2020 Election: The Beginning of the End?

We are currently working on a reader-requested piece on the question, ‘How exactly should a government deal with a massive underclass of hostile immigrants?’, to be published around the holidays.

But as we have not breached the question of the U.S. election and its aftermath, here is a quick data round-up. From Boston University:

A recent Washington Post headline says: “In America, talk turns to something not spoken of for 150 years: Civil war.” The story references, among others, Stanford University historian Victor Davis Hanson, who asked in a National Review essay last summer: “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?”

Another Washington Post story reports how Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King recently posted a meme warning that red states have “8 trillion bullets” in the event of a civil war. And a poll conducted last June by Rasmussen Reports found that 31% of probable US voters surveyed believe “it’s likely that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years.”

Leftists have never digested Trump’s 2016 surprise victory, and conservatives see fraud in Biden’s squeaker of a win last month. ‘Blue’ and ‘Red’ America seem more hostile to each other than ever.

Minneapolis burns

Far-leftists Antifa and Black Lives Matter spent the summer burning and looting America’s cities, whilst regular citizens defending themselves from rioters were pursued in the courts. All this in the midst of a pandemic whose 'lockdowns' have bent civil liberties to the breaking point. A sense of anarcho-tyranny seems to have set in, and many fear civil unrest could turn (or has turned) into low-grade civil war. 

For some it is a political divide which threatens our national unity, for others it is a racial one. And some are just whistling past the graveyard:

 

Are these fears founded? Are America's divisions too deep to overcome? If so, what comes next?

 

Having researched these questions before, we’d like to bring some data to the fore.

 

Governments Are Us

Harper's Weekly, 1869

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.

Naturalization ceremony, 2010

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:

Not multiculturalists

'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 19^th 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.' 

Wilson-style multiculturalism: No Asians or Blacks, thanks

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.

Forcing Africans to be governed by their own: Worse than slavery

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.

Coming to take part in the Great Democratic Experiment

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.

(Formerly 'Failed States Index')

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 Lift My Lamp Beside the Cold Hard Facts

Have we arrived?

Why, one may ask, have so many leftists gone ballistic over a short stoppage on immigration from 7 terror-prone states?  

Via Steve Sailer

Crowds are mobbing airports. Pundits, movie stars, sports players, foreign heads of state, all lifting their voices in horror….

As though such a banal, oft-practiced, and sensible measure were some kind of crime against humanity.

Headlines courtesy of Breitbart News

It is a question worth asking. An alien arriving from another planet might think Trump had just announced he was planning to rain down bombs on these countries for years. (Thus confusing Trump with his predecessor.) Such country-specific migration blocks are nothing new, and have been a favorite of Democrat presidents from Obama to Carter to old FDR himself. Yet our current hysteria continues unabated.

Agitated Hollywoodians won't take this lying down

One can't be blamed for feeling as though one has arrived at Saint Anthony's 1700-year-old prophecy. Truly, has the whole world gone mad?

Though we're hard at work on our next piece, we're taking a quick break to provide a few links to those seeking some facts and data in the midst of this planetary pants-soiling. 

Some may wonder:

Why We Culturally Profile

The Europe to come?

At the height of the Trayvon Martin affair, we met a young Afro-Canadian who strongly objected to being racially profiled. Drawing on the pool of data at our disposal, we presented, to the best of our ability, the reasons such profiling exists.

Today, as hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants pour into Europe to claim asylum, profiling again rears its ugly head. Not racial/ethnic this time, but religious:

At least five European countries have signaled that they prefer to grant asylum only to Christian refugees flooding the continent from the Middle East, not to Muslims.

“I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country,” Hungarian Prime Minister Orban said.  ... “Refugees from a completely different cultural background would not be in a good position in the Czech Republic,” said Czech President Milos Zeman.

 Lodz, Poland, September 2015

On what are these fears based? Ignorance, prejudice? We have been told for years that immigration is a gift, an economic boost, an injection of fresh blood, and that our new guests will culturally enrich our lives with their differentness (all while assimilating seamlessly thanks to their sameness). We at TWCS have thus decided to take a deeper look at the data.

But is Islam a religion, a culture, or a civilization? Has it genetically changed its adherents over time like Christianity has (cousin marriage enforced vs. forbidden)? In the absence of any genetic connection, does it culturally push its believers to certain behaviors? Could these beliefs and behaviors really, as the critics charge, prevent their assimilation into the West?

In a word--is this cultural profiling of Muslims based on fact or fantasy?

There's Something About Teutonics

Africans waiting to storm Spanish Melilla in Morocco, 'gateway to Europe'

Every year thousands board rickety boats, hide in the backs of trucks, planes, and container ships, cross miles of barren desert on foot... All to get themselves to a land where they can be ruled by a racial group far distant from their own.

