Now I’ve got more reason to like Steve Sailer. He recently showed again on his VDARE blog why I’ve recommended him so strongly. Recall my two columns last year recommending his work—see here and here. I really think he does a great job at quantitatively showing how Jews have become the new elite in our society. And he does a pretty good job at pointing to some Jewish behavior that the MSM doesn’t always want to acknowledge.
His blog here paints a pretty clear picture again. His column is a comment David Brooks NYTimes column extolling the virtues of the new meritocracy compared to the bad old days when the WASPs ran the country. Brooks claims that “we have opened up opportunities for women, African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics and members of many other groups.”
In reality, however, the big winners from this “meritocracy” are Jews. Sailer points out that
In 2009, 35% of the Forbes 400 are from one ethnic group that makes up only 2% of the population. So, is “The Power Elite” really that much more diverse today?
If you break down Brooks’ list — “African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics”– by membership in the 2009 Forbes 400, you come up with:
African-Americans: 1 (Oprah) , Jews: 141, Italians: 14 , Poles (and all other Eastern Europeans): 6, Hispanics: 2
Similarly, if you look at the 2009 Atlantic 50 ranking of most influential pundits, it’s half Jewish, versus 2% black and 0.5% Hispanic.
In other words, this increased “meritocratic diversity” among the elites that Brooks is writing about essentially consists of the rise of Jews over the last century.
The fact is that the new order is reasonably seen as less of a meritocracy than a new form of clubbishness where ethnic ties among Jews ease the way into top positions. Ethnic cohesion is certainly the main story of the Jewish academic and intellectual elite that constructed the Culture of Critique in the academic world, and the vast overrepresentation of Jews in the media elite mentioned by Sailer suggests it’s the same story there. Indeed, Jews are vastly overrepresented as students in elite academic institutions even controlling for IQ.
This new elite based on ethnic networking is at least as corrupt as the old WASP elite and its family ties. The new elite reacts with angry aggression and charges of “anti-Semitism” if one even mentions that they are in fact an elite.
The old elite had a sense of civic responsibility and national interest. As Sailer notes, the new elite seems to care nothing about the long term success of the society as a whole:
The unspoken implication of Brooks’ analysis is that American Jews should start thinking of themselves less as oppressed outcasts who need to go for whatever they can get while the getting is good, and start thinking of themselves more realistically as the core of the New American Establishment. Thus, American Jews should realize that, like the Protestant Establishment of yore, their privileged position as a de facto leadership caste bestows upon them corresponding duties to conserve the long-term well-being of the overall nation rather than to indulge in personal and ethnic profit and power maximization.
But the terrifying reality is that the Jewish ascendancy remains hostile to the traditional people and culture of America. Jews continue to earn like Episcopalians (actually more than Episcopalians) and vote like Puerto Ricans. They are the financial backbone of the Democratic Party and its coalition of non-White ethnic groups. (83% voted for Obama.) The organized Jewish community is a major pillar of support for massive, non-White immigration that will add 100 million non-Whites to the US in the next few decades.
The new elite is definitely not about conserving America for the long term success of the society as a whole. It’s about ethnic paranoia, ancient hatreds, and the desire to completely transform the society at the expense of its traditional people–elite and non-elite alike—at whatever the cost to the society as a whole. Hey, when it falls apart, just take the money and run to Israel.
Sailer makes it pretty clear that Brooks was not connecting the obvious dots: Since Jews took over America, things have definitely changed for the worse for White Americans.
The Occidental Observer Blog, February 23, 2010
20 Comments
Greg Johnson, Brutus, Michael O’Meara, and Morgan,
Thank you for the constructive criticism.
I overstated my case: Mencken was emblematic of the shift from polite disagreement to contemptuos scorn, and he was a powerful influence towards creating this shift, but he was obviously not the only cause. Likewise with George Whitfield and Benjamin Franklin vis-a-vis the shift from agreement to polite disagreement.
I will attempt a more complete examination of the rift between White Gentile American elites and commners in an essay to be entered in the contest on topic of Libertarianism.
As to Gottfried’s H.L. Mencken Club, look at http://www.myspace.com/notesondemocracy, Would Hank Have Joined?, to see what a high old time left-wingers have mocking this poor choice of a name for a paleo-conservative group.
Whites Unite,
For things to stay the same, some things have to change.
Nietzsche, although not perfect, is of the utmost importance to our struggle. Our struggle is not an easy one. It will be the first time in the world that there’s to be such a break with the past, viz. modernity and the first stirring of modernist ideas during the Renaissance. I do not mean this ‘break with the past’ in modernist terms but in Archeofuturist and Maistrean terms.
