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 a secure, privileged social position. Because the people are wary of any sort of hierarchy, any perceived or real inequality will often be portrayed as a problem to be corrected. When some people are poor and other people are rich, this tends to be portrayed as an affront to the natural order rather than something which is entirely natural to humans and animals of all kinds.

Liberals critical of these ‘war’ measures tend to criticize them because they correctly see that, when all people everywhere are held to be equal, any oppressive treatment towards one group in society can and will be extended to everyone in society. In some cases, this policy tends to be preemptively extended to everyone immediately, as with humiliating & ineffective airport security measures put into place after the attacks of 9/11/2001. To avoid damage to the equality principle through the use of extensive profiling, the state put into place a policy which harasses everyone who comes through the security lines equally, while compromising a bit by providing some extra roughing-up of people on a special list. The point of the mass pat-downs is to provide some political cover for the special watch lists (which disparately impact Muslims, who are supposed to be equal citizens). Without the need to defend ever broader expressions of the equality principle, the security measures would probably be restricted to the people who posed the greatest risks of bombing or hijacking planes.

The War on Drugs emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in response to the rapid increase in crime following the Civil Rights and judicial reform movements. Under the pretext of controlling drugs, the state presumed a long list of new powers to wield over all citizens equally in an attempt to suppress crime. It wielded these powers unequally, violating the sometimes-historically-observed rights of some groups of citizens while leaving others mostly to their own devices.

In this, liberals correctly see that when the state rounds up Muslim citizens to detain without trial, the practice could easily be applied to all citizens within the state. They are correct in this, but tend to fail to see the larger problem presented by the extension of citizenship to anyone with a pulse. Retraction of citizenship and the franchise tends to be seen as impossible — liberals portray each extension as a historical advance on the same level as the development of vaccines and antibiotics. Because of this, it becomes much harder to resolve the actual problems posed by a relatively small religious minority. The inability of the state to recognize differences between groups of people, owing to the myths it tells itself about itself, results in a maddening decay of the underlying society that supports it.

Because the state proclaims to treat all citizens equally, the SWAT raids and aggressive pat-downs which tend to be restricted to some portion of the population in a furtive manner are sometimes seen as a threat to the liberty of the population as a whole. The state, being run by not-entirely-stupid people, doesn’t actually want to oppress the entire population. Just the segment of the population that causes more problems than they provide in revenue and opportunity to the state itself.

In this, liberals tend to sabotage their own state which enforces the pretense of the equality principle. If the state decides to not aggressively control crime, it loses valuable industrial centers to blight. When it does use aggressive measures against crime (‘victimless’ or otherwise, on pretense of drug control or without the pretense), then liberals complain about the violation of the equality principle in abstract. But the liberal way of life can’t survive without that sort of aggressive enforcement — as we’ve seen in the destruction and scattering of countless American cities and towns since the middle of the 20th century.

Further, without basic peace and order, there is no liberal way of life. Your butcher shop can’t go on selling meat if it’s being used as a place for hostage rescue dramas. It becomes harder to operate a train system if at any moment, assault rifle wielding bandits can start shooting it up. It becomes harder to run a shop downtown if at any moment some intellectuals at a national newspaper might raise a mob to burn down the local businesses. Less dramatically, it becomes more challenging to maintain bourgeois life when a large portion of a town’s inhabitants are derelict drug addicts. Also, it becomes impossible to live a bohemian, individualistic, hedonist lifestyle if your neighborhood comes under the authority of shariah law or local gangsters. But in the name of preserving their own autonomy and authority, liberals will often extend their umbrella of toleration to startlingly illiberal groups.

Liberal intellectuals tend to regard these threats to order as secondary to threats to the popular assumptions which provide them with power and influence. If the general population loses fervor for the equality principle, then it loses fervor for providing the liberals with the authority to administer the government. And that group of people goes far beyond what the popular press usually calls ‘liberals’ — it applies to broader groups than that.

One of the reasons for this is that new frontiers in inequality are occasions for power grabs and new job opportunities for new cadres of liberals, who are much greedier for protected, make-work positions than the old aristocracy ever was. Inequality as a fact of existence is a sort of zero point energy source for the creation of new bureaucracies for the care and feeding of new classes of pious liberals. Resolving the problems is impossible — but what is possible is to create ever larger occasions for job opportunities for educated bureaucrats.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective, the cycle can’t go on forever.

