12 October 2017

Governments Are Us


David Brooks has a history lesson for Donald Trump (via Steve Sailer):
The Trump story is that good honest Americans are being screwed by aliens.  …  This is a tribal story.  
Somebody is going to have to arise to point out that this is a deeply wrong and un-American story. The whole point of America is that we are not a tribe. We are a universal nation, founded on universal principles, attracting talented people from across the globe, active across the world on behalf of all people who seek democracy and dignity.
This lovely fiction from Mr. Brooks is as quaint as it is ahistorical. But it does go back a fair way. Not as far as our founders, bequeathing a nation 'to ourselves and our posterity.' Not as far as our first naturalization act, in 1790, extended to 'free white persons of good character.' 

Not as far as Thomas Jefferson, quoted by Alexander Hamilton:

'The opinion advanced in [Jefferson's] The Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. 
'They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? 
'There may, as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule.'

The idea that the U.S. was meant to become a League of Nations avant l'heure dates back to the mid 19th century, when America's first nativist party, the 'Know-Nothings,' agitated against Catholic immigrants (both Irish and German). They were  lambasted by people like George Julian, VP candidate:
'Know Nothingism . . . tramples down the doctrine of human brotherhood. It judges men by the accidents of their condition, instead of striving to find a common lot for all, with a common access to the blessings of life.' (1)

By the 1912 presidential election, Woodrow Wilson was currying favor with his new electorate by trumpeting:
'America has, so to say, opened its doors and extended its welcome to men who were Americans everywhere in the world. She has invited all the free forces of the modern civilized peoples to come to America where men can be free, and where all free forces can unite and forget all their differences of origins.' 
But even a 'proposition nation' man like Wilson wasn't a true multiculturalist—he did not extend this welcome to Blacks or Asians:
'The whole question is one of assimilation of diverse races. We cannot make a homogeneous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race.'

These days, things have gone so far that we're being told that not letting masses of Mexicans or Africans into our countries is the equivalent of turning away the Jews in 1940, or runaway slaves in 1840.



This is an astounding statement. Forcing a Mexican to be governed by other Mexicans, or a Senegalese to be governed by other Senegalese, is akin to committing genocide upon them. What a statement on the governing abilities of Mexicans or Senegalese! Perhaps Jefferson was onto something after all…

The 'magic dirt' theory, of course, says that once these foreigners set foot on our soil, they are suddenly blessed with the qualities that have allowed us to govern ourselves so successfully all these years.


But we at TWCS suspect that, on the contrary, Jefferson was right—Governments Are Us. 'That temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism' has not been equally distributed on Planet Earth. 

We mostly rule ourselves now--the age of empire is over.  If we rule ourselves badly, that's because we are somehow ill-equipped to handle the running of a large, modern representative state.



So if we few in well-run countries usher in the many fleeing ill-run countries,  what will be the result? Is it possible such people will recreate the conditions they've created in their own countries, right here on our soil? If so, we should be very, very careful which groups we let in the door.

What is the evidence?




I.) Governments Are Us: Yesterday

Open-borderists argue: 'In the 19th century we absorbed enormous waves of immigrants with no problem at all. Why would we turn anyone away now?'

'No problem at all'? Americans who lived through that era would find such a characterization surprising to say the least

As a matter of fact, then as now, alien groups brought their character and governance styles with them. The result, as we shall see, was far from smooth sailing.


1) Anglo-Germanic Individualism

Why did it matter that later immigrants hailed from places other than that of the founding stock?

By an accident of history, Northwest Europeans, and in particular the English, evolved early on into an atomized, high-trust group. Progressive economist John Commons (in 1907):
We find that our democratic theories and forms of government were fashioned by … that race, the so-called Anglo-Saxon, who developed them out of its own insular experience unhampered by inroads of alien stock. (2)

The original settlers, while not purely English, were yet very ethnically close:

It is the distinctive fact regarding colonial migration that it was Teutonic in blood and Protestant in religion. The English, Dutch, Swedes, Germans, and even the Scotch-Irish, who constituted practically the entire migration, were less than two thousand years ago one Germanic race in the forests surrounding the North Sea. 
The Protestant Reformation, sixteen centuries later, began among those peoples and found in them its sturdiest supporters. The doctrines of the Reformation, adapted as they were to the strong individualism of the Germanic races, prepared the hearts of men for the doctrines of political liberty and constitutional government of the succeeding century.  (2)
These are the men who created the American Republic, for 'ourselves and our posterity'--Englishmen, and men closely related to them. Their individualism and commonweal orientation led naturally to republican self-government.

So when did things begin to change?


Commons describes the change that came around 1882, when immigrants from 'Teutonic' races were replaced with
...Latin, Slav, Semitic, and Mongolian races. When the sources of American immigration are shifted from the Western countries so nearly allied to our own, to Eastern countries so remote in the main attributes of Western civilization, the change is one that should challenge the attention of every citizen. In 1882 Western Europe furnished 87% of the immigrants and in 1902 only 22%. (2)


He worried the newcomers were not fit for democracy:
Nevertheless, the peasantry of Europe today [1907] is in large part the product of serfdom and of that race-subjection which produced serfdom. ... It is characteristic of peasants that they have accepted this inferior lot. .... They have no large sense of citizenly motives; they feel no sense of responsibility for any part of the public life save that which lies within their own narrow round of action." (2)

How different from the qualities of the typical American citizen whose forefathers have erected our edifice of representative democracy!  ... It was the middle class, the merchants and yeomen, those who in religion and politics were literally "protestants," and who possessed the intelligence, manliness, and public spirit which urged them to assert for themselves those inalienable rights which the church or the state of their time had arrogated to itself. 
With such a social class democracy is the only acceptable form of government. They demand and secure equal opportunities because they are able to rise to those opportunities. (2)

Commons felt the new arrivals were too urban and lacked self-reliance:
The cities, too, furnish that choice of employers and that easy reliance on charitable and friendly assistance which is so necessary to the indigent labour looking for work. Thus it is that those races of immigrants the least self-reliant or forehanded, like the Irish and the Italians, seek the cities in greater proportions than those sturdy races like the Scandinavians, English, Scotch, and Germans. (2)

Those running the show, the English, had evolved their own peculiarities, as described by Salvador de Madariaga in his Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards (1929):
...the English sensitiveness to the 'laws of things'--the law of the road, the law of the sea, the law of the hunting field. ... the English are the teachers of the world, not merely in their quickness to perceive these natural laws, but in their cordial and sincere obedience to the restrictions which they impose upon each individual for the good of the whole.

Each Englishman is his own regulator. ...  The average level of honesty in English civil life is singularly high, as is shown in the usual disregard for detailed precautions against fraud or deceit. 
No bureaucracy in the world can vie with the English Civil Service in its devotion to the interests of the country. ... it owes much also to that instinct for co-operation, that objectivity, that absence of self-seeking, of vanity and of personal passion which are typical of the whole race. (4)


Thus the English specifically, and the Anglo-Germanics more generally, brought to these shores a certain character and flavor of governance.

And as the years passed, they saw wave after wave of ever more distant Euro ethnies land upon those same shores. 

So what? Why worry?



2) Irish Clannishness

(Puck Magazine, 1889)

The Irish were a great puzzle to 19th century race scientists. No one knew quite how to classify them. Geographically firmly in Northwest Europe, yet behaviorally and phenotypically so outside its norms that many termed them a 'Mediterranean' people.  

