America relies on the competency of just a few cohorts of people and the health of the institutions that they occupy throughout their careers to function. I think it's a short list but I'd be curious to hear input on what I have so far:
1) The Homegrown Engineer: If you went to a state school, you know many guys like this. Grew up locally, takes all APs in high school, goes to the good state university and doesn't think much about going out of state, engineering or adjacent major, goes on to work for the large engineering employer in the state, purchases house in the state with local wife, cycle repeats. Their dads are usually tinkerers or did the exact same path before them. These large engineering employers exist in most states (Raytheon in AZ hiring from U of A, Ball and Northrop in Colorado hiring from CU, NRG hiring from from UT and A&M, etc). The health of this arc is critical for America as it is the main force that hosts most of our engineering capacity.
2) The Finance Lord: Usually from the coasts, will go out of state for college, moves to NYC, supersoldier who is willing to work 100 hr weeks if the carrot of wealthy coastal wife and Hamptom's house is on the menu. Not that these people hold any real power but Finance™️ in America is an important force.
3) The Statesman (?): I like to imagine that there is some clear arc for kids wanting to be politicians but maybe there isn't. Debate in high school, Ivy League for undergrad, law school, ..?? Striving to be a politician is probably out the window now and most of the people previously in that cohort are probably now working for different NGOs and thinktanks most likely. Just a guess, this bucket is unclear to me.
4) Infrastructure Heads: Some overlap with The Homegrown Engineer but also includes lower income work. Airports/ traffic control, large civil projects, electrical grid maintenance, bridges maint, ports maint, etc. This cohort can definitely be teased apart to the 2-3 most important pieces of infrastructure and the institutions that filter for and train the people who maintain them.
I think the number of critical cohorts and institutions is probably ~5, definitely less than 10.
*continuing post as a reply because it's too long ->*
To make this map even richer, we can identify the key motivators on each track. For The Homegrown Engineer, they want to marry and live locally so the supply of quality partners and moderate home prices are key facets that need regulation for the health of their arc. For The Finance Lord, they are hyper social and want to be in their fraternity forever, plus they want hawt wife and many material things (multiple homes, cars, etc).
Part of the reason why identifying the motivators on each arc is important is because you can see if the arc is susceptible to breaking in the case that the carrot becomes unachievable. For example, the startup/ venture world as we know it is a direct result of California real estate prices going insane over the last 20 years, which it turns out is a result of international buying (specifically by Chinese who purchased 1/3 of all residental RE in California last year). People want to buy homes in CA and normal white collar jobs don't cut it anymore so you have to do something extreme like start a startup, sell investors on something to raise money, sell secondaries, fudge growth, raise more, sell more secondaries, and so on. That is what drives Silicon Valley at its core – the need for income/ gains to keep up with the CA real estate appetite of international buyers such that founders can buy a home. But if SV/ startups are just a side effect of high RE prices, then what was that energy doing before high home values? Probably going into traditional engineering and finance jobs. Startups are just those jobs on crack trying to speedrun house acquisition. The carrot is important to track because extreme solutions will be figured out, even if they're unsustainable and they deplete otherwise useful talent. If you for some reason wanted to cool the VC and startup market or you had some personal vendetta against say Marc Andreessen, you would organize a political effort to ban foreign investment in real estate and abolish the EB5 visa program.
This map is useful if you're trying to organize different players on the board and align their energy in some new direction that overlaps but doesn't derail where their motivations and skills already lie. That is the key – you can't force existing energy or cohorts or institutions to do a 180, you need to prompt few degree pivots over multiple efforts until all of the sails are in the same direction. Forming alliances and collaborations that inch the ball down the field but don't compromise the long run goals is the name of the game. This takes a very long time and extreme coordination but it is where all of the real returns lie.
A question not exactly about your post but about an assumption underlying it: In a scale economy, don't all these cohorts need consumers for what they make? And don't these 'simple' consumers need some way to add value to the economy in order to be 'allowed' to consume? I understand that elites are critically important but all things considered they seem to be nuts but still functional in the US whereas the normal person is increasingly in spiritual and economic distress.
>The Statesman (?): I like to imagine that there is some clear arc for kids wanting to be politicians but maybe there isn't.
I think there actually isn't if you want to be a good statesman, but the system pretends like there is. You identified the popular path though, and yes basically it launches you either into working for a think tank/NGO, or the state directly as a bureaucrat or the intelligence community.
The carrot is status/prestige. Not many go into it out of patriotism, probably the military takes those. Not for financial gain either, actually your family has to be fairly wealthy if you are to make it here, and if you aren't from such a background you end up dropping the whole thing after you get out of school. The think tanker is just someone who wants the prestige of working with the highest forms of power.
>>1454 > 3) The Statesman (?): I like to imagine that there is some clear arc for kids wanting to be politicians but maybe there isn't.
I'd make a strong distinction between statesmen and the broader class of politicians. In particular, I'd define a statesman as a live player among politicians. In any given generation, the number of statesman is small (and at present, even smaller than usual). Here, I see no clear arc.
