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Monday, June 21, 2021

The Yankee Problem in America

I present here the full text of a short article written by Clyde Wilson. I will make only one small comment before presenting the text unaltered; Wilson mistakes Joseph Smith's movement of the Restoration as just one among many Yankee supremacist movements coming out of the babble and confusion of the burnt over district. Knowing as I do, of course, the Doctrine of the Restoration, I know this to be false; Joseph Smith, other than geographical and temporal proximity, has little to do with Noyes' Oneida Community or the Seventh Day Adventists. In fact, I'm quite convinced that the whole furor of the burnt over district was caused deliberately by Satan in an attempt to impede or hinder the Restoration. Somewhat ironically, it was exactly the cacophony of ideas and craziness that prompted Joseph Smith to seek wisdom directly from God in the first place. But I can see how being unfamiliar with the Gospel, the Restored Church, and the need for and truth of the Restoration could lead one without that familiarity to see the actual Restoration as just another movement in a district and time that was clearly stirred up by Satan, rather than specifically the whole reason Satan stirred it up in the first place in an attempt to oppose and confuse and confound it.

It can also be a bit of a cautionary tale to members of the Church, who may find that their own particular weaknesses are often to embrace exactly this type of "Yankeeism", and be warned specifically to avoid it. There's a reason why many who have come from "the mission field" don't really like being in Utah too much, as they find the local culture there all too often leans towards nosy busy-bodying, arrogant judgmentalism and self-righteous, Pharisee-like virtue-signaling. Now granted, I personally kind of like Utah and the rest of the cultural so-called Mormon West myself, but I can also see why some people do not. A good friend of mine, who grew up along the Wasatch Front swears he will never live in Utah again, because of the bad experience he had after finding himself a young divorced man after his wife turned out to be a psychotic disaster (my summary term, not his.) My son has also struggled sometimes with well-meaning but completely wrong-headed people trying to insert themselves unwanted and uninvited into personal decisions between he and his wife, like when to and how many children to have. Anyway, I don't mean to linger too long on this, other than to point out that is is indeed a reflection of sorts of exactly the problem that this article is describing, and members of the church would do well to heed this, I think. The problem with Yankeeism, even when you really are well-meaning and informed with the true, Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ is that it is characterized by unrighteous dominion and the curtailment of the agency of your fellow men. President Benson said, in General Conference 1961:

The fight against Godless communism is a very real part of the duty of every man who holds the priesthood. It is the fight against slavery, immorality, atheism, terrorism, cruelty, barbarism, deceit, and the destruction of human life through a kind of tyranny unsurpassed by anything in human history. Here is a struggle against the evil, satanical priestcraft of Lucifer. Truly it can be called "a continuation of the war in heaven."

In the war in heaven the devil advocated absolute eternal security at the sacrifice of our freedom. Although there is nothing more desirable to a Latter-day Saint than eternal security in God’s presence, and although God knew, as we did, that some of us would not achieve this security if we were allowed our freedom, yet the very God of heaven who has more mercy than us all still decreed no guaranteed security except by a man’s own freedom of choice and individual initiative.

Today the devil as a wolf in a supposedly new suit of sheep’s clothing is enticing some men, both in and out of the Church, to parrot his line by advocating planned government-guaranteed security programs at the expense of our liberties. Latter-day Saints should be reminded how and why they voted as they did in heaven. If some have decided to change their votes they should repent—throw their support on the side of freedom—and cease promoting this subversion.

When all of the trappings of propaganda and pretense have been pulled aside, the exposed hard-core structure of modern communism is amazingly similar to the ancient Book of Mormon record of secret societies such as the Gadiantons. In the ancient American civilization there was no word which struck greater terror to the hearts of the people than the name of the Gadiantons. It was a secret political party which operated as a murder cult. Its object was to infiltrate legitimate government, plant its officers in high places, and then seize power and live off the spoils appropriated from the people. (It would start out as a small group of dissenters, and by using secret oaths with the threat of death for defectors, it would gradually gain a choke hold on the political and economic life of whole civilizations.)

While communism has abandoned the label, because it's fallen out of favor across much of the world, the driving force behind it is very much the same, and you'll see very specific parallels between how President Benson describes communism and how Clyde Wilson describes Yankeeism. Heber J. Grant and David O. McKay made the same arguments against the New Deal, and specifically said that there was no meaningful distinction between fascism, socialism, communism and the New Deal. That's not an accident. It's all part of the same secret combination still that seeks to deprive people of their freedom. The fact that we were warned so many decades ago, so many times throughout the 20th Century should be a bit of a wake-up call to the studious latter-day Saint who reads those warnings. We were warned sufficiently. If we're still not paying attention now, and if the warnings have gone quiet, that's a frightening problem, not one to blow off and assume that the warnings were misguided or that they are no longer relevant because they aren't still being repeated today. Quite the opposite; it suggests that the Lord has perhaps wearied of telling us only to have us not listen.

