The GOP’s Stupidly Selective Patronage

A crucial difference between the Democratic and Republican parties is how each plays the patronage game that is a major part of the larger game of mass democracy. The Democrats win both by rewarding a wide swath of those who support them, while the GOP dishes out milk to its fatcats but kicks its base.

The two parties reward their big donors identically – such as with state contracts or the opportunity to brunch with Bill or Hilary, or with Jeb or Karl.  They also likewise serve their other sort of elite – the busybody intellectuals – by bolstering this segment’s pet projects, like AIDS research so as to please Hollywood executives, or arming jihadists so as to delight Kristol and the Kagans.

But the Democrats feed and protect their peasantry, too. Material rewards, not just promises and pandering, are distributed to those who vote for them or who are very likely to. Union members get tenure. Single moms see their bastards subsidized. Affirmative Action propels non-whites into workplaces and upwards within them.

The GOP has a different interpretation of reciprocity towards loyalists – namely, discarding and ridiculing them. A Republican politician sends them to needless deaths in needless wars. He gives their jobs to Chinese in China and to Mexicans in Mississippi. He bails out the big businesses which use his largesse to crush their smaller, lobbyist-deficient ones. And if his voters object to these arrangements, his generosity will extend to a lecture on their bigotry or economics illiteracy.

To paraphrase Mickey Kaus, the GOP doesn’t have a donor problem, it has an electorate problem. The Democratic Party observes a warped noblesse oblige, while the Republicans don’t even contemplate one. Yes, the mass democracy game is rigged against the Right, but that’s no excuse for playing to lose the game, or one’s own.

Shyness Is Fear and Vice, Introversion Is Neither

Shyness – and the larger category to which it belongs, social anxiety – is fear-based avoidance of social contact. The shy person fears unflattering social judgment, but social anxiety can take the form of fears about worse consequences, like being the victim of efforts at outright humiliation or violence.

Introversion is aversion to socializing – for durations or at intensities which non-introverts prefer – which does not involve fear at all. The introvert avoids or limits social contact because it bores, annoys, or tires him, not because it scares him. (If it does cause him fear, then he’s socially anxious in addition to being introverted.)

Shyness, unlike introversion, has moral content, if only a bit. It’s at least somewhat of a failing to be a Nervous Nelly, especially if one is a straight male. Not one that’s cause for shame, but arguably for embarrassment.

Thus we should see shyness as an enemy which needs destroying. Happily, this can be quickly but not painlessly achieved through making oneself socially uncomfortable until one no longer is.

Introversion, however, is not our adversary, at least not necessarily. There’s nothing unmanly or cowardly about wanting to stay in and read on a Saturday night, as much as Mass Culture demands that we believe otherwise.

On the contrary, introversion is cause for pride given that introverts are hugely and non-randomly over-represented among the highly intelligent, conscientious, empathetic and other sectors of the humanity’s real elite. Also in contrast to shyness, reversing this trait is not just challenging, but unlikely.

Seek the cure to disease of social anxiety, or the far more elusive alternative to introversion, or do neither, but don’t conflate the two traits or be confused what should be done about either.

Sorry, Immigration Fantasists, But The Irish Have Always Been White

It’s almost not worth mentioning, but since I’ve seen too often the claim that the Irish aren’t white – or as this view’s fanbase puts it, “white” – I’m annoyed enough to offer this brief riposte.

The people who like to make this claim have the motive of burnishing the reputation of contemporary immigration. They point to the one-time out-group status endured by the Irish, and then to this group’s success in assimilating, as evidence that today’s exotic immigrant populations will therefore do at least as well.

The most glaring flaw in this theory is that the Irish, being at such high risk for developing symptoms including, but not limited to, fair skin, blue eyes, red hair, and recent ancestry from an island situated in an apparently obscure stretch of real estate called Europe, are, for just about any one of this reasons, white.

Not “white.” Literally white, the adjective unshackled by scare quotes.

Inconveniently for diversity fabulists, this would contrast the Irish to today’s most visible immigrant cohorts. Asians and partly or fully Amerind “Hispanics” or “Latinos” may be “white,” because “white” isn’t verifiable.  But white is, because race is not just an idea.

Sensible, honest people don’t need to be convinced of the reality of race. Such people believe what their lying eyes tell them.

Unfortunately, they don’t rule. On top instead are those who dedicate their higher IQs not to being right or knowledgeable, but to embracing ideas too crazy and obfuscations too complicated for normal people to waste any time thinking about.

