Oddly enough, white males will be the swing voters this election. And if there’s one thing rural and working-class white voters care about a lot, it is their guns.

Any gun enthusiast older than 21 remembers the 1994-2004 assault weapon ban vividly. It was a dark time. Its many loopholes insulted everyone’s intelligence. Purely cosmetic features were banned on otherwise fully-functional AR-15s.  Assault weapons was not a bona fide category; for starters, military assault rifles are select-fire.  So various arbitrary criteria like collapsing stocks and bayonet lugs were defining features of banned weapons.  Civilian “asault weapons” merely look scary.  They’re no different than your grandfather’s M1 Garand. 

The law also had another major component:  it banned large capacity magazines and the transfer of new assault weapons, while allowing existing ones to be owned and transferred. This was a particular grievance of working-class gun owners. Because of the freeze on new magazines and new assault weapons, prices rose dramatically. Formerly $10 Glock magazines cost $100 or more by 2000. No-name “pre ban” AR15 lower receivers cost $1,500 or more. The wealthy, as always, could find a way to get whatever they wanted. But working-class collectors who care about various nonletha features for aesthetic reasons were left to scrape together cash or forego their preferred purchases altogether.

During the Clinton years, Barack Obama became a gun-control fanatic, known for demagoging gun control to keep his South Side constituency happy and to defeat the typical perception of liberals as soft on crime. Obama supported Mayor Daley’s ridiculous lawsuit against suburban gun dealers for “negligently oversupplying” firearms that were resold to criminal inside the city. Even now, Obama continues to blame gun manufacturers and dealers for the criminal acts of urban gang members.

For over 20 years, Chicago has banned handguns and assault weapons, while also requiring the registration of all non-banned long-arms. Needless to say, I felt much safer in Texas and Florida, where I and other law-abiding people could defend ourselves, than I ever did under that regime. Like all gun control laws, Chicago’s approach consists of sentimental feel-good measures that only impact the most scrupulously law-abiding citizens.

Urban dwellers generally support gun control because, even though there are far fewer guns per capita in a city like Chicago, a much higher percentage of guns are in the hands of criminals. The perception of guns is negative, and this perception is aided by the media. Lawful uses of guns in recreation and self-defense are unknown and under-reported. Under these circumstances, it’s politically easier to cast aspersions on the “devil object” than it is to call for serious punishment of the mostly young black and Hispanic gang members who make a hobby of shooting one another and innocent bystanders.

Obama’s gun control position proves to me how utterly bereft he is of moral courage and intellectual seriousness. While at the University of Chicago law school, Obama had easy access to the real facts on this issue because John Lott was there at the time and had just published More Guns, Less Crime. This publication and the various seminars about it had no impact on Obama’s views; Obama remained a run-of-the-mill liberal. Overall, Obama rarely would be seen engaging the rigorous “law and economics” researchers, who made mincemeat of his conventional liberal views on gun control and much else.

Obama appears at first glance to be a reasonable technocrat. Historically, however, he has shown no willingness to challenge the popular will of his constituency, even though various new research shows the falsity of various liberal policy chestnuts, in particular as they relates to guns and crime. The only hope of gun owners is that Obama is selfish and power-hungry.  His number one core value appears to be himself. He’s distanced himself from his old South Side positions, and generally has not taken major risks in his career, as evidenced most dramatically by his various “present” votes on controversial issues during his career.  Gun control is widely seen as a factor in the Democratic defeat in 2000.  His naked ambition is the only hope of gun owners from legal harassment. 

Far from being a courageous messiah, a racial healer or a book-smart technocart, Obama’s just another politician, flattering his constituency and looking out for number one.  What a sign of the times that someone as ordinary as this generates such enthusiasm! 

Between skyrocketing oil, our degraded citizenry, and the likely riots if Obama doesn’t pull off a victory, it’s definitely time to keep your powder dry.

I read Pat Buchanan’s latest article with interest. We, like most conservatives, can agree that World War I itself was an avoidable and tragic adventure for the Americans, that Versailles had many injustices, that Hitler was unduly popular because of legitimate German grievances, and that Stalin was a significant threat to European peace and the sovereignty of his neighbors, not terribly different from Germany.

But the war in the East did not depend on British involvement, nor did it become more likely because of the Franco-British security guaranty to Poland. Indeed, the war arguably would have been delayed by these measures if they were undertaken with greater vigor. Britain reasonably viewed their diffidence on the eve of WWI as having emboldened the Kaiser; they reasoned that clearer commitments might arrest the conflagration from occurring a second time. This became particularly important after Munich, because Hitler showed his bad faith and moved on to the next item on his list by threatening the weak and recently re-born nation of Poland.

Second, the argument about the justice of liberating millions of Germans under Czech control “proves too much.” Many Germans also lived in Poland, Russia, Latvia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and France too. Poles lived in Lithuania. Russians lived in Ukraine. Ukrainians lived in Poland. Magyars lived in Romania and Slovakia. Jews and Gypsies lived everywhere. It would have been impossible to align the political and ethnic borders in 1938 Europe. To avoid the real and imagined harms to vulnerable ethnic minorities, either the borders of all of Europe would had to move and at least some of the people would have to be moved en masse, which is more or less what happened post-war. The Germans would not have stopped at Danzig, and there is no logical reason under Pat Buchanan’s reasoning that they should have. For the Germans, any German being ruled by a non-German was an injustice.