As far as early America, then, were they 'insiders' or 'outsiders'? Behaviorally, nearly all observers chose the latter. It is important to note that in their home country, they were not self-governing in the 1800s:
The peasants had no vote and no stake in the government. When they were evicted, they sought revenge by force and through secret societies and gangs, which the government found practically impossible to suppress. Local courts were powerless before what amounted to organized and publicly condoned crime.  
…  Irish peasants had been tools of their landlords; it was not very different to become the tools of political bosses, who marched them in groups to the polls and cemented the allegiance with free liquor.  (3)


De Madariaga compared them to his own countrymen: 
The Irishman is a man of passion like the Spaniard. He is, therefore, poor in collective virtues, … a dispersive and individualized [non-commonweal oriented] people, weak as a nation.  (4)
They did manage to bring their particular character right into the heart of America's city halls:
The importance of the big city machines in the history of the Democratic party is well known; for decades, and with few exceptions, they were dominated by men of Irish stock. … The turmoil of city politics of a hundred years ago [the 1850s] was attributable in large measure to Irish immigrants who helped make municipal government more venal and corrupt. (3)

Commons' take on Irish municipal government in America:
This is exactly the political problem that grows out of the presence of races and immigrants. [...] A variety of races and nationalities living in the same ward are asked to elect aldermen and other officers by majority vote. No one nationality has a majority, ... (2)
(Oblivious voters drop their ballots into trash can as Tweed and his gang look on)
The boss emerges from the situation as inevitably as the survival of the fittest. And the fittest is the Irishman. The Irishman has above all races the mixture of ingenuity, firmness, human sympathy, comradeship, and daring that makes him the amalgamator of races. He conciliates them all by nominating a ticket on which the offices are shrewdly distributed; and out of the Babel his “slate” gets the majority. 
The representative becomes a tool in the hands of the boss. The boss sells his power to corporations, franchise speculators, and law-evaders. Representative democracy becomes bossocracy in the service of plutocracy. The ward system worked well when the suffrage was limited. ... But a system devised for restricted suffrage breaks down under universal suffrage. (2)
1908 hit song:  the 'Tammany Tiger' Irish political machine ran NYC; their sworn enemy was ex-NY governor Teddy Roosevelt


The word we hear again and again is 'clannishness':
McGee, who wrote a History of Irish Settlers in North America in 1855, frankly admitted that crossing the Atlantic worked no miracle upon the Irish and that they remained the creatures of their own antecedents, "untrained to freedom," and "a poor figure, at first, as freemen."  
The Irish Citizen repeatedly urged the Irish to give up their clannishness and their subservience to "Irish grog-sellers" and argued that there could be no justification for an "Irish vote" in the United States… Three decades later, leaders of the Church were still denouncing Irish clannishness.  (3)
(Thomas Nast, Harper's)

 Resistance grew:
At the end of the 1860's, the extortions of the Tweed Ring in New York City, supported to a considerable degree by Irish votes, aroused an outraged middle-class opposition. In the process, leading civic reformers struck a good many nativistic blows at "the rule of the uncultivated Irish Catholics." For a time the crusading cartoonist, Thomas Nast, flayed the Catholic Church, the Irish, and Tweed with equal fury. (1)

Disgust with machine politics was in fact one of the great drivers of the Progressive Movement of the early 1900s.


The thoroughgoing corruption brought to city government by the 19th century Irish is mostly forgotten today, lost in the St. Patrick's Day parades and leprechaun mascots that have come to define this group in the popular mind.


And it is a fact that this people seems to have in the end assimilated quite well, melting into the larger Euro-American group over time.

But we can hardly blame those who, at the time, looked upon their governing influence as catastrophic.



Having seen the depredations of a group of clannish outsiders who took political power directly, let us now look at a group of clannish outsiders who took that same power, but indirectly.


3) Italian Amoral Familism
John Commons in 1907 lamented that:
The North Italian is an educated, skilled artisan, coming from a manufacturing section and largely from the cities. … Unhappily for us, the North Italians do not come to the United States in considerable numbers, but they betake themselves to Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil in about the same numbers as the South Italians come to us. (2)


Italy sent us a whopping 5 million immigrants total, or one sixth of its 1900 population, the vast majority from the South. In addition to their cuisine and their musical language, they brought us a blight that would gnaw at the U.S. for a century: their  mafia.

To this day it rests firmly in control in parts of Southern Italy. Mafia scholar Alexander Stille:
I’ve heard police officials say people need to understand that the Mafia is not a problem, it is the problem ... Virtually a third of Italy, one of the largest industrial countries in the world, will be in a state of permanent underdevelopment as long as this problem persists. 


Though not governing directly as the Irish did, Italian criminals managed, like a parasite, to burrow into government, civil society, and business at every level. Not only in New York but all over the country, such as Chicago's 'The Outfit':
Capone and his men were raking in vast amounts of money [from bootlegging], largely immune to prosecution because of witness intimidation and the bribing of city officials. They also paid off numerous police officers to avoid arresting his men. By the end of his reign, Capone had successfully expanded the Chicago Outfit throughout metro Chicago.
In the early 1940s, a handful of top Outfit leaders went to prison because they were found to be extorting Hollywood by controlling the unions that compose Hollywood's movie industry. … Ricca was sent to prison later in 1943 for his part in The Outfit plot to control Hollywood. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, along with a number of other mobsters. Through the "magic" of political connections, the whole group of Outfit mobsters was released after three years.
Operation GAMBAT (GAMBling ATtorney) proved to be a crippling blow to the Outfit's tight grip on the Chicago Political Machine. Pat Marcy, a made man in the Outfit, ran the city's First Ward, which represented most of downtown Chicago. Marcy and company controlled the circuit courts from the 1950s until the late 1980s with the help of Alderman Fred Roti and Democratic Committeeman John D'Arco, Sr. Together, the First Ward fixed cases involving everything from minor traffic violations to murder.

Did America's 'magic soil' eventually turn these miscreants into law-abiding democrats?  According to mafia expert Scott Burnstein, 100 years after Lucky Luciano launched his first protection racket, the mob is still alive and kicking:

The Mafia in America today is still surviving; however, [it's] not thriving like it once was. ...Traditional mob hotbeds like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, and New Jersey are still operational and functioning at a consistent level (some have been hampered by legal assaults in recent years), while other cities with a rich mob history like Cleveland, Milwaukee, Kansas City, St. Louis, LA, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, New Orleans, and Tampa Bay are either defunct altogether or heading quickly in that direction.
The Mafia lineage is not being passed on down to the younger generation as it had been in the past, and a lot of members of the Mafia—unlike in the mob's heyday—are refraining from bringing their sons into the "family business."

Glorified by Hollywood, Italian organized crime was a century-long parasite in the American body politic--just as it is to this very day in its homeland of Southern Italy. Siphoning off billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains whilst corrupting city and state governments, businesses, and labor unions--Jefferson's warning of 'attachment to... particular customs and manners' would in this case have been well-heeded.




In the end, the 1924 Immigration Act brusquely turned off the tap.  In the succeeding century, most Italians and Irish have gone on to integrate the American body politic remarkably well, with high education levels and household income. 

How much this is attributable to assimilation (changing habits) and how much to amalgamation (changing bloodlines) remains an open question. Ireland today seems to function at a first-world level, southern Italy somewhat less so.




We have seen, then, that far from the walk in the park it's painted as today, our 19th century absorption of alien ethnies left deep and ugly scars on American governance. 



II.) Governments Are Us: Today

But what about today? What groups are we importing into the West now, and what character and flavor of governance do they bring with them? Are they apt, as Jefferson wondered, to 'bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism?'


1) Hispanics: Dangerous passivity


Barely a blip on the radar fifty years ago (when they were first included as a category on the U.S. census), Hispanics are today the largest minority group in the country at 17%. What do we know about the way they govern their own countries?

Data sources:  Corruption , Democracy


Another way to look at this data--Latin American countries in orange (click to enlarge):


Data sources:  Corruption , Democracy


Do they bring any particular governance style with them? A good place to look is where they have moved in great numbers--Southern California.



a) Municipal Malfeasance

Municipal malfeasance is said to be becoming a way of life in Southeast L.A. County, a.k.a  'the corridor of corruption':


Founded mainly as middle-class suburbs in the early 20th century, the cities that crowd southeastern Los Angeles County saw demographic shifts in the ’80s, as manufacturing jobs that sustained them disappeared and an influx of Latino immigrants moved in. Civic organizations, from philanthropic clubs to local newspapers, shriveled. Residents were too busy, too poor, too new to the country to worry about what their city councils were doing.  … More than a fifth of those living in the area are not U.S. citizens.
Voting rates are among the lowest in California.  … Anemic participation allows a small subset of the community to have an outsized influence on its politics. Public meetings, like city council sessions, are sparsely attended. … Combined with scant media presence in the region, little holds local government accountable. The vacuum has enabled miniature political fiefdoms to flourish over the years.  
Morales said many residents, who have moved from countries in Latin American where politics is entirely transactional and corruption is rampant, expect it, though it only drives them further away: “People innately don’t trust government.”

What Thomas Jefferson clearly grasped was that 'love of liberty' must be shared not only by those who govern, but by the governed themselves. The alarming passivity of many Hispanic voters in the U.S. has allowed Latin America-style corruption to flourish.


In what a district attorney termed 'corruption on steroids,' a Hispanic-Italian-Anglo aristocracy was bleeding the 93% Latino residents of Bell, California dry--and they didn't seem to care:
In July 2010 it was revealed that Bell city officials were receiving unusually large salaries, perhaps the highest in the United States. Robert Rizzo, the City manager, received $787,637 a year, almost double the salary of the president of the United States. Including benefits, he had received $1.5 million in the last year.  …  All but one of the members of the city council were receiving $100,000 for their part-time work, ... By comparison, council members in cities similar to Bell in size make an average of $4,800 a year. 
Like in Latin America, a perfect storm of corrupt officials and indifferent electors:
[District Attorney] Cooley said several factors allowed corruption to flourish in Bell, including a lack of civic participation by residents and little scrutiny from the media until the recent Times' stories. "The electorates of these cities have to be involved if they truly care about their city," he said. "That was not the case in this instance."

