You may have read parts of the Kevin D Williamson NRO article attacking the white working class. It’s behind an NRO paywall and I refuse to pay them for anything, so I haven’t read the whole article, but the excerpts I did read lead me to make to Twitter tirades. I have since found an version of the original article here.
The first rant was about how Kevin is an ass for attacking the white working class for being what it is after decades of prolonged government attack, which he partially supports, destroyed it. The second is was a rant on how soulless high-IQ homo economicus, like Kevin and his ilk, set up an inhuman system designed for them, then sneer at how others the system is not designed for fair poorly under it.
This gives me the opportunity to write something I’ve planning to write for a while now, but haven’t got around to yet.
Now, before I begin, because some cucks like Tom Nicholls argue like 14-year-old socialists, I will clarify my personal position. I come from the working class. Through the luck of genetics and the grace of God, I happen to have be born with high intelligence and an impersonal, homo economicus sperginess, so I am now personally comfortably middle-class, but I see second-hand through family the degeneracies of the lower classes. As well, I am not a Kremlin troll (although, if a Russian psy-ops happens to read this and wants to pay me…)
The current socio-economic system is designed by rootless, soulless, high-IQ, low-time preference, money-/status-grubbing homo economicus for benefit of those same homo economicus. It is a system for designed for intelligent sociopaths. Those who are rootless with high-IQ and low-time preference can succeed rather well in this system, but it destroys those who need rootedness or those who are who are low-IQ or high time preference.
Kevin says, “Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster.” But he’s wrong, there was a disaster, but no just one, multiple related disasters all occurring simeltaneously. Ones that would be missed by a rootless cosmopolitan like Williamson. These disasters include the sexual revolution, the long march, feminism, mass immigration, globalization/off-shoring, forced integration, the drug epidemic, mass TV propoganda, governmental growth, and cultural genocide.
Within a span of a few decades working-class whites saw their communities invaded and destroyed by immigrants and integration, the traditional sexual/moral framework destroyed and replaced by degenerate Hollywood mores, the collapse of restraining institutions such as the church and local community, and what forced into competition for what jobs weren’t off-shored to foreign places paying starvation wages with imported illegals willing to work for almost nothing.
Every support the white working class (and for that matter the black working class) had vanished within less than a generation. There was a concerted effort to destroy these supports, and this effort succeeded. Through minimal fault of their own the white working class was left with nothing holding them up.
Now, some people can succeed in this. Low-time preference, high-IQ groups and individuals, like New England puritans and myself can more or less get by without too many supports. Rootless homo economicus, like Williams, New York bankers, and hipsters, can have satisfying(?) lives living in a rat utopia, grubbing for dollars and status, anomie won’y affect them much. Sociopaths (in the colliquial sense), like most politicians, are made to survive in soulless, inhuman system.
For these types of people this is functional, but different people and groups naturally have differing temperment, intelligence, and time preference. Most people are not high-IQ, soulless homo economicus, most people are of average intelligence and have a strong need for communities and community support. Just as with corporal punishment, differing people require different socio-economic structures and controls.
A high-IQ Jew can probably have a dozen sex partners without becoming a single mother, then go on to either economically-productive bitter cat-ladiness or a stable low-sex marriage. A high-time preference Scots-Irish or black with a dozen sex partners is probably a single-mother with multiple baby-daddies and either a Wal-mart job or welfare payments. In a realm of easy divorce, the marriage of a low-time preference post-puritan will probably survive, but that of a low-IQ trailer park resident won’t. In a town with minimal economic prospects and easy access to welfare, the high-achieving, socially-isolated nerd will probably find it easy to ditch town for university and a Silicon Valley career. The low-achieving stoner or the son of a tight-knit farming clan won’t, and will likely choose the path of least resistance. The low-time preference WASP with good job prospects from an intact, single-child household may snort a line or two of coke on occasion and he’ll be fine, the high-time preference Scots-Irish from a broken family with an unemployed father will follow that first hit of meth down to destruction.
Working-class whites (and blacks, and hispanics) are not able to and can not be expected to function in an inhuman, cutthroat, anomic socio-economic system designed by and for upper-middle class WASPS and Jews. They are no more constitutionally endowed to be able to than women are to be marines. Some of the working-class on the right-side of a bell-curve or two may be able to extract themselves from the cultural collapse and some others may be passed by, but most are no more able to escape than a baby is to swim.
People are not equal. Differing people and groups have differing levels of in-born ability to be responsible. You can talk personal responsibility all you want, but most people require cultural and institutional structures to help hold them personally responsible. Those structures are gone, they’ve been destroyed.
You can not expect natural peasants and yeomen to be able to properly hold up the responsibilities of natural aristocrats or priests.
****
Nature-defying leftists think they can remodel men and make them all into perfect new socialist men. All men are blank slates that can be molded by education to become perfect. Man is perfectable. Of course, every attempt at perfecting man has failed.
Modern conservatives, having whole-heartedly adopted liberalism, fall into the tabula rasa trap from a different angle. All men are capable of perfecting themselves, they just need to become rugged individualists and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. While personal responsibility and individual effort are important, to think that all men are capable of self-actualization in anomic isolation is just as nonsensical the New Soviet Man.
