Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities

Posted on July 28, 2021 by Luke Ford

Eric Kaufman writes in this 2019 book:

* 80 per cent of the world’s 156 major countries have an ethnic majority and half contain a majority of at least 70 per cent. Europe is one of three relatively homogeneous world regions, along with North Africa and East Asia. States in these zones often have ethnic majorities of 90 per cent or more, mainly because geoclimatic variation – topography and soil type – is lower.

* I contend that today’s white majorities are likely to successfully absorb minority populations while their core myths and boundary symbols endure. This will involve a change in the physical appearance of the median Westerner, hence Whiteshift, though linguistic and religious markers are less likely to be affected. Getting from where we are now, where most Westerners share the racial and religious features of their ethnic archetype, to the situation in a century or two, when most will be what we now term ‘mixed-race’, is vital to understanding our present condition.

* The demographic transition is important for politics because it unfolds at different times between world regions, between nations and even between ethnic groups within nations. In Northern Ireland, for instance, Protestants entered the demographic transition sixty to eighty years before Catholics. That meant Catholic birth rates were higher than Protestant ones for decades, which is why the Catholic share of Northern Ireland increased from 35 per cent in 1965 to close to 50 per cent today. Since voting in Northern Ireland largely takes place on ethnic lines, this had serious political ramifications, which played a part in the violence which gripped the province between 1969 and 1994. 21 In other words, it is the unevenness of the demographic transition between groups which carries political implications.

* the West, especially its European-origin population, will be a demographic speck of a few percentage points by the end of the century. Meanwhile, economic power will continue to shift to other parts of the globe. All of which is likely to sharpen the awareness of European origins among tomorrow’s mixed-race Western majorities.

* In East Asia, automation and guest worker programmes drawing on South-East Asian labour are ensuring that the region’s demographic deficit will not produce multicultural nation-states. The same is true in Eastern Europe as rifts over accepting Syrian refugees showed in 2015. The Eastern rejection of cosmopolitan liberalism stands in stark contrast to the Western response, which emphasizes inclusion, multicultural citizenship and a celebration of diversity. This difference, I would argue, largely explains why right-wing populism has not reared, and will not rear, its head in Japan or Korea. These nations remain attached to what I call closed ethnic nationalism, in which proscriptions proscriptions against intermarriage and tight ethnic boundaries coexist with immigration policies designed to maintain majority ethnic predominance. Japan’s foreign-born share is 1.5 per cent, Korea’s 3.4, a fraction of the 10–20 per cent we typically find in the West.

* Over 90 per cent of wars since 1945 have taken place within rather than between countries. Of these, most have been ethnic wars. 24 In developed countries the same forces tend to produce contestation rather than violence, raising the importance of ethnicity in politics and society. In our more peaceful, post-ideological, demographically turbulent world, migration-led ethnic change is altering the basis of politics from class to ethnicity. On one side is a conservative coalition of whites who are attached to their heritage joined by minorities who value the white tradition; on the other side a progressive alliance of minorities who identify with their ethnic identity combined with whites who are agnostic or hostile towards theirs. Among whites, ethno-demographic change polarizes people between ‘tribal’ ethnics who value their particularity and ‘religious’ post-ethnics who prioritize universalist creeds such as John McWhorter’s ‘religion of anti-racism’.

* I chart the four main white responses to ethnic change: fight, repress, flee and join. Whites can fight ethnic change by voting for right-wing populists or committing terrorist acts. They may repress anxieties in the name of ‘politically correct’ anti-racism, but cracks in this moral edifice are appearing. Many opt to flee by avoiding diverse neighbourhoods, schools and social networks. And other whites may choose to join the newcomers, first in friendship, subsequently in marriage.

* rising diversity triggers two responses: conservatism and authoritarianism. Conservatism involves maintaining continuity with the past and resisting change. 26 If the West was diverse and became more homogeneous – as occurred in Poland or Vienna after 1939 – the conservative instinct would be to wax nostalgic about past diversity. Ethnic change is the irritant, not levels of diversity, which is why a meta-analysis of the academic literature I helped conduct shows ethnic change nearly always predicts increased anti-immigration sentiment and populist-right voting. 27 Psychological authoritarianism, by contrast, concerns the quest for order and security. Diversity, whether ethnic or ideological, however long its provenance, is problematic because it disrupts a sense of harmony and cohesion. Thus for authoritarians high levels of ethnic diversity are as much the problem as ethnic change . Even if the rate of change stays constant, high diversity levels increase discontent among those who value existential security and stability.

* A precedent can be found in the anti-immigration agitation of Protestant America in the mid-nineteenth century. The Irish famine and its aftermath saw over a million largely Catholic Irish immigrants move to America, a country which was over 95 per cent Protestant. By the 1850s, Catholics were a majority or large plurality in most north-eastern cities. Horrific violence followed in which mobs torched Catholic churches, vandalized Irish neighbourhoods and attacked priests. Many white Protestants responded by forming anti-Catholic societies or voting for anti-immigration parties. The rise of the Native American (‘Know-Nothing’) Party of the 1850s was breathtaking. In the words of the historian Ray Allen Billington: ‘The result was phenomenal. Whole tickets not even on the ballots were carried into office. Men who were unopposed for election and who had been conceded victory found themselves defeated by some unknown Know-Nothing.’ 28 All but one of the 377 state representatives of Massachusetts were Know-Nothings. They won 22 per cent of the vote in 1856, the most successful third party in American history. Many thought a Know-Nothing President was inevitable until the North–South divide over slavery intervened.

* A second white response is to repress ethnic instincts in the name of anti-racism.

* Our predisposition towards religion, morality and reputation – all of which can transcend the tribe – reflects our adaptation to larger social units. Be that as it may, humans have lived in large groups only in the very recent past, so it is reasonable to assume tribalism is a more powerful aspect of our evolutionary psychology than our willingness to abide by a moral code. Today what we increasingly see in the West is a battle between the ‘tribal’ populist right and the ‘religious’ anti-racist left.

* The fact our tribal makeup can be tricked to apply to sports teams or empires shows that evolution exerts only a distant force on behaviour. We favour genetic relatives, but this primordial tribalism is a weak tie-breaker that comes into play only when everything else is equal. A white American in a foreign airport usually feels closer to a black American than to a white Frenchman.

* As long as political conflicts are centred on ideology or states, primordial tribalism remains latent. What matters most is economic and institutional heft, with nepotistic instincts deciding things only at the margin. A trans-ethnic social group like the left can harness our tribal instincts the same way white nationalism can. Only if the two institutional forces are equally resourced will evolutionary psychology hand victory to white nationalism because it resonates slightly better with our instincts.

* Daniel Bell, used the term modernism to describe the spirit of anti-traditionalism which emerged in Western high culture between 1880 and 1930. With the murderous excesses of communism and fascism, many Western intellectuals embraced a fusion of modernist anti-traditionalism and cultural egalitarianism, distinguishing the new ideology from both socialism and traditional liberalism. Cosmopolitanism was its guiding ethos. Unlike socialism or fascism, this left-wing modernism meshed nicely with capitalism and globalization. The left-modernist sensibility spread from a small elite to a much wider section of middle-class society in the 1960s with the rise of television and growth of universities, taking over as the dominant sensibility of the high culture.

