Enriching America by destroying it

(Be sure to see the further comments that have been added to this entry.)

By consulting the 2000 census, a Steve Sailer reader figured out how Mexican immigrants compare to U.S. natives and to other immigrants in terms of socio-economic indicators such as labor force participation, income, poverty, use of English in the home, high school diploma, and college education. The figures are staggering. Seventy percent of Mexican immigrants have no high school diploma, 96 percent have no college education, and only 5.6 percent speak English at home, compared to 22 percent of other immigrants who speak English at home. The Mexican immigrants’ poverty rate is 24.4 percent, compared to 11.4 percent for other foreign born, and their per capita income is $13,000, half the per capita income of other foreign born groups which is $25,000.

Someone please ask Lawrence “What’s all the fuss about?” Kudlow how scores of millions of low IQ, low skilled, averse-to-education immigrants are going to become the main generators of the tax revenues that will fund social services over the next half century?

When I see figures like this, I become convinced that the stated reasons of the Kudlows and the Glendons and the Bushes and the Specters and the McCains for wanting open borders are not their real reason; their real reason is to destroy American racism, once and for all—by destroying white America.

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Peter A. writes:

“When I see figures like this, I become convinced that the stated reasons of the Kudlows and the Glendons and the Bushes and the Specters and the McCains for wanting open borders are not their real reason; their real reason is to destroy American racism, once and for all—by destroying white America.”

Great sentence. I appreciate it as a cri de coeur, and as a wonderful rhetorical flourish. But do you think that this is LITERALLY their motivation (any psychological, Freudian, etc. speculations aside)?

Or in other words, are those men’s actions better attributed to malice (what you said above), or to incompetence (corporate lobby, the “Hispanic vote”, short-sightedness, lack of vision, etc.)?

Also, as kind of a separate question, do you think that on some level, the open-borders insanity is motivated by a desire to stick it to blacks once and for good?

LA replies:

Look, I’ve spent over 20 years thinking and obsessing about this, the greatest mystery in history. Why are whites letting their own destruction happen, and even eagerly urging it on? This is something radically irrational. It is demonic. Garden variety political explanations don’t explain it. I don’t know that my statement that you question is true (and I’ll admit that it could be a projection of my own concern about white survival); but I nevertheless feel on a deep level that something like it is true. I believe it’s an unarticulated desire for non-existence. As I’ve been saying over and over in recent months, whites are condemned by their own most sacred beliefs, that all people should be equal, and that people shouldn’t be better than other people, and that race is not supposed to matter. But yet there’s the white race, standing like a stone wall, dominating the world, by its very existence a reproof to the liberal belief in equality and powerlessness. So there’s the source of the white discomfort, the white guilt. Of course the elites don’t exactly feel guilty, they think that other whites are guilty. But guilt is what it’s about. Whites recognize that every new argument and trauma about immigration is just stirring up again the same dilemma of white existence. So at a certain point they start to feel (I’m not saying they articulate this to themselves) that they want to be done with that dilemma, they want non-existence. If the white majority is eliminated as a majority, then whites will no longer be there as an obstacle to the flow of humanity, and the dilemma is solved.

I mean, there’s nothing original about my core idea. Ayn Rand said that liberals hate existence. Norman Podhoretz said that the left hates America. David Horowitz speaks of how the left has become simply destructive. Seraphim Rose said that nihilism, which is ultimately the desire for complete destruction, is the ruling idea of the modern age. The only thing new about my analysis is that it relates to race, and that I’m saying that conservatives are, in their own way, as much a part of this as liberals.

(See further discussion of this topic here.)

Jim Kalb writes:

I think James Burnham in Suicide of the West said in so many words that liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.

The problem evidently goes very deep, and is invisible to people, so chances are it’s some fundamental conceptual thing. My guess is that it’s a consequence of the nature of the liberal individual, which is the same as the Cartesian ego—a disembodied subject with no qualities at all other than the free-floating ability to have experiences and make choices. A couple of possible consequences of viewing oneself as a Cartesian ego:

1. Any attachments I have will seem like external intrusions that have somehow gotten hold of me and are dragging me down in to the mud (cf. Peggy Noonan). As a consequence I will want to disrupt my own society, which after all in fact makes me what I am and therefore makes claims on me, so it is no longer able to do so. Since my society—white society—is my tyrant and enemy, I must either dominate it (become a U.S. senator), destroy it (open the borders), or both.

2. The Cartesian ego isn’t really part of the world of experience. How, after all, could something with no qualities be embodied? So perhaps there’s a feeling that it’s more legitimate for Third World types, who don’t seem to be free floating Cartesian egos, to be embodied and thus part of the world of experience. The feeling then is that white people are Cartesian abstractions while nonwhites are vibrant concrete realities.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 21, 2006 05:29 PM | Send