{"id":124848,"date":"2018-11-26T12:42:11","date_gmt":"2018-11-26T20:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=124848"},"modified":"2023-08-11T12:46:19","modified_gmt":"2023-08-11T20:46:19","slug":"americas-first-elites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=124848","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s First Elites"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><script>!function(r,u,m,b,l,e){r._Rumble=b,r[b]||(r[b]=function(){(r[b]._=r[b]._||[]).push(arguments);if(r[b]._.length==1){l=u.createElement(m),e=u.getElementsByTagName(m)[0],l.async=1,l.src=\"https:\/\/rumble.com\/embedJS\/uajap1\"+(arguments[1].video?'.'+arguments[1].video:'')+\"\/?url=\"+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+\"&args=\"+encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify([].slice.apply(arguments))),e.parentNode.insertBefore(l,e)}})}(window, document, \"script\", \"Rumble\");<\/script><\/p>\n<div id=\"rumble_vbnghv\"><\/div>\n<p><script>\nRumble(\"play\", {\"video\":\"vbnghv\",\"div\":\"rumble_vbnghv\"});<\/script><\/p>\n<p>00:00 America&#8217;s First Elites (WASPs)<br \/>\n10:00 Pilleater joins<br \/>\n30:00 Kevin Michael Grace joins<br \/>\nhttps:\/\/www.theamericanconservative.com\/articles\/americas-first-elites\/<br \/>\n46:20 Ed &#8220;Borzoi&#8221; Chang joins, he was recently doxxed by Media Matters<br \/>\n1:16:00 New Yorker: \u201cMan Made,\u201d a Film About Transgender Bodybuilders, Upends the Traditional Documentary Gaze<br \/>\n1:21:00 NYT: My New Vagina Won\u2019t Make Me Happy<br \/>\n1:27:00 Twitter Permanently Bans Feminist For Writing That \u2018Men Aren\u2019t Women\u2019<br \/>\n1:30:00 WHO IS MASIN ELIJ\u00c9? MAN TWEETS ALLEGATIONS AGAINST DWIGHT HOWARD OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT<br \/>\n1:37:00 Class differences in sexual vice<br \/>\n1:38:00 Rutgers Women&#8217;s Studies is the 1927 Yankees of feminism<br \/>\n1:49:00 Jonathan Yaniv, Canadian Jewish guy, now identifies as a woman and is on a warpath<br \/>\n2:00:00 Ukraine prepares to defend itself from &#8216;an immediate INVASION&#8217; after three of its navy vessels were captured by Russian forces<br \/>\n2:05:00 White Liberals Present Themselves as Less Competent in Interactions with African-Americans<br \/>\n2:07:00 Caravan rushes US border, repelled by tear gas<br \/>\n2:09:00 America&#8217;s First Elites<br \/>\n2:14:00 How Porn\u2019s Female Directors Are Putting Hollywood to Shame<br \/>\n2:16:00 Will 2019 be the year of women in porn?<br \/>\n2:23:00 \u2018If Brexit is finished, then so is democracy\u2019<br \/>\n2:28:00 WHO IS MASIN ELIJ\u00c9? MAN TWEETS ALLEGATIONS AGAINST DWIGHT HOWARD OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT<br \/>\n2:34:00 Who Will Fix Facebook?<br \/>\n2:35:00 David French: The White-Supremacy Surge<br \/>\n2:36:00 WP: In the United States, right-wing violence is on the rise<br \/>\n2:43:00 The latest on Robert Mueller&#8217;s investigation of Donald Trump<br \/>\n2:47:00 There\u2019s No Point To Regulating Big Tech Because It\u2019s Failing<br \/>\n2:53:00 Richard Spencer denounces the Sailer Strategy<br \/>\n2:56:00 Stefan Molyneux<br \/>\n2:59:00 Brundlefly joins<br \/>\n3:15:00 Are Jews God&#8217;s Chosen People?<br \/>\n3:26:00 David French and the Closing of the American Mind<br \/>\n3:33:00 Somali Muslim Arrested for Attempting to Mow Down Jews With Car in Front of L.A. Synagogue<br \/>\n<A HREF=\"https:\/\/www.theamericanconservative.com\/articles\/americas-first-elites\/\">Robert W. Merry writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Saturday Evening Post\u2019s connection to the old stock was through the predominantly Anglo-Saxon localities of the heartland, whose leaders ran their communities much as the national elite ran the country. They dominated the banks, civic organizations, school boards, county courthouses, and businesses. And they constituted the core readership of the Post, for decades the nation\u2019s most influential and widely circulated magazine. Its old-fashioned editorials and Norman Rockwell covers depicting middle-class scenes were regarded by many as symbolic not just of the magazine and of their own families but of the nation itself.<\/p>\n<p>This cultural symbiosis between the elites of the Northeast and the heartland masses made for a relatively high degree of civic amity within the polity and relatively little class animosity. The acceptance of the elite by the masses generated self-confidence at the top, and this in turn generated an accommodative and soft-edged leadership. Stewart Alsop, in writing about the elite\u2019s decline, referred to it as having been made up of \u201cself-confident and more or less disinterested people.