Caldwell’s book is far too nuanced and expansive to cover here. But he identifies key moments and key changes. The 1965 Immigration Act was the beginning of a huge experiment in human history. It was complemented by open bipartisan-elite toleration of mass undocumented immigration across the southern border. And civil rights became something other than ending racial discrimination by the state: It became a regime of ending discrimination by individuals in economic and social life; then it begot affirmative action, in which race played an explicit part in an individual’s chance of getting into college; and it culminated in the social-justice agenda, which would meaningfully do away with the American concept of individual rights and see it replaced by a concept of racial group rights. Caldwell sees the last 50 years as a battle between two rival constitutions: one dedicated to freedom, the other to equality of outcomes, or “equity.” And I think he is right to see the former as worth fighting for.
He is referring to Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement. He compares and contrasts it with Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized. Although both books might seem to be in my wheelhouse, I am not planning to read either one. Instead, I am inclined to rely on what others say about them.
Sullivan’s peroration:
I see in the long-delayed backlash to the social-justice movement an inkling of a new respect for individual and creative freedom and for the old idea of toleration rather than conformity. I see in the economic and educational success of women since the 1970s a possible cease-fire in the culture wars over sex. I see most homosexuals content to live out our lives without engaging in an eternal Kulturkampf against the cis and the straight. Race? Alas, I see no way forward but a revival of Christianity, of its view of human beings as “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This means such a transcendent view of human equality that it does not require equality of outcomes to see equal dignity and worth.
Yes, I’m hoping for a miracle. But at this point, what else have we got?
What strikes me is that for all of the talk about how race affects less-educated white voters, actual race relations seem most tense on college campuses. That is where change appears to require a miracle.
But suppose that black college students were to join the backlash against the social justice movement. Imagine a number of them saying, “We don’t need this patronizing condescension. It isn’t helping. We’re strong enough to do without it. From now on, treat us as individuals.”
I’m not predicting that black students will do that, nor am I saying that they should. But if black students were to join the backlash, that would strike a severe blow to the social justice movement.
I plan to read Caldwell’s book: his Weekly Standard articles were consistently good, and Reflections on the Revolution in Europe was excellent and prescient.
I realize I’m probably just invoking a Streisand Effect by bringing attention to it, but if you are going to rely on other people’s reviews, I would skip VerBruggen’s in National Review, which I think was unfair to Caldwell’s general argument and simply incredibly naive on the critical point about the inevitability of the slippery slope down which we always slide whenever a major systemic limiting principle gives way.
I won’t read Klein’s book because he’s often untrustworthy and irresponsibly abuses his influence to engage in false, ad hominen attacks.
I learned a lot from Caldwell’s _Reflections on the revolution in Europe_.
I probably will read his new book since I am addicted to polemics. It’s not a good addiction to indulge, but often polemics are good at debunking the conventional knowledge when such a thing is necessary.
Ezra Klein is the the last person I would read for a balanced treatment of a controversial issue in society or public affairs.
Apologies for sharing this link again, but it makes a useful point.
https://quillette.com/2018/05/25/groups-groups-idw/
Agreed. The Bell Curve controversy was infuriating. To me, Ezra Klein seems to be the leader of the Journalist Unit of the Social Justice movement. It confuses me that Tyler Cowen and Andrew Sullivan show him such respect. He is obviously intelligent and is “rhetorically gifted” but his tactics break the Golden Rule, in my opinion, if not fully cross the border into consciously immoral behavior. “Tactics” is the metric to judge the Golden Rule violations; Social Justice promotes several false memes but it is the tactics the movement has adopted that is abhorrent. Klein seems to subscribe to the break a few eggs to make an omelette philosophy.
It confuses me that Tyler Cowen show[s] him such respect.
I assume he pretends to respect people like Klein and Yglesias so they don’t relegate him to the untouchable-right ghetto.
Depiction of untouchable-right ghetto located on hillock separated by chasm from decent society:
“Political distribution of journalists based on their Twitter networks, from new paper by
@JohnHolbein1.” https://twitter.com/datacrat/status/1229547427767570433
I think Cowen’s explanation referenced by Kling today, is more benign:
I can go there.’Ezra is a deliberate liar. He claims his aim to uncover truth but he mostly covers truth up.
It’s interesting that Cowen and Klein have interviewed each other twice on their podcasts but Cowen hasn’t interviewed Harris, nor will he.
“actual race relations seem most tense on college campuses”
Isn’t the rate of inter-racial romantic relationships highest among young people? When I read the opening phrase, “for all of the *talk* about…race,” I thought that it was going to be followed by, “*actual* race relations have never been better.”
Not sure why Sullivan tries to tie the concept of viewing humans as individuals to a “revival of Christianity”. The notion that all individual humans are created with equal unalienable rights is a “self-evident” truth our nation’s Founders submitted to the “opinions of (all) mankind”. It’s part of the universal “Laws of Nature”, applying to Christians and non-Christians alike. In fact, at the time, the Christian King George III claimed a divine right to rule, so it would seem that a revival of Christianity is neither necessary nor sufficient to revive “a transcendent view of human equality that…does not require equality of outcomes to see equal dignity and worth”.
Finally, more open immigration — which really means immigration driven and limited by market forces and spontaneous order rather than government central planning — falls firmly on the side that is “dedicated to freedom” rather than equality of outcomes. So, Sullivan fails in trying to position the 1965 Immigration Act as the start of the path from individual rights to group rights. Government management of immigration is 100% a group rights (really group wrongs) thing. After all, government-managed immigration in this country started with the Chinese Exclusion Acts. People are, of course, free to oppose our Founding Fathers’ vision of open immigration. But, when doing so, one should at least recognize that one is opposing our nation’s Founding ideals.
