The Plight Of Christian Arabs

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Sadly, almost no one is particularly interested in the plight of Christian Arabs.

I don’t think it takes much analysis to see why Obama’s lack of interest in Christian Arabs is not much different from Dubya’s lack of real interest. Most humans have a “bully” instinct, an instinctive contempt for losers and failures. Christian Arabs are the losers of the Middle East – once dominant, then living for centuries at the mercy of their Muslim overlords. Even in the 19th century most European Christians never seem to have had much sympathy for them.

* When Trump referred to the Orlando terrorist as “an Afghan” in his speech on Monday, journos jumped on Twitter to correct him: “He was born in America!”.

Now we hear the killer referred to Afghanistan as “my country” and claimed affiliation with the Islamic State. Had he called himself a woman, the PC left would insist he was a woman. But Trump calling him an Afghan is a mark of ignorance.

* For today’s “left,” if you’re born with male genitalia but identify as a woman – you’re a woman. On the other hand, if you’re born in America but identify with your Afghan ancestors, your an American. (At least, if you do anything bad).

* The Obama administration, including Hillary Clinton, blamed the 9/11/2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. ambassador to Libya in Benghazi on a Coptic Christian’s YouTube video. Copts are Egyptian Christians though the Obama administration appears to consider them to be Arabs (viz. “Arab Spring”).

An analogy would be if in the 1930s, the U.K. ambassador in Germany was murdered by a group of Nazis and the U.K. prime minister blamed anti-Hitler literature, produced by a German Jew living in the U.K., for the murder. How would “history” view this Prime Minister?

* During Ottoman times and presumably before, Christians and Muslims were viewed as separate groups. The people who today we identify as Christian Arabs would have considered themselves to be Assyrians, Chaldeans, Copts, Maronites, Greek Orthodox, etc., but not Arabs. Arabs were Muslim.

However starting in the 1920s, Arab nationalism was invented by a few intellectuals and some Christians in these regions began identifying as Arab. After the rise of secular dictators in the 40s and 50s, these regimes had an interest in promoting a supposed shared ethnic identity among the people and suppressed separate identifications. Many Christians became enthusiastic participants in the new nationalistic Baathist regimes, the PLO and so on.

Now with the rise of Islamism the Christians of the region have discovered how the Muslims actually feel about them, and it is often not as fellow co-ethnics. As the old Muslim saying goes ‘First the Saturday People, then the Sunday People,” meaning once the Arab countries have been rid of Jews, which was accomplished after 1948, they can be rid of Christians. At this point they largely are. For example Jordan has gone from 30% Christian in 1950 to 5% today. ISIS may be removing the last traces of the 2000 year old Assyrian Christian community from its territory.

Lessons of history usually go unlearned, but many people in the West would benefit from understanding what happened to the Christians of the Middle East. They tried to ally with Muslims only to find out that the alliance was all take and no give.

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Steve Sailer: Is This the Most 2016ish Thing of 2016?

Steve Sailer writes: Commenter Twinkie calls our attention to this characteristic anecdote from 2016, as recounted in the Washington Post article entitled “Inside the Hate-Filled Mind of a Mass Murderer:”

Carter, who was among several patrons Mateen held hostage after they’d tried to take refuge in a club bathroom, told a news conference Tuesday that Mateen asked if there were any African Americans in the bathroom. When one man answered yes, “the gunman responded back to him saying, ‘You know, I don’t have a problem with black people. This is about my country.* You guys have suffered enough.’”

Twinkie comments: “Oh, wow, even mass murdering fanatics/self-loathing homosexuals want to make sure they don’t come off as racists… in the middle of the rampage!”

By the way, you’ll notice that poor Latinos remain completely out of the running in the Oppressed Minority sweepstakes. Here’s Omar taking time out while slaughtering dozens of Latinos to express sympathy for the plight of African-Americans. As a New York Times subscriber, I blame straight white Christian men for Omar’s lack of awareness of how much Latinos have been discriminated against. (By the way, should I also subscribe to the Washington Post for the duration of the election campaign? I sense that the Post is ferociously dedicated to outdoing the Times in 2016 in generating iSteve-worthy content. On the the other hand, while I feel quite calm, I’m not sure if even my good-natured sanity could withstand five months of the WaPo’s mania.)