Anyway, before I get too caught up in that tangent, let me go ahead and give the full text below:

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Since the 2000 presidential election, much attention has been paid to a map showing the sharp geographical division between the two candidates' support. Gore prevailed in the power- and plunder-seeking Deep North (Northeast, Upper Midwest, Pacific Coast) and Bush in the regions inhabited by productive and decent Americans. There is nothing new about this. Historically speaking, it is just one more manifestation of the Yankee problem.

As indicated by these books (listed at the end), scholars are at last starting to pay some attention to one of the most important and most neglected subjects in United States history — the Yankee problem.

By Yankee I do not mean everybody from north of the Potomac and Ohio. Lots of them have always been good folks. The firemen who died in the World Trade Center on September 11 were Americans. The politicians and TV personalities who stood around telling us what we are to think about it are Yankees. I am using the term historically to designate that peculiar ethnic group descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people around. Puritans long ago abandoned anything that might be good in their religion but have never given up the notion that they are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own image.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, raised a Northern Methodist in Chicago, is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee — self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing. Northern Methodism and Chicago were both, in their formative periods, hotbeds of abolitionist, high tariff Black Republicanism. The Yankee temperament, it should be noted, makes a neat fit with the Stalinism that was brought into the Deep North by later immigrants.

The ethnic division between Yankees and other Americans goes back to earliest colonial times. Up until the War for Southern Independence, Southerners were considered to be the American mainstream and Yankees were considered to be the "peculiar" people. Because of a long campaign of cultural imperialism and the successful military imperialism engineered by the Yankees, the South, since the war, has been considered the problem, the deviation from the true American norm. Historians have made an industry of explaining why the South is different (and evil, for that which defies the "American" as now established, is by definition evil). Is the South different because of slavery? white supremacy? the climate? pellagra? illiteracy? poverty? guilt? defeat? Celtic wildness rather than Anglo-Saxon sobriety?

Unnoticed in all this literature was a hidden assumption: the North is normal, the standard of all things American and good. Anything that does not conform is a problem to be explained and a condition to be annihilated. What about that hidden assumption? Should not historians be interested in understanding how the North got to be the way it is? Indeed, is there any question in American history more important?

According to standard accounts of American history (i.e., Northern mythology), New Englanders fought the Revolution and founded glorious American freedom as had been planned by the "Puritan Fathers." Southerners, who had always been of questionable character, because of their fanatic devotion to slavery, wickedly rebelled against government of, by, and for the people, were put down by the armies of the Lord, and should be ever grateful for not having been exterminated. (This is clearly the view of the anonymous Union Leaguer from Portland, Maine, who recently sent me a chamber pot labeled "Robert E. Lee's soup tureen.") And out of their benevolence and devotion to the ideal of freedom, the North struck the chains from the suffering black people. (They should be forever grateful, also. Take a look at the Boston statue with happy blacks adoring the feet of Col. Robert Gould Shaw.)

Aside from the fact that every generalization in this standard history is false, an obvious defect in it is that, for anyone familiar with American history before the War, it is clear that "Southern" was American and Yankees were the problem. America was Washington and Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase and the Battle of New Orleans, John Randolph and Henry Clay, Daniel Morgan, Daniel Boone, and Francis Marion. Southerners had made the Constitution, saved it under Jefferson from the Yankees, fought the wars, acquired the territory, and settled the West, including the Northwest. To most Americans, in Pennsylvania and Indiana as well as Virginia and Georgia, this was a basic view up until about 1850. New England had been a threat, a nuisance, and a negative force in the progress of America. Northerners, including some patriotic New Englanders, believed this as much as Southerners.

When Washington Irving, whose family were among the early Anglo-Dutch settlers of New York, wrote the story about the "Headless Horseman," he was ridiculing Yankees. The prig Ichabod Crane had come over from Connecticut and made himself a nuisance. So a young man (New York young men were then normal young men rather than Yankees) played a trick on him and sent him fleeing back to Yankeeland where he belonged. James Fenimore Cooper, of another early New York family, felt the same way about New Englanders who appear unfavorably in his writings. Yet another New York writer, James Kirke Paulding (among many others) wrote a book defending the South and attacking abolitionists. It is not unreasonable to conclude that in Moby Dick, the New York Democrat Herman Melville modeled the fanatical Captain Ahab on the Yankee abolitionist. In fact, the term "Yankee" appears to originate in some mingling of Dutch and Indian words, to designate New Englanders. Obviously, both the Dutch New Yorkers and the Native Americans recognized them as "different."

Young Abe Lincoln amused his neighbors in southern Indiana and Illinois, nearly all of whom, like his own family, had come from the South, with "Yankee jokes," stories making fun of dishonest peddlers from New England. They were the most popular stories in his repertoire, except for the dirty ones.

