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Jews as An Elite

Elena Kagan and the Decline of WASP America

May 17, 2010/92 Comments/in Decline of Whites, Elena Kagan, Jews and the Left, Jews as An Elite/by Kevin MacDonald

Elena Kagan’s impending confirmation on the Supreme Court has produced several comments on the decline of WASP America. Writing in the Wall Street Journal (“That Bright, Dying Star, the American WASP”), Robert Frank’s article is an expression of Jewish triumphalism and contempt for WASPs. Discussing the New York banking elite, he points to the bad old days when “the strictly homogenous crowd of Protestant blue-bloods spent their mornings comparing golf scores and vacation homes.” Among several causes for the decline of the WASPs, Frank mentions the decline of family connections and the rise of a meritocracy.

This is a favorite aspect of contemporary Jewish self-conception — the idea that Jews replaced WASPs because they are smarter and work harder. But this leads to the ultimate irony: Kagan is remarkably unqualified to be a Supreme Court Justice in terms of the usual standards: judicial experience, academic publications, or even courtroom experience. Rather, all the evidence is that Kagan owes her impending confirmation to her Jewish ethnic connections (see also here).

So we are replacing one type of ethnic networking with another. At least the WASPs’ ethnic networking had a certain legitimacy given their percentage of the population and their role in founding the country and defining its culture for much of US history.

Frank also quotes a passage from E. Digby Baltzell’s The Protestant Establishment:

A crisis has developed in modern America largely because of the White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment’s unwillingness, or inability, to share and improve its upper-class traditions by continuously absorbing talented and distinguished members of minority groups into its privileged ranks.

Perhaps. But that wouldn’t explain the eclipse of the WASPs, only that they resisted the inroads of others — futilely, as it turns out. Mr. Frank, of course, finds the passage useful because he sees himself as a member of a certain upwardly mobile minority group that he feels was not greeted warmly enough by the WASPs.

Baltzell’s comment is quite consistent with my view that that the WASPs did not voluntarily cede control but were pushed out by a rising Jewish group whose base of influence was the academic world, finance, the legal profession, personal wealth, and the media (where anti-WASP movies became a staple at least by the 1960s; see also here).

Frank says that as a result of its downfall, “WASP culture has been left to live out its days as a fashion statement, on the shelves of Ralph Lauren stores, or as a social badge at defiantly old-world clubs like the Knickerbocker Club in New York or the Bath and Tennis Club in Palm Beach.” A triumphalist statement if ever there was one. The battle is over and we won.

Frank quotes an Episcopalian bishop who acknowledges defeat, but isn’t much concerned: “tracking the ups and downs of socioreligious groups like WASPs [is] no longer relevant: ‘That kind of calibration of ‘what members of my team are on the front lines’ seems to me to be an antique kind of thing to do.’”

That’s the kind of broad-minded, liberal thinking that got the WASPs into trouble in the first place. There was always a tension between the WASPs as a clubby, snobbish elite cemented by family connections and their very liberal, broad minded world view stemming from their New England base. Writing in the LA Times, Gregory Rodriguez credits Kagan’s nomination to “The triumph of WASP culture.” Whereas Frank is filled with contempt for his vanquished ethnic rivals, Rodriguez seems quite thankful that the liberalism of the WASP elite was triumphant, presumably so that his people can now swarm over the border and aspire to power while WASP principles still count for something. He summarizes Eric Kaufmann’s view of WASP culture:

The Yankee sense of ethnic superiority often competed with their belief in universalist liberal ideology — equality, liberty and human rights. One way that worked itself out is that non-Yankees could aspire and acculturate to the Yankee norm and ideal — by gaining entrance to their schools primarily, but also by joining their churches, appreciating their art forms and imbibing their ideas, adopting their aesthetic.

Rodriguez concludes:

Students don’t just strive to attend Harvard and Yale for their educational excellence. There is also the matter of absorbing those universities’ sense of authority, legitimacy and historical legacy that leads back to their Yankee founders. If Kagan is confirmed, as seems likely, don’t cry for the WASPs. The educational pedigree of the Supreme Court will be a powerful example that their culture abides and still anoints power. The only thing that has changed is that today’s “WASP elites” are just as likely to be Jews and Catholics as they are to be Yankees.

