I still have not read the book. But here is the most informative review I have seen. Brad Littlejohn writes,
Using the model of a family and a business as contrasting types, Hazony highlights the extent to which modern political philosophy has come to treat the relations of political order as fundamentally like those of a business: “governed primarily on the basis of the individual’s assessments as to what will enhance his physical welfare and protect and increase his property, and by his ongoing consent to the terms of an agreement with others for the joint attainment of these purposes” (83).
In fact, however, a closer look at both the historical foundations of most political orders, as well as the conditions that enable states to continue to flourish, reveals relations more like those of a family: bonds of mutual loyalty anchored, indeed, by an initial act of mutual consent, but sustained through thick and thin by a sense of mutual belonging, mutual indebtedness, and mutual duty to “pass on to another generation an inheritance that has been bequeathed to us by our parents and their ancestors” (85). Whereas the former model encourages us to ask at every moment whether the arrangement is serving our interests, and to cut loose if it ceases to, the latter model encourages us “to stand true in the face of adversity, to refuse the urge to start everything anew” (88).
Read the whole thing. I only picked this excerpt because it reminded me of the distinction between sub-Dunbar and super-Dunbar. Hazony is saying that a nation-state, which is super-Dunbar in terms of population size, holds together because people feel the sort of attachment to one another that they feel in a sub-Dunbar setting. There is an obvious tension here, and Littlejohn dwells on Hazony’s attempts to deal with it.
Much later, Littlejohn writes,
Should America become a majority-minority nation, or—more decisively—should it lose its confidence in the culture and traditions that have actually sustained our political order over two and a half centuries, our abstract ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy would quickly cease to have motivating force to maintain a viable political identity or set of mutual loyalties. Which, come to think of it, sounds an awful lot like a diagnosis of our present condition.
This is a particularly disgusting take today, given the state of recent public discourse.
This is an economics blog. The waves of technological change, the globalism, an economy that has relentlessly replaced personal service and relationships with anonymous transactions, the ultra-narrow specialization of labor. The breakneck speed of change. The total elimination of social communication friction.
But no, it’s the minorities.
Or perhaps your revulsion is due to a misinterpretation of what Hazony means by “nationalism”? Regardless, “Part Three: Anti-Nationalism and Hate” of the book was meant to address your outrage.
It seems that Tom is responding to the quote at the bottom of Arnold’s post.
“Should America become a majority-minority nation”–without, in the quote, any other conditions–American ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy would stop being compelling enough to maintain mutual loyalty?
Those minorities have remained largely loyal to the American nation during eras when those ideals did not apply to them, or applied in a lesser way to them. Perhaps the most charitable reading is therefore that Littlejohn (summarizing Hazony) means that the (white) majority’s loyalty to American ideals is conditional on them remaining the “dominant tribe.”
Or perhaps he believes that those minorities, once they realize they are the majority, will necessarily abandon those values that they were forced to passively accept before. That seems to be Tom’s reading.
Not having read the book either, I can’t say, but both versions have revolting elements, regardless of truth.
I think the most charitable reading of what Littlejohn meant by “majority-minority” is the opposite of what Hazony means by “nationalism”, that is, disjointed trust/identity. Given the context of the article, I don’t think it is just the most charitable interpretation, it is the most likely one.
Majority-minority is an unfortunate choice of words since it is typically interpreted as visible-minority but I don’t think that is the point either Littlejohn or Hazony are trying to make.
I don’t find it any more charitable to read what Littlejohn meant by “majority-minority” as “disjointed trust/identity”. Its just re-phrased racism.
Hazony’s definition of Nationalism has nothing to do with it. I am responding to this quote at the end of the post:
“Much later, Littlejohn writes,
Should America become a majority-minority nation, or—more decisively—should it lose its confidence in the culture and traditions that have actually sustained our political order over two and a half centuries, our abstract ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy would quickly cease to have motivating force to maintain a viable political identity or set of mutual loyalties.”
The problem is a sense of rival loyalties and sub-population solidarity at odds with general solidarity. There are pressure points in the body politic. If you hit the weakest and most sensitive spot hard enough, you can break the bones and tear the muscles needed for the body to work well. If you are going to heal or stay healthy, you have to avoid getting anywhere near that area.
Kling talks a lot about a modern economy involving commercial interactions among “strangers”, but that’s an abstraction which is not actually true and too binary a way to think about what is in reality a whole vast spectrum of potential strangeness which theoretically one could extend to truly sci-fi based levels of alienness, compared to which the typical range of ‘strangness’ within a paritcular country is negligible. Even when engaging with a person you don’t know, in most local or national interactions, one never treats that person like a genuinely totally unknown quantity, but instead automatically takes an enormous amount for granted regarding assumptions of relatively narrow limits of expectations and cultural space.
Indeed, it is precisely by being able to assume that so- called “strangers” are really not all that strange that allows people to lower their guard, interact comfortably on the basis of mutual perception of minimal commonality and goodwill, and enjoy the benefits of a higher trust equilibrium. Instinctive perceptions of trustworthiness tend to radiate out in concentric circles from close family relations and long-term friends at the core to true unknowns at the periphery, and part of the trick is making people believe (with accuracy), that the typical “stranger” they deal with is close-enough to some semi-distant relative in one’s extended family, and thus should be treated and can be dealt with in similar manner.
The less one can assume about a “stranger”, the more uncomfortable and guarded economic and other interactions become, until eventually the uncertainty and risks are perceived as high enough to form a prohibitive barrier between potentially beneficial trades and connections.
