As readers know I think Matthew Yglesias’ One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger is a decent read. Unlike a reviewer at the new TNR, I didn’t expect a Ph.D. dissertation. Though a few years ago I would be very skeptical of one billion diverse Americans, today I am far less so, mostly because I think our elites are perverts. I see no conventional way to get out of the perversion spiral, so I’m quite open to some sort of “exogenous shock”. I am aware of the arguments of people such as Mark Krikorian. We are actually quite friendly and I have appraised Mark of my change of views privately and am open to revising my perspectives in light of new data (he makes the fair point that our elites are so powerful they’ll turn new immigrants into perverts as well!).
But setting that aside, I think Yglesias’ candor in his interviews has been refreshing (he’ll be on the Brown Pundits podcast on the 15th, though I’ve posted it for Patrons). For example, on Tyler Cowen’s podcast, he admits he thinks if more Americans went to church, that that would be a good thing. He also admits openness to immigration that takes into account parameters such as cultural or national background. Like most normal Americans he is not beholden to the redlines of woke Twitter.
But these are details. What I am interested in seeing are ideas that are new for this century. Ideas that shake things up. We have not reached the ennui of the last bourgeois man. On the contrary, we again live in interesting times. But our cultural elites do not have the mental furniture to grapple with the beginning of the new century and the new age. They are stuck in a “Boomer Mindset.”
For conservatives, the 1950s will not return. For liberals, the 1960s will not return. They can pretend and will it, but the recycling of old motifs and paradigms reflect intellectual and cultural exhaustion, not renewed vigor.
That is one reason I read The American Mind. I am, fundamentally, a fusionist of the old school (I do write for NR). But the future does not belong to fusionism. For someone of my age, the future is going to seem crazy. Perhaps Matthew Yglesias crazy. Or Michael Anton crazy. Or a thousand other permutations. The only thing I’m certain of is the exhaustion of old paradigms. I believe “Black Lives Matter” is attempting to recapture the old 1960s radicalism in a bottle. It will not last. When the Republicans last had control of the legislature, the thing they managed to do was pass a tax cut. The last gasp of an old ideology.
What is America in the 21st century? I don’t know. None of us do.
Mark Krikorian… (he makes the fair point that our elites are so powerful they’ll turn new immigrants into perverts as well!).
Krikorian is right. Whatever the cultural proclivities immigrants bring from their old countries, one thing they and their offspring crave is to be accepted by the host society, which these days effectively means acceptance by the elites, those who control the major institutions. So whatever they may think internally, these new arrivals will vote and advocate for what the elites do. As an easy example, look at people who are Hindus in the United States. They are mostly recent arrivals, they may be traditional, but their party ID (as of 2012) was 9% Republican to 72% Democratic.
https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2012/07/overview18.png
I think it’s a fool’s dream to think that new immigrants will show up in a new country and fight against the Establishment. They are far more likely to desire to be accepted by and imitate the Establishment (you know, the people who will let the children of these immigrants into the Ivy League and stamp an approval as worthy new Americans) than join icky “BadWhites” and other “racist,” “bigoted” “malcontents” and combat it.
For conservatives, the 1950s will not return. For liberals, the 1960s will not return.
Why would the “liberals” of today want the oh-so repressive and retrograde 1960’s back? Blacks weren’t worshipped in the 1960’s. Gay marriage and trans-rights weren’t shoved into people’s faces and those who opposed such perversions weren’t pushed out of their livelihood.
And conservatives of today would be more than glad to have the 1980’s back, forget the 1950’s (note cashing-in of the ’80’s nostalgia by Hollywood, e.g. “Stranger Things,” “Cobra Kai,” etc.). That’s how far behind the right is in the fight. The left has achieved FAR MORE than what it ever dreamed of in the 1960’s and, for the right, even 20 years ago is a strange country, let alone 50 years (70 years ago might as well be the Colonial period).
What I am interested in seeing are ideas that are new for this century. Ideas that shake things up.
Over the last couple of years, I have come over to Audacious Epigone’s view. We have to have a peaceful separation (an American version of the Czech-Slovak divorce) or at least a devolution into a very loose confederation with powerful home-rule (so that people can actually vote with their feet and not be ruled by others who obviously and transparently despise them). Otherwise, I am afraid it’s going to be bloody, one way or another and sooner or later.
at least a devolution into a very loose confederation with powerful home-rule
Warlordism is retrograde. It didn’t work well long-term then, and it won’t work now. We need to think in terms of progress, not degeneration.
Hmm… I have a lot of doubts both on narrow consequences: Have massive waves of migration ever been stabilizing? Would new arrivals exert political voice in a positive way? Wouldn’t this just exacerbate problems with scarce real estate in metro areas and elite overproduction that drive a lot of this?
Migration has traditionally never really been good for income inequality, in short or long term (still some possible effect on increased US income inequality and the shape of the US economy from hyposelection and hyperselection from the tails). Migration also seems to select for individualists (relative to culture of origin). So its hard for me to think that large scale migration would not push US society’s income divisions further apart.
