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Thomas Jackson, American Renaissance, October 2008

For Americans, race is only the beginning.

Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, Houghton Mifflin, 2008, 370 pp., $25.00.

What happens when people have more freedom than ever to choose their associates, their churches, their news sources, their neighborhoods, and their schools? Do they seek the joys of diversity, or the company of people like themselves and ideas like their own? The answer from a racial point of view has been clear for years—Americans are essentially no less segregated than they were 50 years ago—but journalist Bill Bishop has found that we increasingly seek homogeneity that goes well beyond race. He cites convincing evidence for what he calls “the big sort:” that Americans are dividing themselves up not only geographically, but also in terms of politics, worldview, and “lifestyle,” and shutting themselves off from others. This book is yet another powerful blow against the idea that Americans (or anyone else) want diversity.

The political divide

Mr. Bishop writes that one of the sharpest and most recent divides is political, and argues that the United States has become much more partisan since a period of bipartisanship that ran from about 1948 to the mid 1960s. He writes that during that period there was much less difference between Republicans and Democrats, and few people had the ideological fervor that is common today. Only half of adults had a real understanding of what was meant by the terms “liberal” and “conservative,” and only one-third of voters could explain how the two parties differed on the most important issues of the time. Unlike today, politics had no moral dimension: No one thought his opponents were evil. Mr. Bishop notes that there was so little difference between the parties that both Republicans and Democrats tried to recruit Dwight Eisenhower as their candidate for the 1952 election, and that even as late as the early 1970s there was not much disagreement between the parties on abortion, school prayer, or women’s “rights.”

Fifty years ago Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn would serve drinks at the end of the day to the Republican leadership, and there was friendship and cooperation across the aisle. Now, according to a congressional barber who has served decades of legislators, “People don’t like each other; they don’t talk to each other.”

Mr. Bishop adds that as late as the 1980s as many as a quarter of voters were genuinely undecided and looked candidates over carefully. Now, he says, 90 percent make up their minds on the basis of party affiliation, so campaigns are designed to mobilize supporters rather than win over doubters or build consensus. Passions run so high that it is no longer unusual for party fanatics to destroy the opponents’ campaign yard signs. Younger party activists are more ideological than old hands, newly elected officials are more extreme than the ones they replace, and the women in Congress are more partisan than the men. “Compromise and cross-pollination are now rare,” writes Mr. Bishop.

Another characteristic of our times is that social clubs such as the Lions, Masons, Elks, Rotary, Moose, etc. have been losing members since the 1960s. They are broad-based groups without a political agenda, where “brothers” are likely to hold a variety of views. Now, people tend to socialize in groups with sharply defined political goals—the ACLU, the Federalist Society, the Club for Growth, EMILY’s List—and to spend hours in Internet discussions with like-minded associates.

Fifty years ago, there were not many explicitly political magazines or newspapers. Now, there is a profusion of sharply partisan print publications, and countless Internet sites that promote divergent views.

Local majorities have already passed laws that send clear signals to racially conscious whites.

Mr. Bishop writes that this sharpening of ideological boundaries has come at a time of drastic loss of faith in traditional authorities. In the late 1950s, 80 percent of Americans said they could trust government to do the right thing all or most of the time. This faith, combined with national consensus, explains how the Johnson administration was able to pass the Great Society legislation that inaugurated the War on Poverty, Head Start, Medicare, and Medicaid. By 1976, only 33 percent of Americans trusted government, and the figure continues to sink. At the same time, Americans lost faith in doctors, preachers, universities, newspapers, and big business.

There are no simple explanations for these changes, but Mr. Bishop is convinced it has something to do with material abundance. When people are hungry they worry about survival; when survival is assured, they want self-expression. People with full stomachs question authority and act on their own political ideas rather than follow leaders. Mr. Bishop also believes that the turmoil of the 1960s—Vietnam, the counterculture, race riots, assassinations—helped destroy consensus and respect for authority, but the entire industrial world was losing faith in institutions.

Some of Mr. Bishop’s most eye-opening observations are about a recent tendency for Americans to move into and form like-minded communities. He notes that greater wealth and easier transport mean people move much more than they used to: 4 to 5 percent of the population move every year, or 100 million people in the last decade. Whether they are conscious of it or not, Americans now tend to move to areas that reflect their politics. How do we know this?

