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Kevin MacDonald on the Fall of Anglo-America
Eric P. Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America
by Kevin MacDonald
from The Occidental Observer, July 29, 2009
Eric P. Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America presents the case that Anglo-America committed what one might call “suicide by idea”: White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants were motivated to give up ethnic hegemony by their attachment to Enlightenment ideals of individualism and liberty. Anglo-Americans simply followed these ideals of the Enlightenment to their logical conclusion, with the result that immigration was opened up to all peoples of the world, multiculturalism became the cultural ideal, and Whites willingly allowed themselves to be displaced from their preeminent position among the elites of business, media, politics, and the academic world.
Kaufmann explicitly rejects the proposal that the decline of Anglo-America occurred as a result of some external force. His view is therefore an important contrast to my view that the rise of Jews to elite status in the United States and particular Jewish intellectual and political movements (e.g., the movement to open immigration to all the peoples of the world) were critically necessary (not sufficient) conditions for the collapse of White America. My view is that the outcome was the result of ethnic conflict over the construction of culture. Indeed, the fall of Anglo-Saxon America is a textbook case of how deadly the conflict over the construction of culture can be.
In this review, I will show where Kaufmann goes wrong — mainly by committing sins of omission in ignoring the Jewish role in the decline of Anglo-America. But it must be said that he provides a fascinating historical overview of the decline of Whites in the US. As he notes, it was not very long ago that America strongly asserted that it was a nation of Northwestern Europeans and intended to stay that way. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act was carefully designed to preserve the ethnic status quo as of 1890, thereby ensuring the dominance of Anglo-Americans. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act reiterated the bias toward Northwestern Europe and was passed over President Truman’s veto.
But only a decade later, in the 1960s, White America began the process of ethnic and cultural suicide . . . Read the whole article.
Kevin MacDonald
Kevin MacDonald, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at California State University—Long Beach.
The Enlightenment was an unmitigated disaster: it caused the emancipation of the Jews. Before then, Jews were correctly regarded as a group, an exceptionally nefarious group. Jews were tolerated (on and off) in certain commercial roles but were generally segregated and not allowed to infect the culture. Then in the Enlightenment Jews somehow acquired rights as individuals, rather than being there at the sufferance of the rulers. There was a fantasy that they would assimilate and become patriotic citizens, and I also read that Prussians expected that with the authority of the rabbis broken, Jews would convert. They couldn’t imagine that Jews actually liked Judaism, nor did they anticipate secular Jews (like Marx and Freud) even more hateful and dangerous than the religious ones. One odd thing about the age of reason is its lack of a feedback mechanism to correct such ideas as they proved false in practice.
Not many people know this but enlightened liberal ideas are also popular in the Arab world. That’s what they have cafes for. If we had confined our Enlightenment to the salons of Paris, the Jews would still be locked up in their ghettos, not performing tikkun olam on the rest of us.