Historically, leftists have favored free speech when they did not have the power they do today. For example, during the 1950s’ McCarthy era, the left—already well entrenched in the media and elite universities—was mainly concerned to protect communist professors and other leftist dissidents—many of them Jewish—who were targeted by Congressional committees. Their political views stifled by restrictions on communism, their response was to create a culture in which free speech was viewed as sacrosanct. Inherit the Wind (by Jerome Lawrence Schwartz and Robert Edwin Lee) was written to oppose McCarthyism.[1089] Another famous example of anti-McCarthyism from the 1950s is Arthur Miller’s The Crucible which implicitly condemned the House Un-American Activities Committee by comparing their hearings on communist infiltration to the Salem witch trials in Puritan Massachusetts.
However, the rise of the left to cultural dominance has coincided with the power of organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC—another de facto Jewish organization[1090]) and the Anti-Defamation League that care nothing for free speech and specialize in getting people fired and ostracized for thought crimes. There is clearly a Jewish ethnic aspect to this transformation.[1091] While there are endless tears for Hollywood screenwriters blacklisted during the anti-communist fervor of the 1950s and since promoted to cultural sainthood,[1092] don’t expect our new elite to condemn witch hunts against the Dissident Right. And don’t expect any time soon to see a hit Broadway play based on an allegory in which the SPLC is implicitly condemned for its persecution of race realists and White advocates.
The lesson is that the left will not give up its cultural dominance without a battle and they will be utterly unprincipled in how they attempt to remain in power. The left’s power resides in its ability to engage in psychological manipulation by occupying the moral and intellectual high ground in the media and universities; it resides in its ability to shape incentives and disincentives in the workplace; it resides in its ability to import a new left-leaning electorate. If all these fail, force can and will be used.
Appendix to Chapter 8: Recent
Cultural Deterioration:
Some Cultural Correlates
of the Rise of a New Elite
____________________________
It has been noted that the English Civil War was a fundamental breaking point in the history of the West. However, another watershed era was the 1960s. The outcome of the English Civil War result in the gradual ascendency of a new elite. The success of the 1960s countercultural revolution has also resulted in the ascendency of a new elite which has rapidly changed the country. The eclipse of the old WASP-dominated elite in America is described in Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (see Chapter 6);[1093] the rise of the new Jewish-dominated elite is described in my book The Culture of Critique. While the ultimate loser of the English Civil War was the aristocracy, the ultimate loser of the 1960s countercultural revolution is the White population of America (and ultimately the West as a whole), but especially the White working class.
While the most important consequence of the 1960s countercultural revolution has been the colonization of millions of non-Europeans into the West to the point that traditional White populations will become minorities in this century if this is not reversed, there have also been dramatic changes in the culture of the West. This appendix discusses the effects of this cultural revolution on the family and on recent increases in mortality particularly affecting the White working class.
The General Cultural Decline in America since
the 1960s
A theme of The Culture of Critique is that the rising Jewish elite was fundamental to the success of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, whether as leaders of campus radicals or promoting the sexual revolution.[1094] Regarding the sexual revolution, higher-IQ people suffer to a lesser extent than lower-IQ people from the erosion of cultural supports for high-investment parenting and the decline in religious belief involving traditional Christian sexual attitudes. This was especially a theme of the chapter on psychoanalysis that focused on the effects of the sexual revolution.[1095]
Although the West had developed a decidedly individualist culture, there remained strong social controls on certain aspects of individual behavior, notably sexual behavior. These social controls were buttressed by the pervasiveness of Christian religious beliefs. Although there certainly were periods of greater and lesser controls on sexual behavior, in general and at least since the Middle Ages, Western culture had been characterized by monogamous marriage, high-investment parenting, and very low divorce rates, with non-monogamous sex relegated to an underground of prostitution.
In general, people on the lower end of the IQ distribution benefit more from the traditional social supports embedded Western culture—in particular, support for marriage and for mores against out-of-wedlock births. In my previous life teaching developmental psychology, the textbook chapter on the family had charts showing that beginning in the 1960s there have been dramatic increases in out-of-wedlock births and divorce, resulting in many more children being raised without fathers. This opened up new fields in child psychology as psychologists investigated the effects on children of these cultural shifts. The results are clear: divorce, single parenting, and out-of-wedlock births are strong risk factors in a wide range of child problems, including delinquency, criminality, poor performance in school, poor physical and emotional health, and early mortality.”[1096]
A major theme of Richard Herrnstein’s and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve is that divorce and other measures of family dysfunction are more common at the lower end of the IQ distribution.[1097] The only reason I use IQ is that it is studied much more and can be very precisely measured, but by using impulse control one could obtain similar findings. People at the lower end of the IQ distribution also have more difficulty controlling their impulses, are more prone to instant gratification rather than long-term planning and can be expected to be more prone to drug addiction.[1098] As a result, they suffer more from the erosion of cultural supports for high-investment parenting—delaying sexual intercourse, not getting pregnant before marriage, etc. In my high school—a Catholic school where the traditional sexual ideology was firmly in place—virtually no one was having sex. But that was in the late 1950s–early 1960s. Since the 1960s, there has been a very successful attack on this culture.
