Racialization of American Politics

Further Evidence for the Racial Polarization of American Politics

Recent election trends clearly indicate an increasing White disenchantment with the Democrats, especially among the working class. The enraged Whites who are expressing themselves in the tax revolts, tea parties, and town hall meetings of 2009 are middle- and lower-middle class.  Ronald Brownstein points out that their incomes have been stagnating or declining for years, even during periods of economic expansion of the Bush years. Bush did nothing for the White working class, but still only 40% voted for Obama.

The Democratic vote among Whites in 2010 will probably be quite a bit lower than in the next election. In Massachusetts there was a huge shift from 2008 to 2010: In the 2008 presidential election, working class Whites voted overwhelmingly for Obama: 75% for incomes between $30-50K; 65% for incomes between $50-75K. But Brownstein notes that 60% voted for Scott Brown.  Moreover,

Much of the Democrats’ distress among blue-collar whites results from long-term changes that have re-sorted the electorate more along the lines of cultural values than of economic interests. These working-class voters, mostly conservative on cultural and foreign-policy issues, have moved toward the GOP …. But the disaffection from Democrats among blue-collar whites is especially severe now. That is probably because their financial pain has intensified. (The unemployment rate among this group, at 10.4 percent, is well over twice the level for college-educated whites.) Polls suggest that these voters have focused their discontent more at government than at business.

One can’t help thinking that “cultural values” is a code word for implicit Whiteness. No matter what they say to the pollsters, it’s hard to believe that concerns about foreign policy or gay marriage really trump economic issues in a group that has been the most negatively affected by all the economic shifts of recent decades, including mass immigration. Indeed, the shift is apparent in all White groups: “In opinion polls, college-educated white men, always a tough group for the party, are hardening in opposition; college-educated white women, Democrats’ best constituency among whites, are softening in support.”

It’s often said of Jews that they earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans. Now, as ethnic interests become central even for Whites, economic interests are an increasingly poor predictor for everyone. Working class Whites vote Republican just like the Episcopalians— their cultural values are to vote along with people like themselves. Similarly, non-Whites vote Democrat whether they are successful Asians and Jews or Blacks and Latinos at the bottom of the economic ladder. Their cultural values are to vote against the Republicans at least because they see the Republicans as the party of Whites.  These trends have been apparent for some time, but there seems to be increasing polarization now.

Quite a few people anticipated that an Obama presidency would produce an upsurge of White identity — that an Obama Administration would be a clear harbinger of the non-White future of America. They were right. Many Whites got caught up in the emotion of the election — the feeling of moral righteousness of putting America’s racial past behind us. But the party is over and the Obama administration is in shambles. I can’t imagine that anything like amnesty for illegal immigrants would be possible now.

If, as seems likely, the Republicans get 70% or more of the White vote in the 2010 elections, the media is going to have to confront the racial polarization of American politics. It’s definitely not the multicultural future envisioned by the activists on the multicultural left and the mainstream media for the last 40 years. If there is a racially lopsided vote, we’ll hear a lot of talk about racist Whites. But at some point, thoughtful people will realize that it is entirely legitimate for Whites to want to retain control of their country, and explicit expressions of White identity and interests will begin to be heard whether the media wants to hear them or not. And that’s all to the good.

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Nietzsche on Religion

I went through a Nietzsche phase as an undergrad philosophy major but never read The Anti-Christ, so Thomas Dalton’s current TOO article “Nietzsche and the Origins of Christianity” was a real eye-opener — the ultimate conspiracy theory: St. Paul as the center of a plan to counter Roman power by recruiting non-Jews to “to steal away their moral authority and place it, ultimately, in the hands of a Jew who would sooth their suffering, and ‘save’ them.” The result of the triumph of Christianity was a Jewish slave morality — “a catastrophe of the highest magnitude. … countering every aspect of Roman morality and spirituality, and … establishing a system favorable to Jewish interests.” A morality born of “the hatred and revenge of the Jews.”

What an incredible feat:  to turn Europeans away from their own western heritage — a noble, life-affirming Greco-Roman culture — and toward a foreign, alien, decadent, Oriental worldview.  And it was done as revenge, out of hatred, and built upon lies.  An ancient religion — Judaism — born of falsehood and lies, creates another born of falsehood and lies.  It is done for reasons of power, control, wealth, and survival.  And the lie prevails.

