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You will be assimilated!

Michael Lind has a piece in Tablet, The Revenge of the Yankees: How Social Gospel became Social Justice. As a trained American historian, Lind is always a good read and generally makes erudite and cogent arguments, whether you believe him or not. To me, the piece struck me as trying a bit too hard to fit facts into a thesis…but it foregrounds dynamics of American history that many modern Americans, being totally ignorant, are unaware of.

Knowing people in the D.C. nonprofit world, I recall being told by an old-line WASP that this is where all the WASPs went. So Lind is not seeing something that is not there when he says that WASPs retained control in the “Deep State” and nonprofits, while the white ethnic, Southern, and black, coalition dominated politics and culture between the 1930s and 1960s. The past few generations has seen a realignment of that configuration, but that is not the only thing that happened.

About 15 years ago I read many books on the history of American Catholicism, and the book that stays with me the longest is Catholicism and American Freedom: A History. In it, the author highlights the strong strand of intellectual anti-Catholicism that existed in the 19th century, and the victory of American Anglo-Protestant culture over the Catholic attempt to remain apart and distinct (one of the intra-Catholic stories is the erosion of German-language instruction due to the pressure put by the Irish dominated hierarchy).

One of the threads of Catholicism and American Freedom is the collapse of the intellectual alliance between Jews and Roman Catholics after World War II. Basically, American Jews who secularized and assimilated switched sides in the 1960s and aligned with secular post-Protestants in fighting the attempts of Roman Catholic thinkers to maintain a level of social conservatism informed by religious values on the Center-Left. Earlier, due to the nativism of early 20th-century Protestant progressives, Jews and Catholics had fit together as “white ethnics,” albeit with some disagreements (Jews never supported Roman Catholic attempts to gain support for parochial schools because they, on the whole, took to public education).

What does this have to do with Lind’s piece? Let’s grant his contention that modern-day social justice activism has its roots contingently in WASP Protestant culture, and particularly Yankee culture. Anyone who reads Curtis Yarvin or David Hackett Fisher will see the cultural genealogy here. But secular Jews, who are overrepresented in the Ivy League and institutions more broadly, have assimilated perfectly as well. And not just them. Indian Americans who grew up in this country in the last quarter of the 20th century are extremely well assimilated too.

One of the geniuses of modern social justice ideology is that it’s highly portable and deployable by people who are educated in the WEIRD way.

35 thoughts on “You will be assimilated!

  1. Some silly aspects to the article:

    “Fundamentally it represented the partial overthrow of Yankee Protestant hegemony in American society by a coalition of outsiders, chiefly provincial Southern and Western whites and European-American immigrants in the North, many of them Catholic.

    The Democratic Party that dominated the United States between the 1930s and the 1980s had a few Yankee progressive members, but it was essentially the old Jacksonian alliance of white Southerners and non-British “white ethnics” in the North.”

    There’s also the question of quality vs quantity, as the “few Yankee progressive[s]” included people at the very top, like FDR……

    “The New Deal era also witnessed the downfall of the post-Civil War New England/Midwestern hegemony in American literature and culture. Following World War I, advanced intellectuals ridiculed the Puritan tradition in New England and its offshoot, the upper Midwest, home of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.”

    Of course, many of those “advanced intellectuals” who were doing the ridiculing were themselves the post-Puritan descendants of the old New England elite (EE Cummings, etc)….

    “The postwar literary world underwent an ethnic succession, in which many white Southerners—including Willie Morris, Tom Wolfe, William Styron, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote—”

    Dunno about counting Gore Vidal as a Southerner, at least not when compared to people like Wolfe, Styron, and Capote. His mother had Southern connections (she was descended from Southern plantation owners), but Vidal’s father was from South Dakota. And Vidal attended that ultimate bastion of New England WASPdom, Phillips Exeter Academy.

    “together with Jewish writers and intellectuals like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and many others shouldered aside Northeastern WASP professors and novelists and purged the American literary canon of New Englanders like Longfellow, Whittier, and the Fireside Poets.

    …..Meanwhile, while lesser fry like the Fireside Poets were being demoted, the canonicity of Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson was reaffirmed…..And one could also add half-New Englanders like Melville (Melville was the grandson of Boston Revolutionary Patriot Thomas Melvill) and Whitman (Whitman was descended from New England Quakers who settled on Long Island)……and, of course, the central figure in Anglophone letters between 1925 and 1950 was TS Eliot (Missouri-born but very much a New Englander in terms of culture and ancestry)

    “This mentality with its bizarre synthesis of science-inspired technocracy and millenniarian zeal, was shared by many turn-of-the-century Progressives, including Woodrow Wilson, a Southern-born Northern transplant.”

    Wait, you’re counting Gore Vidal as a Southerner but not Woodrow Wilson?

    “The goal of the new woke national establishment, the successor to the old Northeastern mainline Protestant establishment that was temporarily displaced by the neo-Jacksonian New Deal Democratic coalition, is to stigmatize, humiliate and disempower recalcitrant Southern, Catholic, and Jewish whites, along with members of ethnic and racial minorities who refuse to be assimilated into the new national orthodoxy disseminated from New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and the prestigious private universities of New England. Properly understood, the Great Awokening is the revenge of the Yankees.”

    Uh, yeah. I mean, that works, right? You guys see what I’m doing? Elite Jews are just brainwashed puppets of their evil WASP masters…..

  2. If somebody wants to understand how big alliances and their shifts work, just look at Europe in the 19th century up to the 1st World War, which kind of cemented some blocks. There too various ethnicities worked together or against each other, depending on the goals they had at the time in question. Like Italians were allies with Prussians against Austrians, then with Austrians and Germans against France…

    If you have such ethnic and religious groups within a country, it always skews politics and makes rational decisions and a sound economic and social policy in particular much more difficult than in a homogeneous ethnoreligious country. That is because the ethnic and religious interests will always interfere with what would be good for the state and the people as a whole.
    This is therefore something which primarily hardcore Libertarian Capitalists can think of being something good, but if they think straight, not even those.

    What happened in the last 150 years or so in the USA is a shift of alliances on various levels, one of the more important ones was the “minority” alliance of Catholics, Jews and Afro-Americans against the old WASP dominance. This was an ideological-cultural alliance primarily, for all three to get a bigger part of the cake. What the Jewish side achieved was their full scale acceptance in the white club, so they no longer needed the others as desperately as before.

    This resulted not in a complete discharge of the old minority alliance in the socio-cultural sphere of soft politics, but a major shift towards the old WASP-Yankee elite in the economic & power sphere of hard politics. I’m talking about the very top elite of both sides, uniting and taking the majority of their people with them on the train.

    That’s when Catholics were completely left behind, as a weakened left-liberal amorphous mass which slowly disintegrates. Because the Catholic elite tried to hop on the very same train of Cultural Marxist sociopolitics and Neoliberal private-corporate state building based on erroneous ultra-Capitalist teachings, but that doesn’t work out, because its essentially an anti-catholic mentality.

    Calvinist Protestants can hop on, and still be Protestants, Jews can hop on, and still be Jews. But Catholics can’t. If they do, if they try to, they lose their identity and dissolve into something misshapen which is no longer able to survive.

    Similarly, Islam and Lutheran Protestatnism can’t hop on that train, they too have just the choice between either trying to adapt and dissolve in the process, or make a stand.

    That doesn’t mean that people of Catholic, Lutheran or Muslim can’t be part of the Oligarchy or helping it out, obviously they do, but only if they leave their ethnic or religious identity behind. That’s why, among people which take their religion and ethnic identity really serious, that kind of ideology and stratification causes headache, if they are not part of the original propagators.

    Therefore believing Catholics were, in this alliance, just abused, and when the original objects were achieved, they were left behind. Similarly, the “black movement”, which now being pushed by the Cultural Marxists. You might say they are among the ideological winners, but in my opinion they are not. Because from the point of view of their ethnic interest, they achieved nothing, absolutely nothing and are in fact worse of, as an ethnic group in the USA, than they were some decades ago.

    That’s not because of “white privileges”, but because they too lost cohesion and identity where it matters a lot. This resulted in even more violence and disputes among themselves, and an ever growing competition with new immigrants and them struggling with the changing, ever more asocial new economy. And what did they get from the WASP and Jewish elite for their favour? How did they invest big time in their community and help them build their own identity and settlements on a higher level, with better education and health care etc.?
    The politicians just redirected tax and state money to some projects, while punching the white middle class in the face. That’s what they did, but nothing more, because they don’t want a strong black community, they want to have control over black individuals, and that’s a difference, a major difference.

