Racialization of American Politics

More evidence for the racialization of American politics

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Some recent results of the November election amplify the theme of racialization of American politics that has been a theme at TOO for some time (e.g., here). Ron Brownstein’s “White Flight” has some familiar themes. 60% of Whites voted Republican (actually higher because the 60% includes Jews and Middle Easterners classified as White but who identify with the non-White coalition centered in the Democratic Party). Meanwhile, 73% of non-White voters backed Democratic House candidates, showing that non-Whites are even more biased in the direction of Democrats than Whites are in the direction of Republicans. Attitudes toward Obama were slightly more skewed.

Reflecting White anxiety about a non-White future, “minorities were almost exactly twice as likely as whites to say that life would be better for the next generation than for their own; whites were considerably more likely to say that it would be more difficult.”

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Becoming a minority could hardly be thought of as improving one’s life chances—indeed, it may be a whole lot worse even than current voters anticipate given that so many non-Whites hold historical grudges against the traditional people and culture of America. Read more

Implicit Whiteness and the Republicans

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Kevin MacDonald’s work on the concept of “implicit whiteness” in his essay “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism” (acacdemic version) is a major breakthrough for White Nationalism. Ethnocentrism—usually stigmatized as “xenophobia” and “racism”— is a preference to be around genetically similar people. Anti-ethnocentrism—a preference for people unlike ourselves—is sold today as “diversity,” the secret ingredient that adds “strength” wherever it is found.

According to MacDonald, ethnocentrism is a natural phenomenon, hard-wired into the oldest and deepest levels of the brain. Anti-ethnocentrism, however, exists as a conscious moral conviction. From a psychological point of view, therefore, anti-ethnocentrism is relatively superficial, even though it currently dominates our culture and politics. Read more

The Republicans’ Temporary Reprieve

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To listen to pundits like Rush Limbaugh, one would think that the Republicans had died and gone to heaven. Getting a strong majority in the House and picking up several seats in the Senate certainly sends a message. But they shouldn’t get too comfortable.

The Republicans had their big day because Whites were a larger percentage of the electorate than in 2008 and because they were more inclined to vote for Republicans. Comparing the CNN exit polls for House races in 2008 and 2010 is revealing. In 2008, Whites were 74% of the electorate and voted 53% Republican, 45% Democrat.  In 2010, Whites were 78% of the electorate and voted 60% Republican and 37% Democrat. (The White category includes a substantial percentage of Jews and Middle Easterners who do not identify as White and tend overwhelmingly to vote Democrat.) Read more

"A Corrosive Loss of Confidence"

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Ron Brownstein’s latest suggests that a political crisis is on the horizon, spurred by the disaffection of White voters and possibly leading to revolutionary stirrings and a movement toward a third party (“A Corrosive Loss of Confidence“).

Even as voters prepare to send more Republicans to Washington, polls show that Americans are not enthusiastic about the GOP. Indeed, the arc of disillusionment spreads beyond the two parties to virtually every major American institution. If November’s election allowed Americans the opportunity to fire not only members of Congress, but also the nation’s entire public and private leadership class, they might take it. This deep, broad, and visceral discontent is a recipe for social and political volatility.

Whites are more alienated from both major parties than non-Whites. Brownstein proposes that this is solely due to the economic downturn. I suspect that White disaffection also involves racial anxiety about the non-White future. Non-Whites doubtless feel optimistic about the long term future in a White-minority America, even if their present circumstances are difficult.

There is an apocalyptic tone to Brownstein’s essay—a belief that our new elite is out of touch with the great majority of Americans, that revolution may be just around the corner, and that third parties may be swept into power:

If polls existed just before the French Revolution, they might have returned results such as these. They point toward a widely shared conviction that the country’s public and private leadership is protecting its own interest at the expense of average (and even comfortable) Americans.

Because he sees the economic downturn as central, Brownstein sees a successful third party as headed by “a non-politician with a problem-solver pedigree” who is seen as able to turn the economy around.

He may be right, but the American Third Position believes that a prime mover of White disaffection is racial anxiety—amplified by the recession and by the perception that elites are completely out of touch with the interests and attitudes of the great majority of Americans. Good examples of the latter are recent court rulings that nullify popular sentiment on issues like the Arizona immigration law and California’s ban on same-sex marriage. Indeed, today’s op-ed page in the  LA Times shows the divide: The pro-homosexual marriage piece piously defending the courts and the anti-homosexual marriage piece emphasizing the undemocratic nature of the ruling: The “people’s will” was violated.