I do cry a bit for the WASPs because I think they were more public spirited than our current elite and less likely to welcome a radical change in the ethnic balance of the country that they built. After all, the WASP elite did make common cause with the rest of White America in fashioning the 1924 immigration law (the “period of ethnic defense”). But they ultimately fell to the rise of a new Jewish elite that has shown itself as intent on establishing alliances with non-White ethnic groups and has taken an oppositional stance toward the traditional people and culture of America — including the WASPs. The “Jews as a hostile elite” theme of much of my writing.

And to claim that it really doesn’t matter what people’s ethnic or religious identity are as long as they graduate from an Ivy League university is completely nutty. Ethnicity matters a great deal, no matter what university one graduates from. The fact that Elena Kagan is the product of New York’s Jewish leftist sub-culture makes a huge difference in what we can expect from her — particularly given her views on the First Amendment and executive power that are in line with the mainstream Jewish community.

The Jewish leftist subculture is light years away from traditional WASP culture. Indeed, in her article on Thurgood Marshall, Kagan completely rejects the WASP cultural influence:

The Constitution today … contains a great deal to be proud of. But the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality.’

The fact that Kagan’s Jewish leftist subculture has become ensconced at Harvard and other elite academic institutions speaks volumes on the massive changes that have taken place in the academy and WASP America generally. Rodriguez is deluded (in a self-interested way) to suppose that changing the ethnicity of Supreme Court justices won’t change anything as long as they graduated from Ivy League colleges.

The WASPs had their faults certainly. But their main one was their failure to block the emergence of a non-WASP elite — to go down with their principles. I rather doubt that this new elite will be as willing to see itself eclipsed as the old one was. It will hang on to power with no regard at all for principles. Indeed, a good example of corruption and lack of principle among the new elite are the many defenses we now see of Kagan emanating from elite opinion makers despite her being the poster girl for ethnic nepotism and lack of real accomplishment.

Christopher Donovan: Ignoring the Jewish Lesbian in the Room

May 12, 2010/15 Comments/in Jewish Influence, Jews as An Elite, Media Influence/by Kevin MacDonald

Christopher Donovan: Kevin MacDonald has done great blogging about Elena Kagan, who’s now known to be Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court. She is, of course, Jewish, and stands as a spectacular example of the “Good Ol’ Jews Network” — her main qualification seems to be that everyone (as in, fellow power-Jews) gushes praise for her, which in turn causes more gushing. Everyone wants to comment on the king’s fine new clothes. This type of thing happens to wealthy Jews from the Upper West Side. It does not happen to White Protestants from Oklahoma, no matter how smart they are.

Speaking of which, there are now no Protestants on the Supreme Court. One might think that white Protestants would bemoan this fact. But they aren’t. They’ve been trained not to, of course. Which stands in sharp contrast to, say, the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. She’s supposed to be the Hispanic representative. The Hispanic complaint was that they didn’t have anyone on the Supreme Court. Obama fixed that.

So, all things being equal, white Protestants would have just as much of a complaint now that they’re on the outs. But we all know that racial politics in America today aren’t about actual equality, they’re about pushing Whites off the stage. Elena Kagan will turn the Supreme Court into a “Sanhedrin”, in the phrase of some associates — 1/3 Jewish. This reflects the shift in America’s powerbase from white Protestant to Jewish.

This has consequences: policies that hurt whites are enacted, and Whites suffer. It’s that simple, and that monumental. Yet the conservative legal blogosphere is completely silent on this point. It is even censoring comments of anyone who mentions it.

At National Review — long discredited in any event, but worth noting as a gauge of the absurd — says nothing about it. Some of them are taken in by Kagan’s having reached out to the Federalist Society as a sign that she’s “not hostile” to conservatism.

This is a complete crock. Kagan just grasps that it’s “hip” to hang with the Federalist Society because it shows your open-mindedness, but the Federalist Society has absolutely nothing to say on issues that affect Whites. In fact, it’s a tool for the promotion of Israel-friendly “war on terror” policies.