Most men need community, cultural, and institutional support to self-actualize.
Now, there it is possible to just say, fuck them, they lost the darwinian struggle and deserve to die. Rootless conservatives like Kevin certainly do, as they propose that the broken white working class just move and gets jobs. Rather than trying to fix a system that was designed to destroy working-class communities, he glorifies a system where men’s only hope is to leave behind their families and the towns where their ancestors lived for generations to move to anomic, demographic-shredding urban centres to simply to be able to provide for themselves. Whatever you might call such inhuman mammon-worship, it is nothing anyone sane would recognize as conservatism.
Real conservativism and reaction recognizes that not all people are equal. You can’t just abandon whole swaths of people to anomie, poverty, and economic misery. Superiors have a duty to protect and care for their inferiors just as the inferiors have a duty to obey and respect their superiors. Conservatives can not abandon the idea of noblesse oblige.
****
None of this is to say that we should adopt socialist or communist policies where everybody gets free government handouts. That’s just another form of anomic, inhuman mammon-worship. There are other options besides anomic socialist mammon-worship and anomic corporatist mammon-worship. I’m planning another post on economics, hopefully soon.
****
Finally, just to make it clear, there is nothing shameful about not being an aristocrat or priest or with being a yeoman, peasant, or even a slave. While our modern status structure prizes the priestly class (ie. the educated, the academic, the high-IQ, the journalist, the bureaucrat, etc.) as having status above all, primarily because the priestly class seized the status hierarchy for themselves through their control of modern mass communications, this is a corrupt and degenerate status hierarchy. (The aristocratic class is all but dead). The denigration of the admirable yeoman or peasant and the loss of the status that used to be given granted to an honest blue-collar family-men is an evil corruption.
Anybody, who knows their proper position in the hierarchy and faithfully renders their duties should receive the proper honour and status. Such is right and noble. The priestly class should and will pay dearly for their destruction of the natural status hierarchy.
The warriors are rent-seeking as well as they lose conflict after conflict, putting the mission success secondary to their careers and other ambitions. Maybe the business sector is doing mostly well, but sometimes their Politically Correct religious convictions cause them to appoint a remarkably disastrous executive, to the amusement of the non-Politically Correct. Nobody involved is innocent, but the road to salvation has been very pitifully obscured indeed which means that the priests are definitely to blame.
Also, you may find a lot of pay-wall sites have given access to Google News, which means putting the title of the article in quotation marks, then doing the search there.
http://tinyurl.com/jpzo599
Then you may see the entire article at the N.R. site linked from the Google News list of queries:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432876/donald-trump-white-working-class-dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump (Looks like the title of the apparently controversial article was changed, didn’t think Mr Williamson had a pro-white bone in his body, but now look how it reads on the U.R.L. “…White Working Class Dysfunctions, Real Opportunity Needed…”)
This has also worked for me when the other news articles were behind paywalls at other sites.
A.J.P.
This all touches on how blank slate theory hurts the lower classes. The elites, who assume it to be true, assume that if you shut down all the mills and factories, it’s no problem because a 52-year-old father of three who used to be a foreman at a paper mill can just go to college, get a Master’s degree in Computer Science, get to be a part of the startup scene, and become a billionaire by inventing the next Facebook or Snapchat.
You see, if you find yourself unemployed and stuck in a dead-end town with no hope ever since the mill left for Mexico, the answer is real simple: just pack up, move to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and get a job writing at an elite opinion magazine, just like Kevin Williamson did. Easy as pie. If those rubes from flyover country are too stupid to think of that or too shiftless to go do it, well then they deserve what’s coming to them.
Egalitarianism and blank slate – the idea that any given person can fill any given job if a properly accredited school just gives them some classes in how to do it – has, like all of the other ideas in leftism’s toolbox, ended up destroying the very people it was intended to uplift. The elites neither know this (for they know nothing of the genuine working class) nor do they care (for their purpose is to raise their status through moral signaling, not to genuinely help the afflicted and downtrodden.
But you already knew that.
Well done.
A book you may find really helpful is Satoshi Kanazawa’s The Intelligence Paradox. It explains why intelligent people (like Williamson) are frequently so very stupid and why Joe Sixpack is sometimes intuitively smarter. You may not agree with the “different”kinds of intelligence” thesis of the book, but the evolutionary novel aspect is well worth the read.
Absolutely fantastic, FN. Echoes my sentiments precisely on the matter. (More precisely than I would’ve been able to myself.)
Blank slate is wrong. But it comes from a wider view of empiricism. That is if all knowledge is by sense perception then the blank slate follows. This was Locke’s logic. Empiricism has been proved wrong and there are a few known counter examples. This is one of the reasons I prefer Kant as walking a balanced path between empiricism and rationalism.
Yes, and the number of intelligent people who can’t play the game is growing too. There’s just to much vomit inducing nonsense we are supposed to believe even to get hired, and there are only so many people who are going to make it going into business alone.
