From the comments at Steve Sailer:
* For whites, there are actually four possible outcomes:
1. Destruction
2. Reconquista
3. Fleeing to nations where they will be protected.
4. Break up of the U.S. into ethnic states, whites forming one or more of them.
* William Stuntz complained in “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice” that SCOTUS made rulings intended to address the inequities of the Jim Crow South, but unfortunately rather than narrowly target the problem they made with substantive requirements or explicit anti-discrimination rules they instead made facially neutral general rulings on procedure nevertheless inspired by those southern cases which hampered the functioning justice system of the north. A similar interpretation is possible regarding what happened with legislative changes, although I would note that currently things like political correctness act through many non-legislative channels and that might continue to be the case even in the absence of the threat of lawsuits after the SCOTUS victories Steve imagines at the end of his article.
* We could either have a “colorblind” legal system that dumps affirmative action, treats all groups equally, and lets the chips fall where they may.
Or, we could have an outright racial spoils systems in which Whites are emancipated politically to identify, fight and lobby for their own interests as the other groups do now.
But the status quo in which every grasping group takes its spoils from the mythical White “majority” is not sustainable. (One example is the dwindling supply of White kids to provide “integration” services for the new PoC majority).
The “colorblind” legal option has come close to reality in several 5-4 decisions. But one Justice always loses his or her nerve (Powell, O’Connor or Kennedy) when confronted with the prospect of actually being the deciding vote to get rid of legalized anti-white discrimination.
They know who writes the history books and they crave elite respectability over principle. Roberts actually strikes me as the next guy to lose his nerve when the time comes to cast a decisive fifth vote.
* Once things start moving in the right direction, other outcomes can be pondered. You think the transition from being allowed to laugh at effeminate behavior to requiring people to genuflect before the alphabet soup mafia happened in a day? Progress in reverse will also be incremental.
* The South understood early on the cognitive and moral limits of its African American underclass. Something the Northern rust belt region had to learn the hard way at extreme detriment to national society. Honestly, the harshness of Segregation would’ve been utterly unnecessary if the subjected race was anyone else besides African blacks. Chinese, Native American, Indian, etc, would never have required such a rigid system but was necessary to keep the peace between the black underclass and everyone else (including higher ability/middle class) blacks.
* The Civil Rights Act harmed the lives of tens of millions of Americans. It would be great to get rid of it. But we can never make those lives whole who were immiserated by it.
* Societies have long had separate-but-equal policies when it came to various races/ethnic groups. These kept order and muted violence, since the groups were legally prohibited from mixing in many ways that would normally cause violence. Plus the ruling class was usually one ethnic group that wanted the other ethnic groups to either assimilate (via religion/intermarriage) or leave, but didn’t want to go full expulsion for either economic reasons or else because that seemed a bridge too far morally. It was decent compromise and not at all intrinsically “evil”.
* The black communities themselves did a lot better under Jim Crow than they did at pretty much any other time in U.S. history. We can chalk it up to technological advancement up until the fifties and the catastrophic effects of CRA afterward, but it’s awfully convenient and ought to strike just about anyone as a facile argument. It would be like claiming that colonial governments didn’t really raise the standard of living, that just somehow happened on its own and mysteriously reversed after decolonization.
So if Jim Crow led to better outcomes for both races – which really isn’t all that surprising, since it’s just the logical extension of the sovereignty doctrine – what exactly was wrong with it?
* Voluntary communities of selected blacks and selected whites with responsible leadership can coexist, as in the military, but in the general population blacks and whites will always self-segregate and in areas with high percentages of blacks formal rules were beneficial to both sides, which is why Jim Crow evolved pretty rapidly after Reconstruction ended in the South.
It was for the most part an equitable system. Were there some abuses? Sure, but for the most part blacks were far better off in the Jim Crow South than in the black areas of Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago or St. Louis today. They were making upward progress, today they are making downward progress. Black schools in all but the very worst parts of the South did a better job of educating average underclass Blacks than schools, on average, in black inner cities today. They were taught by black teachers, often men who could and would throw a punch if needed, but who related to their charges and knew how to teach them. The old hand me down McGuffey’s Readers and other old textbooks worked better than many textbooks today. In a very real sense, the average black fully knew he was not as capable at intellectual pursuits as the average white, but he wanted to learn as much as he could, he more often was educated to the capacity of his intellect than is now the case.
And Blacks read the KJV Bible-along with Shakespeare, the formant of the English language at probably its peak, and aside from its spiritual lessons, the language did him well in forming a sense of using the language. I run into old blacks who can speak quite eloquently when they want to, but few young ones. For that matter, Shakespeare was probably more read by blacks back then than by white kids now! (The anglophone Catholic Church’s antipathy toward the KJV -I believe it’s still technically anathema, without or with the Apocrypha-has served it poorly: the Douay-Rheims English translation simply stinks.)
Occasionally Black bucks would go after each other with razors, and more occasionally a female after another female, but drive-by spray shootings were not a thing. The frequent and genuinely sad story of a sympathetic, often young and occasionally genuinely promising black bystander being cut down by gangbangers we see today was mostly unheard-of.
