“We are one American nation. We must unite. We have to unify. We have to come together.” Every faction in our irreparably fractious and fragmented country calls for unity, following events that demonstrate just how disunited the United States of America is. They all do it. Calls for unity come loudest from the party of submissives—the GOP. The domineering party is less guilt-ridden about this elusive thing called “unity.” Democrats just blame Republicans for its absence in our polity and throughout our increasingly uncivil society. These days, appeals to unity are made by opportunistic politicians, who drape themselves in the noble toga of patriotism on tragic occasions. The latest in many was the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre of Oct. 27. In the name of honesty—and comity—let us quit the unity charade. The U.S. is not united. Neither is America a nation in any meaningful way. It hasn’t been one for a long time. Consider: In the late 1780s, Americans debated whether to nationalize government or keep it a decentralized affair. The discussion was one in which all early Americans partook, nationwide. Think about the degree of unity that feat required! The eternal verities of republicanism and limited government were understood and accepted by all Americans. The young nation’s concerns centered on the fate of freedom after Philadelphia. (The Anti-Federalists, the unsung heroes who gave us the Bill of Rights, turned out to be right.) Around the time The Federalist Papers were published in American newspapers—Americans were a nation in earnest. For it takes a nation to pull that off—to debate a set of philosophical and theoretical principles like those instantiated in these Papers, Federalist and Anti-Federalist. The glue that allowed so lofty a debate throughout early America is gone (not to mention the necessary gray matter). The Tower of Babel that is 21st century America is home not to 6 million but 327 million alienated, antagonistic individuals, diverse to the point of distrust. Each year, elites pile atop this mass of seething antagonists another million newcomers. Democrats, who control the intellectual means of production—schools, social media, TV, the print press, the publishing houses, think tanks, the Permanent Bureaucracy—they insist mass immigration comports with “who we are as a people.” The last is yet another hollow slogan—much like the unity riff. Modern-day Americans, some of whose ancestors were brought together by a “profound intellectual and emotional attachment to individual liberty,”possess little by way of social capital to unify them. We don’t share the same core values, morals or mannerisms. We don’t revere the same heroes. We tear down other countrymen’s historic monuments. (As governor, Nikki Haley, hardly a member of The Mob, led the charge in South Carolina.) We display different regalia. Our attachment to one language, English, is tenuous at best, and waning. Surveys suggest Americans today would rather avoid one another, choosing instead to hunker down unhappily in front of the telly. As Americans, what unites us most is our passion for, and patterns of, consumption. America is an economy, not a nation. Unite we Americans do over the state of our sovereign debt—it’s bad! But not over what it means to be a sovereign people. For half the country, sovereignty entails hordes of defiant scofflaws breaking the border. For the other half, sovereignty means borders. (And some respite, maybe even a moratorium on the incessant influx.) People become rightfully resentful of others when forced into relationships against their will. Signs of the attendant, endemic civil unrest are already evident. Don’t knock the cliché. Good fences (or walls) do indeed make good neighbors, within countries and between them. A sense of security and sovereignty are essential to the health of individuals and nations alike. Developmental health in kids is predicated on respecting their bodies and their boundaries. Wait a sec: Kids need boundaries but the communities in which they reside don’t? Why do boundaries or borders become cardinal (racist) sins when staked out by communities? And why is trespass a praiseworthy creed? A peaceful society is one founded on voluntary associations, not forced integration. By extension, if the Christian pastry man doesn’t care to bake a cake for a gay wedding; leave him be. There are plenty cake-makers who’ll cater for your event. Where’s the morality and munificence in compelling a service from an unwilling service provider? Servitude not service iswhat the gay master is extracting from the baker subordinate. People are harming nobody when they withhold their wares. It’s their right. The baker owns his labor and his property. Leave him alone. Currently, our overlords in Deep State D.C. insist that because we’re so rich and innately mean, they should decide what to do with the lion’s share of our earnings (including to distribute it to the world.) No need. Americans are terribly generous—and most generous when left to choose their charities. We are most generous to strangers in need when they, in return, don’t encroach on our space, and respect the natural rights we have in our person and property. Besides, people get mad, even murderous, when Big Brother tells them who to shower with brotherly love. An uneasy co-existence, not coerced unity, is the only hope for calm in our country. Respectful disunity is the only way forward. This piece was previously published in the Unz Review on November 1, 2018.