Making strangers less strange to each other via cultural leveling in terms of behavioral expectations thus functions like establishing more robust and comprehensive protocols and uniform standards for network communications, which is a public good with big positive externalities and enables the perpetuation of important institutions which otherwise could not exist. It’s a form of social capital with large dividends. Indeed, one wonders whether the emergence of modern economic activity was in part an incidental benefit of historical contingencies which came about from the pursuit of other motives and goals leading to such leveling and widespread adoption of certain protocols.
Now, a great wooden bridge is also a public good and piece of capital, and it is always possible for some individual, if not prevented from doing so, to rip it up and burn it so that he can personally enjoy warmer camp-fires. That’s something worth worrying about, and is what happens when agitatators foment discord by encouraging a consciousness of group rivalry.
Unfortunately there is asymmetry. It’s super hard to build a bridge, but super easy to burn it down. If you have lots of other alternate bridges to fall back upon, not so bad. If someone is burning down your one big bridge, you are in big trouble. So it’s a good idea to arrange things so that there are always lots of bridges, and people who try to burn them down are shot on sight.
As a final note, in terms of the social ideal of treating everyone with a high minimum threshold of courtesy and respect, and having that cultural institution be able to self-perpetuate as a manifestation of spontaneous fraternity, such an ideal can only be sustained in practice when the distribution of responses and extensions of reciprocity is fairly narrow, that is, when one’s trust doesn’t get him burned as a chump too often, or in a way that follows an obvious pattern that puts the lie to any claim of statistical indistinguishability from random sampling from subgroups.
Yes, but here’s the thing. We live in a multi-ethnic society already, and as technology continues to progress, it is only going to get easier for people to move around. So the challenge is to build social capital between sub-groups and create mutual solidarity. Feeding the dominant group’s fear of becoming non-dominant, including giving them a sense of entitlement to remain dominant, is just another way of fomenting discord.
If you want to build social capital, it may actually make more sense to await the day when the dominant group is no longer a majority, so that all sub-groups can then begin to treat one-another as having equal status. In other words, “majority-minority” might be better from the standpoint of building social capital, since now everyone is a minority.
The world already has such countries, Hazel, in Africa- the results aren’t all that promising- most of those countries would be better off separating themselves along tribal borders. Indeed, history basically shows that countries that are the least ethnically homogenous are the also least governable and less successful.
+1
Examples of majority-minority countries with a low IQ group(s) in majority are all failures. Even examples of cities within the USA are failures (Detroit, Baltimore), especially if they aren’t tied into some one of a kind money siphon (DC).
Nothing is “inevitable”. East Asia isn’t getting more diverse. That’s the usually over a billion people exception to the rule I guess.
“so that all sub-groups can then begin to treat one-another as having equal status.”
This doesn’t happen, and you know it’s not going to happen here. When minorities get a majority they don’t start treating the whites fairly. Their grievances and misbehavior merely amplify now that they can act with impunity.
You bring up Africa, I counter with well, the UK – which is part English, part Welsh, part Scottish, and part Irish.
Or Spain – which has many ethnic sub-groups (recently the Catalonians have been thinking about seceding). Or India, which has numerous ethnicities and different languages (Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi).
I spent some time pondering this over the years, mostly while doing Ph.D. research and reading a lot about Nigeria in particular, but also gamely striving to make links to places and times elsewhere.
Most of the big multi-ethnic states of Europe were empires or some sort. Or elsewhere they were created by colonialism and are post colonial in some sense. They tended to break apart. Similarly the Ottoman Empire, which had a Sunni Islam ideology.
I think it may be possible for the USA to be democratic and well-governed as it becomes increasingly full of immigrants from everywhere–but is it likely? Under certain conditions, yes. But it’s not something that will automatically happen and can be assumed to be non-trivial in being accomplished.
The old European multinational empires like Czarist Russia and Habsburg Austria (after the Ausgleich becoming Austria-Hungary) were essentially dynastic and with an established religion, though some tolerance of religious minorities.
What Hazel argues for is logically and theoretically possible–I’m just not sure that it’s especially likely based on historical precedents, current cultural fashions, and the unchanging essentials of human nature.
I may have quoted James Bennett before–he has bon mots like “Democracy, Multiculturalism, Welfare State–choose any two.”
Carnes Lord in _The Modern Prince_ warned against people seeking to build up political systems based on possibilities they imagined in their minds. He may have been quoting Aristotle.
The book to read, probably, to get a handle on this, is Donald Horowitz _Ethnic groups in conflict_. It’s old, and door-stopper, and not light reading.
My essential quibble with Hazel is that Switzerland exists–but we can’t make the whole world look like Switzerland. Every time we see the dissolution of a Yugoslavia, or Lebanese Civil War, or the civil wars that broke out in ill-structured federations after the British left (Nigeria, Uganda, Greater Hindustan under the Raj) we need to remind ourselves that not every political system has staying power.
Silicon Valley companies that look like the United Nations are possible–but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to achieve for a country of 330 people who are an end in themselves. A company has a profit motive that helps unify it, and competitors to promote internal cooperation.
Much of the problem is “norms of political conduct.” Robert Conquest liked to make this point. A perennial challenge of managing immigration is that immigrants bring their own norms. Some good, some bad.
Charles, many/most major urban centres in Canada are already majority-minority (in the visible-minority sense) or are well on their way. The City of Toronto proper is majority-minority and in the adjacent city of Brampton, people of European descent only make up 26% of the population behind South Asians at 44%.
In the Anglosphere, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have different immigration issues than the U.S. and the U.K. but Hazel’s claims are not theoretical, they are reality and thriving.
@Hazel: Funny you mention Punjab. Punjab has about 30 million people and is about 60/40 Sikh/Hindu (the other religions have negligible numbers).