Traditional Christianity was a major part of those cultural supports. Quoting from The Culture of Critique:
As [Norman] Podhoretz notes, “it is in fact the case that Jewish intellectuals, Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Congress, and Jewish-dominated organizations such as the ACLU ... have ridiculed Christian religious beliefs, attempted to undermine the public strength of Christianity, and have led the fight for unrestricted pornography.”[1099] The fact is that psychoanalysis as a Jewish-dominated intellectual movement is a central component of this war on cultural supports for high-investment parenting ... .
Although other factors are undoubtedly involved, it is remarkable that the increasing trend toward low-investment parenting in the United States largely coincides with the triumph of the psychoanalytic and radical critiques of American culture represented by the political and cultural success of the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s.[1100]
These trends have occurred in all races, but they affect Blacks more than Whites because on average Blacks are around one standard deviation lower than Whites on IQ and, as noted in Chapter 8, they are lower on impulse control (Conscientiousness). Blacks have always had higher percentages of out-of-wedlock births, but the gap has widened since the 1960s.
This fits with J. Philippe Rushton’s ranking of evolved race differences.[1101] Sexual behaviors are heritable (i.e., genetically influenced): a study showed that before the sexual revolution, age of first intercourse was not substantially influenced by genetic differences because there were strong social norms against premarital sex; if there is no variation, then there can be no genetically influen
ced variation by definition. As a result, age of first sexual intercourse was not significantly heritable.[1102] So in my high school, since no one was having sex, age of first intercourse was not heritable. But after the sexual revolution it became heritable: people prone to a slow life history pattern and high control of impulses were more likely to delay onset of sexual behavior, avoid childbirth outside of marriage, and stay married. As would be expected given Rushton’s theory, the sexual revolution has been disastrous most of all for Blacks. In 1965, 24 percent of Black infants and 3.1 percent of White infants were born to single mothers compared to ~72 percent and ~29 percent now.[1103]
In his book Coming Apart, Charles Murray notes that for Whites beginning in the 1960s, there has been an increase in crime, and a decrease in religiosity, the work ethic, and marriage.[1104] For the upper-middle class, marriage fell from 94 percent to 84 percent between 1960 and 2010, but for the White working class it fell from 82 percent to 48 percent. For the White working class, never-married rose from 10 percent to 25 percent; and there has been dramatically lower workforce participation. Murray attributes this to a loss of “virtue,“ but doesn’t discuss the forces and motivations behind this massive cultural shift.
It’s common among Murray’s critics to claim that these shifts result from economic conditions rather than the broader culture. From this perspective, in the America of the early 1960s, a high school graduate might expect to find a job which would allow him to marry and enable his wife the leisure to stay at home and raise children. He could buy a house and a car, and still afford to take the family on a two-week vacation every summer.
The problem with this is that all the trends affecting marriage and the family started in the 1960s when the White working class was doing well, reaching its zenith in the early 1970s and stagnating thereafter.[1105] The steep upward trend in family and other aspects of social dysfunction began around 1960 and continued to climb until around 1990, when it temporarily fell back before reaching new highs. By 1970, when the White working class was at its economic peak, out-of-wedlock births had already increased threefold from 1960 levels.
There’s no question that the period from 1948 to the early 1970s was the golden age for the working class (non-supervisory production workers)—strong unions and no outsourcing of jobs. Since 1973, the income of this group has actually increased ~9 percent[1106]—much less than for the college-educated, but this is stagnation, not a disaster. By itself, it shouldn’t cause increases in family dysfunction.
Nor should it cause increases in mortality given medical advances in the areas of heart disease and cancer. Angus Case and Anne Deaton point out that any economic explanation must account for why stagnant incomes cause early mortality in Whites but not in Blacks or in Europe. “Even if we go back to the late 1960s, the ethnic and racial patterns of median family incomes are similar for Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, and so can provide no basis for their sharply different mortality outcomes after 1998.”[1107] This also rules out widening income inequality (“your income is going up faster than mine”), and it also precludes loss of virtue aided by generous welfare and disability programs—Europe also has strong programs in these areas.
In general, according to Case and Deaton, the increased mortality among the White working class begins in the 1990s. The first cohort to really show increased mortality was the one born in 1950—they were 40 years old in 1990 and thus the first generation to experience the countercultural revolution as teenagers. For every cohort after that, the increased mortality from drug poisoning, liver disease, alcohol, and suicide starts at an earlier age and is steeper—it gets to higher levels faster. These trends are higher among men than women and vary by education, with Whites with high school diplomas or less showing by far the worst effects.