As it gained ground, it turned moralistic and imperialistic, seeking not merely to persuade but to institutionalize itself in law and policy, altering the basis of liberalism from tolerating to mandating diversity… Meanwhile the economic egalitarianism of socialism gave way to a trinity of sacred values around race, gender and sexual orientation. Upsurges of left-modernist fundamentalism became a feature of campus life in the mid-1960s and waxed in the late 1980s and early 1990s as well as in the period since 2013.

* left-modernism laid the basis for a new moral order – a redefinition of sacred and deviant – which pushed immigration restriction beyond the pale, keeping it off the political agenda. This permitted business and humanitarian considerations to override cultural concerns, facilitating the immigration-led ethnic changes which have powered right-wing populism.

* Negative liberalism says we should allow people to pursue their goals as long as they don’t infringe the rights of others. Positive liberalism consists of promoting particular goals, such as autonomy or diversity, as the proper aim of human individuals and societies. 33 Tolerating difference is critical for negative liberalism. Celebrating it is not. If someone doesn’t have a taste for Marmite, asking them to celebrate it is a coercive form of positive liberalism with no roots in the Western legal tradition.

* In the 1960s, resistance to left-modernism came from formerly socialist, primarily Jewish, intellectuals like Bell, Nathan Glazer and others. Glazer was an especially influential critic of the multicultural resurgence of the 1990s. 35 These criticisms shaped intellectual life on the centre-right and informed opposition to bilingualism and affirmative action in the United States. Even so, the multicultural narrative continued in the media while affirmative action was upheld by the courts and practised in elite universities. Events moved more quickly in Europe in the 1990s, where populist-right gains in countries such as France, Italy and Austria prompted mainstream politicians to abandon the rhetoric of multiculturalism. Where left-modernism was formerly able to portray national identity as dangerous, clearing the way for multiculturalism, political change desacralized multiculturalism, permitting it to be debated, whereupon it was swiftly replaced by civic nationalism.
Immigration was the next moral battleground.

* The fact Trump openly talked about building a wall and banning Muslims and still won shifted the so-called ‘Overton Window’ of acceptable political ideas within the right-wing media. This weakened the anti-racist taboo among American conservatives and made it acceptable to openly campaign on a platform of reducing immigration. In Canada, by contrast, the taboo still holds on the right, so talk of reducing immigration lies beyond the bounds of the permissible. The only question is whether levels should remain the same or increase. Thus the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, which was strongly pro-Israel and willing to criticize conservative Muslims, didn’t dare touch Canada’s ‘immigration consensus’. This has produced the highest immigration levels in the OECD and increased the non-European share of the Canadian population from around 2 per cent in 1970 to 22 per cent today.

* Immigrant children typically speak the native language without an accent, but will tend to retain their religion and, if non-white, remain racially distinct. Non-Christian groups, apart from East Asians, generally remain religious over generations, though there is a slow process of secularization under way among Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. 41 Physical differences likewise erode only over generations, through intermarriage.
Race does much of the work in demarcating whites from minorities today. Religion, despite the challenge of conservative Islam, is becoming less important as the West grows more secular. Current thinking on the role of racial appearance in nationalism divides primordialists, who think race matters because of our tribal instincts to cooperate with those who share more of our genes, and instrumentalists, who think it counts only because it serves people’s material interests.

* The Irish or Jews in America, though outside the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core, were distinguished from African-Americans or Chinese in daily social interactions. Some Latinos can pass as white: whether they do so is less dependent on census categories and laws than emergent, bottom-up social processes of social acceptance similar to those which eventually made gay marriage a non-issue in America. I’m a good example as someone who is a quarter Latino and a quarter Chinese but is considered white by most people…

* Appearance plays a central part in this even if race isn’t ‘real’: physicists tell us there are no actual colours in the electromagnetic spectrum, just a continuum. Yet we perceive colours and develop similar words for them across cultures. This is partly due to the way our brain processes electromagnetic stimuli and partly because of how cultures classify the primary colours. 43 A few small groups, such as the Namibian Himba, don’t recognize the colour green, calling it a shade of blue. 44 Still, broadly speaking, there is cross-cultural consensus around colour and I don’t believe this can be deconstructed. Is the same true for our established racial groups? Broadly speaking, I think so.

* the ultra-Orthodox are a third of Jewish-Israeli first-graders and by 2050 will form a majority of observant Jews in America and Britain. Since these groups are essentially all white, they push against the grain of the West’s racial trajectory… The main reason large sections of Brooklyn are becoming whiter is because of the rapid growth of the city’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, where women bear an average of six to seven children.

* The liberal conceit that whites must be post-ethnic cosmopolitans has outlived its usefulness. Some warm to cosmopolitanism, others prefer to identify with their ethnic group… Elites who use national and supranational institutions to advance a cosmopolitan vision are eroding conservatives’ trust in liberal institutions.

* England is projected to be 73 per cent white in 2050, precisely where the US was in the year 2000. This puts America half a century ahead of Western Europe on the racial transformation curve.

* A ride on public transportation in New York, San Francisco or Chicago is generally a far more ‘majority-minority’ experience than taking the London tube or Paris metro.

* much of our left-liberal lexicon on immigration – multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, anti-whiteness, diversity – developed in America in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

* By the time of American independence in 1776, the free population of the United States was 98 per cent Protestant and almost entirely white apart from a small population of free blacks in the North. Eighty per cent of the colonists were of British descent, predominantly English, but with a significant Scotch-Irish component. The remaining 20 per cent were almost all of North-West European background – German, Dutch, Swedish, French or Irish. African-Americans and Amerindians comprised a fifth of the total, but were effectively disenfranchised and not considered part of the American nation. The Constitution in 1790 restricted citizenship to ‘free white persons’. John Jay, despite his Huguenot ancestry, considered Americans ‘essentially English’ as did foreign visitors like Alexis de Tocqueville.

* Many of the American founders viewed Americans as descendants of the Anglo-Saxons who had fled the Norman yoke in England. This borrowed from British Whig historians who considered the British monarchy, which stemmed from the Norman Conquest, to be a tyrannical institution which quashed the primitive liberties enjoyed by the Anglo-Saxon tribes.

* American political nationhood, as in much of Western Europe, was constructed around what the sociologist of nationalism Anthony Smith terms an ‘ethnic core’. 5 We can think of two aspects to ethnic groups: a time dimension connecting them to ancestors, and a spatial dimension distinguishing them from neighbouring groups in the present. The spatial aspect is referred to in the literature as an ethnic boundary and its symbols typically include one or more of language, religion and physical appearance. At different times, and in different places, certain markers become more important. In Northern Ireland, the groups look and sound the same, but differ by religion. Hungarians and Slovaks look alike and don’t differ much on religion, but language sets them apart. In Britain, Afro-Caribbeans have the same religion and language as white Britons but look physically distinct. Sometimes the boundary markers all matter and reinforce each other, as with white Afrikaner Protestants and black Zulu animists in nineteenth-century South Africa.
In the United States, the boundary markers for the ethnic majority were the ‘W-AS-P’ trinity of white appearance, unaccented English, British or Dutch surname, and Protestant religion.

* Catholicism represented what the Czech-British sociologist of nationalism, Ernest Gellner, calls a ‘counter-entropic’ trait. That is, retained through generations and resisting decomposition over time. Whereas language or accent tends to fade in the second generation, religion and phenotype are often inherited and therefore endure.

