GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Feminist critiques of liberalism (like, e.g., Carole Pateman’s) hit on a crucial point: by pointing out that the presumed or iconic liberal subject was the bourgeois male property owner, with no wife and children or, for that matter, no parents or previous childhood, to shape his entry into the marketplace, such critiques revealed liberalism’s horror of biology. Indeed, the feminist critique can easily be taken in directions that would make feminists themselves extremely distraught (thereby revealing their own liberalism): the findings of the “manosphere,” which has undertaken a systematic, auto-didactic (because the history of Western social and political thought offers about zero help here, and contemporary educational institutions offer far less except, perhaps, informally) study of sexual relations and hierarchies, shatter the assumptions of equality and rationality undergirding liberalism and feminism alike. These critiques of liberalism can easily forget that liberalism didn’t address such issues because there was no need to, as such essentially tribal relations were still visible and, in fact, constituted the tacit background out of which liberalism sought to carve a new space. But the critique becomes even more important once we consider that, at a certain point (already in the Enlightenment, but accelerating dramatically from the early 20th century on) liberalism decided not just to erect a free system of exchange over the more primitive quasi-tribalist relations but undertook to extirpate those relations altogether and install the liberal program at all sites, public and private. At that point, liberalism’s distancing of itself from biology becomes an assault on biology.

The acceleration of liberalism’s biophobia is certainly in large part due to the biopolitics of Nazism, and the consequent recoil against all attempts to bring racial differences into politics. Liberalism’s autoimmune response to the catastrophic eruption of biological differences that had been assumed marginalized was to transform itself into a self-enclosed, self-reproducing and viral system of rights that automatically excludes any claim tainted by the biological—and, like any good autoimmune system, attacks the carriers of such claims. The anathematization of nationalism and populism in liberal thinking is an expression of this autoimmune response: nationalism is not quite as deeply seeped in biology as race and sex, but there is always a racial component and sexual politics to nationalisms; while populism, likewise, reaches into that amorphous region where emotions, impulses, mimetic contagion, taunts, unspoken commonalities, and so on cannot be kept from contaminating the approved discourse of “policy,” “principles,” “accountability,” and so on.

Once the biological is let into politics, the liberal (and post/ultra-liberal, e.g., feminist) fears, there is no telling where it will end. The rule of law must be kept free from, while somehow authoritatively regulating, biological matters. The American constitution limits the “executive branch” to certain powers, and only those powers—but what if some surge of nationalism and/or populism demands an override of those limitations? That surge will almost certainly prove stronger than the categorical imperative embedded in the Constitutional provision, and why should nationalism respect such limitations—why should the question, “is it Constitutional” out-rank the question, “what’s good for the American people”? Also, biology has been overriding legality for a century already, as the government has made it its business to manage the care of the elderly, the raising of children, marital relations, food and medicine and now all of health care along with the micro-managing of the most intimate of sexual relations. Constitutionalism has apparently found no way—or shown no desire—to resist those developments. So, maybe the problem is liberalism.

While we can find no self-limiting principle in the victimary (or on the left more generally), though, we certainly can with nationalism. The nation itself, and its relations with and differences from other nations is the first such principle. Even the most horrific form of nationalism imagined by liberals, the physical expulsion of unwanted (less “national”) populations, would confront the plurality of the world as a limitation: let’s say some American nationalist of leftist nightmares decided to expel the Jews, the Mexicans, the blacks, or even the leftists themselves. Where to? Forcing such groups to simply leave and become refugees would create an enormous burden, first of all on neighboring countries, and thereby poison crucial relations. (Of course, expelling Mexican citizens who are in the US illegally would be a different matter—in that case, indeed, it is the Mexican government and nation that has acted unjustly by encouraging illegal migration, even while many Americans are, of course, complicit.) Well, maybe that leaves no choice but genocide, one might say—far easier said than done, though, without the context of a hot civil war or a policy of conquest that makes possible the allotment of faraway territories for carrying out such atrocities.

Furthermore, nationalism transcends while incorporating the tribal. At the very least, nationalism entails the free movement of all nationals through the national territory, and the free adoption of any profession by all. In other words, nationalism presupposes at least a minimal market, and that that market is protected from the imperatives of tribal honor. Insofar as the nation remains, at least to some extent, a nation of tribes, but also of cities, towns and neighborhoods, various forms of local patriotisms will ensure resistance to premature or abusive attempts to establish, preserve or restore national unity from some national center. Of course, such attempts will be made, and sometimes they will succeed, and sometimes to the benefit of the nation as a whole. (I don’t think many Frenchmen and women would prefer [or could even imagine] a France in which French was the language of the educated in the capital, with the rest of the country speaking a few dozen or so different language, even while acknowledging the cultural loss in the “expropriation” of the speakers of those languages.) But the resistance will still ensure that national ‘incorporation” is conducted in such a way as to allow the margins to adopt and inflect in their own ways national imperatives. Anomalies will always remain, though, and it’s good that they do. Nations benefit from a bit of irritation, a touch of idiosyncrasy.