Anything bordering on religion is always likely to provoke intense feelings and for good reason. Since I am an evolutionist, I see all religion as a sort of ideology — a belief system that gives meaning and coherence to the world, and motivates behavior. The only important question is whether the ideology furthers or hinders the evolutionary aims of the people who believe in it. In that sense, Jewish religious ideology has tended to be quite adaptive for Jews — regulating marriage and providing for group cohesion and negative views of non-Jews, etc.

What about Christian ideology? Here the record is quite a bit more mixed, but in general I am much more positive about Christianity than Nietzsche. Regarding the ancient Roman world, the following is a passage from my review of David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedrals:

Particularly interesting is the discussion of early Christianity based on the work of Rodney Stark (1996). Early Christianity emerges as a non-ethnic form of Judaism that functioned as a way of producing cohesive, effective groups able to deal with the uncertainties of the ancient world. The ancient world was a very unpredictable place indeed, characterized by natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, rioting, epidemics, brutal military campaigns against civilians, famines, and widespread poverty. Navigating this world was greatly facilitated by co-religionists ready to lend a helping hand and to establish economic alliances. Wilson has no hesitation in supposing that Christian charity in extending aid to fellow Christians suffering from the plague involved altruism, as indeed it did. But the result was that more Christians survived these disasters than did Pagans: Christianity was adaptive at the group level. The adaptiveness of Christianity also stemmed from its emphasis on several attitudes that were notably lacking in the Roman Empire: encouragement of large families, conjugal fidelity, high-investment parenting, and outlawing of abortion, infanticide, and non-reproductive sexual behavior. The bottom line is that Christian women did indeed out-reproduce Pagan women. Other obvious examples of religiously mandated fertility and family-promoting values in the contemporary world are the Amish and Hutterites, the Mormons, and Orthodox Jews. All of these religions are characterized by social controls and religious ideologies that promote adaptive behavior at the group level.

Further, Christianity has at times been a very effective force against Judaism. Indeed, in Ch. 3 of Separation and Its Discontents I argue that the institutionalization of Christianity in the late Roman Empire was fundamentally an anti-Jewish movement. See here for the short version. I note there that these fundamentally anti-Jewish attitudes remained Church teaching and influenced Church policy until Vatican II. I also note that

on the one hand, there is no question that Catholicism was able to serve as a viable institution of ethnic defense in other historical eras, notably the Middle Ages when, as James C. Russell notes, the Church was influenced by German culture. On the other hand, the strands of Christian universalism can lead to compromising the ethnic interests of Christians. Indeed, since Vatican II, Catholicism has become part of the culture of Western suicide. In the US, it is in the forefront of the open borders movement. It is therefore not at all surprising that Jewish organizations would be dismayed by any retreat from Vatican II.

As Russell notes, Germanic culture was not submerged by Christianity. My view is that a biological tendency toward individualism is a far better explanation of Western institutions since the Enlightenment than Christianity. There is much else to be said — too much to get into in a blog.  Suffice it to say that whatever St. Paul intended in creating Christianity, he could not control the outcome in its long later history.

Nevertheless, I do think that Christian universalism remains a problem for European survival. In commenting on Evangelical Protestants in the US, I noted their high fertility and strong sense of family values as clearly adaptive.  However,

A great many Christian denominations, including some evangelical groups, are strong supporters of multi-racial immigration and quite a few Christian groups avidly seek converts from all races and ethnicities. My impression is that most white Christians live in an implicit white world. Their gut instincts are to preserve an America that has at least a vague resemblance to the world in which they grew up.

There is no question that Christian Zionism has been a negative force on US foreign policy in the Middle East, although. as Mearsheimer and Walt note, it is very doubtful that they would have any influence at all without the support and encouragement of the Israel Lobby.

I do think that race will trump religion in American politics in the sense that White Americans will realize that importing millions of non-White Christians from Mexico and elsewhere is a horrible idea. Race is a far more powerful variable in predicting people’s political affiliations than religion, and that will continue as the racial polarization of America continues and the Republican Party (or, hopefully, the A3P)  becomes the party of Whites. Implicitly at least, White people who are strong Christians understand that they have far more in common with atheists, agnostics and liberal Protestants who are White than they do with non-White Christians. The fact that Conservative Protestants defied their leaders and were strong supporters of immigration restriction in the period of ethnic defense that culminated in the 1924 law shows that they can be rallied to sensible causes. The fact that so many of them are now involved in the Tea Party opposition movement and the rallies against immigration amnesty of recent years shows that they have healthy instincts.