Gina Kolata and Sarah Cohen elaborate on these findings based on their examination of 60 million death certificates from 1990–2014, but they pin the blame squarely on opioids, not on alcohol or suicide.”[1108]
In 2014, the overdose death rate from legal and illegal drugs for Whites ages 25 to 34 was five times its level in 1999, and the rate for 35- to 44-year-old Whites tripled during that period. … While the death rate among young Whites rose for every age group over the five years before 2014, it rose faster by any measure for the less educated, by 23 percent for those without a high school education, compared with only 4 percent for those with a college degree or more.
Another study also found that increases in deaths were not due to alcoholism and pinned the phenomenon squarely on the opioid epidemic. The authors note that mortality rates “took off around the time when prescription opioids became readily available, and it has kept rising steadily ever since.”[1109]
Given that the trend in mortality may has not occurred in Europeans, the cultural shifts inaugurated by psychoanalysis are not solely to blame.[1110] The general decline in the culture is separate from increases in mortality—just because family relationships are dysfunctional doesn’t imply greater mortality. However, I suspect that these two factors interact in the sense that if the cultural supports that existed up until the 1950s had remained in place, the White working class would not have succumbed to the opioid epidemic.
Again, people with a faster life history profile are less able to control their impulses and thus more prone to maladaptive behavior in a culturally permissive environment awash in drugs and where religious and other cultural constraints on behavior have been weakened. The combined effects of these two things—the cultural shifts brought about by the triumph of the countercultural revolution and the glut of opioid drugs—was a disaster for the White working class.[1111] In this regard, it’s interesting that the first generation to show increased mortality was the one that became teenagers in the 1960s.
As in The Culture of Critique, the movement to promote opioid use was originated by elites and based ultimately on pseudoscience created at the highest levels of the academic medical establishment, motivated by payoffs to a whole host of people ranging from professors in the academic-medical establishment down to sales representatives and general practitioner physicians.
A fundamental problem in dealing with this now is that the trends in increased mortality set in motion by these processes will continue no matter what governments do about prescription opioids. Increased regulation simply forces addicts into heroin and other illegal drugs. In fact, whereas in 2002 deaths due to prescription opioids were much higher than total of deaths due to heroin and synthetic opioids, by 2017 43,900 deaths were due to the latter, compared to only 17,000 involving prescription opioids.[1112]
The opioid phenomenon reflects the post-1960s culture of America. It is the product of elite culture, well-funded and with access to the most prestigious institutions of society. Because of this prestige, it was able to present essentially false data as science and have it accepted by the medical establishment. Similarly, in the case of the campaign to enact the 1965 immigration law, pro-immigration committees were funded by wealthy individuals, fraudulent academic studies were created on the benefits of immigration, positive articles about immigration appeared in the media, lobbyists were paid, and prominent people were recruited. A good example of the latter is that future president John F. Kennedy was recruited to put his name as author on a book titled A Nation of Immigrants which was actually written by Myer Feldman and published by the Anti-Defamation League.[1113]
Also similar is the neoconservative infrastructure, with well-funded think tanks, prominent spokesmen at prestigious universities, and a very large media presence. Neocons can be assured that if they are forced out of a job in the Department of State or Department of Defense, they will have many options to fall back on in academia, think tanks, or lobbying groups. Despite promoting disastrous policies, such as the war in Iraq, they are still a very powerful component of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.[1114]
Conclusion: The Transformative Effect of the 1960s Countercultural Revolution
The countercultural r
evolution of the 1960s has had a transformative effect on American society every bit as dramatic as the eclipse of the aristocracy and the Indo-European model of Western culture that began in the seventeenth century. This new culture is fundamentally based on importing non-Western peoples as clients of the left and as vital to a permanent leftist hegemony as already seen in states like California where even moderate conservatives are excluded from the political process; it is also seen by many of its strongest proponents as a guarantee against the rise of a White identity movement violently opposed to minority group interests.
If this transformation is not rolled back, it essentially implies the end of the ethnic core of Western civilization and very likely the entire set of cultural structures created by West. And because of the rise of non-White identity politics, it likely means the end of individualism as Whites coalesce into a cohesive group able to assert its interests in the new multicultural context.
9
The Liberal Tradition versus
Multiculturalism
_____________________________
This book has emphasized the liberal strain of Western culture stemming ultimately from European individualism which can be found at the very origins of the Western European peoples. As noted in several places, a fundamental aspect of individualism is that group cohesion is based not on kinship but on reputation—most importantly, a moral reputation as honest, trustworthy and fair.
There is much positive that can be said about these liberal-egalitarian cultural trends. One can easily see why an intellectual or religious leader would find that the aristocratic, fundamentally Indo-European culture that had dominated Europe for millennia had shortcomings. The aristocracy, originally composed of military leaders who had earned their positions in battle, had often become a politically and economically oppressive, parasitic elite—alienated from the people they ruled and, quite often, addicted to conspicuous consumption and degenerate sexual behavior, particularly in France.
Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition Page 39