Finally, every nation will have its professions, or its disciplines, and will want to take pride in those disciplines. Every real nation, and, therefore, every real nationalism, is civilized, that is. The nationalism of the nations lawyers, journalists (or bloggers), and academics (or bloggers), doctors, etc., can, of course, allow them to be swept up in pathological nationalist contagions, and lend their expertise and influence to shameful deeds. (One consequence of embracing nationalism is accepting that politics cannot be deployed so as to abolish human sinfulness—there is no ultimate answer to “what about…?” type questions.) But they (as can non-experts proud of the disciplines) can also insist that in this nation, among this people, the rule of law, professional standards, and dissemination of the truth will prevail, even in the face of the mob. And this would include, of course, for Americans, an insistence on Constitutional primacy (and the entire system of legal thinking and institutions it entails), insofar as the Constitution has become far more than a legal code, having worked its norms and its language into American discourse and culture at all levels. But American nationalism cannot wait for a constitutional “restoration” before it addresses, in some necessarily rough ways, the biopolitics of immigration in particular. Indeed, a nationalist restoration (evidence of which would be that more than one presidential candidate would be simply taking for granted in casual utterances that America should be for Americans) is a precondition for a constitutionalism that would be something other than a Trojan Horse for a transnational progressive (“human rights”) legal regime. To take a concept from the cultural left, that restoration would require the “circulation” of nationalist “bodies”: nationalist masculinities and femininities, ethnicized and maybe even racialized nationalisms, popular and elite nationalisms, and so on. The US has some of this—but we had a lot more of it 30 years ago, and even more 60 years ago—and such overt expressions of American pride and uncritical belonging and celebration have been increasingly seen as shameful. It is the attempts to make those expressions shameful that should become shameful.

I was very glad to see Kevin Williamson’s article, “The Buchanan Boys,” in today’s NRO. At last, we are getting engaged: the “mainstream” right, represented most prominently by National Review, is being compelled to recognize the alt-right—recognize, at least, in the sense of acknowledging they exist and that their “numbers aren’t trivial.” Williamson has noticed the enthusiasm of white nationalists for Trump’s campaign, and his observation that this attachment to Trump represents a continuation of the white working class resentment first advanced by Patrick Buchanan’s campaigns of the 90s is a real and important insight. And Williamson raises some crucial questions about the “economic nationalism” of Trump and those hoping he will be the vehicle of their movement: here, Williamson is on familiar ground, and within his sphere of expertise, and I certainly agree that attempts to rejigger trade agreements with the rest of the world so as to protect the jobs of the American working class are likely to backfire. Indeed, I doubt that anyone has a very clear idea of how to do something like that. Still, if we are just free traders, why do we have trade deals at all? Why not just let American consumers and businesses buy and sell from and to whomever they like? Well, one might say that other countries won’t reciprocate—but, according to free trade orthodoxy, they’re just hurting themselves, and should be left to their own devices. But we do enter these enormously complex agreements, negotiated with dozens of countries over many years, so those negotiating in our name must be trying to get something out of it—what? Is it so unreasonable to assume that they have the interests of global corporations, along with the pet environmental and immigration (among other) concerns of the participating politicians, or even, perhaps, abstractions like “the stability of the global market” uppermost in their mind, rather than the living standards of American workers? Rather than adopting the libertarian utopianism of eschewing such agreements altogether, why not impose the interests of American wage earners upon them, and figure out the details as we go? Williamson doesn’t seem interested in this line of thought.

Williamson also has a point, albeit a more tenuous one, when he asserts that

The Buchanan boys are economically and socially frustrated white men who wish to be economically supported by the federal government without enduring the stigma of welfare dependency.

And

It is an odd line of thinking: If the government levies a tax on your neighbors in order to fund an earned-income tax credit for your family, then you’re a welfare queen; if the government levies a tax on businesses that is passed on to your neighbors in order to subsidize your earned income through higher prices, then that’s economic nationalism.

It is true that, by definition, adopting economic policies so as to benefit a particular group (in this case, white working class men), is, in effect, a way of redistributing resources to that group, and you could call that a “subsidy.” Of course, as Williamson must realize, the presumed alternative of subsidizing no one is not exactly on the horizon—indeed, Williamson, who has been writing of late of the great condition conservatism is in, would be hard pressed to identify any progress conservatives in power have made to the de-subsidization of the American political economy. On the simplest, or at least most cynical, level, then, why shouldn’t white male wage earners get cut in on the scam? But by distinguishing between the earned income tax credit and the higher prices brought about by protectionism, Williamson skews the question: the earned income tax credit, which also goes to wage earners, has not to my knowledge, been on the economic nationalist hit list. Williamson wants to keep the discussion on secure “free trade” grounds, which precludes establishing criteria for more or less preferable “subsidies.” Are there good grounds, if we are already “distorting” the economy, for distorting it in favor of white male wage earners, compared to some of the ways it is presently distorted? Nothing from Williamson on this question.