Mexicans seeking Anglo rule: Illegal desert crossing at Sonora 

They cross the Mediterranean by the hundreds, many dying en route.  Not to get to Italy--that's only phase one--but to the real Eldorado: Northern Europe.

Over half a million Mediterranean boat people since the turn of the century

Calais, in the north of France, is now home to a tent encampment of several thousand third-world migrants. Are they content to have made it to one of the richest countries on the planet? They are not. Each day they lie in wait trying to jump in the backs of trucks embarking the Channel ferry for the promised land: the U.K.

The mayor of Calais has begged for help with an increasingly uncontrollable situation 

Boats of fortune leave regularly from Sri Lanka and Indonesia, full to cracking with Pakistanis, Lebanese, Somalis...  Though these Asian and African 'refugees' are surrounded by dozens of safe countries which could take them in, they'd rather risk death on the open sea in hopes of reaching a land run by...Anglos. Why?

Dozens of Iraqi and Iranian women and children perished in this December 2010 crash 
off the coast of Austrialia

Gallup recently polled the citizens of Planet Earth, asking 1) Would you like to migrate abroad? and 2) If so, where?

They have concluded that three-quarters of a billion people would, in fact, like to leave their home country.

Image source

From this Gallup was able to cook up a Potential Net Migration Index: If everyone in the world could magically land in his country of choice tomorrow, Singapore's population would rise by 219%.  Zimbabwe's would fall by 47%.  The top 20 destinations, according to this measure:

Data source

Thirteen of these twenty, one may have noticed, have a little something in common.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

 Nigel Farage celebrates UKIP's E.U. election victory, May 2014

Political maps have changed much since one hundred years ago. Or two hundred, or five hundred.

Some changes have crept in; others have exploded. It can be interesting to look at old maps and think, how will ours look to our descendents?

"The world" in 1570

Imperialism was the trend for much of the modern era. Most peoples were swept up into the folds of empires-- European, Turk, Chinese.

Empires of the world, 1914

But West European colonialism dissolved in the 1960s, Soviet imperialism in the 1990s. Since then the trend has gone the other way:  States are fracturing ever more.

1960 to 1990: A multiplication of states

The one exception is the quasi-super-state known as the European Union, which has been hoovering up members as fast as it can.

Bucking the trend: EU grows ever larger

The recent eurozone crisis has led to calls for 'a United States of Europe.'  Only a true federal authority in Brussels, with control over member states' moves, can lead to a happy European future:

European Commission vice-president Viviane Reding has predicted that the eurozone will become a federal state, while urging the UK not to leave the Union. ... “In my personal view, the eurozone should become the United States of Europe."

... Reding noted that euro countries have made an “extraordinary” leap in terms of integration due to the economic crisis. Citing the commission’s new powers to scrutinise national budgets and plans to create a banking union, she said: “a few years ago no one could have imagined member states being prepared to cede this amount of sovereignty.”

Indeed.

The United States itself, a grand experiment in federalism, has seen its central government intrude ever more deeply on states' rights over the last century.  Is this a happy thing?  At the same time, the massive post-1965 immigration experiment has flip-flopped U.S. demography.

These trends have created deep American fault lines.  Europe is in fact trying to emulate the U.S. at the very moment when the latter seems to be fracturing.  In both cases, then, we have a tension between creeping federal authority on one hand, and a desire by regions to throw off that authority on the other.

What does the future hold for these two super-states?

We at Those Who Can See feel it is naively optimistic to imagine in 100 years the maps of our descendents will look the same as ours.  Where are these two chunks of the Europsphere headed?

Were you Assimilable?

'The Mortar of Assimilation--And the One Element that Just Won't Mix'

(standing is an Irishman)
Puck Magazine, June 1889

A great many people today can look at this map...

Image source

...and conclude, 'This can only spell good things for America.'

Why?

'Anglo-America absorbed millions of alien immigrants in the 19th century, then went on to become the biggest superpower in world history!'

As it happens, both these statements are true. It is also true that after metal helmets replaced leather ones, the number of soldiers' head injuries increased. So did America become a huge superpower because, or in spite of, these aliens? Or a little of both?

And if these waves of 19th c. foreigners did make her stronger, can the same be said of the millions streaming in yearly now?

The question is by no means flip.  Many of the arguments used by immigration restrictionists in 2012 are identical to those used a hundred years ago.  It's a case of Chicken Little, says our open-border contingent--'Your predecessors said the sky would fall; it didn't, and this time it won't either.'

Who's right?

Why, just look at this mosaic:

Image source

A propositional nation, n'est-ce pas?

The conundrum of Afro governance

 
Detroit City Council meeting, 2012

You may have seen Walter Russell Mead fretting of late about the hash Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's cronies have made of the city pension fund. (h/t Heliogabalus)  Mead is wowed by both the scale of the graft--

...corrupt and incompetent trustees appointed by Democratic officials over many years in Detroit are responsible for almost half a billion dollars in investments gone wrong.