*As we all know, Omar Mateen was an AMERICAN CITIZEN, born right down the street from Donald Trump. Omar’s reference to Afghanistan as “my country” must have been due to evil Trump brainwaves from the future affecting him via a time portal.

Omar’s massacre couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the inherent tensions in our elites’ grand strategy of Invade the World & Invite the World, because Invade the World & Invite the World is not a thing. It’s just not. Why are you even thinking about it when you haven’t been told to think about it? Before answering, remember that anything you might say goes on your Permanent Record. So it’s probably best for all concerned if you just Shut Up.

COMMENTS:

* The whole Post article really has to be read to be believed. The Pulitzer-Prize winning “reporter” (aptly named A. Nutt) begins by asking “what can science tell us” about Mateen’s motivations…she then interviews a “social psychologist” (God help us all) who delivers herself of the profound insight that “hate of other people is really displaced hate of oneself.” From this it follows that when Donald Trump says mean things about Muslims, it adds to their self-hatred, which then turns into hatred of others, leading to terrorist killing sprees. Or something like that. SCIENCE! Where would we be without it?

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NYT: Why You Republicans Are Guilty of Murdering All Those People in Orlando

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* In a way, one could almost feel sorry for him. He did his (sadly limited) best to express his motivation (i.e., resentment over American bombing of his native country, Afghanistan) – but everybody insists that it must really be something else, instead.

* A similar, but less serious example of this reasoning occurred in Paris in 2013.

Two gays were severely beaten late one night. This happened around the time millions of traditionalists were taking to the streets to protest against the gay marriage law, which later passed. The badly beaten-up face of one of victims, Wilfred de Bruijn, was widely circulated.

Though it wasn’t immediately clear who had done the beating, many blamed the “atmosphere of homophobia” brought about by catholics and right-wingers opposed to gay marriage.

If I recall correctly, it turned out the culprits were “youths”, hardly surprising if you weren’t plugged into the media narrative.

Five months later, four suspects of committing the homophobic beatings were arrested by the police. And indeed they turned out to be “youths” from the suburbs. Two were sentenced a year later. Their names were Taieb and Malik. It’s fair to surmise they were not Catholics worried about preserving the traditional family unit. (As should have been obvious just from the neighborhood where the crime happened). But so much later after the fact, no one was paying attention anymore.

And so the regretful violence had at least the redeeming value of making people more aware of the danger of homophobia and of resisting social progress…

I just saw Anderson Cooper berating a Florida official in charge of helping the Orlando victims and their families for not supporting gay marriage. It’s the same mechanism. If you ever had any doubts about any aspect of gay liberation, don’t you feel guilty now? If not, you’re a fascist and a murderer.

* Omar Mateen lived in Fort Pierce, Florida, which is 40.9% black and 21.6% Hispanic. The city has a female mayor and two of its four city council members are named Rufus and Reginald (no need to click on their pictures to figure out what race they belong to). It’s so “diverse” that it’s pretty good odds that city council will be 100% non-white within 20 years.

Somehow a brown, Muslim Democrat from a diverse city slaughtering other Democrats is the fault of Republicans. It always is.

* Watching the 10 pm tv news the spin is very predictable. They downplayed his gayness and brought out some Muslim cleric who denounced violence and stated that Islam was a tolerant religion that loves everybody. However, I noticed he was a cleric of the Ahmadiyya sect, a persecuted minority within Islam based in Pakistan. The media always go to this unrepresentative sect for soundbites. This is part of the program of lying to the American public. The more one pays attention the more one realizes how everything is spin.

* The disturbing thing to me about this and the San Bernardino shooting is that they’re laying down a new pattern for crazy people inclined toward mass shootings, especially if they’re Muslim.