Most symptomatic, though, is Williamson’s evident desire to skirt the real question regarding the “Buchanan Boys,’ and Trump, their current “celebrity mascot”: immigration. According to Williamson, the economic benefits of immigration are mixed and unclear; and he acknowledges that immigration is not only an economic issue. And that’s pretty much it. But there has been a real bait and switch in that case, because the only objective correlative to Williamson’s name calling, explicit and implicit (jackboots are evoked), lies in the immigration question. You don’t call people Nazis because they want tariffs on kids’ toys made in China; you call them Nazis because they want to bust into houses in the dark of the night and drag out cute little brown kids. So, what is Williamson’s view of, for example, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which overturned the traditional preference given to white and European immigrants—i.e., those immigrants most like the people already living in the country? Is it racist to want a country that maintains its current demographic proportions? (And if it is, should we care? What are the consequences of making not being racist the prime directive?) Can he propose a way of discussing this without overt engagement with the question of ethnic differences? Can he propose such an engagement that won’t bring a hailstorm of denunciation from the Left (and many on the supposed Right)? Would he like, then, for immigration restrictionists to capitulate or to stand firm and, even, answer insult with insult, tribal banner with tribal banner? Or is the issue not even worth discussing—as seems to be the case, for Williamson, given his silence on these questions.

Williamson had a chance here to engage with some of the ideas informing the “white nationalists” and “immigration reform patriots”—and the thinkers, people like Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire, James Kilpatrick and others who publish regularly on the VDare site; or, someone like Sam Francis, who has been referenced quite often lately in discussions on the alt-right—or, for that matter, the bogeyman informing his entire diatribe, Pat Buchanan himself. Well, he will have other chances—perhaps, eventually, he will have no choice (it sounds to me like he wishes he had a choice not to write this article). This is really not a bad way to get started.

The only real fight against the victimary entails dismantling the entire “non-discrimination” regime put in place after World War 2—it means giving up on, and accepting the reversal of, the abolition of what Eric Gans refers to as “ascriptive differences”—which may not be restored in de jure form by the state, but will be restored in in sufficiently explicit de facto form so as to acquire state sanction (the state won’t discriminate, but it won’t stop anyone else from doing it). In the end, you can never really stop ascribing differences—every attempt just leaves more residue of those differences, and reassembles the resentments in new forms. We will have to learn to live in a world where people judge each other based on race, nationality, sexuality, religion and so on—that is, if we want a human world at all. There is nothing new in any of that to any one who reads my posts on this blog. Nor is there anything new in my claim, logically derived from the preceding, but also evident in those who actually challenge the SJWs and PC in sustained ways, that these developments will make expressions of resentment towards Jews respectable and common. Anti-antisemitism is the original PC, and cannot survive the overthrow of the victimocracy.

Against that background, I’d like to explore a bit further something I’ve mentioned a few times—the form this resentment towards Jews will most likely (is already starting to) take. The charge is as follows: Western, which is really to say, by now, American, Jews have established their identity through a constitutive hypocrisy: while defending ethnic homogeneity for Israel, they promote mass immigration and all manner of “diversity” initiatives at home. Pushed even further, we get the following formulation: the Jews are the only nationality whose national integrity and solidarity is dialectically tied up with their contribution to the dissolution of the national identities of others. But, as indictment unfolds, it turns out, given that the Jews have been pursuing this national interest (really, more of a kind of cultural, even biological, imperative) so successfully for so long that it is now their white, Western victims who live a marginalized, diasporic existence. And, as we follow the call to resistance against the spirit of Judaism to its logical conclusion, we find the marginalized whites resorting to the same disintegrative, “critical” strategies that worked so well for the Jews (dissecting texts for hidden motives, depth psychology, etc.). The logical conclusion doesn’t always come, but we can see parts of this argument all throughout the “alternative” or “dissident” right (while many writers of the alt-right do not pursue this logic at all). Perhaps the best (in the sense of most exemplary and most sophisticated) representative of this antisemitic resentment is Kevin MacDonald, whose writing is widely available on the internet, and persistently pursues this logic of the Jews are the opposite of what they say they are which is what we really are even though we let the Jews convince us that we really are what they really are.

The mimetic structure of this resentment is very obvious—the Jews are both model and rival, admired and hated. Equal energy is put into debunking Jewish claims to a higher morality and more universal ethics as to asserting a right to precisely the kind of particularist ethic that would enable us to see the Jews for who they are and act accordingly. Western civilization, in fact, has achieved the kind of objectivity and sympathy for others that Jews claim but have in fact always rejected; while unfortunately, this Western generosity has made whites easy prey for the Jews (which must mean that the only salvation for whites is to practice the same kind of hypocrisy of which the Jew stands accused: universalism in theory, unwavering ethnic solidarity in practice—with the false universalism serving the ethnic particularism). The symmetry is striking.