The injustice done, even just in an HR department when they choose, gender, race, credentialism- rather than IQ and competency- is enough to make our modern system morally bankrupt. It seems to me a lot of people could use the rise of Trump to be making several points to the progressives- like maybe they’d prefer a government that actually followed the Constitution rather than have to be scared of a Trump, or what will ensue if Trump is denied.
But for the most part, it seems like the journalists and academics are doubling down on their class biases.
You are sadly mistaken as is that clueless retarded cuck from the New Zoo Review. Society was not holding up the White Working Class. The White Working Class was what was holding up society. You must live in the echo chamber bubble of the provincial out of touch coasts or ruined inner city to not see that America has completely collapsed. The Dream is Dead, and now the War will come. You see, the White Working Class may not seem as smart to you, but they can fix your plumbing, and get your heater lit and install the wires that charge your cheesy smart phone. Without them the tax base is crumbling, the consumer base is gone and the functional core of civilization has rotted away. When something breaks down in your hipster studio apartment the White guy that knew how to fix it is not going to come anymore. Some dark skinned goof with the skill of a cartoon character is gonna make a big mess, quit and make an empty promise to come back, and you are left high and dry. You may think that college degree in social sciences is good, but when you have no electricity, no hot water, and can’t find anyone who can come make it work again, only then will you realize how dumb you are, for you see flyover country is America, and your silly hipster village is just a useless appendage growing rootless out of it. Without it, you and your life will dry up and blow away. The angry barbarians at your gate will break down the walls and loot those pretty toys you got from the hipster catalog. Ciao.
Don’t forget that the “working class” supported most of the leftist policies that destroyed them (a little bit less so in America than in Europe, but still). And while it’s true that as reactionaries we don’t believe “the people” have agency, that doesn’t change the fact that sans-culottes are probably the greatest enemies of Reaction that there are, so I really don’t understand all this empathy for the proles. They are something to be carefully managed, not someone to feel for.
Shorter Ahote: “Beep boop. Working class drone inefficient. Greater management required.”
The left abandoned the white working class decades ago for ideological impurity (when they realized no great communist revolution was forthcoming) and has since strived by all means to destroy it. It did not support the shitlib insanity, which is why it is currently being replaced by blacks, hispanics, and mohamadans who will.
And complaining about empathy for your fellow man? Your blood and roots? Calling them assets to be managed? These are people you’re talking about, you sperg, not little pixels on your computer screen. Geez, you’re sounding like a Jew talking about goyim.
>Kevin says, “Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster.” But he’s wrong, there was a disaster, but no just one, multiple related disasters all occurring simeltaneously. Ones that would be missed by a rootless cosmopolitan like Williamson. These disasters include the sexual revolution, the long march, feminism, mass immigration, globalization/off-shoring, forced integration, the drug epidemic, mass TV propoganda, governmental growth, and cultural genocide.
There’s no doubt that the white middle and working class has suffered a series of successive and destructive disasters over the past few decades. But, it isn’t clear to me that things could ever have been otherwise. Is it really reasonable to expect a business owner, no matter how racially conscious or patriotic or whatever that he might be, to continue to pay his white workers $30 an hour + generous benefits when he can just lay them off and offshore their jobs to China or India (and, increasingly, to Africa) where he hire Chinese, Indian and African peasants to do the job for $1 a day (or less) with no benefits? Obviously it isn’t, and so we shouldn’t be surprised that it didn’t happen.
Also, is it really so surprising that once white middle and working class males lost their jobs, their wives would leave them? It’s unquestionably the case that feminism and welfare state both did a great deal by way of undermining the nuclear family. At the same time, though, let’s not lose sight of what HBD actually tells us about women and their nature. From the perspective of HBD, it makes perfect sense that these wives would lose respect for their unemployed and underemployed husbands, thereby making it close to impossible for their marriages to last.
As far as ‘forced integration’ is concerned, the only that I’ll say is that it makes sense, at least to me, that once the white middle and working class lost the economic superiority that it once had over the blacks, that the concept of ‘segregation’ would begin to lose its meaning. To put it bluntly, however different poor whites and poor blacks may be, the fact is that they are the same in one crucial respect: that is, they are both poor. And it is obvious that no government is going to care about its poor people to such a degree that it is going to try and maintain a spatial and cultural division between one group of its poor people from another group of its poor people.
The one thing for which the elites can condemned, in the sense that in this particular case it seems as if they were acting with deliberate malice and, through their actions, took a situation that was bad and made it needlessly worse, is mass immigration. In my view, the white middle and working class was inevitably headed for a serious decline in their material standard of living, but the importation of millions and millions of low-quality immigrants was to exacerbate their poverty significantly.
And yet, and yet….even here, our condemnation of the elites must come with a caveat. It makes sense that with rising economic inequality, their would be a corresponding decrease in the political clout of the white middle and working class. In that case, the elites, knowing that they could manipulate the political process at will, and could get whatever they want, irrespective of the resistance of those less politically powerful than they, took advantage of their position, and flooded the country with immigrants, in order to further cheapen the cost of labor and to make changes in the country’s demographics more in line with their interests. Which is to say, the elites did what anyone in their position would do, by taking advantage of their power in such a way that was unfavorable to the interests of those less powerful than they.