Right into the war, Northerners opposed to the conquest of the South blamed the conflict on fanatical New Englanders out for power and plunder, not on the good Americans in the South who had been provoked beyond bearing.

Many people, and not only in the South, thought that Southerners, according to their nature, had been loyal to the Union, had served it, fought and sacrificed for it as long as they could. New Englanders, according to their nature, had always been grasping for themselves while proclaiming their righteousness and superiority.

The Yankees succeeded so well, by the long cultural war described in these volumes, and by the North's military victory, that there was no longer a Yankee problem. Now the Yankee was America and the South was the problem. America, the Yankee version, was all that was normal and right and good. Southerners understood who had won the war (not Northerners, though they had shed a lot of blood, but the accursed Yankees.) With some justification they began to regard all Northerners as Yankees, even the hordes of foreigners who had been hired to wear the blue.

Here is something closer to a real history of the United States: American freedom was not a legacy of the "Puritan Fathers," but of Virginians who proclaimed and spread constitutional rights. New England gets some credit for beginning the War of Independence. After the first few years, however, Yankees played little part. The war was fought and won in the South. Besides, New Englanders had good reasons for independence — they did not fit into the British Empire economically, since one of their main industries was smuggling, and the influential Puritan clergy hated the Church of England. Southerners, in fighting for independence, were actually going against their economic interests for the sake of principle.

Once Southerners had gone into the Union (which a number of wise statesmen like Patrick Henry and George Mason warned them against), the Yankees began to show how they regarded the new federal government: as an instrument to be used for their own purposes. Southerners long continued to view the Union as a vehicle for mutual cooperation, as they often naively still do.

In the first Congress, Yankees demanded that the federal government continue the British subsidies to their fishing fleets. While Virginia and the other Southern states gave up their vast western lands for future new states, New Englanders demanded a special preserve for themselves (the "Western Reserve" in Ohio).

Under John Adams, the New England quest for power grew into a frenzy. They passed the Sedition Law to punish anti-government words (as long as they controlled the government) in clear violation of the Constitution. During the election of 1800 the preachers in New England told their congregations that Thomas Jefferson was a French Jacobin who would set up the guillotine in their town squares and declare women common property. (What else could be expected from a dissolute slaveholder?) In fact, Jefferson's well-known distaste for mixing of church and state rested largely on his dislike of the power of the New England self-appointed saints.

When Jeffersonians took power, the New Englanders fought them with all their diminishing strength. Their poet William Cullen Bryant regarded the Louisiana Purchase as nothing but a large swamp for Jefferson to pursue his atheistic penchant for science.

The War of 1812, the Second War of Independence, was decisive for the seemingly permanent discrediting of New England. The Yankee ruling class opposed the war even though it was begun by Southerners on behalf of oppressed American seamen, most of whom were New Englanders. Yankees did not care about their oppressed poorer citizens because they were making big bucks smuggling into wartime Europe. One New England congressman attacked young patriot John C. Calhoun as a backwoodsman who had never seen a sail and who was unqualified to deal with foreign policy.

During the war Yankees traded with the enemy and talked openly of secession. (Southerners never spoke of secession in time of war.) Massachusetts refused to have its militia called into constitutional federal service even after invasion, and then, notoriously for years after, demanded that the federal government pay its militia expenses.

Historians have endlessly repeated that the "Era of Good Feelings" under President Monroe refers to the absence of party strife. Actually, the term was first used to describe the state of affairs in which New England traitorousness had declined to the point that a Virginia president could visit Boston without being mobbed.

Yankee political arrogance was soulmate to Yankee cultural arrogance. Throughout the antebellum period, New England literature was characterized and promoted as the American literature, and non-Yankee writers, in most cases much more talented and original, were ignored or slandered. Edgar Allan Poe had great fun ridiculing the literary pretensions of New Englanders, but they largely succeeded in dominating the idea of American literature into the 20th century. Generations of Americans have been cured of reading forever by being forced to digest dreary third-string New England poets as "American literature."

In 1789, a Connecticut Puritan preacher named Jedidiah Morse published the first book of American Geography. The trouble was, it was not an American geography but a Yankee geography. Most of the book was taken up with describing the virtues of New England. Once you got west of the Hudson River, as Morse saw it and conveyed to the world's reading public, the U.S. was a benighted land inhabited by lazy, dirty Scotch-Irish and Germans in the Middle States and lazy, morally depraved Southerners, corrupted and enervated by slavery. New Englanders were pure Anglo-Saxons with all virtues. The rest of the Americans were questionable people of lower or mongrel ancestry. The theme of New Englanders as pure Anglo-Saxons continued right down through the 20th century. The alleged saints of American equality operated on a theory of their racial superiority. While Catholics and Jews were, in the South, accepted and loyal Southerners, Yankees burned down convents and banished Jews from the Union Army lines.

