by Brett Stevens on May 27, 2015

At its founding, America was a WASP nation. This acronym, originally meaning “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” generally included those of indigenous Western European heritage regardless of religion. English, Scots, Dutch, Germans, Scandinavians, northern French and Austrians fell under this banner. Genetic outlier and admixed groups like Greeks, Italians, southern French, Slavs, Jews, Poles and Irish did not.

As industry boomed in the northeast, it needed more menial laborers: unskilled, repetitive task-doers who could be paid minimal wages which would, relativistically, be seen as a great step up in condition of life. The importation began with a flood of Irish, then Italians, Greeks and Poles. The WASP establishment disliked this process but rather than fight it, retreated behind a wall of money and exclusivity. The fuse was lit however, and during the Civil War it became clear how useful these “New Americans” were: they could be counted on to wage war on those more prosperous or simply more selective than themselves. With the advent of massed infantry charges and repeating rifles, the skill of warriors became less important than having a willing mass which would charge forward when the horn blew.

When the new century dawned, the world wars required that the West — ironically like both Napoleon and Genghis Khan — adopt a pose of being accepting of all as a means of differentiating itself from those nasty, exclusive nationalist and monarchist states. Each war increased the propaganda for acceptance and solidarity based on position, such as political stance or economic position as workers, and this enabled the West to produce the human wave it needed to win its wars. Unfortunately, in a pattern that would repeat time and again, most of the casualties were from the original WASP contingent. When you read the names in the old 13 colonies churches, you see mostly English, German and Scots names with a smattering of Dutch and French. When you read the casualties from the first two world wars, the same pattern prevails.

During the second world war American propaganda reached new intensity. Not only did it set the stage for the future of “perpetual war,” or constant definition of our purpose as struggle against impediments to ideological objectives such as democracy, but it also established egalitarian dogma as the basis of why we considered ourselves exceptional. No longer was America the “city on the hill” for its morality of doing the right thing, but for its morality of inclusivity. Not surprisingly, the so-called Greatest Generation — with non-WASPs more prevalent because of their lower casualties — voted for a series of disastrous immigration acts, first in 1958 and then in 1965, which guaranteed that the new population of the country would be mostly non-WASP.

Liberals rejoiced. Their line for years had been that the snooty WASPs, who retreated from the Irish/Italian/Polish immigration waves to gated communities, were the source of our misery and injustice. In their thinking, if the WASPs were removed, a new Utopia would reign. That event happened in the 1990s, when the work-ethic of the 1950s combined with the politics of 1968 as the Baby Boomers assumed positions of authority across the board, and the immigration that had been nascent even when Ronald Reagan made his 1987 compromise became a flood. The new rules had been posted: liberals are now in control, and everyone is welcome to come get a slice of the American pie. What occurred was predictable, since people act both in their own interests and through the path of least resistance. The third world fled its homelands and poured into the West, both America and Europe. Unable to attack the flood politically for fear of being seen as Hitler or the antiquated WASP establishment, conservatives retreated.

No one called the liberals on the failure of their plan. They promised a new land of peace, justice and equality with the demise of the WASPs. Instead what they produced was a faddish land where the new elites, generally of the former immigrant stock, chased after trends and clickbait statements to make to the press, while the newest immigrant groups joined in the civil rights experience by using the same justification that achieved affirmative action and federal benefits for African-Americans. This resulted in a society dedicated to taking from its founders and giving to new warm bodies, and no one could criticize it, or they would be branded as racist in the media and lose their jobs, homes, spouses, friends and legal protection.

Fast-forward twenty years from that point and the Rainbow Nation is in chaos. Race riots are a regular occurrence to which the only solution seems to be not to police non-white groups, who still have disproportionate rates of crime and victimization compared to WASP groups. Affirmative action has not resulted in widespread equality, but it has resulted in widespread expense, since the law does not recognize the difference between a qualified minority candidate and an unqualified one. Even more, as Robert Putnam discovered in his landmark study, diversity increases alienation and distrust even within ethnic groups. As our presidential candidates openly admit to treasonous scandals, our military is embroiled in corruption, and control by moneyed interests reaches a new peak, we might ask the role that our lack of cooperation with each other plays in those developments.

Our choice is clear: we either go back to what worked, which was a Western European only nation, or we continue down the path of diversity which is the policy that produced most third world nations. As Ann Coulter clarified for us all, this is not only a “clash of civilizations” but clash of civilization-models. In particular, our method works better; the third world method works less well; by merging our method with the third world method, we will end up with the third world method, and no one will benefit:

You fled that culture. Because it is a â€” there are a lot of problems with that culture. Hopefully, it can be changed. But we can share our culture with other nations without bringing all of their people here. When you bring the people here, you bring those cultures here. That includes honor killings, it includes uncles raping their nieces, it includes dumping litter all over, it includes not paying your taxes, it includes paying bribes to government officials. That isnâ€™t our culture. You can see the successful cultures in the world. They have been studied ad infinitum, America is about â€” it is the best in the world and we are about to lose it. And everyone who lives here is going to lose that. And the people who are going to suffer the most are the weakest ones. Itâ€™s the women. Itâ€™s the children. â€¦ No country has ever had the sort of respect for women that Anglo America does and that is going out the door.