The post Equality and the Wars On Poverty, Terrorism, and Drugs appeared first on Social Matter.

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:

1. Cultural differences are malleable — most immigrants just want to assimilate into the historic and distinctive American culture.
2. Genetics is mostly cosmetic — observed differences in intelligence and behavior are mostly due to differences in upbringing rather than inborn.
3. People have no moral right to use state power to prevent property owners from importing as many or as few people from foreign countries as they want to.

Point #1 — that all people everywhere are simply Americans-in-waiting — is both logically absurd and readily observable to be false, even when traveling to relatively homogeneous regions like Western Europe and Latin America. While Americans are accustomed to having one big language group over a vast territory, in much of the world, linguistic and cultural fragmentation is a given. In countries like France, there are substantial differences in cuisine, accent, dress, and cultural expression from one region to the next.

There’s also the question as to why corporate leaders looking to increase the supply of skilled labor that they can hire should have superior rights to property owners and others who might want to restrict access to their territories. What gives those leaders superior rights to the existing skilled laborers who might want to restrict immigration?

In practice, the corporate leaders are just more effective at manipulating the political process, but it’s entirely possible to see the reverse happening at another time.

Further, despite postwar and post-cold-war consolidations of political models, there’s still substantial diversity in terms of the types of governments people support worldwide, what policies they favor (if they can even articulate a political consciousness), and what morals they follow.

As for the second point, it requires a staunch denial of the entire body of knowledge of genetics, going back centuries. Thinkers as diverse and well-known as Stephen Pinker, Charles Murray, and James Watson (whom you should remember from your High School biology textbook as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA) have all done a better job of deflating the ‘blank slate’ myth than I could in a short letter to you.

The political implications of substantial biological diversity between groups of humans means that any model which rests on the assumption that humans are roughly uniform in terms of their economic productivity, cultural practices, and political beliefs is not a good model to base your legal reasoning on.

Point #3 is more esoteric, as most people nowadays have a fuzzy notion of what governments should and shouldn’t be permitted to do, with most people hewing towards a contradictory grab bag of custom and abstract principles.

The chief reason why you should consider changing your position on immigration is that it creates social incoherence and makes it more challenging to run an effective government along any given lines, regardless of whatever your beliefs about government are.

If we, for a moment, imagine importing 30 million Frenchmen into the American Midwest and giving them citizenship, the results would be the creation of a big exiled France-on-the-Prairie. The original population would be politically displaced, linguistically marginalized, and also marginalized from existing economic networks within the exiles.

The original government of those regions would have to make way for power-sharing with the new French majority, which would likely move to change the political and cultural climate to one much more like France than it was like the Midwest, with its distinct history.

Immigration advocates could counter that that is largely what happened with the original settling of the Midwest in the mid-19th century, except with immigrants from Germany, Ireland, and elsewhere. And in fact, the history of the settling of that region is one of inter-ethnic conflict between Irish, Germans of different Christian persuasions, the Native Americans, and Yankee settlers from New England. And part of that incoherent internal conflict is what lead to the heinous Civil War, in which Yankees conscripted immigrants straight off the boats to fight against the South.

We like to think that we shape our own political beliefs, but we are also shaped by the results of past wars, rather than an exercise of pure reason which we conduct isolated from others. One of the reasons why debates about immigration are so tendentious in contemporary America is because it’s long been a contentious debate, in large part due to the civic rights granted to all citizens to vote.

In democracies like the United States, the winners of domestic political conflicts have imported foot soldiers to use against their rivals, both in a literal sense and at the ballot box. Ambitious Americans from the founding onward have seized upon dislocations and conflicts in Europe to gain an upper hand in their domestic schemes. When the ambitious see fewer advantages in importing a new class of foreigners, they tend to stop doing it. That’s one of the reasons why, in the early 20th century, Progressives opposed immigration for a time — they were trying to bust local political machines run by largely Catholic rivals descended from immigrants.

