There are a lot of ways to describe the new political divide that has emerged over the last decade. We have nationalists versus internationalists, globalists versus populists and identitarians versus the multiculturalists. All of those are true, but another way of thinking about it is that the debate is now moving upstream. For a long time, public debate was focused on economics or maybe politics. Those are downstream from institutions, culture and biology. Now, the debate has moved upstream, to the the stuff that really matters.
Not everyone has figured out that the debate has changed. The Bernie Bros, for example, are like the Japanese soldiers, who were cut off in the war and lived in the jungle for years, still fighting the war. The Bernie Bros still think the Democrats are the party of the working man, as if anyone in Washington cares about the working man. The legacy conservatives are similarly trapped in a bygone era. You see that in this post, by our old friend Sloppy Williamson, on the ravages of socialism on Venezuela.
he United States has resigned in protest from the UN Human Rights Council, which has a long and ignominious record of protecting the world’s worst abusers of human rights. The proximate cause of the U.S. resignation was the council’s unwillingness to act on the matter of Venezuela, where the socialist government of Nicolas Maduro is engaged in political massacres and the use of Soviet-style hunger-terror against its political enemies. Venezuela remains, incredibly enough, not only protected by the Human Rights Council but an active member of it, an honor shared Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its political assassins, the People’s Republic of China and its organ harvesters, and the Castro dictatorship in Cuba with its torturers and al paredón justice.
Venezuela and North Korea could not be more dissimilar in terms of their respective cultures, peoples, and histories. And yet they have arrived in approximately the same place: at the terminus of F. A. Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom.”
For generations, it has been an article of faith, among conservatives, that everything depends upon economics. It’s not just that if you get the economics right, then the miracle of the marketplace will usher in the the age of bliss. It’s that their preferred economic models are intrinsically moral. That means the wrong economics must always result in terrible outcomes. Bad tax policy not only makes people poor, it makes them corrupt, violent and cheat on their wives. Like Marxists, they think the system makes the man.
Well, what about Venezuela? What’s really going on? Here’s the per capita GDP.
That’s in constant dollars and it shows a remarkable thing. After the turmoil that brought Hugo Chavez to power, the Venezuelan economy started a nice run. Per capita GDP is a benchmark number that economists love to use to measure the health of a country. Here’s what wages look like in the country:
source: tradingeconomics.com
Now, wages and economic growth don’t tell the whole story. Venezuela suffers from the curse of natural resources, which in her case is oil. What dumb people call socialism is really just the way things have always operated in countries with low levels of human capital. The elites monopolize the natural resources and the profits that come from selling them on the international market. They spread enough money around to prevent a revolt, but otherwise it a system not all that different from what existed in colonial times.
In other words, what ails Venezuela is not ideology. It is biology. It is the way it is because of its people. What determines the nature and character of a country is not the tax code or the regulatory regime. The nature of a country comes from the people. Venezuela lacks the human capital to operate a modern economy. It has and always will suffer from the smart fraction problem. That is, it lacks a large enough smart population to carry the rest of the population into a modern economy. It remains stuck in a model suited for its people.
Put another way, it is people, not pots. Replace the Venezuelan population with Finns and they will figure out how to make a mild form of Nordic socialism work just fine. Fill the place up with Japaneses and the country will look like an Asian tiger. At the same time, begin to fill up the United States with Latin Americans and it is going to start to look like Latin America. That’s why your newly imported replacements are running on platforms familiar to anyone getting ready to vote in the upcoming Mexican elections.
Of course, the reason that raging cucks like Sloppy Williamson avoid the obvious is that it is much safer to focus on trivialities. Lefty mobs are not going to swarm his Rascal scooter if he avoids taboo subjects. That and these guys have been playing the role of useful idiot for so long, they are unable to notice that the world has changed. They operate like a cargo cult, convinced they can pretend it remains the 1980’s and it will magically be so. National Review is like a weird living museum to the Reagan era.
The world has changed, though, and the debate has shifted upstream. People are noticing that when you elect a new people, you don’t actually end up with a new people. You end up with a culture that reflects the biology of the people you imported. Whites in America are now coming to terms with the choices in front of them. Keep their head down and play make believe while they are replaced, or risk moral condemnation for defending their heritage and their culture. It’s a future with you or without you. That’s the debate.
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Did you notice that little latina who won the congressional primary yesterday first order of business will be to remove border enforcement if she gains office?
Yes, it is the people. They double down so we must also.
The speed at which the Democrat Party is becoming the anti-white party is surprising even to Democrats. It’s quickly becoming angry twats from human resources and non-whites. The leadership is trying now to apply the brakes, but it is too late.
The frenzy of radicalization the Democrats are displaying simply helps expose what was always under the surface. More, please. It helps even partially blind people see how evil they are.