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The latest “caravan” community planning to crash borderless America is not part of Latin America’s problems; it’s escaping them. So say America’s low-IQ media. And Latin America’s problems are legion. The region, “which boasts just eight percent of the world’s population, accounts for 38 percent of its criminal killing.” Last year, the “butcher’s bill … came to around 140,000 people … more than have been lost in wars around the world in almost all of the years this century. And the crime is becoming ever more common.” So writes the Economist earlier this year, in an exposé aimed at “shining light on Latin America’s homicide epidemic.” As is generally the case with this august magazine, the shoe-leather journalism is high-IQ, but the deductions drawn therefrom positively retarded. Tucked into these frightening facts about a killer culture is a timid admission: The Problem—Latin America’s murder trends—could be exported to the neighbors. How? Do tell. By osmosis? Perhaps by “caravan”? Liberal louts never say. By the by—and just so you know—Latin America’s crisis of crime “has been mounting.” El Salvador, for instance, had the highest murder rate in the world: 81 to 100,000. By the early 2010s, “the bloodshed in some cities had reached a pitch.” Referred to by demographers also as a “youth bulge,” this “demographic bulge” is the crème de la crème comprising the caravans. Their exodus is from the slum-dog cities of Latin American, where the crime is heavily concentrated, and where “people are crowded into … shantytowns and favelas.” Our young, strong caravanners hail from a culture of “extortion gangs,” “drug-trafficking,” badly trained, “often corrupt” police and prosecutors, marred by general “institutional weaknesses.” War-like conditions in their countries force “Latin American governments [to] spend an average of five percent of their budgets on internal security—twice as much as developed countries.” Since I reported on El Salvador’s murder rate … a paragraph or two back, the murder rate in that country has “rocketed to 104 per 100,000 people.” Such is the power of the war lords there, that stationing “soldiers on the streets” and throwing “thousands of gang members into prison” only served to increase crime. Only— and only—when government offered bribes to “El Salvador’s three main gangs” did murders halve “almost overnight.” The government gave “imprisoned leaders luxuries like flat-screen televisions and fried chicken if they would tell their subordinates to stop killing each other.” But then “the gangs began to see violence as a bargaining tool,” and the peace died. What do you know? Since telling you about El Salvador’s criminal pinnacle, a mere paragraph ago, Venezuela did one better. (Maybe the Economist isn’t so high-IQ, as the rather randomly yoked-together data I relay here are its own). “Venezuela now has the world’s highest homicide rate.” The country “stopped releasing murder statistics altogether in 2005,” because these make South Africa seem an oasis of peace and prosperity. To fanfare, Colombia announced the achievement of “a murder rate of 24 per 100,000 people, its lowest in 42 years,” in 2017. In the United States, it’s still 4.9 per 100,000, although in some spots, murder rates are higher than in South Africa. When they aren’t in hiding, Latin-American leaders and their international helpers try to excite a reverence for life among their people with sexy sounding campaigns. “Value life” is one. Another is “Instinct for Life.” These attempts haven’t taken. Still, when the most hated man in America, President Donald J. Trump, questioned the benefits to the U.S. of immigration from what he called "shithole" countries, the low-IQ media lost it. The president’s brutal honesty masks a more vexing question: What makes a country, the place or the people? Does "the country" make the man or does the man make the country? To listen to the deformed logic of the president's detractors, it's the former: The "country" makes the man. No sooner will these Latin-American migrants crash into our borderless country—than the process of cultural and philosophical osmosis will begin. Big time. In no time will American probity and productivity become second nature to the newcomers. Quite the reverse. Having chronicled and analyzed the fate of the dying Christian civilization at the tip of Africa, allow me to sound the alarm, straight from a book that predicted the demise of South Africa, due to the same, shared flippant attitude toward human capital: “Human action is the ultimate adjudicator of a human being's worth. The aggregate action of many human beings acting in concert is what makes or breaks a society. Overall, American society is superior to assorted African [and Latin American] societies because America is [still] inhabited by the kind of individuals who make possible a thriving civil society.” (“Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,” pp. 161-162, 2011.) Put differently, it is the individual who creates the collective, not the other way around. The Man makes the country what it is. South Africa ceased being great once enough good people were expunged from state and civil society. The tipping point is coming. A sufficient number of bad people admitted into the Unites States of America will make America great no more. Adroitly, President Trump has optimized outcomes for the American Worker. His is a labor market like no other.