Most “conservative” legal bloggers are, of course, themselves Jews, so they make sure to keep the focus on silly details. Ted Frank and Eugene Volokh are good examples. See here, here, and here.

America no longer belongs to whites. Its machinery is controlled by those hostile to their interests. We need to recognize this fact and respond.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.

Elena Kagan Gets the Nomination

May 10, 2010/82 Comments/in Anti-Defamation League, Elena Kagan, Israel Lobby, Jewish Ethnic Networking, Jews as An Elite, SPLC/by Kevin MacDonald

It’s great to be Jewish in the year 2010. The latest evidence is the appointment of Elena Kagan as the third Jew on the Supreme Court. Philip Weiss puts it this way:

The Kagan appointment means that we have entered a period in which Jews are equal members, if not actually predominant members, of the American Establishment. Obama’s two closest political advisers are Jewish, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, and are said to be his foreign-policy braintrust. The economy is supervised to a large degree by Jewish appointees, Larry Summers and Fed Reserve Board chair Paul Bernanke (Time‘s man of the year last year, a selection overseen by Rick Stengel, the Time magazine editor, who is also Jewish).

Of course, that’s just scratching the surface on Jewish representation among the elites in politics, law, the financial world, the media, and personal wealth. Weiss goes on to take the standard line that Jews have achieved so much because of their bookish culture. But if there’s anything that stands out about Kagan, it’s how utterly ordinary she is in terms of scholarly accomplishment or anything else that would qualify her for the court–very few publications, no experience as a judge, little courtroom experience — the Harriet Miers of the Obama administration. (I stole that one from someone on the Rachel Maddow show, maybe Maddow herself. But it shows the depth of her inaptitude that even liberals are sensitive to it. For example, Paul Campos writes on the Daily Beast, “if Kagan is a brilliant legal scholar, the evidence must be lurking somewhere other than in her publications. Kagan’s scholarly writings are lifeless, dull, and eminently forgettable. They are, on the whole, cautious academic exercises in the sort of banal on-the-other-handing whose prime virtue is that it’s unlikely to offend anyone in a position of power.” Here’s my version: “When she received tenure at the University of Chicago in 1995, she had exactly two scholarly articles published in law journals — a record that would ordinarily not get her tenure even at quite a few third tier universities much less an elite institution like the University of Chicago.”)

Her only talent seems to be getting really prestigious jobs without any obvious qualifications apart from her ethnic background. And her appointment is a sure thing for the left: Whereas Republicans have been disappointed several times by nominees who converted into liberals (like John Paul Stevens), Kagan’s ethnic identity ensures that she is on the side of all things multicultural.

My take (see also here) is that this is an affirmative action appointment of someone who has benefited greatly from Jewish ethnic networking and has dangerous views on the First Amendment that are in line with the views of the ADL, the SPLC, and the rest of the organized Jewish community. (See also Patrick Cleburne’s post at VDARE.com.)

It’s amazing to see liberals expressing doubts about Kagan. (In fact, one wonders where these people were before her nomination was a done deal. Kagan’s name has been floated since the Sotomayor nomination, but suddenly we see all these doubts about her — mainly from liberals feigning concern.) She is clearly on the left, perhaps with some neocon tendencies regarding executive power. But that is hardly reassuring. Put these tendencies together and you have someone who could be very dangerous to an incipient racialist movement: Anti-“hate speech” and comfortable with using government power to suppress political action that conflicts with the aims of the regime.

Another thought that crossed my mind was that Obama and his advisers may have wanted to court Jews [bad pun] because of the fallout from the tensions with Israel. Despite the fact that, as John Mearsheimer recently noted, the confrontation with Israel was won hands down by Israel, a recent poll shows that American Jews are defecting from Obama in droves, with only 42% saying they would now vote for Obama (down from 83% who voted for him in 2008). A recent visit to the White House (“Obama Tries to Mend Fences with Jews“, NYTimes, May 4, 2010) by Elie Wiesel indicated shows that Obama sees a need to placate the Jewish community:

The lunch meeting between Mr. Wiesel and Mr. Obama came three weeks after Mr. Wiesel took out a full-page advertisement in a number of United States newspapers criticizing the Obama administration for pressuring Mr. Netanyahu to stop Jewish settlement construction in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians would like to put the capital of an eventual Palestinian state.