In other words, from the Alsace-Lorraine to the Volga, the Germans had a pretext to engage in wars to “liberate the oppressed Volksdeutsch.” Let’s be clear. This was a zero sum game: if the Germans got Danzig, the Poles of Pomerania would be Germanized, expelled, or oppressed, as they eventually were when it was annexed by the Third Reich. It was not a vain or unreasonable measure under the circumstances for the British to guarantee the sovereignty (and geographic accommodation in the form of a sea corridor) of the great victim of European history. Focusing on British actions does not put the blame where it belongs, and it functions potentially to relieve the Germans of the lion’s share of moral responsibility for resorting to a war of conquest.

Further, Britain’s concern for the European balance of power should not be dismissed because Poland was run by its equivalent of Pinochet. Such considerations did not stop Catholics from supporting Franco or the Rexists in Belgium. Sovereignty is a distinct issue from how a nation governs itself, and a nation does not lose its moral right to self-defense of its legal borders on account of being run by a Colonel. Further, Pilsudski was not even in the same league as Hitler no matter what Stalin, Golmuka, and Steven Spielberg have to say about it. I hope this is not debatable.

Focusing too much on Munich and the Sudetenland ignores the German troops occupied the Rhineland in 1936 in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. The Allies acted weak and continued to do so afterwards. In other words, German militarization, the violation of treaties, and the resort to force was the context in which all of their “reasonable demands” post-1936 were made. The British could not ignore the other dimensions of context either: an increasing brutality within Germany, the grand vision of conquest laid out in Mein Kampf, and Germany’s extraordinary military rearmament program.

Threats and treaties are an important part of international diplomacy. They are designed ultimately to prevent war, even if they do not always succeed. Any criticism of British actions must depend upon the view that without this or that particular British mistake, Germany would have backed down. Because of the romantic Blut and Boden ethnonationalism of the Germans, and the scattering of Germans through Europe, this seems highly unlikely. And since Germany’s previous expansionist attempts involved both East and West, Britain rightly concerned itself about what would happen if it acted too late: becoming an isolated and vulnerable nation subject to its neighbor’s capricious will—Europe’s island-version of Finland.

The neoconservatives wrongly try to transpose Churchill and the orientation of the British Empire upon the United States today, just as they misread every petty dictator as the equivalent of Hitler and his Wehrmacht in 1939. American conservatives should avoid making the same error in reverse.  The circumstances of the past, whether for Britain or the United States, are different from today.  The United States has a providential capacity for isolation that the British lack. They, unlike we, could not ignore the balance of power in Europe in 1939, and it was perfectly reasonable—if too late—for them to offer protection to Poland in the face of ominous German designs to liberate their “oppressed brothers and sisters” to the East.

“Obama needs to do more to communicate the facts about his relatives and his family’s history,”  So says Andrew Sullivan today.

Surely Obama’s polygamous, 17-year-old-screwing, socialist African dad is not someone whose story Obama really wants getting out.  His dad is a son-of-a-bitch who left his mom and showed her no respect after Obama was born.

Obama’s family background has a broader significance.  He is an archetypal symbol of a recent phenomenon that worries otherwise non-racist whites.  Normal white parents worry that their little girls will “hook up” with a charming and virile playa’ who will quickly run out on her if she gets knocked up.  If the young lady is pro-life, an unwanted preagnancy means she bears the double burden of an illegitimate child coupled with the social impact that her child will always evidence that she once crossed the color line.  Most people recognize that this situation results from youthful passion and susceptibility to empty words.  That is, an illegitimate child that is obviously from a now-skeddadled man of another race does say something about the mother’s character.

What Andrew Sullivan and other childless liberals don’t understand is that for many white, suburban parents, particularly their fathers, there is a visceral feeling about their daughter having a mixed race child.  I speculate that this is because an abandoned, mixed-race baby also says something negative about them, namely, that they did not raise their daughter to have good judgment or self respect.  Obama’s mom is a case in point; her realtionship with Obama’s old man did not turn out as planned, and her pattern of irresponsible behavior continued in her second marriage, which soon ended in divorce. 

Obama never expresses gratitude that his grandparents did not recoil from him, nor adopt the more common racial attitudes of other white Americans of the time.  It’s obvious to Obama that they owed him the loving treatment he received. As we know from his various books, they raised him with a great deal of love and patience when his will-o’-the-wisp mom was off in Indonesia for extended periods of time pursuing her studies. Their progressive racial attitudes, far from being praised, instead were criticized in a campaign-saving race speech.  The offense:  his grandmother was scared of black muggers.  Obama’s obtuseness, sense of entitlement, and loyalties should be obvious.

Obama presented other challenges.  His mom faced an uphill battle outside of her immediate family that is obvious to anyone who knows single moms.  Many men would not want to settle down with someone who is a single mom, let alone the single mom of a mixed-race baby.  This is not because men don’t ever want to settle down.  Most men will only reliably settle down if they know the baby they are rasising is their own; this is why most cultures place a much higher premium on female than male chastity.  Stanley Ann Dunham resolved this dilemma by getting married to Obama’s generous and well adjusted Indonesian step-dad.  People know that even this would not be an option for most girls in her position from places like Atlanta, Cleveland, or Chicago. A white girls’ mixed race child is an unmistakable signal to any future white suitors that a life together will be hard because the family and her new man will never be able to blend in with the crowd. 

