Capitalism and White Racial Decline

Editor’s Note: The following discussion of Michael O’Meara’s recent review of William Lind and Paul Weyrich’s The Next Conservatism is from the Occidental Dissent blog. It is so good, I have decided to steal it.

At The Occidental Quarterly, Michael O’Meara is saying a lot that I happen to agree with about America’s racial decline. It wasn’t a function of a small cabal of Jewish cultural Marxists associated with the Frankfurt School. The triumph of political correctness in the 1980s happened long after the Civil Rights Movement had realized its primary goals. The worship of “diversity” as a fundamental American value was unheard of before Judge Powell’s opinion in the Bakke case. Multiculturalism first emerged on the scene in the 1970s. Chalking up our racial demise to “diversity snobbery” is putting the cart before the horse.

Capitalism has always been one of the primary drivers of race replacement. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the internal logic of international markets (the profit motive) resulted in the dumping of hordes of negroes on America’s shores. The settlement of the West Indies was even more driven by these concerns. In the mid-nineteenth century, demand for cheap labor in the sparsely populated American West brought the first waves of Chinese immigrants to the United States. This experience was repeated with the Japanese in Hawaii (working on sugar plantations), Mexicans in the Southwest (who first came to work on the railroads), and the Great Migration of blacks to Northern cities (who came to work in wartime industries). The Immigration Act of 1924 specifically exempted Mexicans in order to appease Southwestern business interests.

The Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the Scandinavians, the Slavs, and the Jews all came in waves and settled throughout the American North. Most left their homelands for economic reasons. Many were attracted by the wages being offered by Northern industries at the time. Then as now, big business lobbied Congress for loose immigration laws. The indigenous Yankees soon dwindled to a minority throughout most of the Northeast. It was the push and pull of America’s capitalist economy that drove these demographic changes, not a vast Jewish conspiracy.

The fate of New England is now happening on a nationwide scale. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, and the Wall Street Journal are naturally the biggest boosters of open borders. The same fundamental forces are at work that have always been operative throughout American history. The only difference is that they are now met with less resistance than before.

Capitalism has eroded white racial consciousness in other insidious ways. During the Cold War, Americanism came to be identified with anti-communism. In order to score points for capitalism in the Third World, rightwing anti-communists like Dean Acheson adopted anti-racist rhetoric and began pushing for desegregation in the Jim Crow South. The most obvious example of this would be the Eisenhower administration’s response to the crisis in Little Rock with the Civil Rights Act of 1957. America’s elite ultimately cared more about the wealth and privilege they enjoyed under capitalism than the racial values inherited from their ancestors. And so, Truman and his postwar successors would go on to give their seal of legitimacy to Martin Luther King and his fellow radicals.

As the capitalist system evolved in the twentieth century, it became necessary to dispense with traditional values like thrift and prudence in order to sustain economic growth. The advertising industry began to take shape after the First World War. Americans were molded by its propaganda into thinking of themselves as consumers. An ethos of expressive individualism was encouraged that ultimately became severely corrosive of white ethnocentrism. It triumphed in the counterculture and eventually went on to dominate the cultural mainstream.

Suburbanization has allowed millions of Whites to avoid the costs of integration. Suburban living enables better off Whites to sing the praises of diversity while pushing it off on their poorer neighbors. White flight has acted for years as a release valve of racial tension. Why make a fuss about the status quo when you can simply pack up your bags and move off to another city or state?

As I said in a recent thread, the liberal democratic capitalist system is the meta cause of white racial decline. It chewed up Norman Rockwell’s America and spit out Barack Obama’s.