Kevin MacDonald

From The Occidental Observer, September 6, 2009

I’ve managed to avoid the vast majority of the outpourings of praise for Sen. Kennedy. But I couldn’t help noticing Neal Gabler’s op-ed in the L.A. Times because it mentioned Kennedy’s notorious moral lapses. The article, titled (ironically) “Ted Kennedy, America’s conscience” notes that

after his brothers’ deaths and after he had inherited not the presidency but their political mantle, Kennedy compromised all that he had been given. It began with Chappaquiddick, continued with a decade of womanizing and debauchery, and climaxed with his nephew’s arrest for rape in Palm Beach, Fla., in 1991, on a night when Kennedy had induced the young man — who was later cleared — to go out for drinks at a local bar. He remained a great senator, but he was now also America’s fallen angel, his halo badly bent.

. . . Publicly confessing his errant ways, committing himself to do better, and then marrying a woman who helped him fulfill that promise, Kennedy achieved redemption. He fought even more ferociously for the powerless and voiceless. He demonstrated personally and politically what it meant to be rehabilitated. He reassumed his moral authority.

It was an extraordinary performance, not least because Kennedy’s personal psychodrama mirrored the nation’s. His divisions were our divisions; his struggles, our struggles. Kennedy was us.

Well, not many of us have been involved in the death of a woman-not-one’s-wife under circumstances that would have resulted in a charge of manslaughter for ordinary people.

And then there’s the matter of lying about the ethnic effects of the 1965 immigration law. Kennedy never retracted his statement that “it will not upset the ethnic mix of this country.” That law was the result of a long effort, mainly by Jewish organizations and activists, whose main goal was exactly that. But Kennedy was more than willing to lend his abilities to the cause, and he continued to be a pro-immigration advocate the rest of his career.

But let’s assume that what Gabler says is true: Kennedy managed to regain his moral authority despite his personal failings by fighting “even more ferociously for the powerless and voiceless.” Such a statement resonates with all we know about human psychology. Most people strive to get a good reputation and they are motivated to atone for their sins by loudly proclaiming their moral rectitude.

Of course, the problem is that the conventional moral imperatives are all on the side of the multiculturalists. Gabler can blithely call Kennedy “America’s conscience” in a mainstream publication and most people will agree.

This presents a great difficulty for people who see moral virtue advocating for a resurgence of White racial/ethnic identity and explicit assertions of White interests. Such assertions are met with a firestorm of moral condemnation and ostracism. These moral panics warrant any and all actions against the miscreant, including removal from one’s livelihood, or even physical assault.

So what is the morality of ethnic self interest? There are at least two ways to think about. One is that many of the people who are most eager to create moral panics about such ideas also have strong ethnic identities and interests of their own. This is one of the first things that struck me about Jewish political and intellectual rhetoric — that they managed to create a culture of critique in which only Whites had a moral obligation to disappear as a racial/ethnic entity while minority cultures such as their own were encouraged to hold on to their traditions and group cohesiveness.

This way of thinking goes back to Horace Kallen, an important Jewish intellectual who was the first to develop a vision of multicultural America, combining this vision with a deep attachment to Zionism. Obviously, Kallen’s prescription for America is quite the opposite of his vision of the Jewish state as a state for the Jews. The only thing these beliefs have in common is that they serve Jewish interests. This is an example of Jewish moral particularism — the age old “Is it good for the Jews?.” Kallen appeals to the tradition of Western moral universalism to attain the interests of his ethnic group.

Kallen had a major influence on Randolph Bourne who wrote a classic statement of a multicultural ideal for America in his famous “Trans-National America” that appeared in Atlantic Monthly in 1916. All other ethnic groups would be allowed to retain their identity and cohesion. It is only the Anglo-Saxon that is implored to be cosmopolitan. . . . Read the whole article.