October 08, 2005
Sailer vs. Taylor, Round II —"Citizenism" vs. White
Nationalism
By Steve Sailer
I first came to admire Jared
Taylor's talents over 20 years ago, during the
dawn of the personal computer age, when he ranked
with
Jerry Pournelle as the most brilliant
PC journalist.
That was the last time there was
anything
PC about Taylor. He’s now the editor of
American Renaissance,
a newsletter that applies
Bell Curve-type concepts to
current social problems in a way that the Mainstream
Media should be doing but doesn’t, because it’s been
frightened off.
He’s also emerged as a sort of
white nationalist, explicitly defending the interests of
whites (who, of course, would have been described as
“Americans”
before the federal government began
electing a new people with the
1965 Immigration Act.)
Taylor is a man of commanding voice
and mien,
Central Casting's dream of a U.S. Senator. But,
needless to say, he will never become a Senator—because
he long ago chose to sacrifice popularity for his
principles.
Taylor has responded to my critique
of his position that I offered in the course of
reviewing his organization’s
new survey of un-PC facts about race and
criminality, The Color Of Crime. He has objected
to my calling myself a "citizenist", arguing:
"’Citizenism’
assumes that race can be made not to matter, and that
citizens will set aside
parochial ethnic interests for the good of all….
What course of action would he propose for white people?
“Continue to preach ‘citizenism’ when no one else
practices it?
“Continue to
fill the country with people who do not hesitate to
advance their interests—material, cultural, and
biological—at the expense of whites?”
Yet, as the swordsman Inigo Montoya
tells the villain Vizzini in the movie
The Princess Bride,
"I do not think that word means what you think it
means."
I sense (or perhaps merely hope)
that millions of Americans feel as I do, in an
unarticulated fashion.
But at the moment,
Google suggests that I am just about the only person
in the country calling himself a "citizenist." So
I think I have a certain right to suggest what the word
means.
By "citizenism," I mean that
I believe Americans should be biased in favor of the
welfare of our current fellow citizens over that of the
six billion foreigners.
Let me describe citizenism using a
business analogy. When I was
getting an MBA many years ago, I was the favorite of
an acerbic old Corporate Finance professor because I
could be counted on to blurt out in class all the stupid
misconceptions to which
students are prone.
One day he asked: "If you were
running a publicly traded company, would it be
acceptable for you to create new stock and sell it for
less than it was worth?"
"Sure," I confidently
announced. "Our duty is to maximize our stockholders'
wealth, and while selling the stock for less than its
worth would harm our current shareholders, it would
benefit our new shareholders who buy the underpriced
stock, so it all comes out in the wash. Right?"
"Wrong!" He thundered.
"Your obligation is to your current stockholders,
not to somebody who might buy the stock in the future."
That same logic applies to the
valuable right of being an American citizen and living
in America.
Just as the managers of a
public company have a fiduciary duty to the current
stockholders not to diminish the value of their shares
by selling new ones too cheaply to outsiders, our
leaders have a duty to the
current citizens and their descendents.
That implies the opposite of what
Taylor claims. In reality, citizenism entails focusing
on the central issue for the future of our country:
limiting immigration.
While citizenism is compatible with
a realistic appreciation of racial differences, it
opposes wasting political capital and energy on
expressions of hostility toward our fellow citizens who
are African-Americans—energy that could far more
profitably be devoted to
rallying broad support for preserving the value of
our citizenship.
Blacks should be ashamed of the
level of crime found in their community, but
anti-black sentiment is self-defeating.
Indeed, much of current
white conservative support for illegal immigration
is a covert way of sticking it to African-Americans and
their liberal supporters by importing harder-working
Hispanics to drive blacks out of the workforce.
Of course, no matter how satisfying
this may seem psychologically to many whites, it's
self-defeating. Depriving
African-Americans of the
discipline of work just worsens their behavior.
Admitting vast numbers of Latinos, many of whom will end
up in the underclass, just exacerbates America's social
problems.
A huge number of Americans grasp
that we are lucky to be American citizens and they want
to pass on their good fortune to their
posterity undiluted. But the political class has no
conceptual vocabulary as of yet for expressing these
normal human feelings. So I'm not enormously optimistic
that these commonsensical principles will become popular
enough among the Establishment to stave off the troubles
headed our way.
But like
Enoch Powell, I believe that
"The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide
against preventable evils." America has been, on
the whole, much less plagued by evils than most
countries. Our leadership's first duty (although
generally last priority) is to keep it that way.
But the odds seem a whole lot
better that “citizenism” will prove more
effective at defending America from harm than that the
White Nationalism advocated by Jared Taylor will do
so.
I don't doubt that immigration will
work to make
white nationalism more popular in decades to come.
Yet the only scenario likely to
make white nationalism effective as an electoral force
within, say, three decades would be the utter failure of
our current attempts to limit immigration.
Moreover, making immigration
restriction into a white nationalist crusade would wreck
the chances of
immigration reform passing.
As
Talleyrand might have
said, "White Nationalism is worse than a crime,
it's a mistake."