So I remain optimistic that Christianity will ultimately prove to be an evolutionarily adaptive ideology for Christians.

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Implicit Whiteness in Scott Brown’s campaign

The day before the election I happened to catch Keith Olbmermann at his smirking best — looking intensely into the camera and declaring that Scott Brown and all the people voting for him are racists. What’s the evidence for this? You see, Brown used a pick-up truck in his commercials. (Gasp!!) You know, pick-up trucks are pretty much the same as men in pointy hoods burning crosses. Next thing you know, candidates will seek endorsements from country music singers and NASCAR drivers.

What’s going on here, of course, is implicit Whiteness — implicit whiteness of a certain sort, that basically says “I, Scott Brown, am the candidate of the White working class.”

As I noted previously, the enraged Whites who are expressing themselves in the tax revolts and town hall meetings of 2009 are middle- and lower-middle class. These people are less able to avoid the costs of multiculturalism: They can’t move to gated communities or send their children to all-White private schools. Their unions have been destroyed and their jobs either shipped overseas or performed by recent immigrants, legal and illegal.They are very angry — but they can’t discuss the real reason they are angry: mass immigration and the dispossession of people like themselves and their culture.

Unfortunately, there were no exit polls for this election. It would be fascinating to see the racial breakdown. In the 2008 presidential election, 80% of the electorate in Massachusetts was White. Working class Whites voted overwhelmingly for Obama: 75% for incomes between $30-50K; 65% for incomes betwen $50-75K.

Obviously, that did not happen this time around. Although it’s still a long shot, we can hope that eventually candidates will be able to explicitly assert the legitimacy of White identity and White interests.

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The looming racial chasm

Ronald Brownstein’s recent column points once again to the emerging racial chasm in the US. Obama won 80% of the non-White vote in 2008, and his approval rating among minorities continues to be around 75%. Among Whites, it’s a different story. 44% of college-educated Whites approve of Obama, and only 38% of non-college-educated Whites. If, as Brownstein suggests, these approval ratings reflect future voting patterns, it would mean a landslide against the Democrats by Whites — quite possibly more than the official 58% White turnout for Bush in 2004.

But he also points to the possibility that support for Obama will slip even further among college-educated Whites:

Since 2007, median incomes have plunged more for white families headed by men with a college degree than those headed by men with only high school educations, the Economic Policy Institute reports.

That widening distress changes the political equation. A possible Republican surge next year in blue-collar “beer track” districts remains the biggest threat to the Democrats’ House majority. The Democrats’ vulnerability will deepen, however, if they cannot hold the line in “wine track” districts whose education levels exceed the national average. That’s one way a difficult 2010 election for Democrats could turn catastrophic.

If less than 40% of Whites voted Democrat while twice that percentage are voting Republican, it would indeed indicate a widening racial chasm. Of course, the downside is that there is no evidence that this is anything more than implicit Whiteness. And the Republicans are certainly not going to nominate candidates that would do anything to change this.

Still, it’s only a matter of time — and a fairly short time at that — before everyone realizes that the political landscape is fast becoming a racial landscape. And at that point, explicit assertions of White identity are inevitable.

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Anger in White America — Again

The health care debate continues to rivet the country. By most accounts, the sheer emotional intensity of the protests has forced Democrats to scale back their plans for nationalized health care. And who are these angry protesters? The vast majority of these angry citizens are White people — a topic I wrote about recently, but before the health care debate assumed center stage.

The health care debate seems to have ratcheted things up a notch. As an NPR commentary of August 13 noted,

If you’ve been anywhere near a TV in the past week, you have seen images of irate voters berating their elected representatives. And if so, you cannot have missed the strong representation of vociferous Caucasian males of a certain age. Theirs are not the only voices raised, but they are surely the loudest and most numerous.

Actually, it’s White women too:

Angry

A Democrat strategist commented,

the vocally disaffected represent a very real phenomenon that has been rising around the country since before Obama’s election. It is growing in the face of a damaged economy, a series of bank and Wall Street bailouts, and big-dollar government programs to stimulate jobs and stave off foreclosures.

I’ve never seen as angry an electorate as this one. …. They’re as scared as I’ve ever seen them, and that manifests into anger.