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;But it would be a mistake to view the old elite as soft or easygoing on matters related to the national identity or the country\u2019s political and foreign policy aims. This was brilliantly captured by writer and thinker Benjamin Schwarz in a provocative 1995 essay in The Atlantic Monthly entitled \u201cThe Diversity Myth.\u201d Schwarz punctures what the magazine called the \u201chortatory version of our history, in which America has long been a land of ethnic tolerance and multicultural harmony.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>No, says Schwarz: until probably the 1960s, the \u201cunity\u201d of the United States derived not from its \u201cwarm welcoming of and accommodation to nationalist, ethnic, and linguistic differences but from the ability and willingness of an Anglo elite to stamp its image on other peoples coming to this country.\u201d This was the legacy of \u201ca cultural and ethnic predominance that would not tolerate conflict or confusion regarding the national identity.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Consider the stark expression of Stewart Alsop\u2019s great-uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, who offered words of both welcome and warning as waves of immigrants entered the United States from Eastern and Southern Europe. \u201cWe have no room,\u201d declared Roosevelt, \u201cfor any people who do not act and vote simply as Americans.\u201d Newcomers who had become \u201ccompletely Americanized,\u201d he added, \u201cstand on exactly the same plane as the descendants of any Puritan, Cavalier, or Knickerbocker\u2026. But where immigrants, or the sons of immigrants, do not heartily and in good faith throw in their lot with us, but cling to the speech, the customs, the ways of life, and the habits of thought of the Old World which they have left, they thereby harm both themselves and us.\u201d America would not tolerate, said Roosevelt, newcomers inclined to \u201cconfuse the issues with which we are struggling by introducing among us Old-World quarrels and prejudices.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This was a distillation of the concept of the melting pot\u2014which, as Schwarz correctly notes, \u201camounted to the repression, not the celebration, of ethnic diversity.\u201d He adds that, given the immigrants\u2019 value as working-class stalwarts at the dawn of industrial America, no effort to curtail the immigrant wave could succeed politically (until the 1920s). But these groups weren\u2019t allowed to vitiate Anglo-American dominance. \u201cAmericanization, then,\u201d writes Schwarz, \u201calthough it did not cleanse America of its ethnic minorities, cleansed its minorities of their ethnicity.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;The British ventured to the New World largely as families to create communities, commerce, and wealth born of toil. Bent on perpetuating the folkways and mores of the Old Country, the menfolk brought their own women and generally refused to mix with the Native Americans. The Spanish of Mexico, by contrast, came as conquerors and plunderers. They mixed freely with indigenous women\u2014beginning with Hernan Cortes, who, upon arriving, promptly took as his mistress the lovely and intellectually vibrant Princess Malintzin. The result was that, within a few generations, ethnicity became a particularly vexing issue in the lands of New Spain. Eventually, a new class system based on blood lines emerged, with the increasingly numerous mixed-blood mestizos harboring political and social resentment born of mistreatment and prejudice from both Indians and Spaniards. One result was that the kind of civic solidarity seen in Anglo-Saxon America couldn\u2019t take root in Mexico.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A friend says: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Gary Cooper has been replaced by Dustin Hoffman! Haha. Wow.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt should be noted that this article represents no call for any kind of restoration. History moves forward with a crushing force and doesn\u2019t pause for nostalgia.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Well, of couuuurse.