I guess my point in writing this is to offer a qualified defense of Williamson. I didn’t like the tone of his article, and there are things that he says which I find objectionable and wrong. But, ultimately, he is write that what has happened to the white middle and working class isn’t something that could have been avoided. On the one hand, they’ve been almost entirely priced out of the labor market, and that this would happen was clear for some time–even Spengler, specifically in his Man and Technics, published way back in 1931, predicted as much. And, on the other hand, they’ve been victimized by an elite that is totally unconcerned, if not hostile, to their interests–which is to say, the elites, finding themselves with complete political control, acted in a way that elites have always acted, with careless contempt for the masses. The white middle and working class is simply going to have to adapt to this new environment. It is going to be difficult and I doubt that they’ll be successful, but they’re going to have to try (and, from the looks of it, it seems as if they aren’t trying, but rather are giving themselves over the meth and heroin). Because, if they don’t try, then they, as Williamson right points out, will really be done for.
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. One of the best things I’ve read in a long time, and I’ve read a lot of great things.
@Calvin
Leave your snark somewhere else.
The left may have abandoned the white “working class,” but it did not abandon the left. They have consistently voted left (not that the so-called “right” is any better, but still). The “poor” today tend to embody the worst sins and excesses of the “Biblical rich.”
They are human beings (despite the fact of, for example, tendency of the British “working class” toward worse-than-animal behavior), however they are going to be the greatest opposition come the Restoration… they like their porn and their welfare programs too much.
I grew up in a totally Wasp area. (White Anglo Saxon Protestant). There was only one other Jewish family within the city. For there was something wholesome and precious about the environment.
Besides that my studies emphasized the idea of private property. So my feelings were reinforced by the Gemara’s approach that property is not owner-less nor does it belong to government nor to the “people.” Property is in the possession of the person that owns it.
The problems of our society do not stem from the failings of the lower classes. They lie right at the feet of the elite.
What if John the potato farmer is a failure? Who is hurt? Himself and his family if he has any, and that’s it. What about Karl the intellectual? If he comes up with a flawed system, then we have hundreds of millions of people killed, maimed, tortured, imprisoned, enslaved, and entire cultures demolished. See the difference?
My beef with the Kevin Williamson’s and their ilk is this: for the most part the auto mechanics, roofers, insurance adjusters, and othe low level people are doing their jobs. It’s the people in charge who are failing. The elite are where all the failed ideas come from. They are the ones in charge of the government and culture. Any of the ideas that we despise did not originate with Joe Schmoe, nor were they implemented at the behest of Joe Schmoe. They come exclusively from the elites and are forced on us.
Democracy is a sham. It is not that the people are dumb and they come up with dumb ideas. Its that the people are followers and are being played by the elite, who force their dumb ideas on us whether we want them or not.
Also, the working class is far less left wing in its voting than the intellectual class. By far.
The welfare state was not voted into existence at the behest of the dependent underclass. At best the underclass represents maybe 10 – 20 % of the population, and tend to vote in much lower numbers than the middle or upper classes. So no, back in the 60’s, when the welfare state was vastly expanded it wasn’t done so from the demands of a tiny minority of gimmedats. It was cooked up by a bunch of elites who thought they were smart enough to play with the traditional incentive structures of our society and get rid of poverty once and for all. They failed and set in motion the further decay and dissolution of our culture.
@Ahote:
Not actually true. The white working class is quite famous for “voting against its own economic interest” for putative social conservatives (the sort that Williamson probably loves), which have almost to a man handed them the shit sandwich that they’re supposed to find so tasty.
As for the rest, of course people tend respond badly to too much freedom, of course people tend to vote high time preference. That’s an argument against too much freedom and against voting, not against people. Elites have, by controlling the narrative and cultivating consent, crafted a world of unfettered freedom which is LESS pathological for them than it is for everyone else.
@Ahote:
Why would anyone carefully manage people they did not “feel” (care) for? Hint: They wouldn’t. Bonus: That is pretty much what this entire conflict is about. The “Right Kind” of White people have been at war (sometimes literally) with the “Wrong Kind” of White people for a very, very, very long time.
I come from what is basically the Scots-Irish working class (both parents were high school dropouts) but worked their way up to the middle class. My father once told me, “What I did then I could not do today.” Had I been born today it’d be a hell of a long climb out of the poverty-stricken working class – thanks to our treasonous government.
@nickbsteves
That’s the case only in the USA (and maybe Canada, I don’t know much about Canada), which admittedly does have a large contingent of somewhat right-wing “working class” people (famously known as rednecks and hillbillies), but even they sing praises to the likes of FDR. In the rest of the world, the “working class” are socialists of the worst sort.
Because that’s the right thing to do.
@Ahote
No.
What the hell have you been smoking? The left has been complaining about the lack of working-class fealty for decades. From “What’s the Matter With Kansas” to the Trumpenkreig, the left has been losing more and more of them.
The greatest opposition to the restoration? Now I know you’re trolling or seriously deluded. The greatest opposition, as it does now, will come from the bloated parasites you call an elite. Working white men form the backbone of Trump’s campaign, while fat whiny bloodsuckers on top do their damnedest to futilely oppose it.
