Another “conservative” who will never see reality

Victor Hanson keeps evoking race blindness as the true American ideal, not recognizing that the race blindness to which he is unquestioningly devoted produced the immigration policies which gave decisive political power in this country to race-conscious nonwhites and thus assured the doom of his own race-blind ideals. As I explained yesterday, right-liberalism leads automatically to left-liberalism, and the right-liberals never, ever grasp this.

Another way of putting this is that right-liberal (“conservative”) whites never actually look at nonwhites, never see them as human beings. They simply imagine that the nonwhites are just like them, sharing the same ideals. And the right-liberal whites cannot understand the criticism I’ve just made, because they think that to believe that the nonwhites are just like them is to see them as human beings, because all human beings are by nature right-liberals.

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James P. writes:

You wrote that Victor Davis Hanson does not recognize that the “race blindness to which he is unquestioningly devoted produced the immigration policies which gave decisive political power in this country to race-conscious nonwhites and thus assured the doom of his own race-blind ideals.”

It did more than assure the doom of his race-blind ideals. It assured the doom of the California in which his family has lived for generations, and it assured that the county where he lives would be turned into a Third World country in which he is constantly at risk of theft or worse. Yet even this kind of personal economic doom and the very real prospect of personal physical doom does not cause him to renounce his stupid, suicidal ideals.

James P. to LA:

It is no great matter, but you altered my words slightly. I said, “the county where he lives,” and you made it, “the country where he lives.” I was trying to convey that Hanson’s race-blind ideology has had an immediate, personal, and local impact on him—it has degraded the economic and social environment on the farm and in the county where he lives from day to day. If a man’s country is going down the tubes but his local circumstances remain fortunate, then perhaps his blindness would be understandable if not excusable. But this is not the case. His race-blind ideals have directly affected his home and its immediate surroundings, and yet he still clings to his beliefs.

LA replies:

I’ve changed it back to “county.”

November 21

Ed H. writes:

I tried to read the VD Hanson article. He goes on and on about how Political Correctness has manifest itself in appointments to the State Department, the Supreme Court etc. Hanson’s point seems to be that the grievance industry is out of touch with reality, that it really needs to become more rational. He points out that the Susan Rice appointment is unjustified. She is unqualified, that she is incompetent, that its just plain wrong that she lies so much. Has Hanson never heard of the reelection of Marion Barry? Coleman Young? Robert Mugabe? How is that it never occurs to him that incompetence mixed with delusion is the preeminent black characteristic? The truth is that the more Rice can be unfazed by failure, and the more truth has no claim on her, the more she is likely to be promoted to high positions in and black- and liberal- ruled America. Can Hanson name one black-run country or city that does not fail in precisely the way that Obama has failed? One? But Hanson can never come to clear judgment on anything. Its always the same shambling, good-natured, moralizing vagueness that 100 years ago would have had him pegged as a “big dumb Swede.”

LA replies:

It would be useful for someone to read a couple of typical Hanson articles and analyze them step by step to show how pointless they are. His articles appear in an unceasing jet, and 95 percent of the time he says absolutely nothing of substance, just the same complaints (always about liberals’ bad character, not about the substance of their ideas) that go nowhere, yet people keep reading him.

He and Jonah Goldberg—these two non-conservatives whose articles appear more often than anyone else’s in the conservative Web—have done very great harm to conservatism.

November 22

Stephen T. writes:

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

“When I eat lunch with a Mexican-American childhood friend, I feel no greater affinity with the white waitress by reason of our shared appearance.”

Well, of course, he doesn’t. That perfectly natural instinct, present in everyone but white Anglos with Nordic surnames, has been suppressed to the point that Hanson doesn’t even sense it anymore. However, the question of whether Hanson identifies more with his Mexican friend than an Anglo isn’t the issue, anyway, because it isn’t white Anglos with Nordic surnames who are subsuming the country by the millions, and soon by millions more. The question is the reverse: When the chips are down, with whom does Hanson’s Mexican friend most identify: a fellow Mexican or this pale Anglo guy (who probably comes across as somewhat overly keen to have a Mexican friend in the first place)? I think Hanson would be depressed to know the reality that Mexicans, including those he calls his friends, are unabashedly loyal to their own race over others and make no apology for being so. I guarantee you this: If Victor Davis Hanson ran for public office in his county and his opponent had a Spanish surname, Hanson’s lifelong Mexican friend would pull the lever for his fellow Mexican without giving it a second thought, nor laying awake at night agonizing over whether he was guilty of “tribalism.” That loyalty is based precisely on (what Hanson believes are) silly irrelevancies such as skin color and blood relations, concepts that Anglos like him gave up on long ago and now shake their heads and wonder why the millions triumphantly eradicating his country and culture haven’t done so, too. The Mexican tribe’s principle advocacy group is called The National Council Of La Raza. I mean, how much clearer can these people make it?

LA replies:

If Stephen’s remark about people who feel guilty about “tribalism” is directed at my criticism of that concept, he should understand that the paleocons who promote the tribe as the main social unit do not generally defend the white race. For them, the white race is too large a category, and too materialist in its definition, to have any meaning or to be an object of loyalty. Only small and localized groups can have any meaning and be worthy of defense and preservation.