If you look at career tracks of politicians more generally, they break down in the obvious ways. For congressmen, you find:
• legal/judicial • business & finance • electoral politics at lower levels • activism/NGOs
>>1470 financiers have an obscene amount of power. We can tell from how much they dominate the economy. But maybe you mean why the merely rich don't have generalized power. It's because the virtues to make money and the virtues to spend money effectively for political power are not the same, and people generally don't believe in or are actively opposed to the latter.
>>1473 > ... the virtues to spend money effectively for political power ...
What are these virtues? Would you consider Soros to exemplify them? I consider Soros to be effective in getting what he wants, but I also think his influence on governance has been hugely negative. Which raises a further question: are the techniques for spending money effectively for political power neutral among political ends, or do they contain an inherent, perhaps unintended, bias towards certain sorts of ends? My concern is that there may be something like McLuhan's "the medium is the message" at play, where the techniques themselves tend to filter for certain kinds of people, institutions, and hence goals.
Cohort 5 is the military, and like Cohorts 1 and 4, the heritage American WASP stock that supplies the bulk of these three is dying out, thus too the nation.
>>1510 > thus too the nation. Yeah despite all hopes and beliefs to the contrary, de Gobineau may just be right about what leads to the end of societies: the original people of the original character which sustained the original culture simply dies out or gets too mixed biologically, and then the whole society built on the assumption of the existence of that culture and those institutions can no longer be sustained.
This is different in cases like egypt and china where the thing fundamentally holding that society together is a geographic material opportunity (fertile valleys), but the original character of the thing still dies out.
The Caesar - the ultimate force of human will made manifest. He's not just a leader; he's a walking, talking powerhouse of persuasion & action. With a mere glance, he can make wordcels scramble into action, all thanks to his unyielding will to impose ORDER.
He's universally accepted, by existing institutional academics, the poor, foreign dignitaries, and the wealthy. Chaos trembles in his wake as he strides through life, shaping destinies and blazing a golden way forward through sheer grit.
He's not just a leader; he's a legend. The duty falls on him alone to make those 50-paragraph Substack culture war diatribes comprehensible to the masses.
The thing about Julius Caesar is that he did a whole lot of stuff prior to crossing the Rubicon that made the latter possible. Like, conquering all of Gaul against great odds. That's what put him in a position to dominate Rome. (And even then, he didn't dominate it quite enough.)
Even with enormous talents, it's actually very difficult to become "Caesar."
If that cohort is truly critical, that is bad, and it would be good to think about how to make this cohort less critical.
Every time the nation chooses to invest in the visa-baited slave labor class it chooses not to invest in its own people.
Either the US needs better assimilation technology or it needs to stop importing talent from abroad and start cultivating talent here. I'm open to being convinced that the former is possible, but right now it seems like the latter is the logical conclusion of every lamentation about silver tsunamis, the collapse of critical industries, offshoring, deindustrialization etc. etc.
Manhattan project had the European Jews e.g. Szilard, the Apollo Project had Wernher von Braun, Silicon Valley has Collison Brothers, Musk and (if you squint a little) Peter Thiel. Its neither controversial nor undesirable that US attracts the best and brightest of the world. I'm not referring to visa-baited slave labor class
This actually raises an interesting distinction. Has anyone done a study of immigrants to the U.S. that went on to become successful founders and looked at the type of visa or legal status with which they entered the country? What proportion were something other than H1-B (which is defined as a "nonimmigrant" visa)?
The examples you give (Collisons, Musk, Thiel) have a quite different flavor than the immigrants people worry about, and that might actually be quantifiable.
For purposes of the study, one would have to come up with a measurable definition of a "successful" company, but that shouldn't be too hard.
To add to my previous comment, In the US, individuals with high will to power can self-actualize in a way they can't in their native countries. That this can happen since the US scientific/business culture is so accepting & supportive of foreigners is I think a great virtue.
I think looking at the visa type is interesting. The O-1 visa is quite popular in SV right now. I also think culture/race also play an important factor. BAP had an interesting thread on the Chinese in academia a while back. Not sure if this prejudice on my part, but if you were to do an RCT and give citizenship to 10k White South Africans vs 10k East Asians, I think the former would outperform in achieving prominence and greatness.
Bringing this back to critical cohorts, if one looks at the Nobel prize winners for example, it'll be a lot of foreigners who are naturalized as American citizens and work in American universities.
RCTs cannot measure greatness effectively. Greatness can only be measured on an infinite timescale and so the only true judge of greatness is Nature's God.
>>1556 You’re not, but others use the people you mention to provide cover for the people I mention. That being said, you are not wrong, the distinction is important, and America as a nation is a little different since it is, at least today, merchant and mercenary, closer to a stillborn pirate kingdom or an aborted ancient city-state than a blood-and-soil nation. It really isn’t any of these right now, but it’s clear that one is more achievable than the other, and arguably more appropriate.
>>1558 At the risk of treading wignat waters, I can immediately see some differences in the 1556 examples, and it they haven’t anything to do with visa status.
>>1552 >>1556 >>1562 >>1564 As you guys are implying, no discussion of immigration makes any sense until you have a racial sense of what kind of society you're running. De Gobineau at al are right that all societies are racial first and foremost, even when they pretend not to be. The USA was a society of WASPs and people close enough to assimilate to that. I say "was" because that society died through the 20th century.