Plus longer term consequences: Super-massive states (territory and population) just do not have a great track record of functioning well, over the longer term, as described by Scheidel and others. The short term advantages of scale that Yglesias argues for seem hollow relative to longer term lack of robusticity, responsiveness and pluralism.
Ultimately though, I feel like you’ve fought (and thought) the good fight for restrictions for long enough, when you didn’t really have to, that I can’t really object too loudly to you to arguing for something else.
I guess that a big wave of migration could at least break the stalemate of US politics, where you have two party constituencies where only at the margins there is switching, because there simply isn’t a place in either opposing party’s vision for most of the supporters of the other side. Then because of the US’s complex Presidential system of legislative checks and balances and separation of powers, no party that gains power can really it seems make much law, and so things at a national level devolve to being done by executive order (“pen and phone”), until they are either struck down or not by the judiciary (depending on how much they suit the judiciary’s generally ‘elite’ preferences, and largely without reference to public opinion, and absolutely without any public accountability). A big migration wave would probably make it not matter; as one side would simply dominate the legislature and make whichever law it chooses, and the US could get back to being a normal legislative democracy, for good or ill.
In terms of the discussion about “new ideas”, I don’t see much of those in the new Millennial voices coming through in politics. Those on both the Right and Left, simply seem to be about cheerleading every possible expansion of state size and power in every circumstance (save perhaps the regulation of the internet). Simply because they perceive the “Boomer” libertarians and “neoliberals” who “won” in the previous generation to be against that, and because government debt has low interest rates, and because they can climb the ladder of media profile by promising naked transfers to core supporters in big business (right), and the lumpenintelligensia (left) respectively. It’s fundamentally contrarian reaction and rebellion, driven by self interest, and is unlikely to lead to anything substantially useful, and it certainly isn’t new. Genuinely new ideas will probably only emerge with new technological possibility.
As capitalist investor and land owner, more people mean more profit for me. My tenant farmers with six digit income mostly want the same. Our relationship is win-win cooperation.
But the very bottom of society is also concern for me.
As bottom feeders, they would fight over every penny of interest with mindset of scarcity. People with scarcity mind would hate any potential competition from immigrants, other poor people, each other. They are the force for any violent revolution which mostly brings destruction to a society. One billion American seems ok number for this land. But without social safety net to pacify the bottom, revolutionary force can be enlarged to a dangerous point.
@IC
Bread, circuses and soma
The main problems of the current society are its financial system and Oligarchy, which controls most of the wealth and means to control the people and the demographic and cultural collapse of the European people both because of Cultural Marxism and Capitalist societal mechanisms.
Immigration will in the short run just lead to assimilation and easier control by the Oligarchy, on the long run it will turn the country in a similar society as the one from which the majority of the immigrants came. The rule to that is pretty simple, its a simple tipping point determined by the absolute numbers of immigrants, as well how fast they are coming in, without the generation before not having assimilated yet. If many people from one group come in, in a relatively short time, they will take over with thier way of life, even if they could be assimilated based on basic cultural and genetic traits if coming in low numbers and slowly.
My position on immigration and its evolution are very similar to that of Razib. I used to be a restrictionist arguing for limited-moderate skilled immigration, primarily on conservative/nationalist grounds (leaving aside that there is no purpose to bringing in unskilled labor into a modern welfare state).
My position changed, now I advocate near-total open borders for a couple reasons.
1) There is no case to be made for conservatism and nationalism anymore. They are dead, inert ideologies. It is a fact that more Millennials lament Season 8 of Game of Thrones than lament the 1619 Project or the Founders’ statues coming down.
The American mythos only has the power that people give it. If people don’t give it any power, then what is it even worth?
—
2) I realized that economic concerns have a generally low salience to humans. Otherwise we wouldn’t bring in ANY elderly immigrants! No, people care about family and race, that’s what matters more than marginal cost v. benefit or points systems.
IME the big struggles of the coming decade, both in America, and elsewhere, are going to heavily involve tech and the internet. It’s obvious that the free for all, wild West of the 90s and much of the 2000s is gone and never coming back, but the corporatized, smartphone, social media, user-friendly “global village” internet we’ve had since the end of the 2000s is clearly unsustainable socially and politically and is already under assault from all political directions. Zuckerberg’s dream of connecting everyone is going to go the way of those Edwardian era dreamers who believed the future was everyone speaking Esperanto.
I don’t think the end result is every country going with Chinese-style national firewalls, there are far too many people who grew up with a mostly open internet (read: pre 2015, when the trend towards strong moderation gained major traction) for that to be a possibility, but I can see a future by 2032 where the US government is much more involved in managing the internet and even providing service, and where the dominance by the current tech giants fades in favor of a more decentralized web of platforms and networks. The political party that figures out the best approach to handling tech and the internet, which both parties in the US currently have disastrous approaches toward, will be rewarded with political dominance for 15-20 years or more in the way the Democrats dominated from the 30s through most of the 60s after the New Deal.
A question of human caliber: What about john hawks weblog?