Long overdue in the U.S., a labor market is one in which firms compete for workers, rather than workers competing for jobs. “For the first time since data began to be collected in 2000, there are more job openings than there are unemployed workers.” By the Economist’s telling (Jul 12th 2018), “Fully 5.8 million more Americans are in work than in December of 2015.” Best of all, workers are happier than they’ve been for a long time. Not so business. For American business, it’s never enough. Big or small, business is focused on elephantine-like expansion. Big and small, business is nattering about labor shortages: “Ninety percent of small businesses which are hiring or trying to hire workers report that there are few or no qualified applicants, according to the National Federation of Independent Business.” With blaring headlines, the megaphones in the financial press are amplifying a message of dissatisfaction: “The shortage is reaching a ‘critical point’ … A lack of applicants for blue-collar jobs such as trucking and construction has received particular scrutiny, as have states like Iowa where the unemployment rate is especially low (it is just 2.7 percent in the Hawkeye state).” August 31 saw President Trump sign an executive order meant to further boost small businesses. These will be permitted “to band together to offer 401(k)s.” Again, nice, but not enough. It never is. A businessman present piped up about “a very tight labor market … causing us a little bit of a problem.” Contrast this gimme-more-forever-more attitude, with the patriotic perspective of your average Trump supporter: “I’m willing to take my lumps for the good of the country,” a farmer told broadcaster Laura Ingraham. “The Scottish in me says to the death.” Look, a labor market allows wages to rise and productivity to grow, for unprofitable firms will soon fold when they find they can’t pay enough to attract workers. Scarce resources—labor and capital—are then “put to better use.” … More crucially, wage gains accrue “to the poorest workers.” As the neoliberal, Trump-hating Economist notes, “Full-time employees at the 10th percentile of the income distribution are earning almost 4 percent more than a year ago.” Beware; the good times may be short-lived. Trump’s response was Pavlovian. He promised the bitchin businessman to “start looking at, very seriously, merit-based immigration. We have to do it, because we need people.” Read: We don’t have enough fabulous people among a labor force 160-million strong. This is the conditioned response corporate America has come to expect from Power. Business wants the world as its labor market, because? Fill in the blanks, dear reader. For its part, government cares a great deal about outsized sectional interests and GDP (gross domestic product) numbers, as churned out by number-crunchers. But, surely prosperity is about per capita growth as well, and—dare I say? —the wealth and health of local communities? We know that multinationals—stateless corporations; “global beasts with vast balance-sheets”—are preoccupied with increasing value for shareholders. However, that and training American talent are not necessarily mutually exclusive. What’s so wrong with making fellow Americans part of the success story? This may slow economic growth, but may increase its sustainability; make it the kind of growth around which authentic, organic communities can coalesce. And what’s wrong with doing well enough with the labor available in the country? Or, with a view to training American talent? Or, with a mind to paying more for local labor? As it stands, business is permitted to petition The State to import the world at a price heavily subsidized by disenfranchised American taxpayers. By extension, the attitude of business toward economic growth is rooted not in healthy, community-based practices (stateside and abroad), but in some aberrant economic gigantism; in an economic elephantiasis undergirded by greed. Fair enough: Small business wants to be big when it grows up. But let us not confuse the metastatic multinational, motivated by mammon alone, with a business whose growth is sustained by communities, as opposed to colonies of imported labor. This piece originally appeared on IlanaMercer.com on September 20, 2018. It takes no time at all. You listen to Bob Woodward’s halting speech. You read his lumpen prose, and you get right away what undergirds his Trump-phobic tome, “Fear: Trump in the White House.” Naively, the president had expected to fulfill his revolutionary campaign promises to the American voters, an assumption that threw Woodward and the D.C. elites for a loop. If past is prologue, voters don’t—and should not—get their way. After all, the views of Trump voters on American power are polar opposites of those held by the permanent state. What does "Boobus Americanus" know? Nothing! Woodward and the New York Times’ anonymous anti-Trump whistleblower consider the president