Richard Spencer

August 10, 2009

Judging from Steve’s review in today’s VDARE, the mainstream and neoconish writer Christopher Caldwell has written an insightful and wonderfully un-PC new book, Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West. Steve is also able use the book as a way of revealing why Republicans are so cowardly in their putative opposition to affirmative action:

Caldwell adds this memorable dictum in reply to [Nicolas] Sarkozy’s [proposal for affirmative action in France and his] Continental innocence about America’s experience:

“One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong.”

(I suspect that when Sen. Lindsey Graham decided to vote for Sonia Sotomayor, he was saying something like this to himself, just less elegantly.)

Also of note is the fact that much of Caldwell’s argumentation appears to derive from Peter Brimelow’s much denounced Alien Nation, a book Caldwell is advised to avoid mentioning and citing if he hopes to keep his gigs at The Weekly Standard and Financial Times.