@Twinkie:
We have to have a peaceful separation (an American version of the Czech-Slovak divorce) or at least a devolution into a very loose confederation with powerful home-rule
How would this be practically achievable, given that the people holding opposite ideological views aren’t separated into clear cut geographical regions (unlike the situation in 1860)? Isn’t it primarily a city-vs-country division we see in the US today? And secondarily, a young people-vs-old people division?
Perhaps this is a conflict that will have to play itself out, like the English Civil War. Hopefully without violence and bloodshed though.
I would like to see someone write a book titled “Half a Billion Indians” with a blueprint for how this can be achieved (completely peacefully and voluntarily, of course.)
@Numinous
You are right, and this is why the peaceful split/secession isn’t achievable; we’re far too evenly spread out, both within states and between them, politically. America’s “moderate middle” has for almost 90 years now been based in the suburbs: the inability of many people under 40 to get a foothold in this geography, and of the strong socially liberal drift and international outlook of the particularly wealthy suburbs, is deeply upsetting and polarizing American politics.
Have massive waves of migration ever been stabilizing?
do you people read what i write before you comment?
i don’t want stability. our culture is perverted and sick. this includes the republican party elite.
if immigration pause can fix that, i’m for it. if opening the borders can fix that, i’m for it.
being on the Right for 20 years and being familiar with lots of ppl now, i know they mean well. but the republican party worships tax breaks while watching the culture get disgusting. they have thrown up their hands, but they lost because of priorities.
another option is have kids. i have 3. how many do all my restriction readers have? a few are fecund, but most of you have the reproductive outcomes of madison grant and lothrop stoddard.
do you people read what i write
Not anymore. How do I cancel my $2 a month, or whatever it is?
Your readers made this very same point when you first reviewed that book…
Be careful what you wish for…
How many did Laerte and Peleus had, versus Priam? How did Priam fare in those very interesting, revolutionary, and definitely not stable times?
I mean, I get razib wanting to think outside the box and explore other solutions to the cultural problem, but I’m surprised by how easily he seems to have converted.
I think he’s underestimating a few factors by a lot; namely, the power the American cultural norms have already achieved in the possible demographic sources of immigration, the amount of evil in the leftovers of other countries’ cultural norms, and how much the loss of stability would render his own efforts to have children and grandchildren more prone to fail. Change of culture is difficult to have, and when you have, it tends not to be very fun.
Not anymore. How do I cancel my $2 a month, or whatever it is?
if it’s patreon just login! otherwise it is stripe in which case it should be cancelled. I’ll double check someone didn’t get left!
Your readers made this very same point when you first reviewed that book…
mark made it way before you guys. you think i would announce this change in public first? i told him immediately. i know the republican elite better than most of you and what i know has made me very skeptical of resistance from that angle. they gave up long ago. (i didn’t know what i know now 5 years ago and was more hopeful that they actually might stock what is happening now; but they got nothing)
How many did Laerte and Peleus had, versus Priam? How did Priam fare in those very interesting, revolutionary, and definitely not stable times?
sophistry. you can pull out out a quote to suit anything. who the fuck are you and why do i care?
twinkie has children. he’s invested and i pay attention to what he says. those who care about this culture but don’t produce children to perpetuate it are the problem. if you are a monk you have an out. otherwise your words are empty. but the deeds of your progeny you have show your convictions. my children will live until 2100. none of this is abstract for me. so spare me.
you believe that somehow a virtuous elite can emerge from within to face up to the perversion? there’s no there there.
Just downloaded. Not yet read:
Published on September 13, 2020 “The Failure of Fusionism” written by Grant Wyeth
https://quillette.com/2020/09/13/the-failure-of-fusionism/
iffen no idea why you were in the system, but i manually deleted you so that should be done. sorry
What do you mean by “perversion”? Is that a reference mostly to sexual degeneracy, promotion of homo- and transsexuality etc.? Or to something else, like general lack of civic spirit? I find it difficult to understand your argument, because “perversion” is so vague (deliberately so? If you don’t want to go into details, ok, but I thought I’d at least ask).
i linked to dictionary.com above. here is the closest: “to cause to turn aside or away from what is good or true or morally right : CORRUPT”
i don’t think corrupt gets at the connotation though. so i like to say perversion. the republicans are controlled by economic oligarchs. the democrats to cultural oligarchs. when i ask ppl ‘connected’ in republican politics about rolling back the cultural stampede they’re totally hopeless and admit there’s no plan to do anything.
it’s going to be neoliberal culture war on the middle class for the foreseeable future.
If I could, I would have had children. But for personal and especially financial reasons, that was never in the cards.
I am, however, deeply and personally invested in the continuance and well being of my immediate and extended family.
I’d like to think that counts as some skin in the game, even if “don’t do what I did” is the only thing they’re able to take away from it.
fair point spike.
it’s just in the two decades I’ve run this blog a lot of ‘social conservative’ men turn out to be childless. huh?
Well, I’m assuming you want some kind of more stable culture and not just endless chaos, not that you want to stabilise at the current equilibrium.
