ll take a wild guess that he still has a Jewish identity and is pursuing Jewish interests—a crypto-Jew by any other name.)

This was certainly the strategy of the Bush administration: Rally the white base of the Republican Party by appealing to implicit whiteness and then do absolutely nothing to advance the interests of white people. But that sort of tactic can’t work forever. It’s like the immigration amnesty act of 1986: When people realized that the amnesty law did not stop illegal immigration, they couldn’t be fooled a second time and overwhelmingly rejected a (McCain-sponsored) amnesty law.

McCain himself may well be absolutely cynical about all this, but sooner or later, the Republican appeal to white identity will have to actually do something to advance the interests of whites. And they will have to be explicit about it. Right now, it looks like the election of 2008 will bring that day closer.