We acknowledge that the Aryan race has been on the wrong path for centuries [one could say two thousand years if one were thus inclined], what was lost is now lost forever. Modernity has run its course, culminating with the thought of Kojève, it has exhausted itself. It is now for us, we aristocrats of the soul, to transcend this reign of quantity asserting that which is non-ephemeral and primordial to our kind.
Evangelical Christianity, borne of modernity, is not primordial. I am of course heavily biased against this brand of Protestantism being raised as a fairly traditionalist Catholic [I ought to be excommunicated for my neopagan/Nietzschean ways mind you] in an exceedingly religious area [there are two Opus Dei schools five minutes drive from my home]. The Anglican Diocese of Sydney is, bar a handful of churches, low church, sadly.
Carl Schmitt wrote in Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty:
Progressivism, liberalism, hyper-individualism… etc, come from secularisations of Christian concepts. They were always present in earlier theological works in the Church but became more pronounced with the various Protestant distillations. Remembering of course Protestantism goes hand in hand with modernity.
I don’t know what came first. Did the bourgeoisie pick up these concepts that were always present in Christianity and make them more prominent, as well as adding there own economic ideas to the theology? Or was it these ideas that created the bourgeoisie? Perhaps it’s a combination of both.
We need The Culture of Collaboration as a supplement to The Culture of Critique. Consider this a call for papers. Who are these gentile collaborators, and what makes them tick?
Indoctrination, incentivization, intimidation, and finally imitation. Read Boyd & Richerson.
Whites Unite,
Several decades ago I read Mencken’s book on Nietzsche. As I remember it, it was typically American in seeing Nietzsche as the great individualist scornful of the grubby masses.
Following the work of Julian Young, I, by contrast, have come to see Nietzsche not just in a different light than his American interpreters, but also as someone who was part of that late-19th century volkisch revolt against the atomization and materialization of European culture. On this basis, I wrote in “Only a God Can Save Us” (TOQ Summer 2008) that Nietzsche’s transvaluation of morals is of the utmost importance to the WN project, offering us an ethic of solidarity and struggle that alone will save us from ourselves.
I also follow Greg Johnson in believing that the factors responsible for our dispossession cannot be attributed to a single individual.
You are correct, though, to stress that there is an implicit relation between our present predicament and the general desacralization that afflicts our people. Nevertheless, as I understand it, Evangelical Christianity was not just a Jewified version of Christianity, but one of the forces contributing to the loss of any sense of transcendence. This view might be the result of my early Catholic education, but it has also accorded with much that I’ve learned since leaving the Church.
At the highest level, though, I think it was the “modernization” of European civilization, America being the most preeminent representative of this modernization, that led to the present ideological domination of “consummerate meaninglessness” and the reign of quantity.
Even so, Sailer believes Jewish IQ to be the main reason for Jewish overrepresentation. Brooks is both right and wrong. He’s right in that career fields are open to more groups than ever. There is less overt discrimination based on race and ethnicity than in the past. There was a time when most law firms wouldn’t hire Jews or promote blacks.
But access is not the same as achievement. Blacks today are freer than ever but many blacks don’t hit the books. They spend more time hitting eachother. Polish-Americans haven’t been known for intellectual achievement or interest. Anyway, it is a fallacy to think meritocracy leads to diversity in any field. Meritocracy in the NFL and NBA has made them overwhelmingly black. Or look at 100 and 200 m sprints in the Olympics. That’s meritocracy for you. Though those events are open to every nation, the nations that dominate are the US and Jamaica because they have lots of blacks of West African origin.
Also, it’s not just about money but about intellectual curiosity. Jews tend to be more involved in intellectual and cultural matters. They are more likely to read books, study film, and write about history. Your average Jew is many times better-read than your average GOP republican. This, plus the fact that Jews tend to be more hardworking as students and professionals, gives the Jews an edge. The Jews I knew in college took their studies more seriously than others. Black students were the worst, watching too much TV. Too many white guys from privileged families wasted time joining frats, having parties,and flunking out or passing with mediocre grades.
Of course, group cohesion is important to Jewish success but would amount to little if not for Jewish intelligence, curiosity, and work ethic. After all, gypsies are very tightly organized but where is their success? Italian-Americans have been even more clannish and tribalistic than Jews but far less successful. La Raza Mexicans stick together but remain poor. No people in America are as tightly united as blacks, most have been economically underwhelming. On the other hand, blacks have been tremendously successful in sports and music, where they have some kind of natural edge(at least in pop music).