 As in Bell, so in Cudahy:

Earlier this year, David Silva and Osvaldo Conde were sentenced to prison for a bribery and extortion scheme. A third official, Angel Perales, former head of code enforcement, was sentenced to five years of probation.   
In their plea agreements, the three portrayed Cudahy as a town where corruption was rampant, elections were rigged and where drugs were used at City Hall. Court documents made repeated references to a top official identified as “G.P.” [city manager George Perez] as orchestrating much of the alleged wrongdoing. 

 …Or in Lynnwood:
Two former Lynwood council members accused of illegally boosting their salaries were convicted Tuesday in a closely watched case that legal experts said could expand the definition of public corruption. …   The added pay boosted the part-time council members' income from less than $10,000 a year to as much as $112,000 in one year for Louis Byrd and $72,000 for Fernando Pedroza, prosecutors said.

…Or in Maywood:


Boasting a population that is 97% Hispanic, more than half foreign born, and 40% illegal, the Los Angeles County, Calif., incorporated city of Maywood has achieved the Reconquista goal. It is now as lawless and chaotic as any place in Mexico.  Maywood was the first California city with an elected Hispanic City Council, one of the first “sanctuary” cities for illegal aliens, ... Council meetings were conducted in Spanish.  
... Charges of corruption and favoritism led to one recall of city council members and threats of more recalls are heard to this day. ... Today, Maywood is broke. Its police department dismantled along with all other city departments and personnel. Only the city council remains.


…Or in South Gate:

Today, South Gate is 93 percent Hispanic. ... Nearly half of South Gate’s population was born outside of the United States, and 80 percent of the town’s residents speak Spanish at home.
In 1997, Albert Robles won the race for city treasurer and began collecting an annual salary of $69,000. Meanwhile, he had seen to it that his friends and business associates were awarded city contracts worth millions. ... his political opponents were not faring nearly as well. City councilman Henry Gonzalez was shot in the head but survived the wound. Another political rival had his car firebombed. The crimes remain unsolved.
At his trial in December, prosecutors argued that Robles threatened to rape state Senator Martha Escutia and kill her husband.  …  A friend of state Assemblyman Marco Firebaugh testified that Robles had threatened to kidnap the assemblyman, throw him in a car trunk, drive him across the border to Tijuana, and “blow his brains out.” 

City clerk Carmen Avalos made the mistake of complaining about corruption and election fraud.  … Reacting to her co-operation, several dozen supporters of the Robles machine cornered Avalos at City Hall and chanted “Malinche,” a reference to the Aztec mistress of the conquistador Hernan Cortes. To those supporters, both Avalos and Malinche had sold out to the white man. 

…Or in Commerce:


In 2012, Councilman Robert Fierro resigned after he pleaded guilty to a felony conspiracy charge related to his attempts to dupe investigators looking into the financing of his 2005 campaign. In 2010, Councilman Hugo Argumedo resigned after he pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. Argumedo concocted evidence to help an attorney sue his city for allegedly unpaid legal fees.

We don't want to give the impression that L.A.'s municipal corruption is a uniquely Hispanic enterprise; far from it. Behold the rogues' gallery of two other L.A. cities, studded with good old English names:




A pattern is not an absolute, but the data thus far gathered on the governing and the governed in rapidly hispanifying Southern California is troubling to say the least.


b) Civil Service Corruption

Government also means civil service. As one more example of what Jefferson called 'attachments to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners', see the new public database on rogue U.S. Customs officers caught smuggling in illegal immigrants and drugs:


Rudy Soliz did it for sex. Sergio Lopez Hernandez blamed depression and financial trouble. Daphiney Caganap allegedly received cash and a “deluxe” hot tub worth $10,000.  
They are just three of the dozens of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials and Border Patrol Agents who have been arrested, charged or convicted of corruption in the past 12 years. A joint investigation by The Texas Tribune and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting has identified at least 140 officials who were arrested or convicted for acts of corruption that allegedly compromised their mission to stop crime and keep the nation secure.

The Center for Investigative Reporting has a more complete rogues' gallery:


Of those in this pantheon convicted with serious border offenses, 75% are Hispanic (global U.S. population = 17%).

Generally, violent crime does not seem to be very highly correlated with Hispanic population (click to enlarge):

Data source: Los AngelesNew York City

...But a tendency to govern and be governed as in Latin America is a trend that cannot be ignored.

From an ethnic standpoint, Hispanics are the trickiest group to get a read on, as they can be anything from pure-blooded white Spaniard to Aztec Indian to black West African, or any combination thereof.

We can't ignore the fact that roughly the poorest 1/5 of Mexico is currently living in (or trying to get to) the United States, and that this group is overwhelmingly Mestizo. They're anxious to trade in being ruled by white Spaniards at home for being ruled by white Anglos abroad.

But these Anglos have the right to ask, and should ask, if this is a group that brings with it the character needed for American-style self-governance.




Having seen a recent immigrant group affecting largely the U.S, let us look at one who is (for the moment) mainly affecting Europe.



2) The Muslim World: Civilizational Differences


While Hispanics have been flowing into the U.S., Muslims have been doing so into Western Europe. Samuel Huntington famously said that 'Islam has bloody borders.' In the context of immigration, one might say that their communities have frictional borders. What style of governance do they bring with them? 


a) Muslim governance: Clannishness

Muslims are of course an ethnic hodge podge, spanning lands from Morocco to Senegal to Indonesia. But more than anything else, they are a civilization. One that is deeply alien to the Christian West.

How do they govern themselves at home? We've looked at the question before. In the meta-data graph below, we see the differences between Muslim countries in Africa (red), the Middle East (yellow), and Asia (pink). (click to enlarge)


Data sources:  Corruption , Democracy


The UK has seen an influx from its erstwhile colonies in the sub-continent. When it comes to governance, there's one trait that has been strongly in evidence (which is in no way exclusive to Muslims)--clannishness

The move comes amid findings that "almost all” the cases of large-scale electoral fraud in England since 2000 have occurred in areas with large Pakistani or Bangladeshi communities. ... The main issues highlighted were the influence of the "kinship networks” combined with an absence of mainstream party political activity.

Britons fêted the great milestone of their first Muslim mayor...  then promptly disqualified him for 
massive ballot fraud:


Mr Pickles told the Commons that Mr Rahman had dispensed public money like a “medieval monarch” and oversaw an administration that was “at best dysfunctional, at worst riddled with cronyism and corruption”.  He added: “It seems to me that the mayor’s test is, ‘If you’re not actually caught with your fingers in the till, you’re innocent.’ ... If I was the mayor of Tower Hamlets, I would be hanging my head in shame.”

More tales of this elected official who brought a zesty bit of Bangladesh to Britain:
Yet of Mr Rahman’s 18 councillors elected last week, all are Bangladeshi (and 17 are men). He has never appointed a non-Bangladeshi to his council cabinet, though he says that is because none will join. … Council meetings have often been toxic, with Mr Rahman’s supporters in the gallery chanting homophobic abuse at his main opponents, who happen to be gay, as the mayor looks on.

Some of the intimidation has been more like Chicago in the 1930s [!] than London in 2015. For many years, it can now be revealed, Mr Rahman has benefited from a group of “enforcers,” individuals attached to youth organisations heavily funded by his council. … The wife of one witness against Mr Rahman was threatened by four men that they would burn down her house, killing her and her children, if her husband testified.

Vote fraud has also been a recurring problem in English city of Birmingham:
Richard Mawrey QC, sitting as an electoral commissioner in Birmingham, found "overwhelming" evidence of fraud in last year's city council elections that would "disgrace a banana republic". The elections, where several Labour candidates bucked the trend to win, were dogged by claims of intimidation, bribery, "vote-buying", impersonation and even the creation of a "vote-forging factory".
The court ruled against three Labour councillors in Bordesley Green ward, Shafaq Ahmed, Shah Jahan and Ayaz Khan, and three in Aston ward, Mohammed Islam, Muhammed Afzal and Mohammed Kazi. The 10 June poll was declared void and will be rerun next month.

These incidents so piqued the ire of the British that they overcame their nearly invincible fear of being branded 'racist' and actually researched the problem. The result, a 2017 study called 'Electoral Fraud Since 2010,' lays it all out:
The authors found that: Pakistani- and Bangladeshi-origin communities in England share a wide range of vulnerabilities, which may make them susceptible to becoming victims of electoral fraud. … The Government said it would invite applications from the 18 local authorities that have been identified by the Electoral Commission as at most risk of allegations of electoral fraud.