November 23

Ed H. writes:

I am trying to read Hanson—really read him—for the first time. I mean concentrate for more than one paragraph without tossing it aside. Its like a house of mirrors at the fun fair. Just when you think you are on a clear path out of the maze you realize its all a cruel trick to keep you lost. What a tangle of abstractions, bloviations, vague generalities and deliberate evasions. The man is addicted to that universal utopianism so common to Scandinavians. With typical grandiosity he dreams of a post-racial world. He should try to aim lower and achieve post-Dumb Swede first. He has more in common with Chris Matthews than he will ever admit to.

LA replies:

By the way, I would guess that the Anglo-Saxon part of Hanson’s ancestry (those several generations that have owned that farm before a Hanson married into the family) is at least as large as the Swedish part. Maybe we should just call him a Dumb Southern Californian.

LA continues:

Ed H. is inspiring me. I’m going to have to subject a couple of Hanson columns to a thorough critical reading, which I haven’t done in many years. Think of the celebrated “intellectual” conservative figures—Hanson, Steyn, Pipes—who have the prominent careers they have because no one in the mainstream has ever subjected their writings to a critical reading and shown how incoherent and contradictory they are.

November 25

Stephen T. writes:

You write:

“If Stephen’s remark about people who feel guilty about “tribalism” is directed at my criticism of that concept, he should understand that the paleocons who promote the tribe as the main social unit do not generally defend the white race.”

I was referring to Hanson’s attitude about tribalism, as I perceive it. He seems annoyed that Mexican immigrants, who have swiftly and permanently transformed his part of the central valley of California into an outpost of debauched Mexico, will not voluntarily give up their noxious practice of remaining in tribes and join the tribe-less (and soon-to-be culture-less) white Anglos like himself. He seems totally tone deaf to the reality that the very tribalism he so disdains is the same potent power Mexicans have successfully utilized to pull his world out from underneath him up there, without a single shot fired. Yet he still he thinks they ought to give it up. Why should they? Tribalism works wonders. The problem in California is not that Mexicans do not give up tribalism, it is that Anglos like Hanson refuse to adopt it or even advocate it to fellow Anglos. Mexicans know this well. In fact, many will privately tell you of their wonderment over the fact that Anglos are so singularly impotent in the face of a tsunami of immigrants and do nothing to protect their own culture and territory.

Back in the 1990s, Dennis Prager made a comment on his show one day that is so engraved in my memory I can quote it, I believe, verbatim, even after all these years: “When I see millions of Mexicans coming to this country, I don’t feel concerned. I feel complimented.” Prager believed that Mexicans, by the very act of coming here, were symbolically taking some sort of vow that they renounced The Mexican Way (including its native tribalism) and were now eager to embrace his superior European-American values and culture with open arms. Some years later, when three million illegal aliens poured into the streets of Los Angeles waving Mexican flags and signs that declared things like, “Go back to Europe. This is our territory now,” Prager came on the air and in this whiny, disillusioned voice lamented, “Couldn’t there be just ONE sign that said, “Thank you Americans, for allowing us into your great country?”

They never learn! The naivete of the Hansons and Pragers of the world regarding Mestizo Mexicans is stunning. Prager probably doesn’t meet many in his affluent West L.A. circles, but I don’t know what Hanson’s excuse is. He’s probably been hiring them for years on his farm.

LA replies:

Your quotation of Prager shows better than ever before what a hopeless idiot he is.

However, I differ with something you said. You wrote:

Tribalism works wonders. The problem in California is not that Mexicans do not give up tribalism, it is that Anglos like Hanson refuse to adopt it or even advocate it to fellow Anglos.

Tribalism is a primitive concept. I do not advocate tribalism for white Americans. I advocate that they act as a people. When white Americans colonized this land, and drove back the Indians, and kept blacks in a subdued condition (so that whites would not become victims of the rampant black savagery we have now), and drastically reduced southern and eastern European immigration, they were not, as you would like us to do, thinking of themselves as a “tribe,” and they were not calling themselves a “tribe.” They were acting as the American people, as civilized white men.

People who embrace crude and primitive concepts like “tribalism,” as do many paleocons and race-conscious conservatives, become crude and primitive themselves.

Nick D. writes:

Prager is also baffled that Christians do not have telethons and raise private armies to fight the persecution of brother Christians across the globe, in contrast to Jews’ rallying support of Soviet Jewry, Ethiopians, and whatnot. I am baffled that Prager, a member of a race that calls itself “The Tribe,” is outright blind to the difference between the religions: Judaism is rooted in blood, Christianity in hearts and minds. Obviously, the tribal ties are bound tighter. This fact does not excuse Christians’ inaction and possible apathy, but it does explain the difference.

As to your “crude and primitive” concerns, we’ve already showered the primitive non-whites with food, money, medical care, education, amnesties and cell phones—and they still hate us, probably more than ever. If we need to become primal and/or tribal to preserve our civilization, then so be it. We know we can become civilized again when it’s safe to do so.

It is presently inconceivable to see whites “tribing” together, if for no other reason than we have come from so many different tribes and intermarried, but several more years of realizing that “It’s their country now” could break the dragon’s back.

A reader writes:

The first community to examine which may offer a model for a response to the calamity which has befallen Christian conservatives: Orthodox Judaism. This community is a great example of a community which has managed survival in the face of its enemies.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 20, 2012 10:24 AM | Send