That is, a mixed-race baby in a later relationship with someone of the same race has an important indirect consequence:  the baby’s very skill color tells everyone that girl has had—and that this new beau is raising—someone else’s baby.  That baby came from a promiscuous and long-gone alpha male; we can’t help but assume that the alpha male is likely still out there having fun, charming someone else’s naive daughter.  A black baby in tow by a white couple testifies that the “man” of the relationship is a beta male expending the resources that should rightfully be spent by the cad.  By contrast, a white baby from another white guy would easily be confused by most onlookers as the new boyfriend’s own.  It could be dealt with discretely.  More men today are willing to stay with a single mom if her kids are not obviously from someone else.  Such men have the moral satisfaction of choosing a burdensome, but authentic, love-interest without the embarassment and public humiliation of manifest beta-ness.  The line between nobility and being a sucker is a fine one.  After all, if St. Joseph wouldn’t do it for Mary without a visit from the Angel, you’re asking a lot of Joe Beta to raise Long-Gone-Alpha’s baby when everyone, not just Joe Beta, would know what’s up.

Obama wants to talk about family and race when it’s convenient.  But, like his wife’s political musings, he doesn’t want any independent and negative associations to be drawn.  I imagine his supporters don’t either.  What I’ve said is admittedly strong, but I’m just doing my part for that national conversation on race we’re all supposed to be having. Right now, it consists too much of cant and self-flagellation, and not often enough of “unmentionable truths” that should be apparent to anyone who has spent some time out in Applebee’s country.

I’m surprised at the strength of Buchanan’s criticism of Winston Churchill. While conservatives have generally been uncomfortable with total war and recognized the folly of our entry into WWI as a crusade for democracy, WWII has long been, if not sacred, at least widely recognized as a war of national self defense against a totalitarian regime that threatened the security of the world and the integrity of European civilization. Britain’s heroic participation proved necessary to prevent a Russia-dominated Europe. For most conservatives, the flaws of Roosevelt always stood out in greater relief than those of Churchill, because it was Roosevelt who failed to appreciate the similar civilizational and global threat of the ideologically motivated Soviet Union.

I have a few preliminary thoughts. First, the seeds of WWII were indeed laid in WWI, and to the extent Churchill’s nationalistic impulses got the best of him then then he (along with that entire generation of British, French, and also German and Austrian leaders) deserves some share of the blame. But there were many ways the Germans could have responded to Versailles, and Nazism was only one of them. Even if Germans had legitimate desires for the unity of German-speaking peoples in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig, it was certainly legitimate that all of the other European powers take a stand against a massive German expansion eastward to form en empire right in Europe’s backyard, particularly as that empire would be so brutal according to the dictates of Nazi ideology.

Second, any suggestion that Poland’s attempts to have good relations with Germany in the 30s and its very limited participation in annexing ethnic Polish areas of Czechoslovakia in the Munich settlement was the equivalent of the Hitler-Stalin pact is rubbish. Though a military regime, Poland was hardly Hitler’s Germany. For starters, its ethnic minorities were comparatively safe and its ambitions were very limited. The area annexed by Poland under the Munich agreement was a mere 900 square km and was almost entirely Polish. More important, a small and weak nation like Poland must by necessity adhere to one of the great powers that it lies between. Poland under Pilsudski leaned towards Germany (contra the advice of Roman Dmowski), but Poland balked at the demand to give up historical Polish areas stretching back to the 9th Century, just as it balked at participating in any attack or provocation of Russia. Its memories of the war against the Bolsheviks was fresh, and its desire for peace pronounced.

Three, Britain must by necessity be concerned with balance of power politics more than the United States. It is adjacent to Europe. What happens in any part of Europe is its natural concern, just as what happens in the Western Hemisphere is America’s natural concern. It may have been foolish to extend a security guarantee to Poland, but Britain and Churhcill’s concern for traditional Metternichian balance of power politics is wholly legitimate. This has little to do with Churchill’s personality, and the identification of Britain’s role in WWII with Churchill’s personality seems to confuse that era with our own. The war in Iraq was a war promoted by the administration to generate support for what was widely regarded as an unusual “war of choice.”

WWII was more or less inevitable because of the imperial designs of Germany coupled with the peopling of Eastern Europe from the Elbe to the Volga with German settlements. Nazi ideology demanded that Germany proper be reunited with the rest of her people. Hitler’s romantic view of German “destiny” also made Germany pursue a worldwide empire of resources, even though brains and industrial skill were the ascendant economic commodities of global power. In response, Britain and France played a traditional role; Churchill’s rhetoric did not propel Britain in a direction that long habit and realist concerns for order and balance of power would have in any event. While I am not a so-called historical determinist, I do not believe individual actors and personalities should be given excessive blame for their participation in a role which someone else would have had to play, and likely would have played, though without the same panache and inspiring rhetoric as Churchill.

We’re asked quite predictably by proponents of gay marriage, “Why is the state in the marriage business anyway?” (Well, truth be told, because the state kicked the Church out of the marriage business in the name of secularism in the 18th and 19th Centuries, but here we are.) Even with church-sanctioned marriages, the state has authority and a duty to support civil society, moral life, the disposition of property, the care of children, and the maintenance of social order. The threats a people faces come both from within and without; that’s why states, under laws, have almost always concerned themselves with some bare minimum of rules limiting who can get married, when they can leave the marriage, and what their duties were to one another within marriage, i.e., not to abandon one’s wife, the care of one’s children, etc.