Of these 18 cities, the majority are at least 15% Asian, and a third are 25% or more Asian. (National UK average = 6%). ('Asian' in the U.K. =  'South Asian', i.e. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh)

In the 'Chronology' of notable electoral fraud incidents from 2003-2016 (from these studies, minus those whose charges were dropped), we found 58 names, of which 44 were clearly South Asian in origin, and 14 native British:

Data sources: 2010-2016, 2003-2009


Can Britain really justify importing a culture this allergic to 'that temperate love of liberty so essential to real republicanism'? For the moment, it appears that they can.


The U.S. has, for the moment, experienced very little of this Muslim population wave and the flavor of governance which can come with it. In Minnesota, however, a small taste of municipal cultural enrichment is in full swing in the land of Garrison Keillor:

Rowdy, fighting crowds cut short a neighborhood precinct caucus Tuesday in Cedar-Riverside, where Mohamud Noor is challenging longstanding state Rep. Phyllis Kahn. Nearly 300 people crowded into the gymnasium of the Brian Coyle Community Center on Tuesday, but tension and scuffles between attendees shut down the caucus 40 minutes in.

What vibrant electoral customs have these Somali-Americans brought with them to Minneapolis?
Afterward, it was explained that the argument concerned representatives of the opposing camps who were competing to chair the caucus. That dispute  eventually led to the physical attack. A shaken Zamzam Ali, a Noor supporter, said she received more votes than Mohamed Jama, who supports Kahn. Just before the event was shut down, Jama climbed atop a table and started chanting his initials. Members of the crowd, who gathered in the front of the gym, joined in.  …. 

 

… “I’m told some caucus participants felt threatened at this meeting and were concerned for their safety,” DFL Chairman Ken Martin said. “While we appreciate people are passionate about the political process, the DFL does not condone violence or threats of any kind.” 
Ilhan Omar, the caucus monitor, was rumored to have prompted the melee by slinging tribal insults on Facebook:

'Prior to the fight, she engaged in a tat-for-tat exchange on Facebook that essentially materialized into a physical altercation... Among her posts include taunting lyrics and the following tribal reference: "We ruled kingdoms, made you our servants, it's only with honor you claim to be one of us." She has since deleted many of these statements.'

As Somalians continue to pour into the upper Midwest, we shall see where this clannish municipal 'passion' takes us next.



b) Muslim governance: Values Clash


But clannishness is not the only element of governance they bring with them.  There is also the unique set of civilizational traits to which they are so attached. What can that mean for Muslim leadership in the West?

An essential point about Muslims is that they don't need to be in a position of governance to enforce their civilizational agenda. The concept of 'separation of church and state' is unknown to them—the religious sphere IS the public sphere, and vice versa.  

This is why even if they aren't yet elected to government in large numbers, they are throwing their political weight around all over Europe.


ISLAMICIZING PUBLIC SPACES


Muslim pressure is finally starting to achieve its goal of re-making Western society in its own image. Europeans are starting to sex-segregate their public spaces: Swimming pools in SwedenGermany, Switzerland, and the U.K.; buses and trains in Germany; music festivals in Sweden, even driving schools in France.

Women are being de facto chased off the streets in parts of Paris, Lille, Grenoble, Nîmes, and Roubaix, France; as well as in parts of Germany, Sweden, and Belgium. In Sevran, a suburb of Paris:

A quiet Paris bar where men play cards and bet on horses has become the unlikely focus of a national row. A secretly-filmed French TV news report this week showed two women being told not to enter the "Au Jockey's Club" bar. “It’s best to wait outside,” a man advised them. “There are only men here.”A third man: “In this café, there’s no mixing.” He added: “We’re in Sevran, not (central) Paris.” Another said: “The mentalities are different, here it’s like it is back in the old country.”


In the Chappelle-Pajol neighborhood in Paris, women are feeling the effects of islamization of the public sphere:
Lucie: "I don't even go out certain days, or I only go out with other people. … It runs the gamut, from comments—'hey cutie,' 'you're gorgeous'—to insults—'Lower your eyes, whore'. We're getting used to hiding our bodies, keeping our heads down, especially when coming home late, and then... well, all the time, really."
Julia, speaking in the Quatre Chemins neighborhood of Seine St. Denis: "It's oppressive." She chooses her clothes carefully before leaving the house. "Otherwise, you can't walk ten feet without the comments starting up…"  
Samara: "I love pretty clothes, but I've toned it down," she says. "Otherwise, they look you up and down like you're a steak! When I go to see my boyfriend downtown after work, I take other clothes in my bag and change when I get there."

MAKING DEMANDS TO CHANGE SOCIETY


Part of asserting your dominance over the public sphere, even in the absence of political power, is demanding that the host culture change its rules to accommodate your beliefs, instead of the other way round.

We have documented the subject extensively, as it encroaches ever further on Europe's public spaces. In W. Europe, just to take a few examples, Muslims have demanded the right to


CREATING PARALLEL SOCIETIES

The evidence is growing that completely parallel Muslim societies are mushrooming wherever Europe allows them to, especially the uber-tolerant U.K., right under the nose of its oblivious (or complicit) leaders.


A feminist scholar at Holland's most prestigious university has revealed a 'parallel society'
in the U.K.:
Q: You described yourself as left-leaning liberal when you started your investigation on sharia courts in the UK. Now you warn against a lack of knowledge of and a lack of resistance against the advancing radical Islam.  
 A: ‘I discovered a comprehensive system of law — far more systematic then I had expected — that contradicts our secular laws. Many Muslim women are locked into a religious marriage because their community thinks a divorce according secular law is insufficient.  
Women have to ask a sharia judge or an imam to dissolve their marriage, for example when the husband physically abuses her. Even Dutch Muslim women travel to the UK to appear before sharia courts. It is a parallel society. I object to it because these practices go against women’s rights.’


Critics are sounding the alarm about a 'parallel education system' in the U.K.:
The revelations about the un-British goings-on at the [taxpayer-funded] Al-Madinah School -- some staffers have compared the working conditions at the school to "being in Pakistan" -- are fueling outrage over what some are describing as underhanded attempts to establish a parallel Islamic education system in Britain.  
In addition to the strict dress code, pupils have been banned from singing songs, playing musical instruments, or reading fairy tales, …  Girls must wait for all the boys to get their lunches before they can eat. Female staff are banned from wearing jewelry and are instructed to avoid shaking hands with male teachers to prevent "insult." 

This creation of 'parallel societies' is in some cases actively encouraged by Muslim leaders, such as Turkey's Recep Erdogan, who's called on Germany's 4 million Muslims to resist assimilation:
Speaking to a crowd of more than 10,000 immigrants waving Turkish flags and shouting "Turkey is Great!" in the German industrial city of Düsseldorf, Erdogan said: "We are against assimilation. No one should be able to rip us away from our culture and civilization."

Treating the Turkish diaspora as a de facto fifth column, he advises them in no uncertain terms to take over Europe:
Speaking in the central city of EskiÅŸehir, Turkey’s president urged “his brothers and sisters in Europe” to begin a baby boom in their new countries. “Have not just three but five children,” he told his flag-waving audience.  “The place in which you are living and working is now your homeland and new motherland. Stake a claim to it."

In response to Erdogan's entreaties, Turks in Germany recently showed their disdain for Western values by voting massively to 'eliminate democracy' in their home country. Hasnain Kazim:
'A clear majority of Turkish voters living in Germany cast "yes" ballots for Erdogan's autocratic presidential system [in the recent referendum]. ...  Despite living in democracies and in freedom and safety, these people have essentially voted to eliminate democracy in Turkey.
'As painful as it is to write this, one cannot support an autocratic system [in Turkey], ... then turn around and complain that you are not accepted in Germany as a German. That's unacceptable. It shows that integration in Germany has failed -- and that it isn't just the Germans who are to blame for that.' 


ONCE IN POWER, HOW WILL THEY VOTE?

If Muslims in the West hope to one day vote in an agenda based on their own civilizational values, what will it likely be?  One need not guess, only ask them:
Many British Muslims do not share the values of their non-Muslim compatriots, and say they want to lead separate lives under Islamic Sharia law, according to the findings of a new [2016] survey.
The survey reveals:  
      ·         One in five Muslims in Britain never enter a non-Muslim house;
·         31 per cent of British Muslims support the right of a man to have more than one wife;
·         52 per cent of Muslims did not believe that homosexuality should be legal;
·         23 per cent of Muslims support the introduction of Sharia law rather than the laws laid down by parliament.