One of the reasons it died has been alluded to in this thread: the USA never fully became a civilization capable of training up and sustaining its own high culture (including science, the arts, aristocracy). Maybe this is because since 1776 the USA has always been a rebellion of lower man against rightful authority, maybe it's more solvable than that. The consequence was that America had to continue to import foreign talent and elites to make up for the WASP elite failing and eventually dying.
It's notable that the best of the high-talent immigrants have been trained up in the European civilization that the USA has always been opposed to. (Germans, Russians, etc). In an alternate and more optimistic world, the USA would have successfully constructed itself as a modern new world extension of european civilization. In some ways this is still the clearest racial-cultural vision for America that isn't the global favela.
USA as european civilization has a very clear immigration analysis: germanics (broadly construed) fit in and contribute well, and everyone else is trouble. Foreign elite immigrants can make great contributions, but tend to become a political menace. This is more or less how things have gone, too: again the best immigrants have been those bred and trained up in the various branches of european civilization, and the imported slave labor class and foreign elites have broken the coherence of the previous society.
The US elite now is not confused WASPs but foreigners openly hostile to this point of view (for obvious reasons of ethnic interest). It's unclear if there is any alternate vision of society that could make this rassenchaos work, but you'd have to figure it out before any immigration policy other than Benjamin Franklin's made sense. I know some of you are partial to the ideal of a post-racial liberalism where various multicultural elites can all somehow mostly cooperate by larping the remnants of the WASP constitution, but that is increasingly not working and it's unclear how much work the institutions were ever doing. If one of you has an analysis of how this is supposed to work that can respond to de Gobineau, let's hear it.
>>1567 >The USA was a society of WASPs and people close enough to assimilate to that. >the USA never fully became a civilization capable of training up and sustaining its own high culture (including science, the arts, aristocracy).
What if we take a more anglo-centric view of history for our purposes? Having conquered diverse areas of the world from India to South Africa, and forcing decadent empires such as China to kowtow, americans understandably looked to London for cultural and civilizational guidance. London had the knowledge of how to run a global seafaring empire, it even was benevolent enough to train local elites. Japanese and chinese naval officers of the first sino-japanese war were all trained by the british royal navy, but by the end of the 19th century the anglo ruling aristocracy had already declined too far to be able to keep order. Following WW2 is an experiment by the USA in whether this post-racial liberalism alone is enough to work as a coordinating mechanism for industrial civilization, which, it seemed to for a while, until it hit a succession crisis. Super Bowl ads are only going to get you that far. Phrased in this way, perhaps our task is to reboot the British Empire by becoming a sort of web-surfing space imperialist aristocracy able to unleash a new kind of gunboat diplomacy?
> Following WW2 is an experiment by the USA in whether this post-racial liberalism alone is enough to work as a coordinating mechanism for industrial civilization, which, it seemed to for a while, until it hit a succession crisis.
I think the results of that experiment are pretty clearly in, and the answer is no. I'd argue the apparent early success was deceptively amplified by the U.S. having received a decades-long bonus for being the only major power, even among the victorious Allies, to have not been badly smashed in the war.
>>1575 Sounds glorious but I'm afraid the anglo thing is even deader than America. If there's a civilization worth rebooting, it's European civilization, under whatever name and self definition.
OP here. Yes, I agree that ability to ingest foreigners, train them and mobilize them in some direction may actually be the genesis edge of America. That was the pitch – if you have 1) talent and 2) work ethic, then you'd have a chance to capture some of the fruits of your skills in a way that your home country was unable to cultivate and mobilize. Talented people want to work under good leadership that is willing to equip them with resources. That was America's original edge. I also don't say this to minimize the risks that this strategy comes with but it would be foolish to deny that this strategy was instrumental on America's road to govern the world.
I think this also explains why racism is especially impolite in America - the minimization of racism and emphasis on Ability was a defining feature in our speedrun to conquer the world. It's hard to deny that.
Antiracists in control, trust the plan.
People get confused on both edges of this key American design element – you see a lot of guys get too carried away with the race stuff (ie Steve Sailer heads) which is just a losing strategy and then other people who want to diversitymaxx just for diversity sake and lose the plot of Ability. Tricky stuff.
I'm curious to hear from people who downvoted the post about SV/ the startup industry partly owing its existence to high real estate prices in California. What do you think catalyzed the startup industry as we now know it?
I guarantee you that the key input – founders – would evaporate if home prices were such that a normal job set a clear path to home ownership.
The vast majority of people in tech will start a company or work in startups for two reasons: to speedrun making money and because there are few other institutions available to mobilize their skills in some other direction. That's it.
>>1626 I don't know. I just upvoted because it doesn't deserve to be so low. Might have been hit in the general taste apocalypse (some wonky behavior from the algorithm last week). --admin
I just read your comment on RE prices driving startup activity in SV. Didnt vote on it anyways but frankly I don't find that compelling at all. For example, Mark Zuckerberg didn't start Facebook to be able to afford RE in SV.
Older generation of companies like Apple weren't started so that their founders can afford RE either. SV goes back to Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, and Stanford and Fairchild semiconductor etc. Most founders move to the Bay Area after they start their companies, to take advantage of that pre-existing network.
And high RE prices in other cities/countries don't induce startup formation rates. Overall its not a good theory.