Now, part of the problem here is that some of this resentment is well-founded. The antisemitic analysis overlaps considerably with Yuri Slezkine’s distinction between the “Apollonian” European nations and the “Mercurian” Jews (of course, Slezkine himself has been accused of antisemitism—indeed, how far is Apollonian/Mercurian from Aryan/Jew?). Israel is, indeed, an ethnically based nation (even if the reality is more complex, insofar as Israeli Jews in fact are comprised of many ethnicities), which will not be letting in Muslim refugees, or allowing for mass (or pretty much any) immigration of non-Jews. And American Jews, in both their corporate forms (the major Jewish organizations) and public opinion has been vociferously pro-immigration, including immigration from the non-Western world, for many decades—and, much of the impulse for this agitation has, in fact, been resentment towards the white, European homogeneity of the American population, and the assumption that Jews would be safer (and more powerful?) in a more ethnically diverse society. This is true to this day, as I am reliably informed by the Jewish media that I consume that, of course, as a Jew, I must be enthusiastically in favor of a continual flow of Syrian refugees and find Donald Trump’s proposals to the contrary utterly reprehensible. Even conservative Jews barely dissent, while bleating about “vetting.” The days when one could silence discussion of this issue through accusations of antisemitism are rapidly coming to a close—the more slowing down (at the very least) immigration, and ending illegal immigration, comes to be seen as an existential issue by the American “core,” or the “historic American nation,” the more likely a reckoning, as the aware and enraged will want to know where everyone has stood on the question of the demographic warfare carried out by the globalist elite.

But American Jewish support for increased Muslim immigration is a sign of a Jewish genius for collective suicide, rather than domination or destruction—predictions are usually off, but what can be more certain than that a critical mass of Muslims in America will make life untenable for the Jews, just as has been the case in Europe? This interferes with the antisemitic narrative. Meanwhile, Israel is heading in a diametrically opposed direction to that of Europe and the US—towards greater ethnic solidarity, and lesser willingness to make concessions that put their citizens’ lives at risk. This allows us to respond to charges of Jewish hypocrisy with the following query: do you genuinely want to adopt Israel as a model to emulate (with the consequence that you’d be ready to endorse their approach to the Palestinians), or do you prefer to hold onto your (culture of) critique? In other words, let’s cut the Gordian Knot—what Israel is doing is right (and those, in fact increasingly few, American Jews supporting them unequivocally are also right), while American Jewish support for immigration is terribly wrong—the most generous reading is that it’s a kind of PTSD from presumed American indifference to Holocaust refugees, but in that case it is still pathological. If you are first and foremost an antisemite—if antisemitism is your passion, your addiction—then you want to keep the Gordian Knot tied up, and you will end up with ridiculous pseudo-alliances with the Iranians, the Palestinians, and a host of other anti-Western forces (and with the left, which is already in an odd alliance with the Islamists), and forced to ignore or explain away pretty much everything they say about you as well. If, on the other hand, it is really preserving the American nation that concerns you, and your resentment of the Jews derives from that concern, then you will prefer to split off the Zionists from the immigrationists—and, in that case, you might find some Jews willing to add their voices to that critique of “hypocrisy,” and support Israel precisely by encouraging the US to take it as a model. (This raises a whole new kind of question for American nationalism—can Jewish Americans care more about Israel than other countries—would that not give them an interest in encouraging an “entangling alliance”? Of course, it doesn’t end there—can Irish Americans care about Ireland, Ukrainian Americans about the Ukraine, etc.? The anomalies of American nationalism will have to be reckoned with—but are not the Jews the most anomalous ones of all?)

For Jews, meanwhile, this means engaging what seems to be the permanent (if usually non-violent) Jewish civil war (something else the antisemitic narrative misses). This civil war now takes the form of Zionism vs. secular universalism—the Israelis are culling their secular universalists (and, not coincidentally, realigning Israel’s national “core” around religious Zionism,), just as American Jewry is (more slowly and hesitantly) culling its Zionists. What will the goyim think? It’s a real question, and there is a long history of the denunciation and expulsion of Jewish “traitors” who betrayed, whether under duress, due to venality, or out of conviction the secrets of the “tribe” to a hostile world—with Spinoza being the most famous example. In the connected contemporary world, this is a regular phenomenon, with the latest example being the Israeli leftist group “Breaking the Silence” slandering the IDF, and the Israeli government now putting in place a law to expose the foreign funding of such groups (and undercover Israeli amateur journalists exposing these groups’ dirty secrets and American leftist Jewish publications complaining about all this…) It’s all a kind of hostage taking, but rendered non-violent and symbolic by being played out in front of the world. The tendency, as seems to be the case everywhere these days, is towards exposure and revelation, towards speaking your mind when others urge you to mind your speech. Towards apocalypse, in other words. Let’s create a mode of rivalry whereby we treat our opponents and enemies as models for how to expose them, and through them, us as well, for what we all really are. Eventually, we’ll have to settle things and arrive at a new dispensation, but for now there’s too much that’s volcanically active but still hidden by our anti-discrimination prohibitionist regime. We need to see what’s there. Whoever can find a way to shed light on the resentments while minimizing action on them will save the day.