You may have heard about the recent crisis on the southern border. Well, the word is out. Indians can get to Ecuador or El Salvador without a visa, and from there it’s a hop, skip, and a jump through a number of other persecution-free (but not rich) countries to a U.S. Port of Entry along with a growing number of “Eastern Hemisphere Origin” illegal migrants. And that’s where the majority Punjabi Sikhs all tell the nice officer that they have a credible fear of being persecuted by the Hindus where their
prison gang leaderspoliticians control some local jurisdiction, and vice versa for the Hindu arrivals.At least their claimed persecution (religious) actually fits within the bounds of the statute, as opposed to the Central Americans, for whom our totally-legitimate-and-how-dare-you-say-otherwise judges had to concoct new, extra-legal rationales out of thin air. “Rule of Law” FTW!
Now, of course, your typical American claim processor has no real clue whether or not these persecution claims are bogus or not. They do know that the claim that the sole motivation for the migrants is escape from persecution is bogus, because they obviously transited through a number of persecution-free countries – e.g., Germany – before they got to the border.
But as it happens, there is in fact lot of messy sectarian and inter-ethnic rivalry in Punjab which occasionally turns ugly, and if that’s all it takes, then conceivably 49.9% of Punjabis are eligible for asylum, at least until the whole place has been demographically disaggregated, locally homogenized, and partitioned cleanly (that’s why they call it “ethnic cleansing”), and everybody’s local thug boss Big Man at least belongs to the same gang as they do.
But until that happens, boy, that’s some great example of a totally stable and spontaneously harmonious multi-ethnic and multi-cultural kumbaya entity you’ve got there that isn’t a fissiparous power-keg ready to pop into mass sectarian violence if it weren’t sustained by a balance of terror.
Of course, Punjab’s integrated-populations persecution problem is by no means an isolated or rare phenomenon, and in fact is quite common in similarly situated places all around the world, all of the problems of which are now, apparently, (and legally?) America’s problem.
Which is convenient because America has totally solved the internal-divisions and inter-group tensions problem.
“In the Anglosphere, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have different immigration issues than the U.S. and the U.K. but Hazel’s claims are not theoretical, they are reality and thriving.”
No, this is dishonest and quite frankly willfully dishonest.
Canada (and AZ and NZ) have a skills based immigration system that Trump proposed and what shot down because its “racist”. And of course skills based immigration always boils down to “mostly Asians”. And yes it rewards extra points to English speakers and other people more culturally aligned with natives.
Everyone knows Asians aren’t “diverse”. If they were, they would get SAT points awarded to them rather than subtracted from them when they apply to Harvard. “Diversity” means low IQ brown people, always has, always will. You know that is the kind of immigration people are complaining about, so why lie about it.
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand don’t share a land border with large low IQ brown populations, and as such they haven’t had to deal with large scale illegal migration from such places. This has largely been the problem in the USA. Certain USA policies like family reunification, birthright citizenship, and amnesties exacerbate this problem. In addition lack of enforcement and abuse of amnesty and other loopholes have been a big issue. As has our unique relationship with Puerto Rico.
When we stop considering high IQ (mostly Asian) immigrants as diverse, it becomes apparent that these cities are not diverse. We all know that such places work, but it’s completely irrelevant to what we are discussing in America.
Why even bring these examples up when you know they are dodging the whole point? Purposeful misinformation and underhanded debating tactics are all I can think of.
P.S. You know the irony is that these Asian immigrants your so proud of having in Canada are racist as fuck and don’t allow significant immigration into their own countries.
I’ll just reiterate that whether we are or will be a multi-ethnic society is not a choice. We are.
The choice is between having social harmony between our already existing multiple ethnic groups, or living with the perpetual discord that will result from perpetuating a system of white ethnic dominance.
I’ll also note that there is no necessary connection between white ethnic dominance “confidence in the culture and traditions that have actually sustained our political order over two and a half centuries”. Although I’m sure people here will argue that only white people are capable of sustaining a libertarian culture or something to that effect.
This is a fruitful conversation and I enjoy the exchange of views. My hope is to always be updating my beliefs based on evidence and argument.
Paul Gottfried’s 2017 essay at _American Conservative_ is worth reading over and over because he brings up Max Weber’s old distinction between political claims and scientific claims.
When I say that it is difficult to sustainably manage–in a democratic, stable, and constitutionally ordered republic–a large national society which is multi-ethnic and multiracial with religous and sectarian variety, I make that assertion as a scientific claim based on the historical record.
I may be reading some comments in bad faith, and if so I apologize. My sense is that I am making a scientific claim based on the empirical and historical record.
Additionally, my sense is also that some commenters are making a political claim, more along the lines of “This is happening and it’s good” or “We can let this happen and it will be good” or “We should encourage this to happen,” or even “Isn’t it great the way the way things are going in this regard.”
My claim is that the historical record urges caution, not cheerleader type optimism.
Gottfried said it better than I could, mostly by channeling Weber. To quote Gottfried:
It was the great German sociologist Max Weber who sharply distinguished in two related tracts between “Politics as a Calling” and “Science as a Calling.” According to Weber, educated people have to decide whether they are making statements as scholars, or whether they’re doing so as political advocates. One cannot do both, according to Weber, without losing one’s intellectual integrity and sacrificing one’s scholarly reputation. Although Weber lived in a time when academics were not as frenetically politicized as they are now, his distinction still has instructional value.
full article here:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-todays-conservatives-are-useless-debaters/
I’m not dodging anything. Believe it or not, not everyone is running a continuous Trump vs. Anti-Trump argument in their head. The Toronto/Brampton example is not a debating tactic, it is a freakishly cool example that seems to contradict Hazony’s claims which, by the way, is what I was thinking about. I didn’t realize that a discussion about Nation-States was really about Trump immigration policy. My bad. Who knew.