A few years after Morse, Noah Webster, also from Connecticut, published his American Dictionary and American spelling book. The trouble was, it was not an American dictionary but a New England dictionary. As Webster declared in his preface, New Englanders spoke and spelled the purest and best form of English of any people in the world. Southerners and others ignored Webster and spelled and pronounced real English until after the War of Southern Independence.

As the books show, Yankees after the War of 1812 were acutely aware of their minority status. And here is the important point: they launched a deliberate campaign to take over control of the idea of "America."

The campaign was multi-faceted. Politically, they gained profits from the protective tariff and federal expenditures, both of which drained money from the South for the benefit of the North, and New England especially. Seeking economic advantage from legislation is nothing new in human history. But the New England greed was marked by its peculiar assumptions of moral superiority. New Englanders, who were selling their products in a market from which competition had been excluded by the tariff, proclaimed that the low price of cotton was due to the fact that Southerners lacked the drive and enterprise of virtuous Yankees! (When the South was actually the productive part of the U.S. economy.)

This transfer of wealth built the strength of the North. It was even more profitable than the slave trade (which New England shippers carried on from Africa to Brazil and Cuba right up to the War Between the States) and the Chinese opium trade (which they were also to break into).

Another phase of the Yankee campaign for what they considered their rightful dominance was the capture of the history of the American Revolution. At a time when decent Americans celebrated the Revolution as the common glory of all, New Englanders were publishing a literature claiming the whole credit for themselves. A scribbler from Maine named Lorenzo Sabine, for one example among many, published a book in which he claimed that the Revolution in the South had been won by New England soldiers because Southerners were traitorous and enervated by slavery. As William Gilmore Simms pointed out, it was all lies. When Daniel Webster was received hospitably in Charleston, he made a speech in which he commemorated the graves of the many heroic Revolutionary soldiers from New England which were to be found in the South. The trouble was, those graves did not exist. Many Southern volunteers had fought in the North, but no soldier from north of Pennsylvania (except a few generals) had ever fought in the South!

George Washington was a bit of a problem here, so the honor-driven, foxhunting Virginia gentleman was transformed by phony folklore into a prim New Englander in character, a false image that has misled and repulsed countless Americans since.

It should be clear, this was not merely misplaced pride. It was a deliberate, systematic effort by the Massachusetts elite to take control of American symbols and disparage all competing claims. Do not be put off by Professor Sheidley's use of "Conservative Leaders" in his title. He means merely the Yankee ruling elite who were never conservatives then or now. Conservatives do not work for "the transformation of America."

Another successful effort was a New England claim on the West. When New Englanders referred to "the West" in antebellum times, they meant the parts of Ohio and adjacent states settled by New Englanders. The rest of the great American West did not count. In fact, the great drama of danger and adventure and achievement that was the American West, from the Appalachians to the Pacific, was predominantly the work of Southerners and not of New Englanders at all. In the Midwest, the New Englanders came after Southerners had tamed the wilderness, and they looked down upon the early settlers. But in Western movies we still have the inevitable family from Boston moving west by covered wagon. Such a thing never existed! The people moving west in covered wagons were from the upper South and were despised by Boston.

So our West is reduced, in literature, to The Oregon Trail, a silly book written by a Boston tourist, and the phony cavortings of the Eastern sissy Teddy Roosevelt in the cattle country opened by Southerners. And the great American outdoors is now symbolized by Henry David Thoreau and a little frog pond at Walden, in sight of the  Boston smokestacks. The Pennsylvanian Owen Wister knew better when he entitled his Wyoming novel, The Virginian.

To fully understand what the Yankee is today — builder of the all-powerful "multicultural" therapeutic state (with himself giving the orders and collecting the rewards) which is the perfection of history and which is to be exported to all peoples, by guided missiles on women and children if necessary — we need a bit more real history.

That history is philosophical, or rather theological, and demographic. New Englanders lived in a barren land. Some of their surplus sons went to sea. Many others moved west when it was safe to do so. By 1830, half the people in the state of New York were New England-born. By 1850, New Englanders had tipped the political balance in the Midwest, with the help of German revolutionaries and authoritarians who had flooded in after the 1848 revolutions.

The leading editors in New York City, Horace Greeley and William Cullen Bryant, and the big money men, were New England-born. Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania steel tycoon and Radical Republican, was from Vermont. (Thanks to the tariff, he made $6,000 extra profit on every mile of railroad rails he sold.)

The North had been Yankeeized, for the most part quietly, by control of churches, schools, and other cultural institutions, and by whipping up a frenzy of paranoia about the alleged plot of the South to spread slavery to the North, which was as imaginary as Jefferson's guillotine.

