physics, economics, chess, and a host of natural sciences.19
The relationship of Taylor’s American Renaissance group to Jews is in
some ways atypical of other white advocacy groups in America, including
other primarily intellectual organizations like Greg Johnson’s Counter-
Currents and Kevin MacDonald’s Occidental Quarterly. Taylor welcomes
Jews to his organization, has had several Jewish speakers at American
Renaissance conventions, and seems genuinely to like Jews on a personal
level. Taylor would surely like to see more Jews, at least European Jews,
join the ranks of supporters of American Renaissance. While he regrets
the fact that so many American Jews are hostile to the white identitarian
views he espouses, he believes Jews can be won over and could become
powerful allies.20
His embrace of Jews has led to tensions within his white- identity
movement since it includes at least some people openly hostile to Jews
and to the pernicious effect they claim Jews have had on white interests
in America. For what seems like tactical reasons, Taylor has sought nei-
ther to officially welcome, censure, nor expel from his movement those
14
144
M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
openly espousing anti- Semitic viewpoints. Such a neutral stance, how-
ever, has not always produced the group harmony Taylor clearly desires.
At one American Renaissance convention, an open clash erupted between
David Duke, an avowed enemy of Jews and their influence in America,
and Michael Hart, a Jewish astrophysicist who shares many of Taylor’s
views on race and American society.21
Family- Values Conservatism and Classical Liberalism
Between Shadows of the Rising Sun (1982) and White Identity (2011),
Taylor published another major book, Paved with Good Intentions (1992),
which set forth the socially conservative and “traditional values” side of
his thinking.22 Although it focuses on the downward spiral of the black
underclass in America, and on the unwise government policies that he
believes have contributed to it, this second book eschews the genetic- based
understandings of these developments that would play so prominent a
role in White Identity and many of his American Renaissance articles. There
is no genetically grounded “race realism” in this work, and in many ways
it resembles the kind of critiques of welfare and other public policies to be
found in books by the leading conservative and libertarian writers of the
time.23
When asked in an interview why he did not talk about genetic
differences in this second book, he replied that if he had talked about
IQ differences “it probably would have been impossible to get the book
published.” The question of race- based differences in mental and be-
havioral traits, he said, “is still very much a radioactive subject.”24 There
were many important things to be said about race relations and public
policies in the US aside from genes, Taylor reasoned, and Paved with Good
Intentions was his outlet for presenting them. The book sold fairly well to a
mainstream conservative and libertarian audience, something not true of
the overtly “race realist” White Identity. Taylor’s misgivings about getting
his genetic- based views on race published proved prescient; despite great
efforts, no mainstream publisher could be found to publish White Identity,
which had to be brought out by his own New Century Foundation.
Paved with Good Intentions starts out on the same major theme
that preoccupied Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his
1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.25 “There
is scarcely a social problem in this country that would not be well on
its way toward solution,” Taylor wrote in his own book’s introduction,
145
Jared Taylor and White Identity
145
“if Americans adopted a rule their ancestors lived by and took for
granted: They did not have children until they had a spouse and an
income.”26 Marriage has completely disappeared from many black
communities, Taylor noted, but such social decay was rapidly spreading
among whites as well, where illegitimacy and marriage breakups were
approaching the levels of those among blacks twenty- five years earlier
that had so alarmed Moynihan.