The Jews are always the most anomalous of the many anomalies of the nation; as the poststructuralists have taught us, though, the anomalous is the other that is constitutive of the same. The anomalous is normal—or, to put it in simpler terms, any identity involves an exchange (with debts and unrequited gifts), which makes it at least a duodentity. If the Jews didn’t exist, they would invent themselves. The most important kind of civilizational discipline is resisting the urge to eliminate anomalies. It’s often necessary to bracket them, though, or distill them into oppositions—in order to reconstitute and embody them again. One reason to support a return to nationalism is that nationalism embodies an acceptance of plurality, imperfection and uncertainty, and a rejection of utopian efforts to unite the world and end conflict forever, whether through some universal free trade regime or a global human rights regime. But nationalism itself doesn’t necessarily know this, caught up as it is with managing the boundary between its internal rivalries and its own rivalries with other nations—indeed, the nationalist is likely to view any disruption of this boundary with suspicion, as if an internal rivalry has been skewed unfairly by the infiltration by someone beyond the border. The Jews have obviously always been best suited for this role, while anyone could be the Jew in this sense. The most important role for Jews today in sustaining and elevating civilizational discipline is not to harp on each and every offense (descrying and decrying antisemitism everywhere). Rather, by taking literally the alt-right’s half sarcastic insistence that the West take Israel as a model, Jews should use that model, dispassionately, to delineate and itemize in increasingly detailed ways all the fault and boundary lines separating and associating civilization and barbarism/savagery today. Everything the Israelis are coming to learn they must do to preserve their island of civilization in a sea of barbarism becoming savagery is what the rest of the West that is determined to remain the West will eventually learn they have to do. Then, whoever overly resents that Jewish firstness will be writing their own suicide note.

Is there a single political theory, ancient or modern, that has anything useful to say about immigration? Probably, but I don’t know of it. I suppose it’s because the United States (and then the other Anglo settler colonies) was the first social order in which immigration plays such an important role. Surely there were arguments in the 1840s about (then mostly Irish and German) immigration; and, again, from 1880-1910 regarding the far larger (Italian, Jewish, Slavic) immigration; surely, someone has gathered the records of these debates, someone has written a scholarly monograph on the arguments made for and against over these periods—again, though, if so, I’ve never heard of it. This historical forgetting (and I don’t think it’s just me, otherwise we’d see both pro and anti-immigration arguments invoking the various so-and-sos who said x, y or z in 1885, or 1905, etc.) shows in the pathetic state of the ongoing debate over immigration. But it is at least easy enough to grasp a kind of intuitive, common sense anti-immigration argument: immigrants will work cheaper, undercutting wages, they will be from unfamiliar cultures, perhaps lacking the respect for rights, freedom and individual autonomy we value, they may become more like us but, then again, they may not. From a sheer risk assessment or immunological standpoint, it seems prudent to just keep immigration to a minimum.

But what is the pro-immigration argument? I’m going to construct one here, but I have to confess I can’t remember ever seeing one—the pro-immigrationists seem to have nothing to offer but platitudes about the US being an “immigrant” nation and some of the franker libertarians will assert that we benefit at least from adult immigrants since some other country has paid for their education, from which we get the benefit. But that’s not much—the pro-immigration position seems to rely completely on two things: first, a continual demonization of those skeptical of or opposed to immigration; second, a weird kind of emotional blackmail that goes something like this: if you, the immigration restrictionist, had had your preferred policies enacted in the year xxxx, when your (great) (great) grandfather and mother were preparing to come here, you’d be stuck in some God-forsaken hellhole right now. Now, you don’t want to leave yourself there, do you? For anyone other than a descendant of pre-Revolutionary Americans, there’s something convincing in this argument (if we could call it that)—it’s a call to keep faith with the past, to “pay it forward” by having the kind of faith in future immigrants that someone else must have had in your ancestors. But, insofar as keeping that faith comes into conflict with keeping faith with your own descendants, and leaving them a country at least as good as the one left to you, the latter faith must prevail. Which brings us back to the need for some argument in favor of immigration.

The arguments from the standpoint of business are clear enough—a vast reservoir of cheap labor enables, under some economic conditions, economic growth far greater than would otherwise be possible, and this, in turn, again, under certain conditions, benefits the native population, who can move up to less labor intensive jobs and benefit from cheap and readily available consumer goods. The 19th and early 20th century waves of immigration may have met these conditions (although I have to say I don’t really know—has anyone argued that the American economy would have grown faster or “better” in some sense without all that immigration?), and the cultural differences brought by the Eastern and Southern European immigrants may not have been that disruptive to American traditions (although here, as well, there is probably a good argument to be made to effect that these immigrants brought enough socialism and anarchism with them to tilt the US to the gargantuan state we now have—who voted for FDR, after all?). But today’s (mostly Mexican but also, increasingly, Muslim) immigrants aren’t rushing into major growth industries that will enhance our position as an economic superpower, are they?

