The Western world is in a crisis in large part because its culture from beginning to end is depicted as immoral in the elite media and throughout the educational system. It has affected a great many White people—people like those depicted in my compendium of White liberals rejoicing at the decline of people like themselves. As I noted,

As individualists, White people are particularly prone to forming moral communities (rather than kinship-based communities like the rest of the world) and to punishing people who dissent from their moral world view, even at substantial cost to themselves and even if they share many of the same characteristics as the people they are punishing, such being White. This is termed altruistic punishment by evolutionary psychologists and is a major theme of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition. Liberals therefore rejoice when Whites are punished for their racial attitudes.

To flesh out the theme that moral communities rather than kinship-based communities are fundamental to thinking about the West, I post a section from Chapter 6 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition which provides some historical background. As noted in the section quoted below, “A critically important feature of Puritanism is the tendency to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues.” In the nineteenth century, the main moral issue was slavery—Puritan-descended intellectuals were the main influence in developing the moral case against slavery. Now it is the charge of “systemic racism” whereby Whites, just by being White, are recipients of “White privilege.” Whites buy into a system that systematically disadvantages People of Color (ignoring the success of several non-White groups, such as Chinese-descended Americans).

Thus in my view, this moralistic fervor—a fervor that has often led to altruistic punishment of White people like themselves—has deep roots in the culture of the West, particularly the cultures of northwest Europe. In Individualism I argue that these tendencies are genetically based on the basis of historical patterns in family structure and genetic clines. However, my view is that the current culture of moralistic self-hatred is not an inevitable consequence of White tendencies toward moralistic utopianism and altruistic punishment: “With the rise of the Jewish intellectual and political movements, the descendants of the Puritans readily joined the chorus of moral condemnation of America. With their base in the Ivy League universities, Puritan-descended intellectuals dominated intellectual discourse in the United States until the rise of a Jewish elite beginning in the 1920s which accelerated after World War II and became dominant after 1965.”

There are, of course, other reasons besides feeling morally superior for buying into the culture of anti-White hate—most obviously that individuals who publicly dissent from that culture are likely to be punished with ostracism and loss of job; and there are rewards for White people who go along with it—there is a very prosperous diversity industry manned by people—many of the White—who get rich by participating. But as I note, “After the evil has been vanquished, the rhetoric dies down, and disillusionment may occur as people realize that evil has not, after all, been extirpated.” They’ve been trying to “close the gap” in performance with African-Americans for 50+ years now, but it never seems to go away; same for the crime. But by the time disillusionment sets in, it may be too late for White America.

*   *   *

In short, the Puritan Revolution meant the end of the Indo-European world and its Christian version: the king and aristocracy (“those who fought bellatores”), the Church (“those who prayed, oratores”), and the commoners (“those who worked, laboratores”).[1] It was thus the quintessential modern revolution—a fundamental break in the history of the West. It marked the beginning of the end of aristocratic individualism with its strong emphasis on hierarchy between social categories and the beginning of the rise of egalitarian individualism with its ideology of social leveling.

The revolution, although begun in England, was slow to reach its completion there, whereas in the United States, “as a consequence of the Civil War, the absolute hegemony of the leveling, acquisitive and utilitarian society pioneered by the Puritan Revolution was firmly entrenched.” The Civil War pitted “the Cavaliers of the Old South [who] recalled the highest ideals of European chivalry” against “the soulless materialism of Northern capitalism.”[2]

The new order was far more egalitarian than the older order. Congregations elected their ministers, who served at their pleasure.  Whereas war had been the province of the nobility, Cromwell’s New Model Army was based on citizen participation.

It was also profoundly spiritual and created enormous energy—energy that was eventually characterized far more by capitalist financial concerns than religious spirituality. “Possessive individualism” and “tasteful consumption” had come to define the highest expression of Anglo-Saxon character and culture. The government of England and other Anglo-Saxon areas became dominated by commercial and financial interests.

When the intellectuals of the new order looked at the English past, they did not see a social order of liberty and reciprocity. Rather, Whig historians saw the Middle Ages as oppressive, that people had no share in the government and the vast majority were the villeins, vassals, or bondsmen of their lords.[3]

In the United States, the Puritan revolution was carried to its extreme. Freed of the hereditary aristocracy and religion of England, during the Jacksonian era “the few remaining conservative influences in religion, politics, and law” were swept aside.[4] The result was an exultant radical individualism in which every person was to have direct, unmediated access to God. This radical individualism distrusted all manifestations of corporate power, including chartered private corporations. However, the corporations established by the heirs of Puritanism, referred to as WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) in the following, eventually metastasized into monsters “incapable of preserving either the class boundaries of the bourgeoisie or the ethnic character of the Anglo-American nation as a whole.”[5] In the hands of recent and contemporary Anglo-Saxons, the modern business corporation is analogous to the “proposition nation” concept: merely a concatenation of contracts, with no ethnic character, although Fraser is quick to note that corporations dominated by other groups do not lose their ethnic character.