    That’s why the white middle class, which is not part of the current Leftist-Big Money alliance anyway, being made the scapegoat. Its cheap and it may hide, for the moment, that the black movement was abused as well, just like the Catholics. The black upper class being largely corrupted and bought in, just like the white leaders below the Oligarchy and their circles were for generations, and they just have to keep them happy until other immigrant groups have dwarfed them in numbers.

    Behind this is the fact that in American politics the importance of religion, ethnicity, group identity and ideology was constantly shrinking, the importance of sheer power and profits, the naked hard base of American stratification, in favour of the Plutocracy with different ethnic backgrounds, united in their social power and status, constantly growing. Over the top Individualist ideology is just helpful in achieving this and keeping it up, so that people no longer care for others or group interests.

    The old minority alliance was just useful for allowing the new Oligarchy to emerge and leave old group orientation and especially considerations behind. Now its naked, cold, blunt power & profits above everything else and either you belong to the 1000 families or not.

    There are still alliances and group interests, but most of the time, if its about the real policy, hard politics, they being only manipulated and abused.
    That’s one of the reasons why Trump was such a shock, because in his clumsy way, he was a guy on top of the political hierarchy which took some group and state interests seriously, rather than just playing a role for the 1000 families and behaving like they want their coded politicians to behave.

    If anything, the brutal ongoing political discourse should have shown to more people what real group interest politics is about, either for an ethnic or religious group, or the state as a whole and the majority of its people. Either wasn’t done in the last decades, but was largely ignored and only promised by corrupted politicians, but never delivered to the people, because most politicians in the USA might make an act for the masses, but being instructed by the Oligarchy as what the play really is about.

  3. “the piece struck me as trying a bit too hard to fit the facts into a thesis”

    Agree. While I appreciate the ancient dynamics of the Albion’s seed variety, I’m a bit more skeptical of the personification of large groups into plotting creatures.

    I think where I have the most problem is the actual lineage of wokism. Maybe .05% of it has its roots in Yankee Protestant post-millennial optimism, the rest is “I was literally born yesterday”, shameful ignorance, haughty self-righteousness and virtue broadcasting.

    The real origin of wokism isn’t some Yankee vestige, it is the moral insecurity of the West. That’s why there is chaos in the HR department. Nothing is wrong, and everything is wrong! And we shudder because being wrong means a blinking neon arrow pointed at us that says, “bad person right here”, in addition to being fired by a similarly confused HR person (followed by actual Hell).

    Nothing to do with the poor Yanks. They’re eating gluten-free flapjacks.

  4. “Fundamentally it represented the partial overthrow of Yankee Protestant hegemony in American society by a coalition of outsiders, chiefly provincial Southern and Western whites and European-American immigrants in the North, many of them Catholic.

    The Democratic Party that dominated the United States between the 1930s and the 1980s had a few Yankee progressive members, but it was essentially the old Jacksonian alliance of white Southerners and non-British “white ethnics” in the North.”

    Some truth to this, but important distinctions are being lost. White Southerners were marginalized after the Civil War, but the South was a foundational part of the USA (e.g., Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were all Southerners). Southern writers (Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Welty, Robert Penn Warren)exploded into prominence during the interwar period, but they could look back to earlier Southern figures like Poe and Mark Twain.

    Catholics and Jews occupied an entirely different position in the national landscape. Unlike WASP Southerners, they were not foundational. Indeed, unlike WASP Southerners, they had to actively assert their claim (in the face of significant Nativist opposition) that they were “real” Americans.

    And, unlike WASP Southerners, they could not look back to distinguished literary precursors. Prior to Eugene O’Neill (who emerged as America’s first world-class playwright in the 1910s), significant Catholic writers are quite thin on the ground. Off-hand, the only one who comes to mind is Orestes Brownson, and he was a WASP New Englander who converted. Jews are in a similar position, with significant figures only emerging in the 1920s (Nathaniel West, Ben Hecht, etc)

  5. George Fox was stickin’ it to the man 300 years before any of this “Yankee revenge” business!

  6. “The woke left not only demanded the removal of statues of Confederate traitors—a perfectly reasonable demand—but also targeted Columbus, the icon of Italian Americans, and Spanish Catholic saints and conquistadors.”

    The Woke, in their Maoist frenzy, also targeted statues of Union Civil War heroes like Hans Christian Heg and Ulysses S Grant. Theodore Roosevelt’s Natural History Museum statue was vandalized, and, thanks to Woke agitation, is going to be moved.

    As for monuments and statues of “Spanish Catholic saints and conquistadors,” perhaps Mr Lind is unaware of the fact that many Latin American radicals despise Europe, with many preferring to think of themselves as the sons and daughters of the native Amerinds. Monuments to Cortes have not fared well in Mexico:

    “In 1981, President Lopez Portillo tried to bring Cortés to public recognition. First, he made public a copy of the bust of Cortés made by Manuel Tolsá in the Hospital de Jesús Nazareno with an official ceremony, but soon a nationalist group tried to destroy it, so it had to be taken out of the public.”

    “Later, another monument, known as “Monumento al Mestizaje” by Julián Martínez y M. Maldonado (1982) was commissioned by Mexican president José López Portillo to be put in the “Zócalo” (Main square) of Coyoacan, near the place of his country house, but it had to be removed to a little known park, the Jardín Xicoténcatl, Barrio de San Diego Churubusco, to quell protests.”

  7. I would er… like to see how the Woke rank and file would respond to suggestions they’re all merely following in a tradition of WASP Yankees and acting as their footsoldiers and dupes. Not actually any traditions of activism originated by or really from their identity groups (gender/sexuality/ethnic/etc.)….

    “Erasure”, “Appropriation”, “Centering”! 😉 I can head the tweets already.

    I get why some people *want* this line of argument to be a thing! It’s all a lot *easier* if it’s just a proxy war waged against normies who get on just fine as is, by A Group It Is Very Socially Acceptable To Deride. Opposing Woke then becomes really the socially acceptable Punching Up and *not* the socially unacceptable Punching Down… But what’s comforting here (Cope, to use the parlance of our times), is just not really plausible.

    This line of theory is repackaging a conflict with movements with an genuine origin from socially marginal or subordinated groups, and the rest of society, as really a conflict between a privileged Establishment and the People (including migrants and other “upstarts”). Seems just pure theatre for people who are for whatever deeply uncomfortable with being in conflict where they are not on the side of the marginal and subordinated. (Get over it guys! It’s quite OK to Punch Down if what’s Down really is crazy and has big ambitions!).

  8. BB:I think where I have the most problem is the actual lineage of wokism. Maybe .05% of it has its roots in Yankee Protestant post-millennial optimism

    +1. How much of this is really *from* the phenomenon Lind describes? Woke advances for many reasons, and has many ideological parents and supporters (mainly college grads but broad coalition within that!), and a simplistic explanation that pins it on a single, very small scapegoat social minority will not work. If I had to narrow it down to a couple big, broad reasons though, with others less important (off the top of my head), besides BB’s suspicion of a newfound moral insecurity:

    1) Woke is Cope. Many “new” social groups have entered the academy in recent decades (with demographic and social change), have been encouraged to be conscious of their identities (partly as this advantages political parties to lock them in as clients), and are thinking about the general class questions of which “Yali’s Question” is a specific instance (“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”). In place of a discouraging reality without answers and action, certainly no comforting answers and clear action, Woke gives an opportunity to LARP as heroic vanguard revolutionaries (A lumpen version of “Radical Chic”).

    And it provides immediate, material justification for jobs and speaking appointments. (An escape to Tuchin’s “Elite Overproduction”.)

    2) Academic non-refutation of the feeder ideology. The academy just does not exert significant efforts to refute Woke’s feeder ideologies, appearing to feel that there is something wrong about pushing back too hard (with too much ridicule) against the feeders of socialism, World Systems Theory, post-colonialist literature, Critical Theory and post-modernism in philosophy. (Probably because pushing back is “Punching Down”).

    The effect is that these ideas tend to spread on campus more (because they’re personally satisfying to many on campus, and many others don’t push back), the sympathy deepens into open academic activism, and then it crosses over to wider society….

    There’s a fertile economic environment too, for all of this (Turchin’s “immiseration”, though I suspect this is only relative and not absolute).