Trevor Phillips, former head of Britain's Equality and Human Rights Commission, warned of a growing "chasm" between Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain that "isn't going to disappear any time soon." He added: "I thought Europe's Muslims would gradually blend into the landscape. I should have known better."


The same can be said in Denmark, where the 'new Danes' are not becoming more assimilated with time, but less:
Research in the European microcosm nation of Denmark has found three-quarters of Muslims in the country register on an important measure for radicalisation – more now than a decade ago.  
As well as taking the faith more literally, Muslims in Denmark also practice it with greater devotion, with more than half now praying at least five times a day, and a similar proportion rejecting the notions of any form of modernisation or reformation. 


We thus see that electoral representation is useful, but not needed to radically alter Western cultures.  Muslims can achieve this same goal by sheer badgering. It is no secret, then, that if they do indeed begin to govern in large numbers, the likely goal is transforming their new homelands into something much more closely resembling the old. 



Is this compatible with Westerners' stated vision of secular, equality-based liberal democracy?



Having seen the governance styles brought to Western countries by newcomers like Hispanics and Muslims, let us also look at the style practiced by an outside group who has dwelt among us for centuries—Sub-Saharan Africans.


3) Afros: Lower Competence Level

As we have seen, outside observers have long puzzled over Afro governance. Their competence level has often seemed perplexingly lower than that of other groups.

Data sources:  Corruption , DemocracyHuman Devpt

Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma doesn't mince words. According to him, 'There Are No Successful Black Nations':
Nigeria, the most populous black nation on Earth, is on the brink of collapse.  A culture of incompetence, endemic corruption, dignified ineptitude, and, chief among all, destructive selfishness and greed has played a major role in its unravelling. The same, sadly, can be said for most other African nations.  … As long as we continue to ignore our own self-assessment and soul-searching, we will remain the undignified race. 

The annual Prize for Achievement in African Leadership is given out by the foundation led by Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese billionaire. In the eleven years it's been on offer, only four have been won—most years, not one leader on the continent meets the jury's exacting standards:

There have also been accusations that failing to find a prize winner can encourage negative stereotypes about Africa and its leaders. Hadeel Ibrahim, Mo's daughter and founding executive director of the foundation, told CNN: "We're holding a mirror up to Africa and if there's a winner, congratulations to the winner and to that country, and if there's no winner we hope that African people get more of the leadership they deserve."

The core of these Africans' self-criticism often comes back to two words: incompetence and corruption.

So what about Afros in America? Separated from their home continent by many centuries, does their governance style in the U.S. more closely resemble that of the host culture, or of their African cousins?


a) State takeover of cities

In cases of gross mismanagement, American states have often stepped in to take over city governments. This rather extreme step has a long history, and many cases have something in common--the majority / plurality of the population and city council have been Afro-American. This has been the case in Detroit and Flint, MI; Atlantic City and Camden, NJ; Harrisburg, PA; and Washington D.C. (taken over by the feds).

City councils of Detroit, Flint, Harrisburg, Atlantic City, and 
Barry and Pratt, bankrupters of Washington, D.C.

The example of Flint, MI:
Flint's municipal debt has climbed to nearly $40 million, alarming state officials,  ... The city administrator went so far as cutting public ambulance service to try to bring the city's finances under control. The denouement came on Monday when the state took control of the city's government, stripping elected officials of much of their power. Flint, a city of 125,000, is the largest municipality that has ever been run by the state. 

Another metric for urban governance is WalletHub's 'Best-run cities' Index, which, having examined their methodology, we would more properly call the 'Best-functioning cities' Index. In graphing this index vs. % black population by city, we see the following (click to enlarge):


Data source (Using 'Quality of City Services' Index only)


b) State takeover of school districts

Another area of governance in which Blacks have struggled in the U.S. is their leadership of school boards. One recent example is Detroit, where despite spending $14K per student, 96% of eighth graders are not proficient in mathematics nor 93% in reading. Taken over by the state of Michigan in 1999, nothing seems to have stopped the freefall. A last-ditch attempt to sue for 'the right to literacy' failed:

Legal observers say [it] is an unprecedented attempt to establish that literacy is a U.S. constitutional right.  
Haynes says claims laid out by plaintiffs — including deplorable building conditions, lack of books, classrooms without teachers, insufficient desks, buildings plagued by vermin, unsafe facilities and extreme temperatures — go far beyond mere access to education. The suit claims the state has functionally excluded Detroit children from the state’s educational system. It seeks class-action status and several guarantees of equal access to literacy.
 
'Mismanagement' is the word that floats to the surface every time an urban school district gets disbanded and taken over by its state government—and it happens with surprising frequency in the U.S. What is the common denominator between the urban school districts in Detroit; Philadelphia; Milwaukee; St. Louis and Kansas City, MO; Inglewood and Oakland, CANew Orleans; Memphis; Camden, Newark, and Jersey City, NJBaltimore; Birmingham and Selma, AL; Jackson, MS; Little Rock, AR; and Gary, IN?


Top to bottom, left to right: Officials and school board members in Baltimore, Inglewood CA, Detroit, Jackson, MS, Philadelphia, Birmingham AL, Gary, IN, Kansas City MO, Memphis, Camden NJ, Milwaukee, Selma, AL, Newark NJ, students protesting takeovers in St. Louis and Newark.


c) Civil service breakdown

As far as big city public services go, one that has come under almost fully black rule is the Washington D.C. metro. 

Interviews with ex-employees have been revealing:
Ninety-seven percent of the bus and train operators at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority are black.  ... From a 2003 class action suit: “There appears to be an entrenched network of African-American employees at WMATA that is able to steer jobs, promotion, training and other career enhancing benefit to persons of their own racial or ethnic group.”


Interviews and internal records depict environment in which hardworking employees are actively excluded and those who rise are those willing to do the bare minimum — never causing a stir by flagging rampant safety violations, reporting malfeasance or proposing improvements.

Days after a Red Line accident killed nine in July 2009, Brenda Whorton drew the line. “I told them I wasn’t going to pencil-whip for them,” she said. “It means fudging it: like marking down that a motor’s according to specs when it’s not.” 
It is common for midnight-shift workers to “lock the doors and go to sleep, because they’ve got other jobs,” and equally common for supervisors to turn a blind eye, she said.

Conditions have deteriorated so much that the government has threatened--that's right--a takeover:
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx threatened Tuesday to suspend the D.C. subway if the system fails to make immediate changes to fix dangerous safety lapses. Foxx's tough talk comes after Metro employees denied federal inspectors access to a metro tunnel on Thursday following an explosion of a third-rail insulator. 

Smoke and fire in the tunnels is a long-running concern for the transit authority. …  Since April 23, eight incidents involving fire or smoke forced evacuations and service suspensions, according to FTA. The National Transportation Safety Board ruled that Metro ignored safety provisions for years.
 ... During the hours-long hearing, the NTSB issued a list of 43 findings that it says led to the the deadly L'Enfant Plaza incident — including improperly secured and covered power cables, water problems, poor training and lack of procedures and proper maintenance.

It appears as though sheer incompetence may force the D.C. Metro to follow in the path trod by so many black-run city councils and school districts.


d) Congressional chicanery

Not just at the local but at the federal level, Blacks seem to routinely punch above their weight when it comes to incompetence and corruption:
If you are a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, the chances that you will eventually face an ethics probe are better than the odds of you becoming president, senator or a Nobel Prize winner.
According to a 2012 National Journal study, five of the six lawmakers under review by the House Ethics Committee were Black Caucus members.  … In 2009, all eight lawmakers under ethics investigation were African-American. Besides Jackson, they included Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who was later convicted of accepting gifts from donors with business before his tax-writing panel and 11 other ethics violations. 
All told, the Journal says, an astonishing one-third of sitting black lawmakers have been named in an ethics probe at some point in their Hill careers.


Though they have been here longer than many European groups, Africans are a case study in what Commons calls the 'assimilation / amalgamation' problem. Amalgamation has been minimal, as even very Euro-mixed Blacks stay on the 'black side of the line' socially. 


Assimilation, unfortunately, has also been minimal—Afro-Americans seem, in many ways, to remain an essentially separate nation from Euro-Americans.  From the data gathered, this would seem to often be the case in the political sphere as well.  


*     *     *


Today's New York Times readers may be shocked to see their editorial from May 1921, at the height of debate over the proposed 'Immigration Quota Act':


The great menace of the new immigration of recent years is that, by introducing large numbers of varied races whose languages and traditions are alien, the nation may lose unity and solidarity.  
From England, Scotland and Ireland we shall receive immigrants who already speak our language, have kindred standards of living and similar political traditions. [...]  Scandinavians, though foreign to us in language, are racially and politically close kindred.  .... Secretary [of State] Hughes has already urged this upon Congress and patriotic Americans everywhere echo his plea. 