Mr. Bishop studied how every county in America voted during the last dozen or so presidential elections. He defined as “landslide counties” those in which either the Republican or the Democrat won by a margin of 20 percent or more. In 1976, 26 percent of Americans lived in such counties; by 2004, 48 percent did. To some extent, people in a county may have influenced their neighbors in one direction or another, but Mr. Bishop writes that the greatest source of increased county-level polarization is internal migration: Democrats moved out of Republican counties into Democratic counties, while Republicans did the reverse.

San Francisco County is a good example of partisan migration. In 1976, Republican Gerald Ford got 44 percent of the vote; in 2004, George W. Bush got only 15. Republicans did not all die or convert; they cleared out. Mr. Bishop offers an amusing example of the result. “How can the polls say the election is neck and neck?” he quotes a liberal. “I don’t know a single person who is going to vote for Bush.”

The same kind of sorting goes on at the state level. In 1976, either the Republican or the Democrat won by a margin of 10 percent or more in 19 states. By 2004, it was 31 states. Consistent vote patterns give rise to the shorthand of “blue” and “red” states.

How each county voted in the 2004 election. Red is Republican.

Localities take on personalities that go beyond politics. Homosexuals soon learn where other homosexuals live and join them. Places such as Portland, Oregon; Austin, Texas; Raleigh-Durham; and Palo Alto, California, get reputations as trendy, yuppie, liberal havens, and attract the sort of people such places attract. An area that puts out a signal that makes the news—such as kicking out illegal immigrants or legalizing homosexual marriage—gets a national reputation that attracts more like-minded people.

Trendy, liberal places attract college-educated, creative people, and their economies thrive. Other places decline as they lose these people. In booming Austin, 45 percent of adults have a college degree. In declining Cleveland, only 14 percent do. By 2000, there were 62 metropolitan areas where fewer than 17 percent of adults were college graduates, and 32 metro areas where more than 34 percent were. That is a good gauge of an area’s dynamism.

An even better gauge is the increase (or decrease) in patents. Between 1975 and 2001, the number of patents granted to people living in Atlanta doubled. In San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, it was up 170 percent, 175 percent, and 169 percent, respectively. Cleveland was down 13 percent and Pittsburgh was down 27 percent.

People used to move house for economic reasons. They moved to high-wage areas only if the cost of living was not so great it wiped out the wage advantage. No longer. In jazzy places such as San Francisco, New York, or Portland, housing alone is so expensive it wipes out any wage advantage, but people move anyway for the cachet and “lifestyle.” To live in certain ZIP codes is now a luxury product.

Businesses make similar calculations. They hope to recoup the higher costs of a tony address by getting better employees. This process leads to both virtuous and vicious cycles, as one place becomes Silicon Valley and another becomes Detroit. The trendy places tend to be politically liberal, and not very religious, and attract yet more people who are liberal and irreligious. Migration is self-selection.

Builders have cashed in on the desire to club with the like-minded. Mr. Bishop writes about the Ladera Ranch subdivision in Orange County, California, which has a section called Covenant Hills for religious conservatives, and Terramor for liberals. Covenant Hills has a Christian school and the architecture is traditional. Terramor has a Montessori school and the houses are trendy. Colleges have theme dormitories, not only for different races but for students who thrill to the environment or to “peace and justice.”

The political tribe

Mr. Bishop points out that the standard political profiles we take for granted today are relatively recent. He offers this contemporary cliché: anyone who drives a Volvo and does yoga is almost certainly a Democrat; anyone who drives a Cadillac and owns a gun is almost certainly a Republican. He argues that before the 1970s there were no such pat stereotypes. Today, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to be churchgoers, but this was not so 40 years ago. Today, women vote reliably Democratic but in the 1970s women were more likely to vote Republican.

Covenant Hills.

The 2004 elections offer an amusing vignette about political profiling. Mr. Bishop notes that early in the voting, exit polls suggested John Kerry would win. Why were they wrong? The poll-takers were young, collegiate-looking types who gave off a liberal aroma. They tried to stop and ask everyone how he had voted, but Republicans sized them up as Democrats and kept walking. Democrats saw them as fellow liberals and stopped to talk. Self-selection skewed the polls.

What people think about the Bible now predicts a host of other views. Fundamentalists naturally oppose homosexual marriage and abortion, but they are also likely to be for low taxes, a strong military, the death penalty, balanced budgets, and small government. They don’t like redistribution of wealth, and think jobs are more important than the environment. People who think the Bible was not divinely inspired are likely to be on the opposite side of all those issues. This does not hold for blacks, who are overwhelmingly Democrats, whether they go to church or not.

Mr. Bishop notes that there has been an association between religion and conservatism in all industrial countries but that, in most of the Western world, religion has faded. The still-strong tie in America between religion and conservatism is unusual.