Besides such obvious difficulties
as that the growing number of
interracial marriages means that an increasing
number of whites have a nephew or sister-in-law who is
part or all nonwhite, there are two surprising, but
fundamental, practical problems with Taylor's movement
as a movement.
Paradoxically, Taylor is 1) both
insufficiently idealistic about white Americans and 2)
insufficiently cynical about them, too.
1) Taylor isn't pro-white enough. American whites
are too idealistic, too
self-sacrificing for explicit white ethnocentrism to
appeal to them broadly enough to succeed.
Taylor, in fact, is a striking
example of this: a man who could have made a
fortune in the computer business or been a
success in
mainstream politics, but chose to sacrifice
everything to pursue his unfashionable ideals.
In his recent
suppressed law review article, Professor
Andrew Fraser outlined some of the possible roots of
this white tendency toward idealism—stemming from the
individualism and nuclear family-orientation that
replaced clannishness in northwestern Europe.
This heritage makes white Americans
among the world's best at working together in
corporations with strangers who aren't their relatives.
But it also means that American
whites tend to see
tribalism as beneath them.
The GOP, for example, has run a
successful political strategy in the South by advocating
the
colorblind policies that whites approve of:
law and order,
private enterprise, low taxes, and the like.
One striking side effect is that
outside of Democratic-run New Orleans and a few other
sore spots in the South, this strategy has been good for
blacks, too. That's why
Republican-dominated Georgia consistently attracts
the biggest influx of middle class blacks of any state,
most of them
fleeing liberal states in the Northeast and West.
Of course, it doesn't mean blacks
will
vote for GOP candidates in the
South. But the Republicans attract such a
high fraction of the
white vote, that doesn't matter.
The point is that in the South, a
white nationalist appeal would be an election loser.
Any political philosophy aimed at
whites today has to be phrased in high-minded terms
because mud-wrestling with Al Sharpton over the racial
spoils system simply strikes many whites as too
demeaning to bother with.
And at least African-Americans
generate large personalities, like Sharpton. When you
get to Hispanics, most whites can barely remember the
names of more than a few Latinos. There's that
singer with the dresses that almost fall off and
that
home run hitter on steroids and that Democratic
governor down in Arizona or somewhere with the
ultra-white name,
Biff Robertson or something like that.
As a film critic, I hang around a
little on the far, far fringes of notoriously liberal
Hollywood. Yet, even though there are many millions of
Hispanics in Southern California, Latinos simply do
not register at all on the awareness of the
entertainment industry, except as servants. They don't
get invited to screenings and they are only seen at
industry parties parking cars.
They are absolutely no threat to
take away the job of anybody who is anybody in
Hollywood, so nobody notices them.
And that brings me to the second
problem Taylor faces.
2)
As the recent
hatefest over Bill Bennett's abortion-crime remarks
pointed out, much (although not all) of this white
moralism over race merely consists of white Americans
jockeying to claim
status as morally superior to their rivals—who are,
overwhelmingly, other white Americans.
Lots of prominent white people
dishonestly smeared Bennett with the charge of racism
because they want to be seen as more virtuous than the
author of
The Book of Virtues.
For example, Slate.com's national
correspondent William Saletan, who is not generally a
fool or charlatan, wrote a
demagogic screed implying that Bennett got the idea
that the popular
abortion-cuts-crime theory had a racial aspect
(blacks have three times more abortions and commit seven
times more murders than whites)
from me rather than from its author, Steven D.
Levitt.
Yet in his personal life, Saletan
has notably failed to put his money where his mouth is
and invest in the possibility that, as he claims,
"the next generation of blacks might differ" in
having a lower relative crime rate.
The Washington D.C. area where
Saletan works has no shortage of predominantly black
neighborhoods—such as Prince George's County, where the
late
Dr. Sam Francis lived happily, despite his
white nationalism. Yet in 2000 Saletan chose to move
to a D.C. suburb that is only
2.7% black!
In fact, Saletan's suburb has 18
times more residents who possess graduate or
professional degrees than are black.
The American 200,000,000 whites are
too numerous, too wealthy, too talented, and too
self-absorbed to feel much solidarity with each other.
White Americans would rather strive
against each other for prestige than against nonwhites
because (although they will denounce anyone who suggests
this), they generally don't see many nonwhites as
credible rivals.
It would be like NBA stars
Shaquille O'Neal and
Kobe Bryant deciding to patch up their feud so they
can fight off the threat to the NBA's domination of
American basketball from the ladies of the WNBA.
Let me point out an analogy from
international relations. Americans spend a lot of time
hating the French. Objectively, the French are not our
enemies. As the mordant scientist
Gregory Cochran has pointed out, if the French were
out to get us, they would have told us to occupy
Iraq.
Lots of Americans hate Arabs, but
only a limited number spend much time
thinking up more reasons to hate Arabs,
because, well, Arabs are mostly backward and boring, and
thus not terribly interesting to hate.
No, Americans like to
hate the French because, deep down, we see them as
worthy rivals.