The people that Cooper and Irving had despised as interlopers now controlled New York! The Yankees could now carry a majority in the North and in 1860 elect the first sectional president in U.S. history — a threat to the South to knuckle under or else. In time, even the despised Irish Catholics began to think like Yankees.

We must also take note of the intellectual revolution amongst the Yankees which created the modern version of self-righteous authoritarian "Liberalism" so well exemplified by Mrs. Clinton. In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson went to Germany to study. There he learned from philosophers that the world was advancing by dialectical process to an ever-higher state. He returned to Boston, and after marrying the dying daughter of a banker, resigned from the clergy, declared the sacraments to be a remnant of barbarism, and proclaimed The American as the "New Man" who was leaving behind the garbage of the past and blazing the way into the future state of perfection for humanity. Emerson has ever since in many quarters been regarded as the American philosopher, the true interpreter of the meaning of America.

From the point of view of Christianity, this "American" doctrine is heresy. From the point of view of history it is nonsense. But it is powerful enough for Ronald Reagan, who should have known better, to proclaim America as the shining City upon a Hill that was to redeem mankind. And powerful enough that the United States has long pursued a bipartisan foreign policy, one of the guiding assumptions of which is that America is the model of perfection to which all the world should want to conform.

There is no reason for readers of Southern Partisan to rush out and buy these books, which are expensive and dense academic treatises. If you are really interested, get your library to acquire them. They are well-documented studies, responsibly restrained in their drawing of larger conclusions. But they indicate what is hopefully a trend of exploration of the neglected field of Yankee history.

The highflying Yankee rhetoric of Emerson and Hillary Rodham Clinton has a nether side, which has its historical origins in the "Burnt Over District." The "Burnt Over District" was well known to antebellum Americans. Emersonian notions bore strange fruit in the central regions of New York State settled by the overflow of poorer Yankees from New England. It was "Burnt Over" because it (along with a similar area in northern Ohio) was swept over time and again by post-millennial revivalism. Here preachers like Charles G. Finney began to confuse Emerson's future state of perfection with Christianity, and God's plan for humanity with American chosenness.

If this were true, then anything that stood in the way of American perfection must be eradicated. The threatening evil at various times was liquor, tobacco, the Catholic Church, the Masonic order, meat-eating, marriage. Within the small area of the Burnt Over District and within the space of a few decades was generated what historians  have misnamed the "Jacksonian reform movement:" Joseph Smith received the Book of Mormon from the Angel Moroni; William Miller began the Seventh Day Adventists by predicting, inaccurately, the end of the world; the free love colony of John Humphrey Noyes flourished at Oneida; the first feminist convention was held at Seneca Falls; and John Brown, who was born in Connecticut, collected accomplices and financial backers for his mass murder expeditions.

It was in this milieu that abolitionism, as opposed to the antislavery sentiment shared by many Americans, including Southerners, had its origins. Abolitionism, despite what has been said later, was not based on sympathy for the black people nor on an ideal of natural rights. It was based on the hysterical conviction that Southern slaveholders were evil sinners who stood in the way of fulfillment of America's divine mission to establish Heaven on Earth. It was not the Union that our Southern forefathers seceded from, but the deadly combination of Yankee greed and righteousness.

Most abolitionists had little knowledge of or interest in black people or knowledge of life in the South. Slavery promoted sin and thus must end. No thought was given to what would happen to the African-Americans. In fact, many abolitionists expected that evil Southern whites and blacks would disappear and the land be repopulated by virtuous Yankees.

The darker side of the Yankee mind has had its expression in American history as well as the side of high ideals. Timothy McVeigh from New York and the Unabomber from Harvard are, like John Brown, examples of this side of the Yankee problem. (Even though distinguished Yankee intellectuals have declared that their violence was a product of the evil "Southern gun culture.")

General Richard Taylor, in one of the best Confederate memoirs, Destruction and Reconstruction, related what happened as he surrendered the last Confederate troops east of the Mississippi in 1865. A German, wearing the uniform of a Yankee general and speaking in heavily accented English, lectured him that now that the war was over, Southerners would be taught "the true American principles." Taylor replied, sardonically, that he regretted that his grandfather, an officer in the Revolution, and his father, President of the United States, had not passed on to him true American principles. Yankeeism was triumphant.

Since the Confederate surrender, the Yankee has always been a strong and often dominant force in American society, though occasionally tempered by Southerners and other representatives of Western civilization in America. In the 1960s the Yankee had one of his periodic eruptions of mania such as he had in the 1850s. Since then, he has managed to destroy a good part of the liberty and morals of the American peoples. It remains to be seen whether his conquest is permanent or whether in the future we may be, at least to some degree, emancipated from it.

  • Sheidley, Harlow W. Sectional Nationalism: Massachusetts Conservatives and the Transformation of America, 1815—1834. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.
  • Grant, Susan-Mary. North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.
  • Bensel, Richard F. Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
  • Tuveson, Ernest L. Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
  • Norton, Anne. Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Friday, June 18, 2021

More mainstream data: racism is a hoax

First, the Z-man blog post.