There is a feeling of powerlessness–that even strong majorities don’t matter any more. And that is indeed what revolutions are made of.

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Gregory Rodriguez on White Racial Anxiety

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There are signs that the left is beginning to realize that White dispossession is not going to happen without a few bumps in the road. Recently Gregory Rodriguez wrote in the LA Times:

I believe that white racial anxiety, not immigration, will be the most significant and potentially dangerous socio-demographic trend of the coming decade. The combination of changing demographics and symbolic political victories on the part of nonwhites will inspire in whites a greater racial consciousness, a growing sense of beleagurement and louder calls to end affirmative action or to be included in it.

He’s right, except for the ridiculous implication that immigration is not the fundamental issue. After all, it was immigration that has resulted in the affirmative action crisis–along with  a host of other costs to White America, including the very real prospect that a hostile non-White coalition will be able to shape public policy against the interests of Whites. Even without affirmative action, Whites will suffer as all the other costs of ethnic diversity escalate–increasing ethnic conflict, less civic mindedness, greater psychological alienation.

Rodriguez proposes that Whites will be happy if affirmative action is ended:

I am so convinced of [impending White racial consciousness] that I think to avoid a destructive white backlash in the face of a rapidly diversifying society, the president should call for an end to affirmative action. In a “Nixon goes to China” sort of way, Obama — by virtue of his racial background, party affiliation and political temperament — is better poised to pull off such a difficult task more gracefully than any other politician.

Whites would indeed like to see an end to affirmative action, but that won’t be enough to save them from all the other costs of immigration noted above. Predictably, Rodriguez asserts (with no supporting data) that Whites have not suffered from affirmative action. (For some real data, see the National Policy Institute’s report, “The Costs of Diversity“; see also “Jewish Qverrepresentation at Elite Universities Explained” showing that already Whites are vastly underrepresented at elite institutions on the basis of IQ.) And the reality is that elites have been able to preserve affirmative action even in the face of laws that forbid it, as in California where there has been endless tinkering with university admissions criteria aimed at increasing Black and Latino admissions to the University of California.

Quite simply, because of lower average IQ, Blacks and Latinos can’t do without affirmative action; their percentage representation in elite institutions based on intellectual merit would be nil. (See “End Affirmative Action, End the Black Upper Class: The Case of Law“) So the pressure for affirmative action will continue far into the future, with the result that Whites will be increasingly caught between affirmative action for Blacks and Latinos on the low end, and Asians and Jews on the high end–all exacerbated by the exploding non-White population and ethnic networking by highly ethnocentric minority groups.

For the left, there’s no going back. The only solution is to continue to pathologize White racial consciousness and keep the costs to Whites of our multi-racial future out of the media.

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Hans Prinzhorn’s Aphorisms

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The current TOO article is an introduction to the thought of Hans Prinzhorn, a German (“Leadership and the Vital Order: Selected Aphorisms by Hans Prinzhorn,” translated by Joseph D. Pryce). Quite a few of his ideas resonate with recent essays here. Perhaps most central is this:

We can hold out no hope whatever for the successful creation of the sort of community that is constructed by ideologists on the basis of purely rational considerations, for the projects that are hatched out in the mind of the rationalist are most definitely not analogous to the development of living forms in nature, no matter how often the contrary position has been proclaimed by false prophets.

Prinzhorn is warning about the creation of blueprints for society without any concern for human nature. In the language of current psychology, intellectuals have constructed various utopian scenarios, taking advantage of explicit processing and often ignoring our evolved psychology (my academic version is here; see particularly the Discussion section).

Prinzhorn is also quite aware that these blueprints for utopian societies are typically couched in moral terms, historically often with a large flavor of Christianity–“the nihilistic Will to Power that conceals its true nature behind the cloak of such humanitarian ideals as humility, solicitude for the weak, the awakening of the oppressed masses, the plans for universal happiness, and the fever-swamp vision of perpetual progress.” As noted especially with the Puritans and their descendants, these moral prescriptions have a unique appeal to Western peoples–an aspect of Western individualism and concomitant moral universalism.

