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Israel/Zionism See other Israel/Zionism Articles Title: White Identitarianism vs. Citizenism From my 2011 review of Jared Taylor’s book White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century in VDARE: What are the prospects for white identity politics emerging as a self- conscious, public force in America? I’d guess: not good. This is not to say that white identity politics won’t continue to manifest itself de facto. We saw that, for example, with the Tea Parties and the emergence of an overwhelmingly white movement to protect Medicare in 2009. But, white people aren’t supposed to say: we’re doing this “to promote the general welfare” of “ourselves and our posterity” (to quote the Constitution’s Preamble). Whites aren’t supposed to say that—and they don’t like to, either. They like to come up with some principled reason, such as: the philosophy of Ayn Rand says so. Thus, the GOP’s bright young man, Paul Ryan, managing to totally miss the point, announced a plan privatizing Medicare. (Older heads in the House GOP are slowly walking that one back.) Nevertheless, an explicit white identity movement is unlikely to be tolerated. It’s not so much that blacks, Asians, and Hispanics don`t want this to happen. None of these groups are really all that powerful. Blacks tend to be colorful but not too competent; East Asians competent but colorless; Latinos culturally lethargic and unenterprising. No, the much more serious roadblock to the emergence of white identity politics: more Jews don’t want it to happen than do want it to happen. Many Jews have strong reasons for their aversion to white identity politics, either irrational (the Cossacks are coming!) or rational (what’s in it for me?). Perhaps Taylor can persuade enough Jews to get onboard to make white identity respectable in the MSM and thus with the media’s consumers, the public. He’s striven manfully and graciously over the years to make Jews feel welcome in his movement and many Jews have written for American Renaissance. Recall that neoconservatism emerged in the late 1960s, largely due to Jewish shopkeepers’ fear of black crime and Jewish civil servants’ fear of being fired by black politicians. Brilliant Jewish intellectuals like Nathan Glazer and Norman Podhoretz took their relatives’ complaints seriously. Still, over time, Jews mostly figured out it was simply easier to move away from blacks and get better jobs where they didn’t have to deal with many blacks. Let other whites deal with them. Thus Commentary lost interest in complaining about quotas, and neoconservatism morphed into mostly being an Israel Fan Club. The fundamental question for 21st Century white identity politics is the same as for Armenians, just two or three orders of magnitude greater in media influence: What’s in it for Jews? Taylor has worked out strong justifications for why a white identity movement would be good for average, and particularly good for below-average, whites. But not many Jews are below the white average. Jews are generally praised in the press for engaging in Jewish identity politics. So why would they instead want to engage in disreputable white identity politics? What’s in it for them? My alternative philosophy of “citizenism” proposed attacking identity politics at its most vulnerable points: Affirmative Action quota preferences for Hispanics and Asians. (See the 2005 debate between me and Jared Taylor on VDARE.com.) Nobody can come up with a good justification for these privileges for immigrant groups. They just free-ride off the anti-white glamour of the 1960s black civil rights movement. Indeed, there’s no good reason for the “Hispanic” category even to exist in government data. It`s not a race, it’s not an ethnicity, it’s not a linguistic group, it’s just a rent-seeking special privilege. Abolish the category! Once the data isn’t collected anymore, nobody can use it in government lawsuits alleging “disparate impact”. I did propose conceding permanent quotas for the descendants of American slaves. That’s a high cost, but one we’re likely to pay anyway. Is my philosophy extolling solidarity among American citizens rather than among whites likely to prove more acceptable to the media gatekeepers that Taylor’s white advocacy? Sure—in the sense that a two percent probability is twice a one percent probability. You’ll note that, after all these years, I’m still using quotes around “citizenism” because nobody knows what the word is. It hasn’t exactly swept the intellectual world. This is a pretty depressing way to wrap up. But I do think it’s safe to say that the conventional wisdom will change when it has to change. It probably won`t change until it has to, but it will have to when it has to. In other words, what historian Hugh Davis Graham called attention to in the title of his 2002 book, Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America, can’t go on forever. The mounting “racial ratio“ of nonwhite beneficiaries to white benefactors means the system will inevitably break down under the weight of numbers. At that point, white consciousness could be forced into existence. In the meantime, we can all be thankful that Jared Taylor has been thinking ahead. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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