White America

This is the second installment in OD’s investigation into the crucially important and neglected topic: Who Are White People?

The Boomerangs

In recent weeks, the term “Boomerang” has entered our lexicon and we have been using it ever more frequently in our analysis of Black Run America.

A “Boomerang” is a White Millennial who attended college in the Bush/Obama years and who was probably an Obamaniac in 2008. After graduating from college and entering the workforce, the Boomerangs discovered that there wasn’t much of a job market that matched their education and skills.

The Boomerangs moved back home to live with their parents like 85 percent of college graduates now do these days in the Obamanation. Lots of Boomerangs now find themselves unemployed, working part time jobs, putting off getting married and having children, and burdened with student loan debt they have no hope of ever repaying.

Half of last month’s job growth was provided by McDonald’s. White Millennials went to college and mortgaged their lives to big banks to work at McDonald’s for Barack Hussein Obama, Our Great Leader.

Last year, I poked fun at a triumphalist book called “Permanently Blue” which forecasted a permanent Democratic majority largely on the basis of White Millennial support for Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

I sensed at the time that the “youth vote” for Obama was probably more of a sign of desperation and economic frustration than anything else. It wasn’t a real verdict on Obama or Democratic policy positions.

I also pointed out the irony that White Millennials were being counted as solid Democratic voters on the basis of one election cycle when the “Greatest Generation” and “Boomers” which created postwar America – most strikingly, the White working class, which was once the base of the Democratic Party – had turned so sharply against it and had evolved into the Tea Party.

In 1984, Ronald Reagan won 49 states in a landslide election. I’m not drawing attention to this because I have any particular love for The Gipper. The point is that you could never have predicted the 1984 election result on the basis of the Boomers involvement with the 1960s counterculture.

I said at the time:

“What makes progressives think the Millennials won’t turn on them as well? If anything is true, the White Millennials are even more likely to turn on them, and far more radically, as they and their children will be the ones who inherit the Minority-Majority, decades of racial conflict, and a bankrupt Third World America. The Millennials are now graduating from high school and college. In a few years, they will be in the real world and outside the indoctrination centers, trying to establish independence from their parents. Let’s see how racial harmony fairs in the long run in Depression conditions and a zero sum game of racial conflict over scarce resources.”

Looking into the future, I predicted that White Millennials would emerge from their college cocoons and find themselves in a Great Depression world. It actually turned out to be worse than the Depression.

The children of White Millennials will inherit a world that it even poorer, marked by even greater racial strife, and where Whites feel even more imperiled than this one.

The Boomerang Future

The key insight is that the economic future of White Millennials will be radically unlike the conditions which led to the creation of Black Run America.

In the 1960s, Americans walked on the moon and declared a war on poverty. They watched the Jetsons on television and imagined themselves living in space by now. In the 2010s, Americans are going to space for the last time and the poverty rate is soaring.

Historically speaking, the liberalization of White racial attitudes in the United States has been driven by three critical factors: conflict with a White foreign power like the Soviet Union, the assurance of white supremacy, and economic prosperity.

Correspondingly, White racial attitudes have tended to harden in historical conditions when the reverse is true: long periods of peace with other White nations, when Whites feel threatened by social revolution from below, and in times of scarcity and economic decline.

I have believed for years now that energy scarcity and the systematic mismanagement of the American economy would one day recreate something like the Jim Crow world in the American South.

By that I mean the federal government is too corrupt and incompetent to effectively respond to its terminal problems (future White historians will find the Paul Krugman archive to be a goldmine) and that the long term result of this will be a slow economic decline and the gradual reemergence of a rural agriculture based economy in this area.

I can envision a world which has somehow has managed to combine abandoned Wal-Marts and deteriorating suburbs being torn down for salvage with cell phone service with sharecropping. I can see our descendants getting to town on trains, motorcycles, and small electric vehicles.

Having seen a preview of the future on Black Memorial Day 2011, I don’t believe for a second that our present racial illusions (in which we pretend that African-Americans are just like us and pay them off with EBT cards, African-American studies programs, and TANF welfare to keep quiet) will survive this transition.

Changing Boomerang Attitudes

It is way too early to make any long term projections, but there are already clear signs that economic anxiety is beginning to influence White Millennials in the positive manner which we have described.

(1) There is a new Heartland Monitor poll which contains an interesting result that inspired this article: Barack Obama has lost more ground with White Millennials than with any other White demographic.

Obama’s support among White Millennials is down a full 10 points from the 2008 exit polls. He is down 3 points with Whites over 65, down 2 points with college educated White men, and down 3 points with White Boomers.

Without the support of White Millennials, Obama would have lost Indiana and North Carolina in the 2008 election. Combined with the souring of White elderly and middle aged voters, Obama would have lost Florida and Ohio as well.

(2) This poll was taken on May 18-22 and comes fresh on the heels of the death of Osama bin Laden. It shows an 8 point surge in approval among Republicans and other White demographics which all reflect the bounce from this good news.

But still, only 22 percent of Whites believe that Obama is increasing opportunity for people like them, which is his lowest rating ever among Whites on the economy. It is very interesting that such a huge foreign policy success had so little impact upon White Millennials who were seen on television celebrating at the White House and Ground Zero.

We predicted at the time that the euphoria would fade and that reality would quickly set in. It took less than two weeks.

(3) The New York Times is reporting that Obamamania has cooled even at such unlikely places as Oberlin College in Ohio, the first integrated college in America, and which has been a trendsetter and bastion of leftwing utopian lunacy for over a hundred and fifty years now:

“In a conversation after the symposium, he spoke of a love affair that, to a palpable degree, had wound down. “It started hot and heavy,” he said. “And with extremely idealized notions. Then a reality dawned in the way that a once charming laugh becomes an irritating giggle: He’s a politician who no longer corresponds to the grand ideas that many students had in their heads about him. And that’s deflating and disheartening for them.”

If Oberlin students are shrugging their shoulders and becoming politically disengaged, the hardcore vanguard of the progressive left, then how much more disillusioned must White Millennials be on campuses like the University of Wisconsin or the University of Virginia which are crucial to an Obama victory in 2012?

Final Thoughts

The lesson of this article is that people change.

White America is changing before our eyes. White people are losing hope about the future. They are losing faith in the ability of their elected representatives to improve their lives and even to represent their views in Congress.

The status quo is bankrupt. The federal government and the mainstream media have lost their legitimacy to govern and guide public opinion.

White racial attitudes are lagging behind these other changes, but we have polling data and many other lines of evidence which indicates that racial resentments are there and could burst out into the open in the right historical conditions.

We have to be in a position to take advantage of these changes. White people are changing and we are going to have to change to join forces with them. That means shunning people like Alex Linder who spit on the people we ought to be reaching out to.

Here’s a Heartland song about young White people growing up in the Great Depression. As we saw in the suicide statistics, White people and African-Americans have always coped with adversity in radically different ways:





