Donald Trump has been tapping into popular anti-illegal immigrant sentiment. Ann Coulter and Katie McHugh (Breitbart front page editor) have jumped on his bandwagon. This dovetails with the "cuckservative" meme. Ex-Marine David French, a lawyer who takes on religious liberty cases for the ACLJ, did a couple of posts:
As he stated on Facebook, that generated quite a backlash,
…and all others who've been following our social media and online battle with white nationalists these past couple days. Well, things got a little . . . how shall I put this . . . murdery last night. The comment board of Nancy's blog got flooded with gifts of murders, executions, and suicides. People posted photographs of mutilated bodies and photos of the most grotesque porn you can imagine. In short, things went from vile social media trolling to next-level disturbing.
Let's quote a few tweets by Katie McHugh, to get a flavor of the opposition:
Indian tribes never bothered to build any kind of civilization. They killed each other and chased bison. Yawn
British settlers and their descendants built civilization. Indians never bothered to build more than a few teepees.
As if Indians could ever build the highly-advanced welfare system that sustains their existence… lol
Dear “native people,” Where is your space program? Discovery of the wheel? Civilization?
Primitives who were chasing the rear end of a buffalo (& scalping Americans) before Englishmen built America.
I don't know what percentage of Trump supporters are white supremacists, but I think we should discuss the ideology (such as it is). Americans have legitimate grievances on the issue of illegal immigration. This is currently exacerbated by Obama's plan to unilaterally relocate Syrian "refugees" to the US.
Because both parties have snubbed those grievances, that fuels nativism, xenophobia, and outright white supremacy. It begins to radicalize the issue, as the political vacuum is being filled by the Stormfront demographic. It's important to sort out valid concerns from fringe groups that use that as a pretext to give cover to their virulent ideology.
i) There's certainly a sense in which a country belongs to the people who made it what it is, and not to invaders. However, nations have been invading other nations for millennia, and that includes "white invaders."
ii) It's true that British settlers had a disproportionate role in founding the country. But even in that limited respect, McHugh's assertions are overbroad. Did the Brits build St. Augustine, Florida? Did the Brits build Louisiana? Didn't Jews and Huguenots help build Charleston? Didn't Chinese help build the Bay Area and the transcontinental railroad? And so on and so forth.
iii) A country is built over a period of decades, centuries, in some cases millennia. Various immigrant groups have been building the US. There's a difference between who founded a city or state, and how it developed over time.
iv) Evidently, McHugh has never heard of pre-Columbian civilizations like the Inca, Aztec, Toltec, Zapotec, Maya, and Pueblo. Or African civilizations like Abyssinia. Or Asian civilizations like China, India, and Japan. Not to mention the contributions of modern-day Indians, Chinese, Japanese et al. to contemporary math, science, and technology.
v) It's not a "race" that makes great contributions to math, science, art, architecture, music, drama, philosophy, and literature, but gifted individuals who comprise an infinitesimal faction of the "race" to which they belong.
Likewise, you have cultural diffusion. The Greeks and Etruscans kick-started Roman civilization, which, in turn, kick-started French and Northern European civilization. Likewise, the Sumerians kick-started Assyrian and Babylonian civilization.
vi) "Civilization" depends in part on natural resources. Some people-groups have more to work with than others.
vii) There's also a lot of chronological cherry-picking in the comparison. A particular region may not produce a great civilization or high culture for centuries or millennia. And if it does achieve a period of cultural florescence, that may stall for centuries thereafter. Long periods of stasis without further "progress."
viii) Then there's the question of how to define progress. Would a tropical island be better if it resembled Manhattan island?
Monumental architecture is impressive, but monumentally silly. Likewise, just having the newest gadget doesn't necessarily improve the quality of life. Indeed, we can become slaves to innovation for its own sake.
Some people prefer a simpler life. Some people prefer farming, ranching, hunting, fishing, gardening, chopping wood, riding a horse, &c.
ix) Not to mention the question of how to define groups by race. What is "white"? Are Latinos white? What about Jews? The definition varies arbitrarily depending on who the xenophobe wishes to exclude.
There's certainly a valid sense in which the cultural elites are just wrong in their characterization of "the noble primitives", as if aboriginal cultures, such as they were, innately possessed some sort of inherent goodness in quality. An unperturbed sanctity.
ReplyDeleteBut this is foolish, as can be easily demonstrated by the facts of history. The real issue, I think, is the contribution Judeo-Christianity made to the West in general, and to the United States in particular.
This was a nation founded and peopled primarily by individuals and families who were fleeing religious persecution. That flavored the early part of our history.
Those days are long gone, and we're apparently spiraling downward in a vortex of secular humanism run amok, but there's still a lot to appreciate about the USA, even as she continues to take on freezing, brackish seawater, and lists harder to the port side.
Can she be righted? Time will tell.
On the diversity and shallowness of Trump's support, see here.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that a lot of racists, people who rarely or never vote, people who aren't registered Republicans, etc. are active in online forums in support of Trump. It's not that they agree much with Trump. He just provides them with another platform. It's somewhat reminiscent of what happened with Ron Paul. Like Paul supporters, Trump supporters have an online presence disproportionate to polling and voting results. When writers for National Review put up posts critical of Trump, a highly disproportionate percentage of the response comes from Trump supporters, who are deeply irrational. Somebody will make an irrational comment in support of Trump, and it will get something like 15 or 30 up votes. Somebody else will make far more reasonable comments critical of Trump, and there will be maybe 2 or 5 up votes, if even that.
I think part of what's going on is that any candidate perceived as being significantly successful in undermining mainstream party leadership will attract a lot of people who despise that leadership. They despise the leadership for a large variety of reasons, often inconsistent ones, and they may not intend to vote, may have never been a member of that party, etc. But they're united in their opposition to the party as it's traditionally existed.
It also helps when somebody like Trump is such a blank slate. He's been so inconsistent over the years, both in his positions on the issues and in his party affiliation. He's also vague to an unusual degree about his latest stances on some of the issues. That makes him unusually appealing for people who want a malleable candidate or one they can support as a vehicle for registering a protest.
People have a wide variety of reasons for supporting Trump. Qualities like name recognition and giving people an opportunity to register a protest vote can attract a wide range of people. Trump's more traditionally conservative supporters often act as if they somehow know that most or every Trump supporter has the same motivations they have for supporting Trump, but that's dubious. The Trump movement is highly diverse, inconsistent, and irrational. The sooner it goes away, the better.
"It's not a 'race' that makes great contributions to math, science, art, architecture, music, drama, philosophy, and literature, but gifted individuals who comprise an infinitesimal faction of the 'race' to which they belong. "
ReplyDeleteYes, but why do some races/population groups or whatever you want to call them produce geniuses at such higher rates? One-third of Nobel Prizes in the hard sciences go to Jews. This seems hard to explain without invoking heredity
And groups seem to do equally well (or bad) regardless of the environment. Chinese do well wherever they are (US, UK, Latin America) and people of Sub-Saharan African descent poorly (Africa, US, Canada, Haiti).
Also, groups that are intermediate (such as African-Americans, Hispanics and Cape Coloreds) have IQs in between the parent groups.
A few years ago Charles Murray of The Bell Curve fame suggested that a study be done where genetic testing was used to find the percentage of white/African genes in black Americans and then see if it correlated to IQ. To make things fair, he asked people from all sides of the debate to participate. No one from the culture only side would join.