Libertarians and other sensitive liberals tend to oppose between one and three of the major ‘war’ initiatives of the post-World War II American government. With nuclear weapons intimidating major powers away from conflicts between one another, they turn towards internal struggles to provide a collective sense of purpose and motivation while addressing what the press and the general public see as pressing crises. All of these conflicts arise from the contemporary understanding of equality. When the concept of citizenship becomes diluted to include absolutely everyone — and potentially ever-larger groups of people from around the world — then no one enjoys […]

Dear Advocate, Like you, I once supported fewer restrictions on foreign immigration. While I’m not sure of your specific views, in my case, I believed that it was important to break down barriers to high-skill immigration, and that the US should maintain and expand its policy to take in refugees fleeing oppression. There are a number of reasons why my positions were wrong, but the main reason why I was wrong was because the beliefs rested on a few faulty assumptions: Cultural differences are malleable — most immigrants just want to assimilate into the historic and distinctive American culture. Genetics is mostly cosmetic […]

For years, academics, demographers, and pundits have been discussing the implications of the impending minority status of Whites in America. This trend projection is usually portrayed as an inevitability, regardless of whether or not there’s much of a change in immigration policy. The usual tack which pundits take is that the Republican party in particular needs to embrace diversity to improve its appeal to African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. On the left, especially among academics, there tends to be an avid celebration of the demographic displacement of European-Americans. The theology of ‘white privilege’ holds that Europeans as a whole are guilty of […]

‘Post-historical bias’ is a special variant of the normalcy bias, which is to say that it’s an implicit or explicit belief that significant historical events have essentially ceased to happen, and that the process of historical change has become predictable and slow. A survey of history over a long enough time in any region shows that events are typically unpredictable, that shocks are common, and that war is a certainty, even between groups of people that were allied a short time ago. However, because human lives tend to be short, individuals tend to treat most days as if they will be […]

When the old monarchical regimes were still around, one of the main ways that emerging nation-states differentiated themselves was by displaying a strong opposition to national pluralism — which is to say creating states composed of many different ethnic or religious groups. The wars of the reformation in large part created the backlash against pluralism — England expelled or harried its papists, France eventually eliminated their Huguenots, and the counter-Reformation purged non-Catholics from Catholic countries. All of this happened after some extended experiments in pluralism and toleration, most of which resulted in too many elite power struggles for the outlook […]