>Yes, I agree that ability to ingest foreigners, train them and mobilize them in some direction may actually be the genesis edge of America… That was America's original edge. I also don't say this to minimize the risks that this strategy comes with but it would be foolish to deny that this strategy was instrumental on America's road to govern the world.
“Foreigners” in the context of this post in favor of “antiracism” obscures a lot here. I’m not even sure this isn’t a troll post, but in case not, some important history: The white men who founded the country couldn’t have been more explicit that they sought to settle the land for white men — themselves and their posterity — specifically Protestant, northwestern European men. “Immigrants”? Technically. But not of the “antiracist” variety. The broadest view they took was to consider it a somewhat pan-European project, but with a strong bias against including e.g. Southern and Eastern Europeans and Catholics. This “racism” was reflected in immigration law until 1965 . Until ~1960, America was about 90% white, and most of the remaining 10% were African descendants of slaves, who the majority of whites did not want to even live near, much less “ingest” them (this was the crux of the slavery issue — the majority of Southerners didn’t even own slaves, but what they really wanted to avoid was having to live among free blacks — as well as of the Civil Rights movement — segregation). The demographics of America did not begin to shift until the late 60s and 70s, slowly at first, always consistently against the will of the overwhelming majority of the population. So sure, maybe integrating foreigners was a strength, but let’s be clear, these were for the majority of America’s history, including its rise, specifically European foreigners, even more specifically northwestern or Anglo-adjacent Europeans.
> I think this also explains why racism is especially impolite in America - the minimization of racism and emphasis on Ability was a defining feature in our speedrun to conquer the world. It's hard to deny that.
“Racism” wasn’t impolite until the cultural revolution of the 60s, although in most locales outside of the South, where racial homogeneity was the order of the day, it was mostly irrelevant due to lack of non-whites, until the Great Migration in the 20s. Today, racism isn’t taboo against whites. It’s common to hear anything ranging from outright blaming Europeans for all the world’s ills on the far left, to mild “hip” mockery of white culture on the more conservative side, all of which is conveniently defined as “not racism”. The former borderline genocidal leftist rhetoric is what goes under the label of “antiracism”.
Under our current Civil Right’s regime of racial and protected class quotas, we have if anything the opposite of an emphasis on “Ability” in many key sectors of society, though I do believe it is still the most important factor in some places e.g., tech startups.
>The examples you give (Collisons, Musk, Thiel) have a quite different flavor than the immigrants people worry about
Yes. Many of the “immigrant success stories” people like to use are immigrants of European ancestry, used to obscure in arguments in favor of unlimited immigration from everywhere in the world.
At this point, the US does have a number of non-white immigrant groups that have been very successful in business, politics, and in materially enriching themselves, that is undeniable. But that does not indicate society is functioning well.
As a follow-up (above cut off due to length), I see “actual” antiracism (not the mainstream definition of it, but rather more “colorblindness”, which is supposedly immoral or white supremacist now) work reasonably well quite often in upperclass (and maybe middle class?) circles, on an interpersonal and collaborative level, with many cross-racial marriages and collaborations. But that doesn’t seem to translate that successfully to political coalitions or to the wider society — why? And one should also ask, is anything else lost when individuals in a community lack historical and “deeper” (ethnic) cultural ties?
>>1653 > I see ... “colorblindness”, which is supposedly immoral or white supremacist now) work reasonably well quite often in upperclass (and maybe middle class?) circles
Even the "colorblindness" of liberal, upperclass circles (say in the 1970-90's) included mandatory prohibitions on "noticing" many truths. At best, it required throwing out certain information about the world. In practice, it was already a kind of proto-woke. And as someone who directly experienced federally imposed school busing in the 1970's, I can assure that it was far from "colorblind," even though that was the exactly the language that was used.
I wasn't aware that venture capital played such a major role in the founding of Lockheed and Apple. I'd love to learn more about that if you have more info.
And you're right – there certainly are examples of startups that grew big where the founder is not in it for the money. What I'm saying is that the vast majority of founders, the key input for there to be any VC industry at all, are largely driven by the prospect of making a lot of money quickly and the reason why that's a necessity at all is in part because of the high cost of real estate. Having been around many founders I see this often.
Coming up with 10D chess explanations for the startup industry is fun, but I think much of it comes back to simple inputs like RE prices. Smart people want a nice house in a safe neighborhood. The price of that is going up so you find new solutions to get it.
You correctly point out that for most of the country's history the vast majority of Americans were white with most animosity being towards eastern/ southern europeans. This is where prohibition came from – anglos did not like the southern and eastern europeans gathering in places like bars so they advocated for liquor to be illegal. Above post never says this is a perfect strategy, moreso just pointing out that it's one that America did lean into *more than other countries* and it played a non zero role in planting America where it is today. Whether it's good or bad or politically or culturally advantageous is a different conversation entirely.
I think that post was half a joke but I'll run with it – that base of Europeans with Christian morality is what paved the way for this "acceptance" at a minimum we can agree on of other less desirable whites. Yes, the original composition was by and for Protestants, but by virtue of them offering a spot in their country to *others* simply because they were willing to work is a point on the same line as the multiculturalism of today. That is unique to America and your point about it distinctly growing out of Christian soil is a great addition.
You're right it's proto-woke because Christianity is deeply woke. The cultural revolution simply shows you how far the tolerance gene in Protestants will go. We still haven't found the edge of it.
The interesting thing about "wokeness" and whatnot is not that it's at odds with American-ism or something, it's that it's a hyperexpression of just one core American gene which is inherited from the original Protestant base. I don't take pleasure in reporting this if it's new information to you.
>>1656 >by virtue of them offering a spot in their country to *others* simply because they were willing to work is a point on the same line as the multiculturalism of today. That is unique to America and your point about it distinctly growing out of Christian soil is a great addition. That is not unique to America. Most of the new world operated on that principle, and much of the old world too. The USA was one of the least multicultural/mixing-pot countries of the Americas.
To add to >>1652's rebuttal of the idea that America is an immigrant nation and this accounts for its success, it's worth asking what happened to America's rise and success after the cultural revolution. The basic synopsis is that this co-occurred with a pretty thorough breakdown of the previous model (under which the gains were made) and the breakdown of many key indicators of progress in everything from energy use to inflation to wages:
>>1657 It's important to put things in the proper context which few appear willing to do. Economic elites fundamentally have a deep-seated need for a cheap, abundant and pliant labour force. The reproduction of capital demands it.
Nordicism and "Pure Americanism" appear to have been an affordable luxury for elites to indulge in so long as the flows from Northern Europe continued apace along with the natural increases at home.
In the 1850's the "Know Nothing" movement was all the rage. The flood of Irish Catholics had to stop! By the early 1900's a (WASP) senator from Idaho saw it fit to brag about his fair-skinned German, Irish and Scandinavian constituents (many of course being Catholic) which he contrasted naturally with the cesspool of mystery meat that was NYC by the standards of the day. Naturally, the senator on the receiving felt obliged to defend the reputation of his varied constituents (Jews, Italians, Poles) and sought to tamper down on such discourse.
Any holistic vision of ethnic nationalism (oriented around the interests of the "every-man") was a challenge right from the get-go due to the irresistible urge of chattel slavery. One conveniently forgotten episode in American ethnic discourse was the mass circulation of "The Impending Crisis of the South" in the lead up to Lincoln's election. HR Helper (a Southerner) argued that abolitionism was a matter of white self-interest and that slavers where betraying "their own station". A clear pre-curser of sorts to such figures as Stoddard and Grant.
From roughly around WW2, the last remnants of spare capacity in ethnic American labour (Okies, Appalachians etc) became used up. It is only natural that the imperative of capital formation required that African Americans, Mexicans and then individuals from all across the globe be assimilated into "the system" in an ever more vigorous fashion.
>>1659 This is the best criticism of American "nordicism", that it was never really driving but only a convenient ideology for what they wanted to do at the time for other (economic) reasons. I am not aware of any major sacrifices of economic or other values made for the sake of nordicism, which backs up this fakeness. Such reasoning can be generalized too: ideology doesn't hold that much power. Even if it's correct and believed, once it's no longer immediately advantageous, out it goes.
One problem with the pure "ideology is fake" view is that ideology does condition how elites and others understand what is "advantageous". This is not purely a material relation, and to the extent that it is, it's driven partially by ideology. We care about money to the extent we do religiously and ideologically, not just materially. There is some purely material advantage (weapons, children, territory, wealth, etc) but even these seem to be able to be turned on and off by ideology. Furthermore, ideology helps us navigate the situations where the pure material advantage is not obvious, or there are multiple strategies.
Also of course ideology is real and politically important in the sense of reflecting and expessing the real interests of various groups. The reason the old racial ideology of America is so suppressed is precisely because it would otherwise charismatically represent the interests of a great many people. Real alternatives are always especially dangerous. The main way it doesn't work is that it doesn't have a muscular elite backing it and so is out of power. Maybe it couldn't possibly have such, because it is a form of populism, which can never really retain a loyal elite. And this is ultimately what's wrong with it: we need to proceed from elite concerns and the material relations that embody elite ideology, not ideology on behalf of fictional collectives like the "nation".
>>1664 > ... ideology does condition how elites and others understand what is "advantageous".
Excellent discussion of ideology. I would summarize by saying ideology is necessary but not sufficient. It is not fake, but it is weak when not integrated with elite interests. Further, that integration, when successful, is bidirectional. It both shapes and is shaped by material conditions.
> ... we need to proceed from elite concerns and the material relations that embody elite ideology, not ideology on behalf of fictional collectives like the "nation".
Indeed. The invocation of fictional constructs is always part of Mosca's "political formula." It serves the recruitment of consent, not anything directly functional. (Although one could argue that the recruitment of consent *is* functional, in an indirect sense.) Reliance on political formula always carries the great danger that those using it will "lose the joke."
The trick is to find a rhetoric that speaks to elite concerns and material relations in a way that the broader population does not find obnoxious. In an age of mass media, communication cannot be narrowly channeled without leakage.
>>1666 >The invocation of fictional constructs is always part of Mosca's "political formula." It serves the recruitment of consent, not anything directly functional. I wonder how we can identify these fictional political formulae more reliably, so we can stop believing in them. The same concept can be used fictionally "the market" and non-fictionally "let's bring that to market". Maybe I need to read Mosca. Related: I would also like to get more sophisticated on taboos beyond "all taboos are lies" "breaking taboos is impolite" and "when in rome, observe roman taboos".