In these debates, as in most issues, we tend to try to re-frame self-interested politics in terms of general principles. We ask “is immigration good or bad for the general welfare?” — and then construct arguments based on those terms, rather than in the particular terms of power politics, because enlightened political structures are not supposed to be about conflicts between interest groups and powerful individuals seeking advantage.

What I’d like to ask you to do is to consider looking past the airy expressions of principles and thinking more in terms of the contemporary political scene in the same way that you would look at a conflict in a foreign country. Americans became comfortable talking about the ‘conflict between Sunni, Shia, and Kurds’ as the US struggled to create a modern state in Iraq governed by a fictional nationality with a similar persuasive weight to the fictional nationality that Americans tend to believe about themselves.

Thinking about immigration with the detachment that you’d feel reading a news story about a conflict between tribes you’d never heard of before is a good exercise to cut away some of the emotional responses to terms which have been carefully cultivated in you by the many different interests who want to persuade you to change your beliefs.

Intellectuals under liberalism tend to see themselves as warriors in the ‘battle of ideas,’ but really, ideas are just the early skirmishes in the actual battles in which people shoot each other over scraps of land to determine who controls it and under what terms. The ideas are important, but the people doing the fighting over those ideas — and the results of those fights — are what tend to matter more.

Consider getting out of the debating hall on the immigration issue. One of the lessons we should learn from the 20th century is that it’s entirely possible for people with terrible, contradiction-ridden ideas to win enormous wars, which gives them territorial control over enormous swaths of the earth. The USSR didn’t have to be run on solid principles for it to conquer much of the planet. You can win the debate, and then lose everything anyway.

The immigration issue is less of one of universal, abstract principles and more one of particular conflicts between particular groups of people in a given country, with different interest groups grasping for advantage at the expense of others. This harms our vanity of seeing our political culture as ‘above’ all of that petty grasping, which was supposed to be characteristic of the ‘old world’ and not of the new political order of popular sovereignty, but that’s the case.

When the determination of what policy to support becomes one of which faction aligns with your interests, it deflates much of the rhetoric and intellectualizing around the issue. That rhetoric tends to be a thin veneer over personal ambition. In democratic politics, political actors use such rhetoric to tout people into their camp, even when it undermines their personal interests. Do what you can to immunize yourself against that.

The post A Letter to Mass Immigration Advocates appeared first on Social Matter.

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 unique historical crimes which morally justifies their cultural and physical displacement from their lands. If anything, the sentence placed on Europeans collectively is harsher than anything dreamed up at the Nuremberg tribunals, with the charges being more vague, subjective, non-specific, and targeted to an entire population rather than specific political leaders.

If this political rhetoric has a purpose, it’s to help the multicultural political coalition to tighten itself. Intellectuals intended to discourage the political right from dissenting on the perceived fait accompli of mass immigration to the postwar coalition in the Western world. The chain of reasoning went:

1. Whites will become a minority in all major Western nations in 50 years or less.
2. The current political right, especially in the US, has a mostly mono-cultural appeal, which means that its agenda will never be able to succeed in universal suffrage democracy in which the ethnic group it most appeals to becomes a minority.
3. Therefore, the right must pander to more diverse ethnic groups in order to salvage some of its political viability.

The problem with this chain of reasoning is that it forecloses an almost infinite number of alternative political strategies that could be adopted in response to changing conditions. Liberal, universal suffrage democracy is itself not a permanent fixture either in Europe or globally — if you tell a population that it’s going to have to give up power over its own affairs in order to maintain a political system that’s at least legitimized by popular vote, there’s a good chance that at least some portion of those people are going to be more willing to drop the popular vote than they are to give up power over their own affairs to a largely foreign population.

This is how that rhetoric wound up backfiring on the academics and intellectuals — by being so clumsy and open about telling the native populations that they were terrible-bad-people who needed to be abolished, they triggered a defensive response that might not have happened otherwise with nearly as much vehemence.

So far, most of the rhetoric on the populist right has been around restricting immigration — which will do little to alter the demographic trajectory of Western countries other than reducing the acceleration of the decline of the native populations. Because this would be necessary but not sufficient to alter the ultimate future of Western civilization, there are a couple further moderate proposals which actually could — one would be mass deportations, and the other would be some combination of restrictions upon the popular vote and experiments in various forms of private government.

