Reaping the Whirlwind

Fareed Zakaria's notice of the increased death rate in blue-collar white Americans, from suicide and drugs, draws this comment from Glenn Reynolds:
 Psychologists say that depression is anger turned inward. What happens if it turns outward?
That's the right question.  Zakaria misses it completely, being so invested in the narrative that America is becoming more ethnically diverse that he fails to notice that it was an artificial process that could be fairly easily reversed.  Nothing can be done but to accept their miserable fate, he suggests:
Working-class whites don’t think of themselves as an elite group. But, in a sense, they have been, certainly compared with blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and most immigrants. They were central to America’s economy, its society, indeed its very identity. They are not anymore. Donald Trump has promised that he will change this and make them win again. But he can’t. No one can. And deep down, they know it.
In fact, it was an immigration reform act in 1965 that altered America's immigration policies to favor the Third World instead of the First as they had traditionally.  Laws that can change one way can change another.

It was the election of two different two-term Democratic presidents who did not enforce immigration laws, and one two-term Republican who was not especially exercised about it, that led to the massive demographic shift over the last three decades.  If you elect a President for whom they are a priority, that massive wave of immigrants are still first-generation.  They could be expelled, if enough anger is focused upon the matter.

Even without the increased anger, last year more natives of Mexico left the United States than came here.  Why not?  People have a natural preference for home.  If Mexico and other Latin American states improve, many of these people would go home just because they'd rather be there than here.  If increasing anger drives a nativism that becomes harsh and unwelcoming, even more people will feel inclined to depart.  They'll take their families with them willingly.  The demographic 'destiny' would then change, and what Zakaria thinks impossible would become real.

It would, however, be a very ugly time.  The expressions of such anger and nativism are not beautiful.

What is driving all this anger?  Perhaps it is the fact that the government, under the current administration, is actively taking sides against these workers.  It's also the triumphalism of the cultural left, which is openly salivating about being able to put the older, whiter America in the grave.  These are choices too, choices with consequences.  These people are not fools just because they don't have a college degree.  Having less education may make their response more visceral, but it won't keep them from noticing what is being done and who is doing it.  They can hear the voices that hate them.  They can hear how happy those voices sound when they posit a world in which these American workers and their families are no longer important.

In fact, even if we avoid the period of anger it would be completely unsurprising if America became less 'ethnically diverse' again -- not by changing actual demographics, but by absorbing later-generation immigrants into a new definition of 'the majority.'  That has happened to the Irish, to the Germans, to the Italians, to many Jews, and could very easily happen to Latinos as well.  There is no reason for us to insist on going through the ugliness that is likely to follow.

Still, avoiding the anger will be hard to do because the anger is not unjustified.  It is clear that a generation of policies have been in place to effect this reduction, that new policies are being put in place to further it and cement it, and that the fall of these people and their families is deeply and earnestly desired by the cultural allies of the politicians effecting the policies.

What happens if the anger turns outward?  That is indeed the question, and people should give it some thought.  It would be wiser and better for those driving the underlying causes of this anger to stop and consider the effects of their actions.

7 comments:

Ymar Sakar said...

The whites know where they can go for training if they want to go external and outwards. There are plenty of cadre cells in the US, who will accept them, whether for money or for other socially beneficial reasons.

Half of them aren't even connected to the usual suspects due to de-centralized cellular grassroots proto org online.

While the Left likes to call Moveon and etc "grassroots", it is really astro turf. Americans have rarely ever actually seen a real grassroots movement. Then again they think Hollywood is art and entertainment.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

The data may not be what we thought at first. There may not be an increase in death rate. It may all be an artifact of age cohorts being different sizes. Keep up with bsking on this over at "graph paper diaries."

To Fareed, any data confirms his prejudices.

Dad29 said...

I think the Kulturkampf is far more significant than the 'diversity.' The culture being attacked is what remains of the Jud/Chri culture passed on for 5,000++ years and it ain't going to disappear easily.

And what CNN's trot-mouth is missing is this: the vast majority of adult BLACK people share exactly the same culture as the vast majority of adult WHITE people.