The frenzy of radicalization the Bolsheviks displayed simply helped expose what was always under the surface. It helped even partially blind people see how evil they were.
How did that work out? More please?
Well if they’re coming for you would you rather they come slobbering and shouting or do you prefer ” The Long March Through the Institutions”?
Just Sayin, good question. It’s a helluva choice, we’re not actually given a choice, and one of the choices has already been accomplished.
Now that the Long March has done its work, I’m not sure that enough people are alarmed by the slobbering and shouting. There was plenty of slobbering and shouting going on before the election, and it almost went the wrong way.
But I agree with your essential point. The evil is increasingly apparent.
I’d never stopped to think how universal suffrage could bite the hand that feeds it. Amusing and satisfying.
I read a response regarding that yesterday that posits now that she put the strong incumbent out of the race, it could now go to a republican in her state if enough conservatives get out and vote. Nice theory but we shall see.
Her district is only 18% White, so I think it is very likely she will win election.
The GDP per capita graph on Venezuela is interesting, but doesn’t tell the whole story. Socialism is kind of like cocaine; it actually works brilliantly… for a while. Your first couple of months snorting coke, everything seems great – you have more energy, you feel good, you work longer hours and you make more money. But after that initial burst of goodness, things start turning bad. Eventually, very bad. Same with socialism – it works brilliantly until, as Margaret Thatcher noted, you run out of other people’s money. Can people with a high IQ make a shitty system work better… Read more »
We have 20 years of Chavez-Maduro now. The libertarians rubbing their hands together telling us that “any day now it will collapse” sound a little foolish. Frankly, Venezuela is better suited to latin fascism, which is what they have now. Western style liberal democracy cannot work with an 85-IQ population. Darwin never used the phrase “survival of the fittest.” That was coined by a libertarian political theorist named Herbert Spencer. Evolution hinges on reproductive success. Traits that tend to make it more likely for a species to make more copies of itself will, on average, flourish, at the expense of… Read more »
People are certainly most important, but stupid economics can cripple an otherwise high-achieving population – just look at China under Maoism. Venezuela is certainly never going to be a major player in the world, but the people are basically the same as they were forty years ago, and yet they were not, as far as I know, eating zoo animals back then. Anatoly Karlin, the Russian blogger (and certainly no fanatical anti-communist) has done some fine work with regard to the retarding effects of bad systems on otherwise high-achieving people. Williamson is, as always, full of sh*t, but we don’t… Read more »
Why would they sound foolish? In the end, they were right. Doesn’t seem foolish to me.
Not all “Latin fascism” is equal. Pinochet brought prosperity. Chavez-Maduro brought poverty. Doesn’t seem the same to me.
Nothing you said about Darwin refutes my point. We seem to have discovered the limits of high IQ’s ability to aid in winning at Darwin, which in the end is the only game that matters. Check out Japan’s TFR. Then check out Nigeria’s. Doesn’t seem like high IQ is winning to me.
It’s not only a numbers game. I’d bet a future sixty million Japanese against a future six hundred million Nigerians in any contest of economics or war. When all you have are great numbers of stupid people this represents anything but an asset.
Very good point. High IQ does not guarantee Darwinian success. Countries with average IQs of 85 might be in the Darwinain sweet spot. Smart enough to be in the second world and survive, but dumb enough to need reproduction for laborers. Even the very low IQ African countries seem to be replacing their populations, despite (or perhaps because of) squalor and starvation. The high IQ countries guarantee a great standard of living, until the invasions from the south deliver the “not enough smart people’ problem to their mix, and overwhelm the IQ advantage.
Chavez/Maduro have been very successful in driving out the former elite and middle class. Much whiter and higher IQ than the remainder population. Chavez even got the Jews to leave, though most seem to have ended up in the US or Spain, rather than Israel.
The communists can stay in power in Venezeula as long as Russia and China bail them out. But in time they will become a colony. The Venezuelan VP is actually a Hezbollah member.
Yes, the AmSpectator types in the 80s were eagerly anticipating the imminent collapse of Sweden. They wrote a whole book about it: The Future that Doesn’t Work.
Much as I enjoy the Z Man’s writings, whenever I see “IQ” I’m confused. Regarding “IQ”, I’m not interested in how well people do on little puzzles on paper. The definition of intelligence is how much freedom do you create and enjoy? Creating and enjoying freedom = high intelligence.