This zero called 911 to proclaim his allegiance to ISIS just before he went on his murder spree. I think the San Bernardino idiots did something like that with a Facebook post right before or during their murder spree. That didn’t make any difference anywhere else except in making sure their mass shootings would get more attention.

The Orlando shooter also declared allegiance to a couple of other Islamic terrorist groups that are at war with ISIS–I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess he wasn’t exactly a scholar of radical Islamic movements. (Or probably anything else.). He associated himself with those movements to get more attention for his crime.

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Steve Sailer: Is This the Most 2016ish Thing of 2016?

Screenshot-2016-06-15-03.44.47

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* How the Hell, even in these PC addled times can one possibly equate mass murder with the express intention of murder, which succeeded and destroyed the lives of 50 human beings – who if given the opportunity to speak beyond the grave would have given *anything* to survive, with the indecent and lewd touching with fingers of an unconscious and non consenting woman?

Sick is not the word for it.

Such is the venom and depth of hatred the totem pole devotees have for straight white men.

* Nice. Like there’s a valid link Omar and Brock, as though shooting 100 people and having the highest shooting death toll in the US is remotely in the same ballpark as getting drunk and raping a co-ed.

Trying to do their damndest to keep that great white defendant in the public’s eye. Ridiculous.

* As one wag on Twitter (roughly) put it, “Why are we going after Peter Thiel for spending $10M to end Gawker when it took $20M for Chris Hughes to do the same thing to TNR”

* Turner’s sentence was 6 months, not 3. Three is the hypothetical minimum timed served.

He also did not commit rape since his penis likely never even touched her much less penetrated her, rather he seems to have had his hand down her pants.

From the article:

“As the sociologist Michael Kimmel has argued, while we talk ad infinitum about guns, mental illness and, in this case, Islamic identity, we miss the strongest unifying factor: these mass murderers are men, almost to the last one.”

No, not really. From what I can tell, a decent percentage of Muslim suicide bombers are women, maybe 20% during the Iraq occupation and second Palestinian intifada. And plenty of Chechen women too. The percentage is certainly higher than, say, the percentage of women who die in conventional combat or in law enforcement.

Muslim men are about 30 times more likely than white men to go on mass stranger-killing sprees. But Muslim women seem to be about infinity times more likely than white American women, as I do not think a white American woman has ever done so in the past three decades.

The last time western white women engaged in terrorism might have been the Weather Underground and similar communist terrorists in Germany in the 70′s. It was a softer terrorism though, planting bombs usually at night, or with a warning first to allow an evacuation.

* “The Hypermasculine Violence of Omar Mateen…”

Except for the small problem that Mateen’s wife knew about his plans, and supported them. The wife of the San Bernardino terrorist actually killed people. Where does their evil rate next to Brock Turner’s?

Brock Turner was some dumb, horny college kid who in a moment of drunkenness went way too far. Noor Salman, Mateen’s wife was, while sober, perfectly willing to accept the murder of dozens of Americans.

By the way, why am I not surprised that The New Republic doesn’t allow comments on its articles? They would get absolutely torn to shreds on this one.

* I think the focus on the Brock Turner case started as just a purposeful distraction from the Okinawa rape/murder incident involving a US citizen, who was also former military.

Of course it was censored in US media but surprisingly never came up on iSteve iirc, despite the high profile; eg Obama himself was berated by Japanese politicians.

Not that race baiting doesn’t motivate the media too, but real convenient for a mix of political/internationalist/military interests to have that go down the memory hole, replaced instead with some stupid college athlete.

* I think this article is completely inadequate, since while Brock Turner and Omar Mateen are easily linked, she did not address the hypermasculinity of Harambe the Gorilla, or the male sense of entitlement of the little boy who went into the gorilla enclosure.

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Is America At War With Islam?

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Liberals declare, as though a self-evident truth: “We can’t go to war with the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.” Why not? For decades we were at war with that other ideology bent on world domination, communism. Roughly the same number of people were communists in the 1950s as are Muslims today. (Tally up the populations of Red China, the USSR, North Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and so on.) We had a sign at the border, too: “Commies Keep Out!” We had in effect a religious test based on your beliefs: If you served the Communist Party, you couldn’t hold certain jobs or participate in the military, even if you were legally an American citizen.

