Given that any members of a “White Caucus” would be run out on a rail, this is a smart move. It puts racial unfairness in the news.

Right now much of the stupidity on race is caused not by anti-White racism, but by people hanging on to an impossible concept of racial fairness that only exists in fantasy. This fairness is only enforced in one direction, which makes it de facto racism. As this myth of fairness blows up, more people will start to think seriously about the practical problems of race.

My understanding of the Congressional Black Caucus is that non-blacks can be ‘associate’ members but are denied voting rights within the caucus. If so, this has to be the only official group in the US Govt where the right to vote is restricted according to race. Or perhaps the same is true with the Hispanic and Asian Pacific caucuses.

Tom Tancredo for President!

Thanks to Mr. Tancredo for his many efforts at immigration reform. I wonder though if Mr. Tancredo is trying to abolish what traditionalists might value: the right to publicly segregate.

I wish Mr. Tancredo would run against Bush in the primaries and really put Bush’s feet to the fire on immigration. The result of the California election just might put Bush on the defensive. Border patrol police and American citizens are being killed along the Mexican border, and Bush just keeps strutting like a rooster. It is sinful to wish Mr. Bush and the many other self-deceived politicians harm. It would, however, have been better had the 9/11 terrorists struck only the country’s leaders. Large calibre mortar shells with nerve gas while the President was giving the State of the Union address would have saved the lives of thousands of powerless American civilians on 9/11. We would no longer be hearing about all the hardworking, god-loving, peaceful Muslims and Mexicans. (Even the terrorists would have had an excellent chance of getting away and would have generated far less world condemnation.)

David Horowitz e-mailed me (in a mass e-mailing, since he does not know me) to sign an e-petition calling on California’s leaders to overturn a measure signed by the desperate Gray Davis giving illegal aliens driver’s licenses beginning January 1. I suggest going to www.frontpage.com, where there is probably a link. I tried to get through with the link in the e-mail, but I could not. I’ll try again in a day or so. Maybe the FrontPage link will work.

Has Mr. Horowitz has been lukewarm about immigration reform?

“Has Mr. Horowitz has been lukewarm about immigration reform?”

I believe that Horowitz’s views have changed over the last few years. If you look at the editors for Frontpagemag.com you would note a shift from open borders assimilationists to immigration restrictionists.

Tom Tancredo will not run for president in 04. He will probably challenge Sen Campbell in the Republican nomination.

Mr. Murgos raises an interesting question on the matter of segregation.

While I would strongly defend the right of individuals to discrimate on whatever basis they wish in the areas of personal acquaintance, whom they employ or choose to do business with, or live beside, and I would defend the right of the States to segregation, I hadn’t thought about this pertaining to groups within a Federal branch.

Aside from the obvious double-standards that are seen here, (since a ‘white caucus’ would go over like a lead balloon,) I suppose that the right to free association must apply there as well. I’d be interested to see what others have to say about this.

While there is a vital need for whites to regain the racial and civilizational consciousness they have lost, I do not want that to take the form of whites just becoming another multicultural group demanding group rights and whining about discrimination. That would mean joining in the multicultural murder of America (which may happen in the long run, but lets not actively seek that, shall we?). Instead, whites need to assert themselves as the historic majority people of this nation and civilization. Also, we want to allow groups to discriminate in private if they want, but within the law and government we need to eliminate racial classifications.

Thus a restored white Christian majority would, for example, change our immigration laws so that there is a net outflow of non-European immigrants, and eliminate affirmative action and other special favors for minorities. Such policies would be at least partially race conscious in that they would be intended to reduce minority numbers and power and restore America’s traditional Western identity. But at the level of public law and rights of persons, there should be a separation of race and state. It’s a two-level approach: on the existential level, in deciding who gets to be an American, we would exercise racial and ethnic and cultural consciousness; but on the individual level, once people are Americans, citizenship would be unitary and not be based on racial or ethnic classifications.

This may sound contradictory, but I think it is ultimately coherent and the only way that offers hope. I’m open to criticism on it of course.

Mr. Auster’s answer was very helpful.

