Caplan on Sailer
9th August 2013
Steve Sailer waxes dyspeptic.
As for my influence, I’ve been writing a long time, and I’m stoic about the fact that my influence works through labyrinthine laundering processes, where my ideas eventually show up in more sonorous forms on the op-ed page of the New York Times weeks or months or years after I publish them. Eventually, I expect to be recognized as The Guy Who Figured Out the Answers to the Hard Questions, but I don’t expect that to happen before I’m very old. Such is the way of the world …
On the other hand, the media conventional wisdom considers Bryan’s extremism to be admirable, if perhaps a little too forthright for the peasants at the moment. Unfortunately, it’s not a good idea to blithely assume that elites won’t get what they keep shouting for, no matter how stupid it is. To update for the 21st Century H.L. Mencken’s apothegm on democracy, “Mediacracy is the theory that the elites know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
The problem is that there can be a lot of collateral damage when sanity is considered unmentionable in elite discourse.
That America is better than other places is obvious from the fact that a lot of people want to move from There to Here. It seems obvious to me that those who are Here ought to want to keep Here as good a place as possible, and I don’t see in what way that’s a bad thing; how does letting in a lot of people from There do that? They have equally obviously not been very successful at making There a better place, otherwise they would want to stay There.
So how do we keep Here the place we want it to be, and keep it from becoming Just Another There? The experience of the European countries is, I think, instructive — never have so many from There been allowed into Here, and the results have been invariably negative — for every 10 things good about such ‘diversity’, there are 100 things bad. Ought we not to learn from the mistakes of others? Do we have to keep reinventing the wheel (or, more accurately, the rack)? The whole ‘come one, come all’ attitude makes absolutely no sense to me.