You are under a misimpression about the attitude of the Founders to open immigration. Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constituiton says, “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.” Starting in 1808, then, Congress had the power to limit immigration. Congress was not allowed to restrict immigration before 1808 as a concession to slave traders, who were afraid it would forbid the importation of slaves.
That clause was indeed about slavery, not immigration. That’s why the Supreme Court had to resort to declaring immigration power an “inherent” power of Congress — because there was no enumeration of such power in the Constitution. Again, fine to disagree with the Founders, say that conditions changed, say that we shouldn’t be limited to the original text of the Constitution, etc. But, at least recognize when one is doing so.
And, regardless, the first attempt to limit immigration in the US were the Chinese Exclusion Acts, which unambiguously reflected thinking in terms of groups over individuals, the opposite of the revival of individual rights over group rights that Sullivan claims to favor. The 1965 Immigration Act stopped considering immigrants based on race. It makes no sense to view the 1965 Immigration Act as the beginning of the path towards group rights and the social justice agenda.
Kling might indeed be wrong in describing race relations per se on campus as more tense. It’s not so much that there’s tension between white and black people. There’s certainly a lot of anger about race, but mostly it’s a broadly shared anger at the (generally nonexistent) white supremacist element. There are hardly any actual enemies on campus with whom they can be in tension, other than the occasional professor who is discovered to have used the n-word while reading Huckleberry Finn allowed in grade school 45 years ago and needs to be purged. If there were real enemies and real tensions, there’d be bigger fish to fry. The kids themselves I think get along with each other; the protests and upset are more about ideological exercise than suggestions of actual tension.
I wonder if Dr. Kling thinks, if we asked black students at Berkeley and black auto workers in Alabama how they feel they’re treated, if the former would see themselves as more regularly and severely victimized than the latter? I could see it going either way, but I don’t think even that is reflective of relative ‘racial tension.’
There is nothing “self evident” about human equality. If anything its “self evident” that there are smart and dumb. Strong and weak. Useful and useless. Etc. Human inequality is the most self evident thing in the world, that’s “the law of nature”.
It’s precisely the claim to human equality that is so *different* about Christianity. It makes no claim to such claim in a material sense (nature), only in the spiritual. To claim it in the physical sense would be absurd.
The founders obviously didn’t believe in human equality. If they did they wouldn’t have owned slaves or restricted voting to a tiny minority of property holding men.
The best take on the Founding Fathers from their actions is that they believed that they (gentlemen of standing and accomplishment) were at least equal to King George (whose only accomplishment was being the son of the last king). Past that I think you are in speculation territory based on the record.
Your obsession with immigration is as usual nonsensical. To link it to the Founding Fathers is equally absurd.
Is there any example of this kind of thing happening? There are some groups that were once important members of the progressive coalition when needed for votes or money, but when not needed, got treated accordingly. If you don’t need to earn someone’s vote, you won’t.
There are occasional members of the class of beneficiaries of some progressive initiative who, despite being spotlessly progressive themselves, are willing to complain about some of the unintended consequences and negative trade-offs of those reforms. I’ve heard very liberal women complain about these three things in the usual form of “Of course this is a good progressive thing I totally believe in, and I would never suggest trying to squeeze the toothpaste back in the tube, but …”
1. Equality in the workplace is great, but, two-income trap, career pressure, time pressure, no actual way to “have it all” and balance professional-level work and family, leading to family formation delayed longer than desired, and sometimes past the window of easy mate-matching and reproduction, which is usually seen retrospectively as a regretted mistake.
2. Huge penalties for sexual harassment in the workplace are great, but now male colleagues and bosses treat any of us with a sexual market value greater than zero like we’re radioactive and are terrified into “Pence Rules”, where they refuse to talk, joke with, or socialize privately with us, like they do comfortably with any of their male colleagues. But let’s face it, that kind of tension and fear and lack of comfort makes it impossible to form the networking, mentorship, and sponsorship friendly relationships that are essential to genuine success, in a way that is just as bad as sexual tension making it impossible to have a similarly purely friendly and professional relationship with someone.
3. The reforms which have ratcheted up the penalties for sexual transgressions, increased requirements for consent, made accusing easier and defense harder, and so forth, are all great, but now we seem to be in a sexual recession where a large number of middle class young men have been conditioned since birth to be kind of terrified of taking the initiative and making the approaches we’d like them to make outside of contexts where “openness to courtship” (to put it nicely) is obvious. And a lot of women find the state and requirements of those contexts and the evolution of the whole sexual market and dating scene to be, frankly, terrible developments.
Now, it’s hard to know how common these sentiments are, and even common lamentation and expression of misgivings about them hardly counts as a “backlash” against these feminist aspects of the broader movement. But it’s something below the “100% unqualified, enthusiastic support” level, that, nevertheless doesn’t seem to have slowed anything down or threatened the power and influence of the movement at all.
At least not in any obvious way. It’s possible that many of these women would be ok with allowing the legal community to do things like pulling back the excesses of the campus sex tribunals, and we can perhaps interpret a less-than-expected backlash against that as a greater-than-expected tacit, passive backlash against the movement. My guess is that this is about as much as anyone can hope for.
