By Steve Sailer
09/02/2017
From commenter Irish Paleo:
Seeing things, as I do, from the Eastern side of the Atlantic, it’s fascinating the degree to which the different demographic vectors in Europe and America have driven the political priorities of: (a) ethno-masochistic white political correctness; and (b) Jews, in each place. The key differences can be summarised as follows:
1. While Jews in America earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans, Jews in Europe are, if anything, even more politically conservative than their earnings would suggest (and have become more so even as high earners have been moving gradually leftwards).
Tory Theresa May won about 75% of the Jewish vote in the British election last June.
2. Jews in America are honorary non-whites (for now) and, thus far, nobody in the mainstream media has cottoned on to the fact that “unbearable whiteness” in professionally and financially desirable fields is almost invariably accompanied by an even more “unbearable” Jewishness in those self-same fields.
3. By contrast, in Europe, Jews are considered white. While European demographics are not such as to allow for the almost feral degree of anti-white hatred that consumes the American left, the European left is pretty anti-white and seems to admire (and envy) the extent to which the American left can indulge its passion for anti-white signalling. Be that as it may, outside a few shrinking pockets of the London leftie set, Europe’s respectable left accords no special protected status to Jews when it comes to the allocation of stigma arising from the historical corruption of white blood.
4. Indeed, on the less respectable left, Jews are now quite close to attaining the status of whitey squared. Of course, Europe’s hard left (which is far to the left of Sanders or Nader in the US) still insists that its problem is with “Zionists” and not Jews. However, as the European left’s voting base is increasingly dominated by Muslim and African-descended voters for whom the distinction is not terribly resonant, Jews are drawing less and less comfort from it.
The above naturally raises the questions of: (a) how Jews and leftists so markedly diverged on either side of the Atlantic; (b) what the consequences of this divergence are for politics in Europe and America; (c) whether we might see some future convergence; and (d) what such a convergence would look like.
To take the first question, we must analyse the key demographic differences between Europe and the United States:
[Comment at Unz.com]1. Due to a combination of mass migrations from Europe to the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries and certain unpleasant events in Central and Eastern Europe in those centuries, a disproportionate share of Europe’s Jewish population emigrated to America, meaning that the Jewish population is smaller and thus less politically influential in Europe that in America. This meant that the pro-Zionist politics that dominated the left in the mid-2oth century largely operated at a poseur level in Europe, where relatively few of the influential left wing thinkers were Jewish. As a result, when Zionism lost its chic on the left, it had no natural critical mass of champions to defend it, in contrast to the US.
2. A higher proportion of European Jews would be Yekke and Sephardic Jews rather than Eastern European Ashkenazim. The former are, generally speaking, more politically conservative than the latter. This probably gave European Jews a slightly more right-ish lean than Jews in the United States.
3. Geographically and demographically speaking, Europe’s Mexicans are Middle Eastern and North African Muslims and its Puerto Ricans and Dominicans are Pakistanis and Bangladeshis — i.e. the Muslim world is the major proximate source of mass third world immigration in Europe. Unlike Hispanics, who have almost zero political cohesion outside of the fantasy world in which Washington political consultants live, Muslims have their religion, which acts as a very effective political glue.
4. Whilst Hispanics play second fiddle to blacks in the US, European Muslims have the advantage of being much more numerous than blacks and having been so for quite a long time. By contrast, Europe’s much smaller black population lacks cohesion compared with America’s. Most blacks in continental Europe are or are descended from African immigrants who came in the 1950s or later. The only substantial slave-descended black populations in Europe are the Afro-Caribbeans in the UK. However, they came as free immigrants from Jamaica, Trinidad, etc. The only unifying romance that European blacks have is imported from the US via Hollywood and rap music and while the European left does plenty to encourage black grievance culture, it is constrained by the relatively low political profitability that relatively small black numbers accord them.
5. Imagine a US with a hyper aggressive Hispanic population most of which has converted to Islam and then imagine a black population a third the size of what it is and consisting 50% of African immigrants who are not descended from slaves. Then imagine 75-80% fewer Jews. That’s pretty close to what we have in Europe. In such a scenario, the largely poseur-level (for now) anti-Semitism of blacks would give way to the genuine and visceral anti-Semitism of Muslims and the left would be faced with an increasingly burdensome carry-cost for retaining Jews as a protected group. Well that’s more or less what we have in Europe, with young leftists wearing Arafat scarves (and I’m talking about white leftists here).
So that’s the why. What’s the result? Well, like all things in life, it rather depends upon perspective.
1. European leftists are disgusted at the American left’s lack of “solidarity” with the Palestinians and, at a grassroots level, many if not most lefties would see Jewish influence on the left as being an example of Goldman Sachs money corrupting the left and driving it away from economic populism and third world solidarity — and remember, to the European leftist who has lacked the narcotic high of attacking colonialism and Apartheid for some decades now, the real importance of the Israel-Palestine conflict is that it’s one of the few remaining examples of a white v. non-white struggle taking place in the realm of geopolitics.
2. That said, while the European left is more economically populist than the American left, one cannot ignore two other factors.
