Kevin MacDonald on Why We Write

Kevin MacDonald

Editor’s Note: This is a lightly-edited extract from a talk given at The Occidental Quarterly Editor’s conference on March 18, 2007 near Washington, D.C.

One of the charges repeatedly leveled against me by the Southern Poverty Law center and others who would silence my research is that I write for The Occidental Quarterly and serve on its Editorial Board.[1] Thus I want to explain here why I write for TOQ, and why I think this journal is so important.

I like to think of The Occidental Quarterly on the model of the Partisan Review in the 1940s and 50s. Partisan Review was an important leftist intellectual publication that gradually became anti-communist with increasing evidence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. The editors, writers, and readers of Partisan Review saw themselves as alienated, marginalized figures. As Norman Podhoretz put it, “They did not feel that they belonged to America or that America belonged to them.”[2] But times have changed, and now that the ideas championed by Partisan Review, and the left in general, predominate, it is we who don’t feel that we belong to America or that America belongs to us. But the good news is that change can happen fairly quickly — within the lifetimes of individuals.

An encouraging sign is that it’s beginning to be respectable to talk openly about Jewish power and influence. Consider John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy and Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid.[3] Books like The Bell Curve have opened up discussion of formerly taboo subjects like race and IQ. The recent furor about illegal immigration has also brought to light the fact that a great many whites are deeply troubled by the changes unleashed in the past few decades.

But there is a long way to go. Already in 2006, we began to see article after article in the Jewish press about presidential candidates from both parties lining up Jewish money for the 2008 campaign and falling all over themselves to show their allegiance to Israel and hostility to Iran. Glimmerings of discussion, mostly on the internet, are a far cry from actually influencing the political process.

In early 2007, John Derbyshire had an online discussion with one Joey Kurtzman who runs the website Jewcy which is aimed at hip, young, strongly identified Jews. Derbyshire also has some interesting things to say about the very precarious status of conservatives in the contemporary United States. He writes:

If tomorrow I submitted a piece to National Review saying, “Kevin MacDonald is really onto something. He’s doing great work, and I think everyone should read him,” the editors would reject the piece, and they would be right to do so. I don’t think I would be canned for submitting such an article, but if it happened, I would not be much surprised.

You forget how lonely conservatives are. The flame of thoughtful, responsible American conservatism burns low, and needs constant careful attention. In the folk mythology of present-day America, conservatism is associated with Jim Crow and the persecution of racial minorities. . . .

I live in an ordinary middle-middle-class New York suburban neighborhood. My neighbors all know I am a conservative commentator. A couple of them will not speak to me on that account. The others just think I am mildly nuts-a thing associated in their minds, somehow, with my being British-born. They regard me with a sort of amused sympathy. The nearest conservative I know lives about eight miles away.

Anyone running a mainstream conservative magazine has to constantly demonstrate ideological purity in matters of race. They have to show repeatedly, by indirect means of course . . . that they are ideologically pure in this zone. Otherwise, they won’t be taken seriously by the cultural establishment.

And that matters. In America, persons who have, or are suspected to have, incorrect opinions on race, are low-status. Human beings are primarily social animals, and we are intensely conscious of status rankings within the groups we belong to. . . .

There isn’t any kind of chicanery or dishonesty there. That’s just how the world is, how America is, under what Bill Buckley calls “the prevailing structure of taboos,” and the prevailing system of status perception . . .

National Review wants to get certain ideas out to the U.S. public — ideas about economics, politics, law, religion, science, history, the arts, and more. To do that, the magazine needs standing in our broad cultural milieu. It needs status. That’s hard at the best of times for a conservative publication.[4]

Comments like this show the power of the liberal consensus that has been dominant in the United States, at least since the 1960s and actually quite a bit longer. Basically, what Derbyshire is saying is that conservatives should be aware that they exist at the sufferance of the “cultural establishment” and that in order to exist at all they have to pledge obeisance to the fundamental tenets of leftist ideology. But to do that is to basically throw in the towel and acquiesce in the dispossession of our people.  Obviously, we can’t do that.

Part of our evolved psychology is designed to emulate and look up to socially dominant people, especially if they look like us. A critical component of the success of the culture of critique is that it achieved control of the most prestigious and influential institutions of the West, and it became a consensus among the elites, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.

Once this happened, it is not surprising that this culture became widely accepted among people of very different levels of education and among people of different social classes. Most people are quite insecure about their intellectual ability. But they know that the professors at Harvard, and the editorial page of the New York Times and the Washington Post, and even conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are all on page when it comes to racial and ethnic issues. This is a formidable array, to the point that you almost have to be a crank to dissent from this consensus.