    Yes, social justice terminology does also provide a preening opportunity for “virtue signalling”, and clique socialisation, and class stratification among a certain strain of moralistic High Church Protestant family lineage. But it provides this for a vast number of people from a diversity of backgrounds backgrounds well outside that tiny social niche, and in any case this is really quite a surface aspect (I’d guess), not the real driving force.

    The Yarvin Thesis (and its variants), drawing this back to lineally to specific strains of Protestantism, simply seems to provide a socially acceptable derided group to scapegoat. That works for Yarvin, who of course doesn’t care at all about whether it’s true, because he basically ultimately just wants to use it to argue for some utopian corporate fascist oligarchy, where the natural oligarchs are implied to be the “efficient and competent”(tm) founders of high share value Silicon Valley companies like himself. (Yarvin wants to argue that the eternal enemy within, descendent of a Fifth Column secret society of Protestant dissenters all the way back to the Glorious Revolution, will always undermine democratic societies. Hence corporate, open oligarchy is the only option.Since he’s not actually a member of the group that would face the firing squad, he doesn’t care too much about if it’s true, or any consequences in terms of violent repression.). But if you actually care about liberal and democratic societies, it’s both questionable and not very useful!

    (In the same manner as it seems socially acceptable to deride high murder rates among some subgroup in the US and attribute it to a genealogy from a Southern White Culture of Honor, despite numerous problems like these rates not really seeming actually very much higher than Southern White Americans in the rest of the country, maybe a bit, but not a lot. “Albion’s Seed” theories are socially riskless in that all the groups involved are coded as socially privileged, and they play well in that White Americans are enormously divided by class and region and will bite on anything that will can draw this division back into a longer narrative, hence they’ll be advanced. But I doubt they generally actually have much explanatory value, because the US is just too much of an open, broadly mixing society among the large, assimilated majority, among other things.)

    Perhaps be wary of intellectual history that seeks to explain some modern day political phenomenon through a “lineage”. To actually point to something more interesting than my logorrhea, contrast this piece by Aris Roussinos (producer of many intriguing pieces of intellectual history with something original to say, and seeming man of the left) touching on similar topics – https://unherd.com/2020/11/the-tories-against-democracy/ – to the “lineage” arguments. Emphasizes parallels and trends and forces, not secret lineages that purport to offer a satisfying explanation of why things are as they are.

  9. Joseph Bottum says something related in An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America. I thought it was an interesting book–and a pretty quick read. And since it’s from 2014, it doesn’t try to “explain” woke.

  10. Matt dropping major truth bombs as usual. Richard Hanania has made the same case regarding the fear on the part of conservatives/anti-Wokesters when it comes to aggressively trying to debate or discredit core Woke principles or theories, exactly because they’re afraid of the inevitable caterwauling charges of racism/white supremacy making them totally anathema in today’s general cultural and intellectual environment. So you get situations like this, with otherwise intelligent thinkers like Michael Lind ret-conning the history of the ideology to make it more socially acceptable for him to publically castigate. Maybe he also feels like he needs to contrive this back-story to make it acceptable to criticize it even to himself – Hanania has also made this point about conservatives having internalized many core Woke assumptions and trying to pander to their talking points instead of actually challenging them.

    I haven’t read too deeply into the history of Critical Race Theory, but going off the list of important foundational CRT scholars on the ideology’s Wikipedia page, I don’t see any white Yankee WASPs – Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, Kimberly Crenshaw, Camara Phyllis Jones are black, Richard Delgado is Hispanic, and Mari Matsuda is Asian. Now it’s true that all of them had exposure to the elite university system either as students or as professional academics (lots of Harvard law degrees in that clique, and some Ivy-adjacent backgrounds like Wellesley, Stanford, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, etc). Aside from Bell and Crenshaw, I hadn’t heard of any of the others before, so I’m not sure if there are some other key foundational thinkers out there that I’m missing.

    I think the most you can do in ret-conning CRT back to White-Anglo late 19th/early 20th century Social Gospel ideology is that all the founding figures of the movement from the 1970s-1980s were educated or worked in elite academia, which in America is a product of elite Yankee high society, with that Social Gospel ethos always being a strong undercurrent in the spirit of American higher education. So I can see how elite academia was obviously important in being an incubator for CRT, because it provided a safe space for the first theorists to do their thing more or less unmolested. But I think just by looking at the backgrounds of the first theorists, the ideology itself is just an outgrowth of post-Civil Rights era, 1970s leftist radical activism, with the corresponding development of related identitarian intellectualisms like Black Studies, Chicano Studies, Second-Wave Feminism/Women’s Studies, Asian Studies, etc. all being of a piece with the birth of CRT.

  11. @syonredux

    The Catholic Church itself isn’t particularly well-loved by Latin American radicals (liberation theology aside), because in addition to the usual left-wing stances about it being incorrigibly conservative, anti-human-liberation, backward, historically allied with royal and aristocratic power and clerical privilege that are expressed in places like Spain, France, or Italy, it is also seen as a link to colonization by Europeans and disruption of the “pure” way of life of native peoples. When that cathedral was burned down over the riots in Chile, many of the radicals cheering it on explicitly celebrated it as a rejection of European cultural heritage expressed via art, architecture, saints, etc.

  12. “parallels and trends and forces, not secret lineages that purport to offer a satisfying explanation of why things are as they are.”

    Let’s consider the matter as a case of Evolution, in this case at timescales that recognize the intra-generational rapidity of Cultural Evolution. (Intra-generational as in even within oneself–I can barely recall the emotional tones and commonplace strategems involved when people such as myself, a mere 25 years ago, used to communicate over distances and/or navigate to novel locations: phone booths utilizing dimes as payment, road maps–how primitive/exotic was my former self of 25 years ago) much less track shifting cultural thought/emotional complexes that have been completely reworked by the 24 hour propaganda feeds.

    Now multiply that times massive pulses of immigration, and you have a society that is not so much “propelled” by lineages as much as it at every moment re-expresses via tangled morphs of, let’s analogize to polygenic expression.

    E.g. Tejanos for Trump.

    Meme-tribes, not “ethnicities”.

    Ask Razib: one night, just this past week, he went to bed Brown and woke up White.

    We all Beltalowda now, bruhs…

  13. I have commented before and will not repeat the arc of Yankee religiosity from the hard core Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards (Arron Burr’s grandfather who was actually the trailing edge of theological orthodoxy) through Unitarianism to Transcendentalism the Progressivism to the end stage of Marxism, of which Wokeism is a version for the terminally uneducated.

    God is gone, but the Yankees are still arrogant, assured of their own virtue and election, and equally convinced of your depravity and damnation.

    Some things never change.

    BTW: I have read other things by Lind, that I rather liked:
    “Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite: To heal our deep social and political divisions, urban professionals must start sharing power with the working class.”
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/saving-democracy-from-the-managerial-elite-11578672945

  14. But secular Jews, who are overrepresented in the Ivy League and institutions more broadly, have assimilated perfectly as well.

    Assimilated or co-opted/infiltrated and re-molded the older institutions? Are secular Jews known for the noblesse oblige of the yesteryear WASPs? Did they volunteer in droves and lead lesser men from the front with pistols in their hands, facing down enemy machineguns?

    And not just them. Indian Americans who grew up in this country in the last quarter of the 20th century are extremely well assimilated too.

    Since Indian immigrants have the lowest assimilation index among major Asian immigrant groups in this country (per the Manhattan Institute studies) and have low rates of intermarriage, military service, etc., this strikes me as a clear case of very rapid elite assimilation… “I for one welcome our new overlords” jokes and all that.

  15. The Neo-Christian spirit as it came up from various American and English sects or religious movements made it most certainly easier for Marxists to enter the discourse. Because with its classic tale of “suppressed” people “in need for help”, and “bad perpetrators”, it could directly connect.

    However, that was rather the entry point, the weakness, the immunological deficiency. Its not the source!

    Its like with people which don’t get the difference between Social Movements, Socialist Movements, Marxism and Communism of the classic sort (like in the Soviet Union).

    What’s the difference in practise?

    There was never ever a need for “female emancipation” to end up in Feminism 3.0, which tries to deconstruct all kind of sexual and gender identities in favour of gender mainstreaming.

    There was never a need for that kind of hateful anti-white resentment and the destruction of white communities and demography, just to emancipate Afro-Americans from first slavery, then the suppression by racial laws.