>The trick is to find a rhetoric that speaks to elite concerns and material relations in a way that the broader population does not find obnoxious. The broader masses find a lot of stuff obnoxious, but accept what they must. The problem with an otherwise good idea is rarely that the people won't accept it. The leakage that is of concern is leakage to other elite factions with bigger megaphones for rallying power.
But there's another more important piece here, which is getting the elite concerns and material relations right in the first place. To follow on the race discussion, the issue at hand is that the antiracist liberal universalism vision is probably just doomed for Gobineauan reasons, but the settlement it replaced also is nonviable because it no longer has an elite that could embody it, nor an answer to the problems of their interest in that system. Generalizing the question beyond race: what is the next actual system of elite organization and interest? These things probably can't be fully answered by questioning, though, only by building. Still, maybe we can learn something.
>>1669 > The broader masses find a lot of stuff obnoxious, but accept what they must. The problem with an otherwise good idea is rarely that the people won't accept it. The leakage that is of concern is leakage to other elite factions with bigger megaphones for rallying power.
Yes, this is what I meant. It's not that we care what the masses think per se. The problem is that the elite is not a unified class. It has factions, and rhetorical weakness on our part will be exploited against us by competing factions. So it ends up mattering after all.
I willingly admit economics isn't my strong suit, but I have seen this argument before, that mass migration is for the benefit of economic elites in the receiving countries. However, how does that square with the fact that a great many of the migrants are net economic drains on the economy and produce little valuable labor, especially in light of the burden they create with crime and other dysfunction and inefficiencies like nepotism? I recall seeing some particularly damning study out of Denmark recently that showed that at no point in their lives are immigrants from the Middle East or Africa ever net contributors to the Danish economy. Or is it that the drain on public finances is not a concern at all for the economic elite? So how exactly are they benefitting, then, from this arrangement? By what mechanism does the wealth flow from increasing immigrants to their pockets? It can't just be cheaper landscapers and nannies, can it? Which faction of the elite are driving this? How are they facilitating immigration flows? Has anyone mapped out the NGO funding structure here? Would it be enlightening if one did?
And my biggest question, from a psychological standpoint: why would these elite want to live in a country that is increasingly populated by Third World labor, even if it does make them much wealthier? I personally would rather be middle-of-the-road in a nice country than the wealthiest in a Third World-like country, especially when considering the longterm impacts to my descendants. I understand being wealthy enough to largely personally insulate yourself from most of the negative effects and ugliness, but it seems to me that one cannot insulate oneself so much that it is invisible, and it is increasingly hard to avoid, even if it never does become much of a personal danger. Do they not also feel the unpleasantness of the changes to society? The uglification of public spaces? And even if the economic elite can insulate themselves, haven’t they changed the composition of their own class with mass migration? Is this just a matter of indifference to them? And do they expect their own descendants to always be as well-insulated as they are? How do they reason about the impact to their own lineages? And do they not worry about the eventual assimilation of their future descendants? I think about the descendants of the Spanish conquerers in Mexico; if I were a Spaniard several hundred years ago looking upon my descendants today, I think I’d be very disappointed with the outcome, from a breeding standpoint.
I just don't see how one can account for all these things as being purely motivated by economics. As other posters have mentioned, ideology plays a part, but I don’t see how the ideology here relates to their "concerns and material relations” in a way that is helpful to them.
>>1678 > ... I have seen this argument before, that mass migration is for the benefit of economic elites in the receiving countries. However, how does that square with the fact that a great many of the migrants are net economic drains ...
"Material" need not mean "economic," certainly not in the sense of "for the good of the economy as a whole." Low-skill immigration is of immediate political benefit to elite factions who are the immigrants' patrons via welfare-state programs. These factions are literally importing reliable voters for themselves. The fact that these immigrants may be a net harm to the economy is of little consequence to them. The parties of welfare pursue many policies that are net harms to the economy.
> Do they not also feel the unpleasantness of the changes to society? The uglification of public spaces? ... And do they expect their own descendants to always be as well-insulated as they are?
If they were sensitive to such things, they would be us, not them.
>>1678 The broader point for me would be that there's often an unhelpful tendency to engage in rhetoric around the alleged unreasonableness of something we don't like in the vain hope of a catharsis.
Why not start instead with the truism that things happen for a reason?
>I recall seeing some particularly damning study out of Denmark recently that showed that at no point in their lives are immigrants from the Middle East or Africa ever net contributors to the Danish economy. Interestingly enough Denmark is a country where the ruling class has made substantive moves to address some of the issues that concern you. We might surmise that Denmark might genuinely have some of the characteristics of a "real democracy". I salute them. Note how they the "damning study" was both funded and then published. Certainly not a given in itself.
>>1678 The interests of the elite, even the "material" interests, do not neatly coincide with the public interest, economic or otherwise. That's the whole problem here. The health of the nation does not have political agency or representation.