* In the 1820s, the Founders’ lofty pronouncements about Anglo-Saxon origins found little echo in the population, most of whom remained attached to denominational, state and regional identities. …These sudden [immigration changes 1820-1860] ignited ethno-nationalist sentiments in the Anglo-Americans who felt threatened by the increase in foreign, and especially Catholic, population.

* As with perceptions of Islam in the West today, Catholicism was viewed as an alien faith with no place in American civilization. …From the 1840s, anti-Catholic political movements had begun organizing and contesting elections. By 1854, these came together as the Native American Party, known as the ‘Know-Nothings’ because of their oath of secrecy. The ‘native’ monicker resulted in a new American term, ‘nativist’, shorthand for Anglo-American ethnic nationalist. The party sought to reduce immigration and introduce a twenty-one-year residency requirement for citizenship. The Know-Nothing Party was the most successful third-party movement in American history.

* Chinese immigration was facilitated by the 1868 Burlingame Treaty with China. But this raises the question of who favoured immigration. Was it humanitarian liberals of the kind that champion open immigration today? Hardly. Liberal Progressivism would not emerge for another four decades. Instead, large businesses, pro-growth politicians and the Protestant clerical establishment comprised the main open-borders coalition.

* The American asylum tradition was not an egalitarian project. Anti-racist egalitarianism played no part in liberal thinking at the time. Americans welcomed immigration to grow the country, and could wax lyrical about the US as a ‘new’ nation made up of various European peoples.

* Ralph Waldo Emerson: “It cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family … The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all other races have quailed and done obeisance.”

* Opposition to immigration was centred in the urban Protestant working class. An important part of the Republican base consisted of former Know-Nothings, many of whom were tradesmen. Pressure from this quarter led to repeal of the contract labour statute, but the battle would continue in California in the 1870s. Most Protestant Americans lived in the countryside and relatively few inhabited larger cities. Nevertheless, urban labour – especially mechanics and those in the craft unions – drew on the ethnic and racial traditions of American nationhood to call for restricted entry. Meanwhile, older waves of immigrants were progressively assimilated into the white working class. One index of assimilation was Irish-Catholic participation in the anti-Chinese Workingmen’s Party in California whose agitation resulted in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Led by Irish-born Denis Kearney, it brought Protestant and Catholic together in what has been described as ‘the most successful labour-based movement in American history’.

* American Protestant clergy, meanwhile, cherished a laissez-faire theology in which God favoured America, with immigration a sign of divine providence. The more zealous maintained that the ingathering of the world’s peoples was a prelude to the Second Coming.

* Laissez-faire theology dominated more strongly among the Protestant clerical elite of the eastern seaboard than in California, where local pastors generally opposed Chinese immigration. Nevertheless, until 1890, the liberal perspective prevailed at national conventions of the mainline Protestant denominations. Business-oriented Christian support for immigration is still recognizable at the upper level of both mainline and evangelical denominations, and in parts of the ‘country-club’ wing of the Republican Party.

* restriction in America is a function of both raw numbers and the distance of immigrants from the Anglo-Protestant cultural core. When numbers and cultural distance increase together, as they often do, pressure for restriction grows.

* As the country grew into an urban nation, the Social Gospel movement arose, uniting a concern for the working class and the ills of the industrial city with the belief that government should control immigration…

* By 1929, WASP interests had prevailed and the quotas came to be based on the WASPier 1920 population stock rather than 1890 immigrant population. Half the country’s immigration quota was now allocated to Britain – the aim being to freeze the ethnic composition of the US population. 31 American national identity at this point is best described as racial, in the sense of excluding virtually all non-whites, and ethno-traditional, in seeking to maintain a population mix in which Anglo-Protestants remained a majority. This is distinct from ethnic nationalism, which would mean that only members of the WASP group could immigrate or be citizens – which was not the basis of the 1924 Act.

* A new feature of the discussions around immigration in the 1910s and 1920s was racism. American intellectuals considered anti-Catholic bigotry a backward sentiment, but hailed eugenics, the science of improving the inherited characteristics of individuals, to be modern and scientific. Eugenics was connected with scientific racism, which ranked different ethnic groups as more or less advanced. This meant Catholic Irish and Germans were now ‘Nordics’, considered by some race scientists to be on par with Anglo-Protestants, an interpretation which many of the Old Immigrant representatives endorsed. Some race scientists demurred, ranking the Irish lower down the pecking order.
Eugenics, despite its scientific patina, was based on a slipshod methodology which confirmed pre-existing ethnic stereotypes. For instance, when it was discovered that African-Americans were under-represented in the prison population, eugenicists improvised an ad hoc argument that this was only because blacks worked on plantations so couldn’t get into trouble.

* Pro-immigration’s intellectual foundations were classical liberalism, the American tradition of asylum and the theology of divine providence. Its handmaidens were growth-oriented politicians and commercial interests. Pro-immigration liberals like Emerson embodied the same unquestioned racist assumptions as immigration opponents.

* The Liberal Progressives were the first recognizably modern left-liberal open borders movement. They combined aspects of individualist-anarchism, ecumenism and Progressivism into a new synthesis. Two intellectual traditions nourished Liberal Progressivism: Anglo-American anarchism and secularized Reform Judaism. The former was represented in the persona of William James, the second by Felix Adler. James was an established New England writer who developed the philosophical stance known as Pluralism. Pluralism initially had little to say about ethnic diversity but rather called for people to combine aspects of multiple ethical systems in order to arrive at the truth.

* Presbyterian spokesmen pivoted from anti-immigration to pro-immigration positions between 1904 and 1913, and now called for universal brotherhood.

* Notice how the rationale for clerical pro-immigration views changed from ‘God’s Will’ prior to 1890 to secular cosmopolitanism and pacifism after 1910.

* During the revival of the second (anti-Catholic) Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, the elite of mainline Protestantism in both northern and southern states editorialized tirelessly against them in their ecumenical and denominational papers. Denominations routinely fired pastors who backed the Klan. In churches where parishioners sympathized with the hooded order, liberal ministers often chose to be forced out by their flock rather than speak for the Klan. Locally, ministers joined civic leaders and journalists to denounce the organization. Even where a city was Klan-run, as in post-First World War Indianapolis, Protestant leaders, civic elites and local journalists showed their resistance to it by conducting war commemorations in which Catholic, Jewish and Protestant clergy gave joint addresses.

Meanwhile, the mainline Protestant missionary effort, both overseas and among ‘home’ missions in the United States, lost its crusading zeal after the First World War and began to question its entire rationale. Beginning with a critique of Western imperialism, missionaries began doubting the wisdom of displacing non-Christian faiths. Eventually, they abandoned missionary activity altogether.

* In 1924, mainline Protestant clergy were almost unanimous in their opposition to immigration restriction. However, their liberal activism was out of step with the views of their parishioners.

* The Young Intellectuals [of Greenwich Village 1912-1917] were Anglo-American bohemian artists and writers rebelling against their own Protestant culture. Inspired by Nietzsche and Bergson’s romantic individualism and modernism in art, they sought to overthrow what they perceived as a suffocating Puritan inheritance. The Young Intellectuals discovered the joys of Harlem’s black jazz scene, experimented with drugs, exhibited modern art at Alfred Stieglitz’s ‘291’ studio or read poetry aloud in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s salon.