The state (as in NY, FL, etc.) should be in the marriage business because marriage is primarily about taming heterosexual men, whose passions and bad behavior create real problems without a norm (supported by laws) in favor of marriage. Men are biologically disposed to promiscuity. Without direction by chaste women and their stern fathers, this passion can create a glut of uncared for and poorly raised bastard children. States rightfully make marriage attractive through various legal blandishments in order to create a financially and socially viable institution for rearing children. Socially, we honor men who enter it as “adult” and “responsible” to counter-balance the inherent trade-offs naturally promiscuous men face:  the legal renunciation of the right to have sex (and children) with others.

Stable marriages create public benefits. Divorce has public consequences. Polygamous or otherwise self-styled marriage duties also have third party consequences, most of them not good. Marriage is an “off the rack” set of rights and responsibilities based on long experience with marriage, including its self-help and child-rearing purposes. The content of those rights, including the ability to leave a marriage and financial results of the same, has significant consequences on third parties with no choice in the matter, such as children and other married couples (whose marriages are threatened by easy divorce).

The state’s recognition of marriage and its promulgation of eligibility rules and duties for married couples is hardly a major encroachment on human liberty. After all, no one is forced to get married. The state’s very limited control over marriage is little different than the law providing “off the rack” terms for a landlord-tenant relationship that is not reduced to a written contract. The difference here is that the terms are not alterable; but this is also familiar in the law. For example, you can’t contract away the statute of frauds, conspire to create a price floor, or contract away your rights in bankruptcy. To say the state’s approach to marriage should be like other contracts obscures the fact that the state through the common law restricts a great number of contracts and contract provisions with effects on third parties under the rubric of them being “against public policy.”

Since the state must enforce contracts (and deal with the consequences of bastard children), it has every interest in channeling and restricting marriage to the extent individual marriages or classes of marriage may affect the public realm.

Gay marriage advocates have taken one of the accouterments of marriage–-romantic love and partnership-–and turned it into marriage’s primary purpose. I am suggesting that societies have instead long recognized, rewarded, and sanctioned marriage for the more prosaic reasons I list above. The fact that we allow old people and the infertile to marry is merely ancillary to this primary social end.

If you redefine marriage and the state’s recognition of it as simply a means to giveaway health and other legal and employeement benefits, then the liberal-libertarian position makes sense. If you think these benefits exist primarily to make marriage a more pro-children-rearing institution, then the gay marriage position breaks down or at least is not quite so obviously persuasive. It should be plain, though, that while family law is unique, the state’s restriction on marriage are well within the mainstream of contract law in other areas.  The state has as much interest in marriage as it does in laws requiring mandatory child support, forbidding child abuse, and limiting other contracts that go “against public policy.” The state rightfully does not allow and will not enforce contracts subjecting innocent third parties to harm as a consequence of contracts that these third parties have no opportunity to sign on to or opt out of.

I am surprised to be having such an acrimonious discussion with fellow conservatives.  I repeat my suggestion that Mr. Stegall has not read any of the relevant literature—Arthur Jensen, the Bell Curve, Sailer, etc.—and therefore he has little relevant (or accurate) to say about the subject.  I note he’s twice dodged my question on this subject.  In the absence of facts, he has resorted to invective and ad hominems.

My position should be familiar: people have different IQs.  I think these differences partially explain differences in social outcomes within and across racial cohorts.  There are many other factors like culture and family life and social expectations that affect individual and group outcomes, but IQ is a significant one.  IQ is heritable, and, like most “heritable” human characteristics, it has a large genetic component. It also has a feedback effect; the culture of a low IQ group will be different from a high IQ one.  A cursory review of the relevant literature makes these basic facts uncontroversial.  If Mr. Stegall’s denial of facts persist, I suppose soon we’ll be fielding Lamarckian suggestions that racial differences in skin color are also caused by social conditions.

I have little use for noble lies.  Truth does not contradict truth.  Christian society demands suppression of neither natural nor social science, particularly when the insights of study accord with common experience. It is not news to most people, whose minds are not blinded by liberal ideology, that individual people have different intellectual endowments and that there are some broad trends in this department between groups, whether those groups are families or the large extended families that we designate as races. 

As I review our exchange, I wonder if this is more of a hurdle for Protestants than Catholics.  Catholics are used to inequality and hierarchy.  We are reminded, for instance, in the very design of our churches that some people are illiterate; thus, beautiful statues and paintings and music are employed to convey God’s message.  We do not demand from every believer the performance of detailed textual hermeneutics. We know St. Peter, with all of his flaws, had certain insights into Jesus’ nature that eluded his peers.  Today, we retain the medieval structure of rank and privilege and duty:  we have priests, religious, nuns, bishops, and a Pope.  We’re very comfortable with individual and civilizational noblesse oblige as the proper moral response to human differences. 

I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Zmirak and other commenters that differences in intellect do not make us different in kind.  We have souls, freedom, and moral agency. We are connected to one another as fellow Americans, brother Christians, and fellow human beings. But individuals have passions, capacities, and tendencies.  Not everyone (nor every group) can easily compete well in a free market or avoid the temptations of drugs and crime.  Troubled souls, often folks with low IQs and consequent shorter time horizons, need charity and other forms of support and direction, including laws on such varied matters as usury and public intoxication.  It is beneficial for such “permanent children” that we act paternalistically.  And this is the case with simpler people in a world with and without different races living alongside one another. 