The reason why universal suffrage encourages open-borders policies is that it encourages political adventurers to import enormous numbers of potential voters for their personal power or (more typically) their party — regardless of the future consequences to the quality of life in the country in question. If you give a vote to anyone with a heartbeat, it encourages politicians to fight with one another by importing people with heartbeats, regardless of the character of the people who have those blood-pumping organs.

It’s well and good to treat the symptoms of a larger political error, but in order to prevent a recurrence of the same problem, more significant changes are going to be necessary.

The post How ‘Permanent Minority’ Rhetoric Backfires appeared first on Social Matter.

‘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 similar to their recent experience and that of their most immediate ancestors.

Although I headed this post with a photo of Francis Fukuyama in front of his most famous book, he himself is not as guilty of this error in thinking as he’s often attributed. Because his thought was so influential on the second Bush administration, the errors in the implementation tend to also be attributed to errors in his thought which were not actually present.

Conflict is what’s typical; peace and predictability are what’s rare. After World War II, and particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a pervasive belief that deviations from the global march of progress were just that — deviations — which would be inevitably corrected owing to the logic of broader historical forces, and that what was left of history was essentially a mopping-up operation combined with a steady advance in technological development.

This hasn’t happened and won’t happen. There’s a particular quirk in the modern democratic mindset that requires the promotion of a general sense of the inevitability of its continual advancement. The sense of inevitable destiny lends the moral pronouncements of ‘democratic activists’ seem more weighty, and the failures of those ‘activists’ — as in Egypt recently — seems to have no effect on the broader thesis that all states will eventually become well-regulated liberal democracies who participate happily in the international system put into place at the end of the last big war.

Fukuyama accurately anticipated, to some degree, the current political climate of liberal auto-cannibalism demonstrated by the absolutism of contemporary campus speech codes and the urban unrest along racial lines.

The idea that liberal democracy is inevitable also makes it more fragile, because the people charged with managing it will tend to believe that any threat to the order will be overcome, and that the proliferation of new rights without duties will continue to an infinite degree. Another curious factor is the pervasive belief that the decline in war between states is permanent due to nuclear proliferation, but also that technological innovation is pervasive in every other sphere.

In trying to stomp out war permanently, Western liberals have progressively eaten away at the common liberties, sense of dignity, and cultural distinctiveness of the countries that they have been charged with ruling. In the hope of extending rights and opportunities to as many people as possible, the dynamism, adaptability, and fitness of our cultures have declined in many respects, or have been instead channeled into relatively narrow areas.

Liberals have to portray themselves as continually winning against remnants of traditional evil, even when the struggle becomes absurd. Stopping the triumphant parade of new rights threatens to bleed off the momentum of the entire project, which is why new ones need to be invented constantly, and why more enthusiasm needs to be redirected to uplifting and importing the third world. This frenzy for liberalism has to die out when the people who promote it, themselves, die out in larger numbers, which they will, because they prefer the promotion of the political story of liberalism over their own lives.

The post The Post-Historical Bias appeared first on Social Matter.

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 to be maintained.

In many areas — particularly under the Holy Roman Empire — ethnic, cultural, and linguistic pluralism within the empire could be maintained so long as the provinces remained loyal to the emperor and the pope both. Some measure of religious pluralism within the Catholic Church also made it so that there were many different expressions of religious worship even under what was nominally the same religion.

Monarchs and nobles were often ethnically and linguistically distinct from their subjects — but with, generally speaking, a smaller cultural gulf than we would expect from a ‘multicultural’ society of today. The European order developed out of the Roman order with its demonstrated success over a thousand years of absorbing subsidiary cultures into a relatively cohesive continental empire.

From the early modern period until the end of World War II, emerging nation-states tended to reject the pluralism of the old regime. The countless languages and dialects of provinces were melted into official-national-languages. Religions declined in importance, while ideologies promoted by the press tended to take their place.

After World War I, the old regimes were all dead. But that didn’t stop the conflicts — the new regimes of self-determined democratic nation-states then got at one another’s throats for another apocalyptic conflict barely a generation after the previous one.