Caldwell is a great writer but I am sorry to say that I didn’t get much new out of it. In January my nonfiction reading ranked in order of most to least bang for the buck would be Brazil on the Move by John Dos Passos, a Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, American Seccession by FH Buckley, Profiles in Corruption by Peter Schweitzer, Caldwell, The War on Normal People by Andrew Yang, and the Levin Time to Build. The best books that read (actually reread) in January though were fiction: The Double Death of Quincas Water Bray by Jorge Amado and The Slum by Aluisio Azevedo. The latter was rewarding enough that my reading goal this year will be to read the remainder of his novels.
I’m working on a review of A Time to Build right now. I’m sorry to say that it’s a deeply disappointing book on many levels.
I suppose there is a silver lining to that cloud. Had it been just a little disappointing, I would have just tossed it away when halfway through and forgotten all about it.
Instead, it’s so thoroughly and comprehensively disappointing, that I’m motivated to demonstrate it in detail.
Probably the best thing that can be said about it is that it is inadvertently useful in revealing just how bad things have gotten for conservative movement in America.
As always, exceptionally well put.
As Levin argues, now is not a time to tear down, but rather to build and rebuild by committing ourselves to the institutions around us.
—
Clueless philosopher. In one sentence review he should explain the mechanism that indicates when individuals build stuff. He cannot, he does not.
Cultural philosophies do not help, what helps is a little intelligence in finding the blunders of the past and writing them off so we do not stick the kids with a disaster. Both Ezra and Levin simply cover up past disasters so we never learn, we just repeat with yet another bozo philosophy of waiting for Godot.
I should note that my interpretation is that Levin wrote a Straussian book, and so these apparently major and plentiful deficiencies of the literal read aren’t nearly as bad as they seem. Indeed, they may serve as signals to those who are clever and understand the deeper problem with contemporary discourse to read between the lines.
Unfortunately, even the most optimistic Straussian interpretation has an objective that is lame and unlikely to produce any meaningful improvement even in the most wildly successful case.
If I’m wrong and he wrote the thing completely straight, then may God have mercy on the state of intellectual health in the American Conservative Movement.
It’s bad when things have gotten to a point where one has to write a book badly as a code. It’s worse if, actually, there is no code. My personality type makes me constitutionally incapable of swinging the ‘black pill’ attitude, so I choose bad over worse.
I liked Andrew Sullivan’s thoughts on these two books. Ezra Klein seems to be represent the Social Justice Progressive while Christopher Caldwell seems to be a fine representative of the Crooked Timber Conservative camp (based on 2nd hand opinions, I respect Handle’s opinion enough to hold judgement). [Since my marketing gene seems to expressing a desire to name political camps, lets call the recent Trump/Brexit types “Pyramid-Base Protectionists” (in reference to Eric Weinstein’s Ponzi Scheme analogy to describe anti-immigration and anti-trade sentiments).]
Both men, however, seem to inhabit the two-sides of the same coin. They are journalists that focus on political science and tend to overemphasize the power of legislation, within the framework of a nation-state’s constitution, to shape society. This is not as much a false meme as a minor meme that is being promoted to a major meme at a key moment in history.
As another side note, I find it fascinating that the “tribalism” meme turns on the idea of “white nationalism”. It is weirdly circular that people from the continent of Europe, once deeply divided along ethnic/linguistic/religious/cultural lines, are now considered a homogenous “nationality”. We need to distinguish between national-identity and political-identity and realize that these are transient labels specific to a unique time and place.
“Politics and the English Language”.
White-whatever-ism doesn’t actually exist to and meaningful extent. Just as an insult.
Orwell complained in his day that all the leftists were using ‘fascist’ in a way such that it was a hollow boo-word epithet for opponents that didn’t have any fixed meaning, and indeed, most people couldn’t explain what the actual meaning was anymore, they never learned and never felt any need to, because they just wanted the equivalent of a crude pejorative.
Fascist hasn’t worked for a long time in American English, and Nazi is out too, but any other code for “ultra-racist” hits the mark.
Ummm, OK, but I was specifically thinking about nationality and my use of scare-quotes was only intended to highlight the irony of immigrants from the warring nations of Europe now being considered a single coherent “white” nationality; the progressive epithet meaning didn’t even cross my mind.
Leave America aside for the moment, I was thinking about the shift in national identity captured in the White Australia policy of 1901 as part of Australia’s federation. Eric Kaufmann tries to give a history of the various meanings of “white” and “nationality” in his book “Whiteshift”. I chose my words poorly but that is par for the course as is my inability to now think of a better alternative that carries the same meaning (e.g. white identity).
I would have put scare-quotes around “American Nativists” if I was describing the antagonists in the film “Gangs of New York”. Context is everything I guess.
We are surrounded by failed Hispanic states. I can list them, but it is easier to just list the one that got it right, Costa Rica. Look at our southern neighbors. What are the immigrants running from? Failed Hispanic states.
This isn’t racism, it is culuralism, something went wrong with Spanish checks and balances about a thousand years ago and never got fixed. The illness remains, in California, in AOC, they have no way out, somehow it is embedded.
What about Chile and Uruguay? Panama?
Sullivan’s review merits many comments about omissions and misrepresentations, especially on ideals:
They were merely a modernization of American ideals: inclusivity, expansiveness, hope.
Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness, and private property — these are the real ideals of the real Founding documents (Declaration & Constitution). Hope comes from them. Inclusivity wasn’t even talked about — it was, in 1964 & before and since, Integration.
Like many semi-honest liberals, including the often dishonest Klein, Sullivan takes a partial truth and builds and elegant argument with one or two pillars of sand.
