ii) Solidifying Class Division by Claiming Moral Superiority
iii) It Gives the People What They Want
v) Conclusion
American multiculturalism became a major force after 1945, when the United States took on a global leadership role. The United Nations, a mutation of the failed League of Nations, and the moral drama of the Nuremberg Trials formed the spiritual locus of a new internationalist belief system.
Whereas the earlier spirit of the amateurish American policy elite had been nationalist (you can see statues in various minor New York parks of Euro-nationalist 1849-type figures like Garibaldi, constructed after the Civil War), the new spirit was founded upon a sense of universal obligation to world peace.
The failure of the League of Nations to stop Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia is still taught in America as a moral dramatization — a ‘never again,’ like the Holocaust is a ‘never again.’
The modern global elite perceive themselves to be the moral guardians of the planet, dedicated to preserving global peace. The prime crime is ‘genocide,’ even though the post-war order was created by a genocide of Germanic peoples and a nuclear spine-cracking of the Japanese empire motivated by explicitly racialist thinking in the US White House.
If you ever wonder why Jews and the Holocaust are such a Big Fuckin’ Deal for the American elite, it’s because the moral fairy tale about is a foundation of the global political system that governs international politics, law, military alliances, and finance. The IMF’s legitimacy rests upon the moral mythology around how America stopped the evil Nazis and nasty Bolsheviks from ruling o’er the West and the rest.
That the American elite was explicitly anti-Semitic, especially at the Cathedral, before and during WWII, could be conveniently exculpated and partially forgotten with the new myth.
By conveniently removing the Cross from American hyper-Protestantism, it made the ideology much more cross-compatible (at least in theory). It is very hard to manage a diverse empire on explicitly religious grounds, because it hands agitators a convenient cause for rebellion. If you say that your creed is based on tolerance of every religion (that strips itself of all elements incompatible with the always evolving hyper-Protestantism), then it is OK.
Subject cultures may have other Gods, but Prog must be first among all of them.
i) Skimming of Foreign Elites
Talent skimming is pursued by elite educational institutions and the corporations that recruit from them. This is explicitly argued for and is one of the reasons as to why the Ivy Leagues mandate racial quotas in admissions. It sounds much less ‘liberal’ when you call it a racial admissions quota, instead of a ‘diversity mandate,’ but that is what it is.
The intention behind this policy is to populate the world with elites that are friendly to American values. It is also to deprive foreign societies of their most talented leaders, and to also ensure that they maintain primary loyalties to American ideology, especially in the realm of economics (which is Keynsian-Schumpterian with a touch of Chicago if you wind up there).
The Ottoman Empire in particular practiced a similar method at a smaller scale, although they did so with more aggression and formalized it more thoroughly, with the Janissary system. Because countries prefer native elites, it is much easier to rule them by attracting or kidnapping natives, training them into the imperial culture, and then utilizing them as local governors. The particular focus on ‘education’ in the American Protestant tradition means that the US does this through its extensive international recruiting and racial quota system.
The fringe right tends to be deeply confused as to why the American elite seems to have no problem with ‘handling diversity,’ and that ‘SWPLs’ are always eager to foist degenerate minorities upon them in life and within corporations.
This is because at small private schools, the only racial minorities that you will ever encounter are sometimes more intelligent, cultured, and high-achieving than their local counterparts (with many exceptions that prove the general rule).
It’s possible for a future Matt Yglesias at Dalton to never encounter a black person with an IQ below 110 in any life context, especially if he doesn’t play a sport that low class blacks play — and anyway, rich children do not play in the same sports leagues.
ii) Solidifying Class Division by Claiming Moral Superiority
You will see this most readily in the non-profit world, which is funded mostly by wealthy people with an internationalist outlook. Commercial elites understand that in a democratic system, their fortunes are always vulnerable to a sudden outbreak in populism. One of the ways that they maintain political and intellectual influence is to manage the flow of America’s rivers of meat.