Happy Juneteenth everyone! Officially, this long tradition dating back to Monday is celebrated on Saturday, but the ruling regime has declared the preceding Friday as a day off for our hardworking civil servants. The rest of us, of course, will have to continue slaving away at the salt mines, but the people who really make this country work will get the day off to celebrate the people who built the country. Even as we toil, we should take a moment to think about both groups.

In a way, the ridiculousness of this new holiday fits perfectly with the absurdity of modern liberal democracy. [T]he system is nothing like it is claimed. Instead of bringing the citizens into the decision making process, it systematically excludes the majority. This new holiday is a great example of how it works. Exactly no one wanted it. Few even heard of it. The people have many higher concerns, but they are ignored in favor of this novelty.

It is also good timing for Charles Murray’s new book. The thesis of the book is that the elites need to accept biological reality or face the wrath of the angry Saxon. This new holiday is a good example of what he means. Ruling class whites pandering to blacks creates friction between whites and blacks over trivial items. It encourages nonwhites to embrace tribal politics, which discourages whites from embracing the active indifference necessary to make a multiracial society work.

There are other things wrong with Murray’s argument. The great Roger Devlin has posted a comprehensive review on VDare. There will be other reviews from dissidents in the coming weeks. Ed Dutton may have summarized it best when he said that Murray is right, but he should have written this book in 1965 or even 1985. At this point, the die is cast and there is no escaping the thing he is warning against. The fact that Washington just created this absurd new holiday is proof of that.

Of course, the fact that both parties eagerly embraced this idiotic idea makes clear that the elites will never face reality on their own. History says they will have their awakening as the trap door swings open. The system we have today is unsustainable, for the simple reason the people at the top define themselves by their hatred of the people over whom the rule. Most of the pols who voted for this new holiday did so out of spite and the rests did so to curry favor with those spiteful mutants.

The VDare review mentioned above is also pretty good.

Charles Murray’s just-published Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America is an elegantly brief (168 pages) essay devoted to summarizing the great mass of evidence for the existence and persistence of significant racial differences in two areas: 1) cognitive ability, aka intelligence, and 2) violent crime rates. Taken together, this evidence is irrefutable, and informed experts have pretty well given up contesting it.  In dramatic contrast, public debate has actually gone backward since Murray co-authored The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life in 1994. He hopes his politely rational arguments can change that—or that the Ruling Class will heed his warning about a white backlash. Too bad he’s wrong.

Facing Reality was inspired by the slogans of “systemic racism” and “white privilege” popularized by the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020. It is Murray’s patient attempt to explain to anyone who will listen just why such incendiary charges “float free of reality,” in the words of the front jacket flap.

Murray’s focus is limited to the USA, yet he refers to American whites as “Europeans” and American blacks as “Africans.” This is due not to any recent conversion to racial nationalism, but because he hopes a more clinical terminology will “make it easier to look at some inflammatory issues with at least a little more dispassion.”

Good luck with that.

And also:

There is really nothing to criticize about Murray’s presentation of the evidence for his “two truths about race in America,” although it will certainly be ignored by those who most need to face up to that evidence.

In a final chapter, however, he goes beyond the data to speculate on what might happen “If We Don’t Face Reality.” This involves speculation and interpretation, leaving much more room for disagreement.

But let us begin with his valuable admission that racial identity politics has strong evolutionary roots:

Treating our fellow human beings as individuals instead of treating them as members of groups is unnatural. Our brains evolved to think of people as members of groups; to trust and care for people who are like us and to be suspicious of people who are unlike us. Those traits had great survival value for human beings throughout millions of years. People who were trusting of outsiders were less likely to pass on their genes.

Yet a few countries, pre-1965 America conspicuous among them, successfully developed high levels of trust independent of kinship bonds. Such countries have fostered historically exceptional levels of human achievement and prosperity.

Murray himself is a typical product of such a society in that thinking in racial terms does not come naturally to him: he invariably treats races as collections of individuals among whom non-random patterns happen to be observable rather than as (roughly) constant gene pools which perpetuate themselves across the generations.

Where does this individualistic mindset come from? Murray attributes it to the American Founders, who enshrined as in “The American Creed.” He might have profited by considering Kevin MacDonald’s argument that northern Europeans (such as our Founders) are the product of an unusual evolutionary environment in which the ability to cooperate with non-kin, including the careful maintenance of a personal reputation for fair dealing with them, was of greater importance than kinship bonds. This is inherently more plausible than seeing American individualism as the invention of a group of Enlightenment-era political savants.