Sullivan briefly notes arguments against immigration, but quotes the arguments in favor, without adding the fact that the arguments in favor have been proven very wrong. Of course, like semi-honest libs, he’d say “that goes without saying”. But it doesn’t, and he knows it. It’s just another example of Liberals making an argument, winning the policy battle they argue for, and then the facts show them to be wrong. With no Lib acknowledgment that they were wrong.
He states the problem well: because human beings are tribal, it should be no surprise that anti-racist indoctrination actually leads to more racism.
Ezra Klein and HR Clinton and most Dems today are supporting racism — but wanting to claim it is the Reps who are doing so.
Again, unmentioned by Klein is college entrance affirmative action — where whites get discriminated against, and Asians even more. Anybody who is talking about “racism” in America, and refuses to explicitly talk about college affirmative action, is at best being only semi-honest.
Then he quotes Caldwell, who does note it: ending discrimination (against blacks and chosen groups); affirmative action; racial group rights.
Sullivan is right to mock Caldwell’s call to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Sullivan then unrealistically, tho he says optimistically, calls for more Christianity. He fails to mention that Christianity claims to be True. (If its morals are objectively evaluated, they are probably optimal for most people, and certainly more optimal for poor people than the current Hollywood-DC-NYC morals for the rich.)
Instead, there is a more obvious step we should try: ending “affirmative action”. We need to affirm a legal definition of “racism” as “one who wants a policy of different standards to apply to individuals based on their race”. We should also explicitly support defamation suits against any who are called racist, but who have NOT supported any policy of different treatment based on races.
Those who support affirmative action ARE racists, and should be called out on it. We can only heal our polarization with the Truth. And one of the bad truths is racist — Blacks, Hispanics, Whites, Asians, Jews are different, and will, with freedom and equal opportunity, have different outcomes.
We need to accept that truth, and work to make the actual outcomes better, especially for …
Think of the Jefferson Bible. He didn’t think that Christianity was true. And yet his thinking was thoroughly informed by these heterodox ideas, the Christian repudiation of Roman and Greek hierarchies.
And at the same time he was cruel and depraved and utterly merciless towards the people he owned. He was bizarre, is one way of putting it.
But the Christian idea, an idea Jefferson obviously understood, is worlds apart from the kind of thinking of the eugenicists a hundred years after him, or today’s equivalent to those eugenicists who boasted of their superiority and their intelligence.
“Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding,” Jefferson said, “he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.”
What I hear from a lot of people today is that being smart does therefore make you lord and master. These Roman aristocrats, in effect, are walking around calling themselves modern meritocrats. They divide the world into teachers and pupils, or nobles and serfs. They think some people are better than others, and the others aren’t really men.
The successful want to assume aristocratic privileges of respect and deference, because they were told college is so important, and they went to college.
This desire of college grads to be “aristocrats”, based on an educational meritocracy, is terrible.
“Meritocrats” is a word that’s too good for them, because they don’t really have so much merit. Nor do they want merit to actually be the test, merit based on real results.
Aristoburrocrats, maybe? With burro like jackass…
The #1 thing people want in relation to the underclass is to be left alone by them. They don’t want plantation of slaves or serfs. They don’t need slaves or serfs. They don’t need the underclass at all.
They would like the underclass to leave them alone, and the underclass says no, you will obey me. My vote is worth as much as yours, and I can make you obey me with it.
I think of non-college white men as the underclass, normal folk – so I don’t understand this.
Such normal don’t want, nor need, elites ordering them about.
I think of the underclass as people who can’t behave according to minimum middle class norms due to genes, culture, or both. Charles Murray used to say that below an IQ of X crime rates skyrocket. I’m just going to throw out -1 SD because I’m lazy right now. So for whites that’s only 15% of the population, but for other groups it can be as high as 50%. I think you could go up or down a little with that and that culture has some impact on how far up and down, but that gives you a ballpark of underclass for me.
“underclass says no, you will obey me.”
I don’t think the < -1 SD IQ underclass really wants the normal folk to obey them. The faux-elite, who claim to speak for the underclass, DO want the normal folk to obey them, and be obsequent to them.
The underclass wants more money, and often more sex, drugs, and rap/ dance music. Plus occasional ultra-violence w' their droogs, er, bros.
Back when white (or European or ‘western’) identities could be positive, e.g., “we” ‘built western civilization and the modern world and invented democracy’ and such, white people were more inclined to attach themselves to such identities. Now that such identities are negative, white people prefer to be individualists. This is certainly something people on the left see as cynical and ironic, which it might be for a 90 year old who was a white identitarian in 1950 but now wants to be an individual, but for those born since the 60s that criticism doesn’t really apply. Of course if you’re born with a choice where the identity open to you is associated with evil, you’ll understandably reject it. Today, I think black people are see in the opposite situation. Being black has become a positive aspect of one’s identity. Even the things historically seen as cultural defects are now widely regarded as the legacy of crimes inflicted upon black people, while the cultural and economic contributions are widely celebrated, and the individual black contributors are hardly ever mentioned without their race being mentioned as well. Take how Nikole Hannah-Jones, leader of the NYT’s 1619 project, has described the project. Now, it’s “we” built America, and contributed most of what distinguishes America culturally. It’s permissible for her to use rather chauvinistic language. The shoe is firmly on the other foot.
When presented with two alternatives, accept an identity which immediately asks one to be ashamed for the group one belong to, or be an individualst and reject group-identity, most people would probably take the individualist route. If, on the other had, the alternatives are: you can be an individualist, or one can accept an identity that immediately allows one to be proud of what one’s group has done, and also righteously indignant about what’s been done to it, I think most people will accept the ‘identitarian’ alternative. Today, many black people would probably see de-emphasizing racial identity as giving something up. Why give up the pride in being identified with those who suffered on the cross for the sake of creating the America that everyone else takes for granted today? It’s practically the Jesus Christ of identities. Being a mere individual may not seem very appealing by comparison.