Thanks for educating me about IQ, diversity, Indian racism, what makes me proud and your fascinating definition of brown people.
@Handle,
Inter-ethnic rivalry is also always on the verge of breaking out between Irish protestants and Catholics in N. Ireland, but that doesn’t prevent the UK from remaining a democratic, secular, pluralistic society.
Your theory that liberal institutions can only survive in an ethnically homogenous state just doesn’t hold water. Even if we had ethnic discord forever and ever (which we already do anyway, between whites and blacks in the US), democracy wouldn’t cease to function. Despite current polarization and gridlock, the system shows no signs of breaking down into civil war. If we were “majority-minority” I doubt that would change. Even if we had full blown ethnic identity politics, we would just see political coalitions between ethnic groups like whites+asians vs. blacks+hispanics. (Indeed, asdf’s categorization of asians as “not diverse” really points the way towards that happening. ) People would always find some other narrow identity group to pull into the coalition. Theorizing that the US will collapse into anarchy like sub-saharan Africa if we were “majority-minority” (a.k.a. ethnically plural) is hysterical.
Personally though, I think a future with less identity politics would be far superior, but we’re not going to get there by insisting that white people are the only real Americans.
@Hazel:
“we’re not going to get there by insisting that white people are the only real Americans.”
Just so. However, that raises the question of what we should insist upon in terms of being considered a Real American. If it’s nothing, then as Teddy Roosevelt said, a mere “polyglot boarding house” with no door.
If it’s something, then what?
Charles, I think you have much more faith in Sociology as a science than I do but its good to know that the man behind The Protestant Work Ethic idea thought deeply about the nature of science 🙂
I appreciate your caution. I too worry about the collapse of post-WWII nation states like Yugoslavia, Portuguese/East Timor, Iraq, Syria, and the head scratcher that is South Sudan but I’m not convinced that the patterns in those cases apply generally to the immigration based “colonies” like the U.S. and Canada.
My intuition is that immigration is potentially more problematic and destabilizing in the U.S. compared to Canada. That is not what I find interesting. What is surprising is that Canada seems to have conducted a natural experiment with immigration and none of the social ills seem to have materialized that a cautious person would expect.
Brampton doesn’t look and act like some kind of multi-cultural Shangri-La, it looks and acts exactly like a Canadian working class suburban city including a more right-of-centre political orientation compared to the more left-of-centre Toronto city-core.
Like handle, I view the history of India through the lens of continuous ethno-linguistic-religious violence and I’m aware of the problems the Indian diaspora has in places like Fiji and various Caribbean islands. But none of that seems to be an issue in Brampton, at least not that I’m aware of, or not any worse than the animosity between existing diasporas. Its weird and, if nothing else, deserves careful consideration.
“Personally though, I think a future with less identity politics would be far superior, but we’re not going to get there by insisting that white people are the only real Americans.”
The amount of identity politics we have will be based on how diverse we are. The more the nature and interests of those groups differ, the more identity politics we will get. The interest of low IQ subgroups is so vastly different than high IQ subgroups that it’s very hard to share policy or cultural preferences.
Take those areas that are already majority-minority? Do we have more or less identity politics? Obviously more. Baltimore is all identity politics all the time. The New York City School Superintendent is training his staff that “merit is a concept of white supremacy”.
To the extent we can limit or even remove the people causing the identity politics (low IQ brown people) it will decrease. To the extent we get more of them identity politics will increase. This is an empirical fact, not a matter for debate.
It is also a fact that in order to fight the injustices of brown people, whites need to stop blaming themselves for their dysfunctions. This only feeds their appetites for using victim based ideology and rhetoric to foist injustice on whites.
So call it a two pronged approach. Lower % brown and unify the actions of % white. That’s the best path to success based on actual experience rather than wishful theory.
I don’t think we will collapse into sub-saharan anarchy because we won’t have a 90%+ subsaharan population or sub-saharan levels of development. But I do think we could over time become more like countries that are like the racial mix we are heading towards.
What is South America like? Poorer. More dysfunctional. More favelas. Politics and conflict often centering around skin tone. This was Tyler Cowen’s prediction, and it was also the prediction in The Bell Curve when immigration was discussed.
Another candidate is a place like Malaysia. I had a lot of people from Malaysia in my college, their state oil company sent them over to get an education. In Malaysia there is a competent Chinese minority and an incompetent Malay majority. The Chinese are treated as second class citizens. They aren’t entitled to the same education. If they own a business, they have to hand 30% of it over to a Malay. It’s a lot of nasty stuff.
The Malays of course say the Chinese are holding them down and their dysfunction is the Chinese fault. They say this despite the fact that both groups started out as impoverished colonial subjects of the British and the Chinese never did one damn thing to the Malays. People don’t need a history of slavery or redlining or whatever else to blame other people for their problems. They don’t do so because it’s true, they do so BECAUSE THEY CAN. They have the numbers, so they can.
Amy Chua wrote a whole book asking people to stop bringing democracy for Southeast Asia because once it becomes a numbers game superior minorities like the Chinese inevitably become second class citizens.
So yes, I expect America to become poorer and more dysfunctional. I expect areas with high concentration of diversity to become particularly bad. I expect that the hollowing out of the white suburban tax and commerce base which is subsiding them will make things even worse. And I expect cultural and economic persecution of whites to accelerate based on brown/progressives increasing electoral ability to do so without repercussion.
It will be a more upscale version of an ethnically tense middle income country like South America or Malaysia, which is to say a huge step down from today.