And so it was, that the 19th c. restrictionist movement had finally caught on, sealed by the 1924 Immigration Act (reducing non-NW Euro entries to a mere drip). The doors would not be opened again until 1965.



The unprecedented waves of South / East European and Irish migration in the late 1800s rattled America deeply. They should have. The country's founding stock were at that time threatened with eclipse.  Were these people assimilable?

Some say no--that this era marked the beginning of the end of our great Anglo-Protestant republican experiment.  

Some say yes--that after turning off the tap in 1924, many of the foreign groups who weren't already 'marrying out' were suddenly forced to do so.  This intermingling between higher- and lower-trust Euro groups led to a 'leveling' by which today, globally, American Whites are behaviorally and cognitively similar to modern NW Europeans.  Wiki:
An analysis of Census information and immigration records would suggest that 62% of White Americans today are of British Isles descent, and a total of 86% are of Northwestern European origins. Approximately 14% of U.S. whites are of southern and eastern European ancestry.

Since 1965, of course, our all-European 'melting pot' of yore has taken a decidedly different flavor: 



Governments are us. We create them. If we're unable to govern successfully, we create unliveable societies. To escape what we've created, we then flee to lands run by those who do it better. 

But when one person = one vote, outsiders can wield real political power in these host countries. Both as governing and as governed, they can change the very essence of that society from the inside out. 

 Commons, in 1907:
Other races and peoples, accustomed to despotism and even savagery, and wholly unused to self-government, have been thrust into the delicate [American] fabric. Like a practical people as we pride ourselves, we have begun actually to despotize our institutions in order to control these dissident elements, though still optimistically holding that we retain the original democracy. (2)

Humans are not interchangeable. The accidents of history, of our culture, and yes, even our genes have helped make us who we are and our societies what they are.  If we treasure the liberal democratic systems we've inherited, let us have the good common sense to think carefully about just who we allow into that 'delicate fabric.' The very future of our societies may depend on it.



Thank you for reading.

(1) Higham, John,  Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955.  
(2) Commons, J.R., Races and Immigrants in America, NY: Macmillan, 1907.  
(3) Wittke, Carl F., The Irish in America, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U. Press, 1956.
(4) De Madariaga, Salvador, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, LondonOxford U. Press, 1929.

27 comments:

Anonymous said...

No mention of Jews.....

Yankee Imperialist said...

Aelius Aristides, a Greek who received Roman citizenship in 123 A.D. stated…

"You have divided into two parts all men throughout your empire…everywhere giving citizenship to all those who are more accomplished, noble, and powerful, even as they retain their native-born identities, while the rest you have made subjects and the governed. Neither the sea nor the great expanse of intervening land keeps one from being a citizen, and there is no distinction between Europe and Asia…No one is a foreigner who deserves to hold an office or is worthy of trust. Rather, there is here a common “world democracy” under the rule of one man, the best ruler and director…You have divided humanity into Romans and non-Romans…and because you have divided people in this manner, in every city throughout the empire there are many who share citizenship with you, no less than the share citizenship with their fellow natives. And some of these Roman citizens have not even seen this city [Rome]! There is no need for troops to garrison the strategic high points of these cities, because the most important and powerful people in each region guard their native lands for you…yet there is not a residue of resentment among those excluded [from Roman citizenship and a share in the governance of the provinces]. Because your government is both universal and like that of a single city-state, its governors rightly rule not as foreigners but, as it were, their own people…Additionally, all of the masses of subjects under this government have protection against the more powerful of their native countrymen, by virtue of your anger and vengeance, which would fall upon the more powerful without delay should they dare to break the law. Thus, the present government serves rich and poor alike, and your constitution has developed a single, harmonious, all-embracing union. What in former days seemed impossible has in your time come to pass: You control a vast empire with a rule that is firm but not unkind…”

Ultimately, the American identity has not been lost within the past 60 years, it just has transformed, similar to when the Thirteen Colonies began as primarily British, but subsumed other European groups who were historic rivals, and eventually non-Europeans. The Welsh, the Cornish, Bavarians, the Catalans–they were distinct sub-Europeans groups, but over generations they intermingled and dispersed in our great land. Americans are a mixture of European and non-European ethnostates who, like any and all groups, self-identify. They know who they are and where they come from, and create groups who share their self-identities. Furthermore, the default for American is American and not a particular race, regardless of one’s willingness to admit it this decided fact. When you call yourself a black American or a Chinese American, you are still an American, as in residing in the nation referred as the United States. And while Yankees and Southerners and Midwesterners are clearly different, they are not separate “tribes” or “nations”, just locations with groups of people who self-identify geographically, socially, and culturally.

Yankee Imperialist said...

This identification is the direct result of indoctrination…from our Founding Fathers. The term "proposition" is found in the first two sections of the Declaration of Independence. We were formed from political and religious refugees and migrants from a dozen European nations to start, and conjoined from the beginning with freed slaves and Native Americans. We were inspired by a great diversity of political philosophies and practices. We have welcomed immigration from the first day, explicated by the First Congress.

Preserving rights "for one's posterity" repudiated feudalistic notions. Similar wording exists in the Federalist Papers and American law rooted in British traditions. Even accepting "Our posterity," means the descendants of those citizens only at the time of ratification, given the healthy dose of non-British in the United States who were among the ratifiers, the concept simply cannot be granted to the British exclusively. And, of course there is the naturalization clause, which assuredly had no ethnocentric provision. One could argue the slave trade clause had such had such an ethnocentric position, but it is clear it was not aimed at non-British or non-whites. And then there is the naturalization clause, which certainly had no ethnocentric provision to it.

Posterity does NOT refer only to one's own children, but as with the synonymous "legacy" also has the broader meaning of what we leave behind. The Founding Fathers were self-consciously leaving behind other than a genetic legacy. The motto "Novus Ordo Seclorum" reflects their legacy, setting up the mechanisms of government they invented to secure liberty against tyranny. Recall Article I, Section 8, Clause 4: "The Congress shall have Power To...establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization...." By definition, naturalization extends citizenship, and all the rights and duties related to it, to an outsider, that is, someone not the posterity of a signer of the document. The Founding Fathers clearly desired "to invite foreigners of merit and republican principles among us." Indeed, the intention was whites and Europeans, but who imagined at that time non-whites and women would be able to embrace these principles? But there is no racial or gender criteria to adhering to republican ideals in the Constitution. Of course, that does not mean foreigners have the right to enter our shores, as Congress sets the standards for immigration. But the proposition remains that there are hoops for newcomers to jump through.

Yankee Imperialist said...

Americans in the past and at present identify with American civilization, with its underpinnings of representative democracy and capitalism. Certainly, political and economic concepts from Western Civilization played a major role in the development of American institutions, but the Founding Fathers granted liberty to its citizens to set the course for its own future. While posterity originally referred to those who founded the nation, the die was NOT set, as evident by the power of the people to set immigration criteria, which has noticeably changed since the inaugural 1790 law.

Posterity to the founding fathers meant the creation of an independent nation, with a vigorous and adaptable form of government, with a body of liberties that were malleable to the times. Thomas Jefferson bore witness to the new government as a unique combination of the freest elements of English law and political custom. While he was concerned that unrestricted immigration of peoples from lands unacquainted with the principle of representative government MIGHT undo the careful work of our Founding Fathers, he said prophetically, “from such we are to expect the greatest number of immigrants”. Indeed, American economic growth required a massive influx of foreign labor.

Alexander Hamilton wrote, “Immigrants exhibit a large proportion of ingenious domestic and valuable workmen who by expatriating from Europe improved their condition, and add to the industry and wealth of the United States”. In Common Sense, Thomas Paine upheld “this new world” as “the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty”--which in essence refers to any and all groups of people, whether it be European or non-European. Jefferson argued for “a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them.” James Madison defended immigration on the grounds that it is “always from places where living is more difficult to places where it is less difficult,” so “the happiness of the emigrant is promoted by the change”.

Hence, the Founding Fathers enabled Congress to set the criteria for immigration with those newcomers blending in and articulating what is posterity from that new baseline. In other words, future generations of Americans were given the liberty to decide what is and what is not “an American”. At the time of the Founding Fathers, their worldview was European, which is other than surprising. However, as we have seen throughout the course of human history, perspectives change over time due to a host of factors.

Yankee Imperialist said...