The advertisement, in which Mr. Wiesel wrote that “Jerusalem is the heart of our heart, the soul of our soul,” alarmed White House officials, in part because it came on the heels of similar advertisements from the World Jewish Congress and grumbling from members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, that Mr. Obama was pushing Mr. Netanyahu too hard.

Giving them yet another appointment to the Supreme Court certainly can’t hurt.

Kevin MacDonald: Review of Podhoretz, Part II

April 2, 2010/15 Comments/in Anti-White Attitudes, Jews as An Elite, Neoconservatism, White Pathology/Guilt/by Kevin MacDonald

Kevin MacDonald: Part II of my review of Podhoretz is now posted on Alternative Right. Quite a bit of it relates to the current discussion of Jewish intellectual style on this site. I agree with Podhoretz that Jews are attracted to religious thinking in which they accept theories that explain everything but are incapable of disconfirmation. The problem is that Jews have advanced these religious theories as “scientific” not only in the social sciences and humanities, but also, perhaps, in theoretical physics, as some have argued here.

The other point is to underline the fact that the only theory that can account for Jewish political behavior in the Diaspora is that it is motivated by ethnic conflict with the White, Christian majority seen as the historical enemy. I note that the status as an elite outsider has grave moral implications. In fact, Jews are actively engaged in making alliances with the soon-to-be non-White majority. Whites should be deeply concerned about what this portends for the future.

It’s interesting that in the Comments section Paul Gottfried agrees with my analysis but also points to White guilt as a critical factor. I agree with that and have written about it several places. For example, White predispositions to guilt and the manufacture of White guilt by prominent Jewish intellectual and political movements is the topic of my review of Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo America. (see also here.)

Review of Podhoretz, Part I

March 30, 2010/15 Comments/in Anti-Semitism, Anti-White Attitudes, Israel Lobby, Jews as a Hostile Elite, Jews as An Elite, Neoconservatism/by Kevin MacDonald

I have a rather longish review of Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals? posted at AlternativeRight.com. I thought I would post a summary here to encourage commentary. Part I is “Remaking the Right: Liberals, Jews, Conservatives” and deals with how Jews see their history in Europe — the lachrymose view of European history in which Jews have been the victims of irrational hostility ever since the origins of Christianity. The take home point is: “It’s a very short jump from blaming the culture created and sustained by Europeans to the idea that Europeans as a people or group of peoples are the problem. Ultimately, this implicit sense that Europeans themselves are the problem is the crux of the issue.”

This then feeds into the Jews as a hostile elite theme that is so apparent today. What’s really scary is that the Jewish Republican branch of the hostile elite represents itself as conservative. A conservative elite hostile to the traditional people and culture of the US. Orwell would love it.

The other theme is how neocon Jews like Podhoretz displaced true conservatives from the Republican Party in the interests of aiding Israel. However, they have not shed any of their hostility toward Europeans and their culture. Indeed, they have been complicit in the movement for massive non-White immigration. As I note, “With conservatives like these, who needs liberals? ”

Racial Conflict and the Health Care Bill

March 26, 2010/21 Comments/in Evolutionary Psychology, Implicit Whiteness, Jews as An Elite, Political Processes, White Anger/by Kevin MacDonald

Of all the op-ed writers in the MSM these days, Ronald Brownstein seems most aware of the emerging racial fault lines in American politics — which means that his work has been a rich lode of material for my blog (see The looming racial chasm and Further Evidence for the Racial Polarization of American Politics).

His latest column (“Dems caught in populist crossfire“) gets at the racial nexus of the health care debate. Despite intensive attempts by the Democrats to pitch the health care bill as benefiting the middle class, White people don’t buy it. Most Whites (52%) think the law will benefit poor people, but only one-third think it will help the country and only 20% think it will help them. On the other hand, much higher percentages of non-Whites think that it will help them and help the country.