* [Randolph] Bourne, on the other hand, infused Kallen’s structure with WASP self-loathing. As a rebel against his own group, Bourne combined the Liberal Progressives’ desire to transcend ‘New Englandism’ and Protestantism with Kallen’s call for minority groups to maintain their ethnic boundaries. The end product was what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism , whereby minorities identify with their groups while Anglo-Protestants morph into cosmopolites. Thus Bourne at once congratulates the Jew ‘who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his’, while encouraging his fellow Anglo-Saxons to:
“Breathe a larger air … [for] in his [young Anglo-Saxon’s] new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself a citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide.”
Bourne, not Kallen, is the founding father of today’s multiculturalist left because he combines rebellion against his own culture and Liberal Progressive cosmopolitanism with an endorsement – for minorities only – of Kallen’s ethnic conservatism. In other words, ethnic minorities should preserve themselves while the majority should dissolve itself.

* [Bourne split] the world into two moral planes, one for a ‘parental’ majority who would be asked to shed their ethnicity and oppose their own culture, and the other for childlike minorities, who would be urged to embrace their heritage in the strongest terms. This crystallized a dualistic habit of mind, entrenched in the anti-WASP ethos of 1920s authors like Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken and the bohemian ‘Lost Generation’ of American intellectuals such as F. Scott Fitzgerald. All associated the Anglo-Protestant majority with Prohibition, deemed WASP culture to be of no value, and accused the ethnic majority of suppressing more interesting and expressive ethnic groups. The Lost Generation’s anti-majority ethos pervaded the writing of 1950s ‘Beat Generation’ left-modernist writers like Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac – who contrasted lively black jazz or Mexican culture with the ‘square’ puritanical whiteness of Middle America. As white ethnics assimilated, the despised majority shifted from WASPs to all whites. The multiculturalism of the 1960s fused the Liberal Progressive pluralist movement with the anti-white ethos of the Beat counterculture.

* FDR told Catholic adviser Leo Crowley in January 1942, ‘Leo, you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here on sufferance.’

* Nathan Glazer put it: ‘In the later ’20’s the Quota Act took its toll, then the depression began and nobody wanted to come, so for a long time American public opinion lived in the consciousness and expectation that America was completed … No one expected that America would again become an immigrant society.’

* the US census bureau defines anyone with ‘one drop’ of minority identity to be non-white. This overstates the decline of whiteness. In 2013, half the country’s newborns were categorized as non-white in census terms, yet 60 per cent had at least one white parent.

Posted in Nationalism | Comments Off on Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities

Simone Biles drops out of the Olympics for mental health reasons (7-27-21)

Posted on July 27, 2021 by Luke Ford

I’m trying and failing to think of some other professional athlete bowing out of competition to concentrate on mindfulness. Can you imagine a QB pulling this?

To quit at the Olympics is the equivalent of taking a mental health day during the Super Bowl. I don’t recall any football player taking a mental health day to avoid playing in the Super Bowl. Simone Biles is on a team, she quit on her team, and on her country.

Wasn’t Simone Biles lecturing America and American gymnastics on its failings? Do they get to have opinions about her choices?

Michael Tracey tweets: “In a way, Simone’s spectacle was probably the most rational thing she could do — it seems to resonate with the current culture more than if she’d actually won the Gold Medal for the USA. Will turn her into an even bigger, more valorized celeb. She’s just responding to incentives.”

A review of major media reveals only gushing stories about Simone Biles. We’re told she’s stunning and brave for quitting on her team.

This story illustrates the benefits of the situationist approach — everybody quits in some situations, everybody is courageous in some situations, everybody has situations where they are honest and situations where they are dishonest. Nobody is always brave and noble and true. Nobody always takes the high road. Nobody is always up to every challenge. Nobody is always helpful.

There’s no such thing as moral character because there’s no true self. Who we are depends upon the situation.

In this situation, Simone Biles feels like the John McCain of US gymnastics. McCain had no interest in winning in 2008, he should never have sought the nomination. “I just felt like it would be a little bit better to take a back seat and work on my mindfulness,” she said.

Should the United States have placed her on the team if there was good reason to believe she would fold under pressure? Why didn’t she bow out ahead of time and let someone else shine?

“[Simone Biles] had been struggling with the stress of being the greatest gymnast in history, she said, and outside expectations were just too hard to combat.”

Biles said: “There’s more to life than gymnastics.” Perhaps she should have shared this attitude with the selectors before dropping out due to sad feelings.

Steve Sailer comments:

It sounds like all this #BlackGirlMagic / #RacialReckoning / #Intersectionality hype might be taking a toll on Naomi Osaka, the torch-lighter who just went out in the first round of the Olympic tennis tournament, and Simone Biles.

The media wants these poor girls to embody #BlackSupremacy and #FemaleSupremacy. That’s a lot to ask of anybody.

COMMENTS:

* This mental illness thing seems to be quite contagious.

Those English soccer players who missed their penalty kicks did the right thing in taking a private jet to the Cayman Islands for a mental health break.

Biles has said that there are more important things in life than sport. Precisely! It is not like she is a highly paid professional athlete or anything. She should just have fun jumping and running and tumbling, but not to the extent of making it an obsession.

* I think part of it is the nihilism of this moment of black ethnocentric politics. There are no laws to be passed and there are no real problems with racism. So without that and without a plan for self-determination, it probably is getting depressing to people other than criminally-inclined males aged 18-24.

If there was some objective this black ethnocentric politicisation was working towards, something positive, the establishment of African-American self-determination, a homeland. Otherwise maybe that unmet need just makes it depressing like for Native Americans who faced into oblivion and white Americans. Whipping people up into an ethnocentric frenzy and telling them the majority population is against them and creating antagonism is pretty depressing when you have to live with those people day to day.

There certainly isn’t a plan to elevate blacks socio-economically in play. Black politicisation is stuck in the 60s, LARPing the civil rights movement with no leadership to move it forward.

00:00 White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K356517/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
03:00 Simone Biles drops out of the Olympics for mental health reasons, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=141426
05:00 Simone Biles Says She Wasn’t in Right Place Mentally During Olympic Final, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/27/sports/gymnastics-olympics-results
14:00 Michael Anton: “That’s Not Happening and It’s Good That It Is”, https://americanmind.org/salvo/thats-not-happening-and-its-good-that-it-is/
20:00 Michelle Goldberg: We can replace them,

42:00 Dennis Prager: The Media Produces Derangement: Proof From New York Times Readers, https://dennisprager.com/column/the-media-produces-derangement-proof-from-new-york-times-readers/
45:00 Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=130046
50:00 WOKE JAPAN’S POSTER GIRL FAILS TO GET A MEDAL, https://affirmativeright.blogspot.com/2021/07/woke-japans-poster-girl-fails-to-get.html
55:00 Beate Sirota Gordon and Japan’s Post-WWII constitution, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beate_Sirota_Gordon

Posted in Olympics | Comments Off on Simone Biles drops out of the Olympics for mental health reasons (7-27-21)

Thick Vs Thin Identity

Posted on July 25, 2021 by Luke Ford

Report: “Thick” vs. “thin” ethnic or racial identities: A comprehensive or thick ethnic identity or racial tie is one that organizes a great deal of social life and both individual and collective action. Thick identity powerfully shape most aspects of social life. Up until the 1990s in South Africa, race determined whom you could marry, where you lived, how you were treated by the police, employment opportunities, political power, etc. Basically, racial identity was exceptionally thick.