Reflecting the concerns of his time, Prinzhorn is most concerned with socialism, seeing it as “demagogic assault on the part of the inferior rabble against the nobler type of human being.” In our time, the greatest concern is the invasion of traditionally White nations by massive numbers of non-Whites.

This raises an interesting issue:  White advocates tend to gloss over social class and  IQ differences among Whites, seeing Whites as having interests in common as Whites. National Socialism bridged this gap, seeing the society as an organic whole based ultimately on a long cultural tradition and shared biological kinship, while nevertheless preserving a hierarchical structure of inclusiveness for all social classes. Because of the appeal of National Socialism to the German working class, the left shifted gears: In the post-World War II era, the most influential intellectual movements (e.g., the Frankfurt School, the New York Intellectuals, and pretty much the entire intellectual left) have championed mass immigration, multiculturalism, and the dispossession of Whites.

It is no accident that the  White working class has suffered the most from these changes–or that they are the most angered by the current regime. Nor is it an accident that this shift toward White dispossession by the left was championed mainly by Jewish intellectual movements given the very strong overtones of anti-Semitism characteristic of National Socialism and its conception of society based on blood kinship with roots in traditional German culture.

The result is a new elite, substantially Jewish but with a considerable component of deracinated Whites–many of them people like the sociopathic Morris Dees whose championing of  “oppressed” non-Whites has paid off handsomely for himself (see Steve Sailer’s “Morris Dees’ Poverty Palace“).

The question now is whether this new utopia of multiculturalism premised on White dispossession will ultimately fail because of the lack of fit with our evolved psychology–as Prinzhorn suggests. The research strongly suggests that multi-ethnic societies have a number of built-in costs–particularly greater conflict, greater psychological alienation from the society as a whole, and less willingness to contribute to public goods like health care.

There are signs that the left is beginning to be aware that the utopian transformations they have in mind are not going to be easily achieved in the long run and that there is a backlash brewing from dispossessed Whites. Nevertheless, for the left there is no going back–only an increasing commitment to manage these tensions, by force if need be.

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John Paul Stevens as a prototypical WASP

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There’s been a lot of talk about the fact that soon there will be no WASPs on the Supreme Court. What does it mean? And does it really matter?

What’s fascinating is that John Paul Stevens was nominated to the Supreme Court as a moderate Republican who gradually moved further to the left as he got older.  What strikes me is his strong sense of principle–even to the extent of making decisions that could not possibly be seen as helping his ethnic group. After all, that’s what being principled means: Doing something because you value an ideal, not because there is anything in it for you. If I don’t steal something because I am afraid of getting caught, it’s not a matter of principle. But if I refrain from stealing some money it even if there is no possibility of being caught and even if getting the money would mean a lot to me, then I am acting on principle.

Stevens’ liberalism meant that despite being nominated by a Republican, he timed his retirement to occur during a Democratic administration. Even without knowing who would be the Democratic president, he surely knew that a Democratic president would nominate someone quite unlike himself to fill his position. The chances of any Democratic administration appointing a WASP to the Supreme Court are less than zero. And of course, Obama appointed someone who seems to all appearances to be a strongly identified Jew — not to mention that she has no visible qualifications and has benefited immensely from Jewish ethnic networking.

Much the same could be said about David Souter–another WASP appointed by a Republican who chose to retire during a Democratic administration and was replaced by a Latina.

The result is that the Obama administration has has had two appointments very early on, predictably appointing people who represent two important Democratic constituencies–Latino and Jewish. (Jews contribute at least 60% of the money for the Democratic Party, and Latinos are an increasingly important component of the non-White ethnic coalition that the Democratic Party has now become.)

Stevens therefore is the ultimate non-ethnic actor. This is reflected in his writing:

“The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force in motivating leaders like Patrick Henry, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln, schoolteachers like Nathan Hale and Booker T. Washington, the Philippine Scouts who fought at Bataan, and the soldiers who scaled the bluff at Omaha Beach,” he wrote in an unusually lyrical dissent [in a 1989 flag burning case]. “If those ideas are worth fighting for—and our history demonstrates that they are—it cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection.

Ideas are worth fighting for, but Stevens has no interest in advancing the cause of WASPs as an ethnic group. Here he idealizes non-White Filipinos fighting alongside Whites to secure a set of principles. He has no concern that there will be no more WASPs on the court for the foreseeable future, presumably because he thinks that what’s important is that certain ideas will continue to guide the country.