Just as wrongheaded as race-denial is the conclusion drawn by this meme’s proponents from its other premise – the one that by sheer dumb luck happens to be true – that of the Irish receiving exclusion and denigration.

Yes, the Irish were disparaged as non-white. But since when are insults necessarily accurate? If the Irish were denigrated as “dogs,” would this remove them from the category of human?

There are things which exist outside of our minds, whether we’d like them to or not, and those which only exist in them.

Race is the former. The non-whiteness of the Irish is the latter, and, given that it tells us that easily-sunburned people from an island in the north Atlantic aren’t white, it’s also worse than that.

A Bad Question About Immigration

Conor Friedersdorf, in his latest piece on mass immigration, offers a too familiar rationalization for that destructive, anachronistic practice:

Undoubtedly, my Scotch, German, and French Cajun relatives imposed costs on natural-born citizens when they first immigrated. As the beneficiary of that transaction, who am I to keep a Thai, Mexican, or South African family out, even if their presence does force the school where my kid goes to grapple with another language or adds another car or two to the freeways?

Elsewhere in this piece, he offers respect – albeit qualified – to restrictionists, and he grants that immigration isn’t cost-free. For these concessions he deserves credit, but his effort is undermined by his bungling of causality and his trivializing an enormity. He errs by presenting contemporary mass immigration as something less than a very big deal, and by wrongly thinking the first quoted sentence has much logical bearing, or any moral connection whatsoever to the second.

It’s as though he can’t bring himself to confront this essential fact of contemporary immigration’s enormity, the reason we call it mass immigration. He confines his rhetorical question to his commute, his kids’ school, and his first sentence to his ancestors  – in another words, to his life and his family tree exclusively, and to immigration’s minor effects therein, whereas he should pay heed to how immigration imposes itself on hundreds of millions of Americans.

But even if his choice of words convinced us that he was contending with scale, his reasoning for his prescription to continue mass immigration would remain unacceptable.

If he acknowledges that a thing is harmful or costly to others, his implied concern for others requires him to consider whether he should support its perpetuation in light of this awareness alone. Consideration of benefits which accrue to him constitute a completely separate question – they have no bearing on what is incurred by other people.

That slavery was good for slave-owners and their descendants has no relevance to the question of whether it was good for slaves, or whether we should support its perpetuation when we know that it was bad for the latter. Yet you could use Friedersdorf’s illogic to ignore that, and even to justify human bondage, by asking: “As I beneficiary of the plantations, who am I to object to them?”

He’s implying that there’s something hypocritical about opposing that which you have benefited or still benefit from. Rather, it’s the opposite – it’s consistency in altruism that demands that a person object to that which is or was a boon to him, but a detriment to others.

It’s understandable that a smart guy like Friedersdorf would ask a bad question. He and the rest of us have been indoctrinated for decades into false guilt about standing up for our fellow citizens. Immigration-promotion’s tear-jerking, sepia-toned spectacle of “huddled masses” eradicate analysis and replace it the emotionality that can be more easily manipulated by those who would dump poverty on our land from selfishness or adherence to ideology.

We need to start feeling so wantonly and naively about immigration, and star thinking about it. We need to clear our heads of mythologized Ellis Island’s sentimentality and self-righteousness, and contend forthrightly with what we owe to the most vulnerable Americans, and with what we’re inflicting on them by, as Steve Sailer has put it, inviting the world.

Journalists and others who shape opinions have an even greater responsibility to take on this challenge. Here’s hoping that this response persuades one to do just that.

Sometimes They Mean It

Sometimes, Leftists mean what they say. To assume otherwise is to assume that people on the Left are motivated by nothing more than cravings for enhanced social status or material welfare, that they are inhuman in their lust for these objectives.

Actually, Leftists are people, too, and people have transcendent desires – we want beauty, comfort, inspiration, aesthetic pleasure, and joy, and we desire them apart from self-interest or similarly grubby considerations.

That the orthodoxies of the Left give its adherents these things makes it difficult to tease out motivations in any of its initiates. Does a progressive mouth a platitude because he thinks doing so will make him look good, or because he derives great spiritual satisfaction from the notion that we are all equal, that The People’s will is sacrosanct, and so forth, or as a result of a combination of those desires?

It seems easier to discern motive when his words contradict his actions, but only seemingly so. Self-deception, which numerous psychological studies have shown that we humans are proficient at, complicates the picture. The successful self-deceiver not only contradicts his statements with his actions, or with other statements, he does so unaware of any such conflict.