to be stark raving bonkers for not grasping that Rome on the Potomac moves to its own beat. It does not respond to voters, except to mollify them with "bread and circuses." Mostly reflexively, not always consciously, The Powers That Be seek to retain and enlarge their sphere of influence. Nothing, not even the venerated vote, is allowed to alter that “balance.” This means that established fiefdoms and the “thinking” underlying them are to remain unchanged and unchallenged. Foreign affairs, war-making, the post-war economic order and globally guided crony capitalism are examples. Against this command-and-control apparatus, 60 million Americans rebelled. They liked Trump’s America First ideas enough to elect their champion as president. The president promised to upend “the post-1945 rules-based international order,” and Deplorables applauded him for it. Had Woodward and his publisher missed the 2016 Trump Revolution? Apparently so. Incredulous, Woodward grumbled at one Fox News host: “People need to wake up to what's happening under Trump.” Again, Woodward is hardly original in his endeavor. In the tradition of the Never Trump Resistance, within and without the administration, he and those for whom he speaks have resolved to thwart and discredit the political plank on which Trump ran. The washed-out journalist then blurted out this in disbelief: “Trump said the ‘World Trade Organization is the worst organization in the world.’” Hyperbole? Maybe. The FBI under James Comey, Andrew McCabe and now Christopher Wray are easily worse than the WTO. Like the New York Times’ anonymous, op-ed writer, purportedly a member of the Trump administration, Woodward is exposing the Trump White House for nothing more than its attempts to fulfill voter demands. Withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement was one such goal. These senile subversives would like you to believe the president is insane for expecting to move on promises made to American voters. If not to withdraw from international agreements that have compromised ordinary Americans, at least to rework them so they don’t further pauperize our workers. Who can argue that successive U.S. administrations had ceded the sovereignty of citizens to various supranational systems through international treaty making? That Deplorables wished to reclaim their sovereignty is nevertheless news to seasoned newsman Bob Woodward. The Woodwards of the D.C. Swamp want multilateral trade agreements maintained. The smart set call it “sovereign multilateralism,” which is Orwellian for a loss of citizen sovereignty through undemocratic, international treaties. American workers don’t want their interests lost in this maze of multilateralism. Thank goodness, gasps Woodward, that the globalist grandees with whom he stands so courageously, and who surround the president saved the day: “[D]rafts of a proposal to get out of the Paris climate accord … were removed from the president's desk,” Woodward says. "[There were] draft statements about withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement—which would have been a disaster—and [former economic adviser Gary] Cohn just took it off the desk." To repeat, this was promised on the campaign trail and in Trump position papers. We now know who stole those promises from the American people. In fact, until Woodward’s revelation, I was under the impression that, in June of 2017, President Trump had extricated the U.S. from the Paris Accord! The thing was nothing but a wealth grab from the constituents Trump vowed to protect, with no benefits to the environment, which we all cherish. Besides, the U.S. has strong in-house environmental protections, including emission controls. Thanks to Woodward, we now know that the ditching of the Paris Accord never happened. The outrage animating Woodward—he insinuates that he’s driven by truth, not politics—is shared by the New York Times’ anonymous op-ed scribe aforementioned. This yellow-bellied purveyor of yellow journalism claims to be a “senior official in the Trump administration,” who “vowed to thwart parts of [the Trump voters’] agenda and temper the president’s “worst inclinations.” (All the good things listed above.) We thank you, oh overlord who art in D.C. In his piece of pomposity, this anti-Trump White House employee invoked scripted party policy for his screed, while congratulating himself for being a “first principles” guy or gal (or amalgam). He, too, has cast as dangerous the Trump positions millions of American voters considered wise. To wit, diplomacy with “President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un” and a cessation of America’s hobby wars. We Deplorables disagree with the New York Times’ unelected, “lodestar” for all things honorable and conservative. Never Trumpers and Trump haters are on a quest to scuttle an agenda seconded by millions of American voters. To them, the positions emanating from the Trump White House are a crisis of crazy. To these saboteurs of the president, “crazy” is, very plainly, keeping campaign promises. This piece was originally published on Townhall on September 14, 2018. Liberals have taken to promoting socialism, which is the state-sanctioned appropriation of private property. Or, communism. In communism's parlance, this theft of a man's life, labor and land