Writing in the LATimes, Gregory Rodriquez framed the the issue by titling his article “The triumph of WASP culture“: the lack of WASPs means the WASPs have won. The multicultural left should build statues to Stevens and Souter as heroes of the hopeful non-White future. Their principled sense that ideas matter and that race and ethnicity are not at all important is exactly how the multicultural left wants all Whites to behave. WASPs as the proposition ethnic group heralding America as the proposition nation.

This devotion to universalist ideas is a strong tendency in the liberal WASP subculture that has been such an important strand of American intellectual history. (See my review of Eric M. Kaufmann’s The Rise and  Fall of Anglo America.) (The exception was during the 1920s when the WASPs sided with the rest of America when they led the battle to enact the immigration restriction law of 1924 which drastically restricted immigration and explicitly attempted to achieve an ethnic status quo as of 1890. Even then, there were substantial numbers of WASPs who opposed immigration restriction.)

In the 19th century, this liberal WASP tradition could be seen in their attraction to utopian communities and their strong moral revulsion to slavery that animated the cause of abolition. Ideas matter and are worth fighting for–even if more than 600,000 White people died in the battle –“Let us die to make men free” as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” urged. They had the idea that people are able to fashion moral ideals and then bring them into being as a result of political activism. They were individualists who saw the world not in terms of ingroups and outgroups, but as composed of unique individuals. Their relatively tepid ethnocentrism and their proneness to moral universalism — ethnic traits in my view and in  the view of many WASPs in the 19th century — made them willing allies of the rising class of Jewish intellectuals who came to dominate intellectual discourse beginning at least by the 1930s.  Even by the 1920s, the triumph of Boasian anthropology meant that appeals to WASP ethnicity would fall on deaf ears in the academic world.

And now that the forces of liberal cosmopolitanism have won out, the WASPs — even the liberal ones — are being rapidly jettisoned by our new, substantially Jewish elite. The replacement of Stevens by Kagan is deliciously paradigmatic.

Kaufmann points out that one of the defining features of the  WASPs is the tendency to believe that as a result of assimilation everyone would be just like them. Immigrant Catholics would shed their religion and become proper Protestants. In fact, becoming a WASP wasn’t all that hard if you had enough money, dressed right, joined the right clubs, and became an Episcopalian or Congregationalist. As I wrote about growing up in Wisconsin:

I think we Catholics did feel a bit separate from the Protestants, especially the well-off Protestants. … 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 suspect therefore that Stevens and Souter think, perhaps unconsciously, that the people who replace them will be just like them in the sense that they will uphold the same ideals. The republic will live on but with different faces–a utopian idea, to say the least.

In fact, it is far more likely that now that the WASPs are gone, the Supreme Court and every other important institution will be divvied up as an ethnic spoils system, especially for the Democrats as they try to appease the various parts of their ethnic coalition. And the Republicans will doubtless appoint at least some non-Whites to show that the principles of WASP idealism are not dead.

The reality is that the  various non-White ethnic groups jockeying for power in America are not like the WASPs at all. Their powerful sense of ethnic identification means by definition that they are unprincipled–that they can be reliably predicted to see things in terms of what is good for their ethnic group. Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” comment comes to mind, and Kagan’s strong ethnic identity implies that she, like the rest of the Jewish community, will be mainly motivated the old dictum of “what’s good for the Jews”: the Supreme Court as a lifetime legislative appointment to be used to advance the interests of their ethnic group. Kagan’s unprincipled views on issues such as free speech are entirely within the mainstream of the Jewish community. Indeed, in one of her law review articles she anticipated the recent hate crimes legislation that was pushed so strongly by the ADL and supported by the rest of the organized Jewish community. The most glaring aspect of Jewish political behavior now is their remarkably unprincipled support for the multicultural left, including massive non-White immigration in the United States while at the same time providing unquestioning support for an apartheid, racialist Israel with laws that make Arizona’s immigration laws pale by comparison.

Stevens and Souter are naive. Their devotion to ideas and principle along with similar attitudes of a very large number of like-minded Whites will cast a long, deadly shadow as we head into the  future.  All the research shows that ethnically divided societies are prone to conflict and have less of a civic sense — for example, people in ethnically divided societies are less likely to contribute to public goods like health care. The new elite is much more likely to act out their historical grudges against the White majority than to uphold WASP ideals. Ethnicity matters.

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