To quote another:
The American white working- and middle-class is a huge part of America’s rise to dominance, the goose that laid the golden egg. These are the middle of the bell curve, the 100-130 IQ folks who get things done. These are the people who build those bridges, turn vast swaths of arid grassland into surplus grain and meat, design and churn out cars and planes (and battleships and tanks when need be), delve into the earth for staggering quantities of minerals and raw materials, and man the ranks of the (formerly) best military organization the world has ever seen.
>What if John the potato farmer is a failure? Who is hurt? Himself and his family if he has any, and that’s it. What about Karl the intellectual? If he comes up with a flawed system, then we have hundreds of millions of people killed, maimed, tortured, imprisoned, enslaved, and entire cultures demolished. See the difference?
But what does any of this have to do with today’s intellectuals? Today’s intellectuals, if you want to call them that, haven’t caused anything to happen the white middle and working class that wasn’t going to happen anyway, as I argued in my first post; the most that we can say is that they made certain negative developments that were inevitable worse by their dissemination of a corrupt ideology, which arguably had the effect of making it more difficult for the white middle and working class to adapt to the new circumstances.
>Not actually true. The white working class is quite famous for “voting against its own economic interest” for putative social conservatives (the sort that Williamson probably loves), which have almost to a man handed them the shit sandwich that they’re supposed to find so tasty.
It depends on what country you’re talking about. In America, the white middle and working classes have always been suspicious of the welfare state, but their problem with it has little to do with the fact that it is welfare, and much more to do with their (accurate) perception that, in America, the welfare state often means wealth transfers from white people to black people. It is clear, for example, that the problem that these whites have always had with Obamacare never had anything to do with the fact that it amounts to government subsidized healthcare, and everything to do with the fact that it was instituted with the palpable, if not explicitly articulated, purpose of giving poor blacks and Hispanics health care, largely at the expense of the white middle and working classes.
Of course, in the until recently more racially homogeneous Europe, the white middle and working classes have consistently supported and voted for welfare.
A++ with free extra credit post, FN.
@Bob Wallace
>My father once told me, “What I did then I could not do today.” Had I been born today it’d be a hell of a long climb out of the poverty-stricken working class – thanks to our treasonous government.
How can this be true? It isn’t the fault of the government that China and India came along and priced overpaid unskilled American workers out of the labor market.
@Calvin
>What the hell have you been smoking? The left has been complaining about the lack of working-class fealty for decades. From “What’s the Matter With Kansas” to the Trumpenkreig, the left has been losing more and more of them.
This argument really doesn’t hold. Trump’s supporters are clearly motivated by Trump’s promises to give them free stuff.
>The American white working- and middle-class is a huge part of America’s rise to dominance, the goose that laid the golden egg. These are the middle of the bell curve, the 100-130 IQ folks who get things done. These are the people who build those bridges, turn vast swaths of arid grassland into surplus grain and meat, design and churn out cars and planes (and battleships and tanks when need be), delve into the earth for staggering quantities of minerals and raw materials, and man the ranks of the (formerly) best military organization the world has ever seen.
First of all, in what world is someone with an IQ above 120 “middle of the road”? It is people with IQs above 120 who make life livable, through their leadership and accomplishments. People below that are dependents and, if they achieve anything, they only do so at the behest the 120+ IQ types.
>This argument really doesn’t hold. Trump’s supporters are clearly motivated by Trump’s promises to give them free stuff.
That’s stupid and so is your first argument.
>How can this be true? It isn’t the fault of the government that China and India came along and priced overpaid unskilled American workers out of the labor market.
What could the government have possibly done about American corporations shipping thousands of factories to slave states in Asia? What could the government have possibly done about 1/4 of Mexico’s population flooding across our border? What could the government have possibly done about fat executives exploiting visa programming to replace white workers with cheap indian slave labor?
Oh wait, quite a lot, if it wasn’t run by and for the elite you so idolize.
>First of all, in what world is someone with an IQ above 120 “middle of the road”? It is people with IQs above 120 who make life livable, through their leadership and accomplishments. People below that are dependents and, if they achieve anything, they only do so at the behest the 120+ IQ types.
Really? Funny, because most of said high-iq types are actively working to destroy the white working man for precious shekels. And yet, things still get done. One might almost be tempted to believe the current elite is a useless mob of fat, cowardly parasites in need of a trip to the guillotine.
@Calvin
Trump is basically a ’90s-era Democrat, and I wouldn’t consider his presidency any kind of restoration (it would be kicking the can, at best – which is for the worse, and at worst we would have the establishment screaming that it was the “evil right-wing dictator’s fault” for the Great Depression 2.0; Hillary is the best president for the right to have in the office when the excrement hit the air conditioning, and even if that doesn’t happen, she’s so inept that she’s bound to make even more people right-wing than Obama did). The best thing that Trump can do is to get cheated out of candidacy by brokered convention, thus undermine the peoples’ faith in democracy (and destroy the Republican Party in the process).
@Irving
>How can this be true? It isn’t the fault of the government that China and India came along and priced overpaid unskilled American workers out of the labor market.