I am passionate on this issue because I hate lies and any system built on lies.  We must make due with human nature, in all of its diversity and inequality and individual variation and group tendencies. This is a moral imperative.  As Solzhenitsyn said about another dishonest egalitarian regime, “But there are no loopholes for anybody who wants to be honest. . . . Either truth or falsehood: Toward spiritual independence or toward spiritual servitude.” Any society built on lies and distortions is fragile, unstable, and unjust. The suppression of truth demands various forms of violence and ostracism, as my paleoconservative ancestors, Joe Sobran and Sam Francis, learned the hard way along with more recent victims, such as Dr. James Watson. 

It is self-evident that our IQs are different within racial cohorts, but the differences across races are also very significant, usually measured around one standard deviation.  Individuals and societies must subordinate themselves to reality.  Ironically, it is those who deny racial differences that obsess about differences in outcome between white and black groups, seeing it as evidence of “invidious” racism.  We should be aiming instead that both groups achieve maximum performance and social flourishing, while recognizing and accepting that there may always be a gap.  It’s not a question of “catching up.”  We are who we are.  Certainly black society did much better under the austere leadership and philosophy of racial realists like Booker T. Washington in the early 20th Century.

Mr. Stegall’s egalitarian schtick subordinates our inquiry into truth not for a genuinely noble reason—such as avoiding scandal or certain demoralization—but to serve the needs of a disordered and declining society built on various liberal myths about democracy, equality, hierarchy, and economic life.  If we suppress all of the facts that demonstrate the differences between groups, then on what basis will we prefer European to Third World Immigration?  How will we explain the persistent and perennial differences in outcome from one racial cohort and another?  The inevitable gap will demand an explanation.  We’ll have to suppress the fact of that gap too, and that in essence that is what our corrupting affirmative action regime aims to do.  Lies beget lies. 

Mr. Stegall’s discussion makes another dubious assumption about the relation of conservatives and our society.  He suggests we are elites, that I am a lousy elite, and that a more responsible leadership class would recognize the obvious necessity of suppressing racial differences in intelligence.  We are not, in fact, the elite.  We are insurgents. We are on the losing side of a 40 year culture war.  The central moral claim of that order is that the inherited American society is wrong, unequal, racist, and evil.  I will not kowtow to the elite that regards our civilization as only now hitting its stride, after a long eon of darkness starting with the Crusades, moving on to slavery, and culminating in the Holocaust.   Anti-racism and the enactment of anti-racist reforms is the central moral tenet on which modern liberalism is built.  I don’t accept this characterization of our complicated past.  I don’t accept this view of our present inequalities.  We must fight these corrosive lies, not as elites, but as the vanguard of restoration and counter-revolution.  If we do not succeed, let us at least maintain our integrity.

I rather enjoyed Mr. Zmirak’s recent post.  I particularly agree with his point that Christianity defines the meaning of raw data on IQ and ethnic differences.  It might be hard for secularists to imagine, but recognizing inequality between individuals and groups as well does not compel ordinary Christians to hate other people.  With John, I believe this information should make us more charitable and more willing to find ways through charity and the laws of softening the rough edges of a free society for those dull and irresponsible individuals that are, in certain important respects, permanent children. The Bell Curve, in spite of the mountains of criticism to which it was subjected, raises this very point near the end of the book in relation to structurally unemployed blue collar workers who are being displaced by mass immigration and an “information-based” economy.

It is, however, very optimistic to restore the old American consensus on voluntary, private actions, including unkind ones like racial discrimination. Our entire culture and most of our institutions of moral teaching—schools, churches, television, universities, the arts—are devoted to making racism, private or otherwise, the summum malum.  Even many libertarians adhere to this view, particularly the so called “modal libertarians” at Reason and elsewhere. 

It’s quite an act of mental gymanstics for someone to think racism is absolutely despicable and also to say it’s trumped by an absolutist notion of individual freedom. Rare will be the philosopher who can sustain this view.  This moralistic view of racism often tranforms from one of moral disproportion to a denial of reality, where any recognition of individual and group differences of white and black people is labeled racism, racialism, or simply evil. 

Racism used to mean race hatred or irrational attribution of negative traits to a group solely because of their race.  Now it means any recognition of race and ethnicity at all.  Surprisingly, Takimag’s own Justin Raimondo forcefully defended this 1970s High School Social Studies view of the world.  Nonetheless, even as the meaning of racism has expanded, the moral meaning has become more narrow and uncompromising.

Like many conservatives, I don’t share this expansive view of what racism is, nor the view of racism in general as the greatest evil.  I do think real racism is wrong-headed and often mean-spirited.  But it’s chiefly an error of the intellect, a misunderstanding of why groups are different.  It can translate into mean-spirited action, but it is not itself action.  I view racism much the way I view liberalism itself:  regrettable, mistaken, often the sign of an immature and resentful consciousness, but certainly not worse than acts of violence, fraud, law-breaking, and the like.  My view is certainly outside of the mainstream in these respects.

So long as racism is considered a great evil by people, those some peoples’ defense of liberty will tend to be limited to those liberties important to them:  free speech, low taxes, the right to smoke weed, the right to cohabitate, the right to have an abortion, etc.  Even in the past, the “liberties” of the founders came from a particular tradition and were adapted to a particular view of life.  I would hazard the suggestion that 18th and 19th Century American voters did not preserve a free society out of abstract concern for drug-transporting mules and the rights of gay couples to cohabitate, so much as they had a particular self-reliant vision of how they wanted to live their own lives and saw government as interfering with it.  They were voting on the basis of their perceived interests. 