Further, he cites more evidence that White people are starting to believe in the Sam Francis analysis, as colored by contemporary events: The country is ruled by an elite of very wealthy people who created the financial disaster and are now benefiting from the government’s bailouts. While wealth is going steadily upward and increasing the gap with the middle class, the White middle class and the White working class are increasingly alienated and angry because wealth is going to non-White minorities at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Indeed, physical threats and vandalism directed against lawmakers in the wake of the bill’s passage has drawn the attention of the media and the political class. White rage has been a theme ever since Obama became president, but the temperature continues to rise.

Democrats are doing all they can to change public perceptions of the bill, but “skepticism that government will ever deliver for them is bred in the bone for many white voters, especially those in the working class.” Exactly. And it’s difficult to see how the Democrats are going to change that when these are the same people who want to legalize millions of mainly poor non-White immigrants who will then legally import tens of millions of their impoverished relatives — all of whom will then qualify for benefits like healthcare paid for mainly by White people.

These trends show once again that people are unwilling to contribute to public goods like government health care when the so many of the recipients who benefit the most are ethnically different than themselves. Liberals wring their hands and talk about how the White working class is not voting its economic interests, but these White people are definitely acting in tune with their ethnic interests, if only implicitly. Only a brain dead Marxist still worshiping at the altar of class warfare could fail to see that the political fault lines are fast becoming based on race, not social class. The fact that the Obama administration is widely and correctly seen as having rammed this down the throats of the American public is only going to make the anger more intense. November should be very interesting indeed.

America is entering the age when it will obvious to everyone that the much advertised era of racial harmony isn’t going to happen and that we are faced with an ever escalating if undeclared race war. It is a good sign that Whites seem to be realizing that the forces arrayed against them are a wealthy elite in alliance with a racially alien, predominantly poor underclass. In fact, the forces arrayed against Whites are even more starkly racial than that. The backbone of the Democratic Party is a coalition of non-Whites — an alliance that includes a large Black and Latino underclass, as well as middle class and elite non-Whites, most importantly a large contingent of wealthy Jews and Jews with influence on the media.

The big picture is that beginning with Jewish intellectual movements — particularly the Frankfurt School, Jews have rejected a traditional Marxist analysis and began to see the White middle and working class as their enemy. After all, these classes had not embraced a communist revolution but had joined the fascist movement in Germany.

It is encouraging that polls indicate that Whites are aware that the elites are arrayed against them. It is a short step for them to develop an explicit understanding that Jews are vastly overrepresented among this elite, not only in the financial sector that created the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression and continues to benefit from the bailouts, but also in the elite media that promotes non-White immigration, rationalizes the multicultural status quo, and religiously avoids the topic of Jewish influence. And they will become explicitly aware that wealthy Jews are the financial backbone of the Democratic Party and its coalition of non-White minorities.

With the failure of the traditional Marxist analysis, Jewish intellectuals became aware that racial and ethnic conflict is the name of the game. The post-WWII commitment of the organized Jewish community to massive non-White immigration in all Western countries is really an acknowledgment that it is, after all, a race war. It has taken some time, but it seems that White people are catching onto this as well, if only implicitly. Control of the cultural high ground by this hostile ethnic elite creates enormous barriers to making explicit the reality of racial conflict that is at the heart of the current political culture. But if very large percentages of Whites coalesce together politically, even if it is in the corrupt Republican Party, the reality of racial conflict will be simply too obvious for anyone to ignore. And then it will get really interesting.

More On Our Unethical Financial Elite

February 28, 2010/58 Comments/in Jews as a Hostile Elite, Jews as An Elite, Jews in Economy/Finance/by Kevin MacDonald

Matt Taibbi is at it again, this time with “Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle.” I can’t really comment on many of his substantive claims, but there is an awful lot of smoke at this point for one to suppose that there is no fire. Note especially the point that the financial system “assumes a certain minimal level of ethical behavior and civic instinct over and above what is spelled out by the regulations” (p. 7).