Tom Wolfe effectively parodized this class in Bonfire of the Vanities. What prevents regular riots in America are a constant stream of payoffs to agitators, often mediated or funded partially by the Federal government. The baby boomer revolutionaries set up the infrastructure for this in the 1960s and 70s, and can be seen as a negotiated peace that ended the (often Jewish-lead) domestic terrorist conflicts of the period.
You usually know that someone is low class (uneducated) by their insensitivity to the latest developments in hyper-Protestant religious norms. If someone made a ‘faggot’ joke in the workplace in 1995 or even 2003, most people would laugh along with him. Making the same faggot joke in 2014 would not only result in termination, but possibly a lawsuit and future un-employability today.
Theocracy works better when the doctrine is not continually shifting, but it helps to explain the Cathedral’s business model. If you do not stay abreast with the latest theological developments as expounded upon in e-pamphlets, op-ed pages, Tumblrs, tweets, GIF lists, and other such techno-religious sermons, you will run the risk of retarding your career advancement or even damaging it permanently.
To the extent that you can keep up with the latest theological-technological developments, you can increase your access to capital and general social approval. It also helps to protect you from the legal risks of not maintaining yourself within the grace of Prog and xir’s agents on Earth.
iii) It Gives the People What They Want
In the 1960s and ’70s, ‘the people’ — meaning the spiritual leaders of the West — developed a new theological strain called ‘environmentalism.’ While this doctrine has had its expressions throughout human history, in the United States it manifested itself at the same time as an inflationary-regulatory financial crisis (and consequent danger of loss of American supremacy) forced Nixon’s team to jerry-rig a solution.
To summarize, Nixon closed the gold window (as the revanchist de Gaulle’s policies which threatened to restore European independence by taking advantage of the low price fix and criticizing the dollar system). Soon after, Henry Kissinger took advantage of the diplomatic impasse between the USSR and China to begin a long US-China economic cooperation.
American hyper-Protestant theology reacted to the economic, racial, and environmental chaos by (through the implement of the Nixon-created EPA) to essentially make mass manufacturing in the United States illegal.
After doing so much to preserve the American empire, religious inquisitors at the Washington Post, using evidence provided by a rogue FBI agent, removed Nixon from the presidency for his sins.
The dollar system was given a new critical market in Japan (an occupied society to this day) and later China. American religious sensibilities favor spiritual work of the mind over material work with the hands. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn discusses this Protestant peculiarity in detail in his books.
The religious leaders of the People wanted to send as much physical work as possible overseas. And the People agreed. Who wanted to work on dreary assembly lines? Why deal with all the legal conflicts involved with pollution? Why not just send more of that production overseas to Asiatic societies that were eager for the business?
Hyper-Protestants already regarded physical work as close to sinful. Why not ‘outsource’ and ‘offshore’ as much sin as possible elsewhere?
This, combined with the West-wide moral eruption of 1968, ensured that the American empire held together. There would be no de Gaulle types to emerge later, and Asians (to generalize in a bigoted way) are too dull, slave-like, and militarily weak to rebel against American power in the Pacific.
However, to ensure that the East remains slaved to the West, global elites know that there must be some give and take to maintain this order without occupation. Hence, there is a special focus on permitting Asians to immigrate to the West to work primarily as engineers and scientists.
While some complain of the ‘bamboo ceiling,’ most are happy to take the wages and not complain. To the extent that there is Asian racial agitation, it is firmly within the hyper-Protestant tradition, and usually conducted by American-born Asians seeking greater political power.
Because US Asians tend to believe themselves to be the spiritual equals of white progressives, they often become angry when their self-perception does not match with reality.
Only one religious leader of any consequence, Niall Ferguson at Harvard (who divorced his original wife to marry a famous ex-Islamic negress), has stated in a loud and impolite way that this state of affairs will not hold for much longer. This reading has been symbolically resisted by religious leaders from Princeton — namely, Paul Krugman (who is much more sacred, enjoying a high position in the theology pages of the New York Times) and the exited Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, also of Princeton.
The international supply chain rests upon an internationalist, trans-racial theology and globalist culture. It is supported by a military system dominated primarily by the US Defense Department.