Fraser usefully divides U.S. history into four periods defined by three transformation: The Constitutional Republic dating from the American Revolution to the Civil War and based on political decentralization, liberty and egalitarianism; the Bourgeois Republic resulting from the victory of the North in the Civil War and lasting until Franklin Roosevelt, typified by the Fourteenth Amendment and a large increase in federal power; and the Managerial/Therapeutic leviathan since that period, characterized by an even greater concentration of power at the federal level, combined now with energetic attempts to change the attitudes of Americans in a liberal and eventually in an Anglophobic direction.

None of these eras was explicitly Anglo-Saxon Protestant: Even at the outset, “the Anglo-Saxon character of the Constitutional Republic was merely implicit.[6] The fourth, as yet unrealized, republic is slated to be the Transnational Republic where all traces of White domination have been erased and WASPs have become” a shrinking and despised minority.”[7]

The Puritan-energized egalitarian tendencies of the first period, the Constitutional Republic, eventually ended the aristocratic, Indo-European-derived social order of the Old South.

A natural social order dating from time out of mind had been leveled. The egalitarian sense that every free man must participate in labor now outlawed “invidious” social distinctions between those who worked, those who prayed, and those who fought. It also aggravated the growing split between the North and South. Both the celebration of work and the disparagement of idleness made “the South with its leisured aristocracy supported by slavery even more anomalous than it had been at the time of the Revolution.” Combined with the anti-institutional fervor of evangelical revivalism, the democratic ideology of free labor eventually lent its mass appeal to a multi-pronged crusade against Negro slavery. … The conquest and destruction of the Old South marked the second phase of the permanent American Revolution.[8]

The triumph of the North in the Civil War meant that the US was even further removed from its Indo-European roots than before.

The result of Lincoln’s victory was that limits on federal power “were swept aside by executive decree and military might. By crushing the southern states, Lincoln fatally weakened the federal principle; his arbitrary exercise of emergency powers laid the foundations for executive dictatorship whenever exceptional circumstances justify the suspension of constitutional liberties. The war was an exercise in constitutional duplicity; the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 was accomplished only by means of blatant fraud and military coercion. Nonetheless, once securely enshrined in the Constitution, the amendment provided both the Second [i.e., Bourgeois] Republic and the Third [i.e., Managerial/Therapeutic] Republic with their formal constitutional warrant. … By the standard of the First (Federal) Republic, the Fourteenth Amendment was unconstitutional. But, despite some initial resistance, the legal priesthood of the Republic soon elevated the amendment to the status of sacred writ.[9]

Nineteenth-Century Intellectual Trends

A critically important 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 most fertile ground for “the perfectability of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms.’”[10] There was a tendency to paint political alternatives as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as evil incarnate—inspired by the devil. Puritan moral intensity can also be seen in their “profound personal piety”[11]—their intensity of commitment to live not only a holy life, but also a sober and industrious life.

Whereas in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts the moral fervor was directed at keeping fellow Puritans in line, in the nineteenth century it was directed at the entire country. The moral fervor that had inspired Puritan preachers and magistrates to rigidly enforce laws on fornication, adultery, sleeping in church, or criticizing preachers was universalized and aimed at correcting the perceived ills of capitalism and slavery.

Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own cousins—quite possibly a form of altruistic punishment as discussed in Chapter 3. Whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired and justified the massive carnage of closely related Anglo-Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa. Militarily, the war with the Confederacy was the greatest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans.[12] Puritan moral fervor and punitiveness are also evident in the call of the Congregationalist minister at Henry Ward Beecher’s Old Plymouth Church in New York during World War II for “exterminating the German people … the sterilization of 10,000,000 German soldiers and the segregation of the woman.”[13]

It is interesting that the moral fervor the Puritans directed at ingroup and outgroup members strongly resembles that of the Old Testament prophets who railed against Jews who departed from God’s law, and against the uncleanness or even the inhumanity of non-Jews. Indeed, it has often been noted that the Puritans saw themselves as the true chosen people of the Bible. In the words of Samuel Wakeman, a prominent seventeenth-century Puritan preacher: “Jerusalem was, New England is; they were, you are God’s own, God’s covenant people; put but New England’s name instead of Jerusalem.”[14] “They had left Europe which was their ‘Egypt,’ their place of enslavement, and had gone out into the wilderness on a messianic journey, to found the New Jerusalem.”[15]