Ann might as well have extrapolated to Western European culture in general: no society has had so much reverence for learning, for excellence instead of mere participation, for sacredness and sacred roles to the genders, for respect for nature, and for caring for children. Compared to us the rest of the world is a cold, dark and unforgiving place, and yet in our best of days, we were also the most warlike, vigorously squashing whatever offended our values. There is a connection: among other things, Western Europe is the culture of the hard rule. We know what we like, and what we do not, and we eject the bad and multiply the good, while being skeptical of the unknowns. At least, that is how we were during the best of our days. Since the rise of liberalism, these positive attributes have been attenuated.

The facts of this complex dilemma take two dimensions. Our society makes the first taboo, which is noticing that genetic differences result from societies which take the path we did not. The second is more complex, and relates more closely to Putnam’s revelations: homogenous societies, with a strong cultural and ethnic identity, provide the best basis for working together and therefore thrive in a lack of internal friction. Even more important is the notion of identity, and having pride in who you are and your history, so that you want to continue this beyond the threshold of personal convenience. Identity turns our method into a way of life and a tendency imbued deep within every soul. It means we do not need constant government to prevent third-world style chaos, but have high-trust societies where cooperation is more prevalent than coercion. We might call this the “first world method” because all first-world societies became that way under its rule.

In contrast, third world societies are the most individualistic, “free,” autonomous, cheerful, tolerant places on earth. There, you do whatever you want. In exchange, you have less social order and fewer functional institutions. In other words, they are closer to the state before civilization. This is why the vast majority of third-world societies are low on social standards; the focus is on the autonomy of the individual, and the unintended secondary consequences are the lack of social order, rule by warlords and gangs, corruption and high crime. But to a true individualist, this is a benefit not a curse. The individual is restrained by nothing and can do whatever he or she wants with no negative feedback from society and no enforcement of standards. These societies have more freedom than the first world, and their tolerance is such that they admit any newcomers, which is why almost all of them are mixed-race. They are also highly sexually liberated for the most part, with no tedious social standards forcing boys and girls to wait until long-term commitment for sex (even in countries with strong putative sexual morality, the reality is more liberated). The third world is the liberal ideal, although liberals want to hang on to first-world conveniences and will attempt to do so through totalitarianism, which as we see in the Russian, Venezuelan, Cuban and East German experiments, does not quite work out as expected.

In the West, the first-world method resulted in our meteoric rise to the top of the world. We then colonized it, bringing with us technology in exchange for what the left calls “oppression” but was more likely the grim process of beating radical individualists into conformity so they could actually achieve something. Where we have retreated, technology remains, but it has now become a tool of the corrupt warlords and gangs rather than a means of restraining them. In other words, the third-world method has absorbed the first-world one. The same is being attempted in the United States and European Union, but even now the writing on the wall suggests this will lead to more of what the rest of the world is doing. Nine out of ten humans live in third-world conditions or near to them, with the Western Europeans in the US and EU as the outliers. Naturally the rest of the group wants us to conform, and stop rising above their level, so that no one feels challenged by the possibility of life being better. Mediocrity loves company.

How can we pull out of this tailspin? The germ of it lies in accepting Western European exceptionalism: our method works better, but we cannot share it with others by inviting them here, only by succeeding and making them jealous and angry to the point where they implement it in their home countries. Diversity does not work. It cannot work because it is paradoxical. It assumes that all people are the same and that beating the same rules into them will achieve the same results. Yet the lesson that colonialism taught was that this approach does not work either. Each group must develop the “first-world method” on its own; it cannot be taught. Western Europeans must withdraw to our own spaces in America and Europe, and eject everyone else to take our lessons home to their countries, which badly need improvement. It is not our responsibility to fix them, because if we assume that, it takes the burden off of those countries to improve themselves. And then we would live in a WASP world with one vital change, which is that we will remove the “gated communities” plus cheap labor formula of the early WASP decline. That would look more like this promising vision from South Africa:

But in the midst of a sinking South Africa, there is one beacon of hope: the Afrikaner self-governed town of Orania. Orania in today’s South Africa is a bit like Asterix’s village in conquered Gaul. The town is a private entity that has striven since its founding in 1991 to provide a self-determined homeland for Afrikaners. Here Afrikaans is the official language. All work, even manual labour, is done by Afrikaners. In that way, jobs for poor Afrikaners are created. There is no interference from government in how Oranians run their businesses, and there are many one-man enterprises. Apart from having to pay a low yearly registration tax, we are left alone. Crime is virtually non-existent in Orania. Here is no violent crime, and rare incidents of theft, committed by fellow Afrikaners, are quickly resolved; in such cases, the transgressor has to do community work for minor offences, or otherwise has to leave town.

Notice the vital difference: this community requires affirmative and constructive participation, and it wields a great threat to those who do not conform, which is exile. Much as Europeans sent their unwanted to Tripoli and Americans sent them into Mexico, this population can eject those who commit crimes. The point is that being in this society is a privilege, not a “right,” and that only those who uphold the first-world method get to stay there. This makes it something to reach for by its citizens, and something to emulate by the third world. It also ends the tedious duality of importing third-worlders to do our cheap unskilled jobs, then a generation later noticing the vast social impact of creating a third world within the first. Send the Irish, Italians and Poles back; send the Mexicans, Chinese and Africans back. Restore America and Europe to their Western European roots, because that is when we were not just barely functional but great, and it gave us the pride to have the will to work together.

Tags: diversity, first world, internationalism, multiculturalism, nationalism, pan-nationalism, racism, third-world, wasp

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