I think the self-excluding we, as Gary Saul Morson calls it, is the word I keep hearing. We, meaning not me. We, meaning they.
And they have a lot to atone for. Which is why teachers in America are going to lap up this idea that Britain was enlightened and sophisticated and on the verge of abolishing slavery across the empire at any moment. We Americans are backward, enthralled to slavery. Britain, on the other hand, was enlightened.
Which is not an empirical argument that needs to be backed up with evidence or sources. Nikole Hannah-Jones: “I’m making a moral argument. My method is guilt.”
Using guilt in the modern sense, likewise. Our guilt, meaning theirs. Meaning, I’m guilty about their sins, and what they must confess. The words are “we Americans.” Them is the meaning.
It’s catnip to teachers in America that the British were at the vanguard of history, bending its arc toward justice, and the Americans were these regressive, reactionary, backward barbarians scared of all the progressive and forward-thinking idealists in Britain.
Teachers in Britain, on the other hand, have no use for this exact same idea. Teachers in Britain want to hear that it was Britain that was depraved through and through. They want to hear that Britain was lagging behind the forward-thinking Americans. We Brits are backward, enthralled to slavery. America, on the other hand, was enlightened.
There’s what teachers in Britain find useful and, at the polar opposite, what teachers in America find useful.
This is from a book called Moral Capital by Christopher Leslie Brown: “Granville Sharp worked tirelessly against the institution of slavery everywhere within the British Empire after 1772, but for many years in England he would stand nearly alone. The man was not a movement, and the Somerset case failed to produce one. Ten more years would pass before an organized anti-slavery lobby would coalesce, in part because those who cared knew neither how to proceed nor what end to seek.”
What Nikole Hannah-Jones is offering to wealthy white Democrats in America is, as she says, a moral argument. The historical record doesn’t come into it. That’s irrelevant. (But of course there is such a thing as the evidence, useless as it is.)
I like this quote from Christopher Leslie Brown. Even once a good plan with realistic end goals are in place, good outcomes do not always follow.
Historical Exercise: use Wikipedia to explain the origins of the mottos of Haiti (“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”), Liberia (“The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here”), and Sierra Leone (“Unity, Freedom, Justice”) and explain how these origins ended with their current Human Development Index ranks of 169, 176, and 181 respectively (out of 189 countries).
Historical Exercise Part 2: If Part 1 results in any causative factors common to Haiti, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, explain these factors with respect to the International rankings of Costa Rica
Have blacks every done anything for anyone else? Has any non-white group ever done anything for anyone else?
Taking what you can when you can is the norm. I see no reason to expect blacks to change behavior, there is no precedent for it.
That’s even what all this nonsense is about. One group of white people wants to take from another group of white people, and blacks are just one of many mercenary groups that they can employ in that struggle. No different from one person who wants to be emperor calling in some Goths or Huns to elevate himself above his rivals.
It can, of course, get worse. In countries with a market dominant minority all of this can get ramped up. Just look at Malaysia. If you think it’s bad now, wait till whites are a minority instead of a majority. Then you don’t even have to pretend its about fairness, it just descends into naked power grab.
Your right to point out that the desire to be “an individualist” is basically about running away from whiteness to save ones own hide. I kind of cowardice and selfishness. It won’t work. All struggles are group struggles. Individuals are just a group of one against a horde. The horde wins every time.
If you really want to be an individual, form a group, gain power, and then dictate terms which are most amenable to your individualist sensibilities. Those without power dictate nothing and accept everything.
Um, what have African-Americans done for this country? Would have the country grown as fast after the war of 1812 to Civil War without the slave trade? I don’t think so as I think capitalism best thrives when it has good access to cheap labor. (Yes I know the theories that slavery/sharcropping probably limited industry growth in the South but it did a lot keep cotton cheap.) And I do believe the non-agriculture sectors post WW2 in the US could grow faster with the high number of Hispanic-Americans working the fields.
And what has end of segregation meant to United States? First it ended the whataboutism of the Soviet 1960s which hurt their long term hope for endless revolution. But secondly, it created a nation and business environment that learned to grow into the global marketplace. I still think a lot of US soft power comes from other nations seeing people from all backgrounds succeeding here. Sure it utopia view here but I do think it makes long term impacts in the world. For instance, I believe the main reason the US/West won the Cold War in early 1990s was the success of Japan economy in which other nations could follow.
Through the lens of William H. McNeill’s 1976 book Plagues and Peoples, western sub-saharan Africans with Sickle-Cell protection against malaria arguably made new world sugar-cane, cotton, and tobacco possible pushing the timeline back several centuries. I think slavery was the only viable path to a disease resistant workforce and it was purely a fluke that the slaves available along the sea route were resistant. This is the “Germs” part of Jared Diamond’s title. Arguably, Quinine and rubber “agriculture” shaped modern history as much as slavery and that is not downplaying the horror nor impact of slavery.
This is correct. Blacks had a biological advantage in such environments, that’s why they were enslaved. People tried white indentured servants, but they died. If they had worked I don’t think people would have bothered with the trouble and expense of bringing over blacks. Slavery was never practiced in colder climates at any scale, and not always because of a cultural aversion (New York had slavery for quite a long time, but never at the same scale because there were no plantations).