The problem isn’t off-sourcing, nor the cheap imports. Problem is: a) regulations, especially labor regulations which price out the unskilled labor right out of the market; b) too much legal immigration, not to mention illegal immigration – they not only lower the price of labor, but also raise the price of living at the same time; c) inflationary monetary policy, which raises the price of living; d) the welfare state. All this being said, the american “poor” are still richer than what passes for the middle class in the most of world, so all the problems which american “working class” face are mostly cultural and spiritual, rather than economic in nature.
“These are the middle of the bell curve, the 100-130 IQ folks who get things done.”
125-126 is the 95th percentile. That’s the far right of the bell curve – the top five percent, not the middle.
@Calvin
I’m no supporter off mass immigration and, to the extent that elites encourage it, they should be vigorously opposed. That said, it was inevitable that, with the advent of globalization and job automation, the days of low skilled whites getting $30 an hour + benefits to do low skilled work would disappear. It was never reasonable to expect businesses to continue to hire low skill whites at that cost once it was shown that there are actually billions of people world wide who could do the same job just as well for much cheaper. This was all to be expected and there’s no point in trying blame any individual or group for that happening.
I notice that those slobbering over elite rule never mention:
A) {{Who}} is disproportionately represented among the elite.
B) That elite rule is what we have right now. Nobody seriously cares for the man on the street.
C) The elite is pushing the Poz harder than anyone else.
D) That Sweden has both a monarchy and a state church. How’s that working out?
@Irving
And it’s not reasonable to expect that businesses choosing to replace Americans with foreign slave should be permitted to do business in the US without massive tariffs and taxation. And of course, the idea that executives choosing to do such should be permitted to live here is absurd. Let them enjoy the company of their Chinese serfs.
“>My father once told me, “What I did then I could not do today.” Had I been born today it’d be a hell of a long climb out of the poverty-stricken working class – thanks to our treasonous government.
“How can this be true? It isn’t the fault of the government that China and India came along and priced overpaid unskilled American workers out of the labor market.”
My father was a general contractor who built homes for people and you have your head up your ass.
Brilliantly done. This is what I’ve been trying to express to my “libertarian” son, who agrees the majority of those who could/would function and survive in his imagined world of strong individualists would be White, yet cannot bring himself to exclude the racially-alien outliers who might also succeed. This is why I’m willing to lend support (and as you wrote, that is not the same as advocating for hand-holding for life) to the White working class and not the purportedly brilliant Indian doctor or Chinese tech entrepreneur.
As much of an individualist as I am, only now that I’m deprived of that sea in which I swam, a White and functional America, do I realize how much my individualism and success and contentment rested upon that community and those cultural supports that I took for granted. Those cultural institutions which developed over centuries of hard work and war were dismissed and dismantled with malice aforethought. Those voluntary or community organizations which reinforced cultural mores and standards were deliberately perverted by sexual deviancy (Boy Scouts) and racial division (lots of Indian and Chinese Girl Scouts).
Those commenters blaming unions or regulation or working-class greed (Irving and Ahote) are still guilty of precisely what this essay is condemning – defining man solely as homo economicus. As a believer in HBD, of course IQ matters – but an equally vital part of HBD is the culture that a particular race (with its IQ, time preference, and cultural proclivities) creates. Genuine race realism is antithetical to the fallacies of equalitarianism and homo economicus. Individuals matter, but without the supporting community, the vast majority of individuals will be subsumed by the ravening horde.
@Sheila
>Those commenters blaming unions or regulation or working-class greed (Irving and Ahote) are still guilty of precisely what this essay is condemning – defining man solely as homo economicus.
I was not “defining man solely as homo economicus”. Actually, all that I was doing was insisting that we apply the basic knowledge of economics and HBD that all of us have to the significant and still burgeoning number poor whites that we see in America and England primarily, but in other Western countries as well, so that we can properly understand why these people are in the sad situation that they are currently in.
I don’t look down on anyone and I don’t think that, in the eyes of God, I am any better than those who are less intelligent or less well-off than I am. Nevertheless, facts are facts, and one very important fact that we mustn’t lose sight of in this discussion is that “genuine race realism”, when properly understood, does NOT take into the consideration the moral or spiritual worth of individuals; it is, rather, a tool, backed up with abundant and unimpeachable truths derived from evolutionary biology and psychology, that we use, among other things, and perhaps most importantly, to explain the socioeconomic outcomes of different individuals and groups.
I notice that it is rare for commenters on blogs such as these to intervene when discussion is taking place concerning the various and undeniable failings of (for example) the black race to say, “Well, look, HBD isn’t everything; yeah, their IQs are low, but let’s not be too hard on them, it is culture that is important after all, etc., etc.”. I suggest that we keep up the same, detached perspective when we talk about poor whites.
Antidem “can just go to college, get a Master’s degree in Computer Science, get to be a part of the startup scene, and become a billionaire by inventing the next Facebook”
Zuckberg stole the idea for facebook from a classmate. I don’t think any of them have come up with new ideas since Martin Luther wrote a book about all the financial scams associated with (((them))) in the 1500’s. Think about it high freq trading is no different than hiring falconers to kill other peoples messenger pigeons, & around 2000 when they laid so much fiber optic cable that the US used less than 5% capacity, only to have telecoms go bankrupt and bought up by the same group for pennies on the dollar is no different from how they took over banking.