Z-man – I’m generally with you (and Derbyshire) on institutions and culture, and grasp the genetic/biological piece. But isn’t “culture” (or worldview) the predominant force of the three? E.g. When a Japanese business model is brought to a mid-TN car-manufacturing plant, those workers submit to a unique Japanese business culture irrespective of biology, turning out cars just like a Japanese plant. I live near an Amish community, which of course is a nearly-closed gene pool. But I would argue that it’s their religion – their worldview & shunning of mainstream culture – that makes them as they are; not so… Read more »
It has always been bizarre to me the way that people separate biology and culture, as though the biology of a population has no influence on the sort of culture it will develop. To me, it seems to bw putting the cart before the horse. High testosterone, low future time orientation, low iq populations tend to develop cultures that reflect those traits, and this is true for other traits as well. I tend to think this plays a large part in the failures of our misadventures in the middle east to “spread democracy”. Those populations have traits which predispose them… Read more »
I’ll do a post on this next week, but the short version is this. The great chain of causality is Biology->Culture->Institutions->Politics->Economics. Culture certainly helps shape biology, just as biology shapes culture. There is an interplay between these items. But, the people on top of the hill will always have greater influence on the people down the hill, than the other way around. Start with a collection of Swedes and they will build a Swedish culture and those institutions, politics and economics will follow a predictable course. The Nordic countries made socialism work for a very long time. Socialism is not… Read more »
Maybe it’s the same pathogen that made them choose socialism in the first place. The Kumbaya pathogen. It causes the disease of smugness/moral superiority.
The Nords were socialist before the term existed. Read up on Viking culture and you see an economic model that grew out of their strange geography. They lived on to resources that could not be privatized – the ocean and raiding. They made socialism work for a long time. They still do, despite having imported a nuisance population. They also seem to be waking up to the reality of their situation. Anti-immigrant parties are on the rise all over the Scandinavian realm.
Kumbaya pathogen. I love it.
Well, guess who owns their media.
And exerts undue influence in their feminist-friendly universities and law schools, the gateways to a political career.
Every. Single. Time.
The racial-cultural pathogen hijacks women.
They are it’s carrier, less resistant to it than men. It uses their same negative traits.
This. The snarky response to Capt S might be: how many African Amish communities do you see? Or for that matter, how many Italian Amish communities?
The answer is zero because Amish culture was a particularly German adaptation of Christianity. Biology->Culture->Institutions->Politics->Economics.
Would Africans who are Christian and unable to, or refuse to use modern technology technically Amish in a way?
But Nordic countries *didn’t* make socialism work. You can’t separate the economic socialism they engaged in from the cultural socialism that made them stop reproducing and start inviting in hordes of foreigners. They are of the same substance, linked, two expressions of the same idea: egalitarianism. You can say that once you have biology, culture, institutions, politics, and economics will follow, but they really don’t. I mean, they do to some degree, of course, but not to the degree you’re making them out to. If this was the case, how can you explain the vast differences we see on the… Read more »
Sure they did. It is simply nonsense to claim otherwise. You are committing the fallacy of the undistributed middle. To update and expand on this. There is no causal relationship between Sweden’s economic model and their bizarre decision to import Muslims. You’re assuming a causal relationship, where one does not exist. After all, where in socialist dogma does it say you must import Muslims? Why after a century or more of socialism in these countries did they suddenly decided on open borders? You are also making the same error as Sloppy Williamson. He assumes that socialism always leads to bad… Read more »
I’ve found that there’s an odd phenomenon that many (especially on the race-focused end of things) on the “dissident right” seem to be there not so much because they want to defeat liberalism but because they want to save it. They blame blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and other nonwhites for its failure and insist that not only *can* it work if the right people tried it, but it *has* worked when the right people tried it (despite the countries of those “right people” having coincidentally somehow ended up a shambles after they did). Socialism is a manifestation of egalitarianism, and egalitarianism… Read more »
Kind of easy when you sit on Oil or a Geothermal hotspot. Not to mention the US subsidizing NATO. Let’s see how well Scandinavian Socialism faces off against Russia alone without evil American rednecks backing them up.
“After all, where in socialist dogma does it say you must import Muslims? ” Even last year Bernie was talking about illegals, until they shut him up, or he wised up himself. Compare those vids of Hillary and even Bill ranting about illegals. it’s not socialism as such but the increasing power of Hispanics etc + liberal guilt.
1. Greek city-states were more alike than dissimilar. All had city-state polities. All had, at one time or another, kings/hereditary monarchs. All were slave economies. Land-locked/land powers did differ from those on the coast, but the Spartans showed that they had what it took to start a fleet from scratch and whup Athens. 2. Not all Greeks were of the same stock. Greek stock changed from Minoan & Cretan times, ancient times, bronze dark age, classical greece, Byzantine greece, and post-Byzantine greece. Due to invasions/migrations. ============ The scandis made it work pretty well. They did not have the explosive post-WW2… Read more »
1. Not really. You can always make things seem more alike than they really were by listing the similarities and not even mentioning the differences. But seriously, the Greek city-states had vastly different ways of doing things. Also, they were “city-state polities” except when they weren’t; for example when fortune gave them the chance to become big empires, as happened with Alexander and with the Byzantines. And they had hereditary kings except when they didn’t, as with the Athenian democracy, which was kind of a big deal. 2. The small differences in Greek genetic stock doesn’t explain the vast differences… Read more »
Were they the same stock, though?