There is one more argument in favor of immigration that I can think of, one that I don’t remember having seen made, but that must have been in people’s minds, especially around the turn of the 20th century. This is an imperial argument—if you, a second rank power who wants to play in the big game at a time when that game is getting very big indeed, and is drawing in other powers that were second rank not too long ago (Germany and Japan), wouldn’t a good way of doing so be to increase your own population far more rapidly than could be done through natural increase? And, at the same time, you poach from your competitors some of their most energetic and future oriented people. It may be the case that the US could never have won WWII (much less become the post-War leader of the “Free World”) without those tens of millions of immigrants (but perhaps they wouldn’t have had to fight it?—that is, we’d have to imagine an alternative history to assess these hypotheses). But it’s interesting that all of these pro-immigrant arguments come from the standpoint of the elites—the tycoons, the corporations, the politicians (and their academic and journalistic hanger-ons) who want a globe-spanning empire. (Has there ever been a majority of the American people in favor of immigration? We probably can’t answer that question but there are good reasons to doubt it—the restrictionist arguments all seem to come from the middle class.)

It has also been argued that emigration to the US served as a kind of safety-valve for revolution-fearing European states and ruling classes—but that wouldn’t have been America’s problem. Perhaps you need a large immigrant population to settle a new continent—but why? The West was pretty much settled by 1890, and, anyway, without the immigrants, Americans would have surely gotten around, perhaps a bit later, to building up California, Arizona, Nevada, etc. But the difficulty in sorting all this out reveals a basic assumption of modern political theories and assumptions about the nation-state—they all assume a static population. How would, say, social contract theory, need to be reformulated to include the assumption of a steady flow of immigration? But something else of great importance—something that, of course, we all know, but never seems to make it into political thinking—is revealed: modernity essentially shuts down the world. What I mean by that is that the migration of peoples is a basic fact of human history—people were always on the move, replacing, displacing and mixing with other peoples. No government until modern times had sufficient control over its territory to prevent this. All the causes of migration still exist—war, famine, drought, etc.—but people can today only migrate either with the permission of some state, or illegally and surreptitiously. We still have no solution to the inevitable problem of stateless populations, over whom some government must have control but for which no government wants responsibility. All we know how to do its try and make it someone else’s problem.

The American response to immigration during the first half of the 20th century is probably the only one with any chance at all of succeeding. This approach involved forced cultural assimilation, which means treating the immigrant as a kind of colonial subject who must learn the language and adhere to the norms of the dominant society. That also means there must be something to assimilate to—and something that can be assimilated to (unlike, say, ethnic homogeneity). The culture to which the immigrants assimilate must be esthetic and moral, not ethnic or religious. This may also require (at least in the US case it seems to have required) a (specifically political) founding event, reverence for which is assiduously inculcated. This combination of cultural elements will necessarily be very rare, and hard to sustain, as the resentment toward “Americanization” that it became safe to express from the 1960s on demonstrates. The ethnic origins and religious faith of the founders may turn out to be more intrinsic to the founding event than assimilationists would like to believe, which means that even apparently successful waves of assimilation may turn out to be less successful than assumed—and, certainly the more distant from those ethnic and religious conditions the successive waves of immigrants, more unrealistic expectations of reverence for them becomes. No one even seems to want to try anymore—the unspoken hope is that a shared social media, celebrity, pop music and video game culture will accomplish what censorious schoolteachers, a homogenous media and wartime solidarity and propaganda once did.

The Trump phenomenon has raised the question of whether the conventional left/right, liberal/conservative mapping of American politics is ultimately all wrong, or, at least, is less significant than an elite/people, ruling class/country class, globalist/nationalist, victimocracy/normal mapping. From the standpoint of an American nationalism, it’s remarkable to note that of all the items on the conservative checklist (small government, limited powers, free markets, anti-abortion, traditional morality, even gun rights and hawkish foreign policy), none of them intrinsically, necessarily, make the conservation of the American nation a priority. Who, though, does make the conservation of the American nation a priority? It may be only, or almost only, those workers in direct competition with the current wave of immigrants—those whom the blogger ArchDruid, in a a very interesting post John Gay just forwarded to the GaList, calls the “wage earning” class. The argument is that of the four economic classes in contemporary America (the “investor,” “salary,” “wage” and “welfare” classes), the investor and welfare classes are left pretty much the same by globalization and mass immigration, while the salaried class benefits (through lower priced consumer goods) and the wage class is devastated. That certainly brings things into focus, as the salary class includes government workers, academics, the media (i.e., the major components of the victimocracy) and, probably, most Republican “moderates” (who work alongside of and socialize with leftists). The wage class, meanwhile, are those Eric Gans has referred to several times in some recent Chronicles, drawing upon Charles Murray’s study of the economic polarization of what was once a more cohesive, less abrasive, series of gradations up the economic ladder, as the major “problem” for any contemporary politics that hopes to move beyond the victimary.