The profiles of Mr. Bishop’s “landslide” counties are now no surprise to anyone, though they reflect a divide that did not exist 40 years ago. In Republican counties, 86 percent of the people are white, 57 percent are married, and half have guns in the house. In Democratic landslide counties, only 47 percent are married, only 70 percent are white, and only 19 percent have guns. The women in the different counties vary in whether they have children, how many, and how late in life they had them.

Probably not Obama supporters.

Not surprisingly, the farther people live from neighbors, the more likely they are to vote Republican. There has always been a city/country gap, but people always assumed television and the Internet would narrow it. Instead, the gap has grown wider. At the same time, with every 10 percent decline in population density, there is a 10 percent increase in the likelihood that people talk to neighbors. City people rarely do; country people almost always. The political correlation means Republicans are more likely than Democrats to talk to their neighbors. This city/country spectrum also predicts who fights our wars. In 2007, the Iraq casualty rate in Bismarck, South Dakota, was ten times that in San Francisco.

Even child-rearing is now political. Parents who require obedience and good manners tend to vote Republican, whereas indulgent parents vote Democratic. Mr. Bishop says this was not so 30 or 40 years ago, and that today, parents with the most education tend to be the most indulgent.

The Christian tribe

For three centuries, sages have been predicting the end of religion. Voltaire said it might last another 50 years. Freud, Marx, Weber, and Herbert Spencer all predicted an early death. They may have been right about most of the West, but not about America. Here, churches have survived, in part by changing to accommodate the inclination of the like-minded to herd together.

There have always been two types of Christian in America: those who thought religion was mainly a matter of personal morality, and those who thought it was an instrument for transforming society. The former—the conservatives—want to save the world by bringing more people to Christianity, whereas the latter—the liberal, “social-gospel” Christians—want to reform the world without necessarily making it more Christian.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the “social-gospel” Christians took over virtually all the mainstream Christian institutions, and used them to advance every pet liberal project from integration to homosexuality to Communism. The organized “Christian Right” emerged as a response.

Since that time, both movements have been eclipsed by a new kind of Christianity that has largely dispensed with theology, denomination, and the traditional geographic limitations on congregation size. Today, religious entrepreneurs decide where to found a church by using the same marketing and demographic techniques that determine where to put the next Wal-Mart or Home Depot. The idea is to find, within easy driving distance, a lot of people who fit a certain profile and then reach as many as possible. If the marketing is right and the preacher has flash, the result is a mega-church with a multimillion dollar budget and a TV audience. Such churches give people what they want: undemanding, feel-good Christianity, served up and consumed by people who are all the same race, social class, and political orientation.

The Crystal Cathedral in Anaheim, California.

This is far from the traditional pattern. Denominations mattered 40 years ago because Methodists and Presbyterians did not believe the same things. Also, churches served a neighborhood of people who varied, if not in race, then in many other ways. Before the “social gospel” divided churches into left and right, church members held varying political views, even if they agreed on doctrine.

Today’s nondenominational, new-breed preachers care about market share, not doctrine, and know that pushing predestination or baptism by immersion drives away customers. There are still churches with doctrine, but they count their members in the dozens or hundreds, not thousands.

Even for most mainstream churches, denomination has become so watered down it means almost nothing. As Mr. Bishop points out, whether or not a church flies the homosexual rainbow flag is a much better indication of what it is like than whether it is Baptist or Church of Christ. These days, everyone wants a tribe, and people will not cross lines of race, politics, erotic orientation, or class to go to church.

What does it mean?

“Americans,” writes Mr. Bishop, “segregate themselves into their own political worlds, blocking out discordant voices and surrounding themselves with reassuring news and companions.” He doesn’t like this tendency, because it makes Americans incomprehensible to each other. He cites often-replicated research showing that when people with off-center views spend time with each other they tend to go further off-center; lefties become more lefty and conservatives more conservative. Once a group has a distinctive tone, people gain respect and take the lead by trying to pull it even further from the middle.

Because of the self-sorting that is now common, it is possible to avoid ever having to talk to a political opponent. Many versions of the same research show that people who never meet the other side have exaggerated notions of its depravity or fanaticism. With enough reinforcement from colleagues, partisan publications, and Internet sources people can become so fixed in their thinking that they simply disbelieve anything—no matter how solidly demonstrated—that conflicts with their views.

Partisans cannot see what should be objective, common realities. For example, just before the 2006 mid-term elections, 70 percent of Republicans said the economy was doing fine, while 75 percent of Democrats said it was in deep trouble. Even if they have different news sources, Democrats and Republicans must see the same economic statistics.