The question is just how valuable cheaper new world sugar-cane, cotton, and tobacco was to the industrial revolution. Lots of people have tried to prove it was of central importance, but on closer inspection it doesn’t seem to have been that important. In fact its lack of importance is a big part of why the South lost the civil war (it turned out England didn’t need southern cotton that bad).
Even more, the “Germs” in the title refers to European germs for which Native Americans had no resistance: smallpox, typhoid, measles, etc. Modern estimates are that they killed 90-95% of the population and upended the culture of the survivors. I forget whether it was Charles C. Mann’s 1491 or which pointed out that infection roared ahead of the settlers, so that they encountered almost empty land. This led them to believe that the Indians didn’t deserve it, because they hadn’t improved it. “Look at this meadow. It could be planted full of crops.” Maybe a decade before, it had been.
Ironically, that same myth is around today, just for opposite purposes. “We should be more like the Native Americans. Unlike us, they lived lightly on the land. They were in harmony with Nature.”
I forget whether it was Charles C. Mann’s 1491 or 1493which pointed out that infection roared ahead of the settlers,
The “cheaper” part is misleading. The North Atlantic Gyre created an enormous comparative advantage. The scalable raw cotton supply chain along the Gulf Stream was a key component in the birth of the Industrial Revolution; steam engine powered transportation made the Civil War era very different. The slave trade doesn’t have to get anymore complicated than maximizing transport capacity during the age of sail. The tricky question is when do you disrupt the easy and profitable process currently in place because it is morally right to do so.
Roger Sweeny said:
Absolutely correct, thanks for the clarification. I should have been clearer. Jared Diamond is very slim on the Germs part of the book, if I remember correctly, he references “Plagues and Peoples” as the single source of truth and moves along. I should have placed my “Germs” comment closer to the book reference.
I don’t remember if Diamond mentions that disease rode ahead of the Spanish and was responsible for Atahualpa’s short-lived reign as Incan Emperor before the battle at Cajamarca, but as Roger mentions, others certainly have.
“the scalable raw cotton supply chain along the Gulf Stream was a key component in the birth of the Industrial Revolution”
Do you believe that without slavery the industrial revolution would not have happened? I think this claim goes far too far, and I think such a claim is really more of a new wave SJW logic. The consensus view as I understand it doesn’t agree with this. I don’t think it was “key”, or even particularly important. To the extent slavery had any economic positives for America, I think they were swallowed up by the costs of the Civil War and onward long ago.
We all agree that without slavery America would be richer today, not poorer? I think that’s obvious. Wasn’t that part of what the uproar over 1619 about?
“The tricky question is when do you disrupt the easy and profitable process currently in place because it is morally right to do so.”
The British did it earlier because the industrial revolution started there. When America was having its industrial revolution, it got rid of it.
Slavery (or something like it) is an inevitable consequence of Malthusian economics. Only industrialization can eradicate it.
I think slavery was a spandrel in the evolution of the American economy; simply along for the ride because it was built-in from the start. The key factors behind the scalable American raw cotton supply chain were the superior cost and scale of Atlantic sail transport, the cotton gin, and a large amount of inexpensive and uncultivated land along the Mississippi with good inland water transport.
My view on the underlying cause of the industrial revolution is non-consensus. It was due to the incredible product-market fit of global industrial scale cotton yarn and cloth, in my opinion. It raised the bar for customer value and supply-side profit. Wool, linen, and silk were not competitive materials. India could have pivoted to be the competitive industrial scale alternative supplier for Asia but they did not make the transition and continued as the leader in high quality but high cost cotton. African chiefs demanded European weapons and fine Indian cloth in exchange for their captured slaves, if I remember Sven Beckert’s book correctly.
“1) Would have the country grown as fast after the war of 1812 to Civil War without the slave trade?”
The southern economy was incredibly small relative to the north. There have been many attempts to link slavery to modern economic wealth and they always fail when you look a the math.
Actually, King Cotton delusions were part of why the south destroyed itself. You should learn from the planters idiocy, not try to repeat their propaganda.
“And I do believe the non-agriculture sectors post WW2 in the US could grow faster with the high number of Hispanic-Americans working the fields.”
Then how the hell did they grow so fast from 1945-1965, that’s basically considered “Make America Great Again” territory and growth was very high.
“And what has end of segregation meant to United States?”
Literally the first thing that happened in any city with a higher concentration of blacks is that they burned the place down and turned our cities into war zones. Those cities with too high a black population never recovered. Those that had fewer blacks and some global industry were able to use high rents to gentrify blacks out, though the black portions of the city are still bad (see The Bronx).
“For instance, I believe the main reason the US/West won the Cold War in early 1990s was the success of Japan economy in which other nations could follow.”
The Japanese are a xenophobic racist people who allow zero immigration.
BTW, none of this answers the question of what blacks have ever voluntarily done for non-blacks ever.
It is true the length and the heyday of the Cotton Plantation economy is greatly exaggerated in a lot of people mind. Outside of Virginia most plantation estates really only started in 1810s – 1860s so it was limited number generations. Also the reality was most Confederate landowners did not own slaves. (I believe it was 80% or so.)
But the Confederate sure did believe slavery though and pre-emptively removed themselves just because an abolitionist was elected President and fought a war in which the Union had several more times the troops and equipment. At the time high level the value of slaves was $3.2B (US income was $5.3B) so the value of slaves was probably the second highest asset class in 1860 after land. I know agriculture was not the future of the economy, but it sure looked important to Confederate economy in 1860.
Income vs Wealth = stock vs flow
Can’t comment on your specific statistics right now. I just know when I looked at the numbers it wasn’t impressive. If it really were impressive, they wouldn’t have lost the war.