    One thing is not even dirctly conntected to the other, and like I wrote above, if you would have asked what most black activists would have wanted in the 1950’s, and showed them their communities as they are right now, the unsatisfying state of the Afro-American villages, towns, districts and families, the majority would have wished a different future for their people, I guarantee you that.

    Yet the damage done to American, Western culture as a whole, and the European derived one in particuluar, in the name of this kind of “liberation” is immense, and in no relation to the “achievements”.

    Why is that so? Because like housing and settlement projects, the main objective of “racial politics” in the USA was not to improve the situation of Afro-Americans. The main objective of “Feminist” activism was not to simply improve the situation of the average woman and so on.

    These were just political agendas, put into a bigger picture and instrumentalised, for a completely different purpose, for transforming society as a whole.

    And we have those on top which told you so, both from the Plutocracy and the ideological-academic sphere. Like Marcuse from the Frankfurt School, highly important for the spread of Cultural Marxism in US academia, saying that “white middle class failed” and now “we try it with sexual and racial minorities and women, which will bring forward the revolution”. That’s what he said, at least analogously. So did Erich Fromm and especially Horkheimer.

    If you look at where even most of the representatives of the actual minorities come from, the pushed authors which have a “non-white” or “non-heterosexual” identity and being presented as the “active movement”, just look where they went to study, who was their teacher, who did instruct them, who did implement this and told them that they need “to liberate themselves and fight suppression”?!

    I repeat, there is more than one way out of any sort of suppression, even if it is real, and the kind of destructive, in the true sense of the word, because they want to “deconstruct occidental civilisation”, is a very specific way of reacting and demanding. Its not natural, its not like it comes to every people’s mind.

    Like I know how the representatives of ethnic minorities in Europe, Africa, Asia or even Latin America talked about their problems before coming into contact with aggressive Cultural Marxist theories and afterwards. There are worlds between then and now!
    They wouldn’t even have come to such ideas, such arguments, on their own, in a thousand years time span! This was like poison runnning directly into their brains, and afterwards, they couldn’t even argue differently. Even if it would have been better for the practical well-being of their people, of their social group, they have troubles arguing in a different manner – like for a more practical, economic and conciliatory solution. They were really poisened!

    Like partners can get poisened when its about a divorce by manipulative lawyers, its the same thing. They start the separation, a practical solution for both sides is close, both could get out of the room heads up, but with manipulative lawyers, the solution becomes more difficult, the dispute more gruesome.

    Cultural Marxism with its identity politics and divisions, with its reach for utter destruction of the European people and occidental culture, no matter what, is like that. Its like an antidote which is worse than the poison for which is what made for.

    Most of the Christian sects involved were just too naive and had, like explained above, that kind of weakness, that kind of defect already imbedded. Once they were exposed, without protective elites, to that poison, they were in.

    Now the real question is, why did the elites, of which most certainly a large portion was and is still WASP, in the USA, did not interfere, did nothing or not enough, to stop the disease from spreading, when it became obvious where it was going.

    The reason is not, in my opinion, that all of them liked it too much, but they didn’t care enough. It was also very useful to keep real Socialism and Communism down, because the Cultural Marxists argued, that American style Capitalism is bad, but still better than totalitarian or autocratic regimes, because they first free the individual from traditional limitations, so that they can then, in a new Matriarchy, fully embrace the revolution. Plutocrats and big spenders could keep their position, and even “do good” by helping to spread the “New Order” within Capitalism.

    Now that sounds better for a Plutocrat than Socialists which demand their execution or dispossession, doesn’t it?

    Also, they wanted to expand the Neoliberal Capitalist system with financial-corporate control to the whole globe, with just one global sytem for all of mankind and therefore maximal control.

    The first adaptation that path was like demanded by Walter Lippmann, make Capitalism more appearling and consumerist, give the common people goods and minimal social security.

    The second with Cultural Marxism just means to deconstruct everything which was before the Neoliberal Capitalist order, everything, down to families and gender roles. So that there is no way back or out any more, but people know nothing but the system created and controlled by the money flow.

    Those on top, like in the “good English tradition”, in the USA, did never care enough for “their own people”, even those of the same religion and of the same descent, for compromising their personal and Plutocratic clan goals. That kind of corrupted Individualism, which appeared from the top to the bottom of the American society and became rampant in the last decades, is just shameless.

    And that’s also the “nice” thing about Cultural Marxism, it gives people, shameless people, any kind of argument in favour of their own, personal interests. You can twist reality as long as you want, until you get the argument for your personal social advantage. Its ugly, its corrupted, it will lead nowhere, but its convenient and fits into the consumerist way of thinking and living, which promoted the kind of irresponsible egoism which became rampant in the first place.

    In that way, its radically different from old Social ideals too, because like we can observe, in real time, its single individuals which make it to the top, with that kind of poison, but once they are on top, they don’t do enough, not nearly enough for “their people” as they could or should, in practise, in reality.
    They being satisfied, by the given order of the Oligarchy, by having their place and their pulpit, from which they can preach hate, all day long, and getting attention and social acceptance from.

    That kind of ideology is easy to corrupt, because its constructivist-individualist basic assumptions are erroneous and corrupt by default.

  16. @Twinkie

    I think a lot of people, given the behavior of the WASP elite in the final decades of the Gilded Age, tend to assume that the WASP elite has always been extremely conservative, socially and economically. The truth is, for most of the country’s history, the WASP elite have been out of step with the mores of the general population, and has often been dragging it forward in favor of ideas of progress. Case in point: the left has liked to retcon the civil rights era as a grassroots phenomenon of hard-working little guy activists, but the truth is that the “Power Elite” of the country in the post-war era launched a concerted effort, before WWII was even over (it would have been even earlier absent Roosevelt’s need to maintain alliances with Southern segregationists to ensure the viability of New Deal reforms), in the courts and through legislative and executive policy to overcome de jure segregation by government, and then de facto segregation by private choice. This eventually petered out at the end of the 60s as the avatars of the post-war order lost their mandate, and we really lost any coherent class of elites in the 70s and 80s.

    Secular Jews, mostly the liberal ones, have just picked up in the past 25 years where the former WASP class left off in the 60s. Same appears to be coming true for high-caste Indian immigrants, so I wouldn’t say Razib is wrong. It’s not like the WASPs of yore were known for high rates of intermarriage with the common-folk Americans.

  17. @Mekal: “The truth is, for most of the country’s history, the WASP elite have been out of step with the mores of the general population, and has often been dragging it forward in favor of ideas of progress.”

    I completely agree with what you said about the “character” of the “WASP-elite”, but don’t call it “ideas of progress”. This is not progress, this is a specific direction society was pushed into, nothing more and nothing less. Its even worse than the term “Liberal” if its about Cultural Marxist ideology. Its a trivialization of what really happened.

    “Secular Jews, mostly the liberal ones, have just picked up in the past 25 years where the former WASP class left off in the 60s.”

    That’s not true. Take secular Jews in the US film industry as the most prominent and important example for the mainstream, popular cultural propagation of Liberal and even openly Cultural Marxist memes, and you see that they were the avantgarde whenever having the chance.

    The WASP elite had more the role of allowing it to happen, support it when it got close and direct it into a specific, no longer “Socialist”, less economically focused and truly revolutionary, but more individualist and Capitalism-corporate control-compatible direction.

    The WASP elite guided and protected it, the secular, Liberal and Marxist people of Jewish descent were prominent in promoting it, especially on campus. Funnily, one could even argue, if it would have gone horribly wrong, they could have still blamed it on them exclusively, without having to take full responsibility in front of the mob. One could ask whether that was a conscious strategy or not, but it seems so to me. Because the financiers and supporters from above always cared for not being made public, especially in the early years of the transition, when Cultural Marxism began to spread and before its dominant narrative was fully established.

    Like the Plutocracy now being not in the foreground, but aggressive ideologists of various ethnic, social and sexual background are. The new Oligarchy can lean back, watch, and if something appears or happens they don’t like, they can still interfere or in case of emergency give the blame to this radical loonies only, even though it was to a large part their social engineering. .

    That’s very convenient for their social, economic and political power.

    I also had debates in the past with various people about how the Jewish families which became part of the Oligarchy, of the “exclusive club” in the USA and GB, think about their own people and I usually say that they would sacrifice “their people” too. They would sacrifice Israel, they would sacrifice Jews in any given country. If it ever comes to the crunch between the big strategic goals and caring for others.