Personally though, I think a future with less identity politics would be far superior, but we’re not going to get there by insisting that white people are the only real Americans.
We’re also not going to get there if we insist that white Americans are responsible for the problems of non-white Americans.
(“Oh, but they are” comes the response of so many people who think they are good-hearted and enlightened.)
It’s pretty obvious that the “New World Melting Pot Countries” are different from the “Old World Countries” of Eurasia. They are also different from any country on the continent of Africa–with the partial exception of South Africa which is a sort of outlier and in some ways *sui generis*.
Countries like the USA, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Argentina don’t have as the basic societal matrix a number of territorial rooted ethnocultural groups the way most Old World countries do.
New World melting pot countries tend to have cheaper land which is easier to buy and sell with clear title. The inhabitants move around a lot more, and the cities have long been “melting pots.” Immigrants have tended to assimilate into the dominant language over a few generations.
It’s false to say the USA has always had heavy immigration, but it’s true to say that 100 years ago the cities were already “full of foreigners who didn’t speak English.” I think for that quote I’m channeling the recently deceased Hungarian American historian John Lukacs.
My point: The challenges for a country like the USA are different. Probably it can absorb a million or so legal immigrants every year without much trouble in an average year. My guess is that Jefferson would have been surprised. Alexander Hamilton would have approved of the ambition, the relentless churn from newly arrived strivers seeking to destabilize the smug elites currently at the top.
Challenges as I see them–You make your list and I’ll make mine.
1. Who is allowed to come here and who is excluded? How do we exclude highly determined people who want to come here illegally? “Yes, we are letting one million people permanently move here this year. But not you. Never you. Not on your life.”
2. How to manage the labor market to absorb new comers while discouraging dependency, sloth, and irresponsibility. Don’t we have enough home grown dependency, sloth, and irresponsibility already? Some immigrants are demonstrably better than the average American citizen–some are far worse. Who shall judge, and how to tell? Riddle me that, riddler!
3. How to manage political discontent with the inequality that will continue to exist and is likely to become more extreme? Exhibit A might be the predominance of Chinese and Chinese American strivers in NYC’s competitive high schools.
4. Do we want a welfare state? Can we have a welfare state in an ever-more diverse country in which people can come and bring in their relatives, including their elderly relatives? Show me how that works in the long run.
5. Do we want a minimum wage? Show me how that interacts with large streams of low productivity unskilled migrants who may not speak English. Have you noticed that the same party that loudly advocates for open borders also advocates for raising the minimum wage and expansion of rent control and free health care and free college? What could go wrong?
All good things won’t go together. Generally speaking, all good things don’t go together.
Somebody gains and somebody loses from current and future immigration. This can be obvious in some circumstances–citizens born here and murdered by an immigrant lose, as do their families.
Immigrants from low productivity anarchic environments that lack rule of law and a commercial code are highly motivated to come here. If such immigrants come here and bring in many family members by chain migration, they win the most.
Does the US get any net benefit from such family / village /clan networks? How can we tell? Worse–is there something troublesome about such people? Normans were ferocious and pugnacious for hundreds of years. Are Somalis the same way? I’m not certain I want to find out! Cochrane and Harpending argued that “Every culture selects for something.” Are you certain that they are wrong?
Further reading on one man’s view of Somalis: Richard Dowden’s book (2010) on Africa, with a nice chapter on his time living in Uganda among the Baganda and how much he liked it. And then the chapter he has on Somalis: “These people are crazy!”
Like Steve Sailer’s comment on Chechens: “These people scare me!”
At times the USA has struck gold–scientists and other scholars fleeing Hitler. At times not so much–career criminals specialized in running criminal enterprises. Claire Sterling’s book _Octopus_ on the Sicilian Mafia still makes instructive reading.
6. There’s a religion factor, in the sense that every European country with Muslim immigrants has a Muslim issue. I don’t expect the USA to entirely dodge that problem. Christopher Caldwell’s book from about ten years is still relevant. The late Robert Leiken’s more recent book as well.
For the record, I don’t think I’m anti-Muslim–the issues internal to Muslim cultural struggles are being imported here. As a liberated female Muslim in the US how she feels about the arrogant young man from her country, half her age and just arrived, who refused to shake her hand and presumes the right to boss her around. Is this something we are ready to manage?
7. Refugees and asylees pose an additional issue. There is a lot of suffering in the world. Should refugees from the Great Lakes of Africa move to the front of the queue to come to the USA? Why?
8. The US has incredible strengths and incredible assimilationist powers. Many immigrants and refugees I know personally seem to regard the US much more favorably than liberal intellectuals who were born here. As a nation, the US has a lot of options. I don’t think that the strengths of the US are grounds for insouciance or a lack of prudence.
9. Periodically the old book _Suicide of the west_ by James Burnham seems relevant. Chilton Williamson’s book review essay at his website is worth reading.
Here is a line stuck in my head from Williamson:
“the liberal, and the group, nation, or civilization infected by liberal doctrine and values, are morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself.”
You bring up Africa, I counter with well, the UK – which is part English, part Welsh, part Scottish, and part Irish.
The English and the Scottish were at war with each other on and off for roughly a millenia, sometimes even when they were part of the same country. And Anglo-Irish relations…do I even have to say it? Is your idea that everything will be fine in the United States after a few centuries of inter-ethnic warfare? What a prospect.
This is t what happens, and history is pretty clear about it.
It’s odd that I should have to convince you of this, but human beings are eternal tribes. The ‘dominant group’ that white supposedly are today is the result of just a few generations of merging (or rather eroding if boundaries in identity) of various groups once not dominant (Italians, Jews, Catholic, etc.). When everyone in a country is Protestants, the fault lines are between different sects of Protestantism; when a catholic minority arrives, the catholic-Protestant fault line becomes most important. And should Protestantism lose its majority as Jews, Muslims, and Sikhs enter, there doesn’t cease to be a dominant group; it just ceases to be ‘Protestantism’ and becomes ‘Christianity.’