Were the periods of turmoil also periods of movement and migration?
It’s very likely that the high cooperation (socialism) model found in Scandinavian cultures is related to the environment of the high latitudes (e.g. long & extremely cold winters). During these extended periods of scarcity, group sharing of resources probably improved survivability of the tribe or village on the evolutionary timescale. Raiding behavior probably evolved as a desperate final stage before winter starvation occurred.
“Per capita GDP is a benchmark number that economists love to use to measure the health of a country.”
Economics (and economists), generally speaking, seems to be about as useful as alchemy or astrology in dealing with today’s problems.
I agree with the basic premise of this article, but we have a clear test case in east/west Germany in the Soviet era. Easy Germany was waaay behind west, but still east Germany was not an unlivable hellhole. Of course Germans are notoriously smart and high functioning, like Scandinavians. might there be a population on the cusp where the difference between a sensible economic structure and a communist fantasy would make or break the level of civilization? Just brainstorming.
Lefty mobs are not going to swarm his Rascal scooter…
Heh….so cheeky, Zman!
In electing a new people did you have Bertolt Brecht in mind?
“After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers’ Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?”
Because this is exactly what the elites/libertarians are doing to us.
And shitheads like Williamson like this just fine.
“Demographics is Destiny.” Pat Buchanan used to say that years ago, and made the neocons and liberals gasp and shriek. As usual, Pat was right.
I think I figured out that race was a hell of a lot more important than ideology when the whole Alvin Greene debacle went down. For those who forget, Greene was the first black guy to be nominated by a major party for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina. He also had a sub-room temperature IQ (bad enough that even Don Lemon was exasperated with him in their interview) and pending sexual harassment cases against him when he ran (he would show up at university libraries and share porn images with unsuspecting young coeds). How did he get so far?… Read more »
Unfettered, economic freedom is one of the most essential elements of having liberty. Something that has not existed in our republic for too long to remember. Culture is upstream of politics. How do I say this… Politics is war by other means on the dirt people for the fun profit and power of the Amerikan Nomenklaturer. Though the hour is seemingly growing late, Alt-Right is enevitable. Reality has a way of waking up and red pilling the dirt people. Interesting thing about dirt people, through history, time and time again, it is always and nobody else, in the final equation… Read more »
It is human nature to help yourself to as much as you can, to the detriment of others, if need be. The Scandinavians likely pursued a socialistic system with a clear responsibility to maintain the well-being of their neighbors, and a social network that would punish those who overtly harmed their neighbors with their selfishness. The homogeneity of the culture, along with smaller local populations, probably had a lot to do with it. Go with concentratated populations (big cities) and a heterogeneous cultural population, and all hell breaks loose.
Much of the culture of Scandinavian socialism dates back to the days of the Vikings. A ship owner had to entice others to join his ship to go a Viking (used as a verb). The owner of the ship took a larger percentage of the booty to cover the costs of the ship, but the remaining booty from the Viking excursions was split equally among the members of the raiding party.
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
How fervently we believed, as desperate a faith as a drowning man clutching at straws.
Lefty mobs are not going to swarm his Rascal scooter
That cracked me up!
Part of making things work is having faith in the culture, and in the governing system, whatever it is. Lefties and socialists have a starting point of assuming it is a free-for-all, so put somebody smart in charge to dole things out. The right trusts the system and human ingenuity to allow people to find their place in things. The Left is fundamentally pessimistic, distrustful, and grasping. The Right is fundamentally optimistic and trustful. This is a starting point for a bunch of other things. I am not so sure about downstream/upstream. Any element can be a good starting point.
I don’t know if Hayek was unique among Austrian school thinkers, but he believed economics followed people and not the other way around, that people and cultures were remarkably different and not interchangeable. And he was addressing just the differences in Europeans. His essay on the dissimilarities between the English and Germans is hilarious in a Hayek way.
Years ago on some Usenet forum I was challenging some libertarian to explain the success and happiness of the Scandinavians and he retorted “Oh, that just proves that white people can make any economic system, no matter how stupd work well enough.” Might have been my red pill moment.
Re-institute colonialism. There, I said it. Even Jonah Goldberg, of all people, actually made this argument back in the late 90s, re: Africa (I’m sure NR has memory-holed it). There are still enough Rhodesians around to ask: Would you rather have Mugabe, or Ian Smith? My guess is 100%, black AND white, would have Smith back in a heartbeat. If we don’t do it, the Chinese will — they are — and those guys think King Leopold’s Ghost is a how-to manual.