ArchDruid doesn’t give us numbers, so I can only guess at how many members of each class there are. That guess would be around 10% at the extremes, the welfare and investor class (maybe a bit lower for the latter); and perhaps around 35/45% for the salaried and waged. That would make the wage class a plurality, but not a majority—a coalition of the other 3 classes could always deny them power or, given the sharp conflicts of interest, any remedy or hope whatsoever. But that 45% could certainly make quite a commotion. It seems to be the core of the American nation (and probably, I would imagine, the source of most of our military and police). It seems likely that the only thing that would satisfy this American core is a cessation of immigration, and the expulsion of a very substantial number of the illegals. (They would also probably like victories in some trade wars—tariffs on China, etc.—but that’s more complicated, and the immigration moratorium would probably have enough of an effect to bring about some cross class solidarity.)

This has been a rambling post (and it’s not the first time in the last couple of months I’ve tried to write something on immigration) but I’m publishing it anyway, because I think I’ve arrived at a useful conclusion: any community, and society, has a core, which might be a substantial minority or an overwhelming majority. What makes them the core is that they resist inter-social merging—either the integration of their society into a larger one (they would be the basis of an anti-colonial revolt), or the integration of members of other communities into their own. There will be cultural and economic reasons for this resistance, or “allergy.” What brings about dangerous social imbalances are social and economic trends that undermine the position of the core, and/or put its interests at odds with the more peripheral (although perhaps more powerful) social elements. What gives cause for despair of the American polity is the difficulty of seeing why any of the other classes would be inclined to concede anything to the waged—indeed, from the perspective outlined here, we could say that the victimocracy is essentially a war by a large chunk of the salaried against the waged, a war in which the welfare class is used as shock troops and for psyops, with threatening gestures toward the investors serving as an ongoing distraction. It’s a war with an economic basis, backed by deeply laid cultural hostilities (by now unconcealed hatred), and a war the aggressors most likely think they are winning (or can even pretend they aren’t fighting). Trump, at last, gives the aggressed against a general—if he doesn’t lead them to some victories, someone else will rise from the ranks. Whatever that might look like, it’s preferable to the continuing destruction of the American core, because that way lies societal suicide.

A final word: it seems to me that a way of supporting the American core (the waged), beyond the absolutely necessary immigration moratorium, is to support the kind of labor that in its very nature cannot be outsourced and, moreover, can only very moderately be transformed technologically. House painters, plumbers, contractors, landscapers, electricians, mechanics and so on—all well paying jobs that require skills and discipline, but not 1300 SAT scores or the piling up of 100,000$ in student loans. All jobs that we will always need—any homeowner can learn to do a lot of these things, but most won’t, because of the law of comparative advantage, and because they won’t get as good at them as someone who does them professionally. All dignified jobs, which allow for independence and mobility—your life won’t be destroyed if the plant closes up or moves to the Philippines. I don’t know how many of the waged class are in, or could move into such occupations—but whatever can be done, e.g., through tax policies, the elimination of licensing requirements, the loosening of safety and other regulations, should be done to make these occupations viable. This seems far simpler than trying to change our trade balance with China. It would at least be a gesture of good will, if the salaried can accept paying a bit more for some of their amenities.

SJWs always lie. Why? Because they have decided to denounce the differences in civilized capacities (and their fruits) produced by differential discipline as unjust expropriations. It’s not immediately obvious why this is necessary in order to attack “privilege”—after all, there is far from a one-to-one correlation between self-discipline and “success,” by any measure—plenty of hardworking, talented, intelligent people fail through no fault of their own; even more obviously and egregiously, plenty of people seem to get rich, famous and powerful despite not being particularly brilliant or determined or worthy in any discernable way. If we wanted to, we might all have some interesting discussions on how to make the match between discipline and wealth and power tighter. But that discussion wouldn’t satisfy the SJWs because it would still leave the central point untouched: self-discipline is better than indiscipline, in any field of endeavor, and discipline must be inculcated, accepted and internalized. And if that’s the case, the first advice you would still want to give to anyone, no matter how unfair their circumstances, is to study and master your impulses, appetites and resentments; which further means you would judge their actions by how fully they display that mastery. And the insistence on demanding open-ended reparations would always, self-evidently, be understood to be subversive of such study and mastery. Victimary thinking is, most fundamentally, resentment towards civilization—a resentment only possible for the civilized, or those in close proximity to them. Rejecting the primacy of discipline and deferral (which, as originary thinkers know, is not just the source of personal success, or even of civilization, but of meaning itself) requires systematic lying. Every story, statistic or benefit demonstrating the link between discipline and world appropriation must be denied. All success must be at the expense of others, all failure must be due to injustice. Now, there are some strict rules regarding the application of this principle, and plenty of exceptions. There are big Others and little others, generating a hierarchy of oppression radiating out from the center of Western male whiteness (the description of civilization stripped of everything that makes it civilization), which allows, say, for mistreatment of black women by black men to be blamed on the Big Other of White Patriarchal Racism. And billionaires who benefit the cause are not really exceptions—rather, they are granted exemptions, putting their ill-acquired wealth to a good purpose. White male American soldiers can become victims of the American war machine. Etc. What matters is reducing civilization to a kind of negative image of your own identity politics, and you must say whatever you have to preserve that image.