    That’s why I assume, that on the long run, the religious and conservative, more clearly nationalist and Zionist Jewish people will get ever more troubles with all of the Plutocracy too. Its too much of a contradiction in the global context.
    That’s still not the case now, because the situation is just fine and there is no need for making a decision, but once it gets down to the basics again, we will see. The Israel-critical and anti-conservative/religious comments and propaganda coming from ever larger portions of the Liberal Jewish community might foreshadow this.

    I also think that the Oligarchy of all ethnic backgrounds has its own dynamic by now, a “club ethos”, because obviously they act systemic. If they would be more rational, while keeping all others dumb, they would do better as a group on various levels, especially if its about children and family cohesion, protect their dynastic interests and think ahead, for longer term plans. But they do not, I mean they do better than the decadent average Joe, but not by a lot and some not at all. Many of their own scions ruin themselves the same way as many Westerners do and fail in life. That’s not intentional of course, but it just shows how they choke on their own poison.

    So there must be this idea of a new world order, as an trans-personal ideal which the Oligarchy approaches and formulated in various think tanks over the last decades, in their inner circles, for its own good and interests, but legitimated “morally”. They might even think they are “the good” and doing the right thing, at least many of them do, while others are more openly egoistic on the short term, which means for their lifespan, with little care for what’s following. I guess both exist and might end up fighting once things get nasty.

  18. Mekal:”Secular Jews, mostly the liberal ones, have just picked up in the past 25 years where the former WASP class left off in the 60s.”

    Jewish involvement in Left-ish politics has a much longer history than that. To cite an obvious example, Jews provided most of the funding for the NAACP during the interwar period. And, for a very long time, they made up a disproportionate share of the organization’s leadership (Henry Moskowitz, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsh, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Joel Spingarn, etc)

    Walter Sobchak:”I have commented before and will not repeat the arc of Yankee religiosity from the hard core Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards (Arron Burr’s grandfather who was actually the trailing edge of theological orthodoxy) through Unitarianism to Transcendentalism the Progressivism to the end stage of Marxism, of which Wokeism is a version for the terminally uneducated.”

    It’s also important to bear in mind the anti-Woke Yankee tradition: Hawthorne, Henry Adams, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound (of New England descent on both sides of his family), Robert Frost, HP Lovecraft, Lothrop Stoddard, ….

  19. Secular Jews, mostly the liberal ones, have just picked up in the past 25 years where the former WASP class left off in the 60s. Same appears to be coming true for high-caste Indian immigrants, so I wouldn’t say Razib is wrong. It’s not like the WASPs of yore were known for high rates of intermarriage with the common-folk Americans.

    Syonredux has already corrected you, but I want to amplify what he said.

    In America at least, the Jewish predominance among leftist causes really began with the wave of immigration from Eastern Europe in the late 19th century.

    The German-American Jews who preceded that wave were not known for their leftist sympathies, even if quite naturally they were vocal in defending their own interests. But anarchists, communists, and socialists were common among the Eastern European Jewish immigrants.

    Here’s a very vivid example of what I mean. From the election of 1920, I provide first the percentage of the electorate that voted for each candidate followed in parentheses by the Jewish vote for each candidate:

    Republican Warren Harding – 60% (43%)

    Democrat James Cox – 34% (19%)

    Socialist Eugene Debs – 3% (38%)

    So Jewish-Americans in 1920 were more than 12 times as likely to vote for the Socialist candidate for president than was the electorate at large.

    This wasn’t a one-off situation, either. Here are the results from the 1948 election when the “Progressive” and decidedly pro-Soviet candidate Henry Wallace ran for president.

    Democrat Harry Truman – 50% (75%)

    Republican Thomas Dewey – 45% (10%)

    Progressive Henry Wallace – 2.4% (15%)

    Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond – 2.4% (0%)

    Jews were six times more likely to vote for the Progressive Henry Wallace than was the voting population at large. Wallace’s best state that year? New York.

  20. It’s also important to bear in mind the anti-Woke Yankee tradition: Hawthorne, Henry Adams, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound (of New England descent on both sides of his family), Robert Frost, HP Lovecraft, Lothrop Stoddard, ….

    True, but there was a decidedly Woke strain in 19th-century Yankee progressivism nevertheless, and one can see it most clearly in the rhetoric of the Radical Republicans just after the Civil War when the immigration debate about the Chinese in the West became a national issue.

    An excellent book on this is Andrew Gyory’s Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. It’s a fascinating read and it implicitly showed me how this strain of thinking preceded any Jewish influence and was a consequence of Christian universalism adopted into an American political context.

    The lefty Jews who later arrived eventually discovered and adopted this creed and then magnified it through their disproportionate influence, but they did not invent it.

  21. @Pincher Martin

    It’s true that German Jews who immigrated to America brought with them left-wing politics, but it’s also true that Germans in general, including Protestants and Catholics, who immigrated to America in the second half of the 19th Century in general brought with them left-wing politics, in large part because after the abortive 1848 Revolution, they went to America to start a new life for themselves.

    Is the Jewish “character” of left wing politics in America different than non-Jewish left wing politics? Sure, in the sense that the religions motivations may be Jewish in character, rather than Christian, but the ends are mostly the same, and for sure the overrepresentation of Jews among the early ACLU (see eventual Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis) influenced the direction it took in regards to cases and its stance on public displays of religion, religion in schools, and government funding of religion, because they were more sensitive to the dominance of Christianity in the public square than Christians. But by the same token there were a number of non-Jewish liberals, including ones who identified as Protestant or Catholic, whose stance on separation of church and state was virtually indistinguishable from the ACLU stance, including Supreme Court Justices William Brennan and William O. Douglas.

  22. It’s true that German Jews who immigrated to America brought with them left-wing politics, but it’s also true that Germans in general, including Protestants and Catholics, who immigrated to America in the second half of the 19th Century in general brought with them left-wing politics, in large part because after the abortive 1848 Revolution, they went to America to start a new life for themselves.

    I said the opposite.

    The early German Jews (and the handful of Spanish Jews who arrived even earlier than the German Jews) did not bring any influential left-wing politics with them to America. Those political views would come with the second wave of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants to America who came from Russia and the lands in the Pale of the Settlement (Poland, Ukraine, etc.).

    Those “Russian Jews”, for lack of a better term, initially turned off even the German-American Jews. The feeling was more than reciprocated. But just by sheer numbers, the second wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were very quickly much more influential in the United States than were the earlier German-Jews.

    And to the degree that the 1848 Revolution was important in America, it was – as you suggest – Catholics and not Jews who were more representative of it.

    But the radical movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were not directly tied to the 1848 Revolution. Russia, after all, was not much affected by the 1848 Revolution, and it was Russian Jews who took the lead in America in those radical political movements. Think of Alexander Bittelman, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman.

    For an excellent book on the topic, one which was written by an English Jew, read The Politics of Nonassimilation: The American Jewish Left in the Twentieth Century by David Verbeeten.

    Is the Jewish “character” of left wing politics in America different than non-Jewish left wing politics?

    I was not speaking so much about the “character” of Jewish left-wing politics (although I guess I could have) as I was speaking about just the numbers. Until the Russian Jews started showing up in large numbers beginning in 1880 and ending around 1920, Jewish ethnicity expressed as a political preference wasn’t that distinct in America. Jewish numbers were too small and assimilation took place through intermarriage more so in the early- and mid-19th century than it did in the early- and mid-20th century.

    But by the same token there were a number of non-Jewish liberals, including ones who identified as Protestant or Catholic, whose stance on separation of church and state was virtually indistinguishable from the ACLU stance, including Supreme Court Justices William Brennan and William O. Douglas.

    Yes, but it’s a numbers game and you need to quantify it. That’s why I referred to the 1920 and 1948 U.S. presidential elections because those Jewish voting numbers are so starkly different than for the country as a whole. You also need to differentiate between liberalism and more radical political ideologies, like communism, socialism, and anarchism.

  23. Those “Russian Jews”, for lack of a better term, initially turned off even the German-American Jews. The feeling was more than reciprocated. But just by sheer numbers, the second wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were very quickly much more influential in the United States than were the earlier German-Jews.

    I think this is true and certainly comports with my anecdotal experience – most Jews I know with a history of military service are descended from those who settled in the Midwest and the Southwest from earlier migrations. I even know a Jewish rancher from Arizona whose family has been in the States for many generations. He grew up cattle-tending, horse-riding, and hunting. Quite unlike the “men without chests” urban Jews of my youth.