Black-owned businesses serving other blacks was a thing. They usually were not as good as white businesses, but they provided income for their proprietors and an example of success to other blacks. When segregation ended the vast majority of the black business owners quit and got jobs with corporations or with the government.
* South Brazil is at least 80% white but not rich. The place is kind of shabby middle income. That’s because the whites there who are although of good stock (Germany and Veneto) aren’t running on the high performance Anglo operating system. They are using the dysfunctional Iberian OS. A mixed race America may have eroded stock but the Anglo OS is not going to be uninstalled. The resulting performance will be OK. America in the mixed race future is not going to be a super rich country like today (top 5 in the world) but can still be a rich country (top 20 like France). Trump and his successors will make this more likely to happen. By reducing immigration by 70% last year he has created long term conditions favoring race mixing rather than conflict.
* Trump may add Nigeria to the travel ban list. Taking up the draw bridge from there is never a bad idea given how large the numbers can be expected to be and already are. (Particularly for a country that still practices jus soli) American might be getting less and less attractive economically to emigrate to and will become less so in the near future, but Nigeria will get FUBAR faster than the US will.
The stated reasons for the new batches of countries, Belarus, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania is that they failed to meet State Department standards on biometrics, information-sharing and counter-terrorism measures. But really I like this new aggressive use of travel bans and it would be nice if it was applied to any country that refused to take back deported citizens. Normalise the situation of just banning immigration from places. Nobody has a right to somebody elses home.
Another medium term strategy may be to end direct flights to certain countries. Another would be to just to do a kind of African Marshall plan to set up some momentum in those places to keep pace with population growth. But really once it becomes clear there is no hope, people will stop going and make due with their lot in their own countries, or places they can emigrate to legally, such as if the new freedom of movement proposals in African come into force.
* The coastal cities are actually very comfortable areas for white people to live. As long as you can afford to live in an affluent suburb. Sharing a town with Ivy League graduates of Chinese or Indian ancestry is a lot more pleasant than living next door to a meth lab in Kansas or sharing a town with FOB Somalis in some town in Minnesota or Maine. What we have lost is not the coasts, it is the interior – to brain drain, immigration (check out the Mexican population in Iowa) and economic neglect. Trump won because people in the heartland are disgusted at what is happening to their towns. People in Bethesda MD or Scarsdale NY think life in modern America is great.
* Reading Christopher Caldwell’s prose unflinchingly reveals the vast vasty unbridgeable chasm between a true intellectual giant, and yer typical untalented run-of-the-mill lightweight hack, who, nontheless has an unmerited and unwarranted inflated opinion of his own abilities. Such as the entire editorial staff of The Economist magazine – and lastly and leastly, the political trash which take their cue from The Economist.
* I am 100% pro-segregation, so that’s not my problem with Jim Crow. But I think racial attitudes towards blacks at the time were unnecessarily harsh. I don’t just mean against civil rights agitators, I mean in general, all throughout the first half of the 20th century. I imagine if I were black at that time, it would be almost impossibly difficult not to view the country I lived in as my enemy. You know, I get it – you’ve got your part of town, I’ve got mine, but why go out of your way to degrade me, humiliate me, make me your enemy? Especially when with just a few small changes you could make me your friend. That would have been a smarter way to proceed, rather than an all-or-nothing approach that ultimately saw segregation abandoned and white society wrecked.
* OK, so the diagnosis is correct – we’ve long known that. What’s in short supply are suggestions as to what can be done (and how). Presumably, that is because all the ways to resolve the situation are not very appealing to the public accustomed to the enlightenment-driven civilization.
That the SCOTUS wisely and gradually reverses the disastrous course is a hope that is completely naive. Wishful thinking, nothing more. From here, there are only three major ways:
1. The decay continues and even accelerates (relax and try to enjoy what’s left)
2. Civil war (lovely, right?)
3. Military putsch that tramples on all the Western-style freedoms until a semblance of sanity is restored (what can go wrong?)
What else is there, realistically?
* Prior to 1964, refusing to hire someone, refusing to promote someone, refusing to retain someone, and refusing to do business with them was not defined as a tort or anything resembling one, so not actionable absent some contractual obligation unless the vendor had a functional monopoly. The net effect of the insertion of lawyers into these transactions has been escalating injury to the idea of merit as lawyers pursued social policy goals that have absolutely no purchase outside the professional-managerial stratum (and hardly any explicit statutory warrant), and did so in the public and private sector alike. The most absurd manifestation of this was the assertion by a federal court of appeals that it was unconstitutional for voters in Michigan to invalidate racial preference schemes via referendum.
* It was pointed out that in the North, Whites granted Blacks equality, but didn’t want them around, while in the South, Whites didn’t mind Blacks being around, as long as they were subordinate.
* Steve’s sweet reasonableness is a function of his natural temperament, not people-pleasing. He’s not throwing himself, or the rest of us, on anyone’s mercy but doing what he does best – bringing the crazies of all stripes back down to earth.
His solution is at this point the most likely outcome, adjacent to which lies the best outcome: continuing and intensifying the dramatic decrease in immigration over the last year while increasing the birthrates of American citizens to prevent whites becoming a minority at all while leveraging the cognizance of the injustice of present arrangements to get us back to equality before the law.