Artificially low prices within the US for certain classes of goods rest upon this religious-technological-military system which spans the globe. Knocking out any single one of these components would cause cascading failure. This is why any reform is so stridently (and effectively) opposed.
China did not elect to be America’s helper after Harvard asked it to, and has instead begun to attempt to extract its pounds of flesh.
iv) It Is All We Know
Multiculturalism is all that the rising class of Millennial elites know. What has been hammered into them in almost every speech they hear, every book that they read, every class that they take, is that maintaining this multicultural system is their primary goal in life and highest moral calling.
Systems either rot from within or are destroyed from without. The American elite has rotted within. You can see this on a cable TV network, HBO, well-regarded for its premium religious programming. Lena Dunham went to St. Anne’s, which is all you really need to know about the junior elite. No graduate of St. Anne’s or a similar school would regard her behavior as unusual or even immoral.
A young St. Anne’s student who would protest that chastity is a moral ideal for women would probably be expelled or socially ostracized if she gave a speech on that topic. Lena Dunham has been on the cover of Vogue. It is clear which belief system is higher status.
Lena Dunham’s classmates are already working in the US policy establishment, and they behave like her, and hold identical religious values.
St. Anne’s has had a reputation among parents of private school-bound children as being the #1 school in the borough in terms of placement rate to the Ivy League — moreso than stuffier prep schools in the area like Packer, with its vast athletic fields that recall the previous era of the American elite. St. Anne’s student-directed curriculum and loose approach to grading based on performance make it unusual relative to others in the area.
The American elite, being characteristic of democratic elites everywhere, selects for effective liars, who are skilled at misdirecting the attentions of the herd, while scrambling behind the scenes to keep the show going. Managing ‘diversity’ is all that the leadership class knows how to do, it is all they have been trained to do, and it is the job that is needed to maintain the current political machinery.
Democratic leaders excel in providing facile explanations for political and economic events to the masses, while blundering about in private, continually ‘informed’ by self-interested bands of consultants and lobbyists from higher social classes.
Speaking the magic Marxist vocabulary is all that most of the leaders know how to do. In Hoppe’s words, they are not qualified to be gas station attendants. Despite this, their unity ought to be split. Find exploitable divisions and put pressure on the fracture points.
This class holds the military in contempt. It does not treat politics as a serious matter. It is not a class that will be capable of maintaining power at the scale that it has. However, it needs to be provided with a suitable exit, a means of stepping down with dignity and a little money and territory besides.
Give America’s class of Gorbachevs their equivalents of Pizza Hut sponsorship deals — it makes the transition easier and more peaceful.
That the bureaucracy has wrong ends conducted by the wrong means does not really matter to the leadership class, which lurches from crisis to crisis, and will always prefer the job of producing a new strain of heresy to the task of good governance.
v) Conclusion
The symbolic end of the American post-war era will be marked by reversals of VE-Day and VJ-Day. The leadership class lacks the talents of people like Harriman, Kennan, and Kissinger — not that any of them were all that impressive given that they had a lot of resources and temporarily weak competition relative to previous generations.
The US has structured itself upon a crazy quilt economic structure, a strange and degenerate moral doctrine formed in the communes of 1968, and a military that can no longer provide security in a cost-effective way.
Increasingly, elite members of the military are switching loyalties to international security companies. Unable to maintain loyalty within its own security service (and eager to out-source sinful militarism, just as industrialism was outsourced for sinfulness), the State Department must rely upon mercenaries to maintain tenuous control over the Ukraine.
Why mercs?
Greystone Ltd. is now simultaneously providing security services for State while, even on their own website, announcing that it is also providing executive protection in Russia.
I approve of this traditional business practice, but one questions about whether or not this displays a conflict of interest within their client list. If I were Greystone, I would be sure to hew closer to the winning side.
Germany will, at some point, eject the US from its bases there. So will Japan. They will do this because the US leadership class is too distracted by domestic chaos and internal religious disputes to maintain its international empire. Once this happens, the international system will revert to a normal state.