Also, it’s wrong to make too great a distinction between Jewish intelligence and Jewish orgnaization. The ability to organize is a form or evidence of higher intelligence. Smarter people devise more effective organizations. Blacks organize street gangs. Italian-Americans organize higher forms of crime–the Mafia. But, Jews have been able to create the highest and most complex forms of organizations in media, retail business, hightech innovation, medical research, finance, think tanks, academia, building of the atomic bomb, and government. This too is a form of intelligence.
It may well be that rich and privileged Jews give aid to the less intelligent Jews, but no organization can succeed for long if it has too many mediocrites. It will lose out in the competition. For example, a basketball team will not win the championship if it only recruits whites in the name of white solidarity and organization. The teams that recruit blacks will be favored. Even though Jews help other Jews, this has been helpful to them because most Jews are above average in IQ.
But, there are two reasons why Jews do indeed have an unfair advantage. The Holocaust has it made it impossible for anyone to criticize Jews without being blacklisted from the respectable sphere. To be sure, Jews made it so by control of media and education, but Jews came to dominate those fields through business and intellectual smarts.
The other reason is Jews operate as both ‘Jews’ and as ‘whites’, depending on which happens to be advantageous at any given moment. So, if Jews do something bad, the evil deeds are blamed on ‘whites’. If Jews do something good, the noble deeds are credited to ‘Jews’. When Jews are victims, they are ‘Jews’. When Jews are villains, they are ‘whites’. So, Jewish communists are remembered as ‘Russian’ communists, but Jewish victims of Stalin are remembered as ‘Jews’.
Jewish Hollywood gave us degrading images of blacks in the past, but we are told ‘whites’ racially slandered the blacks. But, when Jews helped the blacks during the Civil Rights Movement, we are told that ‘Jews’ helped the blacks.
When it comes to affirmative action, Jews suffer less than poor whites because Jews are included among the ‘whites’. So, even if Harvard is 30% Jewish, it’s shows up on statistics as 30% ‘white’. Since affirmative action hurts whites who do better than blacks but worse than Jews, gentile whites are most negatively affected while Jews, with higher IQs, are less affected. (To be sure, geographical affirmative action somewhat redresses this problem as it favors whites from rural areas over Jews concentrated in urban areas. As Bill Bradley said, he got into Harvard thanks to geographical affimative action which favored a smalltown white kid over some New York Jew.) Even so, the chameleon-like ability of the Jew to play it as both ‘white’ and ‘Jewish’ has been very advantageous to him.
So, I suggest we put Jews into a separate ethnic category when it comes to affiramtive action. If white Hispanics–and indeed many are white, especially Cubans–can be counted as a separate ethnic or racial group, why shouldn’t this be done for the Jews who have semitic origins(even if they are mixed with European blood, as are most Hispanic-Americans). If whites must make concessions to the less successful blacks and Hispanics, this should be compensated by more successful Jews making concessions to the less successful whites.
“The new elite is definitely not about conserving America for the long term success of the society as a whole. It’s about ethnic paranoia, ancient hatreds, and the desire to completely transform the society at the expense of its traditional people…”
So what actions should we take if this is true? In my view, this question lies at the root of talk of Jews and their influence. What is the utility of understanding Jewish influence and that it is bad? Is proving propositions about Jews an end in itself? How does this help white people understand that race is real and that the white race should be defended and preserved?
I’m assuming that the practical application of this knowledge would be to remove Jews from their positions of influence. How? Make laws the prohibit them from certain professions? Deport them to Israel? But if we could get enough support to pass anti-Jewish laws, then we would have already succeeded in breaking Jewish influence. If we had broken this influence, then why bother to pass laws against them, since we could then just get our pro-white message across? In short, I question the utility of talking about the Jews.
Whites Unite has a very good point, but, like Johnson stated, it suffers from both overs simplification and rests upon the explicit assumption that Evangelical Christianity, and indeed Christianity itself, is the salvation of the white race rather than a crucial problem as set forth by racialist thinkers like Revilo P. Oliver and the like.
However, I think the post of Whites Unite is nevertheless a pearl of great price in that it most likely is the most concisely put essentials of an answer as to why so many otherwise highly intelligent people, e.g., Thomas Fleming, are so adamant in their advocating of Christianity and total rejection of a Nietzsche, Darwin, William Simpson’s “Which Way Western Man” type philosophy as a suggested direction our race should begin taking.
The argument of Whites Unite is well-stated and food for thought, but it suffers from extreme over-simplification. The rift between the American plutocratic elite and the American masses is far older than H. L. Mencken and so pervasive in the culture that it cannot be pinned on any one thinker. Nor is it merely a matter of religion. Economics and pre- and non-Christian concepts of status and nobility are also important factors here.