Irving ” To put it bluntly, however different poor whites and poor blacks may be, the fact is that they are the same in one crucial respect”
The richest blacks from families earning over $200,000 /year have an average SAT score of 981, just 3 points higher than the poorest whites from families earning less than $20,000 a year. That’s how strong affirmative action is. There are illegal aliens cheating the child tax credit to the tune of $29k a year using ITIN numbers and moving before affirmative action govt workers can look for the money back.
Irving, don’t you understand that what the underclass, both black and white, need is precisely the social structure that the original post talks about? The elites deliberately destroyed that social structure: with divorce, sexual revolution, single parenthood glorified, incentive destroying welfare handouts, shipping jobs overseas (benefits the tiny elite minority only), and allowing our nation to be overrun with illegals who lower the prevailing wages.
I personally know people who could not find jobs due to illegal immigrants. Blaming some dude with a 95 IQ who fixes cars who now cannot find a decent job due to the flood of immigrants for his predicament is coldhearted. It’s not his fault that the country is flooded with these people and no, he did not vote for that.
I would like to propose a new word for “elites,” and that is SkumLord, which I think is a more apt description.
Democracy is a sham. Nothing, and I mean nothing, happens because “the people voted for it.” What we get is what the SkumLords want us to have. If they manage to make it appear as if a majority of people actually support that policy then they’ve got a good cover, and if not, they force it through one way or another. The SkumLords are responsible for our predicament in the west, and not “the people.”
If you don’t like one product, you can try a different one. We need to swap out our destructive and dysfunctional SkumLords, for a new elite. Hence, NrX.
Irving “the fact that it amounts to government subsidized healthcare, and everything to do with the fact that it was instituted with the palpable, if not explicitly articulated, purpose of giving poor blacks and Hispanics health care, largely at the expense of the white middle and working classes”
Change that to taking from old Asians/whites and giving to blacks/illegals. Asians and whites with no family histories where better off with a catastrophic plan until they hit 50 or had kids. After that they would be shortly able to get on medicare. Blacks/mestizos have a lot more need for care younger and don’t live as long. Mestizos will bring their anchor baby into an ER for diaper rash, blacks with full sickle cell have about 2 weeks worth of SC crisis a year.
“It isn’t the fault of the government that China and India came along and priced overpaid unskilled American workers out of the labor market.”
When the ((()))) did the scam i mentioned above of laying excessive fiber optic cable, going bankrupt, then buying up for pennies/dollar, that enabled india to be tech support and got some of them trained to the level that 5 could do the job of a weak skilled white. The costs of immigrants are socialized. With the HIV travel ban lowered that gives the possibility of them eating $2,000-5000 of just meds a month, on top of other benefits they eat up. Switzerland has a pay as you go system and a refusegee family of 8 costs their taxpayers around $60,000 a month. I can guarantee we have non Asian minority families costing us more but there are laws preventing reveling it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2758055/Outraged-Swiss-village-1-000-residents-forced-raise-taxes-African-refugee-mother-seven-moves-costs-40-000-month-benefits.html
Irving,
I’m not arguing HBD isn’t everything; I’m arguing IQ isn’t everything, and that HBD also accounts for such things as time preference, creativity, curiosity, etc., which together produce a particular group of genetically-related people’s culture. Specifically, working-class and moderate IQ Whites were generally able to function and succeed within the societal structures the initial post noted (church, social respect for doing an honest day’s work, voluntary and charitable organizations, etc.). Sometimes they’d drink too much, or their kids might get wild, or an illegitimate child was conceived, but on the whole they followed the rules society set down, and which ensured a certain amount of personal success and social stability. They finished school, they worked hard, they married and stayed married, and they did their best to ensure their children did the same or better.
In contrast, even when those social structures and institutions were in full-force, the vast majority of Negroes could not and did not abide by the social mores, and they did not succeed – in SPITE of all the support that existed (and it did, in numerous ways, despite “racisim” and Jim Crow). Further, those social and cultural and governmental institutions were created by and for White people and their particular genetic gifts courtesy of HBD. Neither Negroes nor Mestizos have created such structures or societies on their own, and they’ve proven unable/unwilling to take advantage of them in White societies. It’s one thing for a farm-kid from a tight-knit family to have bonds and responsibilities that limit him seeking other venues and employment. It’s another for the outlier who does have the ability and IQ to consciously and deliberately turn his back on all opportunities for educational or cultural or social advancement, because he’s afraid to leave la familia or they feel he’d be alienated from them if he got too much education. My husband was an army brat and spent a good deal of his youth in El Paso, and he saw that over and over again among his Mestizo classmates. In contrast, most of the Whites left for other opportunities, and even some of the Negroes did.