Slavery was basically about 10,000 or so rich families that owned a lot of slaves. They started the war to protect their own interests, and dragged the south with them. They were clearly the instigators and had spent the decades leading up to 1860 engaged in bad faith political tactics and a crusade to force their externalities on northerners through things like the fugitive slave act. They were also desperate to expand their empire, but the southwest was never going to be cotton country, and expanding northwards meant breaking all their compromises, which they tried to do with often bloody results.
Ordinary Confederate soldiers fought for a lot of reasons. To protect their land and family (Sherman didn’t care whether you owned slaves when he rolled through town), because they were conscripted against their will, and for some slavery or some other reason. The war was mostly fought in the south, so in many cases these people didn’t have much of a choice.
We should remember that all wars often involve lots of lots of reluctant/forced soldiers in the fight.
The consensus story until recently was that the planters were the instigators who by hook or by crook has dragged the common folk around them into ruin because of their own hubris, ignorance, and greed. Part of that ignorance was believing their cotton was more valuable than it was.
IDK that this is some kind of crisis here and most of it comes across as excessive online bickering. And I suspect one reason why the cultural wars are so loud is they don’t cost anything.
1) I still say the big issue today is why it does take so long for young people to move from High School 18 to full married career, family, and kids say at 32. Shorten that time and this would decrease this stuff.
2) If conservatives believe the importance of local institutions then what are they doing with local institutions. I see lots of we need them but little actual effort. Or what can conservatives do to improve high school to vocational training. (At my kids High School they are doing a decent job of this to the local community college but I don’t see the employers participating that much. Maybe they do at CC.)
3) The weird thing about everybody remembering a different past. I old enough to remember the Rodney King riots and the realities of gang inner city wars. Things have vastly improved in this nation and the strange thing of the cultural war is there is few saying this.
In terms of weird realities is the Huge drop in crime since 1990 in all developed nations when we think about our past. Crime was literally twice as big in 1970 – 1990s and yet it started falling in 1990 when nobody was predicting this would happen. Or even when crime decreased in the early 1990s, I remember nobody believe it.
And yet, for great this crime drop was nobody has offered a good well defined reason(s) for this reality. (Most of the police and gentrification changes occurred after 1994 when the crime drop trend was already occurring. Also plot all developed nations and they all followed close to the same pattern of turning in 1990.)
Great points, Collin. Some thoughts:
1a) “from High School 18” could be divided by gender: male/18 and female/16. Accelerating female K-12 education seems like a highly plausible path to explore.
1b) Going with high predictability of female IQ for outcomes (via “Human Diversity”), perhaps female IQ rank matched with incremental/continuous education for women in lieu of university/community-college is another area worthy of exploration that would allow much earlier marriage/pregnancy options. Think “signing contract” for an 18-year old woman with an IQ of 130.
2) Co-op programs work incredibly well and not just for specialized Math/Engineering career paths at the University of Waterloo. American software companies have embraced co-op programs but American’s have been slow to adopt the systems.
3) Steven Levitt correlated the drop in crime with the availability of abortion. I think birth control is causative but just one component of the overall “Coming Apart” trend involving women gaining access to both birth control and the job market.
I tend to think of Levin ‘Access To Abortion’ in terms of a larger picture here and that Roe was the Black Swan Event of the Early Marriage/Post WW2 boom years. So I simplify the crime drop is that young people put off families in 1973 and this lowered crime 18 years later. (Placing the impact on family size better deals with the impact of lowering abortion rates after 1981.)
1) For all the claims of low FTR of today forgets that the mid-1970s had both lower FTR and especially lower birth totals. (We are 3.79M when it was 3.2M in mid-1970s)
2) Probably the biggest impact of Roe on the political spectrum is it changed the birth control discussion and in that the Ross Douthat accept it mostly legal status.
3) The reality of the post Great Recession is the primary drop in birth have come from single motherhood, and big drops in Hispanic-American (& Af-Am) birth rates. In reality white FTR has 1.8 babies/female for decades.
4) I do think Charles Murray did identify the birth rate problem in The Bell Curve but he dislikes the reaction to his 1994 concerns. He believed that the low IQ female makes more wrong family decisions and this had a real potential problem. (Given he wrote in 1994 when the crime rate drops were yet to believed.) However, he is upset that society have simply moved more towards the Asian models not past US models. I jokingly called it the Singapore Solution. I partially think of it as the Asian led trend is because Murray had high thoughts of Asian populations.
And the low long term birth rates were identified as a problem for Japan Inc. in the 1980s when most developed nations saw birth rates have a bounce from 1970s lows. (I had an visiting Indian Econ Professor in 1993 stating that Japan would have slower economy than the Us the next generation in which nobody in the class agreed.)
That is young people are just putting off family formation all together and the US moving towards long term lower birth rates and late family formation. And if you map out US birth rates we still see the higher you go up the income scale to $500K the FTR of women fall on the way up.
Incarceration rates went up in response to the crime wave.
Rates were low until 1980, even though crime increases began in the late 60s (rates actually went down for the first 10 years of the crime increase, contributing to a widespread believe that criminal friendly justice reforms were part of the problem).
In 1980 they were under 300/100,000. In 1990 they were just under 600/100,000. B 2000 they were 900/100,000 and the back of the crime wave was broken. Part of the answer is that we locked up the criminals.
2) Many of the criminals killed themselves. Murders are primarily criminal on criminal, and if they spike inevitably your murder prone population eventually kills itself.
3) The drugs of the crime wave were all uppers. The drug of choice in the 1990 crime wave were crack and PCP, literally the drugs most likely to turn someone into a violent crazy person. Eventually, these drugs killed their users.