Some on the Alt Right claim that the United States is not a nation founded on a proposition. Only the founding stock, those from the British Isles, are the “original Americans”. One such writer touts how the non-British are unable to appreciate AND have shown a knack for perverting, our republican form of government, on the grounds that its foundational underpinnings are specifically peculiar to the British Isles. So, for those readers here whose ancestors came from Germany, Italy, and Russia, you are in essence a “fake” American. You have to go back. But do not fret. In United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), the Supreme Court ruled that a child born in the United States of Chinese citizens, who had at the time a permanent domicile and residence in the United States and who were carrying on business there other than for the Chinese government, automatically became a American citizen. This decision established an important precedent in its interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

M.G. said...

Anon—

Indeed, no mention of Jews. This was not meant to be an exhaustive rundown of all groups and their style of self-governance, just a survey of some notable ones.

We've touched on Jewish issues before, those articles can be found at this tag. Thanks for stopping by.

M.G. said...

Yankee Imperialist—

Thank you for taking the time to share your many thoughts.

Unfortunately, per the FAQ, the comments section here is reserved for race realists. Your current comments can stay, but we'll regretfully not be publishing any in the future.

The reason is so that those who can see, whose views are verboten on 99% of the web, can have a space to talk amongst themselves in peace.

As your blank-slatist worldview is very popular, you will no doubt find many places online which will be happy to publish your thoughts.

You seem like a very bright, curious person with a lot to share. I wish you all the best on your intellectual journey.

Yankee Imperialist said...

My comments were squarely based in response to your insight as to what is essentially government. If it makes you intellectually uncomfortable that my cogent rebuttals are in some way "debating the reality of HBD", then that would be on you, not me. While I appreciate you not scrubbing my insight, why not be interested in substantive debate about historical phenomenon even if it directly counters your own political worldview?

M.G. said...

Yankee Imperialist—

We see the world through different lenses.

A forum for atheists may not let in a commenter who spends his time trying to convince them that God exists.

A forum for Christians may not let in a commenter who spends his time trying to convince them that God doesn't exist.

A forum for gun enthusiasts may not let in a commenter who spends his time telling them the 2nd amendment should be repealed.

A forum for 2nd amendment repealers may not let in a commenter who spends his time vaunting the joys of gun ownership.

…Etc.

These are all perfectly reasonable positions to take.

It's not that no one here wants to debate the nature of government--no one wants to debate the nature of government with a blank-slatist.

The blank-slatist himself may find such a debate fascinating, but having heard it a thousand times, we're just no longer interested. We've moved past it.

Anyone is welcome to read this blog. But regretfully, the TWCS comments section simply doesn't host arguments on social science with people who believe that evolution stops at the neck. We never have.

I understand that you're very keen to engage in such a debate, which is perfectly understandable and even admirable, but I'm very sorry, it's simply not going to happen in this space.

I encourage you to continue your exploration of these issues in any of the literally millions of online venues that welcome your perspective on them. TWCS, regretfully, is not one of them.

Again, thank you for stopping by, and I sincerely wish you good luck on your journey, wherever it may take you.

Yankee Imperialist said...

Sir, the issue here is that you assume that I'm a "blank slatist"; therefore, since these arguments posed is being filtered through that lens, there need not be any time spent actually sifting through each position taken. That, from my vantage point, is an intellectual cop out. The positions I took specifically reference to posterity and the intent of the Founding Fathers. I would be very much interested in how you would craft an argument to address the points I made in response to your work and your use of sources. Otherwise, there is a definitive appearance on your part that it is simply easier to label those who take umbrage to your perspective as merely being a "blank slatist" rather than engage in worthwhile discourse. That is most unfortunate.

Finis...

Scott said...

Hello-

I read here regularly, and I have linked back to this post. I am not sure if your platform will give you a heads up about it.

https://americandadweb.wordpress.com/2017/10/24/it-starts-to-get-really-hard-to-ignore-this-stuff/

Have a great day.

Scott said...

On the matter of who you allow to post comments here/argue.

It actually makes sense. For a while, my wife and I blogged about alternative forms of mate selection (to dating). Mostly we had already decided that the modern form of dating had a been a failure based on our own definition of that term. We were discussing other forms of mate selection (betrothal/courtship) as viable alternatives, and connecting with other like-minded folks.

Invariably, we would get commenters showing up with:

"You can't control what your kids do. Courtship is stupid. Its a free country."

And my response was "yes, we understand that 99% of Americans do it that way. So why did you come here to tell us that? Your position is the dominant form of mate selection, so if you want to date, all you have to do is walk outside and ask someone out. Everyone already agrees with you."

I think it makes perfect sense to lay down the basic presuppositions you will adhere to. Especially if you have minority position to express. The rest is just noise.

M.G. said...

Scott--

Thanks for the link! Very interesting post; I commented on it over at your blog (hope it went through; Wordpress was acting odd).

I think it makes perfect sense to lay down the basic presuppositions you will adhere to. Especially if you have minority position to express. The rest is just noise.

Indeed, when you hold a very minority view, it can be a breath of fresh air to have a space to discuss it among the like-minded. My moderation style is not up everyone's alley, but that's OK. I treasure the many fascinating debates that have gone on here among those who are open to genetics' role in politics.

You have a lovely family; I wish you many happy hours of blogging ahead.

Scott said...

MG-

I snatched your comment from the jaws of the spam folder!

I will respond to it a little later. It requires some thought.

armenia4ever said...

I'm not of accordance with the HBD side of the dissident right, but this is a damning piece and the best refutation of the magic dirty theory Vox and the Z man often mention.

The piece about the DC metro left me flabbergasted.

However, I dont think anyone would believe it unless they experience it. I suppose it takes anecdotal experience to awaken one.

One thing I've realized about assimilation is that one must toss out the negative elements of their culture, embrace the positive ones, and absorb the best aspects from the culture of the lands they have just entered. Discipline and intact family structures - something that that plagues much of black families after the 1960s shows a bitter picture.

My family has been able to experience something different than the usual picture: Three of my cousins who are half black and half white. Though divorce occurred, strict discipline, non-tolerance of anything ghetto and my "white" aunt being a cop has entailed my cousins a very structured life that has set them up for success.

Another anecdotal example I'll mention is an old boss of mine. His wife and him couldn't have kids so they adopted a white girl, and three brothers - two who were hispanic and a half brother of theirs who was black/hispanic.

Something that stood out to me was that the kids were brought up as if they were "white" in the pejorative sense that social just types would propose based on the kids having no interest in anything from their ethnic backgrounds. Again, my old boss was a disciplined blue collar tradesman whose adopted kids were the same. (They moved from California to Missouri, so perhaps a small amount of "non-whites" brought up by whites are likely to assimilate into an area surrounded by well.... whites.)

Fascinating post my friend.



Rogers Cheshire said...

Of course the Irish were "clannish" and fought passionately to protect their own... they had been subject to 800 years of "benevolent" English rule by those who you claim were so civilized... and yet those great civilizers were responsible for the oppression and death of tens of millions, both on the Emerald Isle as well as in India, Africa, and throughout the British Empire.

I'll say one thing about the British, they never met a non-Brit who they weren't ready to subjugate by the sword, torture, and murder. And before you say that's ancient history, let's not forget that the Mau Mau massacre in Kenya happened *during the reign of Elizabeth II*!

M.G. said...

armenia4ever--

Thanks for your comment.

Discipline and intact family structures - something that that plagues much of black families after the 1960s shows a bitter picture.

Yes, it's true in all ethnic groups to some extent, but the black community in particular seems to have been devastated by the loosening of social mores since the 1960s. Black conservatives hammer on this constantly, but they just aren't listened to today. In the past, men like Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, who stressed chastity and strong family life, were respected voices.

One thing I've realized about assimilation is that one must toss out the negative elements of their culture, embrace the positive ones, and absorb the best aspects from the culture of the lands they have just entered.

Agreed, but the other side of the coin is that the host culture must insist on all of this. I think where so many Western countries are floundering today is that not only are they NOT demanding assimilation, but they are in fact twisting their own culture to make it more like the newcomers'! It's amazing to watch, in a historical sense. It's like surrendering your whole civilizational identity to outsiders, without a shot being fired.

Something that stood out to me was that the kids were brought up as if they were "white" in the pejorative sense that social just types would propose

Adopting interracially is a minefield. Honestly I've seen it go both ways: Kids raised really assimilationist who end up more or less 'feeling white' and acting that way, no problem--or, on the other hand, kids raised this same way, but who end up finding 'racial consciousness' and at some level rejecting their adoptive family. This is a really fraught subject these days and you have to admire people who try to give these kids a home knowing what a tightrope walk it is.

M.G. said...

Rogers Cheshire--

You'll get no argument from me on any of that. The Brits, like all colonial powers, imposed themselves ruthlessly on conquered groups.

Benevolence for ethnically alien groups is not the first step in the 'widening circle of empathy' (Steven Pinker)--it's the final one.