--and the indifference of the press:

I honestly don’t know why there is so little national outrage about this despicable crew and the terrible damage they have done. ...The 41 year old Kwame Kilpatrick may well be the worst and most destructive American of his generation; his two terms as Mayor of Detroit are among the most sordid and stomach churning episodes in the storied history of American municipal corruption.

The question of Afro governance has long intrigued Euro-Americans, especially in the South.  The latter feared the former's great numbers meant they would one day take control, a disaster because (1) they would trample Whites' rights and (2) they were unfit to govern.  The ten-year Reconstruction nightmare, they say, proved them right.  J.W. Garner:

In some instances the board [of supervisors] was composed entirely of illiterate negroes. Although their duties necessitated calculation and computation, there were instances in which no member could do the smallest operation of arithmetic, and their highest mark of erudition was the ability of the president to sign his name to a record, the contents of which he could not read. In Issaquena County, in 1874, every member of the board was alleged to be an illiterate negro.

... In Madison County, every member of the board was colored, and the maximum of learning among them was the ability of one to sign his name mechanically. There was not a justice of the peace in the county who could write his name.  [...] shortly before the meeting of the grand jury, they usually got some friendly white neighbor to write up their dockets for presentation at the proper time. (1)

J.W. Burgess, on the outrageous expenditures of the all-Negro South Carolina legislature:

It was the most soul-sickening spectacle that Americans had ever been called upon to behold. ... In place of government by the most intelligent and virtuous part of the people for the benefit of the governed, here was government by the most ignorant and vicious part of the population for the benefit, the vulgar, materialistic, brutal benefit of the governing set.  (2)

Men of the 19th century drew their conclusions about Afro governance from simple observation. They watched Haiti, they watched Liberia, they watched Afro-Americans conduct their own affairs.  Today the data-set is richer--50-plus African nations now independent for half a century, as well as a growing number of American cities led by wholly black government.  In surveying this landscape, two words come to our lips again and again--'corruption' and 'ineptitude.'  Why?

The temptation to blame outside forces, as we have seen, is strong.  The instinctive pity and revulsion we feel when faced with a group of people so seemingly inept can cause us shame, so we attempt to redirect blame.  'Other people made them this way,' we say. 'It is inconceivable that their problems could be rooted in their own make-up.'

At Those Who Can See, we argue that the evidence points strongly in the other direction.  We propose that in the aggregate, traits which lead to good governance are in acutely short supply in Sub-Saharan Africans.  Let us examine the evidence.

Colonialism, Today II

A small country, a relatively happy country, a country who's been producing wealth at more or less the same level for years... 

 [photo: Peter G., Souvlaki for the Soul]

...Who one day decides to abandon control over its own monetary policy.  To take that sovereign control, stuff it in an envelope, stick on a stamp, and mail it to a country far, far away.

A boxing club made up of only heavy-weights and middle-weights has the magnanimity to invite in a few feather-weights.  How kind.  How inclusive. How optimistic.


What could possibly go wrong.


This, apparently:

Comparing Peoples--References

      International policy-makers, particularly economic ones, often consider the Earth's inhabitants as peas in a pod.  All the same, interchangeable units, that one can plug into an equation any old how--the average Kurd, as well as the average Japanese, can be represented as variable "x."

This blog disagrees.

Policy equations reckoned in such a way tend to come out cock-eyed, yet no one ever seems to try fiddling with variable "x."  By our calculations, says Important Washington Think Tank, Anglo-style liberal democracy should be flourishing in Russia, and Ethiopians should be exporting luxury cars as fast as their factories can spit them out.


And twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred years after all the 'right conditions' have been put into place, when the people in question is still as authoritarian or as poverty-stricken as ever, Think Tank-ers refuse to change the one variable that counts more than any other.

Variable "x."

So let's take one of their very favorite tools, statistics, to find out why Think Tank-ers just might want to have another think coming.

Letting things slide

Greeks are furious over the crisis rocking their country.  Disbelief has given way to anger, one minister describing it as 'the darkest page in [our] history.'

No, not that crisis.  This one:

"Nearly 70 people have been named in Greece in connection with an alleged football match-fixing scandal.  They include two Super League club presidents, club owners, players, referees and a chief of police.  They are charged with a variety of offences including illegal gambling, fraud, extortion and money laundering.

The investigation began after European football's governing body Uefa published a list of 41 match results from 2009-10 which they believe to be suspicious. 

Among the 68 suspects named by judicial authorities on Friday were Vangelis Marinakis, Greece's top football league official and chairman of champion club Olympiakos Piraeus, and Avraam Papadopoulos, national team and Olympiakos defender.  Late on Friday, a court order banned all 68 from leaving the country."

But really, sports cheating scandals are hardly anything new.  And they happen all over the world. What's so special about this one?