    As you wrote, though, the sensibilities of the later arrivals from the East have come to overwhelm and dominate the more assimilationist mentality of the smaller, earlier waves, and the Jewish-American political characteristics as such today seem to reflect the later arrivals.

    I think it’s the same with Indian immigrants. All my Indian immigrant friends are as old as I am or older and arrived in the 70’s and 80’s and are both more assimilationist than, and more critical of, the recent IT-waves. When international travel was more difficult and expensive, there was definitely a greater sense of the break with the old country and a stronger openness to becoming an American. Now migrants seems to be more interested in economic extraction than patriotic assimilation. Many younger Indian arrivals I have encountered these days openly say they intend to make as much money as possible here and retire to India. And they treat the natives of lower socio-economic strata like dirt (they seem to view the politeness of the earlier arrivals as subservience beneath their dignity). Similar – if somewhat less pronounced – dynamic with the more upscale East Asian immigrants of today.

  24. You also have to consider that German Jews were among the most assimilated and European-oriented Jews of the world. That was part of the reason why anti-Semitism was not that aggressive and widespread in Germany. Small numbers of fairly well assimilated Jews. There too the change in attitude happened when greater numbers from the East came in, Marxism became rampant and a new form of unrestrained Capitalism broke lose. This made anti-Semitism much more of a problem than it was before, for obvious reasons.

    Also, I do think it made a difference for the USA, once Israel was founded or at least the migration to Palestine attracted more and more Jewish people. Really, if Jewish people had to decide where to go, if they emigrated, the decision between building up a country of their own or going to the cosmopolitan East or West coast of the USA is a very fundamental, even ideological one.

    Even if they were leftists, if they were practical, idealistic and group oriented or more religous, conservative and nation oriented, where did they go? I think this led to a kind of ideological and personal selection too and made the immigrants to America of later times different from those from earlier times, for a multitude of reasons.

    Also the comparison to post 1848 Germans is justified, because many of the “suppressed at home” leftists moved to the USA. But that’s where its important to distinguish between various social movements and real Socialism, yet alone Marxism and even among Marxists, the different movements.

    Talking about the most destructive-deconstructivist and now dominant kind of Leftism, you always end up with Cultural Marxism which can be directly derived from the Frankfurt School and “Critical Theory” with all its implications.
    Like I wrote in the past already, even individuals could make a big difference in this respect, because Carl Grünberg, who should have led the institute originally, was Eastern Jewish and a Marxist, but he still was a completely different person, ideologically very different and would have never created the kind of poison Max Horkheimer did create.

    So even among Jewish descended Marxists, individual differences matter a lot, so does chance and chances. It was just bad fate that Grünberg got a stroke in 1928 and Max Horkheimer was ready to take over and gain even more influence and a reputation with it, gathering his disciples around him, which he formed and guided completely, especially in the early years.

    Max Horkheimer was the single most important person for all that crap to spread around the world, to this day – its not just his writings, but his networks and influence on others.
    100.000 “normal” Eastern Jewish Marxist activists were, in comparison, not that influential, not that dangerous, not that problematic, but he, as a person, was.

    Interestingly, he and most of his disciples were actually German Jews by descent, but came from highly religious and wealthy families, with which they had their own troubles and were sometimes ashamed for. They were the generation which left religious Judaism behind, had troubles with their fathers and relatives, but didn’t embrace the German culture. They being left in some kind of ideological and social no man’s land. So they developed their own kind of identity crisis and search for new goals in life.

    Like Erich Fromm said, he and the others never fully gave up on “Messianic thinking”, of a great world solution and salvation. Therefore he began to concentrate on the secular world’s problems with this kind of religious thinking, while having a distaste for the German occidental culture and society. Again, this was a problem of some Jewish circles in Germany. There were perfectly assimilated, well-meaning Jews in Germany and such which were “normal Leftists” or just unpolitical people. But this kind of identity issue was a major problem especially among the most radical and destructive Jewish theorists, like Horkheimer, Marcuse and Fromm, coming quite often form better-off, wealthy, but still very religious, even orthodox Jewish families.

    And Max Horkheimer was just like a father figure for some of them, bringing them together, giving them a job, a purpose in life and a direction for their “scientific”, or better pseudo-religious ideological work.

    If you consider their biography, it gives you very important details about how such personalities and goals could develop, from an attitude of an offended ego, because they thought of themselves as being intellectually superiour, and everybody, including every German, should recognise their superiority. Its that kind of attitude which alienated them even more from their supposed target audience of German workers and created hate. Hate directed not just against them, but Jewish people as a whole, which was even more of a tragedy.

    When National Socialism came to power and they moved to the USA and suddenly were “accepted experts” with connections to the secret service and very top of society soon afterwards, because they were considered being useful both against “Fascism” as well as “Communism”, they could finally be the “respected people” they always wanted to be, gibbering nonsense which young students in the wake of the 2nd World War took serious and repeat, in partly altered form, to this day.

    The whole “New Left” can’t be explained, to this day, without this group of people and “the work” of Max Horkheimer. Because even Eastern Jewish Marxists had not the same approach and ideas before, practially nobody had!

    This is was really an original “School of Thought”, which is about memes running amok. A very dangerous memetic virus, which infects people and impedes their own capacity to think and conclude rational & logical. And it was created exactly for that purpose, to eliminate even the ability to argue with their kind of construct on a rational level, becaue every criticism can be put into a box and discredited by being “a social construct” – which is so absurd, because their ideology with all its false, erroneous assumptions and premises, is the worst construct of all! But that’s the trick, it was made that way on purpose.

    And Max Horkheimer and his gang began the work on this code in the Frankfurt Institute, just because Grünberg got a stroke and Horkheimer got the position…

    Obviously, these highly constructed and quite specific ideas had better chances in specific groups of people, with a specific background and way of thinking. But even then, it needed to be created first. They were not embraced by all Marxists at all by the way, even on the contrary. Not even their fellow Jewish Marxist Genossen did like what they produced. They were pretty much disliked everywhere they went in Europe, from Left and Right!

    It was only in America they got the acceptance and support they always worked for – by support from the highest echelons and American networks almost from the start, from the point they entered the country. Then, only then, they came back to Europe to influence the French and German schools, manipulate the youth and students in the 1960’s movement on both sides of the Atlatnic, with the biggest breakthrough during the Vietnam War. But nothing of this would have been possible without them being welcomed and supported that big by the US academia, administration and financial elite during the War. They were sponsored and pushed.

  25. It’s not like the WASPs of yore were known for high rates of intermarriage with the common-folk Americans.

    I was unaware that they were known for their high rates of noblesse oblige as well.

  26. Mekal: It’s not like the WASPs of yore were known for high rates of intermarriage with the common-folk Americans.

    True, but it’s worth elucidating the difference. Marriage between the lowest and highest strata of society is rare in any society (though rarer in India of course) but what would be really different in the proportion of marriages between one social strata and the immediate next down/up. WASP elites may not have married FoB Irish policemen too oft, but they did frequently marry with people who were prosperous patricians who were slightly lower in SES than themselves, and perhaps might have had a grandparent who was an Irish FoB who became a police captain and so on. This is not the case in India…. Boston Brahmins were permeable, Bombay Brahmins not. And this trend continues on down through society as a whole, so over, say 10 generations (approx 300 years), those who are Upper Class in the US quite likely to have a lower class ancestor (or more likely many), as ancestry percolates up, while India not really.

    And I’d guess this matters socially because there is a lot of bridging; high WASPs are loyal to themselves and the next rank of “good families”, the “good families” are loyal to themselves and the middle classes are loyal to themselves and the lower classes. In this way shared interest, I’d guess, percolates up and down, too, at least a bit.

  27. @Matt: Ideology and ideals, mentality and social customs are in this respect minimum as, if not more important. The epitome of this pattern would be noveau-riche which have no shame or proper education, no ideals, no bond or mercy for those below them, while some old stock aristocratic or highest level financial elite families might have if being raised, socialised and integreated into a greater whole that way. Which works out better and more natural in a homogeneous society of course, because if to the social ethnic differences being added, the gap is even larger.

    Even on the contrary, I think that the quick rise to higher social ranks and the ideology in the USA made people not more social, even on the contrary. This relates also to the two main religious groups which embraced full scale Capitalism early, some Calvinist sects and Jews, both playing with the idea of “predestination”.