is referred to as state-ownership of the means of production. Liberals are less known for misappropriating intellectual concepts. But they do that, too. Take the term "liberal." It once belonged to the good guys. But socialists, communists and Fabians stole it from us. Having originally denoted the classical liberalism of the 18th and early 19th century, "liberal" used to be a lovely word. However, to be a liberal now is to be a social democrat, a leftist, a BLM, antifa and MeToo movementarian; it's to be Chris and Andrew Cuomo. A French classical liberal, Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), explained what liberalism stood for: "Individuals must enjoy a boundless freedom in the use of their property and the exercise of their labor, as long as in disposing of their property or exercising their labor they do not harm others who have the same rights." This is the opposite of communism aka socialism. By harm, classical liberals mean aggression, as in damage to person or property. To contemporary liberals, "harm" encompasses anything from Donald Trump's delicious tweets to the economic competition posed by a kiddie lemonade stand. In the UK, those in-the-know still use the word liberal in the right way. The august Economist—essential reading for, unlike American news outlets, it covers The News—has recently lamented that democracies are drifting towards "xenophobic nationalism," and away from liberal ideas. At the same time, the magazine allows that "liberalism is a broad church." It mentions the "Austrians" as being among liberalism's "forerunners"—a mention that gave me, as a devotee of economist Ludwig von Mises, the opening I needed. So, let me ask the following: Have the Economist's left-liberal editorializers (excellent writers all) read what liberal extraordinaire von Mises had to say about nationalism vis-à-vis immigration? Mises was a Jewish classical liberal in the best of traditions—a political economist second to none. He escaped the Nazis only to be treated shoddily in the American academy, by the Fabian "forerunners" of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's teachers. Another formidable, younger classical liberal thinker is David Conway (a friend). Dr. Conway has argued most convincingly and methodically—he's incapable of arguing any other way—that nationalism is in fact a condition for the emergence of liberalism. To that end, Conway invokes Mises. In "Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition," published in 1927, Mises warned that, "In the absence of any migration barriers whatsoever, vast hordes of immigrants … would … inundate Australia and America. They would come in such great numbers that it would no longer be possible to count on their assimilation. If in the past immigrants to America soon adopted the English language and American ways and customs, this was in part due to the fact that they did not come over all at once in such great numbers. ... This … would now change, and there is real danger that the ascendancy—or more correctly, the exclusive dominion—of the Anglo-Saxons in the United States would be destroyed." Mises was not only a true liberal, but a master of the art of argument. Still, he didn't imagine he needed to explain why the West had to stay Western to be free. And in "Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War," published in 1944, Mises could not have been more emphatic: "Under present conditions the adoption of a policy of outright laissez faire and laissez passer on the part of the civilized nations of the West would be equivalent to an unconditional surrender to the totalitarian nations. Take, for instance, the case of migration barriers. Unrestrictedly opening the doors of the Americas, of Australia, and of Western Europe to immigrants would today be equivalent to opening the doors to the vanguards of the armies of Germany, Italy, and Japan." As Conway surmises, "Mises feared a massive immigration into the liberal democracies of peoples of vastly different ethnicity, culture and outlooks. Without strict immigration controls, Mises thought, host populations would rapidly become national minorities in their own lands. As such, the hosts would become vulnerable to forms of oppression and persecution at the hands of new arrivals." As far back as 1927, when the seminal "Liberalism in the Classical Tradition" was published, Mises, a gentleman from Old World Vienna, understood the following: Once illiberal, unassimilable people gain "numeric superiority," they will turn their population advantage into political advantage, using the host population's liberalism against it. Note: This piece was originally published at IlanaMercer.com on August 23, 2018. Once upon a time there were two politicians. One had the power to give media and political elites goosebumps. Still does. The other causes the same dogs to raise their hackles. The first is Barack Hussein Obama; the second Vladimir Putin. The same gilded elites who choose our villains and victims for us have decided that the Russian is the worst person in the world. BHO, the media consider one of the greatest men in the world. Obama leveled Libya and lynched its leader. Our overlords were unconcerned. They knew with certainty that Obama was destroying lives irreparably out of the goodness of his