* While in school during the late 1980s, my school offered a course entitled “Communism: One third of the World”. One third of the world is a much larger proportion than one fifth.

* Yes, last night 11 out of 10 late night talk show hosts all denounced guns and those dirty NRA no-goodniks who allow us to own guns. Is there like a journolist II that sends out talking points from the Hillary campaign?

I get the feeling though that this is starting not to work. Hillary said in 2008 that she had not shattered the (imaginary) glass ceiling but that there were now lots of cracks in it. I get the feeling that there are beginning to be cracks in the Democrat coalition.

You have to be pretty desperate to try to connect Omar Mateen to the white frat boy “rapist” from Stanford as if nobody is going to notice that there is a little something different about Omar. And while there are lots of low information voters, most people, no matter how stupid, realize on some level that guns do not walk into nightclubs and go on rampages by themselves. And there is the little detail that Omar was a professional security guard and even in most countries where they don’t allow ordinary people to have guns, security guards have access to them.

Besides being an obvious red herring, the anti-gun crowd has to explain how, if we are not going to build a fence (and god forbid we should do such a thing), it is possible to smuggle across 11 million human beings and mucho tons of drugs every year, but there’s no way that guns will come across the border once we make them illegal here.

You can TRY to change the subject but now you have the candidate of one of the two major parties loudly NOTICING and saying the I-word and it’s going to be hard to memory hole Omar’s pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State and retcon him into a hateful white man like George Zimmerman. Maybe if he had changed his name to Omar Zimmerman?

You can denounce Trump as a badthinking racis’ and try talking about guns instead but he is going to be on the teevee every day at least from now until November so it’s not going to be that easy to shut him up like some poor schmuck whom you can force out of his job for having said a bad word. Even Hillary had to (reluctantly) say the I-word in order to avoid being outflanked by Trump or looking like a total fool.

* It is very characteristic of ideological regimes that are on the ropes that as your position becomes more and more tenuous, you insist on ideological purity even more. If you allow even one whisker of the camel’s nose into your tent then the whole camel may follow, and you can see that the camel is not far away any more but he is right there pushing on your tent flaps . The Inquisition really got going once the position of the church was threatened by the Reformation. The Chinese Communist Party is cracking down on dissent now, because they realize that their legitimacy is in question. They view Gorbachev’s perestroika as an object lesson in what NOT to do.

So the desperate measures (such as no longer maintaining even a pretense of objectivity in the news pages) are a sign of weakness, not strength.

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Donald Trump’s Commonsense On Immigration

Steve Sailer writes: The latest Muslim massacre has driven the mainstream media absolutely berserk with fear and loathing…but not, though, of the Muslim terrorist who murdered 49 Latino gays in Florida. Instead, the bad guy is Donald Trump for having been demonstrated to be right about immigration policy.

The GOP candidate offered a sensible speech on Monday on reforming our immigration system to work better for Americans:

But the current politically correct response cripples our ability to talk and think and act clearly…. The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here…. We have a dysfunctional immigration system which does not permit us to know who we let into our country, and it does not permit us to protect our citizens.

Of course, Trump’s pragmatism was also calibrated to drive mad with rage the bipartisan Washington establishment that has grown rich off the conventional wisdom of Invade the World/Invite the World. Trump noted:

That is the choice I put before the American people: a mainstream immigration policy designed to benefit America, or Hillary Clinton’s radical immigration policy designed to benefit politically correct special interests….

Ask yourself, who is really the friend of women and the LGBT community, Donald Trump with his actions, or Hillary Clinton with her words? Clinton wants to allow radical Islamic terrorists to pour into our country—they enslave women, and murder gays.

The New York Times, for example, threw aside all pretense of objectivity, “reporting”:

Mr. Trump’s speech…represented an extraordinary break from the longstanding rhetorical norms of American presidential nominees. But if his language more closely resembled a European nationalist’s than a mainstream Republican’s, he was wagering that voters are stirred more by their fears of Islamic terrorism than any concerns they may have about his flouting traditions of tolerance and respect for religious diversity.