    Add to that an at least somewhat permeable society and you can tell everybody in need or bad shape, that it was “just their own fault”, since “everybody can make it”. Its a cheap excuse for a bad and corrupted system. Like they can always present “that single guy who made it”, just to prove that “everything is possible” and the system is not rigged.

    This kind of society and “non-ideals” breeds shameless egoism, which needs, especially in a classic Christian society, at least be better hidden than with agenda driven, manipulative “charity”, which gives “the elites” even more power than a proper social and health care in the first place. Because they being not obliged to give, but “are just merciful enough” to spread some breadcrumbs to the movements they like to support – oftentimes for their very own good and influence on society.

    Some aspects of this would have been unthinkable in 20th century Europe, especially the shameless attitude of “I don’t care for the the community and society, I’m a rich person and do what I want”.

    With that attitude, no matter which ethnoreligious background you had, people created hate in the past, and even real action, movements. This was a no go, even down to the very corrupted and distinctive British elite, which too cared little for its people. But even there, not that far.
    It was in the USA that this kind of attitude could spread and being tolerated, which speaks for itself.

    So I don’t agree at all, that social permeability is the main cause, its the values and ideology a society has which is much more important. Old stock aristocrats with zero “lower” ancestry could be more social and group oriented than a nouveau-riche any day if having just the right ethos. In fact, that was the case, especially in Germany, which caused people to not leave the Aristocracy and old stock behind all too soon in favour of a “new bourgeois elite”, which did not better, and which best parts mimicked the Aristocracy, rather than the other way around like in Britain. Because they were more of an “independent institution”, not as much involved personally.

    Which is a problem, if one part of the economic sphere of interests is the absolutely leading one and nothing else is there to order things, we’re endung up on a Plutocracy. Elected politicians should have this role in a Democracy, but this would need them to independent, largely, from the Plutocrats in the first place, which they are not – in the USA in particular.

  28. @Obs, to be honest I don’t think US marriage networks were a whole lot more or less class permeable compared to the European “Old World”, nor that those societies were too different to each other. Differences very small on the scale of difference between Europe and India.

    To the extent there are variations, when we talk about social class sympathy, I am not sure that individual social mobility (as opposed to less class structure in marriage) really seems to clearly make people more or less likely to make an individual / luck based attribution. Individually socially mobile Sweden doesn’t seem more unsympathetically individualist than more socially immobile Germany, and so on. I can’t really call it but a tendency to blame social outcomes on the social system (“the sick, corrupted and dirty system, engineered by the disgusting top secret people” and so on) rather than individual qualities or luck seems a separate, largely left wing idea that is present in “low trust” societies and social subsets of varying degrees of mobility, particularly those with high focus on “rational” material outcomes as a determinant of happiness, like property and money and numbers of children (material, measurable things that exist in reality). (I would expect on a global scale to be present in poor and immobile countries though).

    I *would* guess that permeability of the social structure through marriage kind of matters for the spread of culture. In a permeable society, everyone wants to emulate the immediately upper ranks so that their children can marry up, so they will adopt practices like religion, “bourgeois values”, literacy, Confucian study, “taste” (maybe some other things in future). In an impermeable society, that’s not so much the case and practices will spread much more because of utility and being immediately materially valuable, or because it is mandated by religious doctrine, or because they’re personally satisfying, or to improve marriage prospects within group, but not so much to make children more “marriageable” outside the group. (This for better of worse).

  29. @Matt: “Individually socially mobile Sweden doesn’t seem more unsympathetically individualist than more socially immobile Germany, and so on.”

    Sweden was a Lutheran and very group oriented society by default, even before Marxism. What they were not, however, is socially overly mobile in a Europe-wide comparison.

    Also, I don’t agree with social permeability being the primary mechanism for social imitation from the upper classes. Actually, in old Europe, it was simply forbidden to wear some clothes reserved for the aristocracy, the clerical elite or any other specific social group. It doesn’t matter if people could afford and even buy it on the market, they were not allowed to wear it by law and punishment.

    Only those lower classes develop a strong social framework of their own which being truly cut off from the next higher social strata. Whereever possible, the next lower usually tries to imitate the next higher level, even without a chance of social upward mobility.

    That was the lesson the Cultural Marxists learned, which is absolutely fundamental for their ideology and practical policy, that if you give the working class just better material conditions, they will start their own bourgeois life and forget about “the revolutionary goals” of the Proletarians. Marcuse made this quite clear, his disappointment of the “white middle class” male which just started to live like a bourgeois himself, once getting to chance to, instead of fighting for his “revolutionary project” with the end of the bourgeois society, the end of occidental civilisation and a new egalitarian philosopher ruled, matriarchally inspired uber-society.

    So what they do in the USA for decades now, is practising what they learned and the Plutocracy loves: They solve socio-economically nothing, but do divide society below the larger ethnosocial units. Along sex-gender, sexuality, race, class, everything being mixed up and being used to limit the individual scope to fights which are soft insofar, as they don’t touch the ruling Oligarchy and solve nothing fundamental.

    Like you have women which struggle with their job, income and family, well, you just blame the males and “patriarchal suppression” instead of making jobs and society more family friendly, instead of creating alternative life and value concepts beside the Capitalist order or simply paying more and giving more social security.

    So you incite hate on males, and especially “white males”, while keeping them busy and only let “some make it”, so that they can look up to “female role models” which made it in the new system. But for the vast majority, life got worse than it was, nothing solved, you keep them busy and active for the social engineering.

    Same with poor black communities, which are now worse off, higher rate of homicides, crime in general, drug addictions, single mothers and destroyed families, STDs and insecure or non-existent jobs. But intead of creating jobs and rebuilding the community, you make social housing in white settlements, incite hate, blame “white males” again and let some individuals from these community into elite colleges by quota, another one into a supervisory board and make them “role models of people who made it in the new society”.

    For the majority on the ground, nothing solved, nothing improved, even on the contrary, hate incited, conflicts created, the white people under check, the black people as a clientele.

    That’s Cultural Marxism in action, individual social permeability without structural solutions, rather structural deconstruction and destabilisation, in preparation of the next steps of social engineering. If they would solve the origianl cause of the activation of their clientele, they would lose it, like they lost “white working and middle class” people once they were able to live a “bourgeois lifestyle”.

    But that’s not the goal, they want to destroy the bourgeois-occidental society as such, they don’t want people to be able to embrace and love it. The enemy of the Freudian-inspired Cultural Marxists of Horkheimer and his disciplies, including the completely lunatic Wilhelm Reich, is to destroy occidental society.

    The Plutocratic elite too doesn’t want an ordered Fordian type society, which keeps them under check and obliged to “their people”, but rather limitless global exploitation and social engineering.

    So both sides are not interesting in really solving the socio-economic problems, but rather using them to get through with their social enginnering plans. The “social permeability” of individuals is just there to grab all the potential from the lower standing groups and corrupt it, before it could get a dynamic of its own.

    Like the black intellectuals being bought in first by this personal success, being “living examples of the new opportunities” and secondly by their ability to hack on lower standing whites and occidental society. Nothing solved for their people in the hoods, not even planned to, but they are under control as long as it works out that way.

    Nice for the Cultural Marxists activists and Plutocrats alike. Because the experience the Frankfurt School guys made, two times in Germany, was that the white males will fall back to more conservative, bourgeois values, once they reach a certain econonmic status and societal participation. They don’t even need to rise to the top, just their primary problems and the obvious injustice must be eliminated, really solved, and they are happy enough and don’t demand “revolution” against the occidental culture any more.

    That didn’t make Horkheimer, Reich, Marcuse and Fromm happy, because they cared s**t for the people, like the Cultural Marxists in the USA in cooperation with the Plutocrats care little for any group they pretend to fight for. Instead, they want to keep them active and busy, by solving nothing, not alienating their financiers, and deconstruct, step by step, occidental society.

  30. @Matt: “Individually socially mobile Sweden doesn’t seem more unsympathetically individualist than more socially immobile Germany, and so on.”

    Sweden was a Lutheran and very group oriented society by default, even before Marxism. What they were not, however, is socially overly mobile in a Europe-wide comparison.

    Also, I don’t agree with social permeability being the primary mechanism for social imitation from the upper classes. Actually, in old Europe, it was simply forbidden to wear some clothes reserved for the aristocracy, the clerical elite or any other specific social group. It doesn’t matter if people could afford and even buy it on the market, they were not allowed to wear it by law and punishment.