After World War II, the ideology-religion of humanism and human rights came to be the official belief of the global elite, which had come to be dominated by the United States. Humanism is the belief that all people are spiritually equal, and that that spiritual equality obligates all political leaders to craft policies that bring material conditions for people in line with that essential spiritual equality.

States can only maintain so much pluralism while maintaining coherent enough to administer. When there is a great deal of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity within a state, the religion must be unified, or else the difference in outlooks among the populace will lead them into permanent conflicts with their neighbors.

Similarly, when religious pluralism is permitted, little diversity in other matters can be permitted without risking serious strife and civil war. The first lasting government in the United States — a state with more religious pluralism than most others formed at the time — didn’t make it a century without a bloody civil war, demonstrating the dangers involved in religious toleration.

So in modern states, there tends to be minimal religious diversity permitted — all must bow down to humanism and a raft of other progressive beliefs — but there is maximal ethnic diversity mandated, because the latter policy is intended to demonstrate an absolute commitment to the doctrines of humanism. If leaders believe in humanism, then they will avoid enacting policies that might hint that they don’t believe that all humans from everywhere are equal in value.

Postwar nation-states take the principle of unlimited ethnic diversity in order to demonstrate a commitment to humanist values. Those humanist values have tended to be supported by even ‘realist’ thinkers and politicians not so much out of sincere belief but out of fear that the failure of that religious system would lead to a replay of World War II and the serious human costs that ensued. One of the chief reasons as to why World War I and II were so severe was that a Europe fragmented into mutually antagonistic ethnic nations proved to be unable to maintain sufficient common interests to avoid wars of near-annihilation which devastated the populations and elite classes of most of the belligerents involved.

Postwar elites find themselves in a serious bind. The hastily constructed godless religion of humanism is insupportable and results in serious instability both within nations and between nations. It encourages maladaptive behavior on a grand scale, and nature tends to correct such behaviors with a harsh hand.

These postwar elites have been trained into believing a false choice — that it’s either the noble lie of humanism, or global thermonuclear annihilation. This is the chief reason as to why this humanism is so resilient to all critiques — whenever it even comes to be slightly threatened by alternative beliefs, leaders feel a responsibility to shore it up, because they believe the alternative is so dire.

The post Mutations in National Pluralism appeared first on Social Matter.

Accounting is a way of rationalizing production using tokens of value combined with scrupulous record-keeping. It has less to do with enormous factories and more to do with the mathematically rationalized operations of those factories. Much of the political agitation surrounding the developments of capitalism owe to an evaluation that the rational method indicated by what the numbers say ought to be is unacceptable. When the accounts say that a given laborer can’t be paid more than what he produces, agitators will try to convince that laborer that he might be able to earn more than the books say that he should if he joins a protest or lobs a bomb at the works.

In the more modern times of too-big-to-fail nationalized and quasi-nationalized corporations, we see an aesthetic and political preference for the preservation of defunct entities — better to be big, impressive, shiny, and defunct than functional and rationally ordered. This is the essence of the Keynsian approach — puff up accounting entities with lots of credit, and then presume that rational productivity will ensue.

What actually happens is that entrepreneurs of all types — state and business — orient towards chasing new credit, because that’s what a rationalized response to the changed accounting environment is. The smartest decision to make is to chase after credit and credit-generated investment dollars, rather than following the restrictive moral and financial strictures of cash accounting along with scrupulous avoidance of excessive debts.

Much of the economic history (like its social history) of the 20th century concerns a pervasive rebellion against traditional strictures and disciplines. If the accounts say that a pursuit is wasteful, then the good (post-)modern man says “damn what the books say: flood it with more money!” In doing so, they can appear heroically irrational, even bold, and any boondoggle (no matter how poorly thought out) can be rationalized as an important speculative exploration, even when it’s actually just depleting the capital of the society and uncovering almost nothing.

The main difference between speculation under a more disciplined monetary system and speculation combined with too-big-to-fail accounting is that in the former, when speculators err, they run out of cash to speculate with, and poor speculators get culled from the market. With too-big-to-fail, bad speculators get rewarded commensurately with their failures, and their errors then cause further coordination failures. This goes beyond just big banks, but also extends to cities like Detroit, Camden, Newark, and Baltimore — essentially defunct municipalities where rational large-scale production can no longer occur.