heart. Same thing when Obama became the uncrowned king of the killer drone, murdering Pakistani, Afghani, Libyan and Yemeni civilians in their thousands. That, too, his acolytes generally justified, minimized or concealed. In June of 2008, Obama marked his election as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.” Media did not mock their leader’s delusions of grandeur. All the estrogen-oozing amoebas of mainstream media would do in response to the Obama charm offensive was to turn to one another and check, “Was it good for you? Did he make the earth move and the oceans recede for you, too?” Recently, Obama romped on to the Third World stage “bigly.” He delivered an address in this writer’s birthplace of Johannesburg, South Africa. The occasion: the centennial commemoration of Nelson Mandela’s birth. On that occasion, Obama praised “the liberal international order,” which is founded on inverted morality: Good is bad and bad is good. Small wonder, then, that nobody—broadcaster Tucker Carlson excepted—was willing to shame Obama for lauding genial thug Cyril Ramaphosa as an inspiration for “new hope in [his] great country.” President hope-and-change Ramaphosa has gone where his four peer predecessors had not dared to go. He led a wildly fruitful effort to tweak the already watered-down property-rights provision in the South-African Constitution. Theft of land owned by whites will now be permitted. Other than their modern-day-messiah status, BHO and his hero Mandela share something else. Both were silent about the systematic ethnic cleansing and extermination, in ways that beggar belief, of South-African farmers, in particular, and whites in general. Does the barefaced Barack care that white men, women and children are being butchered like animals, their bodies often displayed like trophies by their proud black assassins? An example among thousands are Kaalie Botha’s parents: “You can’t kill an animal like they killed my mom and dad. You can’t believe it.” The Achilles tendons of Kaalie’s 71-year-old father had been severed by his assailants so he couldn’t flee. He was then hacked in the back until he died, his body dumped in the bush. The head of wife Joey had been bashed in by a brick, wielded with such force that the skull “cracked like an egg.” A day in the life of farming South Africa. Yet, there was Mr. Obama touting the new South Africa as the instantiation of the ideals promoted by Mandela. Mind you, Obama might be on to something, in a perverse way. As stated, Mandela was mum about these killings, labeled genocidal by the expert Dr. Gregory H. Stanton. As for “Madiba’s” fidelity to the cornerstone of civilization, private-property rights: In September of 1991, “Mr. Mandela threatened South African business with nationalization of mines and financial institutions unless business [came] up with an alternative option for the redistribution of wealth.” Had he lived to 100, Mandela would likely be cheering Ramaphosa for authorizing a free-for-all on white-owned private property. You know who’s not ignoring or minimizing those ongoing attempts at extermination and immiseration in South Africa? President Putin. Russia has purportedly offered to give shelter to 15,000 white South African farmers, so far, recognizing them for the true refugees they are. But Mr. Putin must be a racist. At least that’s what the cruel and craven African National Congress (Mandela’s party) dubs any nation daring to succor white South-Africans. The very idea that black Africans would persecute white Africans is racist in itself, say South Africa’s ruling Solons. In fact, the ANC regularly intervenes to set aside findings made by Refugee Boards across the West in favor of South Africa’s endangered minority. Putin, of course, has a history of such “racism.” Take his “unhealthy” fixation with saving Christians in Syria. Yes, that community is thriving once again because of the Alawite and Russian alliance. True to type, “racist” Russia is now looking out for the Afrikaner settlers of South Africa. In 2011, when “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” was published, there were approximately 40,000 commercial South-African farmers who remained on the land of their ancestors. Minus about 3000 slaughtered. The total number of commercial farmers who feed South Africa is now less than half the number of “refugees” the US takes in each year. To date, “there has been a trickle of South Africans applying for asylum in the United States on the grounds of racial persecution. Almost all have been deported.” It should be news to no one that American refugee policies favor the Bantu peoples of Africa over its Boers. As Obama would drone, “It’s who we are.” Whichever way you slice it, on matters South Africa, Russia is the virtuous one. Note: This piece was originally published in the Unz Review on August 9, 2018. To listen to political psychologists and demographers, women are "abandoning the Republican Party" and voting for progressive policies because "they care about reproductive rights." Get it? Women "care." What do they care about? "Rights." The implication, at least, is that "the gender gap in American politics" is related to something women possess in greater abundance than men: virtue. Put bluntly, women believe they have a right to have their uteruses