This characterization of Trump’s rhetoric reveals more about the momentum of the conventional wisdom—anything other than Open Borders is Hitlerism—than it does about the candidate. Read on.

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Reddit post: I work at Google HQ – we do not deny censoring autocomplete to favor Hillary

Reddit: I’m not even a Trump supporter – just a “typical” libertarian leaning tech guy. I voted for Ron Paul. I think free trade is always the answer, even when trade partners are being dicks (fuck me in this election, right?). I think fighting wars elsewhere is the wrong answer 99% of the time. I hate ISIS and literally love gays (that those two don’t seem to go together really confuses me).
I used to watch Philip DeFranco every day. I saw the SourceFed video about Google censoring negative Hillary results from autofill. I went and tried it out myself. It seemed conclusive. But. There had to be something, right? “Don’t be evil” is the company ethos. The people I work with are all amazingly talented people who believe that ethos wholeheartedly. I wanted to believe.
Google has this thing, in the name of transparency, where all employees get to ask management questions publicly and get them answered publicly. It’s pretty cool and it wouldn’t fly at a lot of “old world” companies. And we only get to have it if we are all super trustworthy and don’t share what happens.
And so when someone asked about the Hillary censorship thing I got excited. Hopeful. Please, fucking explain this to me so I can understand, I thought.
[paraphrase] “if we respond to every accusation, we’d never get any work done” [/paraphrase]
That’s it. I wanted one word. “No.” I wanted one sentence. “Here’s why: XYZ”. But no. They just dodged it in a display worthy of a career politician. It was easy. Oh so easy. “We can’t respond”, they said as a response.
Don’t. Be. Evil.
I felt like shit. But I wasn’t going to say anything. Not until today. I went to bed horrified at this time last night, believing a white supremacist was shooting gays in a night club. I woke up at noon to see moderators openly censoring the story on Reddit, to find hackernews (my tech news source) entirely silent on the topic despite covering the tragedy in Paris, to listen to my President fail to say the words “radical Islam”, and then tonight I watched The New Yorker quote a Donald Trump tweet and include a period inside the quote marks where Donald had put a comma. I should know. I just spent the day reading up on this guy…and the only people saying anything sensible was you folk. You loud, rude, unloveable, truthful fucking people. When did you become the good guys?
When did I become the bad guy? Fucking when. I want off this ride.
And now I realize. “Don’t be evil” doesn’t work. When you believe your opponents are truly evil, how can it be evil to stop them? When they (and…previously me) said Trump was racist, sexist, Islamophobic – they meant “Trump is evil.” And in the fight of Good vs. Evil, anything goes, right? Evil must be stopped at all costs. Censorship is such a minor evil, and really, aren’t private citizens free to do what they want? Is Google lying really so different from your friend lying?
Everything here in my post is the truth. I don’t trust the media not to fuck me, I don’t trust my coworkers so I don’t bring it up at work, I danced around the topic with my friends but that won’t change anything. I half expect to get doxxed and spend the next year at a startup until I’m hireable.
So here I am. Going to bed tonight while I get paid by a private company that has a virtual monopoly on U.S. Searches and is censoring the results to favor a politician over all others, too scared of repercussions to speak freely…
Trying to be the good guy.
I don’t know if Trump is the right guy. I read your points about sexism and racism and Islam and I don’t have a counter. He seems childish and an asshole. And also like the only person willing to speak the truth.
Google certainly isn’t.
So I’ll vote.

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Prager & Prayer

Al emails:

Listening to the Dennis Prager radio program last Friday, June 10th, I heard the beginning of a telephone call from a woman caller that went something like this: I am calling you because you are a deeply religious person. I too am a deeply religious person — I am a Roman Catholic. I am calling because I have lost my ability to pray. I prayed very hard for my sister’s recovery from an illness, but she died! Ever since she died, I have been unable to pray again.
Prager said something like: I have an answer for you. I am not sure you will find it emotionally satisfying, but it will satisfy you intellectually, but I have to take a break, so don’t go away…

Unfortunately, I had to go away and couldn’t hear Dennis Prager’s answer.