It seems obvious that an Obama acolyte who praises diversity but sends his kids to a less-than-vibrant montessori school knows that he’s a hypocrite, but this isn’t self-evident. If the pain of realizing a dispiriting truth is too great, his mind will take any and all escape routes from that reality. The evasions he offers in heated, finger-jabbing, riesling-spilling arguments with his college friends may be those he sincerely believes in, or at least desperately wishes he did, which is almost the same thing.

T.S. Eliot observed that man “cannot bear very much reality.” Especially given that most self-proclaimed progressives have given up monotheism and its attendant benefits, it makes sense that they would seek succor in a slew of god-replacements which prove similarly resistant to encroachments of fact and logic.

The Narcissism Advantage

Consciousness coupled with intelligence is a pairing that comes with a heavy price: existential despair, a condition which impairs its sufferers’ fitness – the potential of an organism to survive or reproduce (or its genes to avoid oblivion). Narcissism is an evolutionary adaptation to that cost.

It’s a raw deal to be be intelligent enough to ask existential questions but unable to answer them to one’s emotional and intellectual satisfaction. The despairing person is likely to be a loser by evolution’s standards because his lassitude suppresses his ability to pursue his interest, and that of his genes . He’s drained of the motivation to hit on women, or grind away for a workplace promotion, for instance.

The narcissist is less likely to suffer such a consequence because he’s distracted from the existential by his characteristic, constant, and powerful drive to enhance his power, status, and self-esteem, and by the concrete actions needed to meet those goals. Unlike the intelligent non-narcissist, he’s not speculating airily, brooding, or stagnating. He’s asking questions which promise concrete answers (e.g. “What’s in it for me?”), he’s doing rather than thinking endlessly, and he’s steering himself even further from rabbit holes that are existential inquiries by contending with the concrete consequences of his actions.

The brainy non-narcissist sequesters himself in his head, and embarks on a Sisyphean struggle for endlessly elusive inspiration.   The narcissist eschews philosophizing and navel-gazing for quests which offer not just the potential for success, but a means of measuring it. His self-infatuation spurs him to work out, and his subsequently strengthened body makes it less likely that he’ll die of an early heart attack, or suffer some other reduction of his (Darwinian) fitness to zero. Each time he recognizes a “personal best” or a bigger muscle, his brain rewards itself with a generous outpouring of dopamine, thereby cementing his motivation to keep doing right by his body and his genes.

The philosophically questing non-narcissist loses at life, and his genes and their copies lose at evolution’s game, because he insists not just on endlessly asking “What’s the point?” but on answering seriously. The narcissist and his selfish replicators win because, if he asks the question at all, his answer is: “Me.” Intellectuals disdain glibness, but evolution rewards it.

Tortured Souls: Leftism Among Whites as Coping Strategy

For one kind of Leftist – the trendy — beliefs and slogans are mere talismans brandished in order to attract higher social status, like a Native American’s dreamcatcher is supposed to entrap spirits.  A principle like “white guilt” isn’t believed in, it’s just deemed useful for getting ahead of other whites or at least maintaining enviable social rank.

There are of course other Leftists who sincerely believe what they profess, no matter how illogically or counterfactually, such as those who think equality is compatible with evolution because the latter is misunderstood in Lamarckian terms.  The true believers misunderstand, but, unlike the subject of this essay, they don’t rationalize or otherwise self-deceive their way through their politics.

We take note of the kind of white leftist who does whenever we associate leftism with physiological traits.  The mainstream and the alternative Right have noticed that many white leftists are what I will call subnormal for their respective sexes — that is, deficient in either masculinity or feminity.  For instance, a man lacking in size, physical strength, psychological dominance, or competitive drive is likely a subnormal. His female equivalent is mannish or ugly in some other way.

That such unfortunates abound among leftist journalists, activists, or even your Prius-driving neighbor is cause for glee for the mainstream Right, which likes to brag that Fox News anchorbabes — and, more tellingly, Evangelical housewives and Young Republican co-eds — are far more attractive than the likes of Janeane Garofalo.   This joviality distracts from the important, disturbing reality that innate, biological deficiencies of certain whites is a powerful inducement to radical politics, including the taking up of causes harmful to white interests.

The status quo, i.e. “the system,” works well enough for normal to supra-normal whites — women who are OK-looking to beautiful, and men who range manly enough to Adonis-like.  Because it is standard for normals to be treated well, and for the very gifted to be treated very well, neither has the incentive to challenge prevailing ways or mores.