Dr. O’Meara,
You ask an extremely important question about the motives of non-Jewish white elites and their hostility towards white commoners.
Here is my theory: The relationship between white elites and white commoners has gone through three stages in American history — agreement, polite disagreement, and contemptuous scorn.
The first stage, agreement, occurred in the early to middle colonial era. William Bradford, John Winthrop, and William Penn completely shared the Evangelical Christian belief system of their Puritan/Quaker followers.
This stage began breaking down during the Great Awakening. Commoners eagerly embraced the preaching of Whitfield, while the “Old Light” elite rejected what they saw as a dumbed-down, overly emotional version of Christianity — eventually drifting away from Evangelical Christianity altogether when they could not reclaim their “New Light” followers. In the late 18th century and the 19th century, while revivalist Evangelical Christianity maintained its hold on the commoners, Deists and Unitarians were heavily over-represented in the intellectual, political and economic elite.
In spite of these religious differences, the elites of this period show a profound respect for the common man and an anxious solicitude for his well-being. Deist Benjamin Franklin, Unitarian John Adams, theologically liberal Abraham Lincoln, and many other non-Evangelical elitists of that period all had great appreciation for the role Evangelical Christianity played in maintaining morality among the common people of America.
This began to change thanks to one man — H. L. Mencken, American admirer of Nietzsche.
Evangelical Christianity explicitly rejects all non-biblical influences on Christianity, including all influences stemming from Europe’s pre-Christian paganism. Within the Bible, Evangelicals value the New Testament more highly than the Old Testament, and within the new Testament they tend to value the writings of Paul in particular. Evangelical Christianity is thus 100% opposed to Nietzsche, with absolutely no common ground.
As an admirer of Nietzsche, Mencken hated Evangelical Christians and made a career of pouring scorn, contempt and mockery upon them in the pages of Smart Set and American Mercury — compared to which the Jewish Culture of Critique which these same people have endured seems almost mild.
Young 1920s readers of the Smart Set learned to despise the South and the Mid-West, small towns and rural areas, and the working and middle classes. Smart Set-ers became college professors who passed on Mencken-derived anti-Redneck attitudes to an entire generation of college educated elites. These elites now take pleasure in an entertainment industry which blackens the image of white American commoners in front of the entire world, economic policies which minimize wages and maximize housing costs for white American commoners, and affirmative action policies which keep non-Jewish white commoners under-represented at the best universities.
Thinking as I do, I find it very discouraging that a group of Paleo-Conservatives and White Nationalists have chosen to give themselves the name “H. L. Mencken Club”. (Both Paleo-Conservatism and White Nationalism should DEFEND precisely those people whom Mencken made a career of mocking!) In my opinion, this poor choice of a name is either evidence that H. L. Mencken Club founder Paul Gottfried is extremely stupid or it is evidence that he is a fiendishly clever saboteur / closet Herbert Marcuse follower.
I think Nietzsche-admiring TOQ and TOO contributors underestimate the importance of Evangelical Christianity in the formation of the original core of the White American ethnicity. White immigrants to colonial America were mostly self-selected on the basis of adherence to Evangelical Christianity: English Puritans and Quakers, and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, chose to move to New England, Pennsylvania and Appalachia rather than conform to the semi-Catholic high-church Episcopalian state churches of England and Ireland. Likewise, German and French Protestants moved to colonial America rather than submit to counter-reformation era pressure to convert to Catholicism.
Is Nietzsche-ism really a suitable philosophical basis on which to build a nationalist movement for a nation with roots such as these? The example of H. L. Mencken and his pernicious influence suggests not.
Nice article, and on-target comments. On the matter of Jewish % of political-economic elite, though, we need to understand the these figures are based (mostly) on self-identification; factor in the crypto-Jews and Jewesses, and the Jewish over-
representation is even more grotesque and deadly. An easy example would be “Australian” media-mogul Rupert Murdoch…referred to even in KM’s Culture of Crtitique as a non-Jew. Not: Jewish on mother’s side (heiress Helen Green), and, in the usual pattern, M’s daughter has recently married back into the Tribe. Which brings us to Control Mechanism #1, touched on by James’ post: racial intermarriage. This also enables the Jews to get a degree of physical camouflage via the genetics of “looking” White. Mechanism #2: the Big Money, simply buying up the WASP and other non-Jew politicians; and #3: media control, glorifying Jews, promoting “holocaust” propaganda and other guilt-inductions, granting and denying acess to media depending on attitude toward Jews and Jewish projects, and so forth.