The first step--and what the English had been doing for centuries by the 1700s--was moving one's loyalty from only family/clan, to one's whole wider ethnic group. (Alan McFarlane details the process a bit in this piece.)

This creates the kind of intra-society trust that allows relatively clean, civic government to develop. But it has nothing to do with how the society acts toward outsiders.

Germany and Japan in the mid-20th century were both highly civilized countries, with low interpersonal violence and high trust. Yet look at the horrors they wrought on the outside groups they conquered.

It's only recently that we've seen the final step in this expanding 'circle of empathy'--benevolence to completely alien outsiders. (Current multiculturalist fervor in the West.)

In fact, I think we've gone one further--the final step isn't just extending trust to ethnic outgroups--it's placing them above your own ethnie. This is what we're seeing today in the UK and Sweden, two of the most advanced cases, which if left unchecked will lead them to one day extinct themselves. (In the UK's case, by their erstwhile colonized--the ultimate revenge of the once-conquered!)

Bruce said...

"We are a universal nation, founded on universal principles, attracting talented people from across the globe, active across the world on behalf of all people who seek democracy and dignity." - Brooks

MG, How can they (the liberals and neoconservatives) have it both ways? On one hand, we've always been a universal "proposition" nation. On the other hand, they are always reminding us of how racist and discriminatory we have always been.

Well, fine. I accept that America is a "racist" nation. Therefore, it isn't a univeral, proposition nation as your quote from Woodrow Wilson (and pre-1965 immigration policy) demonstrates.

M.G. said...

Bruce--

MG, How can they (the liberals and neoconservatives) have it both ways?

They would very much like to have it both ways! Unfortunately for the neocons, their fantasizing about our founders' multiculturalism is just that, fantasy. The Sam Francis piece lays it out pretty brutally. America's founders wanted a country made of men ethnically and culturally close to themselves. By today's standards that is, indeed, 'racist.'

I'm no white nationalist myself, but there's no sugarcoating the fact that (1) the U.S. was founded by and for ethnic NW Euros, and (2) homogeneous societies tend to do better than diverse ones. My gut feeling is that the late 1800s immigration wave was harmful but not fatal--Euro assimilation/amalgamation eventually did its work--but that the post-1965 landscape has changed this country in ways we will never recover from. Only time will tell, of course.

Ivan .M said...

Last I checked, there's plenty of cronyism, tax evasion and fiscal shenanigans going on in Ireland.

We may never know what the distribution of behavioral traits among Irish immigrants was relative to their source population, so it's hard to speculate whether that massive emigration to the United States altered Ireland's gene pool in any meaningful way.

And for all the (legitimate) concern over Eastern/Southern-Euro and now non-Euro governance styles, the "big government" temperament of Scandinavians and certain German elements ended up rankling a lot of the colonial English stock eventually. I think heritability of political views increases with rising wealth, safety, nutrition and advances in medicine.

Hell, JayMan has squeezed an entire series of articles out of the fact that even different subgroups of English Americans have had trouble getting along! I'm not so sure that the various American Nations will ever put their differences aside no matter how many Hispanics and Asians pour in.

I await the full expression of Chinese governance in Vancouver. We'll see.

Scott said...

ways we will never recover from.

This is kind of where I am at. I only hope for whatever happens to be as peaceful and orderly as possible. And I want to be really far from large population centers.

M.G. said...

Ivan M--

Nice to see you again!

We may never know what the distribution of behavioral traits among Irish immigrants was relative to their source population

I don't know, I think something like half the total population of the country came over to America in the second half of the 1800s, that's a pretty big sample size. One could argue it was the poorer half, though. Ireland's a puzzler to me, they seem pretty first-world today, but to believe 19th c. commenters they were a dysfunctional rabble. I'm 1/4 Irish, and to be honest I wouldn't judge anyone back then for wanting to keep my ancestors out.

the "big government" temperament of Scandinavians and certain German elements ended up rankling a lot of the colonial English stock

Agreed, and this lasted quite a long time. Weren't the Socialist and Progressive parties most successful with old-stock Germans and Scandinavians in the Midwest and out west?

JayMan has squeezed an entire series of articles out of the fact that even different subgroups of English Americans have had trouble getting along!

Yes, this is some of his best work, here's a link if anyone hasn't checked it out. Albion's Seed and American Nations really help to understand the British founding stock. They were a motley crew to say the least. In American Nations, Woodard flat-out claims that the Brits who settled the North and the South of the U.S. were on two different sides of the English civil war, and centuries later went on to be on the two different sides of the U.S. civil war. (And even today often don't seem to understand each other.) Fascinating stuff.

I'm not so sure that the various American Nations will ever put their differences aside no matter how many Hispanics and Asians pour in.

Fair point. But I think white southerners see 'Massachusetts liberals' as annoying cousins that they would still take up arms to defend (against outsiders). Those Massachusetts liberals, on the other hand, would probably join forces with the Asians or Hispanics against their southern cousins if it came to that. I could be dead wrong but that's my suspicion...

I await the full expression of Chinese governance in Vancouver.

LOL, you may not have to wait long!

M.G. said...

Scott--

I only hope for whatever happens to be as peaceful and orderly as possible.

Agreed. I think we've been lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that it's been 150 years since Americans fought each other here on our soil. Compared to that era, we are rich, fat, and zombified by technology. The fractures under the surface take longer to be seen. But when people feel they have nothing to lose... I just hope we don't get there any time soon.

luke said...

@armenia4ever @M.G.

I'm not sure if you're aware of this but some HBD bloggers like Jayman, his associate
Misdreavus and even some of the articles in this blog suggest that Black Americans as a group were not better off in any standard before the 60's despite having fewer broken households than even whites at the time. In terms of average income, literacy, lifespan, education and standard of living they seemed to be relatively worse off before the welfare state than today and even the iq gap between blacks and whites was 2 points wider than now. There's also no indication of blacks having lower crime rates in the past compared to now, most evidence suggest the opposite: http://theinjusticefile.blogspot.com/2011/07/black-males-historical-crime-rates.html

This shouldn't be shocking if you consider Judith Harris and Steven Pinker's research that a person's upbringing has little-to-no effect on how they turn out. All this explains why Black conservatives are mostly ignored by the rest of their group on this issue. Their constant focus on family values misses the mark and it shows the willful ignorance of HBD among American conservatives in general.

M.G. said...

luke jones--

There's also no indication of blacks having lower crime rates in the past compared to now, most evidence suggest the opposite

I can only agree with this half-way. I've seen The Injustice File's data (it comes from historical compendia of the census), and have in fact published it here before, in more accessible form:

'Ratio of Black to White Incarceration Rate, 1926-2010'

'Incarceration Rates per 100 of the Population, Black and White, 1926-2010'

(Both graphs originally published here in 2012, 'Self-policing and the Afro-American')

So we can see that though there was always a gap between Afro and Euro crime, that gap has widened considerably since the 1960s.

As for other measures of social dysfunction, we see the same trend. Here's some historical family data:

'Percentage of Children Living with Both Parents, Black and White,1880-2010'

'Percentage of Women Married, Black and White, 1880-2011'

(Both graphs originally published here in 2014, 'Reparations for Slavery?')

Again, we see the same trend: A gap has long existed, but it widens quite a bit after the 'Great Society' of the 1960s.

As far as 'average income, literacy, lifespan, education and standard of living,', I haven't done any in-depth research. But it would be very surprising if Blacks weren't worse-off in all these areas before the 1960s, since Americans of all races were worse-off in these areas before the 1960s.

I haven't read Harris's and Pinker's book, so I can't speak to that. But the environment a child's family creates for him is not quite the same as the environment society at large creates for a particular ethnic group.

Severe black dysfunction in the U.S. today has, I suspect, both a nature and a nurture component:

Nature, because a serious dysgenic breeding experiment has been going on in the black community for 3 generations now. The least able are having the most kids, and the most able--especially college-educated black women--are having hardly any.

Nurture, because society's constraints on our behavior (or lack thereof) matter--and this is true across ethnic groups. Afros have had a harder time than any other group moving from their traditional small, constrained native communities to big, anonymous urban societies.

But again, all that's just my opinion based on the data I've seen. Thanks for taking the time to read and comment.

Mr. Rational said...

There's also the detail that "civil rights", "disparate impact" and "sensitivity" have lessened the pressure on Blacks to achieve, so even the ones who could make something of themselves legitimately are allowed to coast.  This is probably where all the "empty suit" AA hires come from; as kids they behaved well enough to get along in White society, but nobody asked anything from them academically so even if they were capable of making it for real they never put forth the effort.  Why bother, when they get paid just for showing up?