By contrast, many voters today see their interests and the problems facing society differently, particularly in relation to economic security and related concerns about private racism. Even most libertarian-leaning voters view the evils in the world differently than those of the past, and it would be quite a bit to ask them to trump government action against the greatest evil by theoretical concerns for voluntary associations.  Libertarian-leaning liberals would just as likely make an exception for racism and, before long, become full blown liberals.

Anti-racism is at the heart of much of the suicidal anti-western apparatus at work in our society, both governmental and otherwise.  This evil can arguably be addressed by government action, and it would demand great restraint for the votaries of modern thinking on racism to restrain themselves chiefly on the basis of abstract philosophical concerns like consistency and the “human right” to discriminate.

Modern anti-racism depends in part upon the idea that great disparities in outcome between the races are due to past discrimination and widespread “invidious” racism.  This exagerated account of racism’s existence and this lopsided view of racism’s moral meaning are the weak links in the modern liberal order. This is why, I believe, that facts and speculation about racial difference are suppressed so aggressively.  Discussions of genetics, IQ, and the like permit another means of explaining minority underachievement that does not attribute pervasive evil to American’s majority-white leadership, past and present.  Discussions of anti-social minority behavior in particular suggests that white racism may be counterbalanced by other evils perepetrated by minorities today.  No group is without sin, of course, but anti-racism largely functions to condemn whites and elevate the moral status of minorities.  Frank exploration and discussion of real racial differences would undermine the myth of “invidious” racism and thereby restore the moral authority of whites to act normally and with moral authority as the majority.

In other words, addressing the web of lies, evasions, and myths surrounding anti-racism is absolutely essential for a conservative reform of public and private life, just as Christianity is essential to guide our use (and prevent our misuse) of any facts that may emerge from our examination of human differences.

One striking thing about the recent discussion on the alleged racial bias of Hillary voters is the venom and excessive personalization of the debate.  My defenders and I were mocked as racialists, who were supposedly incensed by Obama’s rise because his singular success is some kind of scandal, just as we were blind to the pathologies and relative low levels of achievement in Appalachia.  Neither is true. Some blacks (millions even) clearly have high intelligence and talent and the capacity to be productive citizens.  Many whites are anti-social, low IQ, poor, uncultured, and the like. This is not news.  The suggestion that it would be news, however, is a caricature and an insult.

Justin Raimondo is a libertarian and a vocal anti-war critic.  But his recent writings have revealed a stunning lack of judgment and proportion in defending libertarianism’s Great Black Anti-War Hope.  One would think that a persuasive ideology would not need to resort to so many insults and so much name-calling.  After all, those who disagree may simply be mistaken, confused, motivated by different priorities, and possessed of different values and factual understandings.  This generous interpretation won’t do.  If one thinks there is only one fair way to set up a political regime, then most alternatives are “evil,” trying to dragoon the government into forcing political enemies to do their bidding.  Opponents are described as “dividing people” from the universal appeal of libertarianism.  Thus, for Raimondo, only racialist Americans care about who their neighbors are and whether the new President has it in for their group.  Raimondo describes “peasants with pitchforks” coming after the neocons for all of their lies.  Ironically, writers who criticized Ron Paul for his dalliance with “racialists” are mocked as “Reasonoids.”  In discussing the Reasonoids, Raimondo concludes with his typical restraint:  “Well screw you, Weigel, and screw Reason magazine—Ron Paul is the future of the libertarian movement, and you are yesterday’s flotsam.”

Part of this excessive hostility results, I believe, from the total claims of libertarianism, which are made in universal terms and described as having universal appeal.  Under libertarianism there are no government-picked winners and losers; everyone is free to do as he pleases.  Raimondo says in his latest that any mention of race is political poison, because “any movement that makes a big deal about race is going to pretty much confine itself to members of one race—and that’s not a good thing, as far as the freedom movement is concerned.” If it’s all or nothing, any call for some parochial interest like that of one’s economic class, ethnic group, the interests of native born Americans, or some other particular good is a threat to the universalist ideology. Anyone who interjects particularism against this airtight, universalist system can be mocked and called names and not engaged on the level of ideas.  After all, in the eyes of a committed libertarian, all the thinking necessary for political life is complete, and all resistance comes from the same source as conservatives’ particularism:  selfish attempts to advance the interest of some small organized faction against the common good. 

The ideology of universalism, however, finds few adherents.  Libertarianism has a natural and shrinking constituency:  chiefly, it consists of self-reliant white people of an intellectual bent. But that constituency is not as pure in general as professional libertarians like Raimondo and Weigel.  Even people opposed to the Iraq War, redistributionism, and an invasive federal government might also not want to live next door to Third Worlders or hear their people insulted by the Rev. Wright.  Libertarian-leaning voters are often so disposed less because the government’s actions hurt them, than they are distraught over the alien constituency that the government is helping. Hence the effective rhetoric of “welfare queens” in the 80s.