I'll briefly point out that while mass alien immigration is economically bad in Europe, it's much more plausibly part of America's post-1960s system of labor globalization, which economic elites benefit from economically. It comes at long term social and political cost, but not really in terms that are represented in the logic of the system.
As for how the elites perceive those political and social costs, I was having dinner with a wealthy Cathedral family the other day and they said they basically don't worry about it. America becoming more like Mexico does not bother them, because they like to hang out in Mexico and don't live in the hard-hit neighborhoods. I think they are missing something important about the future, but if there's a material crisis coming here, it has not directly threatened to hit them in terms they understand. They think the people who worry about it are being silly. "Let them eat cake."
You are right that the future is bleak for these people's grandkids too, but they don't understand the world in those terms. I think it's possible that a different political economy with built out ideological apparatus studying this stuff could represent these concerns more directly as matters of elite interest, but the WASP consciousness failed to do so and everything since has been constructed against this possibility.
>>1681 > As for how the elites perceive those political and social costs, I was having dinner with a wealthy Cathedral family ...
Cannot stress enough how common the sentiment expressed in this paragraph is. I have often spoken with high-IQ, well-educated liberal folks who speak exactly this way. Guys in our sphere look at the world at see huge dysfunctions. They look at the same phenomena and say, "It's not a problem. You're just being irrationally emotional." And of course, we say the same about many of the things they get upset about.
This doesn't mean "everything is subjective" in some dismissive way. These different outlooks, when acted upon, do objectively lead to very different worlds.
I have similar observations about the elite I know, assuming they qualify as elite. That's a separate discussion and it would be good to have some guidelines for analysis. But I have some additional observations, and I wonder if anyone else has seen these too.
The elite I know are approximately elder millennial, many have young families, but never with more than two kids. They went to the top universities in the world and are now either employed by them, or are in fields like finance, tech, or bioscience, with a smattering in NGOs and government bureacracy. Most are very wealthy. Some are still single, but most have managed to form stable families. None are religious in more than a cultural sense. They generally lean liberal, but over the past few years have become, privately, deeply cynical about the woke, especially the gender stuff, and some might even secretly harbor quite rightwing views. They spend their time in places like NYC and SF and small prestigious college towns in the US, and some in European capitals, mainly London.
The thing that strikes me is that a very large fraction, maybe 50-75%, are in mixed-race marriages and/or are mixed-race themselves, but are white-adjacent or white-passing, and their kids will be as well. For example, there are mixes of various European ancestry, Ashkenazi, Lebanese, Palestinian, Bengali, Indian (Brahmin presumably), white Hispanic, etc. -- not a lot of East Asians in my sample for some reason but I know that's a common one in general.
I don't want to harp on the racial angle, but it's interesting to me what political alignment possibilities are opened by their racial identities. Being able to avoid being labeled white, or at least having kids who can avoid being labeled white, means they don't really seem to care about the demographic change of the US or European countries. But at the same time, they're pretty thoroughly assimilated into elite American white culture and have a lot of white friends and family, and they're deeply realistic about matters of IQ and "human quality", for lack of a better term. They aren't woke, but they also aren't very personally threatened by the woke, because they aren’t targeted as "oppressors", and technically get lumped in with the brown victim class -- but that is a matter of amusement or convenience, as they're very upperclass, and they very much know it. They're increasingly sick of the dysfunction and ridiculousness of woke governance, e.g., mocking their own alma maters and indicating surreptitious interest in what could be considered "right-wing" political positions. Not being white frees them from a lot of social censure and personal shame due to the presumed guilt of whites in modern racial politics, but they're also successful enough that they could potentially assert some independence rather than be one of the regime's client classes. Vivek Ramaswamy might be a decent example of the politics of this class of people, though most are unwilling to publicly affiliate with the GOP. I'm curious what posters here think of that guy. I don't yet have much of an opinion other than he seems interesting.
The future of elite America looks like these type of people, or is already these type of people; it’s just an obvious consequence of incentives induced by racial quotas — the best people who can avoid being labeled white have access to the most opportunities. Whites continue to exist, but as a shrinking and disempowered middle-class, as a lot of the upper-class ones will or already have assimilated into the high-IQ mixed-race milieu described above, and there will be mixing at the middle and lower levels as well. Those of us who expect to become or remain members of the elite can probably expect that this is the way our lineage will evolve if we remain in the US. The founding American stock will go the way of the Vikings or Romans, a distinct extant people no longer.
The question is whether these kinds of people can or would drive post-woke / post-liberal politics, or whether it is a matter of indifference or even benefit to them. There's beginning to be some evidence that the left is trying to give many of these classes of people (Jews, East Asians, possibly Indians) a similar treatment as whites at least when it comes to school admissions e.g., it's already quite hard to get into top schools as an East Asian applicant, maybe even harder than it is for whites. But I don't know how this will play out or how it will affect their views. I have the sense the sample described in #1693 is non-representative in not including enough people with further left-leaning beliefs.
>>1693 > very large fraction, maybe 50-75%, are in mixed-race marriages and/or are mixed-race themselves, but are white-adjacent or white-passing, and their kids will be as well. For example, there are mixes of various European ancestry, Ashkenazi, Lebanese, Palestinian, Bengali, Indian (Brahmin presumably), white Hispanic, etc >Being able to avoid being labeled white, or at least having kids who can avoid being labeled white, means they don't really seem to care about the demographic change of the US or European countries.