Whereas Puritanism as a group evolutionary strategy crumbled when the Puritans lost control of Massachusetts, Diaspora Jews have been able to maintain their group integrity even without control over a specific territory for well over 2,000 years and even during periods when they adopted crypsis to avoid persecution. This attests to the greater ethnocentrism of Jews. But, although relatively less ethnocentric, the Puritans were certainly not lacking in moralistic aggression toward outgroups, even when the outgroup was their close relatives in the Confederacy. And while the Puritans were easily swayed by moral critiques of White America, Jews, because of their stronger sense of ingroup identity, have been remarkably resistant to moralistic critiques of Judaism.[16]

With the rise of the Jewish intellectual and political movements, the descendants of the Puritans readily joined the chorus of moral condemnation of America. With their base in the Ivy League universities, Puritan-descended intellectuals dominated intellectual discourse in the United States until the rise of a Jewish elite beginning in the 1920s which accelerated after World War II and became dominant after 1965.

Ernest Tuveson notes that the moralistic, idealistic strand of American thought tends to come to the fore in times of crisis—“the expansionist period, the Civil War, the First World War.”[17] After the evil has been vanquished, the rhetoric dies down, and disillusionment may occur as people realize that evil has not, after all, been extirpated.[18] However, it lurks in the background and may revive in times of crisis. “Yet, despite post-Civil War disillusionment, the myth of the Redeemer Nation kept a hold on the deepest feelings of the country, and in critical moments asserted itself,”[19] citing several speeches of Woodrow Wilson: “America had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world.”[20]

[1] Andrew Fraser, The WASP Question (Arctos, 2011), 117,

[2] Ibid., 122.

[3] Ibid., 156.

[4] Ibid., 27.

[5] Ibid., 254.

[6] Ibid., 280; emphasis in text.

[7] Ibid., 322.

[8] Ibid., 287–288. In the passage, the inner quotations are to Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), 336–337.

[9] Ibid., 294–295.

[10] David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed (Oxford University Press, 1989), 357.

[11] Alden T. Vaughn, The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620–1730 (University Press of New England, 1997), 20.

[12] Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars (Basic Books, 1999), 477.

[13] Ibid., 556.

[14] Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 20–21.

[15] Ibid., 20.

[16] See Kevin MacDonald, “The Israel Lobby: A Case Study in Jewish Influence,” The Occidental Quarterly 7, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 33–58.

[17] Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (University of Chicago Press, 1968), 199.

[18] Mark Twain commented early in the twentieth century in notes for a projected essay: “[Robber Baron Jay] Gould Followed CIVIL WAR & Cal.[i.e., California] sudden-riches disease with a worse one… by swindling and buying courts.” Quoted in Tuveson, Ibid., 208.

[19] Ibid., 209.

[20] Ibid., 212.

Deborah Lipstadt has been nominated to be the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, a  position where, if confirmed, she will have an official position as a Jewish activist, as opposed to her current position in which she masquerades as a “scholar.” Because I participated in David Irving’s lawsuit against Lipstadt, I wrote the following on her, excerpted from this general discussion of my participation in the trial. Yes, Lipstadt is yet another academic Jewish activist.

Despite the fact that David Irving contacted me because I had discussed the suppression of his book, I continued to be concerned that this issue was not really central to Irving’s case and that my purported expertise on Judaism was irrelevant. The link to the case was that Deborah Lipstadt had joined the effort at suppression despite her lack of scholarly expertise on Goebbels. The Washington Post of April 3, 1996 quoted Lipstadt as stating that “In the Passover Hagadah, it says in every generation there are those who rise up to destroy us. David Irving is not physically destroying us, but is trying to destroy the memory of those who have already perished at the hands of tyrants.” “They say they don’t publish reputations, they publish books…. But would they publish a book by Jeffrey Dahmer on man-boy relationships? Of course the reputation of the author counts. And no legitimate historian takes David Irving’s work seriously.” These comments were made in reaction to the St. Martin’s Press rescinding publication of Irving’s book, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, and were clearly intended to support that decision. The decision to sue Lipstadt came only after St. Martin’s Press had rescinded publication of the book, and only after Lipstadt’s public support for that decision (David Irving, personal communication; see also Guttenplan 2000, 53).