From previous posts, was assuming that the Billion Migrants thing was to import “family values” and so a stabilized culture. If it’s actually to import destabilisation to do “accelerationism” then I guess that’s something else!
yeah, basically i want a society that values the nuclear family more than this. unfortunately, in the short-term, that’s not going to be stable. it is in a way accelerationist.
if you can convince me that restrictionism + renewed conservative movement can maintain that, i’m game.
but looking at the last few years do we think conservatives have the heart to stand athwart sodom & gommorah and shout “no!”? even my conservative Christian friends are despondent at the spreading of wokeness into their churches. (these are not liberal churches) the cultural plague is beyond escape velocity. the oligarchs are just trying to co-opt and channel, and retreating to their cosseted lives. meanwhile, public schools are pushing stupid and evil critical race theory and gender stuff at my kids (one reason we’ve mostly home-schooled).
if you are the parent of young children you see a world of abomination. but the republicans could get a tax cut passed, couldn’t they? jared got the UAE to make nice to Israel, didn’t he? i’m sure if republicans get total gov control they’ll get that obamacare repealed. #priorities
we’re living in the beginning of the poronacracy.
I read Yglesias’ earlier book advocating easing restrictions on building housing and agree with it. I think if immigration is increased without letting a lot more housing be built natalism will fail. The economically prosperous parts of the country would be more like San Francisco with expensive housing, few children and a culture that cares more about LGBTQ people than families. The urban elites are more enthusiastic about immigration than higher density zoning so this is a likely future for the US.
I don’t see why the US has to match China’s population to be secure. The US could align with India, Japan and the EU against China.
I don’t see why the US has to match China’s population to be secure. The US could align with India, Japan and the EU against China.
that’s a harder argument when there is more balance. US as a hegemony leading alliance works…but India has its own interests vis-a-vis china.
but i think this is a reasonable goal.
The urban elites are more enthusiastic about immigration than higher density zoning so this is a likely future for the US.
the only thing is in places like DC and SF the immigrants don’t live in the cores…they live in cheaper satellite cities.
the issue in CA is that incumbent owners prevent others from building. google implicitly threated to ‘out-vote’ ppl in mountain view years ago by mobilizing their employees. if you flood the city with immigrants the problem is they don’t vote initially and even after naturalization have lower incentive to vote. basically, you’d need a ‘strong-man’ to mobilize them.
it’s all a shitshow.
but we’re a perverted shitshow.
iffen no idea why you were in the system, but i manually deleted you so that should be done. sorry
Thanks. I will use the one-time donate tab in the future. I have six grandchildren.
I really don’t have an answer to that, honestly.
Short version: Guess best chance of killing off “the Successor Ideology” is probably “Defund the academy” and generally waging richly deserved economic warfare against elite aspirants (elite university graduates) to the degree that elite overproduction stops. (Defund the university, crush with student loan debt, defund urban infrastructure, use AI to push their wages down to subsistence. Make it a loser’s path while using unionization and protectionism to drive up working class wage.) Con elites have never done this, but was anyone even asking them to in 2016? Maybe if we asked them, they’d do it.
Don’t think massive migration selecting for nuclear family units is a sustainable counter. It would rapidly turn into something else, even if the Cons could get it through, and it worked, and there was no immediate backlash from their constituency, and it wasn’t plagued by immigration fraud.
Why would perverse elites put up with a discriminatory pro-family migration regime, whatever Yglesias thinks? And you would need to select for family units; selecting young single Asian men and women would get you exactly zero family values, because Asia is low TFR, small family norms, perperpetual single country these days. (Africa’s still high TFR world, but it has its own issues).
I can go into it at more length but that’s the pith.
@Razib: You probably remember that I have a family, but I know for sure that the Cultural Marxist and Capitalist framework created a huge problem for Western people in the relationships they have.
I know a lot of men which don’t got the right women for founding a family, simply because most women are leftists, career and materialistic oriented or even hedonistic, promiscuous b*****.
In the same vein, I know a lot of women which got bad luck with their guys, either they are irresponsible and don’t care about a long term relationship, or they just want no, at best 2, usually just one kid.
The problem in our world is that if just one side in a relationship doesn’t want more kids, it doesn’t happen. And with the social, economic and ideological pressures, the brainwashing and programming, so many people have a negative perspective on large families, that it became really hard to get the right partners.
And in fact, 3 children is not that much, its just what every family should have – minimum – because there are always couples which can’t get kids, people with don’t want, and those children which never make it into adulthood. So every half-way healthy and valuable family should have minimum three kids to keep the population stable, with a slight positive turn.
Its not much, 3 is the real minimum of basic reproduction – it would be only enough or more if its the average per women, which is a different thing than good couples with kids having as much – because of the losses one has to consider in every generation.
Populations with an average of 3 have in their healthy base many families with more than 3 and even 4+ kids, otherwise it doesn’t pan out.
So the perspective on 3 or 4 kids as being “a big family”, like many in Europe view it these days, is already wrong and shows the wrong attitude already.
This is all indoctrination, its a setting in which individuals have a hard time to make the right decisions and to have a fulfilled life in their social sphere with it. Its all pretty much distorted.