One powerful reason to suspect our individualism and tendency to de-emphasize race and kinship has deeper roots is the slowness of American whites to adopt racial identity politics for themselves. Murray approves of such reluctance. He may not like minority racial politics, yet his principal fear appears to be that Whites may begin to develop something similar.

In other words, he believes the current double standard forbidding Whites (and only Whites) from pursuing their group interests—while permitting or encouraging such behavior in other groups—is a lesser evil than Whites starting to behave like everybody else and fight fire with fire. In his own words: “If Whites adopt identity politics, disaster follows.”

But disaster for whom? Not for Whites themselves, apparently. Murray acknowledges:

If a minority consisting of 13 percent of the population can generate as much political energy and solidarity as America’s Blacks have, what happens when a large proportion of the 60 percent of the population that is White begins to use the same playbook?

Maybe they start winning for a change?

But no, that is definitely not the conclusion Murray wishes us to draw. Instead, his fear is that the American government will lose legitimacy:

The federal government has enacted thousands of laws and regulations [that] apply to every family and business in the nation. They cannot possibly be enforced by the police or courts without almost universal voluntary compliance. When a government is seen as legitimate, most citizens voluntarily comply because they believe it is their duty. When people see laws as products of the illegitimate use of power, the sense of obligation fades.

This, then, is the disaster which Charles Murray fears will result from the growth of white identity politics: Non-elite white Trump-voters with American flags on their pickup trucks may stop cooperating with the sanctimonious elite whites and resentful nonwhites who rule over them! They must not stand up for themselves because it could prove to be a disaster to their enemies!

The final chapter of Facing Reality is, albeit unintentionally, the most encouraging argument in favor of white identity politics that I have ever read. 

As always, my go-to link for the data here is at Those Who Can See. The Unz Review has loads of data available too, in a long series of articles.

The reality, of course, is that diversity means actual difference. We are indeed commanded to love our neighbor, but we need to stop and think about what that means before we run off a cliff in an emotionally induced hysteria. For one thing, we can't love our neighbor if we're in denial about their nature. If we only love an abstract idea of them that assumes that they are interchangeable widgets with ourselves, then that isn't love. In fact, it's probably quite the opposite of it. We need to figure out how to love our neighbor without destroying our own posterity in an orgy of self-righteous virtue-signaling.

So far, we have absolutely no hope of accomplishing that, because most Americans, or at least most who have any kind of voice in public and social policy, are in complete denial about black and white facts like those mentioned above by Charles Murray.

UPDATE: Here's another post reviewing Murray's new books. https://www.takimag.com/article/a-book-without-an-audience/

The final chapter is where things go off the rails for Murray. His primary reason for writing the book is not to educate his friends and neighbors on the reality of race, but to warn them that their overt hatred of white people could lead to a backlash. Seeing every tribe in the country use identity politics to advance their interests could lead to whites embracing the same thing. According to Murray, that would be worse than death.

This is why Murray is the most brilliant example of the modern conservative. He fully embraces the morality of the other side, while complaining about how they are implementing their morality. In this case, his premise is the left-wing assertion that white solidarity is the worst thing possible, because white people are by nature the evilest people on the planet. In other words, he endorses the blood libel against whites.

In the end, the title of the book is ironic. It is men like Charles Murray, the old conservative guard, who refuse to accept reality. America will be a majority-minority society in a couple of decades. ed. note: This makes the unlikely assumption that current trends will have nothing to alter them, of course. No society has existed peacefully under such an arrangement, especially when a tiny minority sits at the top, maintaining itself by pitting one group against another.

If there was a time for making the points Murray makes in his book, it was half a century ago when the usual suspects were opening the gates to immigrants. America was 90% white and ready to do something about the black population. Maybe in 1985, when the country was 85% white, this argument would have been helpful. In 2020 it is just more defeatism from the people who are largely to blame for the current crisis.

Further, facts and reason are not how one deals with a partisan. This is something the long struggle with communism should have taught guys like Murray. Instead, this generation of so-called conservatives stubbornly clings to the childish notion that their ideas alone will defeat the left. They think if they present the facts the right way, their opponents will throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers.

Given his age, this will probably be Murray’s last book, and it is a fitting end to his career and his generation’s politics. A determined unwillingness to accept the reality of partisan politics and the unwillingness to defend the institutions of society are where the blame lies for the current crisis. Those who survive the looming demographic catastrophe and begin the task of rebuilding the West will look back at this book and wonder why it ever needed to be written.

I'm not actually sure in what sense the reviewer considers Murray a conservative, though.  