4) We got older. Median male age of the USA was 26.8 in 1970. By 2010 is was 35.8.
So if our cohort of criminals is males age 15-25, they just aren’t as big a % of the population anymore.
So the best answer is:
1) We locked them up.
2) They killed each other.
3) They got too old for that shit.
Policing methods may have made a difference, at a minimum bad policing hurts.
I think Levitt corrected for most of these factors including the “Broken Windows” policing strategy. I haven’t followed the data/statistics since “Freakonomics” went mainstream so I might be out to lunch on this.
So the crime wave just followed the Boomer age spectrum and after 1980 we just to cycle through the criminals through 1990. And after 1990 the number of teens was suddenly lower that limiting crime. In reality, this theory fits on the other side of Levitt/Reid the demographics of later family formation and abortion theory and it does a lot of explaining of why crime started increasing in 1964 and grew the next 16 years. (So the first Boomers started reaching 16 and by 1990 all the boomers were 30.)
And yes, we way over exaggerate the impact of 1994 Crime bill as Incarceration rate were already high and mostly the police were putting more criminals in jail. However any moves after 1994 (more police, stop & Frisk) really had small impact.
1) The other low point of crime stats was the late 1950s when society was 20 – 25 years after the Great Depression baby bust. (Realize FTR 2.2 – 2.4/female was below replacement levels with medical realities in the 1930s.) And it is weird to think late 1950s was low crime as the reality was organized crime probably highpoint in terms of power of the US society then. (They were bigger than US steel.)
2) And the reality is US teens today are much better behaved than they were in 2000, 1990, 1960 or even 1950! But it does seem like their failures moved from teen years to mid-20s years. One reason why I suspect we have long young identity politics today than ever, is because young people taking longer to develop their career, family and religious identities.
In terms of crime and illegal drug use, I do find the latest opoid crisis weird given I remember the late 1970s through early 1990s drug battles.
1) The number of drug deaths are much higher than they were in the 1980s which does not seem right to my memory. Except more people were dieing from other crime (gang wars, participating crime, drug wars) than the drug themselves which is happening more today.
2) This is the epidemic that hit white populations at higher rates than minorities which has never happened.
Uppers make you go out and get violent. Opioids literally make you to docile to do anything. The deaths are self inflicted rather than inflicted on another.
Crime waves based violent uppers inherently have a certain “burn brightly and then die off quickly” aspect to them, much like the drugs themselves.
Short periods of docile opioid pleasure are separated by a scramble to acquire enough funds to at least prevent withdrawal but ultimately reach a peak high. Opioid addicts are walking cashflow problems. Docile is not a good description of an opioid addict as their cravings build and their withdrawal symptoms start.
The other simple reality of yesteryear 1980s drug battles and today is the price.
It was extremely expensive to buy Cocaine in 1980s that took thousands for the habit while the opoids today have had price of hit equal to two candy bars at Wal-Mart. This stuff is really cheap today.
There are a lot of ways to get money. When you are high on PCP you aren’t even a human being making decisions anymore, you’re an animal hyped up to act crazy.
What do you think about the unleaded gasoline hypothesis as explanation for the drop in the crime rate? Another factor might be immigration; don’t immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than natives?
Also video games and cell phones. Digital opiates of the masses.
“What do you think about the unleaded gasoline hypothesis as explanation for the drop in the crime rate?”
It’s bunk. By coincidence, mass incarceration began at the same time as lead was being phased out, in part because the Clear Air Act mandated catalytic converters, which don’t work with leaded gas.
The way we can tell it’s a coincidence and spurious correlation is because nothing of the sort happened in other countries.
It’s the kind of story that’s seductive when one want to avoid the obvious Occam’s Razor ugly truth (the crime version of the Null Hypothesis). Lots of places historically and more recently around the world (e.g., Leadville, Huixian) had bad lead pollution problems confirmed by high blood levels in local children, but there was zero correlation with increased crime levels.
My impression is that blacks don’t like politically correct culture. So I would assume that they don’t think too highly of SJW types. That isn’t to say that they don’t believe that the US is racist, nor that don’t think discrimination is still a problem for black people. But lots of black people have believed that for a long period of time, way before SJW types came to prominence in academia.
Can anyone name a SJW type elected mayor in a black majority city?
Blacks don’t believe in SJW-ism, but they do believe in group identity politics.
When you learn about “machine politics” in history class that’s a pretty good description of black political behavior. It’s pretty low information, doesn’t pretend to care about the good of society, and wants direct gimedats as much as possible.
It’s not hard to figure out who blacks will vote for:
1) Name recognition is big and they are low information voters
2) Black opinion makers have a big effect and they can be bought
3) Direct pocketbook guarantees work (free cell phones, etc)
“White people welfare” like free college (they don’t go) or Medicare for All (they already have Medicaid and Obamacare) aren’t useful to them.
The last several black mayors of Baltimore fit this stereotype, most of them end up in jail for corruption.
The issue isn’t that blacks like SJWs, it’s that they will vote for them in the general whether they like them or not if they are the D. If Bernie, who has little black support in the primary, gets nominated they will vote 90-10 in his favor regardless.
The honest answer is I find black group identity politics less repugnant then SJWs. I mean I don’t want blacks people to be running my politics (look at Baltimore), but its an understandable impulse and its not like they got a lot of options. Anywhere where they aren’t an outright majority, whites using identity politics could theoretically keep them in check and find a compromise. SJWs are a worse kind of evil because they think its for your own good and they are totally clueless.