And I too have to agree with you, Razib, on one thing: Here in Central Europe we have people which are totally against immigration, some even against fellows from the same ethnicity coming from elsewhere, other Europeans too, and of course non-Europeans. Yet some of them have no or just one kid, some like their pets more than humans – which I find particularly disgusting.
I once met someone who got enraged because someone, accidently, stepped on a dogs tail, made him yawp – but it was an accident. And he almost hit him in the face, shouting that he doesn’t care for humans, but the “poor dog” and he would like to kill all people which don’t care enough “for poor dogs”.
I think that sums some of the generation in the West up pretty well, like a fellow muslim student, talking about the urban environment in Europe: “Many dogs, few children…”
If all the women with no kids wouldn’t have their dogs and cats or whatever, many would want children or more. Its really interesting to watch a certain type of female in particular, which uses pets as a surrogate for family and children. Sometimes even investing almost as much in their pets as they would have to in kids. Its insane.
But that’s the Western Capitalist environment, it creates the wrong incentives and offers comfortable surrogates to balance out the own deficits and degenerations. So people don’t really feel their failure that much – they still feel it, especially if getting older, but the indoctrination, the ideologies (both Cultural Marxist and Capitalist-Liberal), the economic and social incentives, the surrogates and consumption, everything adds up that a lot of people lost their roots and basics.
And unfortunately, in relationships, its enough if just one side is degenerated – like I see it so often – that both have no reproductive success. Looking at them, I know very well that they wouldn’t act that way, in any other setting, would be excellent “parent material”, in “a different world”. But in this setting, they get corrupted.
Using dogs another time for a comparison, its like if the master dressed a dog in a perverted and dangerous way, by simple stimuli from childhood. What do you expect the animal to do? It won’t act good, because its fundamental behaviours were distorted.
In some you could fix it, by changing the environment, by giving new incentives and motivation, in other cases the damage done is permanent, its irreparable and the only thing you can hope for is, that if a correction would come, they don’t proceed in “infecting” other individuals with the same sickness.
Humans are just not that far away, in some respects, from their own pets. We all have to realise that, because even with the greatest minds and reasoning, we still live in a setting, an environment created not by ourself, but by others, which influences us.
And only people with a strong rationality or personal problems with adapting to the given setting (usually both) question some of the basics served to us sufficiently. Most others, regardless of their intellectual level and theoretical knowledge, don’t. There are those experts on evolution and selection, which have themselves no kids and don’t care for their kin being replaced. They just split between their theoretical factual knowledge and practical decisions and ideological values.
Most people are just more intelligent pets for others and some might have even domesticated themselves in an erroneous and deadly way without realising.
Another example which crossed my mind are people which care very much for the genealogy of their glorious family. They talk about this ancestor and that one, what they achieved, how great they were, the fantastic history of their family etc. Everything nice, I like it, but then I talked about what they do with this valuable heritage, how they think to carry it on. Whether they have kids, whether their brother has kids or their sisters, and all too often, this highly educated, intelligent, generally interested people with their great family history tell me, without blinking with their eyes, that they don’t have kids and never planned to have some – same for their siblings.
So one could raise the question, who should care for their family history, unless they were the greatest entrepreneurs, military genius or scientific minds, after their death? And the clear answer is, nobody will, because such exceptionally great minds are rare, even in high level families. Being proud of the past, with no future…
I think that kind of reasoning sums up a lot of the, even “more conservative” Europeans. They don’t plan into the future biologically, the have no logical approach to life and what they will leave behind. Its horrible, but unfortunately, its widespread.
And unlike some others, I totally realise where it was coming from. People got indoctrinated and lived true to the wrong incentives of a distorted societal system. In this maze, created by a few, they were just highly likely to fail and all the great heritage they brought in, from their ancestors, made them, this is the most perverted aspect of all, even more likely to fail.
Because they were, for generations, programmed to succeed, being socially successful and accepted. If the incenctives and moral codes of a society are sick, they will act even more sick, at least with respect to family and children, than most anti-socials and imbeciles. That’s just the logical consequence.
Why not? There’s no rule against that. And anyway, if the nobodies here noticed the very same thing, maybe you didn’t even need your smart friend to tell you?
Deflection. You could say the same thing whenever someone points to an argument that counters your point.
Oh, I’m nobody. But the thing is, sometimes even nobodies are right, and you definitely should care for the truth they bring. If what I say is true, it doesn’t matter whether I’m not American, or childless, or not well connected, or crippled, or whatever. What’s true is true and will come to bite you and your children.
You know, in the Golden Age of Blogging, people used to know that.
So it’s the Leftist who? whom? all over; got it.
Then at least pay attention to him, because his saying basically what us untermensch are saying.
I presume you mean “pornoacracy.” We’ve had that since Miller v.California (1973) cancelled censorship of pornography. And it is still getting worse: Netflix is now running child pornography for its pedophile subscribers.
The trend towards pornoacracy has yet to run its course. Pedophilia is always the preferred crime of the elites, because it is the ultimate crime. If you can be a pedophile, you have proven your power and status. Eventually, NAMBLA will get ephebophilia legalized, and it might get actual pedophilia legalized, too. The Clintons will come out.