An important corollary of this need to lie systematically is the imperative to attack avatars of the truth. Or anyone inclined to sympathize with bearers of the truth. Or anyone considering taking those truthful claims seriously. Or anyone insufficiently ferocious in denouncing those who tell or bear witness to the forbidden truth or “hate facts.” George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson have been confined to a kind of social limbo precisely because their accounts of the events that covered them in infamy turned out to be true. Only on the very margins of the nationalist right do I see anyone daring to say a good word about either of them. Talk of impeaching Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia started up when he mentioned in the midst of oral arguments the “mismatch theory,” that claims that Affirmative Action policies can hurt their intended beneficiaries by placing them in academic settings they are unprepared for—even though the “mismatch theory” is only basic common sense, unless one wants to argue that admission standards for universities fail to measure academic potential, i.e., are meaningless—in which case, why have them? Ayaan Hirsi Ali, meanwhile, who simply explains what Islam has to say about infidels, women and violence, is persona non grata at universities, and no doubt most other public arenas in the US. European journalists are losing their jobs for asking whether importing millions of Middle Eastern Muslims is a good idea. Democratic politicians are looking into suing oil companies and others for disagreeing with the ruling doctrine on the “climate change” formerly know as global warming. The list goes on. These truths—or, even, reasonable claims that might be proven more or less true—must be denounced as a priori thought crimes, and anyone referring to them other than to anathematize them must be vilified and, in general turned into what Giorgio Agamben calls the “Homo Sacer,” who can be killed by anybody but not sacrificed (Agamben, I assume, would apply the concept rather differently.). So, if SJWs always lie, they also always attack those who tell the truth or those who, even implicitly or indirectly, bear witness to the truth. But, also, then, those who don’t distance themselves sufficiently from those who are tinged by the truth. Those who would be kind to the cruel end up being cruel to the kind because if the kind are allowed to draw too much attention to their the treatment at the hands of the cruel kindness to the cruel would appear as indecent and untenable as it actually is.

Here, then, is where the apocalyptic politics I proposed in my previous post has its site of emergence—in being told, in sensing, that one “can’t say that,” in seeing others being censored, intimidated and punished for saying something that has at least some truth to it. Because in experiencing that violent concealment, in internalizing that imperative, one feels one’s own powers of expression and articulation being snuffed out. It’s a matter of simple intellectual and moral self-defense (or hygiene) that leads you to speak your mind (and the SJW’s customary virulence results from the violence one must first do to oneself to eliminate the temptation to listen to the truth). The analyses, inquiries, and rhetorical and political strategies follow: what, exactly, is that truth, or even that stray observation or remark that might lead one there? For whom would it be devastating to have it heard, and why? What does someone (who?) want to say that would be crowded out by that truth? If you are doing it right, you simply disclose, meticulously, what the discourse of the other has concealed, reading the obverse, so to speak—moral beliefs and political actions will follow and you will exemplify them. I believe that at the end of this line of inquiry you will always find someone who wants to defend or protect evil because punishing or fighting evil conceals the fraudulence of those who claim to be good. In other words, a defense of someone who has given in to indiscipline because those struggling with the limitations and paradoxes of deferral are really just as undisciplined themselves underneath it all, and they’re even worse for pretending otherwise. The founding imaginary of the victimary would then be a collective exposure of indiscipline, which would mean peace because only those who insist on discipline out of shame for their real feelings would interfere with this idyllic scene. A peace maintained by unanimous and feral antagonism towards those with pretensions of discipline. The endorsement of discipline is the highest hypocrisy. But, I must conclude by insisting that this theology derives from a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the doctrine of universal human equality, because if we are not equal to the extent that we have all recognized the demands of deferral, we can only be equal before we have done anything, before we have been tempted or tested—which is to say, we are equal in indiscipline, in our desires, fears, resentments, and sheer vulnerability to violence. The primacy of the victim (whose discipline or indiscipline can be “bracketed”) in doctrines of human equality is posited in order to conceal this blind spot. A fanatic of human equality (one who demands moves towards its instantiation immediately and denounces its every qualification) must in the end become an SJW.