Regarding ethnic groups in the US, ‘white people’ becoming a minority doesn’t necessarily bode the end of dominance by some group. Indeed, the progressive notion of ‘people of color’ is an effort to create and identity around not being white; if successful, in a hundred years it will just be that ‘people of color’ are the dominant group over the ‘white’ minority.
If you look at cultural identity throughout history, successful identities we’re the ones that grew to include a large enough coalition of people to secure dominance. The definition of a Roman gradually expanded to include Italians, then the culturally Roman Gauls and Spaniards, etc. and while a hierarchy remained where the people of Rome maintained a superiority complex, the key ethnic fault line between “Romans” and “barbarians” changed with the composition of the empire.
And reading the likes of Te-Nehisi Coates, it’s doubtful the new dominant coalition will be any more inclined toward inclusivity. Once one realizes that out-group antipathy wasn’t some invention by white people (a rather modern construction itself as used today) to which others are impervious, there’s little reason to expect moral progress just by cycling through who plays what role in the next round of the game.
I agree, Ayanna Pressley’s racism is digusting. Call it ethno-nationalism or tribalism or just identity politics if “identity politics” sounds more charitable.
But whatever you call it, you should still force yourself to read the words, disgusting as they are. “We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice.”
The old name for that kind of thinking is thinking with the blood, translated from the original German, and it’s not compatible with the political order of enlightenment and reason, of loyalties beyond tribal loyalty. It’s the antithesis of individual thought.
She’s got this essentialist idea about who counts as black and who doesn’t, about who speaks for all the Muslims of the world and who is a traitor to Islam.
Cate Blanchett’s version is to vote with your uterus instead of your brain. Linda Sarsour says that Ayaan Hirsi Ali doesn’t “deserve” to be a woman.
The liberal idea is that individuals have minds of their own. But the identitarians believe that races have consciousness and that people must think with their blood and their body parts.
Who thinks like that? We know from opinion polling that this ideology is more common among wealthy white women than among what Pressley calls “brown faces” and “black faces.” As it happens.
The culture of Pressley and Sarsour and Blanchett isn’t a culture of tolerance or individualism or logical thought. It’s not even politics in the sense of reasoned debate and persuasive speech. A rational animal doesn’t speak for some mute mass defined by its melanin levels or body parts.
Nikki Haley can speak for herself. Clarence Thomas is his own man. No matter what Pressley would have them say.
I’ve read Hazony’s book. It’s a pretty lame work in my opinion, and I’m the kind of person who had been thinking along the same direction for a while and who should be totally biased in the direction of a favorable opinion. It may be as good a case as it is possible for someone to make without stepping on a career-ruining PC landmine, so maybe it deserves a boost and more lenient treatment via some kind of golf handicap system, benefiting from a Straussian-by-Necessity Discount.
More later, but in the meantime, here’s a link to another interesting review: https://jacobitemag.com/2019/07/09/nationalism-qua-nationalism/
I’m eager to hear the Handle (and the Kling) review or at least reaction to Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift.
Have you read it, and if so, do you think Whiteshift is worth it? I’ve heard conflicting things about it.
At any rate, there is another way to interpret Hazony’s work.
The problem is a fundamental one: which political arrangements are ‘legitimate’?
We could start with some political theory and maybe logically work it out, and then criticize existing arrangements to the extent they deviate from the ideal.
Or we could be ‘results-oriented’ and start with what we want, which is for particular existing arrangement to be legitimate, and the try to infer the kind of political theory and historical legerdemain would produce that outcome, with the necessary implication that any alternative theory which comes up with a different answer is wrong and evil.
Am I being too cynical with this kind of speculation? Maybe.
But in case you’ve been living in a cave since 1948, it seems to me that the state of Israel has a particular problem with whether or not it is considered legitimate by other countries and influential people (both in terms of its political operations and arrangements, and even as regards its very existence), that is kind of an extreme case of the general problem of the entire system of nation-states being fundamentally illegitimate and incompatible with the logical implications of progressive ideology.
Maybe you thought all that stuff the Commies said about internationalism and making The Internationale their leftist anthem was just about people and countries getting along, but no, they were totally serious: no more countries. Your nationality and citizenship is an accident of birth, any favoritism or particular affection for your homeland or compatriots is essentially racism and bigotry, borders are arbitrary invisible lines that are accidents of history – mostly the history of crime on a mass scale – anything but universal brotherhood and sharing the world in common is merely privilege extended, and so forth. To the extent that nation-states still exist, it’s a matter of demographic inertia (and we can dissolve the populations and elect new ones) and temporary practical necessity the tolerance of which should be terminated just as soon as it’s feasible to end them for good, for instance, by irreversible absorption and subsumation into larger and larger multi-national entities, in unions that are always getting closer, stronger, and more perfect, i.e., with increasingly tyrannical central authorities. Leading, in the final analysis, to the end of the road and One World Government. Go ahead, try and Brexit after that thing’s in place. Fat chance.
So, like I said, the problem is that progressivism is the dominant ideology on the planet, and that’s a problem for anybody who likes their nation-states the way they are. Japan, for instance. Maybe America too. But in particular, Israel, because they are teetering on the very edge of the progressive legitimacy index, (and would be no matter what they did really), and if you fall off the edge you get the apartheid-era South Africa / Rhodesia treatment.