The leftist radicals are winning on every front. The British National Museum is even censoring Darwin’s Beagle record for colonialism. So, the only hope to defeat the left would be if enough Muslims immigrated to allow the imposition of Sharia law. I’m not sure if I would like living in an Islamic state, but it would be preferable to a BLM/Antifa horror show.
It’s not like you can guarantee what deeds your children will do when instability comes – or what deeds will be done to them.
Possibly true in a stable environment; much less likely if you accelerate society into a brick wall.
Then I advise you stop foaming and return to thinking clearly, for their sake, not mine. The very certainty you have that your children will have long lives betrays that your view of acceleration and change is very much abstract and tied to narrow assumptions.
> (he makes the fair point that our elites are so powerful they’ll turn new immigrants into perverts as well!).
Apropros of this, 2nd-gen Hispanic women are going lesbian/”queer” at high rates: https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/latino-millennials-least-likely-identify-heterosexual-survey-finds-n893701. I originally saw this point noted by @tcjfs, a very good tweeter for hard data and evidence-based conservatism. He has better sources that I do not have time to find right now.
RE: this comment on your earlier “1B Am” post:
> i appreciate the commenter who disagreed with but acknowledge i know more history than them. if someone like me is expressing these crazy views, perhaps they aren’t so crazy? that doesn’t mean i’m right, but chill with the smug attitude. I’ve forgotten more than you know.
You do have a point, but Greg Cochran and @tcjfs are two people who rank higher on my epistemic hierarchy of contemporary writers (frankly, I can’t think of anyone I’d put higher than Cochran), and they both remain strongly opposed to mass immigration.
Anyway, I’ve focused on Hispanic immigration in my discussion of America as that has been high inflow in recent history, but it wouldn’t totally surprise me if the Dems decide they want to shift things more toward Asia. You mentioned earlier some info that Indian/Chinese employees at Google don’t drink the kool-aid. My feelings about that are basically:
– They might maintain some family-focused values, but there are some serious downsides, namely…
– Indians on the whole will be more than happy to use wokeism as a bludgeon against whites in power/status-competition: “wokeism for thee but not for me.” This will only strengthen the hold of the elite, drive TFR for whites further below replacement, and worsen whites’ general position in society. I’m pretty racist and nationalistic, so I don’t particularly care about the success of the population occupying American territory at some indeterminate point in the future, rather I care about the success of 1. WASPs, 2. whites, and 3. the present-day nation, particularly people who’ve assimilated into white norms and have some attachment to Western civilization and the Western canon.
– While the Chinese will probably be less adept at the political games, the bigger issue is that they will have dual loyalties to the nation likely to replace US as global hegemon, one with a penchant for realpolitik and a belief that it can and should enforce its laws on its ethnics abroad.
It seems there are many simplifications here. Here’s some of my own: The right economic oligarchy includes petro-chemicals and much of finance; the left economic oligarchy includes the huge Internet information zone, TV & movies and the rest of finance. Cultural oligarchy is evenly split between “Happy Holidays” and “We say Merry Christmas.” Perverted elites? Pedophilia (Mr. Sykes) – is that a whiff a QAnon? Immigration: Europeans (non-Hasidic) Jews, Irish, Italians, Poles etc have learned an “American” culture, married one another and melded with the Anglo-Germanic earlier birds. Asian people have also been Americanized quite well so this isn’t strictly a color impediment. A billion Americans is not happening. The American “century” lasted from 1945-65 (1966 was the end of the last decade in which a majority of people improved their standard of living over the previous decade). We seem to be done. No Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison or Monroe in the wings. We have two old, non-genius, men battling for the Presidency and one of them is slightly mad. Another symptom? All this navel-gazing which I myself am contributing too 🙂
the solutions can be practical ones: healthcare, unions/housing/child care. frankly, it’s conservatives that are blocking these things and have been for 40 years.
I live right near Canada and somehow there’s a magic line called “the border” that separates a healthy society from a decadent one. it’s not that hard to figure out
Slaves growing cotton never made sense that far north. You can trace much of the difference to that.
@Robert: I agree with your view on socio-economics, but none of the more social states of the European sphere is healthy, especially not Canada.
@Roger: Definitely not the main issue here, its a different religious-ideological fundament which is the primary problem. Canada wasn’t as much influenced by mad sects and didn’t lost as much of the contact to Europe. So even though Canada stems from the source region which spread most of the problematic content throughout the world, which is England, its still better in many ways because what went to the United States was, at some times, even too much for the English.
re: greg, i’ve talked to him on average every 2 weeks on the phone since 2005 (less often since i had 3 kids!). he’s more optimistic than me. that being said, when we first talked in 2005 he was also frank he has deep roots in this country and is invested in a way i’m not (even my wife’s family, late 19th century immigrants mostly, are shallow compared to greg).
you guys like to talk about without hope immigration is. i know those numbers. I’ve been in this ‘game’ since 2002.
but who is the alternative? the older i get and the more i get to know the ‘conservative movement’ the less optimistic i am. a body without a head is useless. there’s no head there.