In addition to ideas, most people are motivated by things like loyalty, wariness of change, concern for security, and concern for the lives of their children. They are put off by deontological pronouncements about how most of what government does is “slavery” and “mobocracy.”  It is noteworthy that Raimondo and his clique have written off Democrats, Republicans, Objectivists, the New Left, Black Panthers, Pat Buchanan, and the folks at both Chronicles and Reason in their travels.  In a moment of clarity, perhaps Raimondo would consider that making ideological purity and universalism more important than any other factor leads to an unviable and ineffective political movement.  Movements ultimately need coalitions, and coalitions require some cobbling together of majorities based on perceptions of their actual and particular interests, as well as the perceived antagonistic interests of other groups.  By way of example, ethnocentric arguments against the Iraq War that express the view that “this enterprise is bad for working class America and Americans, including our young servicemen, and even if we were helping these savage Arabs, they aren’t worth the effort,” are likely to be far more persuasive than the umpteenth paean to the Iraqis’ human rights that we see regularly over at antiwar.com, but the libertarians persist, because ideological purity as reflected in universalism is apparently more important to them than political success.

Justin Raimando’s response to my criticism of Andrew Sullivan revealed a major source of friction between Burkean conservatives and libertarians.  He brought up the point that statistics were dangerous and baleful, not least because they’re usually collected by government do-gooders seeking to re-engineers our society.  I certainly have little use for the latter.  But is Rothbard’s original criticism of statistics and empirical analysis in general a sound one?  I don’t think so. 

For starter’s, Rothbard’s point seems quaint and outdated.  Ordinary people use government statistics—from the EPA or the Census, for example—in deciding where to locate businesses or homes.  That is, private people making decisions affecting their private lives want to know the things that are told by statistics.  This is not to say that it’s worth the expense or that the government should generally collect these data, but I hope we can concede that taking a census is constitutional.  Incidentally, many of the statistics collected today are not collected by the government but by researchers at private universities, marketing gurus, pollsters, scientists, and the like.  Much of the IQ data we have is not from government sources but from groups like the college board.  Incidentally, the data showing various racial differences in everything from crime to IQ to participation in the welfare state are well documented.

Second, Rothbard’s point seems to reveal a real methodological flaw in Austrian Economics.  I think on a policy basis much of Austrian Economics is true.  I believe in a gold standard, oppose price controls, recognize the impossibility of most economic planning, and the like.  Yet, even though I think Austrianism reaches the right conclusions often enough, it does so in spite of its deductive methodology. Since human groups differ wildly in their behaviors, such philosophical opposition to empirics leads to mistakes and facile explanations for inconvenient facts, such as dynamic economic regimes characterized by industrial policies and limitations on free trade. There success would be even more without the trade barriers we’re told, but without observations and empirical tools by what tool can we test these very certain explanations.

On economics, the use of sound, common sense axioms about aggregate human behavior often stands up to empirical analysis—i.e., regression analysis. Yet real economic systems are often complicated, and it’s difficult to isolate this or that variable in the form of policy to identify a particular success or failure.  Sometimes the unexpected happens. It’s important to test theories and make economic theory (like any tool of analyzing aggregate human behavior) one that is grounded in reality and as predictive as possible.  Rothbard himself did this in what I believe is some of his best work, the study of the panics of the 19t Century.  The idea of deductively reasoning a moral philosophy and a practical matter like economics is frankly ridiculous.  Human action is complicated, subject to multiple motivations, made confusing and unpredictable by various inherited heuristics, and not entirely rational and self-interested.  Austrian economics and moral philosophy does acknowledge this in part—through the idea of the subjective source of value—but it also purports that careful, deductive reasoning from a few sensible and true axioms will lead to a proper practical and moral understanding of human life. 

This is pretty ambitious. For starters, we know that some human societies suffer from too much government—Cuba, USSR, Nazi Germany—just as others suffer from too little—Lebanon, Somalia, etc.  It is problematic and less-than-fully explanatory to ascribe all big human failings—as groups and individuals—chiefly as the consequence of some government intervention, i.e., the suggestion in the last thread that the sexual revolution stemmed solely from government action.  It seems just as often people fail (or disappear) from a lack of government or a weak government, such as when they are conquered by a neighboring people.  While government can faciliate massive and negative social changes, it can also preserve inherited customs from the prviate and religious realm, as in its recognition of marriage and the creation of various family laws to buttress the same.  Until recently, politics had a limited and human mandate.  We wanted our own governments, to protect us from external and internal disorder, just as we wanted them to work in parallel with civil societies and the like to preserve the moral order and other characteristics needed for a self-governing society.  Conservatives want to be free both from too much government and the horrors of anarchy.  We want statesmen and critics of statesmen to know their subject with some depth. 

Quite frankly, deductive and abstract formulae are often wrong, and renouncing empircal testing and statistics makes it pretty difficult to test whatever it is one is advocating.  Marxism, for example, has a certain elegance to it; it too proceeded from a few axioms and buried its head in the sand like the Ostrich when empirical data—both obvious ones like empty shelves as well as things like GDP statistics—show what an utter failure it was compared to capitalism.  So I’ll take horse sense and statistics, particularly when the latter pass the “straight face” test supplied by the former.  As for the specific subject matter of the last thread, it seems pretty hard to discuss elections without looking at numbers.  They do involve counting votes, after all.  I do not consider myself a white nationalist, but I do consider myself a race realist. The extreme media double standards on how the two groups are allowed to behave was striking, particularly in light of the fact Barack Obama’s belonged to an anti-white church for 20 years and black political leadership has been found wanting in places ranging from New Orleans to Detroit.  I also found the sentimental appeals to the soul and the denial of group trends by Justin and some of his supporters shocking.  But when I re-read some Austrian and other libertarian sources, I think it makes sense:  Austrianism and other libertarian philosophies depend upon abstracting from the whole of humanity to posit a single human nature for political and economic purposes.  A single human nature, coupled with a deductive philosophy, leads to a single political prescription for all people everywhere:  more liberty all the time. 