Indeed, that’s what Israel has already been getting from leftists and progressives all around the world for a long time. But they need America to remain a staunch ally, and the absolute most dangerous thing that can happen is that American progressives finally dump Israel for good, the risk of which becomes even greater if the question of Israel’s legitimacy becomes perceived as a clear left-right split and ideological identifier, because, by the logic of intersectionality, you’re either all in for the whole ideological portfolio of tenets, or you’re out.
So, you see the trouble they are in, which is also the same trouble any pro-nation-stater is in, including American Nationalists.
So, again, what you really need is an intellectual counter to the current trend, and a theory and history story that tells us that internationalism or anything like it is actually evil imperialism, and that American and Israel and the bunch of existing ethnic nation-states that aren’t really racist like South Africa and Rhodesia were, are the kind of states which are genuinely legitimate. And, by implication, that those states have limited but also fundamental collective rights to manage the composition of their own population and control the movement of people across their borders.
But all this seems to be the ideological battle royale backdrop motivating this kind of second-wave neoconservatism.
How would Hazony have defended the proposal to adopt the US Constitution over and against the Articles of Confederation?
I’m guessing he would say something like the “tribes” of the states had come together during the Revolution to join in the big fight for independence and specifically characterized by – and intended from the start to be – a new unified community of shared common existence, with some delegation of power from the tribes to the new common and collective entity reflecting their union.
The various adjustments to the distribution of authorities and processes for using it in response to emergent exigencies were not therefore the imposition of a new ‘imperialist’ philosophy or mindset but just refinements – relatively minor in the grand scheme of things – to what had already been established at the founding and more or less in keeping with the spirit of the merging influence of that event.
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
-Yeats
“In fact, however, a closer look at both the historical foundations of most political orders, as well as the conditions that enable states to continue to flourish, reveals relations more like those of a family…”
Hazony does not cite to it, but David Aberbach wrote a 2003 article in the journal Nations and Nationalism well worth reading entitled “The Poetry of Nationalism” that provides much more historical context on the post-French Revolution vicissitudes of nationalism.
Thinking in terms of poetry, one rarely encounters stirring calls motivating free men to leave home to fight and die for cosmopolitanism or to shed their attachment to the soil their fathers’ tilled in favor of being deemed fungible with every other human on the planet and freedom to enjoy global income equality and live in rental units designed, owned, and administered by bureaucrats in the employ of supranational entities.
One does frequently encounter, over the centuries and in widely scattered societies, deep ambivalence about the political state in which one finds oneself and the yearning for a state representing one’s familial identity and local interests. States offering subsidiarity and permitting individual autonomy one suspects are more congenial to a majority of people. And this is Hazony’s strongest argument against empires like the EU (see pages 151-152).
Also, Harzony, sadly, ignores the always relevant example of Portugal, and thus does not address the question of Salazar’s neo-corporatism as a species of nationalism separate and apart from others, with important examples of conditions that enable a state to flourish.
“Corporatism” is best understood as something akin to what Keynes advocated: “semi-autonomous bodies within the State–bodies whose criterion of action within their own field is solely the public good as they understand it, and from whose deliberations motives of private advantage are excluded–bodies which in the ordinary course of affairs are mainly authonomous within their prescribed limitations….”
The Estado Novo, Salazar’s Portugal, embraced this vision through a Catholic lens informed by late 19th century Catholic social teaching. It embodied a bottom-up vision of governance.
Of particular note, the Article XIV of the 1933 Constitution of Portugal was devoted to the institution of the family, stating “Withe the object of protecting the Family, it appertains to the State and to local authorities: (1) to encourage the establishment of separate homes under healthy conditions, and the institution of the family household… ..(3) to establish taxation in accordance with the legitimate expenses of the family… ….”
The rise of the administrative state and the ascension of the US supreme court to absolute monarch status also draws attentions to conditions in Portugal that allowed it flourish for a while and survive a bit longer. Unlike in the US and its federalism honored in the abstact at best, however, Salazar was wise enough to build subsidiarity into his governance. An early foundational law provided that “The State shall reduce to the indispensible minimum the sphere of action of its officials in the national economy” and an legal decree further declared that the state could only survive if its organs were administered through organs as far as possible removed from the the Portuguese equivalent of Washington, DC. National regulation was understood to be a last resort.
That such an ambivalent creature, a constitutional monarchy of sorts, as many decades tells us something about conditions that permit a state to endure.
We see it replayed in the fawning admiration of so many US public intellectuals and academics for China’s governance at times recognizes the important role that subsidiarity plays in the Chinese communist party.
Given the global death of democracy and the impending supplantation of nation states by supranational entities, the new class of tyrants, as well as any surviving nationalists, would do well to incorporate meaningful subsidiarity into their machinations. In this context, whether you see him as tyrant or not, Trump’s attempts to drain the swamp, as rearguard and minimalist an effort as they have been, are to be lauded and encouraged to develop more expansive ambition.
I think Hazony has a very narrow/weird view of nationalism that he argues is the opposite of Imperialism. The modern U.S. and EU are imperial from his perspective. Salazar’s Estado Novo was unquestionably imperial. The Catholic Church is also imperial according to Harzony. Ironically, Salazar’s Portugal is not an example of Nationalism in this model.
An ethical claim is either universal or it’s not. If universal, then there are only pragmatic reasons not to impose it on others, not moral reasons. And once the benefits outweight the costs, such imposition becomes morally compulsory as necessary to establish justice. If a state conceives of itself as having a mission to further certain universalist moral principles, then when it becomes strong enough, it insists upon them from, or imposes them upon, weaker parties.
That’s Hazony’s “Imperialism”, as a baked-in-the-cake inevitable feature of any political philosophy that deviates too much from “mind your own business” Westphalian “Nationalism”.