That’s the thing. We have not only replaced a manufacturing economy with a financial economy (see Kevin Phillips). We also have a financial elite is completely corrupt — with devastating consequences to the rest of the economy and the long term prospects of growth. As Taibbi notes, the system depends on a “true believer” syndrome in which people simply can’t believe they were conned. We desperately want to trust our elites — the people who come from the best schools and have close ties to the government. As Francis Fukuyama emphasizes, trust in elites and the assumption of civic mindedness are critical characteristics of individualist societies:

To this set of traits, Francis Fukuyama also adds trust as a critical virtue of individualist societies. Trust is really a way of emphasizing the importance of moral universalism as a trait of individualist societies. In collectivist, family-oriented societies, trust ends at the border of the family and kinship group. Social organization, whether in political culture or in economic enterprise, tends to be a family affair. Morality is defi ned as what is good for the group—typically the kinship group (e.g., the notorious line, “Is it good for the Jews?”). This lack of ability to develop a civil society is the fundamental problem of societies in the Middle East and Africa, where divisions into opposing religious and ultimately kinship groups define the political landscape. The movement of the West toward multiculturalism really means the end of individualist Western culture. (See here, p. 27)

We are entering an era where trust in political and cultural elites is fast becoming a thing of the past. Robert Putnam has shown that trust is lower in multi-ethnic societies. This decline in public trust will be accelerated when people really grasp the enormity of the disaster created by Wall Street and its close connections to the government. It’s really the end of a key feature of what made Western societies so successful. As Taibbi points out, there’s no change on the horizon–just a short pause for reloading.

Finally, I can’t help referring to today’s Doonesbury cartoon about the development of an ethical sense among bankers. The banker begins as a college grad who thinks “I hope to do something of value well and be fairly paid.” By middle age he is saying “I demand to be paid obscenely well for destroying value.” The cartoon illustrates the point that lack of trust in financial elites is very widespread and that they are reasonably portrayed as a predatory elite rather than an elite that helps create value.

The only problem with the cartoon is that it’s at least doubtful that the people who make it to the top in this system ever thought much about creating social value. As Edmund Connelly’s recent blog recounts, there is a very long history of vastly disproportionate Jewish involvement in financial fraud. And rather than a long history of civic responsibility, there is a long history of Jews thinking of themselves as outsiders in Western societies — a hostile elite with a strong sense of historical grievance. The long term prosperity of the society is certainly not uppermost in their minds.

This is the relevant passage from page 7 of Taibbi’s article:

Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they’ve been scammed. They call it the “True Believer Syndrome.” That’s sort of where we are, in a state of nagging disbelief about the real problem on Wall Street. It isn’t so much that we have inadequate rules or incompetent regulators, although both of these things are certainly true. The real problem is that it doesn’t matter what regulations are in place if the people running the economy are rip-off artists. The system assumes a certain minimum level of ethical behavior and civic instinct over and above what is spelled out by the regulations. If those ethics are absent — well, this thing isn’t going to work, no matter what we do. Sure, mugging old ladies is against the law, but it’s also easy. To prevent it, we depend, for the most part, not on cops but on people making the conscious decision not to do it.

That’s why the biggest gift the bankers got in the bailout was not fiscal but psychological. “The most valuable part of the bailout,” says Rep. Sherman, “was the implicit guarantee that they’re Too Big to Fail.” Instead of liquidating and prosecuting the insolvent institutions that took us all down with them in a giant Ponzi scheme, we have showered them with money and guarantees and all sorts of other enabling gestures. And what should really freak everyone out is the fact that Wall Street immediately started skimming off its own rescue money. If the bailouts validated anew the crooked psychology of the bubble, the recent profit and bonus numbers show that the same psychology is back, thriving, and looking for new disasters to create. “It’s evidence,” says Rep. Kanjorski, “that they still don’t get it.”

More to the point, the fact that we haven’t done much of anything to change the rules and behavior of Wall Street shows that we still don’t get it. Instituting a bailout policy that stressed recapitalizing bad banks was like the addict coming back to the con man to get his lost money back. Ask yourself how well that ever works out. And then get ready for the reload.