    Only those lower classes develop a strong social framework of their own which being truly cut off from the next higher social strata. Whereever possible, the next lower usually tries to imitate the next higher level, even without a chance of social upward mobility.

    That was the lesson the Cultural Marxists learned, which is absolutely fundamental for their ideology and practical policy, that if you give the working class just better material conditions, they will start their own bourgeois life and forget about “the revolutionary goals” of the Proletarians. Marcuse made this quite clear, his disappointment of the “white middle class” male which just started to live like a bourgeois himself, once getting to chance to, instead of fighting for his “revolutionary project” with the end of the bourgeois society, the end of occidental civilisation and a new egalitarian philosopher ruled, matriarchally inspired uber-society.

    So what they do in the USA for decades now, is practising what they learned and the Plutocracy loves: They solve socio-economically nothing, but do divide society below the larger ethnosocial units. Along sex-gender, sexuality, race, class, everything being mixed up and being used to limit the individual scope to fights which are soft insofar, as they don’t touch the ruling Oligarchy and solve nothing fundamental.

    Like you have women which struggle with their job, income and family, well, you just blame the males and “patriarchal suppression” instead of making jobs and society more family friendly, instead of creating alternative life and value concepts beside the Capitalist order or simply paying more and giving more social security.

    So you incite hate on males, and especially “white males”, while keeping them busy and only let “some make it”, so that they can look up to “female role models” which made it in the new system. But for the vast majority, life got worse than it was, nothing solved, you keep them busy and active for the social engineering.

    Same with poor black communities, which are now worse off, higher rate of homicides, crime in general, drug addictions, single mothers and destroyed families, STDs and insecure or non-existent jobs. But instead of creating jobs and rebuilding the community, you make social housing in white settlements, incite hate, blame “white males” again and let some individuals from these community into elite colleges by quota, another one into a supervisory board and make them “role models of people who made it in the new society”.

    For the majority on the ground, nothing solved, nothing improved, even on the contrary, hate incited, conflicts created, the white middle class people under check, the black people as a clientele.

    That’s Cultural Marxism in action, individual social permeability without structural solutions, rather structural deconstruction and destabilisation, in preparation of the next steps of social engineering. If they would solve the origianl cause of the activation of their clientele, they would lose it, like they lost “white working and middle class” people once they were able to live a “bourgeois lifestyle”.

    Social permeability in this context is just there to grab the social climbers with potential and corrupt them before they can, without control, organise real resistence or change which would be against the Plutocratic interests and Cultural Marxist social engineering. Like many Afro-American social climbers which made it to the upper echelons, which demand just what’s allowed and harmless for the Plutocracy, but nothing which would really improve the status of their follow people on the ground significantly.

  31. Twinkie –

    I think this is true and certainly comports with my anecdotal experience – most Jews I know with a history of military service are descended from those who settled in the Midwest and the Southwest from earlier migrations. I even know a Jewish rancher from Arizona whose family has been in the States for many generations. He grew up cattle-tending, horse-riding, and hunting. Quite unlike the “men without chests” urban Jews of my youth.

    Exactly. Look at someone like Barry Goldwater.

    Goldwater was not strictly speaking a “German Jew” since his paternal grandfather was born in Congress Poland in 1821, which was part of the Russian empire at that time. But Barry’s grandfather emigrated to London as a young man, married into a family of English Jews, and anglicized his name. The family soon afterward emigrated to the United States in the 1850s, and Barry’s father, Baron Goldwater, was born in Los Angeles just after the Civil War. Baron would marry an Episcopalian girl and convert to her faith. Their union produced Barry Goldwater.

    So the Goldwater family’s Jewish roots tracked the experience of the early German Jewish immigrants. They arrived in the U.S. before the great Jewish wave of 1880 to 1920, assimilated quickly, and their children were raised as proud Americans. Barry would on occasion state that he was Jewish, but it clearly wasn’t important to him.

    The ironic thing about Goldwater was that he was the first major U.S. presidential candidate with significant Jewish ancestry, but Jews voted against him in 1964 by nine to one. He also was the first Republican presidential candidate to sweep the deep south, a region which is – or was at the time – often considered the most anti-semitic part of the country. Yet southern voters did not care in the least that their champion that year had a Jewish father or Jewish ancestry.

    As you wrote, though, the sensibilities of the later arrivals from the East have come to overwhelm and dominate the more assimilationist mentality of the smaller, earlier waves, and the Jewish-American political characteristics as such today seem to reflect the later arrivals.

    The remarkable thing about those later Jewish arrivals is how frequently their radicalism had nothing to do with their adopted home. They got off the boat already radicalized. It wasn’t anti-semitism or dire economic conditions in the U.S. that made them radical. They came to America pre-programmed for radicalism.

    Take Alexander Bittelman who was a founding member of the Communist Party of America (CPA). He was born in Ukraine in 1890, which was then part of the Russian empire. He started joining radical groups in his early teens.

    Bittelman emigrated to America in 1912, at the age of 22. He almost immediately started participating in radical political groups upon his arrival. These groups were almost wholly Jewish. For example, he joined the Jewish Socialist Federation in 1915, an organization whose leadership was made up entirely of Jews from the Russian empire.

    Bittelman’s experience was not unique. Other famous Jewish radicals, like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, had similar personal histories. Goldman was born in 1869 in what is now Lithuania, but was then part of the Russian empire. She emigrated to the U.S. in 1885 at the age of sixteen. Within two years she was already engaging in anarchist ideas. By the age of 23 she participated in an assassination attempt on the industrialist’s Henry Clay Frick’s life.

    Berkman, who was Goldman’s lover, was also born in Lithuania. He emigrated to the states in 1888 at the age of 18, and he no sooner got off the boat then he became an active anarchist. Not quite four years later after his arrival to America, he tried to assassinate Frick.

    The more I read about those Russian Jews, the more surprised I am that the U.S. didn’t cut off their immigration much earlier.

  32. Pincher Martin,

    Many thanks for the excellent comment.

    By the way, this may be only tangentially related, but you might find it interesting: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/when-jews-ruled-the-fencing-world

    I found these parts notable:

    Mayer’s bizarre gesture created consternation and a great deal of comment. She was born in 1910 to a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother. Although her physician father was active in Jewish organizations, Helene and her two brothers were raised in a secular home and she attended a Christian school…

    (According to German law, Mayer was a mischling, a German of mixed Jewish and Aryan blood.) Mayer was the only German athlete from a Jewish background to win a medal that year…

    Young Jews have always viewed participating in sports as a means of integrating and gaining acceptance among their non-Jewish peers and within the larger society. This held true for Jewish university students in Germany, Austria, and Hungary during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Only there, fencing and dueling with swords became the Jewish students’ sports of choice…

    As a consequence of their ability and competitiveness, numbers of Jewish fencers became champions in their countries and in the Olympics. Olympic fencing competition was a means by which young Jews could express their patriotism and love of country and a way to show the world that Jews could compete with non-Jews at the highest level and win. In fact, Jewish athletes have won more Olympic medals for fencing than for any other sport…

    Hungarians had always taken pride in being descended from saber-wielding mounted warriors. For a Jew to become a saber champion was to fulfill a fantasy of acceptance. The first Hungarian Olympic champions were Jews who excelled in saber fencing, the most Hungarian of martial arts. In the 1908 London Olympic Games, four Hungarian-Jewish fencers—Dezso Foldes, Jeno Fuchs, Oskar Gerde, and Lajos Werkner—won a gold medal in the team saber competition. Fuchs also won a gold medal in the individual saber competition. He became the first Hungarian Olympic champion in fencing. In addition to his gold medals, Fuchs (1882-1955) won 22 individual matches in the 1908 and 1912 Olympic Games…

    After WWI, fencing became almost an obsession among Hungarian Jews. From 1920 to 1936, Hungarian-Jewish fencers won 11 Olympic medals…

    This new situation spurred Jews to show their courage and display their loyalty and patriotism to the new Hungary. Fencing became their way to do so…

  33. Interesting that the Catholic Jewish intellectual alliance goes back so far. I always wondered why American conservative Catholics were so philosemitic; I figured maybe it was to do with WWII guilt but clearly this predates that. I wonder how figures like Father Coughlin fit into that, however. A throwback to the older antisemitic Catholic tradition?

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