A less comprehensive or “thin” ethnic tie is one that organizes relatively little of social life and action. Today, ethnic identity for Italian Americans is relatively thin. They celebrate and express it in various ways, but other dimensions of social life- such as class, gender, or religion tend to be more powerful shapers of daily life and experience. However, identities change over time. First-generation Italian immigrants have thicker ethnic ties to their Italian culture than third or fourth as many of them have married non-Italians, don’t speak the language, or have any familial ties back in Italy. Not all timelines move in this way. When Europeans first began colonizing the United States, Native Americans had no sense of a unified, all-encompassing identity. However, Europeans still viewed them as one unit. As the awareness of this boundary grew stronger, Native American identity became a significant part of natives’ own self identity and became the basis for a collective action for civil rights. Circumstantialism helps explain how racial identity is thick in one context and thin in others. Social change, or groups’ economic, political, and social positions can also change ethnic identities.

From the 2018 paper COLLECTIVE IDENTITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE: THIN AND THICK IDENTITIES IN MOVEON.ORG AND THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT:

Whether it is the call to “resist” Donald Trump and the radical right or a declaration that American citizens will “never again” be terrorized by gun violence, protest abounds in the digital age. Indeed, Information and Communication Technologies(ICTs)—or the technologies such as the Internet, cell phones, wireless networks, telephone lines and other communication media that give us access to information—challenge how scholars think about collective action.1 This is no less true of collective identity processes.2 Current scholarship includes the
role of communication in collective identity formation. Scholars, however, reach different conclusions regarding what constitutes collective identity and its importance in the digital age. For example, some scholars suggest that collective identity plays a peripheral role in contemporary mobilizations. In the hashtag era, mobilization results from individuals’ connections to issues rather than from their affinity for a collective or group (Bennett 2003; Bennett and Segerberg 2012). Thus, collective identity plays a diminished role in contemporary social
movements and can be understood by analyzing the connections among loosely-linked supporters who presumably share a common cognitive framework (Ackland and O’Neil 2011; Gerbaudo 2015; Monterde, Calleja-López, Auilera, Barandiaran, and Postill 2015). Other scholars disagree with this assessment, arguing that while communication protocols shape how movement supporters interact, ICTs provide spaces where adherents can form and maintain a
collective identity (Coretti and Pica 2015; Crossley 2015; Kavada 2015; Nip 2004). While it is not always clear what makes collective identity processes more or less successful, scholars contend that the evidence regarding the use of ICTs to cultivate commitment to a cause and organization is unambiguous.

We identify four factors that interact and make collective identity “thick” or “thin” in a group: the structure of communication; the breadth of its mobilization efforts; its goals (which may or may not include collective identity); and supporters’ interest in cultivating a political community. Thick identity results when an organization makes cultivating a collective identity a priority and structures communication in ways that facilitate interaction on- and offline. These groups allow interested supporters to interact freely and weigh in on organizational decisions. Interaction is critical, as it enables supporters to build trust, commitment, and solidarity, and it can facilitate in-person encounters that help collectivities define who they are and why participation matters. Activist groups trying to mobilize local (rather than national) constituencies may find it easier to create spaces on- and offline that encourage ongoing interaction and engagement in organizational decision making. Thin identity results when an organization does not make collective identity a priority and adopts a hierarchical structure of communication that allows leaders to control what and how information is disseminated to supporters as well as to determine the organization’s issues, campaigns, and goals. This structure of communication, which is more likely to be adopted by organizations mobilizing national constituencies, makes interpersonal interaction more difficult. This, in turn, makes it harder for supporters to build trust, commitment, and solidarity. Consequently, individuals are only superficially connected to one another and participation is primarily driven by their personal political priorities.

* If cultivating a collective identity is a priority, the organization will adopt a form that gives supporters a variety of ways to influence organizational agendas, actions, and goals (Staggenborg 1988). For example, an organization may adopt a decentralized and informal structure so that interaction is central to its decision-making processes. Ongoing interaction among group supporters not only nurtures collective identity, but also ensures that it is more representative of members’ particular political interests.

* If cultivating a collective identity is not a priority, an organization is far more likely to adopt a structure that minimizes supporters’ influence on organizational agendas, actions, and goals. In this case, a group’s structure may emphasize the role of leaders in making decisions and the importance of a professional staff in “doing activism” effectively. Members’ interactions with one another are minimized (Staggenborg 1988), and if members come together at all, it is typically on an annual basis to vote on a group’s leadership and staff. Consequently, while supporters may share a general political orientation (e.g., feminist or environmentalist),
they do not necessarily have a collective identity that reflects a shared sense of solidarity and commitment to a cause or group.

* Thick identity results when an organization makes cultivating collective identity a priority and structures communication in ways that facilitate interaction on- and offline. These organizations flatten information hierarchies, allowing supporters to interact freely and weigh in on organizational decisions. Interaction is critical, as it enables supporters to build trust, commitment, and solidarity over time. These emotional connections foster a thick identity because they provide a foundation for friendships and romantic relationships.

* MoveOn primarily focuses on raising money for professionally executed political campaigns and does not prioritize collective identity. Instead, it seeks to cultivate long-term donors, who occasionally participate in a campaign effort. To do this effectively, MoveOn adopts a hierarchical structure of communication and works to maintain control over its agenda, campaigns, and messages. Supporter input is limited, as is interaction. FTPM is interested in engaging the citizenry in local politics and thus puts more emphasis on the importance of cultivating a common collective identity, particularly among individuals who may agree on very little politically. In order to do so, the FTPM adopts a horizontal structure of communication, allowing supporters and leaders to interact and to directly determine the course of the movement and facilitating the development of groups and events that support, but are separate from, the FTPM.

* MoveOn’s tight control over the structure of communication also makes it difficult for activists to build connections with one another, particularly for those new to activism. For example, MoveOn does not provide ways for individuals to keep in touch after they participate in an event.

* FTPM cultivated thick collective identities by encouraging and facilitating interaction on- and offline. The supporters who stayed involved with the FTPM over the entire two-year observation period pointed to the importance of the Facebook page as well as the on the-ground groups for the creation of a political community that connected patriots to one another.

* the FTPM cultivated a thick collective identity among its supporters, in part, because Anthony made identity construction central to the movement from the outset. Anthony encouraged interaction among supporters while mitigating partisanship and political conflict. Initially his efforts were effective because he drew on affective emotions (pride and love) and patriotism, which simultaneously created a sense of “we-ness” and allowed for political disagreement. Consequently, unlike MoveOn supporters, individuals engaged with one another directly on issues in which they did not agree politically. FTPM’s horizontal structure of communication also enabled conservative groups to use the Facebook page to build their memberships on-the-ground. Leaders and members of Christians for Responsible Government and Citizens Holding Government Accountable interacted with FTPM supporters online and encouraged like-minded patriots to attend meetings offline. On the one hand, this created the grassroots infrastructure and political community necessary to ensure supporter engagement over time, even in Anthony’s absence. On the other hand, the FTPM’s collective identity constricted and became explicitly hostile to Democrats, people of color, and Muslims on- and offline, causing some supporters to leave the organization.

Here are excerpts from a 2012 article in GeoJournal:

* the contrast between ‘thick’ traditional and historical rooted well-established regional identities, and ‘thin’ regional identities which are more transitory and focus more on economic competitiveness.