In the trial, the defense argued that my testimony was irrelevant and the judge seemed to agree but then changed his mind when the link with Lipstadt was made clear. Irving’s complaint goes beyond simple libel against him to the assertion of an organized campaign of suppression. Evolutionary theory did not enter into my testimony, and it only entered my written statement to the court in a general way—that I saw Jewish- gentile relations as being examples of competition between ethnic groups.

David Irving is in many ways not an ideal person. There is no doubt in my mind that he has strongly held political views — although the extent to which this is a reaction to his demonization by Jewish activist organizations is at least open to conjecture. Whenever a person has strong political views, it is reasonable to assume that these views may color one’s perception of reality. Since I am not a professional historian, I am in no position to judge the validity of his archival research. I am very impressed by the fact that Irving is a recognized expert on certain aspects of W.W.II— recognized by several noted authorities for having made original contributions to knowledge in the field — none of whom are Holocaust deniers or revisionists. These include Gordon Craig, A.J.P. Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and John Keegan. (A column by Keegan, written for the Daily Telegraph (UK) appears as Appendix 1 below. [Keegan concludes: “Prof Lipstadt, by contrast, seems as dull as only the self-righteously politically correct can be. Few other historians had ever heard of her before this case. Most will not want to hear from her again.”])

Post-trial comment: In his opinion, Justice Gray seems to concur with this evaluation:

As a military historian, Irving has much to commend him. For his works of military history Irving has undertaken thorough and painstaking research into the archives. He has discovered and disclosed to historians and others many documents which, but for his efforts, might have remained unnoticed for years. It was plain from the way in which he conducted his case and dealt with a sustained and penetrating cross-examination that his knowledge of World War 2 is unparalleled. His mastery of the detail of the historical documents is remarkable. He is beyond question able and intelligent. He was invariably quick to spot the significance of documents which he had not previously seen. Moreover he writes his military history in a clear and vivid style. I accept the favourable assessment by Professor Watt and Sir John Keegan of the calibre of Irving’s military history … and reject as too sweeping the negative assessment of Evans …. [Richard Evans, a historian who testified for the defense, had stated that Irving has had “a generally low reputation amongst professional historians since the end of the 1980s and at all times amongst those who have direct experience of researching in the areas with which he concerns himself”; although not noted by Judge Gray, Evans also reiterated Lipstadt’s charge that Irving was not a historian at all.] But the questions to which this action has given rise do not relate to the quality of Irving’s military history but rather to the manner in which he has written about the attitude adopted by Hitler towards the Jews and in particular his responsibility for the fate which befell them under the Nazi regime.

The judge is implicitly agreeing with me that Lipstadt libeled Irving by writing he was not a historian and by writing that “no legitimate historian takes David Irving’s work seriously.” I suppose that in the judge’s view this was far less serious than the accusation that he had manipulated data in order to exculpate Hitler, etc., and I have no objection to that judgment.

I also felt that Lipstadt exaggerated the extent to which Irving denied the Holocaust, since there are many places in his writings where Irving describes Nazis engaged in organized killing of Jews. I was also swayed by my knowledge that Irving’s Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich received a positive but critical review in The New York Review of Books (Sept. 19, 1996) by Stanford historian Gordon Craig who cautioned against censoring people like Irving. And finally, I had finished reading Goebbels myself and decided that, whatever faults a close analysis might reveal, it was highly informative on many points—an indispensable source of information on the man and the period. Obviously I would not trust only my own feelings on this issue; but in fact I had satisfied myself that indeed it was a major contribution to the field.

I was also swayed by finding that Lipstadt is a Jewish ethnic activist whose own writings have been criticized by a well-recognized historian as exaggerating the role of anti-Semitism in the Western response to the Holocaust during World War II [see below]. Lipstadt is thus part of a pattern discussed extensively in Separation And Its Discontents in which some (but by no means all) Jewish historians engage in ethnocentric interpretations of history. It is highly significant that Lipstadt’s book Denying the Holocaust was written with extensive aid from various Jewish activist organizations, including the ADL. Lipstadt’s book was commissioned and published by The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In her acknowledgements, she credits the research department of the Anti-Defamation league, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for Jewish Affairs (London), the Canadian Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee’all activist organizations.

Lipstadt is the Chair of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University. Historian Jacob Katz finds that academic departments of Jewish studies are often linked to Jewish nationalism: “The inhibitions of traditionalism, on the one hand, and a tendency toward apologetics, on the other, can function as deterrents to scholarly objectivity” (p. 84). The work of Jewish historians exhibits “a defensiveness that continues to haunt so much of contemporary Jewish activity” (1986, 85). Similarly the preeminent scholar of the Jewish religion, Jacob Neusner, notes that “scholars drawn to the subject by ethnic affiliation’Jews studying and teaching Jewish things to Jews’ turn themselves into ethnic cheer-leaders. The Jewish Studies classroom is a place where Jews tell Jews why they should be Jewish (stressing “the Holocaust” as a powerful reason) or rehearse the self-evident virtue of being Jewish.” (Times Literary Supplement, March 5, 1999).