Since you are (or were) a devotee of Dennis Prager, I figured you would know: is there any way for me to be able to hear the recording of last Friday’s program so that I could find and listen to the answer he gave the above caller?

Pragertopia.com. I am sure that Prager said that the purpose of prayer is to affect us, rather than to change God’s mind.

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‘I feel like this presidential election is essentially a battle between the article and the comments section.’

Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl
With yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there
She would merengue and do the cha-cha
And while she tried to be a star
Tony always tended bar
Across the crowded floor, they worked from eight til four
They were young and they had each other
Who could ask for more?

At the copa (co) Copacabana (Copacabana)
The hottest spot north of Havana (here)
At the copa (co) Copacabana
Music and passion were always the fashion
At the copa they fell in love

Copa, Copacabana
His name was Rico
He wore a diamond
He was escorted to his chair, he saw Lola dancing there
And when she finished, he called her over
But Rico went a bit to far
Tony sailed across the bar
And then the punches flew and chairs were smashed in two
There was blood and a single gun shot
But just who shot who?

At the copa (co) Copacabana (Copacabana)
The hottest spot north of Havana (here)
At the copa (co) Copacabana
Music and passion were always the fashion
At the copa, she lost her love
(Copa, Copacabana)
(Copa, Copacabana)
(Copacabana)

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When Can We Get Past Islamophobia Accusations?

Comments at Steve Sailer:

*

The debate is happening when attacks like the one in Orlando, Fla., have raised concerns about both Islamic radicalism and Islamophobia.

At what point does Muslim mass murder of non-Muslims rise to a level where a phobia about Islam is not concerning? 3,000 on September 11 was not enough, not for George Bush.

How about 15,000?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adana_massacre

How about 20,000?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicosia#Ottoman_rule

How about 52,000?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chios_massacre

How about 150,000?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_genocide

How about 450,000?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide

How about a million? Would Islamophobia be OK for an Armenian in 1920?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

* If you have another nationality, renouncing U.S. citizenship and nationality is fairly straightforward and it is not reversible in most cases. However, it does come with a nice hefty administrative price tag – something like $2500 – if you want to get the coveted Certificate of Loss of Nationality which thanks to FATCA since 2011 is necessary to prove to any credible bank outside the U.S. that they are not opening a can of worms by granting you an account. Also if your net worth is over $650000 you will have to show that you have declared your worldwide income, regardless of where you have resided, to the goombas in the IRS for the past five fiscal years or you will be hunted down for a hefty Exit Tax (basically the Death Tax for the living) and depending on the country you have expatriated to your new government (a NATO government in particular is not trustworthy on this point) might be complicit in helping them garnish your bank accounts. And if your net worth is over $2 million, as is certainly the case for Mr. Johnson, avoiding the Exit Tax gets even trickier.

* A number of years ago, Boris Johnson gave the most IQ supremacist/globalist speech any politician this side of Singapore ever gave.

In general, British politicians are a lot more intellectually agile than American politicians. The kind of pivot due to new circumstances that Pat Buchanan made at the end of the Cold War is pretty common among British politicians.

* I’ve mentioned before watching John Major do Question Time or whatever it’s called in the early 1990s and thinking, wow, I heard this guy was a zero, but he’s much better than American politicians at this.

The gladiatorial system in Parliament is clearly a better school, but I also suspect that going into Parliament is more attractive to the best individuals in Britain than running for Congress is in America. Britain and Israel have had more impressive politicians than America. Israel is small enough so that everybody who goes into the military the same year gets to know who is the best among your cohort. In the U.S., the country is so big that guys like the Bush Brothers can seem like top guys for awhile, mostly through misunderstandings.