* Traditional regional identities take—like national identities—many generations to develop. They are rooted in a long political history linked to the development of the nation state. Sometimes regions are more or less artificial constructions of the central state which over time develop a regional identity based on their political importance. Strong regional identities are however more frequently based on centuries old conflicts over the loss of political autonomy to the central state, like for instance in Catalonia and Scotland. Other conflicts within a nation state can also strengthen regional identities. Flanders regional identity is based on linguistic conflicts within the Belgian state. Long term conflicts over the spatial distribution of taxation and public spending can also boost regional identity.

* Globalisation also dramatically extends the reach of social networks. Together with the individualisation of society this transforms social networks and identity formation.’We replace the few depth relationships with a mass of thin and shallow contacts.’ (Bauman 2004, p. 69). The small stable local networks in which individuals were bound together with multiple bonds of kinship, friendship, work, church and mutual care disappear. These social ties are still important for individuals, but these ties become more separated from each other. Individuals increasingly choose with whom they have what kind of relation. The bonds in these individual centred social networks are weaker and more changeable. These individual networks are larger than traditional networks and the overlap between these individual networks decreases. The stable collective network is broken up into many changeable individual networks. Individual choice, rather than collective conventions and spatial proximity now determine social networks (Blokland 2003; Bauman 2004, 2001). Liquefaction takes place of social frameworks and institutions. Stable collective identities are replaced by chosen, fluid and temporary individual identities. ‘In the brave new world of fleeting chances and frail securities, the old-style stiff and non-negotiable identities simply won’t do.’ (Bauman 2004, p. 27). Discussing and communicating identities becomes more important while in the current phase of liquid modernity identities are undermined. Identities are sometimes temporarily fixed, but are lighter than tradition identities and can be changed more easily (Bauman 2004, pp. 13–46). Especially conflicts can temporarily strengthen communities. Shared identities are usually mobilised when interdependencies cause problems, like for instance economic restructuring affecting specific areas (Amin and Thrift 2002, p. 30; Savage et al. 2005, p. 56; Donaldson 2006). Despite the decline in the localised nature of social networks, residents are still in many ways interdependent. Living together in space makes them interdependent for their quality of life (Blokland 2003, pp. 78–79). Proximity, propinquity (Amin and Thrift 2002), or throwntogetherness (Massey 2005), are the basis of many temporary spatial identifications. Shared interests in a specific place and at a specific moment can create a new, but transitory, regional identity. The relation between identity and space, which has never been straightforward, is thus now further complicated through individualisation, migration, economic changes and political rescaling.

* Thin and thick are sometimes used as metaphors to characterise these changing social relations. Anton Zijderveld (2000) uses them to analyse the changing role of institutions and networks. ‘Today thick, greedy and closed institutions, conditioned by a heavy handed, often religiously and magically tabooed, coercive tradition, have been superseded by thinner, more voluntary, more open, and looser institutions which in the behaviour of people are often alternated or temporarily suspended by flexible networks.’ (Zijderveld 2000, p. 128). The distinction between thick and thin identity is also sometimes made. Thick identity is more based on a shared culture and community relations. Thin identity is more related to a specific problem and requires less direct involvement with other individuals. Thick identities have a normative aspect, while thin identities are more practical and utilitarian (Shelby 2005; Hinman 2003). Thick identities are more fixed and rooted in culture and history, while thin identities are more fluid and based on dialogue (Delanty and Rumford 2005, pp. 68–86).

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Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles

Posted on July 23, 2021 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2021 book:

* In 1921, John Steven McGroarty, a poet who later became a congressman, wrote, “Los Angeles is the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, philosophies—no day passes without the birth of something of this nature never heard of before.” The author Eve Babitz had her own version of this: “It’s very easy to stand L.A., which is why it’s almost inevitable that all sorts of ideas get entertained, to say nothing of lovers.”

* One word that never appeared in Aunt Lydia’s lectures at M.I.T.T. was Lifespring . Lifespring was a popular self-help program from the 1970s and ’80s, similar to groups like Landmark Forum or EST. As a large-group awareness training program (LGAT), as they were known among psychologists, Lifespring had offered a five-day “Basic” training followed by an “Advanced” class, followed by a “Leadership” program, all part of a self-help curriculum.
Marc Fisher, a journalist for The Washington Post , attended one of Lifespring’s Basic trainings in 1987. While reporting on the group, he learned that Lifespring’s executives had known for years that some trainees experienced adverse reactions. The group’s founder, John Hanley, told Fisher, “If a thousand people get benefit from the training, and one person is harmed, I’d can it.” And yet, according to Fisher’s investigation, over the years there were dozens of “casualties,” Lifespring’s name for people who left the training with severe psychological issues.
By the time the Post story went to print in October 1987, according to its reporting, about thirty-five trainees had sued Lifespring; six people had died. In one case, which Lifespring settled, a man who couldn’t swim was persuaded by his trainer to dive into a river to overcome his fear and drowned. “Lifespring denied any responsibility, saying that no one forced [him] to jump in the river,” Fisher wrote. “‘The training doesn’t cause anything,’ Hanley said then. ‘Life causes stuff.’” In another example cited by the Post , a woman had an asthma attack during a training. Trainers told her the asthma was self-induced. “When she finally left the room, she wandered into a parking lot, collapsed and died after five days in a coma.” Lifespring denied responsibility and paid the woman’s family $450,000 to settle their claim.
Thanks to Lifespring’s success, Hanley became a multimillionaire. Previous to Lifespring, he had committed a felony, Fisher learned. In 1969 Hanley and a partner were found guilty of mail fraud. In a separate case, the Wisconsin Justice Department sued Hanley and others for running a pyramid scheme, unrelated to Lifespring, which he paid to settle in 1973.

* Fast-forward to 1998. A Dutch woman named Margo Majdi, a Lifespring trainee and the owner of a beauty salon in Beverly Hills, purchased the rights to the trainings from Hanley. After a publicist told her that Lifespring had gained a bad reputation and she should consider rebranding, Majdi renamed it, coming up with M.I.T.T. “When I made it Mastery in Transformational Training, everybody thought I was crazy,” she told me later during an interview at her home. “Notice now everything is called mastery, mastermind, master this, master tribe…”

* the main purpose of M.I.T.T. seemed pretty clear to me: to make Ms. Majdi, Aunt Lydia, and whoever else a bunch of money, in a system where the biggest epiphanies were still one course away. And surely, even more faucets of cash would be opened if they persuaded us to draft our friends and family to join. Multiple people informed me that close to 100 percent of trainees were referrals—M.I.T.T. didn’t advertise—in part because students were eventually expected to recruit, or “enroll,” outsiders.

* Marc Fisher was now a senior editor at the paper. “This is the perfect time for a resurgence of interest in these kinds of programs,” he said. “We’re living in a time that’s tailor-made for an M.I.T.T., a Lifespring, or an EST. It’s a time of tremendous dislocation in people’s careers and the economies of families. It’s a time of political polarization. It’s a time of loss of community as a result of social media. It’s only natural that people are craving the connections and the meaning that these programs promise.” I asked him what stood out in his memory from thirty years ago. “The relative ease with which the guy running the program could assert control over a large room of people. And not just the willingness but the eagerness of people to be led and for someone to take authority over them.” He added, “Anytime we’re in a crisis of government, or parenting, or family structure—all those things that made this society so unsettled—for somebody to come along and tell you, ‘This is how things are going to be. This is what you need to do to fix it. And then everything’s going to be okay, or better’—that’s pretty powerful.”