I think one of the greatest triumphs of the left has been to get people to believe that people who assert white identity and interests or who make unflattering portrayals of organized Jewish movements are morally degenerate, stupid, and perhaps psychiatrically disturbed. Obviously, all of these adjectives designate low status.

It is the conviction that what we are doing is deeply immoral that justifies virtually any tactic against us. When Jared Taylor was to speak in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on January 16, 2007, the left had no compunction about shutting the speech down and even roughing him up. And there is a long history of intellectually dishonest, politically motivated movements that have attempted to show that white ethnocentrism — and only white ethnocentrism — is an indication of psychiatric disorder. This is a major theme of The Culture of Critique, and we continue to see it when the word “virulent” — meaning “like a virus” — is used, as in “virulent racism” or “virulent anti-Semitism.”

But perhaps we don’t pay enough attention to the simple fact that people who believe as we do are vilified as intellectual cretins. A classic example that probably went a long way toward creating this stereotype was the TV show All in the Family from the 1970s, produced by Norman Lear who has a strong ethnic identity of his own, in addition to being a liberal activist.

It is repeatedly brought out that the main character, Archie Bunker, is uneducated and none too smart — constantly mispronouncing even ordinary words and lacking a basic understanding of geography or history — Lincoln signed the Declaration of Independence, Denmark is the capital of Colorado, and Florida is on the West Coast. But this TV show still shapes current attitudes about people who have a problem with multiculturalism. I found the following posted online by a fan of the show:

This is definitely my favorite show and I am glad that there are re-runs on Nick-At-Nite. One of my favorite episodes is when Archie gets locked in the cellar and is finally “rescued” by a repair man, but Archie is drunk, and he thinks that the repair man is God; little does he know, that the repair man is black! (Not that it matters, but to Archie?!) And when Archie bows down to him and lifts his head to see his “God” the audience roared in laughter as did I. . . . I hope this show remains on the air for a long time, because I could never get sick of watching All in the Family![5]

Obviously, we have a long way to go.

But what I take away from this is that the greatest danger to the cultural establishment is the existence of intelligent, well-written, well-documented, and fundamentally honest articles arguing for the importance of white identity and white interests. And the same goes for discussions of the interests and influence of other groups. The point is that our message must be conveyed with intelligence and ruthless criticism of the intellectual shoddiness of our opponents’ theories and the pervasiveness of double standards when it comes to ethnocentrism. And, by the way, I think that TOQ does exactly that.

We are trying to raise the status of this sort of discourse, and this is inevitably a top-down sort of thing. Notice that Derbyshire is not concerned about what the average person thinks, but what the cultural establishment thinks. We must begin by recruiting well-educated, intelligent, and honest people who are willing to write material supporting white identity and interests and to honestly discuss the ethnic tactics and influence of other groups. This is going to be a long process, and a huge disincentive is that people who do so are subjected to all sorts of attacks on their character and — more importantly — their livelihood.

The Occidental Quarterly represents a unique vision on the right. It is the only outlet for article-length, high-quality publications aimed at an educated readership. Any serious history of the changes in the United States must acknowledge the importance of top-down changes. It’s not going to come from skinheads and disaffected working class people. Having said that, it is also true that once we start to get some traction there is every reason to think that change will come rapidly.

And we do have some things going for us. As I argue in “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism,” an essay first published in TOQ,[6] there is a lot of evidence that white people still have a sense of white identity — even the smart ones — although it is typically unconscious, and that we are gradually coalescing into implicit white groups-groups that reveal white associational patterns like “white flight” and even white political interests, even if they cannot explicitly proclaim themselves as white. Obviously it’s not going to be easy, but The Occidental Quarterly is a critical place to start. And we have no choice but to start somewhere.

[2] Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), 116-17.

[3] John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). On Mearsheimer and Walt, see Kevin MacDonald, “The Jewish Lobby: A Case Study in Jewish Influence,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 33-58.

[4] John Derbyshire, “Be Nice or We’ll Crush You,” http://www.jewcy.com/dialogue/02-28/be_nice_or_well_crush_you.

[5] The Internet Movie Database, User Comments for All in the Family, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066626/usercomments.

[6] Kevin MacDonald, “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism,” The Occidental Quarterly 6 (Winter 2006-2007): 7-46. The essay has been reprinted in Kevin MacDonald, Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilization, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism (Atlanta: The Occidental Press, 2007). (The Appendix of the original article appears separately in Cultural Insurrections as chapter 11, “Biological Roots of Ethnocentrism and Group Conflict.”)