Here’s some of my own: The right economic oligarchy includes petro-chemicals and much of finance
finance are mostly centrist from what i have seen/known.
The mental problem of American conservatives is that they are not happy with a strong state and rather prefer to rely on individual responsibility and independence, coming from the time the sects settled on their own, and were afraid of the state just suppressing their way of life.
Now some people might ask, “well, I just want it like that, I don’t like a strong state” and the correct answer is: In a modern world, a strong state is a necessity and the question is only for whom it works and who controls it. If you don’t care, and prefer to bust your head in the sand, the big money and other social groups will take over, will care for the state, will use it against you.
That’s what happened in the United states. A large, overwhelmingly silent, conservative European population just looked the other way, didn’t care, because they didn’t like “a big state” anyway, just did “their thing”, until everything was changed against their odds and now its too late.
Others are in charge and use their power against them, and they still don’t realise how important it is to have a strong state ON YOUR SIDE, caring for your people and their interests.
But they didn’t learn their lesson and still think Libertarian strategies might work – irreparable? I hope not, but the American population has a lot to learn and the current crisis might be the best instructor, because the transfer of wealth & power wasn’t ever that big and happening that fast, with so much risk for the whole system to implode.
Obs, yeah Europe and Canada are real hell holeholes. Lol. As I’ve said before…we have no chance. Smart people believing stupid things….
@Obs, tangent and this is a bit “sci fi” but it would be interesting to see by the end of the century (though none of us will live to see it) how the “declining population size, growing tech” countries – like probably Japan if they maintain their trajectory – will do compared to more powerfully natalist and “big tribe” cultures. So long as they maintain their borders, small and shrinking populations may not matter, as machine intelligence and high capital ratios from a high productivity population, and growing land:population ratio bite. How many million Japanese do they really need?
To be honest, if that happens, the advance of other forms of intelligence and generally of other forms of life over humans seems like a good thing. Why prefer people from other cultures, or elements within the my culture itself, that show great hostility to my parent culture and its history, over animal forms of life or machine intelligences which have shown none of that? A civilization of uplifted dogs would be easier to respect than one constituted by Woke twitter (or “The Swarm”, to quote Neal Stephenson’s seveneves)…
I guess think the argument that Razib seems to be making, that human flourishing and wellbeing is greater as part of the nuclear family (and goes off course without that), seems a bit more easy for me to grasp, and one I would agree with although I haven’t started a family. Rather than the idea that inherently it’s rational for us to want to replicate our genetic sequences. I’m not really sure I care at all if anything at all close to my genetic sequences even exists in hundred years, provided some sort of more scientifically advanced culture that I can respect is about. (Maybe I think my sequences are above average for humans, maybe not; but it doesn’t really matter.)
On people who care more for pets and I guess animals in general than people… Regarding whether specifically pet ownership tends to have a negative relationship with fertility, I thought that was an interesting idea, so I found a data source of pet ownership by country, from a market research consultancy firm (GFK Global), then correlated that with Wikipedia’s TFR: https://imgur.com/a/08JJmiR
It seems that cultures with high pet ownership tend to have more children. Pets, on limited evidence, good for families.
That makes perfect sense to me, as I’d expect that pet ownership would correlate with normal family life and general tendencies to nurture children. That’s certainly what I’ve found in life; the women I’ve met in my life who care for little doggies and cats, tend to be warm and nurturing and aspire to have children as early as possible, and have pets seems to confirm their tendency to care for children, while the ones who don’t tend be a little more oriented towards careers and consumer culture. Mild tendency of course. Albeit there may be some range restriction here (Developed East Asia seems anti-pet and low TFR; Latins pro-pet and high TFR… though incidentally Latins tended to have high TFR for education and Asians low TFR for education when I looked into that).
I don’t really share Greg’s overall optimism, but I think my policy prescriptions are mostly just a more risk-averse, less ambitious version of his.
> the older i get and the more i get to know the ‘conservative movement’ the less optimistic i am. a body without a head is useless. there’s no head there.
This is an issue. I guess my feeling is that, even if there’s no head in sight for the right, the left’s head is rotting and may vanish within a generation or two (speaking bluntly: left-wing Jews have been intermarrying heavily for a while now, and that’s going to dilute competence of a substantial portion of the left elite). Whether that balancing of the odds runs to completion probably depends on the extent of high-skilled immigration, how involved in politics those immigrants get, and what horse they choose to back.
here’s another weak point: my xtian conservative friends tell me that the leadership of these groups are shockingly wobbly. one conservative catholic working in a conservative catholic pub had to go through diversity training recently.
someone on an earlier thread said “why don’t you move to brazil.” my rxn: “well, the did elect bolsanaro…”
@ragak: “left’s head is rotting and may vanish within a generation or two (speaking bluntly: left-wing Jews have been intermarrying heavily for a while now, and that’s going to dilute competence of a substantial portion of the left elite).”