* It is not difficult to find people in Los Angeles seeking transformation, and also those who would help them. Mystics, psychics, preachers. Life coaches who advertise their services on telephone poles. In the San Fernando Valley, a man known as “The O-Man,” an orgasm whisperer, was said to make women reach ecstasy dozens of times in a single session, though in the manner of a personal trainer. “I fix their posture and mobilize their joints,” he said in an online interview. “It’s pretty simple, just a twenty-to-thirty-minute massage followed by two hours of coming.”

* In On the Road , Jack Kerouac called Los Angeles “the loneliest and most brutal of American cities.” Around the same time, the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Winnicott, writing in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis , called the capacity for a human to be alone a sophisticated phenomenon. “It is closely related to emotional maturity. The basis of the capacity to be alone is the experience of being alone in the presence of someone.”

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California Dreaming

Posted on July 23, 2021 by Luke Ford

Some great comments on Steve Sailer’s site:

* Steve Sailer: I’ve lived on and off in L.A. since 1958. I figured out while I was still in high school that most people in Los Angeles think it was at its peak when they first can remember it, either as a small child or as a transplant.

Assisted by the countless movies filmed here, Los Angeles has a profoundly nostalgic culture. Nebraska-born director Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) pointed out the the main appeal of living in L.A. (besides the weather) is the history…

Consider L.A.’s favorite sportscasters as evidence that deep down, Angelenos hate change.

Vin Scully was the voice of the Dodgers from 1958 to 2016.

Chick Hearn was the voice of the Lakers from 1961-2001, calling 3,338 consecutive Laker games over 1965-2001.

* The other thing that the Californian dream was that it was not just white but very WASPy. It seems to me that California was much more old stock than the big East Coast cities. In a way it was a last stand of old stock America in a big urban setting.

* I first visited California in the early 80s as a teenager who had never left the flat lands of the midwest. I was blown away by the mountains, the beauty of the coast, the glass-smooth roads and the overall cleanliness of the place.

After having lived there from 2008 to 2020, I can say it’s going downhill fast. Homeless living under overpasses; graffiti on the road signs; dry brush everywhere because no one can afford to water anything; confiscatory tax rates and draconian regulations on business.

I’m convinced the only reason the government of CA never changes is because they keep replacing those of us who know what CA used to be, and know what the rest of the country is like, with foreigners who find CA to be perfectly fine compared to the shit holes they fled.

* Nobel Prize winning physicist and founding president of Caltech, Robert Millikan, called LA in the ’40s “the westernmost outpost of Nordic civilization . . . [with] a population which is twice as Anglo-Saxon as that existing in New York, Chicago or any of the great cities of this country.”

Having said that, it was a different kind of WASP or founding stock culture than that of the East Coast. It was more middle and working class, as more established and upper-middle/upper class WASPs back east generally weren’t enticed or compelled to move far west to the deserts of southern California. There were always many evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant churches in LA and Socal unlike WASP areas in the Northeast that tended to be dominated by Mainline Protestants.

This class and cultural difference was why Socal was favorable towards middle/working class aspirations, but probably also responsible for the underlying hokeyness and middlebrow, superficial, anti-intellectual culture of Socal that persists.

* “California was mostly Irish and white trash.”

This is true of the white populations in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. One side of my family, Irish and Scotch-Irish, migrated from Texas in the 1930s looking for work. An “Okie” dialect, which is indistinguishable from a Texas twang, is still prevalent in the white working class clusters in Fresno, Stockton, and Sacramento. Most of the white trash stayed in the valleys.

* Sailer: San Francisco was more post-Puritan New England highbrow than L.A.

The U.S. learned about how great the San Francisco Bay area was from Richard Henry Dana’s 1840 book Two Years Before the Mast. Dana was a Harvard student who’d signed up as a sailor.

L.A.’s gentry tended to be well-to-do Midwesterners who moved out for their health.

SF was more elitist, LA more egalitarian.

* Charlotte Allen: Don’t knock Olvera Street. Olvera Street is great. I’m a Southern California native (Pasadena), and I never fail to visit Olvera Street whenever I’m back in L.A. visiting family or whatever. It has it all: adobe houses from the early 19th century–the time of the missions–a beautiful old church, a lovely, tree-shaded plaza, great Mexican food at restaurants that have been there since forever, and wonderful Mexican tchotchkes for sale that are not made in China (Day of the Dead figurines, etc.). It is also unabashedly religious: a big cross, Our Lady of Guadalupe everywhere, Las Posadas as the big festival. The ACLU has not gotten to Olvera Street. Sure, it was set up in the 1930s as a tourist attraction for Anglos, and when it was growing up, it was derided as cornball and phony-baloney–who’d want to go there? But now, nearly 100 percent of the “tourists” are actually Mexican-Americans from L.A. They love it. The place is always packed.

Did you know my husband? Don Allen, student-body president, Hawthorne High, class of ’63? Grew up on 120th Street, in a house his father built himself after WW2. Everything but the plumbing and wiring. The Wilsons lived a few blocks away, and Dennis Wilson was in Don’s class. Hawthorne was a working-class paradise back then–before they widened 120th Street (Don’s old house is now a rental dump) and tore down all the little businesses on Hawthorne Blvd. to build that ghastly monstrosity of a shopping mall that failed almost immediately and is now a huge, lurking ghost-hulk that continues to destroy the street. Hawthorne today isn’t quite as decrepit as it looked in Pulp Fiction, and some of the little neighborhood-y side streets are quite pleasant with their little houses now entirely occupied by Mexicans. Since it’s not far from the beach, the climate is quite pleasant: about 10 degrees cooler in summer than downtown L.A. I don’t know why Hawthorne hasn’t been “discovered” as a gentrification locus, as it’s not that far south from Beverly Hills. I’ve always said that we ought to retire there, except for the generally grim socioeconomic scene in California. In fact, we stayed in Hawthorne (so close to LAX) on a family visit this June–at a Hampton Inn on Imperial and Acacia, the site of Andy Lococo’s Cockatoo Inn, where Jack Kennedy had a tryst with Marilyn Monroe. Did you ever eat there growing up? It was Hawthorne’s premiere restaurant, where the Lions Club and the other civic clubs used to meet. Imagine: the Lions Club meeting in a mafia-run operation.

* Sailer: Presumably, when Jake Gittes was an LAPD officer he was involved in some seemingly low-level corruption in Chinatown that had a tragic outcome, such as a beautiful prostitute that he loved being murdered without anybody being brought to justice for the crime, which drove him out of the LAPD and into being a cynical private eye.

That’s my most Chandleresque interpretation.

Does anybody else have a theory of Jake Gittes’ backstory? (I’ve never seen the sequel “The Two Jakes.”)