<\/p>\n<p>First thought: maybe hyper-literate urbanism can never be the aspirational model for an entire people. I think this used to be commonly understood. We urbanites needed Iowans to grow our food. It would be crazy to imagine that everywhere in America should be like San Fran and NYC&#8230; those places aren\u2019t even self-sustaining. But that mutual respect\u2014urban respecting rural and vv) has fallen apart.<\/p>\n<p>The phrase \u201cold-fashioned\u201d as used in this article to describe Saturday Evening Post maddens me.<\/p>\n<p>Old elite were \u201cdisinterested people.\u201d Yeah. And remember Washington\u2019s early warning about partisanship. This is the ethos I operate within OR ELSE I risk ostracism&#8230; I have to teach my classes (do my job) as if I have no race, no interests. I\u2019m a ghost. Or else I\u2019m a Nazi. That disinterest, which was the mark of a good person, almost of a philosopher, was weaponized and used against us.<\/p>\n<p>The quote from Roosevelt about people acting \u201csimply as Americans\u201d is akin to the Christian command to be born again. No more Greek or Jew.<\/p>\n<p>To put all this another way: a shadow identity was invented that looked outwardly WASP, but inwardly was anything but WASP&#8230;  the WASP ethos was assumed and self-policing because, as the article says, one needed to assimilate or they wouldn\u2019t be able to make a living. But some realized this situation and consciously performed assimilation (language, dress, even manners) while inwardly never assimilating. And then these shadow WASPs gradually changed the ideal form so that \u201cAmerican\u201d and \u201cWASP\u201d no longer looked exactly the same.<\/p>\n<p> Note: as to why the real WASPs let this happen&#8230; and how responsible they are. Eh. I dunno. Maybe they didn\u2019t think of making movies as a particularly important contribution to society. Guess they were wrong.<\/p>\n<p>I think capitalism and even \u201cusury\u201d is an unremarked part of this story. Capital seems to take on a need to expand, and so bringing in Italians and Irish and even Chinese was profitable through 1920&#8230;  in Federalist 10 Madison talked about the \u201crage for paper money\u201d being a wicked project. Andrew Jackson tried to resist the bank in like 1828, but the bank won&#8230; I don\u2019t know that I\u2019ve ever convinced you about this at all\u2014you seem to be almost an Austrian when it comes to capitalism. But it seems to me like we ought to be looking for other economic models that do not require constant growth and expansion. Otherwise, in the end, the Bank eats up everybody but the bankers, so to speak. <\/p>\n<p>Key sentence: \u201cThus did the old elite soon come under attack from those who saw it as an impediment to American social and cultural progress.\u201d \u2014 progress. Ugh! This is crucial. It begs the question \u2014 progress toward what? What IS \u201cmerit?\u201d One thing is clear: Matthew Stewart never actually wants to live in anything other than a white neighborhood&#8230; however he virtue signals about it.<\/p>\n<p>Interesting sidenote re: Huntington thesis&#8230; Roman Catholicism was long associated with Race &#038; ethnicity, and almost all popes were Italian or French&#8230; but the last three have been Poland, Germany, and Argentina, and soon (of course) that circle will widen and Roman Catholicism will be merely a creed. And that isn\u2019t sufficient. <\/p>\n<p>Final thought: the kulaks who died in Ukraine were basically country bumpkins. Ukraine the bread basket of the USSR. Will our elites seek to totally destroy them the way the Yezhov Terror did under Stalin? Could there be a midwestern holodomor?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>00:00 America&#8217;s First Elites (WASPs) 10:00 Pilleater joins 30:00 Kevin Michael Grace joins https:\/\/www.theamericanconservative.com\/articles\/americas-first-elites\/ 46:20 Ed &#8220;Borzoi&#8221; Chang joins, he was recently doxxed by Media Matters 1:16:00 New Yorker: \u201cMan Made,\u201d a Film About Transgender Bodybuilders, Upends the Traditional Documentary &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=124848\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=124848"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149786,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124848\/revisions\/149786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=124848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=124848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=124848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}