3. The first is that the European left is nowhere near as powerful as the American left. The Democratic Party has now won the popular vote (or at least the popular vote including fraudulent votes) in every presidential election bar one since 1988. By contrast, without the alliance of (disproportionately Jewish) plutocrats and third world flash mobs that constitutes the Democratic base, the European left struggles to maintain influence. For example, the British Labour Party hasn’t won an election since 2005, the German Social Democrats haven’t won one since 2002 and the French Socialists have won the Elysee Palace once since 1988 (in what looks like the rather anomalous 2012 election).
4. While it is more economically populist than the US left, the European left’s priorities are fundamentally the same as the Democratic Party’s. Its concern for the working class now largely involves looking after discrete client groups like public sector unions and it is generally much more motivated by identity politics, bathroom wars and that ever-lengthening LGBTQWERTYUIOP acronym.
5 Looked at in the context of 4 and 5 above, the American left’s continued message discipline in relation to Jews looks more like an intelligent trade-off — albeit one which probably isn’t open to European leftists due to the less favourable demographics it faces.
Third and fourth questions. Will there be a convergence between Europe and America and what does such a convergence look like?
1. The basic difference between the US and Europe is that history and geography gerrymandered the former a lot more than they did the latter. Hispanics are inert and indisciplined. Jews are neither. (American) Blacks are indisciplined but are far from inert. This means that the Hispanics disappoint those who expect them to turn into shock troops for the Democratic Party but it also means that their support for the Democratic Party comes at a price that it would, in any event, have already had to pay in order to maintain black support (keep the welfare cheques coming) and elite white support (keep the immigrants coming). This means that the mediocre political support that Hispanics give the Dems costs them nothing, which dramatically raises its de facto value. Meanwhile, blacks have inherited the African “big man” system of political organisation, one of the features of which is that black voters are often as interested in delivering power and prestige to their community’s elites as they are in their own welfare. This means that they vote for Hispanic immigration that hurts their own interests because it increases the size of the political coalitions that make their leaders (Obama, Sharpton, Holder, Lynch, Harris etc.) more powerful. Jews and other elite whites have the habit of elite whites everywhere — namely that of accepting rhetorical excesses they don’t like in return for policies they do. This kind of gerrymander is just too good to plan and even for manipulators like the Democrats, they had to rely on about 70% dumb luck.
2. However, gerrymandered systems keep working until they don’t and when that point comes, the gerrymander massively amplifies the effect of any backlash. Fundamentally, it’s a numbers game. Like a power plant that is at is most efficient generation capacity when it’s 1 Watt away from causing a transformer explosion, the marginal returns on gerrymandering suddenly go negative just moments after they were at their peak. The election of Donald Trump gives us a clue as to how this works in practice.
3. The rise of Trump surprised those of us familiar with European politics a lot less than it did Americans with an insular worldview. Why? Because since the 1980s, every region of the west outside of North America has had regular conservative nationalist eruptions. In the 1980s, the Front National came on the scene in France. Already, 20 years ago, we had the FPO in Austria and the Lega Nord, Alleanza Nationale and Fiama di Tricolore in Italy, the Vlaams Belang in Belgium, One Nation in Australia and New Zealand First. Now we also have Wilders in the Netherlands, the Sweden Democrats etc. as well. However, American politics maintained utterly boring and conventional post 1945 centrist politics. Indeed, 10 years ago, mainstream Republicans and DLC Democrats regularly used to lecture Europeans on why America had avoided the “far-right” trap.
4. Of course, it was all down to demographics and electoral systems. America’s first past the post electoral system prevented small parties from developing and her demographics meant that the type of anti-white cultural Marxism against which European voters were reacting was such a politically powerful force in America that it was able to crush national conservatism. Then what happened? Size, my dear boy, size. Eventually the anti-white ethnic blocs in America became too large and unruly and catalysed an opposable cohesion and the American electoral system that had protected both parties from dissent suddenly found itself assailed. Until you get roughly a quarter of America, you are stuck on the margins. However, once you get to that magic number, that’s it: one of the parties (in this case the GOP) becomes yours. So, never having had a nationalist political movement, in one fell swoop, America ended up passing Europe out and going straight to a nationalist president.
5. My prediction is that (at the very latest), once the 34-49 year old age group reaches a critical mass of non-whiteness, the Democrats’ white establishment will suddenly find itself unable to avoid the type of pandering that European leftists have been doing since the 1970s to typical third world non-white sentiment re Jews, namely as being not just whites but the worst and most irredeemable kind of whites — and then the dam will break.
6. What will a sign of such break look like? In my view, look for a Jim Clancy moment with the opposite ending. Remember that Clancy went onto Twitter not to engage in Jew bashing but to indulge in pro-Islamic virtue signalling. Clancy is, of course, Irish American and (in my considerable experience of dealing with Irish people) the Irish are slightly less uptight about Jews than other white ethnics. My guess is that, as an Irish American, he overestimated the speed with which Jews were falling out of favour on the left and thought that he could use “Hasbara” as a synonym for white racist. I reckon that Unlucky Jim got it a few years premature. My prediction: There will be a Jim Clancy-Hasbara-type moment some time in the not-too-distant future and that will be the sign that American Jews will be about to travel further and faster in the direction of European Jews and without the intellectual coherence that they give what Steve calls the “coalition of the fringes”, it will, as the old Chinese saying goes, crumble like dry tofu.
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