Subnormals’ lot — characterized by ostracization, loneliness, alienation, humiliation or involuntary celibacy — gives them the incentive to work against the  “system” that enforces these indignities.  This motivation persists even if the subnormal knows on some level that his defects, being innate, won’t be cured or alleviated by societal change.

In fact, it is this realization which fuels this kind of leftist’s fanaticism.  The tragedy of reality is so severe that the subnormal is presented an unspoken choice: despair in objectivity, or, in the narrative of Leftism a vocabulary, theories, and moral principles with which he can banish the unhappiest of thoughts.  The subnormal regales himself with a narrative which alchemizes despondency over his unchangeable condition into righteous anger against foes both personal and impersonal, and drives himself to distraction through concrete action against these adversaries.

Leftist theories about observable phenomeon happily sweep away darker explanations.  It’s much more pleasant for a mannish woman to believe that men reject her because the “patriarchy” is “intimidated” by “strong, independent females” than it is for her to consider the truth: men are repulsed by those qualities which she can’t change.

While such a complete fabrication comes in handy , rationales which include part of the truth are valued more because they’re more persuasive.  The subnormal male projects onto confident, successful businessmen the character of his formative years’ bullies, while the subnormal female sees in such villains versions of the guys who rejected her at prom-time, and continue to ignore or otherwise wrong her in her adulthood.  Even if these resentments can be seen as pathetic, they don’t exactly upend reality — today’s CEOs and so forth often were yesterday’s jerk jocks and arrogant prom kings.

On the other hand, projection in the casting of the narrative’s victims is less tethered to reality.  The subnormal sympathizes with the illegal alien or the non-white affirmative action beneficiary because he thinks he and they share an enemy in whites who are winning at life.   He supports amnesty and affirmative action, even though both of which undermine his practical self-interest, and even though the beneficiaries of either don’t reciprocate his camaraderie, solely because these positions provide emotional uplift.  In pressing for these policies, he can avenge himself on conventional white society and glorify himself as the enlightened, hip champion of The Other.

Whether an external enemy is disembodied phenomenon as in males’ alleged panic in response to females with PhDs, or a tangible entity like anti-immigration activists, activities undertaken in opposition to these threats, such as marching in demonstrations or delivering tirades atop soapboxes, get subnormals out of the house, into the sunshine, and into the company of sympathizers.

All of this amounts to Leftism as practiced by the unluckily endowed being symptomatic of mental illness, exactly as the rightwing conventional wisdom says.   Just as the shy person doesn’t manifest their condition solely through the feeling of immense insecurity about socializing but also through the actions of avoiding of social contact and concocting rationalizations like professed superiority over others, the subnormal white’s symptoms begin with rage over physiological deficits and extend like the tendrils of a parasite into the rationalizations and distraction of politics in hostile opposition to the conventional white person society they feel mistreated by, often not unjustifiably.

Rightwingers — in fairness more so the pedestrian variety that gets Fox News airtime — are too often hostile to empathizing with the enemy.  The boring Right wants to believe that winners and losers alike earn and therefore deserve their results in life, as opposed to accepting the unsettling reality that talent and beauty are inherited at conception and supply advantages unconnected to willful acts.  The Right in general needs to do better than this conventional wisdom, which, even worse than being stupid and ignorant, betrays cowardice in the face of ever-growing knowledge about the vast biological component to human potential.

Empathizing with the enemy is putting ourselves in their shoes, even if only to gain advantage; it is not sympathizing with them, that is, acting on their behalf.  While it’s pefectly justified to be annoyed at the bitchiness and misandry of the “horsefaced” Women’s Studies professor, and obligatory to be horrified at what she her allies have inflicted on our civilization, are you sure you wouldn’t act similarly if you we so accursed — not just with ugliness but with the mental torture that follows from it?

We can’t yet change human natures.  We can’t turn a narrow-shouldered dork into a charismatic Adonis, but we can stop literally pushing him into lockers as a teenager, thereby figuratively pushing him into the welcoming arms and ranks of the race-traitors and Alinsky-ites later in his life.  We can’t prevent most of the misery that an ugly woman will assuredly suffer, but we can choose to not worsen it by shunning or humiliating her.

We can’t hope to overcome the Left if we don’t understand the minds of its constituents.  Empathy will allow us to peel from the Left those who don’t need to be in it, whose attraction to the ideology is significantly due to our efforts and lack thereof.

A society that’s kinder to the tragically abnormal is one that will produce less enemies of normalcy. Subnormals are Nature’s victims, but they need not be ours.