Speaking as one of the people you're describing, lmao we absolutely cannot avoid being labeled white. I buy that a lot of this cohort imagines otherwise, and this colors their thinking, but they're wrong. East Asians and Jews have been cast into the evil oppressor role already. My guess is South Asians are next; we'll see. Regardless of the specifics, any race that performs well is gonna find itself in the same spot. As the old racial lines break down and ethnogenesis continues, the narratives about racial hierarchy will keep pace with the realities with only a modest delay—similar to the formation of the idea of "white people" in the first place, really.
I too am one of the people you're describing, and a dual citizen that grew up in a different country. I love America and the western civilization: neoclassical art & architecture, the industrial revolution, jazz/rock/classical music, freedom, the constitution, blonde girls with blue eyes, you name it.
I do think to the extent that a post-woke functional politics is possible, it'll be if the people you describe can be to America, what the Illyrians were to Rome. In fact I feel a sense of vicarious betrayal: western civilization is being consumed by a nihilistic sense of guilt, on the path towards self-destruction. And my existence in this country maybe both part of the problem and the solution :)
This is all going in a direction close to what I wanted to explore in my no-no racemixing thread (I will not link out of respect for the forum monarch).
I’m “all white,” but not 100% founding stock (at best half), and I’m not particularly committed to trying to distill what is “old American” in my line. There are quality traits among many “new Americans” that I admire. Meanwhile, in my particular bubble, “old Americans” often no longer hold values I recognize, and many of those who do are lacking in e.g. intelligence, ambition, or physical beauty. I have acted accordingly in my personal life.
That being said, I really do not know if there is a sufficient cultural core or assimilation technology in place to allow for this behavior at scale. I see the argument for homogeneity, and it is strong. If “the only way out is through,” we’re counting on the birth of something entirely new and unrecognizable. I have to wonder if the purists are correct to mostly discourage outmarriage. At the very least it feels that one’s attitude here lines up with whether or not they are “giving up on America.”
America attracts a lot of good genes from all over, but there is a tension in tapping into that.
My view is that what genes count as advantageous have to be understood from various social or economic niches. To the extent that those exist in a society, that should result in differentiation and inclusion of many different kinds of people. What is a problem is a kind of one-size-fits-all meritocracy which doesn't really account for developing real talent in particular directions early on. The usual gripe on a forum like this is possibly Harvard, which used to be for producing future statesmen (among the founding stock), but now, um, has more of a reputation for producing middle managers? Maybe it is just the logical consequence of worshipping Goodhart's law or having a cookie-cutter version of the American Dream with a home in the suburbs, car, lawn, etc. To find a way out we'll probably have to think creatively about how to include many different social and economic niches in a new society, as mentioned in >>1463.
>>1697 >>1705 >>1718 >>1719 Specific ethnic grievances aside, the root problem in America is that the hatred by the wretched for the well-turned-out is established as state religion. Even in leftist theory when they are pretending not to hate white people as such, "whiteness" is supposed to mean the cultural (and biological) combination of industriousness, discipline, martial valor, colonial exploration, master morality, etc. As America experiments with racial mixture, the well turned out upper class will not escape condemnation no matter what color they nominally become. Anti-racist means anti-white means anti-aristocratic means anti-virtue. This is why even the nominal "beneficiaries" of anti-racism should not cooperate with it if they have any dignity and uprightness in their souls.
It seems baked in at this point that the American upper class is going to be at least partially some post-white mixture. Really it has been since the 1960s when WASP power died. The only circumstance under which that is not just a degeneration into post-civilization is if there is an ethnogenesis around a postive self-concept. Right now we have a negative concept "lets' all hate the arisocrat/white man/well-turned-out and take his stuff", but this is obviously degenerative and has been since the founding of this country. The opposite, which might actually work and seems as likely as anything else, is "let's all love and strive to become the aristocrat/white man/well-turned-out and build his civilization". The alternative to global slum world is that we all stop worrying and learn to love "whiteness". Though as we've discussed, there's more to it than ideology.
I really liked >>1530 and saved it somewhere earlier. I'm a little sad to see it gone, so here it is for those who missed it.
>The Caesar - the ultimate force of human will made manifest. He's not just a leader; he's a walking, talking powerhouse of persuasion & action. With a mere glance, he can make wordcels scramble into action, all thanks to his unyielding will to impose ORDER.
>He's universally accepted, by existing institutional academics, the poor, foreign dignitaries, and the wealthy. Chaos trembles in his wake as he strides through life, shaping destinies and blazing a golden way forward through sheer grit.
>He's not just a leader; he's a legend. The duty falls on him alone to make those 50-paragraph Substack culture war diatribes comprehensible to the masses.
>>1781 The algorithm giveth, the algorithm taketh away. Occasionally, it may make mistakes, but more importantly we all may make mistakes in what we like and dislike. Attention is a political resource that we must fight to allocate properly. Please form your opinions about what's good and bad, argue for them, and express them where the algorithm can see them (votes, replies). The best it can do is aggregate the wisdom that we express. Also form your opinions about when and how discussions should be pared down and curated, so I can improve the algorithm. --admin