Taylor attributed these developments to a variety of changes that took
place in the 1960s, including more generous and more permissive wel-
fare payments for single mothers, the destigmatization of out- of- wedlock
births, the decline in the “shotgun wedding” tradition, and, in the case
of blacks, the development of an all- pervasive blame- casting and excuse-
making mentality that many white liberals reinforced. On this last point,
Taylor claimed that telling blacks their problems are mostly the result of
unremitting white racism denies to them the confidence they need to feel
in control of their lives, robs them of a sense of personal responsibility
and personal efficacy, teaches them to hate whites, and leads them to be-
lieve that improvement in their condition must await changes in white
attitudes and behavior. Such a message, Taylor says, not only has a poi-
sonous effect on black- white race relations but is devastating in terms of
recognizing the kinds of changes that are needed for blacks to effect their
own improvement.27
Paved with Good Intention contains lengthy discussions of government-
mandated racial preference policies, which Taylor sees as manifestly unfair
to the better qualified white and Asian applicants for jobs and university
positions. In addition, such policies, Taylor claims, reinforce among the
members of the supposed beneficiary groups the idea that advancement
in America comes not from hard work and genuine achievement, but
from investment in one’s status as victim and sufferer from past oppres-
sion. “Our crusade to undo the mischief of the past,” Taylor writes, “has
done mischief of its own, and by formally discriminating against whites,
it has stood both justice and the law on their heads.”28
Taylor believes that all laws requiring racial preferences should be
abolished, but like libertarians and classical liberals, he goes farther and
opposes most antidiscrimination laws, believing that government should
not be telling private institutions how they should be conducting their
business. He objects to laws interfering with the rights of private citizens
and private associations— including private colleges— to conduct their af-
fairs any way they choose, without having to please anyone else. Freedom
146
146
M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
of association should be accorded to private persons, private employers,
private colleges, and the like, without government interference. These as-
sociational rights were the traditional rights of Englishmen, Taylor says
and, until the last century, were traditional rights of most Americans. “I
think everything from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 onward,” he says, “is an
unconscionable invasion of federal g
overnment power into what should
be private decision making.”29
Taylor is consistent in his thinking on this in that, unlike defenders of
the Old South, he believes government- mandated segregation laws were
unjust: with freedom, people will tend to harmoniously self- segregate
on their own, he believes. He sees laws prohibiting interracial marriage,
which almost all southern states retained until they were declared uncon-
stitutional by the Supreme Court in 1967, as patently unjust. Taylor thus
combines with his white racial advocacy strong elements of traditional
“values conservatism” and classical liberal understandings of individual
associational rights.
American leaders of the past as race realists
A recurring theme in Taylor’s writings and public talks is his claim that
the ideas on race and racial identity that became dominant in America in
the latter decades of the twentieth century are historical anomalies and
out of tune with both common sense and human nature. They are also, he
tries to demonstrate, inconsistent with the views of many of the leading
statesmen of America’s past, including Thomas Jefferson and Abraham
Lincoln. Lincoln and Jefferson both believed, he points out, that a freed
black population could never live together in harmony with the dominant
white population in the US, and to this extent, he insists, they were “race
realists” just like he is. Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s pronouncements on these
matters are frequently quoted in American Renaissance articles and else-
where. Jefferson is cited:
Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these
people [blacks] shall be free; nor is it less certain that the two races,
equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit,
opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.30
Likewise, Lincoln is quoted:
147
Jared Taylor and White Identity
147
We have between us [whites and blacks] a broader difference than
exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or
wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great dis-
advantage to us both, as I think your race suffers very greatly, many
of them by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence.
In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a
reason at least why we should be separated.31
Lincoln and many other opponents of slavery in his time, Taylor points
out, supported the American Colonization Society, which sought to con-
vince free blacks to return to Africa or some other suitable location and es-
tablish their own society free from white interference or white oppression.
Lincoln asked Congress several times to appropriate money for this pur-
pose. Taylor insists that while Lincoln’s views on race are considered ret-
rograde by contemporary standards, they were realistic and true to human
nature in a way that most current thinking on race is not.32
Most American leaders of the past also believed, Taylor explains, that
racially homogeneous societies have a much easier time establishing
harmonious relations among their people than racially mixed ones.
This, says Taylor, is why the first naturalization act passed by Congress
in 1790 allowed only “free white persons” to become citizens. He quotes
in this context from a letter Harry Truman once wrote to his future wife
about the undesirability of race mixing (“I am strongly of the opinion
Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in
Europe and America”),33 as well as from Federalist Paper 2 in which its
author, John Jay, saw heaven’s blessing in the relative racial, religious,
and cultural homogeneity of the American people: “Providence has
been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—
a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same lan-
guage, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles
of government, very similar in their manners and customs.”34 Most of
America’s leading men throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and
early twentieth centuries, Taylor claims, held views on race similar to
his own. And those views were more in tune with the truth on these
matters, he insists, than the views that have become dominant since
the victories of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The latter, he
holds, combine fantasy, wishful thinking, and in some cases the cold,
self- interested logic of nonwhite groups seeking to replace whites as
America’s dominant population.