Anti-capitalists rarely frame their criticisms of the system as a denial of the validity of using accounting to rationalize productive human activity, but that is in effect what most proposed interventions and modifications to the system wind up being: a demand either for irrational production or favored exemptions from the strictures that said rationalized production would otherwise indicate.

The post Accounting, Economics, and Capitalism appeared first on Social Matter.

The Rockefeller fortune in particular was instrumental to the founding of the historically black colleges — along with some of the other moguls of the gilded age. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African-Americans were almost entirely confined to the Southern regions of the United States. There was no ‘national’ race problems, although there were countless controversies over European immigration throughout the country going back at least to the first Adams administration.

Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise speech from 1895 best expresses this proto-progressive racial program. The idea was never really to break down segregation. Educating African-Americans, particularly in technical fields, was intended to create a separate Black leadership class, rather than necessarily to displace lower class Whites, which would have been politically unfeasible during that time period.

None of the figures from the time period believed that it would be possible, through education, to equalize Blacks and Whites in terms of their capacities and inclinations. The importance of genetics in determining a person’s capabilities as a worker or manager was widely understood at the time. Rather than a case of the general scientific understanding improving over time, our general understanding of human biological differences has depleted over time.

The early progressive approach was to adapt institutions to local conditions and the different characteristics of Blacks. Fortunes were spent on achievable goals, rather than radical attempts to defy rational possibility.

This developed into a hope that domestic migration could replace politically contentious foreign immigration in terms of satisfying Northern industrial demand for labor. Whereas the South had had a long experience of what postmodern leaders call ‘managing diversity,’ Northern cities — like Detroit — didn’t. The Great Migration was driven by business interests looking to fill the gap left behind by sharply curtailed foreign immigration.

The ‘Civil Rights movement’ was in part a reaction to the mix-ups related to the hopes of the early progressives. Uplift of the Black population was taken as a part of a raft of programs, like the elimination of hookworm from the South. The idea was to make Black labor more productive, to encourage peace between the races, and to promote the ‘separate but equal’ legal doctrine, even leading into the years of urban riots and Federal agitation which followed.

‘Separate but equal’ was an unprincipled exception that was eventually used as an agitator’s cudgel to break down the piecemeal segregation efforts put into place in Northern states like covenants and extensive workplace testing. Eventually, the Great Society managed to more or less permanently destroy the attempt to uplift African-Americans into a modern proletarian class suited for regimented factory labor.

The Black migration was largely opposed by labor unions — as part of the left’s abandonment of labor in the middle of the century, it shifted to race-and-gender agitation as a means of capturing political authority. Ensuring endless conflicts which can never be resolved, but can only be managed by bureaucracy, has been a wonderfully effective method for the professional left. In the name of healing divisions, they create permanent divisions which can be pushed down on at any moment in time to force a response and gin up new funds, whether from the state or from private donors.

The mass migrants from Latin America and Asia have almost entirely taken their place in the minds of modern managerial thinkers. Even wealthy modern pretenders to the Rockefeller-Carnegie legacy, while occasionally throwing millions at Newark school districts in an impotent fit of ketman-charity, have no coherent program whatsoever as it relates to really doing what’s right for relations between races which have been observed to be socially incompatible for thousands of years of human experience.

So, why did progressives make this about-face?

Universal suffrage has a political logic and momentum to it. Even if people only believe in equality in the abstract, it can be used as a political lever to agitate for certain interests in return for votes. If you can convince African-Americans that they’ve been taken advantage of by a brutal system of oppression, then there’s a good chance you can get them to vote for you. If you can bribe them en masse with make-work jobs, special legal privileges in the workplace, and welfare checks, then you can get them to turn out to vote for you consistently.

Progressives have also typically followed the lead of big business. Essentially progressives have usually acted as political brokers between large business interests and labor agitators, working to quell the latter on behalf of their supporters.

When it became impossible to discriminate between employees in a way that generated disparate impact, the state mostly solved the problem of enterprise being forced to hire unqualified applicants by just putting those people on the welfare rolls or in unremarkable jobs — and then preventing anyone from discriminating against the new mass migrants imported mostly from Latin America and Asia.