You have a wrong impression on the issue. The main problem is the Oligarchy and within that Oligarchy, there are many different groups of people, but most are Protestant or Jewish, that’s a given. The problem with the latter is that they are afraid of any sort of criticism which points to a problematic behaviour of people from their own group. Even if they don’t agree with what’s happening, they won’t support hard criticism, because they are afraid it will fire back on all of them. So they keep their mouth shut and now you have leftists which support and defend Neoliberal chimaeras like George Soros and attack everybody for “Antisemitism”, even if he just repeats, basically, the same criticism the left had articulated just 10-15 years ago. Its absurd.
The Left is braindead already, but not because of “mixture of Jews”, which doesn’t make its intellectual capacity weaker, instead it would widen its base only, in theory, but because they sold themselves to the Plutocracy and allied up with big money & big corporations to such a degree, that they are completely corrupted and dependent by now. You can count the “honest” and “straighforward” people with a “classical Left” outlook, there are not that many left anywhere!
The whole “woke thing” is, in fact, soft & control politics, its like a control mechanism for the white majority on the one hand, and a distraction for the leftist tendencies in society as a whole on the other, as long as the Plutocracy keeps it under control, which it does, sufficiently. At the same time absolutely horrendeous things happen, with the Democratic party, with many “left wingers” on board, anti-social and destructive actions, socio-economically, considering the freedom and well-being of all citizens, of all races, but where is the left there? They are silent. And that’s no coincidence.
Just look at what happened to “Occupy Wallstreet”, they were destroyed by the same agents in politics and the media which now support “Black Lives Matters”, “Me Too” and the rest of the identity politics, the Cultural Marxist campaigns.
They are figures on the chessboard, nothing more, whether they realise it themselves or not.
@Matt: I want my kin and people to survive, but I care even more humanity as a whole. Yet one has to evaluate what it means if there is a major shift in genes and memes, and what that means for the future not just of my people, but of all of mankind. And I don’t see anything positive for the future of our species coming from Europeans disappear, even on the contrary.
Humans have and could play many roles. They can improve themselves, they can create artificial intelligence, they can do both. Which culture and people is more likely to do it right? Definitely no superstitious and religious dogmatic people, I give you that and intelligence doesn’t hurt, as does social discipline and perfectionism, working for the right goal.
Concerning Japan: Japan had only one chance, to gain control over East Asia as the dominant, if not global, so at least regional superpower. They tried it in the WW2, and they lost. Now they are the appendage and vassal of the USA, for the time being and get more and more behind their “mother country”, which is China. They have a history of their own, of their deviation from China, which goes back many centuries. Japan has a lot of potential, in theory, but their potential is per individual not X time greater than that of China. The number of people matter, probably less and less for the army, even there too, consumers, on the long run debatable too, but the pool you can work with is just important, as is the size of your country and its natural resources. China has a lot of weaknesses, but Japan has more.
Their only chance was to modernise faster and being ahead, taking over in East Asia. That was prevented and if China prospers, sooner or later, it will swallow the Japanese. And the Japanese small in numbers will largely disappear in a Chinese sea. That’s just the way it might go. The Japanese will add to the East Asian culture and the world some gadgets and productivity, but at their current state, not much more than that. That’s the Japanese legacy after more than a millenium of independent development from the Chinese sphere.
They are completely dependent from what greater powers decide, currently China and the USA.
Look at the Japanese recession, that was a takeover of the Western Plutocracy, they were sold out financially, it was a massacre. Now they being, even financially, a vassal, which they were not, for decades after the WW2. I don’t see any optimism justified for Japan. And if the foreign powers decide they have to allow immigration, eventually, they can “catch up” in a short period of time. There are various examples worldwide, in which “the international powers” (read primarily the USA) demanded more immigration and recommended it for “prosperity and stability in an aging society” and within one generation they got flooded.
Japan is more of a sovereign state than Germany, but still its so completely dependent, that it can be blackmailed whenever the Western Oligarchy wants it. They could rebel, they have the means to, which most Western states have not (any more), but it would be hard, especially after the financial sellout from the 1990-2000s.
If anybody wants to know more about it and the role the Japanese Central Bank played in selling its people to the Plutocracy:
Richard A. Werner is THE expert on financial matters. Better listen to him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Werner
They just did what Western states and Central banks did decades ago, but how they did it, how ruthless the process was is still astonishing.
Of the major states only China and Russia is not completely under control of the Anglo-American financial system and this is a major factor for everything which will come up – probably starting this year, because the “current crisis” is the big catalysator. Everything else is just a sideshow and the “woke movement” is just there to keep people busy and under control. The Left is braindead and just a zombie of the Plutocracy.
I’m pessimistic about the future of this country. I buy into Peter
Turchin’s view that political disasters usually follow when the elites
become polarized, which hey sure are today.
I don’t like Razib’s term “perverted” which has
sexual implications and was not at all specific.
I’m pessimistic about the future of this country.
Mass immigration would indeed change our political culture, but
likely further immiserate the poor, and make health care reform
impossible. I don’t see any reason to hope the change would be an
improvement.
And in the short run it seems likely that the upcoming election
will be decided by violence. As Mao said “power comes from the
barrel of a gun”, and I fear that we are about to see an explicit
example.