148
148
M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
The tensions and instabilities inherent
in multiracial societies
The belief that race consciousness is an important factor in human affairs
is not confined to Taylor or his readers. Where Taylor differs from others
is in the extreme salience he accords to race consciousness and the intrac-
tability of the tensions and disharmonies he believes it inevitably creates
in multiracial societies. When people of different races and ethnicities live
together in the same space and under the same government, there is no
end, Taylor claims, to the problems created. Even under the most favor-
able of circumstances, he believes, multiracial societies are always plagued
with intergroup tensions and disharmonies that are impossible to avoid.
Taylor expressed these beliefs most clearly in a discussion with the psy-
chologist Arthur Jensen (University of California, Berkeley):
It is my view that a sense of racial difference, even independent of
actual measurable differences, is sufficiently great so that any so-
ciety that attempts to build a multiracial nation is setting up what
may be an insuperable obstacle for its own development. I think
that to an unfortunate degree the mere fact of racial differences is
something that human beings are almost always conscious of. For
that reason, a society such as the United States, that is deliberately
and explicitly trying to build a society on the notion that race can be
made not to matter— which is in fact the unspoken assumption in
America today— is doomed to failure.35
This has remained Taylor’s settled belief from the very beginning of
American Renaissance, and although he has high regard for the Japanese
and other Northern Asians, as did the young Harry Truman, he wants
them to remain in Asia, not to overwhelm white people in America. He
is even more concerned that Mexicans, Africans, Afro- Caribbeans, and
members of various Hispanic and Middle Eastern groups remain in the
lands they currently occupy and not flood the US as immigrants.
Southern regional conservatism
Jared Taylor’s basic ideas show a clear affinity for, and to some extent
have developed out of, a distinct “Southern regional conservatism” in
America, which has roots going back to the American Civil War, the
149
Jared Taylor and White Identity
149
Reconstruction period, and the era of legalized segregati
on in the states
of the Old Confederacy. It was a form of conservatism forged by the very
peculiar situation of the American South, and the South’s anomalous po-
sition within a broader American society that affirmed principles of uni-
versal human rights and rejection of legal distinctions based on ethnicity
and race. “Compared to every other country in Western civilization,” the
Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote in a 1942 study of race relations
in the American South, the US “has the most explicitly expressed system
of general ideals in reference to human interrelations. This body of ideals
is more widely understood and appreciated than similar ideals are any-
where else.”36 Myrdal famously described these ideals as constituting an
American Creed, one drawing upon the biblical notion that all human
beings are children of God, and the proclamation in the Declaration
of Independence that “all men are created equal” and have inalienable
human rights. It was largely in reaction to these ideals, Myrdal explains,
that a distinctly white Southern form of social and political conserva-
tism developed that began in the nineteenth century in the struggle over
slavery. This Southern conservatism continued into the next century in
defense of segregation and in opposition to the US government’s attempt
to integrate schools and other aspects of southern life.37
In the period before the popularity of Darwinian evolutionary theory,
prominent Southern writers, including John C. Calhoun, George Fitzhugh,
and William Harper, developed arguments based on traditionalist and
pragmatic grounds for white supremacy, racial segregation, and the sub-
ordination of blacks in the slaveholding South.38 In a substantially modi-
fied form, the legacy of these thinkers would be carried over and gain even
greater saliency in the twentieth century as biological understandings
of racial differences came to dominate racial thinking among interwar
American eugenicists and racialists, including Lothrop Stoddard, author
of The Rising Tide of Color against White World- Supremacy, and Madison
Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race.39 Both of these writers
were influential in gaining support for the 1924 US Immigration Act that
tried to maintain the demographic dominance in America of whites from
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 26