Despite this derailing of the progressive program in a tangled crash of political conflict, the general idea behind it was sound — different rules for different people, a charitable, diplomatic attitude between races, and a willingness to compromise with existing demographics and political reality. It also shows some of the danger in putting trust in even the most well-intentioned of technocratic and bureaucratic programs.

The law of unintended consequences  turned an attempt to make White supremacy into a permanent institutional fixture in American life while reducing reliance on foreign immigration evolved into a political movement to displace Whites from their own country and maximize foreign immigration almost irrespective of the quality of the migrants in question.

The post How White Supremacy Developed Into the Diversity Agenda appeared first on Social Matter.

Success, unless it’s attacked or redistributed, will tend to calcify into permanent privilege. Over time, as that becomes more solid, a society that starts off on relatively even footing will become dramatically stratified. Regardless of all the rhetoric about property and privacy rights, Americans have tended to be dramatically uncomfortable with the results of respecting those sorts of rights. Antitrust legislation and other forms of regulatory intervention came about because popular opinion was so dramatically opposed to the results of free market principles in action — a small number of winners wind up consolidating power, foreclosing off some areas of opportunity.

In America, ‘equality of opportunity’ has a sacred tone to it, more so than more absolute forms of equality. More people are more likely to say that they’re in favor of that equality, but not in terms of ‘equality of outcomes.’ Americans love symmetrical sports in which both teams start from zero, and like to imagine that they can make the rest of the world like one big game. The more that the world resembles a game of baseball or football, the better.

The real world is more like a permanent blowout game in which the best compete against the weakest, and with biased referees. By reducing the messy real world into something that seems like an even game in which both teams have a genuine chance of winning, it eases some of the discomfort that comes with seeing the world as it is, exposing idealistic conceptions of fairness to a reality that can’t support them.

The natural world isn’t a fair place, and neither is the political world. The way to advance under a democratic system is not necessarily to promise full equality to everyone, but to promise that all the people will have an equal shot at success, to make the world like a talent show competition in which everyone, even the least talented and capable, believe that they have a chance at the prize. If they believe that they at least have a chance if they try hard enough, it gives them a sense of agency and control over their own lives, of a freedom without responsibility which they can pretend to.

This is one of the reasons why the education complex in America continues to retain so much credibility. It has nothing to do with the outcomes that education produces. It has to do with maintaining the myth of equal opportunity, which was the promise of the obligatory universal education system. It doesn’t even have much to do with the people who use that system — it’s important even to people who send their children to private schools to maintain the pretense that the people who go to ‘good public schools’ still have a great shot at economic success within the system. Critics sometimes skew reformist politicians who send their children to private schools as hypocrites, but that action is less hypocritical than it seems — it’s more important, generally, for them to promote the idea that the schools are equality-generators than it is to acknowledge the broader truth that the bold goals of the entire system were fatally flawed from the beginning, at odds as they are with reality.

Attempting to engineer equality of opportunity inevitably encourages that equality of outcome will also be engineered — because if all people deserve an equal shot, it implies that they’re of mostly equal value, and if they’re of equal value, then everyone should be winning the same trophy from the same competition, and any time the scores come back differently, it’s that they somehow cheated during the game.

America’s trajectory can’t be changed, but we will have the opportunity to write the closing chapter about why it ended how it did. They built the doom into the project from the beginning.

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The older generations — many of whom were among the first in their family lines to attend college — realized stupendous returns from ‘cheap’ subsidized educations which still held some reputational clout. As time has gone on, university education has become relatively more important in the business world for more professions and government employment while the standards have been watered down to accomodate ever more diverse groups of citizens. The criminalization of intelligence testing and other forms of employment filtering also leads to degrees being used as proxies.

The whiny Millennial refrain is that their parents don’t understand just how hard everyone has it these days. Meanwhile, their parents complain about ‘boomerang kids‘ who fail to find adequate employment and need to move back home. In Western Europe in particular, the problem has reached the proportions of a new norm, with only a few countries having rates of less than 30% of adults aged 18-29 still living in the parental household.