It’s sometimes a challenge to sort through which of the old ways are still acceptable. For instance, we obviously don’t want to bring back the ‘free white persons’ restriction to citizenship. ;-)

I guess on one hand you would not approve of, for instance, the right of States to segregate their public school systems, (even though I think that is permissible under the Constitution.) But on the other hand, we could eliminate such travesties as forced busing, and the social engineering that tries to overtly mix the racial composition of neighborhoods, leaving the natural dynamics to work themselves out. This would probably result in many or most public schools being nearly segregated anyway, whilst private institutions would be left to determine their own criteria for enrollment.

And by acknowledging racial differences in intelligence we could end the bureaucratic scheme whereby racial disparities in test scores are considered ipso facto ‘discrimination’ by a given school district or State, also relieving a great deal of the adverse tension our liberal policies have handed down. Those who need specialized training could receive it, while those who don’t need not be held back academically. I think these examples suffice.

Everyone of course retains the same standing before the law. This restores in great measure the rights of the _people_, without doing violence to ‘civil’ rights. And yes, this allows for eliminating such things as racial caucuses. Those pols who wish to associate with others of the same race remain free to do so, but not under color of government, not as an ‘official’ group in any branch.

I hope I’ve drawn the correct inferences from your statement as you meant it, but in any case I think you’ve made a good answer to the question.

I agree with Mr. Auster’s 5:23 comment. I agree with Joel’s comment above it except where he says he would defend the right of the States to segregation. Segregation and apartheid were not moral. (Or am I wrong?) That said, I believe government has no business telling people whom they must associate with, by any criteria whatsoever. Government-enforced integration is not right. If communities spontaneously develop which are racially more rather than less homogeneous, that’s no business of government’s. I have a right to associate with, admit to my club, hire, rent to, sell my home to, etc., anyone I please without big brother looking over my shoulder.

I’m sorry, I didn’t see Joel’s post of 6:37 prior to posting my comment. In it he shows he agrees with what I was trying to say in mine.

The basic problem though is that we have to decide in what sense the government is to ignore race in its own activities, and what constitutes the clear boundaries of its own activities. Even just the first bit is insoluable, so I’ll discuss only that bit unless someone is terrifically interested in more abstract Mattisms on the second.

There are three possibilities as to how government can ignore race:

1) Formal equality: The government is not allowed to explicitly discriminate based on race, but it has no responsibility whatsoever to insure that it doesn’t discriminate on correlates to race (e.g. intelligence, cultural compatibility, etc). This “formal equality” is really meaningless, because if race actually matters then it will have correlates and we will discriminate based on those correlates for all the same reasons (including the unjust ones) that we would have discriminated explicitly on race. It won’t be possible to insure that a manager in a government department adheres to this policy, because he can always claim that his discrimination is based on correlates (e.g. cultural compatibility). So this “formal equality” approach always will leave people feeling cheated and lied to. We will be promising equal access to riches and delivering an empty bank account to everyone. The front of the bus will be (unjustly, in my opinion) segregated from the back based on cultural compatibility, and hey, guess what color the faces will be? But once that state of affairs is criticized we will have left the world of formal equality and entered the world of, guess what:

2) Substantive equality: Race must be not merely ignored but suppressed. The world must be remade as if race did not exist. Race and all of its correlates must be actively suppressed. There can’t be separate anglo culture and african culture groups in the department.

3) Something in between, where we are constantly equivocating between (1) and (2).

Our actual society (and any actual society that asserts any sort of racial equality of any sort) in fact muddles along squabbling endlessly in the zone of #3.

This describes the actual reality, in which there is quite literally no room for a rationally consistent racial equality that has consequences. If race matters then either a requirement for racial equality has no consequences or it is self-contradictory. Since it is literally impossible to avoid discriminating based on race if race matters, the liberal’s only remaining conclusion is that race must not actually ontologically matter. The laws of physics don’t conform to the liberal model; therefore the laws of physics must change.