There is a general fear that the American dream is not going to be there for them or their children. … There is concern about trust broken between government and the people.

Angry White people. And we are not talking about elite Whites who wouldn’t have to worry about health care no matter what the government does. This is racially-based populism: The protest is coming from middle- and lower-middle-class Whites, not Blacks and Latinos in the same social classes.

And it’s about more than health care. A month ago it was the angry White people who support Sarah Palin. And before that, it was angry Whites participating in “tea parties” protesting the  stimulus bill.

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It’s not any specific issue, but a generalized fear that the country is slipping away from them — that the Obama presidency is moving America very rapidly into a country that they would not recognize and where they do not have political power. Our friend, Mark Potok, of the $PLC, comments, “Clearly, this president has set off a real rage. … Certain people look around and see this is not the country their white Christian forefathers built, and they are angry.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. These angry White people are quite right to fear such a transformation. The anti-White revolution is working beautifully. Legal and illegal immigration is gradually but noticeably transforming the country so that the White populist base will have decreasing political power. By my calculation, by 2012, the Republicans would have to attract around 63% of Whites to get a majority (assuming Whites continue to represent 90% of the Republican vote). In the ideal world of the left, however, this transformation would be carried out without anger and mass protest, apart from the occasional skinhead, swastika-painting fringe that replenish the coffers of organizations like the $PLC and the ADL. White people would sink peacefully into the sunset of American politics, happily joining multicultural coalitions in both parties.

The problem for the left is the anger. With huge majorities in both Houses of Congress and an Obama presidency that seemed committed to nationalized health care, the “progressives” are saying the Democrats should just push through a plan. Elections matter. We’ve got the power, so let’s do it.

But trampling on the sensibilities of what remains a large constituency is very risky. These voters are energized in a way they were not during the 2008 election where the media’s slobbering love affair with Obama (including Chris Matthews’ “thrill going up my leg” when Obama speaks), the failed Bush presidency, the horrible  economy, and John McCain (need I say more) kept populist passions low.

The White House seems to realize that simply having a large majority in Congress isn’t enough if a large angry minority is so enraged that they start storming the barricades with torches and pitchforks. Imagine the commentariat trying to explain away a 65–70% White vote for the Republicans in 2010 or 2012. The stark racial abyss of American politics would be staring everyone in the face. Best not to wake the sleeping giant until it’s really too powerless to matter much at all.

There are doubtless a great many anxieties behind this anger. Certainly many lower-and middle-class Whites have been devastated by the changes in the labor market brought about by massive immigration (including the H1-B program that imports skilled  workers), and many companies cutting health benefits because of the need to compete in a globalized economy in which American elites feel no obligation to protect American workers. And as immigration begins to transform cities in the heartland of America, more and more Americans are coming face to face with the future. Indeed, I suspect the next major outbreak of White anger  will be any attempt by the Obama administration to legalize the millions of illegals. Already, the administration seems to be scaling back its ambitions on the immigration front.

But I suspect that a large part of the fear is about what health care would be like if the progressive wing of the Democratic Party got its way. These middle class Whites envision themselves standing in line with Blacks, Latinos, legal and illegal immigrants, and everyone else. And they realize that in general the taxes of people like themselves are being used to support services for people quite a bit unlike themselves — people who pay proportionately far less of the tax burden and are part of the coalition of minorities that is the backbone of the Democratic Party, while 90% of the Republican vote comes from Whites.

From an evolutionary perspective, this is a classic case of a public goods issue in a multicultural society. As noted by Frank Salter http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=vdare&l=ur2&o=1, because of closer ties of kinship and culture, ethnically homogeneous societies are more likely to be open to redistributive policies such as social welfare and nationalized health care. European nationalized health care systems were initiated decades ago when those countries were ethnically homogeneous. In the US, the Medicare system was enacted in 1965 —  well before the multicultural onslaught.

Some enraged Whites may also have read about the aspects of the bill that make it “affirmative action on steroids,” including what amounts to a quota system for “underrepresented minorities” in medical schools. It’s one thing to have affirmative action professors teaching obscure subjects to college students. But do people really want affirmative action doctors performing heart surgery?

The problem for advocates of universal health care in the US is that this round of reform is being proposed at the precise point when general anxieties about America’s multicultural future are on the minds of a whole lot of White people. It’s not at all unreasonable for them to believe that universal health care will indeed be the embodiment of the multicultural nightmare of the  future. And it’s not at all unreasonable for them to be very angry about that.