suctioned at society's expense. For this, they are portrayed favorably by those citing these proclivities. Whereas women are depicted as voting from a place of virtue, men are described by the same cognoscenti as "sticking with the Republicans" for reasons less righteous. Men are "buttressing the Republican party," complained the Economist, in an article claiming to "mansplain" why male voters—young even more so than old—are sticking with the GOP. If not for men, the party "would otherwise be falling over."As spare and as strong as the Economist's text always is; the writer was unmistakably cross. Academics conducting surveys no longer stick to reporting the trends observed in their often-dubious data, but attach value judgments thereto. Their default bias in the matter of the yawning "gender gap in American politics" is this: Support for the Republican Party is wrong, perhaps even wicked. By leap of illogic, the reasons for such support must surely lie in the dark recesses of the male mind. In search of such confirmation-bias, you have to wonder how would our brainiacs dismiss Republican women? Let me guess: Unlike men, women are good. Therefore, if they vote Republican it must be because they're still oppressed by the patriarchy (if only). Research methodology has moved away from impartially reporting emerging trends, and toward attaching value-judgments to them. These come in the shape of fancy sounding constructs. Most are purely political. The nebulous concept of "status threat," in this case, is galvanized by ill-intentioned and intellectually ill-equipped academics, to cast men as bad actors. When men depart from the "righteous" electoral choices taken by females, and exhibit a preference for the Republican Party—they are said to be acting because of an unseemly fear that women will usurp them to take their rightful place in the world of work. Or so researchers posit. As any researcher worth his salt should know, there are reasons other than "status threat" to vote for the Republican Party (in as much as these men don't yet recognize the GOP for what it is: a party of quislings who seldom keep promises). For instance, men are being crowded out of colleges; 56 percent of college students are women. And, merit be damned, company human-resource departments now put a premium on recruiting women over men. Survival, not necessarily status, is at stake. That sort of thing. From the smart set comes the same type of response to the demographic implications of mass migration. Everybody, the Republican Party establishment excepted, knows that Trump voters voted because of immigration. Deplorable Americans sense that their country's slipping away. They no longer recognize their communities. Accompanying this transformation are strict instructions to accept, never question, the "browning of America" (in the words of a progressive at Vox.com). For this is "some vast natural process," as Steve Sailer puts it. It's "like the drift of the solar system through the Milky Way." Prosaic types that they are, deplorable Americans are not feeling the poetry. Becoming aliens in their own homeland is no fun. For these pitifully small expectations, they're labelled "nativists, "racists" and "bigots." For once, however, "Ezra Klein, founder of Vox and paladin of mainstream Democratic thinking," avoids passing ad hominin for analysis. Instead, Klein has at least described the political effects of putting the American majority on the road to political extinction. Without once saying "nativist, "fascist," "racist" or "tribalist know-nothings," Klein admits that "demographic change is fracturing our politics," and that whites feel threatened by "the browning America." Klein's essay "suggests a bit of a step toward realism among Establishment punditry," concedes Sailer. Again, to explain voting patterns, Klein has avoided brandishing political constructs like "status threat" as weapons to shame. Rather, he practically admits (although doesn't quite state) "that white Americans are slowly waking up to the fact that they don't really want to get pushed around by newcomers just for being white." Progressives, alas, seldom progress. To the rest of the commentariat of CNN, MSNBC, BBC, wanting a place you can call home while white is … racist. Klein certainly won't completely disappoint his prog peer group. To overcome that lamb-to-the-slaughter dread the majority harbors, Klein advises elites to "lie harder" to Americans. Isn't California a good example of the glories of an inevitable majority-minority transformation?! Klein certainly thinks so (and says as much). Name calling remains the purview of the Economist, which is forever grumbling about Trump's "white-identity politics." (Or the Russians.) However, without exception and without let, progressives—one-worlder, open-border wonders that they are—celebrate that nothing Mr. Trump can do "will interrupt how America is changing." This "combination spells a long-term disaster for [the Republican] party," gloats the Economist. Note: This piece was originally posted on IlanaMercer.com on August 2, 2018. |
AuthorIlana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa”(2011) & “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Facebook, Gab & YouTube Archives
March 2024
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