I disagree about keeping a “detached perspective” when discussing poor Whites because I’m not merely a believer in HBD; I’m also an ethno-nationalist, and the overall fate of White people and society matters to me. I identify with them racially as my people, and the society I want to live in is a functional, White society of mixed IQ people along the normal distribution of the White bell curve. Please note I do acknowledge that there will always be some at the far left end of that curve who cannot function without constant assistance, and other than charity, I’m at a loss as to how they are to survive (absent government assistance which requires forced income confiscation from others to which I am adamantly opposed). I also acknowledge that the past few generations have seen strongly dysgenic trends due to all the deliberate destruction of social supports listed earlier.
Some (my son for now, for example), claim they’d prefer to live in a much smaller group of solely high-IQ, high independence individuals, who would be overwhelmingly but not exclusively White. I attribute that to his youth and extraordinarily high IQ, and think further wisdom will come with time. HBD matters, but to limit HBD to IQ or ability while excluding race is, in my opinion, foolish and ultimately destructive of civilization.
>That Sweden has both a monarchy and a state church. How’s that working out?
So is and does England. But, they’re not real monarchies (crown is void of any power, and has merely a ceremonial role), indeed, they’re more democratic than the USA. Their churches parrot the official state religion, which is progressivism.
>Those commenters blaming unions or regulation or working-class greed (Irving and Ahote) are still guilty of precisely what this essay is condemning – defining man solely as homo economicus.
I was just saying what causes unemployment (cheap imports and automation are net creators of jobs, not net destroyers). Did I not say:
All this being said, the american “poor” are still richer than what passes for the middle class in the most of world, so all the problems which american “working class” face are mostly cultural and spiritual, rather than economic in nature.
?
People in the past were incomprehensibly poor compared to modern standards, and especially American standards, and yet they lived the most excellent lives. Giving everyone a million bucks wouldn’t solve the problem, because their problem isn’t poverty (in any meaningful sense).
Sheila @ March 19, 2016 at 4:22 pm:
“As much of an individualist as I am, only now that I’m deprived of that sea in which I swam, a White and functional America, do I realize how much my individualism and success and contentment rested upon that community and those cultural supports that I took for granted. Those cultural institutions which developed over centuries of hard work and war were dismissed and dismantled with malice aforethought.”
Quoted for truth.
The only problem I have with this fine post is that it implies Kevin Williamson is high IQ. I see no sign of that. He strikes me as just a guy who got some connections and was willing to write cuck jabber for the kind of corporate elites that donate to the National Review.
There’s nothing special, interesting, or insightful about his writing. He’s not clever. He didn’t go to college. No degree. His books didn’t sell. He just churns out word salad for cuckservatism.
No, the real motivation for his screed against the white working class is that working class is who HE IS, and he’s afraid if the gravy train of donors cuts off the National Review, he’ll have to go back to working class roots and find a real job for the first time in his life.
Some of you here run businesses…. would you hire Kevin Williamson for anything? What could he possibly be useful for?
(If he was so high I.Q., wouldn’t he work a profitable job? The National Review has lost hundreds of millions over its lifetime, it has never turned a profit, it exists by the grace of wealthy donors. If Kevin Williamson was so smart, he’d be industrious, rather than a parasite writing third-rate propoganda.)
Although the old Shitlord aristocratic class was destroyed by WWI,WWII, Great Depression, taxes, demoralization, exhaustion (see any Ivy’s WWI monument, or worse yet, the casualty rolls from Oxford or Cambridge), there was one family who survived. Although he’s gauche, Donald Trump did descend from landed aristocrats (cheezy real estate developers in Queens NY). The Trumps are the last great American family and a reminder of the patriotic landed aristocrats of Old. These Old families, in the Anglo-Saxon/Germanic/Polish world, were historically high IQ, but had decent relations with their peasantry and tenants. The Church supported the aristocratic class, and vice versa. The destruction of this ancient system lies at the root of the problem.
This is a good post. It’s similar, in some ways, to the argument Weeden and Kurzban make in The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: voters search for social structures that support their own idealized preferences, knowing that they have limited self-control. They contrast Harvard grads (overwhelmingly liberal, because meritocratic systems with few structures of inherited identity suit them) with working class whites who (at least in their data set) endorse socially conservative policies because they are searching for greater constraint that will enable them to live out the lives they’re aspiring to, even if it is undercut by the temptations and anomie of the world as it exists.
On the other hand, “rootedness” was more-or-less the opposite of the American condition for most of the country’s history; Americans are less likely to move now than at almost any previous time, and adults are more likely to live close to where their parents live, for example. Part of this may be a compensation for the deterioration of other social supports, but it’s also easy to overestimate the speed of change now versus, say, the early 20th Century, when you also had dramatic technological change, huge movements of population, and real instability in ordinary life, with huge numbers leaving the farm for the city and men leaving the family to travel great distances for work. The 50s and early 60s were a very unusual time.
How is this different from Charles Murray’s thesis in Coming Apart?
Also, if we create an advanced society that almost by definition necessitates an environment that (exclusively?) creates rewards for discipline, isn’t it a bit too paternalistic to halt progress so that the childish among us can resist the temptation to self-destruct?
I’ve saved this because it’s such a concise explanation of the rot in our society. Thanks. Very well done.
I do not even know how I finished up right here, but I assumed this post was good.
I don’t recognise who you’re however definitely you are going to a famous blogger if you happen to aren’t already.
Cheers!