Either race doesn’t matter ontologically, or racial political equality of any sort is incoherent (or in my usual more precise formula it equivocates between being meaningless and incoherent). That is why liberals always end up concluding that race doesn’t matter ontologically. If race matters ontologically then even a very narrow liberalism, one that asserts nothing more than formal legal equality of the races in the activities carried out by the government, is either incoherent or literally superfluous. Classical liberals tend toward formal equality and superfluousness; modern liberals think that is cheating and tend toward substantive equality and active self-contradiction. Either approach is based in the denial that race actually matters.

All the comments are interesting, and if there were an easy answer to the issue, we would all know it. I think I know the answer, but I certainly didn’t understand all of the comments (which is due to lack of time and brainpower on my part). I hope to be helpful with more comments about the issue

Public segregation in Congress seems necessary for American traditionalists. Segregation in Congress is a weapon. It is a rallying flag, which is desperately needed by white-European Christians and Jewish people (i.e., whites). Whites are too ashamed to fight the demographics war even though most whites and most everyone knows the nonwhites are fighting a demographics war. America could have chosen not to fight Japan after Pearl Harbor, but America knew it was only a matter of time before Japan came to the mainland. (Actually, Japanese soldiers seized some of the Aleutian Islands.)
The anti-white soldiers have landed and planted their flag, which is a rallying point. Whites need to plant their flag in Congress.

The founders could not take into account every variable, and so they made a mistake. They failed to see the need to explicitly declare the kind of ethnic (European-American), religious (Christian), and cultural (Western) country they probably wanted to retain. Certainly the evidence was there for these brilliant and learned men. One reason for Rome’s final fall was Rome’s failure to retain an ethnic identity in its armed forces.

And there is hope. I am still amazed that Tom Tancredo (TNT or Teeintee), a member of the white race, is getting away with having an immigration reform caucus; today, an immigration discussion always leads into a discussion of race, which might make the word immigration a synonym for racialism.

Well, let me try to simplify.

If race _matters_ and it is sometimes just and necessary to take the correlates of race that matter into account, we _will_ discriminate based on race. Formal racial equality just means that we can discriminate based on race but we can’t actually say explicitly that that is what we are doing. Substantive racial equality means that we actually cannot discriminate based on race. Substantive racial equality is honest but self contradictory presuming that race _matters_; formal racial equality is dishonest, promising something and delivering literally nothing.

Now, sometimes it is just to substantively discriminate based on race (because race _matters_ in the question at hand) and sometimes it is not. The demands of justice and the moral good don’t correlate in any way to the formal and substantive equality formulations of liberalism. So the liberal is left in an intellectual position in which he must either renounce racial equality or assert that race truly, actually, ontologically does not ever matter. Most liberals opt for the latter.

Thanks to Matt for his tireless and helpful efforts. Because Mr. Auster was first, I will think more about Mr. Auster’s comments and try to address at least one of his comments with an explicit agreement or disagreement or a question, which is probably what he wants commentators to do (i.e., stick to the subject and don’t ignore counterarguments). I just added more reasons to justify my conclusion instead of first addressing his comments directly. I often merely add reasons because I am just too slow and impatient.

Apologies to Unadorned for causing a little confusion. ;-)

I would not defend State-enforced segregation _per se_. I meant only that my take on the Constitution does not restrict the States from doing so, (notwithstanding the 14th Amendment,) and I oppose Federal intrusion into any matter that is properly within the purview of the States, even if I were in agreement with the overall objective in view. (I oppose the effort in Congress to federally ban partial-birth abortion for the same reason, even though I abhor this ghastly procedure.)

This was probably not pertinent to the discussion though, and I’d have done better to omit it.

Regarding the right of individuals to discriminate, a powerful defense of this right was made by the (now mostly forgotten) Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government, in a 1963 pamphlet entitled “Civil Rights and Legal Wrongs.” This pamphlet critiqued the early draft of the proposed civil rights bill, which eventually became the 1964 Act.

The URL is: http://douglassarchives.org/virg_a21.htm

I would call attention to the section beginning at paragraph 80, (numbers on the right,) but the whole pamphlet is worth a read.