Despite much carping over the ‘crisis,’ the only thing that has happened over the last ten years or so has been an exacerbation of the same trend. Bureaucracies have trouble reforming themselves when political leaders are unwilling to jail, fire, or execute the leaders responsible for the problems — otherwise, everyone in charge has a strong incentive to continue giving themselves raises, clawing back money from government treasuries, and otherwise keeping the regulatory system in place which enriches so many in the academic complex.

The root causes of this political problem won’t be addressed, because even beginning to address them has become a taboo. There were some attempts at controlling the problem in past decades, but those have given way to an exacerbation of the root causes, with some quibbling at the edges of the lower-order effects of those causes.

The other real problem is that the quality of the people being produced by Western societies is declining, rather severely. What most older managers and executives will tell you about declining literacy, work ethic, and knowledge levels in junior employees is generally true: up and down the line from the most plebian graduates to the better ones. That’s not something that can be resolved with a clever tweak to the Pell Grant system.

This hints at a larger issue. You can’t solve a problem with the declining genetic quality of a population with new education policies or bold new ideas about re-regulating the already hyper-regulated banking system. Because intelligence is in large part as heritable as eye and hair color, merely focusing more on providing more training-as-education to a population of declining mental quality is unlikely to achieve the hoped-for results.

Because these education certificates — which are often at least partially falsified by inflated grading or pervasive cheating — declare all students to be equal, employers and others have trouble separating the good prospects from the bad one. Everyone becomes skittish, and therefore less willing to trade.

Most in public life are frightened to even begin to broach this problem, because doing so often results in so much social and legal approbium for even the most prestigious scientists, authors, and politicians who bring it up. Despite all this pressure, crisis will have to force us — whether or not our political leaders are interested in making it easier — to acknowledge that we aren’t all equal in most of the ways that matter, and that many important conclusions follow that observation.

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Contrary to feminist cant, women in just about all social classes did need to learn productive pursuits. At a time when the industrial economy had yet to take shape, the household economy was still much more important. Being able to produce clothing, art, food, and maintain the household was of greater relative importance. And they were often high skill pursuits that required knowledge, dexterity, and people skills to master.

Rather than fixed ages of maturity, adults in the community would instead take stock of where a child was in their maturity, and then assign them work based on their capacity. Different children mature at different rates — often at significantly different ones — and in a community with little tolerance for waste, it was more efficient to assign children and near-adults who could work to jobs matching their capacities and inclinations.

What this also meant is that parents would exchange children with those of their relatives, associates, and friends — even at a distance — to encourage them to learn skills that would serve them well through adulthood, whether or not it was part of a formal apprenticeship arrangement. While this meant that educations weren’t standard, it also ensured that the training of young people would match the actual needs of local economies.

In the modern West, our education systems have failed. Only the pretense of function remains. People who continue to believe in the pretense will disadvantage themselves and their children. Those that accept that it is only a pretense will find new advantages.

Household economies are not as significant as they once were, in part due to technology, in part due to regulatory changes, and in part due to social change. But given that corporate environments are increasingly ideological and dysfunctional, it’s likely that smaller economic networks will start to supplant them again, especially because throwing yourself full-force into the corporate economy is more likely to result in substandard wages and enormous debts.

Natural economic selection is likely to favor those families that find more efficient, lower-cost ways to find economic niches for their children while only minimally touching the sclerotic education systems of the modern West. While the institutions are dysfunctional, it’s easy to meet professionals, gain access to relevant professional knowledge, and find relevant professional networks.

While the state has conditioned Westerners to expect long maturity periods for children as it relates to work (while simultaneously encouraging fast maturity periods as it relates to sexual activity), swapping the two is the advantageous strategy, at least as it relates to young men. If the youngster is capable of work, they should work — and just as on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog, so on the internet, no one knows that their subcontractor is 12 years old.

Childhood was a nice idea, but keeping the spawn of the middle classes in a childlike state until they get their MA in their mid-20s has taken the notion too far.

In particular, we need to increasingly separate practical knowledge from the abstract and intellectual. The modern West tends to treat the abstract as if it’s more important than the practical, and works to abstract even abstract knowledge so that it has no use or relationship with the practical arts. Bringing the two back together will be an enormously challenging project, but it needs to be done nonetheless.

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