Ymar Sakar said...

Western culture has been hammered for centuries by Islamic Jihad, slave raids, and various internal civil wars and disputes.

The genetic predisposition has been buried and hidden, over the generations of the Golden Age of Peace and Democracy, but that recessive trait will express itself as the dominant, if only because the weaklings of Western civilization were wiped out and purged by Islamic slave raids. What were left were the collaborators (like Germany's leaders, like the Vichy of France) vs the nationalists and patriots (National Front of France, patriots of Germany, etc).

The Southern aristocracy of Demoncrat loyalty in 1830s America, had a solid point that they were the more martial, the more elite, the more aristocratic leaders that were loyal to the US Constitution above all else. The problem was that they thought their abolitionist opponents were pacifists, quakers, shakers, and thus unworthy of gentlemanly opposition or a duel. Lincoln wasn't one to shirk from a duel. Brown wasn't a pacifist. Sherman and Sheridan weren't pacifists either. The Southern aristocracy mistook who they were dealing with, and thus activated the ancient impulse to destroy the Enemy, when they themselves only believed that the Southern White land owner aristocracy were the true heirs of Western civilization, Western white civ at least.

Dad29 said...

Actually, THE western culture's most significant internal split began with Luther; you can trace the results of his rebellion through philosophers ever since. The ones most pertinent to the current problem(s) in the US (at least vis-a-vis THE culture) are evident in the writings of Nietzsche and Descartes--whose spawn includes Derrida and his ilk.

Nihilism is--now--the dominant cultural infection, although there are various degrees of nihilism at work. And that is the "ism" which will be defeated, although we know not how. Yes, Mohammed's Koran is nihilistic, by the way.

Eric Blair said...

Luther was just more successful than Jan Hus or the Arians or Pelagians or any number of other "heretics".

You guys always miss that "The West" and by that you really mean Western Europe, destroyed itself (or its soul or whatever) in the second 30 years war -1914-1945.

You can't put that back together again, and the culture that all the participants started the war with was discredited by it.

Grim said...

Somebody has to wield the Mandate of Heaven, though, to put it in Chinese terms. It doesn't cease to be: it passes from one hand to another.

A plausible reading of the post-WWI/WWII era is that people gave up on the Nation as a locus of loyalty, and began to believe in the International. The Communists got there first because they'd been opposed to the Nation all along, and had always looked to Solidarity across nations as a future locus for loyalty. But the rest of the world began to think about the International in those terms too: the Korean war was fought by the United Nations, after all. When that project foundered on the impossibility of overcoming UN Security Council vetoes, smaller internationals were set up: NATO, the Warsaw Pact, the EU, NAFTA. The Communist world's version fell apart on its own.

I think we're seeing the dying days of the International as a plausible locus for human loyalty. Its true believers keep trying to set up new ones and reinforce old ones, but they're collapsing because they don't work. They don't work for the simple reason that they demand you set aside natural loyalties -- to family, to country, to language, to faith -- for artificial ones crafted by legalistic fictions.

What comes next may not be the old West, but it may well be a new birth of the old nations of the West. After all, there's nowhere further to go up, so you have to go back down. UKIP, the French FN, the nativisim at home building around Trump, all these things make sense in a context in which you are revolting against the International by reasserting the Nation.

If that's right, it will be an amusing irony that Barack Obama is the one "on the wrong side of history." The problem is that he hasn't imagined that history could change its verdict; that having tried abandoning the Nation for the International, it could decide the International was unworkable, and fall back again on the Nation.

But it could, of course, because History isn't really a goddess. It's just a bunch of human beings trying things out, and then thinking about how it worked or didn't. Then they make a new decision. This one is logical. Indeed, given the failures of the International, and the lack of a level above the International to which to appeal, it's the only logical decision. Can't stay here, can't climb up, the only thing to do is climb back down and try again there. Maybe we can do it better this time, having learned the lessons from the last time.

The question for me is whether we can make the shift without a very ugly interregnum.