* Lord Bryce had similar notions:

Why Great Men Are Not Chosen Presidents

Europeans often ask, and Americans do not always explain, how it happens that this great office, the greatest in the world, unless we except the papacy, to which anyone can rise by his own merits, is not more frequently filled by great and striking men. In America, which is beyond all other countries the country of a “career open to talents,” a country, moreover, in which political life is unusually keen and political ambition widely diffused, it might be expected that the highest place would always be won by a man of brilliant gifts. But from the time when the heroes of the Revolution died out with Jefferson and Adams and Madison, no person except General Grant, had, down till the end of last century, reached the chair whose name would have been remembered had he not been president, and no president except Abraham Lincoln had displayed rare or striking qualities in the chair. Who now knows or cares to know anything about the personality of James K. Polk or Franklin Pierce? The only thing remarkable about them is that being so commonplace they should have climbed so high.

Several reasons may be suggested for the fact, which Americans are themselves the first to admit.

One is that the proportion of first-rate ability drawn into politics is smaller in America than in most European countries. This is a phenomenon whose causes must be elucidated later: in the meantime it is enough to say that in France, where the half-revolutionary conditions that lasted for some time after 1870, made public life exciting and accessible; in Germany, where an admirably organized civil service cultivates and develops statecraft with unusual success; in England, where many persons of wealth and leisure seek to enter the political arena, while burning questions touch the interests of all classes and make men eager observers of the combatants, the total quantity of talent devoted to parliamentary or administrative work has been larger, relatively to the population, than in America, where much of the best ability, both for thought and for action, for planning and for executing, rushes into a field which is comparatively narrow in Europe, the business of developing the material resources of the country.

Another is that the methods and habits of Congress, and indeed of political life generally, seem to give fewer opportunities for personal distinction, fewer modes in which a man may commend himself to his countrymen by eminent capacity in thought, in speech, or in administration, than is the case in the free countries of Europe. This is a point to be explained in later chapters. I merely note here in passing what will there be dwelt on.

A third reason is that eminent men make more enemies, and give those enemies more assailable points, than obscure men do. They are therefore in so far less desirable candidates. It is true that the eminent man has also made more friends, that his name is more widely known, and may be greeted with louder cheers. Other things being equal, the famous man is preferable. But other things never are equal. The famous man has probably attacked some leaders in his own party, has supplanted others, has expressed his dislike to the crotchet of some active section, has perhaps committed errors which are capable of being magnified into offences. No man stands long before the public and bears a part in great affairs without giving openings to censorious criticism. Fiercer far than the light which beats upon a throne is the light which beats upon a presidential candidate, searching out all the recesses of his past life. Hence, when the choice lies between a brilliant man and a safe man, the safe man is preferred. Party feeling, strong enough to carry in on its back a man without conspicuous positive merits, is not always strong enough to procure forgiveness for a man with positive faults.

A European finds that this phenomenon needs in its turn to be explained, for in the free countries of Europe brilliancy, be it eloquence in speech, or some striking achievement in war or administration, or the power through whatever means of somehow impressing the popular imagination, is what makes a leader triumphant. Why should it be otherwise in America? Because in America party loyalty and party organization have been hitherto so perfect that anyone put forward by the party will get the full party vote if his character is good and his “record,” as they call it, unstained. The safe candidate may not draw in quite so many votes from the moderate men of the other side as the brilliant one would, but he will not lose nearly so many from his own ranks. Even those who admit his mediocrity will vote straight when the moment for voting comes. Besides, the ordinary American voter does not object to mediocrity. He has a lower conception of the qualities requisite to make a statesman than those who direct public opinion in Europe have. He likes his candidate to be sensible, vigorous, and, above all, what he calls “magnetic,” and does not value, because he sees no need for, originality or profundity, a fine culture or a wide knowledge. Candidates are selected to be run for nomination by knots of persons who, however expert as party tacticians, are usually commonplace men; and the choice between those selected for nomination is made by a very large body, an assembly of nearly a thousand delegates from the local party organizations over the country, who are certainly no better than ordinary citizens. How this process works will be seen more fully when I come to speak of those nominating conventions which are so notable a feature in American politics.

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