There is a fundamental lack of honesty in our politics
One of my favourite "midwit" Substacks is Noah Opinion. I don't mean "midwit" as a pejorative, by the way. It is certainly a step up from the majority of half-wit or no-wit content, so subscribe here. In fact, the guy writes good economic analysis and is pretty factual in the same slightly disturbing way that AI is factual.
Anyway, right now he is taking a shot at JD Vance for pushing the "Haitians are Eating Our Cats Meme":
Yeh, I'm pretty sure this checks out, even though to some it will sound a bit like autistic nit-picking. Noah obviously views JDV as a douchebag. My own view of the guy is still up in the air, although my working hypothesis is not very complimentary.
But what is really going on here at the meta level?
A few days ago, I asked this question on Twitter:
The only options I gave people were "True" and "Also True," and -- guess what -- the results 100% aligned, as you would expect them to, although the tick box split was 70/30.
This is a bit how Western Liberal Democracy works. People are not allowed to vote for certain things, and one of the things you are not allowed to vote for the most is anything specifically "racist," like political parties dedicated to preserving the racial character to a nation.
This is something I characterise as the "individual's link with eternity." We all like the fact that, say, a thousand years ago there were people who, despite various superficial differences (like being covered in mud, half-starved, or believing in witchcraft, or maybe even "eating the dogs"!) at least looked like us.
We are also all attached to the idea of such people existing 1000 years henceforward. But this most natural of aspirations is politically denied us in the West and constantly undermined by the way our societies are run.
Of course, there are short-termist, petty economic reasons of social-cohesion for that, but this also creates a wellspring of untapped feeling and sentiment that a skilful politician will find ways to tap. This is essentially what the relatively new phenomenon of Populism is. Trump demonstrated the playbook in 2016 with his "Build the Wall" schtick, and that is what Trump and Vance are doing now with the "Haitians are eating the pets" meme.
By floating these ideas, the populist gives "racist people" (probably the majority) a proxy way to vote for "racist things," or at least to think they are.
The problem here is that it is a proxy, and therefore the thing that people really want is not clearly stated and agreed on with the politicians in question by the "democratic contract" of the election.
Brexit is a good example of how this sort of thing can go wrong. It is well known that very few British people actually wanted to leave Europe. What they did want was an additional barrier against mass non-White immigration from across the Channel.
Yes, British people were quite clearly "racist" and wanting to vote for "racist things" (to use those terms unpejoratively). But they were simply not allowed to -- again for various normie reasons -- so, instead, populism seized on the idea of Brexit, and although it succeeded in removing Britain from Europe, it actually worsened the immigration and identity problem, with Third World immigration to the UK shooting up under the same Tories who secured Brexit.
In fact, that is precisely the reason they lost so badly at the latest UK election.
Thanks to this, it is now increasingly hard to think that Britain 1000 years henceforward will be populated by people who physically resemble the majority of the inhabitants today.
"I’m not throwing around the word 'fake' lightly here. What I mean is that the story about Haitians eating pets was a combination of deliberate fabrication and completely baseless stereotype-driven panic. Vance, in particular, appears to have deliberately amplified rumors that he knew were very likely false. When journalists started asking police and local government officials in Springfield about the pet-eating rumors, they found no such incidents. JD Vance, pressed to back up his claims, cited a police report by a woman who claimed that her cat had mysteriously vanished and might have been abducted by her Haitian neighbors. The cat was found in the basement shortly thereafter..."
Yeh, I'm pretty sure this checks out, even though to some it will sound a bit like autistic nit-picking. Noah obviously views JDV as a douchebag. My own view of the guy is still up in the air, although my working hypothesis is not very complimentary.
But what is really going on here at the meta level?
A few days ago, I asked this question on Twitter:
"If you don't let racist people vote for racist things then you don't really believe in democracy." True or False?
The only options I gave people were "True" and "Also True," and -- guess what -- the results 100% aligned, as you would expect them to, although the tick box split was 70/30.
This is a bit how Western Liberal Democracy works. People are not allowed to vote for certain things, and one of the things you are not allowed to vote for the most is anything specifically "racist," like political parties dedicated to preserving the racial character to a nation.
This is something I characterise as the "individual's link with eternity." We all like the fact that, say, a thousand years ago there were people who, despite various superficial differences (like being covered in mud, half-starved, or believing in witchcraft, or maybe even "eating the dogs"!) at least looked like us.
Retrograde demographic continuity is OK but not anterograde
We are also all attached to the idea of such people existing 1000 years henceforward. But this most natural of aspirations is politically denied us in the West and constantly undermined by the way our societies are run.
Of course, there are short-termist, petty economic reasons of social-cohesion for that, but this also creates a wellspring of untapped feeling and sentiment that a skilful politician will find ways to tap. This is essentially what the relatively new phenomenon of Populism is. Trump demonstrated the playbook in 2016 with his "Build the Wall" schtick, and that is what Trump and Vance are doing now with the "Haitians are eating the pets" meme.
By floating these ideas, the populist gives "racist people" (probably the majority) a proxy way to vote for "racist things," or at least to think they are.
The problem here is that it is a proxy, and therefore the thing that people really want is not clearly stated and agreed on with the politicians in question by the "democratic contract" of the election.
Brexit is a good example of how this sort of thing can go wrong. It is well known that very few British people actually wanted to leave Europe. What they did want was an additional barrier against mass non-White immigration from across the Channel.
Yes, British people were quite clearly "racist" and wanting to vote for "racist things" (to use those terms unpejoratively). But they were simply not allowed to -- again for various normie reasons -- so, instead, populism seized on the idea of Brexit, and although it succeeded in removing Britain from Europe, it actually worsened the immigration and identity problem, with Third World immigration to the UK shooting up under the same Tories who secured Brexit.
In fact, that is precisely the reason they lost so badly at the latest UK election.
Thanks to this, it is now increasingly hard to think that Britain 1000 years henceforward will be populated by people who physically resemble the majority of the inhabitants today.
In the case of Trump and Vance, the hysteria and proxy "racism" they are whipping up against Haitians may energize the vote and may help them to win, but don't expect such a proxy contract like this, based on sub-racist dogwhistling, to be honoured. Trump is too much of a normie pragmatist to let that happen.
"Racism" won't work unless democracy works, and democracy won't work until "racist" people are allowed to vote directly for "racist" things.
Years of the GOP exploiting sub-racist feelings while flooding the job market with migrant labour shows that there are no backdoors or shortcuts to actually constructing a society based on an "eternal identity."
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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).
It is annoying when conservative types or diss right types say they aren't far right or racist, they are more less agreeing with their supposed emnity that these are bad, they affirm their supposed enmities value judgements, which to me is insane.
ReplyDeleteIf you reject we are one race the human race then you are racist in it's original meaning that people incorrectly say Trotsky invented.