This tendency to let party loyalties warp their vision is consistent with another finding by political scientists: Many people choose a party more for psychological than political reasons. Mr. Bishop quotes sociologist Paul Lazarfeld: “It appears that a sense of fitness is a more striking feature of political preference than reason and calculation.” People pick parties if they fit in socially; policy is secondary.

Mr. Bishop adds that people sometimes switch parties when their politics change, but that it is more common to change opinions to match the party consensus. Being a Democrat or Republican means joining a family or adopting a way of life as much as it reflects political choice.

Shrewd political operators have always understood the importance of conformity and belonging. They try to choose canvassers or precinct walkers so that when someone comes to your door he is not only your race and social class, but your neighbor. Emotion and loyalty drive politics more effectively than calculation.

What are the political consequences of “the big sort”? Mr. Bishop argues that Congress is often deadlocked because hard-liners refuse to compromise. When Congress won’t act, the President and the courts take over, but so do local governments. Local autonomy is seeing a resurgence as states and cities deal unilaterally with illegal immigration, homosexual marriage, race preferences, abortion, smoking bans, stem-cell research, etc. Heightened partisanship paralyzes Congress while, at the same time, building homogenous local majorities that can pass laws that would be unthinkable in another state or county. Local majorities, both liberal and conservative, are rehabilitating states’ rights.

Possibilities

Not usually a good sign.

Local majorities have already passed laws that send clear signals to racially conscious whites. “Sanctuary cities” are not attractive while cities that require police to enforce immigration law are. For the time being, these signals are not explicitly racial, but if the country really is drifting toward increased polarization, eventually there will be localities that consistently pass laws that have the effect of protecting white majorities and white institutions.

Today, laws cannot be explicitly racial, but they don’t have to be. A city or town that affirms a policy of hiring on merit alone or a school district that mentions crime rates during Black History Month will attract certain people and repel others. Measures do not need to be dramatic to reverse current demographic flows; reputation alone can set virtuous cycles in motion.

Within the two-party system, it is very difficult to make progress at the national level. Local politics, especially in a time of increased sorting, has much more potential. Once a town or county were secured, it could both lead by example and provide a base for state-level action. Voluntary sorting works in our favor. It is up to us to channel and use it for larger, long-term purposes.

Original article

(Posted on August 7, 2009)

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Comments

1 — RandyB wrote at 5:52 PM on August 7:

I’ll pick up on my “strategic thinking” theme from yesterday — our ideology needs to broaden. Safe neighborhoods are a priority for all families with kids, and we can’t let such an issue become associated with a narrow slice of the political spectrum.

The article mentioned communities cracking down on illegal immigrants. Prince William County VA, which voted 55% for Obama, cracked down on illegals when they brought to that community such “diverse” cultural practices as catcalling to women from the day work pickup point, urinating in bushes around the neighborhood, slaughtering chickens in their backyard and opening brothels in residential townhouses.

We need to sell they yuppies where they live.

2 — Question Diversity wrote at 6:17 PM on August 7:

Several years ago, I was thumbing through a magazine that covered the political polarization of American geography. The article’s theory was that the information revolution was the spark that set it off — because of it, it was no longer necessary for many people to live in one particular place. Therefore, people were politically self-selecting. The mag cited Boulder, Colorado - it has been left-of-center for a long time. But the IR meant that a lot of lefties could move, and they selected Boulder because it was already liberal. This made Boulder even more liberal, thereby attracting crazier liberals, which made it even crazier liberal, which attracts even more crazies…it’s a dynamo effect that goes on to this day. So crazy has Boulder become that it has an active and thriving vegetable rights organization.

The mag cited other cities and towns that have worked in this way for both the left and the right. Metropolitan ares are also dividing up into the lib and cons. parts of town.

3 — Anonymous wrote at 7:52 PM on August 7:

“Fifty years ago Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn would serve drinks at the end of the day to the Republican leadership, and there was friendship and cooperation across the aisle. Now, according to a congressional barber who has served decades of legislators, “People don’t like each other; they don’t talk to each other.””

In the 1960’s the left discovered the phrase “the personal is political”. It became one of the slogans. Who you become friends with, talk to and date has political ramifications. You can see the nastiness just watching the TV now.

4 — Anonymous wrote at 7:57 PM on August 7:

This is obviously a higher relevant topic, central to the future of the United States. I offer the following comments:

1. Regarding the notion of diversity and The Big Sort:

Jackon writes:

“This book is yet another powerful blow against the idea that Americans (or anyone else) want diversity.”