I think this is all too convenient and also wrong.  In what sense do Somalians or Cambodians or Lebanese need more liberty, I wonder?  Did Poles or the French need more liberty in August 1939?  Or did they need a cohesive and effective defense policy?  Hasn’t Russian benefited mightily from stronger and more effective government under Putin compared to the disorder of Yeltsin and his oligarchs?  Times and places and people are different.  It’s true we all have souls and human dignity.  Then again, we’re all made up of atoms and electrons.  There’s a point where emphasizing commonalities may obscure as much as it reveals.  As Burke said, far from needing a deductive politics, statesmen need a deep understanding of human beings, which includes a deep understanding of both their similarities and their differences.  “The legislators who framed the ancient republics knew that their business was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysics of an undergraduate, and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman. They had to do with men, and they were obliged to study human nature. They had to do with citizens, and they were obliged to study the effects of those habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil life. They were sensible that the operation of this second nature on the first produced a new combination; and thence arose many diversities amongst men, according to their birth, their education, their professions, the periods of their lives, their residence in towns or in the country, their several ways of acquiring and of fixing property, and according to the quality of the property itself — all which rendered them as it were so many different species of animals.” 

Andrew Sullivan regales us once again with his Oxford education.  Sadly enough, he must come to terms with the fact that white rednecks still exist; their votes count as much as anyone else’s; and they like neither Obama nor black candidates in general.  Why might that be? 

Sullivan’s analysis consists in part of the following:  “The race factor seems to have tipped very heavily toward Clinton in West Virginia. In Indiana, 16 percent said race was an important factor for them; in Pennsylvania, 19 percent; in West Virginia, 22 percent. The racial skew to Clinton does soar in West Virginia: 81 percent of race-based voters went for Clinton; in Pennsylvania, it was 55; in Indiana, it was 53 percent. Oddly, Obama did better among white Catholics in West Virginia than he has in the past. No idea, if that means anything.”

Consider how incredibly facile this statement is.  For starters, 81% of 22% of West Virginia’s Democratic voters amounts to 17%.  Hillary won by a good deal more than that with a net lead over 40%.  More important, the net effect of race-conscious voters was smaller, since 4% voted for Obama for race-related reasons.  Even if every single race-based voter went for Obama, he still would have lost. 

Indeed, isn’t all this talk of white race-conscious voting ignoring the elephant in the room?  West Virginia is almost all white.  Its voters will split, nearly evenly, between Republican and Democrat in the fall.  Yet blacks will not.  We know, for example, that 90% or more blacks will vote Democratic in the general election no matter who the Republican candidate is.  We know also that for many years majority black voting districts have been created purposefully with an eye to electing black candidates and cultivating distinctly black political power. This takes place because everyone knows that black voters, given a chance, will almost always choose a black candidate over a white one, just as they will almost never vote Republican.  Black voters are the ones with racial solidarity, whereas white voters have strong cohorts in both parties.  Obama’s 90% showing among black Mississippi Democrats didn’t exactly occasion hand-wringing about rising race consciousness by Sullivan, but 17% of West Virginia’s white Democrats voting against a black man on racial grounds is major cause for concern.  This reveals, once again, the basic rules of “diversity”:  everyone can act and think tribally, except whites, who are supposed to be aloof from appeals such appeals and internally divided.

Sullivan’s thinking out loud about Catholics in West Virginia is even worse, revealing his foreign roots and general ignorance of American life.  There are almost no Catholics in West Virginia; they rank 49th out of the 50 states as a percentage of West Virginians.  Whether they tipped this way or that is almost entirely irrelevant.  It’s an old school Protestant state, with snake-handling churches and everything.  West Virginia is a metaphor for all that the cultural left hates about America, its past, and its culture. Like America (particularly the America of yesteryear), it is majority Protestant, majority white, with a significant (75%+) cohort that is not university educated, where hard-working white people do the jobs Americans supposedly won’t do.  This older America is a persistent reality that deeply frustrates Sullivan, Obama, and other forces of the cultural left.  It’s why they resorted to court-led change and rearrangement of America’s demographics in the 1960s.  Among this older, mostly white America, the cultural left sees nothing but hate, racism, and malevolence.  If Obama loses, it will be because whites reject him.  In the age of the trans-racial candidate, the rednecks and the white suburbanites will mutatis mutandis be the swing voters—the power-brokers of a democratic system. The Jewish vote, the black vote, the gay vote, and the various hodge-podge alienated minorities who make up the Democratic Party cannot (yet) outweigh the collective voice of America’s historical majority.

Leftist elites presume to have a moral claim to rule against majority sentiment because of their education.  It would be nice if that included basic numeracy.  There’s a reason it does not.  Numbers representing facts are the starting point for realistic appraisals of everything from our enormous debt to the burden of mass immigration.  Numbers too demonstrate the deep alienation and tribalism of black Americans and other minorities.  Jeremiah Wright’s loony speeches were not a “distraction”; in fact, looking at the numbers tells us that he is a typical representative of his people and their chosen leaders.  Numbers relating to voting, criminality, illegitimacy, IQ, and poverty also tell the story of our deep internal divide in an undeniable and often depressing way . . . if only we take the time to count.