Finally, in my recent fundraising appeal letter, I suggested that the next revolution — like the one that resulted in our current multicultural nightmare — will be a top-down revolution that begins by converting the elite opinion makers.  This anger among non-elite Whites suggests there is a possibility of a successful movement energized by non-elite Whites. In the health care debate, there certainly seems to be a prominent role of elite conservative media figures, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, in mobilizing hostility toward the Obama plan and validating the energy of the protests. The question remains: Will these elite conservative voices openly advocate what needs to be done for their constituency to really take back the country?

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. Email him.

Memo to the Republican Party: You are a party of European-Americans. Accept it or die.

In the wake of the Republican defeat, there is the inevitable soul searching and jockeying for control. The project of defining the Republicans is quite a bit harder than for the Democrats. The Democrats don’t have an identity problem, at least since they got rid of the Southern contingent and unions (apart from government unions) began to be fairly irrelevant. They’re the party of the minorities, government workers, sexual non-conformists, and diverse beneficiaries of the leftist entitlement culture. These people all get along with each other and have no problem supporting each others’ pet projects, notwithstanding the little falling-out between the cultural leftists and the minorities over the California ballot proposition banning same-sex marriage. At least they can agree on looking forward to a post-European future.

But who are the Republicans? Even though 90% of their votes come from European-Americans, these are people who really aren’t on the same page at all. So after each major defeat it’s a Herculean effort to try to keep it all together. You’ve got the big business–globalist–Wall Street Journal–open borders–free trade crowd (the ones with the money). These people actually get along quite well with the neocons whose main agenda is to make the world safe for Israel and are liberals in every other way, especially on immigration. Then there’s the libertarians — people far too principled to find any reason to oppose the mass immigration that has gutted the America they grew up in and not seeming to realize that the people coming here are definitely not on page with their vision of America.

And there is the Republican base — working class and middleclass whites with various ideologies, mainly Christianity. They are remnants of the Reagan coalition and they were critical to the electoral victories of George W. Bush.

There is an obvious incompatibility here. There is deep anxiety in the Republican base because immigration has transformed the country and, along with free trade policies, gutted the labor market. But, as Pat Buchanan notes, the Republican Party is “hooked on K Street cash.” So in the end, the money people get their way on the big issues like free trade and immigration, and then they nominate someone like Sarah Palin to a figurehead position to try to patch things up with the base.

It didn’t work this time around, since enough European-Americans defected to the Democrats to seal McCain’s fate. Indeed, the amazing thing is that more European-Americans didn’t defect from the Republicans given that the Bush administration was arguably the worst presidential administration in history. And they managed to cap it off by presiding over the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. This indicates that European-American identity politics is already a reality in the Republican vote.

But the European-American defectors from the Republicans can’t possibly be happy with the multicultural–sexual deviate–leftist entitlement Democrats. They are likely to return to the Republicans if there is any reasonable excuse for doing so. As a result, one counsel among the Republicans will be to simply stay the course.

There is every reason to think that this might work, at least for an election or two. It’s quite easy to imagine a Republican candidate reclaiming essentially the same electoral victory George W. Bush achieved in 2004 in better economic circumstances. In fact, it probably would have happened this year, except for all of the headwinds of the Bush presidency.

But the problem with that strategy is that it can only work for one or two more presidential election cycles at most. The European-American percentage of the electorate is continuing to decline—around 70% in this election and is slated to continue to drop ever further. (This percentage is based on excluding non-European-Americans such as Jews and Muslims from CNN’s count of white voters — a correction that certainly makes sense given that their interests and their voting patterns are not at all similar to those of European-Americans.) Amnesty for illegal immigrants and continuing high levels of legal immigration will erode the European-American majority even further—and quickly.

Republicans can’t expect to continue to win national elections much longer. There is a ceiling effect for the percentage of European-Americans who might be induced to vote for the Republicans. Some European-Americans are so immersed in the leftist counterculture that there is no hope that they would ever abandon the Democrats. A great many other educated European-Americans are part of the hopelessly liberal educational establishment or they are government  workers. Many benefit from the leftist entitlement zeitgeist themselves.  And many, especially the young, have become multicultural zombies, having grown up with MTV and intellectually seduced by their college professors. These people may well become Republicans when they get a family and start looking for a mainly white suburb where they feel comfortable with the schools, but by then they’ll be part of a permanent electoral minority.

