DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Steve Sailer lets his brain run free, to our benefit and that of all right-thinking people.

Murray says, in a throwaway line in Coming Apart, that the growing problems of the white working class don’t have much to do with race or immigration. Of course, these days, you have to say that to be accepted in polite society. Only poor white trash would think otherwise.

In fact, it’s obvious that class, race, and immigration are indeed intimately intertwined in complicated ways. But we are less and less equipped to understand them—as class taboos harden over what refined folk are supposed to notice about race and immigration.

Even the best of thinkers are constrained by their environment. Thinking outside the box gets you nowhere if the people you’re trying to reach are trained to look only inside the box for their inputs.

Among the intelligentsia, why has not thinking intelligently about immigration become a mark of gentility?

The most obvious explanation: class-based economic self-interest. People higher up the social pyramid compete less with immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, and employ them more.

Duh. Rich people don’t worry about illegal immigration for the same reason that slaveowners didn’t worry about civil rights violations.

Of the 18 NYT editorial board members today, one is black, one is Chinese, and the other16 are white. None have Spanish surnames.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

The Left used to have a ready-made set of class-based explanations for just about everything. For example, they said racial conflict in the Jim Crow South was stirred up by the landowning class to keep black and white sharecroppers from uniting against their oppressors. Similarly, the highly successful leader of the United Automobile Workers union, Walter Reuther (1907-1970), a pillar of the Democratic Party during its mid-Century dominance, preached black-white worker solidarity against management.

That was then, this is now. Nowadays the Left is run by the Upper Crust. So class-based arguments would be, uh, unhelpful.

In recent months, the Left has begun congratulating itself on rediscovering class with its Occupy Wall Street protests. Yet, a glance at the original poster in Adbusters that kicked off the movement should raise doubts. The irony is that this Photoshopped image of a ballerina surmounting sculptor Arthur Di Modica’s iconic symbol of Wall Street, Charging Bull, struck very few protesters as ironic. Ballet is perhaps the most expensive and aristocratic of all performing arts, having attained classical perfection under the patronage of the Czars. Ballet would wither without the rich.

Love the poster. Not every group would announce so publicly that their ‘movement’ is primarily a fancy dance perched on a heap o’ bull.

The Victorians notoriously considered discussion of sex vulgar. Nice people didn’t notice. Likewise, elite Americans now believe that being well informed about race (and, increasingly, immigration) is a sign of ill-breeding.

Suitable only for the rubes in Flyover Country. Listen to any Garrison Keillor monologue for details.

Without massive immigration from Latin America over the last four decades, the U.S. Hispanic population would have become more diffuse. The more talented and ambitious would have married into the general population. Hispanics would have inevitably become even less of a potential political bloc.

But what actually happened was continued mass immigration—and government and opinion leaders actively working to retard Latin assimilation by rewarding Hispanic racialists with Affirmative Action money and prizes.

Who benefits from that? I wonder….

I recently tried to look up how big the Hispanic population was in 1960, the initial point in the half century covered in Murray’s book—only to find that the Census Bureau never asked about Spanish background in the 1950 and 1960 enumerations. During the more idealistic early civil rights era, Hispanics were officially considered just plain white. But that changed as the Quota Era took off from 1969 onward and it began to pay to be officially a minority.

Who benefits from that? I wonder….

But today Chavez’s years of struggle against illegal immigration have almost completely disappeared down the Memory Hole as the MSM has posthumously converted him into the Patron Saint of Undocumented Workers.

To the point of getting a street named after him in downtown Dallas, a city with which he has no connection whatsoever — almost as absurd as naming one after St Patrick.

The issue of immigration is one of the weirder class phenomena of our era. Thus on St. Patrick’s Day, the New York Times ran an op-ed by a Maine-based novelist named Peter Behrens, entitled: It’s About Immigrants, Not Irishness. [March 16, 2012]

No!—St. Patrick’s Day really is about Irishness!

But the Irish aren’t a politically fashionable minority, so we have to ‘spread the wealth around’.

Thus, despite all the elite press effort to get Mexicans to feel simmering hatred over immigration, the numbers suggest that immigration is less of a big deal to Mexican-American voters than it is to the journalists sent to cover them.

And their race-industry pets among the ‘activist’ groups like La Raza, of course — but that’s economically-based, too, because being victims is their meal ticket.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2012 at 09:56 and is filed under Think about it.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.