I am not convinced of the most successful nation-states are built around a family like nationalism. Look at the US:
1) Honestly most of our history (thru 1941) nationalism for the United States was not that high and most people lived more in local community oriented society. The US literally fought a huge Civil War in 1861 and local communities varied greatly within even the same cities. (For instance in New York, there was plenty of ethnic segregation with areas of the city for African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Irish-Americans, etc.)
2) The one constant of US history is there has been plenty of Immigration here and the new entrants are always the one most disliked by the natives. (Irish need not apply.) California had loads of anti-Immigrant and anti-minority ‘Understandings’ instead of defined Jim Crow laws.
3) Yes the US did have a burst of Nationalism during WW2 and the immediate Post-War boom that collapsed during the Vietnam war and the 1970s economy.
4) I think one constant of the US economy is there is in search for workers that accept lower wages!
5) I still understand how make Nationalism work long term if our economic elite, such as the Koch Brothers or Apple, show no sense of economic nationalism. Does the average worker think our economic elite care a hoot about them?
6) The obvious example of family nationalism and economic policy is Japan Inc. and their nation seems even in more of economic rut than the US is.
“The one constant of US history is there has been plenty of Immigration here”
That’s false. In 1910, the foreign-born were 15% of the U.S. population. A series of changes starting in WWI and which culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924 significantly reduced immigration numbers, especially from countries which were not already well-represented in the population’s composition in 1890. By 1965, the foreign-born percentage had dropped to under 5%, until the Hart-Celler Act opened the flood-gates, pushing it up to what some estimate to be an all-time high today.
So as Cowen has pointed out, there seems to be a pendulum-swing negative-feedback mechanism where the proportion of foreign-born feeds into levels of general comfort or anxiety among natives enabling or provoking political change.
Advocates of increased immigration would be wise to assuage those anxieties, as their predecessors did in 1965, but instead tend to demonize them, which is probably strategically unwise on a purely practical level, but also likely contributing to certain political changes we all get to enjoy experiencing today.
It is true that on both sides there is a lot of demonizing and in reality Immigration policy is more of spectrum of opinions. However I bet the median voter is fairly close to our current Immigration with modest changes.
1) The strangest part of Immigration policy is the more pro-Immigration voters live in areas where Immigration is the heaviest, the 4 SW border states with Nevada and New York, not the areas with least immigration. (This is one reason I find the issues of Rust Belt come from higher Immigration levels as this is where they live the least.)
2) In terms of Immigration, I bet most people are fine with 1M immigrants per year, decreased Illegal Immigration, and the protection of DACAs. That is close to median voter with maybe 600K – 800K Immigrants, etc. (I more of family Immigration not a skilled ones to be honest.)
2a) I do with Ds would put together better plans to legally cycle through asylum as most of the Central American families are simply sent home in six months. (Of course the Trump administration could put something together as well.)
3) The other weird reality of Immigration battles, is we are seeing an increase of Asian Immigrants not Mexico/Central Americans ones.
Or alternatively they would take s more assimilationist stance rather than all but encouraging gbettoization outright. A nation can undergo profound compositional changes more easily if everyone believes some essence of it endures.
I think he’s using “nation” not in the sense of “shared genetic inheritance” but in the sense of “shared understanding of who we are and what’s worthy of respect about us”. I think American progressives base their answers to this off the civil rights movement. Conservatives seem to base their answers off WWII, the American Revolution, etc. People who base their answers off technological and economic progress tend toward libertarianism. Differing ideas of what America is and should be create the conditions for disagreement about day-to-day matters.
Like Kling said about the utility of scaling up Dunbar feelings past Dunbar numbers, if the group isn’t kin, it’s useful to have some kind of adequate kinship-substitute, and one approach is a “fictive kinship” mediated by shared ideology and commitments, which is really a kind of “spiritual kinship”, e.g., “Any Christian anywhere is my brother,” which can encourage integration via a form of merger ethnogenesis which softens former perceptions of distinct identities and loyalties, eventually to the point of social irrelevance.
But the trouble is, if you want the benefits of perceived kinship, then you actually have to have something rather than nothing, and it’s important not to fight too much or too openly about it, because without some kind of fallback commonality which induces restraint (e.g., actual kinship) those fights tend to escalate and get out of control.
The traditional restraint that actually worked in history was brute force. State-builders look like Genghis Khan, Otto von Bismark, Ieyasu Tokugawa, and Kim Il-Sung- they have very bloody hands. For obvious reasons, I can’t really recommend it.
Take something simple. There is a row over the fact that the Superintendent of School for NYC has called “merit” a “white supremicist concept” and is teaching that to staff who will then teach it to our children.
We can’t even agree “merit = good”. Or “merit should be rewarded so people do meritous things.”
Of course I can understand why. Merit = useful and pleasant. Some people are more useful and pleasant than others. And some groups have better ratios of meritorious individuals than others. If you don’t have much merit, and your group doesn’t have much merit, why would you want “merit” to be high status in your society? That’s not good for you and yours. You would want to organize society on some metric other than “merit”, preferably one where you would be on top.
The problem of course is we made merit high status because having it high status tends to create a society where meritorious people do good things that benefit us all. So it’s a big sacrifice to throw that away.
And of course what is to replace it. Rewards to those that that complain more? Punishment for those that try to avoid all this nonsense (White Fragility Theory)?
Some of these basic conceptions of how society should run are fundamentally at odds. And they are fundamentally at odds because when the nature of the individuals in society and its constituent groups differs to much there is little Venn diagram equilibrium where the incentive structures of each can overlap in a stable equilibrium that promotes a healthy society.