This line from the article:
“This new elite based on ethnic networking is at least as corrupt as the old WASP elite and its family ties.”
struck me as inaccurate because they are obviously MUCH more corrupt since they care little about truth and are in such a minority, yet are so dominant in certain fields–especially image and media fields and any field with prestige.
But here this line contradicts the earlier line about corruption:
The old elite had a sense of civic responsibility and national interest. As Sailer notes, the new elite seems to care nothing about the long term success of the society as a whole:
which means the old elite was not corrupt. Corruption means caring more about your own situation and interests in the here and now than the long-term success of the society as a whole. The main problem with Jews (and other races) is that they are much more corrupt as individuals and groups. THAT more than any other thing is why they are a danger to us and our people. They care about survival alone — power, status, prestige, money, etc. — and very little for truth and all the good and moral things which flow from it.
Some races are capable of finding truth, but are much less motivated to (orientals), or actually motivated to hide or destroy or confuse truth (Jews). Other racial groups are both not capable (blacks) or less capable (Mexcians) of finding truth, and not motivated toward truth anyway.
In our best people and leaders, the truth motive overrides all others. We even will give our lives for it. That is why I think we are more individualistic, invented freedom, and invented science. I think this is the most important differentiating feature of the white western race. We have both a strong truth motive and we have the ability to move toward it. We are the anti-corruption race. We have the seed of the great destiny of all life in us, the divine future has it’s roots in us. We have been shaped to live in the ocean of truth for the future of our people (and all life on Earth — see my book) just as the dolphin has been shaped to live in an ocean of water in all it’s features. We, however are still being born into our role and therefore are very vulnerable. I think corruption is the #1 issue for us because it can knock us off our great path — whether on an everyday crime scale or on the scale of Bernie Madoff or etc.
As Kevin MacDonald said, the corollary of the Talmudic injunction to “kill the best of the gentiles” is to “promote the worst of them.”
Nietzsche’s comment touchs on another aspect of jewish power. They uplift the worst of the gentiles by giving them a voice through the media and thwart the best of the gentiles by at best degrading them, but mostly by denying them a voice in the media. “Dynamic silence,” I think it’s called.
Note to Nietzsche: I will not post any further comments from you if you do not include a real email address in case I need to contact you about editing issues.
Part of their dominance playbook is to elevate worthless whites (Bush for example) so that the 50% of “elites” that are non-Jews aren’t a threat.
It’s often said that jews are only 2% of the population, but remember they have an intermarriage rate of almost 50% (if I recall). And those 50% aren’t marrying the local village idiots. Pelosi and Reid are both married to jews per a previous article by Andrew Hamilton. They (the jews) tend to marry intelligent, high status gentiles. This magnifies their percentage of the population by a not insignificant degree. And those gentiles they marry have relatives that will, by default, “side” with the jews on belief that they are now family, magnifying the jews’ power even more. Atomized, individualistic whites are easy prey, especially when they are clueless, atomized, individualistic whites, going up against tribal jews and “newly tribalized” whites.
I agree with Dr. O’Meara here. He really has formulated the question brilliantly. Thanks to Kevin MacDonald and others, I think we understand the Jews and their motives better than the psychology and motives of our own people who collaborate with them. We need The Culture of Collaboration as a supplement to The Culture of Critique. Consider this a call for papers. Who are these gentile collaborators, and what makes them tick?
Edmund,
I too think it’s obvious that the Jews have become the dominant elite.
But it’s the questions surrounding their domination that nag at me. For instance, according to the figures cited in your piece, there’s 60% of the elites that are not Jewish: Who are these whites and what is their relationship to the Jews?
I suspect there’s some implicit synergy between their (Jewish and non-Jewish elites) interests, but what’s its nature?
Is it a matter of a totally capitalized social system just naturally falling into the hands of those who represent the crass, materialist interests of capital; is it that the Jews offer a “coherent” ideological superstructure to organize the largely individualized interests of gentile elites; or, are Jews simply adept at manipulating the greedy goys?
In resisting Jewish hegemony, these are, I think, some of the hard questions we have to start addressing. What’s your thought on this?
America is a country with Israeli leadership that panders to a third world demograhic by enslaving to various degrees 200 million whites, what could go wrong with that?
Great article Mr. Connelly! Really brutal analysis of the new elite.
It’s always amazed me how they demanded to be on top, but when they got there, they weren’t suited to ruling. Kind of like the dog that finally caught the car, what now? Dogs can’t drive cars.