It’s difficult to say what this ceiling might be. Around 60% of European-Americans voted for Bush in 2004. But even if 70% of European-Americans voted Republican, it would not be enough to win an election when European-Americans make up 65% of the electorate. And that will happen very soon — probably by 2012.

In this election, overwhelming percentages of all the minorities voted for Obama—ranging from wealthy and middle class Jews and Asians to impoverished blacks and Latinos. If Hillary Clinton had been the Democratic candidate, this tendency would have been somewhat muted, but there would have been a similar general pattern. In fact, greater percentages of minorities voted Democrat in this election with a non-white candidate than when, as in all previous elections, the choice was between two European-Americans. The message is clear: An unambiguous assertion that the Democrats are the party of the ethnic minorities draws a greater percentage of minority votes.

Of course, the globalists and neocons urge the Republicans to solve their problem by trying to appeal to minorities. Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute writes, “If the Republican Party cannot make significant, lasting inroads into … minority voting populations, it has a long-term disaster on its hands.”

Apart from the fact that such a strategy amounts to surrender for European America, the problem with this is that it’s really hard to see how the Republicans could have reached out to minorities any more than they did. McCain is the poster boy for amnesty for illegal aliens, and he said nothing against legal immigration. For his efforts, he received around 30% of the Latino vote. He said nothing to oppose affirmative action, and he studiously avoided linking Obama to Rev. Jeremiah Wright because he didn’t want to offend blacks. For his efforts, he received less than 5% of the black vote. McCain surrounded himself with neocon operatives with a long history of allegiance to Israel. For his efforts, he received just over 20% of Jewish votes. McCain even discouraged any mention of Obama’s Muslim-sounding middle name.

So what more are Republicans supposed to do? The simple fact is that the coalition of minorities in a powerful Democratic Party is their best strategy for achieving their dream of a post-European America, and there is nothing that the Republicans can do to change that.

The only long term choice that makes any sense for the Republicans is to acknowledge that they are a party of European-Americans and that the purpose of their party is to further the interests of European-Americans.

First and foremost, they must publicly state that it is a legitimate interest of European-Americans to prevent themselves from becoming a minority in a country where substantial percentages of non-Europeans — blacksLatinos, and Jews — have historic grudges against them. And they should advocate policies aimed at improving the status of their base — middleclass and working class European-Americans.

Nothing short of adopting a European-American identity will do. It might be possible for the Republicans to adopt a Sarah Palinesque identity of Christianity and traditional small town values. But even if they do, they would still have to oppose legal and illegal immigration in order to remain a majority. The left has shown repeatedly that they will label as racist any criticism of immigration—even those based on economic or ecological arguments. And they would surely do so if a party composed almost exclusively of European-Americans advocated an end to immigration. It won’t matter what surface ideology they adopt.

Fundamentally, the Republicans have to be able to say to the New York Times, the SPLC, the ADL, the NAACP, and La Raza: “We are the party of European-Americans and we wish to remain a majority. We are advocates for our people in the exactly the same way that other groups are advocates for their people.”

The Republicans would certainly lose some of their constituencies if they did this. The neocons would be in high dudgeon, although they are nothing if not pragmatic in pursuing their main goal of helping Israel. And the globalists might leave. But neither of these constituencies is numerically significant.

And on the plus side, the new Republican Party would doubtless gain the allegiance of a lot of European-Americans who voted for the Democrats in 2008 while holding their noses.

Of course, the Republicans won’t do this. Not for nothing did Sam Francis call them the Stupid Party. For one thing, the Republicans would have to find new sources of funding. But more importantly, very few people can withstand the accusation of being called a racist by the mainstream media. Conservative commentators like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly studiously avoid saying anything that could be construed as “racist”; nor do they dare to oppose the massive legal immigration that will  make them a permanent electoral minority even if we stopped illegal immigration immediately; nor do they openly advocate for European America even though the vast majority of their audience are European-Americans who would love for them to do just that.

Nevertheless, despite their timidity (or their concern with keeping their advertizers), the bottom line is that advocacy for their own people is entirely legitimate and intellectually unassailable.

But unless Republicans become the explicit party of European-Americans, they will surely die — quite soon, and right before our eyes.

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.