A newly isolated United States will contain countless promising opportunities. But the adaptations will be wrenching. It will be important not to focus too much on score-settling or on taking advantage of widespread rage and dispossession among the general population. It will instead be more productive to focus on constructing more durable orders within the area.
Some positive aspects of the American continent:
- Capable of feeding enormous populations thanks to fertile land
- Security and economic benefits from access to both Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
- Inexpensive energy thanks to large oil and natural gas reserves.
- Large areas of undervalued urban real estate (due to security problems) & underused rural territory provides room for high-class expansion
- Buffer states in the form of weak neighbors to the north and south with large energy reserves
- Clean freight transportation possible on large river networks.
- Economic dynamism deriving from enclaves of high scientific and technological achievement in narrow areas.
- Back-to-Back World War Champs (success attracts success!)
The obstacles to the success of future North American states are owe to religious & social rather than material problems. Whereas other countries tend to need to overcome geographical handicaps to achieve greatness, North America is still some of the best real estate in the world.
And it still contains some of the highest quality people in the world.
Picking up the security slack of the multi-trillion dollar market currently occupied by the ossified monopolist American government is the largest opportunity of any kind to appear in the last 70 years.
Fret if you like about chaos: being an American, I prefer to think positively.
There is always the danger that, when you ‘out-source’ your core competency, that the firm you just out-sourced it to winds up devouring your former market. As the American government devolves into a poorly-run communications firm with a license to counterfeit currency, there is a good chance that more serious competitors will step in, so to speak.
The key to making a sensible transition is, as alluded to earlier, to provide people within the current power structure some more attractive inducements to abandon their posts. Foreign states are already doing this, probably far more effectively than any internet typists have at their disposal.
To return to a previous example, Vladimir Putin has more cash on hand with which to buy the loyalties of ex-SAS men operating out of Dubai than you or I are likely to have, and far more meaningful experience on how to manage such relationships.
Instead, what must attract defectors is a more spiritual incentive, and the promise of a more durable order to serve within than either preserving the sinking ship of the liberal state or defecting to a foreign state like China or Russia. It is notable that Edward Snowden defected not for a briefcase of cash, but because of his conscience.
Spurned elites may be tired of all the $50,000-per-plate protection payoffs, may prefer a better deal without having to teach their children Mandarin.
Multiculturalism may manifest itself most obnoxiously within the middle class (think a bumpkin woman who adopts a brood from Haiti because she got the idea from a supermarket tabloid), but their behavior must be understood as a mimicry of their betters. The aforementioned bumpkin makes bad decisions because her superiors are not looking out for her best long-term interests. Un-owned things become ruined with time, and effective self-ownership is a rare quality that we attribute to saints and great kings rather than ordinary people.
And rather than building some gross ‘movement’ on mass dissatisfaction, (a strategy that competes with every other liberal group in the world), perhaps it would be wiser to take David Brin’s advice to ‘drop all pretense’ and ‘bring back lords.’
And lords have certain obligations. Someone has said that today’s elites are like ‘noblesse’ sans ‘obligé.’ This is not the case: they just feel obligé to the foreign poor, and consider the democratic government’s work (almost entirely financially supported by taxes on the vilified ‘1%’) to take care of their moral obligations to their domestic inferiors.
The big change to ask for, after the pretense is dropped, per David’s advice, is to tell the upper class of the future that their obligations cannot be ‘outsourced,’ and must be satisfied by their personal leadership. We must also, again, ask of leaders to put their personal lives at risk in defense of country (and king if God has mercy enough on us to grant us one).
Articulating this program and making it both practically and spiritually appealing will take some effort, but is much more promising than mob agitation against the same people who keep the continent passingly functional.
The current system is held together by a shallow, cynical spirituality combined with terror at the lack of stable, comprehensible alternatives. Today’s leaders pay $50,000 a plate because the only credible man who can allay those fears is Barack Obama and the ochlocratic bureaucracy that he represents.
Constructing a better alternative will not be easy, but it is possible. And it must be done.