Perhaps the best indication of Lipstadt’s Jewish activism is that she serves as Senior Editorial Contributor at the Jewish Spectator, a Jewish publication for conservative, religiously observant Jews. Her column, Tomer Devorah (Hebrew: Under Deborah’s Palm Tree), appears in every issue and touches on a wide range of Jewish issues, including anti-Semitism, relations among Jews, and interpreting religious holidays. In her column she has advocated greater understanding and usage of Hebrew to promote Jewish identification, and, like many Jewish ethnic activists, she is strongly opposed to intermarriage. “We must say to young people ‘intermarriage is something that poses a dire threat to the future of the Jewish community.’ ” Lipstadt writes that Conservative Rabbi Jack Moline was “very brave” for saying that number one on a list of ten things Jewish parents should say to their children is “I expect you to marry a Jew.” She suggests a number of strategies to prevent intermarriage, including trips to Israel for teenagers and subsidizing tuition at Jewish day schools (Jewish Spectator, [Fall, 1991], 63).

In his recent book, The Holocaust in American Life, historian Peter Novick clearly thinks of Lipstadt as an activist, although not as extreme as some. He repeatedly cites her as an example of a Holocaust propagandizer. He notes that in her book Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945, Lipstadt says Allied policy “bordered on complicity” motivated by “deep antipathy” toward “contemptible Jews.” Novick says that while there is no scholarly consensus on the subject, “most professional historians agree that “the comfortable morality tale … is simply bad history: estimates of the number of those who might have been saved have been greatly inflated, and the moralistic version ignores real constraints at the time” (Novick, 1999, 48). Novick characterizes Lipstadt as attributing the failure of the press to emphasize Jewish suffering as motivated by “willful blindness, the result of inexcusable ignorance’or malice” (p. 65) despite the fact that the concentration camp survivors encountered by Western journalists (Dachau, Buchenwald) were 80% non-Jewish. Lipstadt is described as an implacable pursuer of Nazi war criminals, stating that she would “prosecute them if they had to be wheeled into the courtroom on a stretcher” (p. 229). In a discussion of the well-recognized unreliability of eye-witness testimony, Novick writes: “When evidence emerged that one Holocaust memoir, highly praised for its authenticity, might have been completely invented, Deborah Lipstadt, who used the memoir in her teaching of the Holocaust, acknowledged that if this turned out to be the case, it ‘might complicate matters somewhat,’ but insisted that it would still be ‘powerful as a novel.’ ” Truth is less important than the effectiveness of the message.

The intrusion of ethnocentrism into historical scholarship is a well-recognized problem in Jewish historiography, discussed at length in Separation and Its Discontents. Historians such as Jacob Katz (1986) and Albert Lindemann (1997) have noted that this type of behavior is commonplace in Jewish historiography. A central theme of Katz’s analysis—massively corroborated by Albert Lindemann’s recent work, Esau’s Tears‘is that historians of Judaism have often falsely portrayed the beliefs of gentiles as irrational fantasies while portraying the behavior of Jews as irrelevant to anti-Semitism. To quote the well-known political scientist, Michael Walzer: “Living so long in exile and so often in danger, we have cultivated a defensive and apologetic account, a censored story, of Jewish religion and culture” (Walzer 1994, 6).

The salient point for me is that Jewish historians who have been reasonably accused of bringing an ethnocentric bias to their writing nevertheless are able to publish their work with prestigious mainstream academic and commercial publishers, and they often obtain jobs at prestigious academic institutions. A good example is Daniel Goldhagen. In his written submission to the court on behalf of Deborah Lipstadt, historian Richard Evans, describes Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, as a book which argues “in a crude and dogmatic fashion that virtually all Germans had been murderous antisemites since the Middle Ages, had been longing to exterminate the Jews for decades before Hitler came to power, and actively enjoyed participating in the extermination when it began. The book has since been exposed as a tissue of misrepresentation and misinterpretation, written in shocking ignorance of the huge historical literature on the topic and making numerous elementary mistakes in its interpretation of the documents.”

These are exactly the types of accusations leveled by Lipstadt at Irving. Yet Goldhagen maintains a position at Harvard University; he is lionized in many quarters and his work has been massively promoted in the media while his critics have come under pressure from Jewish activist organizations (Guttenplan, 2000).