Monday, June 14, 2021

Right vs Left false choice dichotomy

To most people paying attention, the Left was openly the ideology of Satan, the destruction of agency, and the promotion of vice. (see here, as well as numerous statements from every prophet of the 20th century for reference.) Therefore, it was often seen by many Latter-Day Saints that supporting the Right and the Republicans was in their best interest. However, the Republicans were not truly the Right, they were a Fake Right who's main purpose seems to be to have hedged in the Right and not allowed it to express itself properly, at least since the time of William Buckley if not before—although realistically, since the era of the Progressives over a hundred years ago, the Right has been on the ropes in America. This was especially egregious when old, war-mongering FDR style Trotskyites from the Left found themselves out of favor with the free love hippy generation, and rebranded themselves as "neoconservative" and pretended like what was radical leftism two generations earlier were now right wing concepts. 

Anyway, getting too caught up in the philosophies of men is, of course, contrary to the instruction we are given through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is especially true when the philosophies of men offer us false dichotomies posing as meaningful choices, but which are in reality both different ways for an evil elite to dominate us.

A few quotes from the Z-man on this:

One of the underappreciated aspects of liberal democracy is that it always pits morality versus objective facts, always creating a false choice. Every public debate is between one camp that demand we do “the right thing” and another camp that insist on doing “the correct thing”. The right thing is defined as the moral thing while the correct thing is the factually accurate or effective thing. The choice is to fail while on the moral high ground or to succeed and be seen and inhumane or indifferent. The debate that evolved over economics that grew up out of the industrial revolution is the origin. The Marxists were never making an economic argument back in the 19th century. They started with a moral claim that capitalism is built on exploitation of the workers. This was inherently immoral so it must lead to class struggle, crisis and then revolution.

The reaction to Marxism was Austrian School economics. Unlike the Marxists, the Austrians had a very detailed analysis of economics. Their model explained the basics of how goods and services flowed through an economy. This factual accuracy made it possible to form public policy and test the result. Over the course of the Cold War, Austrian economics became the primary weapon against Marxism. It stripped communist economics of the claim to empirical authority.

The trouble with Austrian School economics is it also striped morality and group preference from public debate. Every want and desire had to be justified by an economic argument. Rotten results that may make sense according to the laws of economics could not be contested. The out of control consumerism we see, for example, just has to be tolerated. The spread of degeneracy cannot be opposed, because the market dictates what is right in society.

The dynamic resulting from this false choice seems to be reaching an end point, where neither side is sustainable. The moral claims made by what is called the Left have veered so far into the ridiculous that it looks like satire. A century ago, it was easy to sympathize with the groups the Left claimed to champion. Workers being ripped off by unscrupulous employers had a strong claim. Men is bizarre outfits claiming to be a third sex are clowns no one can take seriously.

A similar fate has befallen the so-called Right. When massive global corporations are stripping people of their rights, often by funding street gangs to assaults people going about their business, it is laughable to defend the "free market" system that produced these companies. When state sponsored financial concerns are buying up houses to create new renters in the name of capitalism, the so-called free market is just as ridiculous as the men in dresses.

Liberal democracy has become an octopus with its tentacles wrapped around various parts of society. One tentacle is the moralizers assaulting us with the latest fads from corporate HR. Another tentacle is consumerism strip mining the traditions and history, the social capital, that are the foundation stones of society. Another tentacle is finance capital skimming a bit from every transaction without adding anything back. 

That is the primary defense of the system. All critics are herded into this set of false choices the system maintains. If you do not like that state-sponsored hedge funds are hoovering up single family homes, you have two choices. One is you can throw in with the loons and their bizarre defense of bourgeoise decadence. The other is you can waste your time making an economic argument claiming that the "market" will solve the problem if we worship it more.

[T]he cosmopolitan global order has more in common with certain movements of the last century than the liberal pieties of today. The new world order is a synthesis of Marxist moral philosophy and Austrian post hoc market analysis. Everywhere one turns in the modern age, they are pelted with moral slogans based in diversity, inclusion, and equity. This call to arms is every bit as radically insane as “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” was in the French Revolution. As in the revolution, it is more than just a slogan. It is the foundation of the new moral orthodoxy. It is the moral claim of Marxism, without the economic plan.

That economics comes from a bastardized version of Austrian economics. The global corporations imposing the new moral framework on the West are justified by their market dominance. After all, if you do not like what the duopoly that controls mobile communications has to say about morality, for example, start your own phone monopoly. The lack of an alternative is proof that the market has spoken.

The old denunciations of democracy, liberalism, and socialism from the fascists of the last century have been updated in the new age. The public will, as expressed through the democratic process, is now systematically marginalized. Liberal principles are condemned as contrary to the moral order. Of course, any effort to restrain corporate power is condemned as socialism. [T]he world is dominated by a synthesis of the two called cosmopolitan globalism. The point of democratic systems is for the public to have a say in how public policy is formulated and a veto over the final result. In reality, it offers false choices controlled by a narrow elite. The narrow elite hides in the shadows of a mythical beast called the general will or the invisible hand of the market. It is a curtain behind which stands the ruling class. In the end, it is looking like what Marxism and liberal democracy have always claimed to oppose.