* Cali’s golden years were clearly the 1950’s and early ’60s (As were America’s).
By the ’70s and ’80s it was mostly running on fumes and by the 1990s it was clear things were amiss when for the first time in history more Americans were leaving the state than arriving. The triple whammy of the LA riots, the Northridge quake and the OJ imbroglio certainly scared a lot of people off. Concurrently, mass immigration (which Californians valiantly opposed in the 1990s)* drove up the cost of housing for regular Americans and made swaths of the state unpleasant rundown foreign colonies; it’s still mostly OK for Americans who could afford $800K for a 650 sq. ft. bungalow 3 miles from the ocean, but for regular middle-class Americans folks the “CA dream” is another nice thing they can’t have anymore b/c of immigration and PC.

* I was in Southern California in the early 80s and it was really nice. It had peaked however and ugly urban sprawl had already covered up the hills and there wasn’t a much open coastline south of LA. The summer weather is or was, to me, the best in the world, especially in the coastal zone. A few hours of gloom in the morning followed by that fantastic sea breeze later made July days just about perfect.

* The nostalgia goes back a long way. Raymond Chandler, writing in the 1940s, has his narrator making some bitter comments about how LA used to be a nice little town just after the first war, with small houses in their own plots and a cozy bohemian feel. So either nostalgia is a universally-held emotion or else California has been going downhill so fast and so badly that wherever you stand it always looks better in the past.

* I visited California in the late 1970s, and it was already overcrowded and too expensive back then. I was shocked by the poverty of my father’s friend, a UCLA professor. He and his family were living in an expensive slumlike apartment without even a dishwasher, and he was wearing broken glasses because he couldn’t afford to get them fixed. His car got stolen a month after we visited. At that point, I knew California was a very bad deal.

My Dad, who lived in flyover land and who was not making a large salary, could nonetheless afford a house, could afford to get things fixed, and we never locked the cars because there was no car theft in our small town.

* As Quentin Tarantino pointed out in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, LA in the 60s seemed both absolutely perfect and yet still a place on the rise and still unknown. A man could go out there and buy a new home at a good price with plenty of space, find a good wife, live in great weather, have a two-garage household to grow 5 kids while having a lifetime job.

Or he could lout about and have wild open hippie sex with the dozens of fresh-off-the-farm, newly-birth-controlled, trusting, thin, attractive, still-near-virginal white blond women dressed in next-to-nothing who had trekked out there to either be movie stars or join hippie communes. All while getting high on weed, alcohol, and LSD.

In either way, it must’ve been paradise until the Manson family and the race riots hit town.

* I first visited California in 1980; it struck me as an entire state run like a summer camp. But this article is making me think about what I meant by that.

For one thing, the tone of the place was relaxed. Relaxed dress codes, relaxed people, fewer rigid requirements. More like vacation than work.

The weather reminded me of summer, especially summer in places like northern Michigan. Low humidity, pine or cedar scent, blue skies, cool nights, warm days. The places you’d visit in the summer in the midwest were northern summer towns, vacation towns that thrived on offering easy, relaxed living.

Also, not crowded. When I was a child in the 1960’s, cheap air travel had destroyed the summer tourism industry; many people flew south for their major vacation in winter. For me, it just made summer even more relaxed, and less crowded.

Who wouldn’t want that, practically year-round?

So, white people started describing it this way, portraying it this way, kind of like you’d talk about heaven or Eden, in religious awe.

Other people around the world saw these portrayals, and sure enough, thought they’d come and try it. And buy parts of it. And move in. And breed.

And that was the end of that.

* I think the best way to understand California is that it was time shifted, where everything happened FASTER (starting with the gold rush). California went through the same stages that America went through, but it went through them more rapidly. It is now ahead of America on the timeline.

It was the explosion of suburbia after the advent of the automobile, the agricultural explosion, the industry, the settlement of WASPy whites followed by other ethnic groups. The influx of immigrants, the slow encroachment of Leftists, evolving from liberty-loving free-thinkers to Leninists. The conservative snap back with Ronald Reagan, followed by the slow victory of the Marxist locust swarm.

California — started later than the rest of America, went zooming past it with some of the highest potential that America ever head, ended up where America is headed.

* I grew up in the San Diego area. A large contingent in those days were Midwesterners (like my parents) who had ended up in San Diego via the military (mostly Marines and Navy but there were army bases there in WWII and some of them stuck around too). My father was the first to show up and promptly brought his parents out here from Iowa, soon to be followed by most of his brothers and sisters (my mother’s family followed a similar course). A big draw was the weather. Midwestern weather varies from miserable to barely endurable. I well remember my Minnesota-raised mother’s opinion of snow: “When you’re a kid, snow is fun but when you’re an adult, it’s just a pain in the neck.” Her Norwegian father had a similar opinion: “If I’d known there was a California, I never would have stopped in Minnesota – forty years of shoveling walks!”

* We arrived in the early sixties when I was an adolescent, and the place was indeed paradise, I literally attended the Beach Boys’ high school and it was everything you would imagine.
Except for one thing. The air during warm months could be like an alien planet. I remember one summery morning waiting for a bus on Santa Barbara Avenue (now Martin Luther King Boulevard) and watching the visibility looking down the street shrink block by block into a cloud of brown smog. On that bright sunny day you could barely see more than a block.
Young people today note the gasoline stench from restored 1960’s collector cars and I tell them to imagine what it was like when every car around you on the street was putting that out.

A friend says:

Although Los Angeles was major metropolis before WWII, it really exploded in population after the war. Even now, announcers often remark during outdoor winter events, especially the Rose Bowl, about how wonderful the weather is. Literally millions of persons, including many soldiers traveled through and stopped in Southern California during WWII and immediately afterword and decided to make it their home. It was easy for Millikan to call it an outpost of Nordic civilization, and that may have been true as far as where political and economic power was concentrated, but L.A. always had a significant population of Mexican descent, and then in the aftermath of the war a higher percentage of the population was black than is true today. For the most part, due to restrictive covenants, they were in separate neighborhoods and out of sight and out of mind from someone like Millikan. L.A. had a fairly large Japanese Community and Chinese as well.

Anyone who looks at the history of the city from the turn of the 20th century but not in the nineteenth, can see that Jews had a significant population and had interests in retail, banking, movies and real estate.

I did love L.A. but that was based on my having a pretty happy childhood. I remember when we used to burn our trash in backyard incinerators and remember even after they were banned, the horrible smog. It was impossible to engage in any protracted physical exercise without your lungs aching. As someone who hiked in Griffith Park or swam in public or friends’ pools, this aching lungs when taking a deep breath is a vivid memory. Back through the 1960’s it was plenty smoggy in Hollywood, but nothing compared to the San Gabriel Valley. I didn’t understand how anyone could live in Pasadena. Now that the air is clear it is highly desirable, but it wasn’t then.

What made L.A. different is that there were a lot of vacant lots. The infill with houses and apartments had not been completed.

The 65 riots were in Watts, but the 1992 riots got to me. All these beautiful neighborhoods were significantly damaged by the rioting. It takes a lot out of a person and it took a lot out of me to see what I thought were stable and safe neighborhoods gutted and looted. This was my beautiful city that had only improved since I returned after college. We had five term black mayor.We had hosted a successful Olympics games. We had an entire cultural renaissance with films, theater, art and music. We had the best ethnic cuisine variety. Wonderful neighborhoods and even a growth of artists lofts and events at downtown warehouses. And of course, clean air. And then the riots. The city may have bounced back with few physical signs of the riots, but for some people like me the riots betrayed the promise of the city and in some way, tore out my heart. It is very hard for me to explain this to persons who moved here years later what it was like when it happened….

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