I’m not so sure. To my mind, that IS diversity, i.e. different places with different cultures, and anyone can go there, as a visitor, to experience it. Diversity, to me, is not that every place is the same, with politically validated proportions of all races and ideologies.

2. When places “attract the sort of people such places attract”, one can only conclude that the saying “birds of a feather flock together” once again wins out in human civilization.

3. To the quote:

“These days, everyone wants a tribe, and people will not cross lines of race, politics, erotic orientation, or class to go to church.”

I can offer that this is not the case for Mormons (LDS church), at least in theory, because it is still geographically organized. However, the Big Sort means that congregation members have already been pre-sorted. (Also, gays may simply shun the church, and blacks are not rushing to join.)

4. Finally, I wish to underscore the following lines, with which I agree:

“With enough reinforcement from colleagues, partisan publications, and Internet sources people can become so fixed in their thinking that they simply disbelieve anything—no matter how solidly demonstrated—that conflicts with their views.”

5 — sofita wrote at 8:49 PM on August 7:

“These days, everyone wants a tribe, and people will not cross lines of race, politics, erotic orientation, or class to go to church.”

Heck yea. If there wasn’t so much forced togetherness all week, I might get curious about other folks but as it is, I just want to be around normal people on Sundays. Naturally, to me, normal means white, staight, Christian, conservative, lower middle-class people who didn’t go to school till they were 40.

6 — European wrote at 9:04 PM on August 7:

“Younger party activists are more ideological than old hands, newly elected officials are more extreme than the ones they replace”

I think this is mainly true of left-wing radicals. Leftism has infected the Democratic Party and has become more and more outrageous. But instead of standing firm on its principles, much of the Republican Party has become infected with the same leftist disease, especially with regard to the immigration policy. The impression is that they no longer believe in their own views. Is it really the case that younger Republican activists have become more ideological?

7 — Istvan wrote at 9:34 PM on August 7:

People have never, ever desired diversity. It might be interesting or fun to visit a people or place unlike one’s own but we prefer our own. Whites, gays, Chinese..whatever..feel most comfortable among their own. And I can prove this universal truth:

THANKINGS - AFTER DINNER: the men gather in the living room, the women in the kitchen and the children in the rec room. Perfectly natural. And don’t give me the sexism argument. If a man offers to help clean up…he will be allowed to carry heavy pots or take out the trash but beyond that he will be sooshed out of the kitchen because he is “in the way”. Actually the women just want to be able to have “girl talk” amongst themselves. Hey, nothing wrong with that!

The above is the reason the government and liberal organizations have to constantly tell us “Diversity is our Strength”. Because it isn’t true it must be drilled into us. When was the last time you saw a commercial or bumper sticker telling you “The World is Round” or “Beer can make You Tipsy”? You don’t because we know those are generally accepted facts.

My fear is: when will the government enforce diversity after turkey and stuffing?????

8 — WR the elder wrote at 3:48 AM on August 8:

Because of the self-sorting that is now common, it is possible to avoid ever having to talk to a political opponent.

True enough. I’m sure the SPLC monitors this “hate site” on a regular basis. But do they ever stop to debate here? Of course not. They’d lose every time. On the other hand, I would never be able to debate them in the pages of their “Intelligencer” because they’d censor me.

Oh, if only that were so. But I fear that this is one prediction that will never come to pass. For one thing there’d be massive federal lawsuits if any community ever tried to become overtly pro-white.

9 — GeoffM wrote at 5:48 AM on August 8:

This is a hoot.

Not only tribes but perhaps nation forming?

It will be interesting to see how this all pans out. In the UK native Brits are leaving the cities in droves to get away from the unwanted immigrants flooding the country. Many are leaving the UK altogether, like me, to live in places like rural France. At least the French authorities still allow gun ownership and the Gendarmerie isn’t staffed with ethnics, gays and marxists like in the UK.

Forced diversity doesn’t work. The multiculturalists are in a panic as Europeans are voting for right wing party’s and we are rejecting mass migration by Afro’s and Muslims.

The next 20 years should be interesting.

10 — feller wrote at 9:58 AM on August 8:

The large, growing sector of independents which is largely white and center right as well as libertarian and nationalist is ignored in this interesting article. Party affiliation by whites will, I believe, decline, or there will be transfer to third parties that protect white interests. Blacks and Hispanics: Democrats. Republicans?: people in finance and larger businesses.

Look for counties that a large majority white and that have many independents. Maybe where you want to live.

11 — Lost in Amerika wrote at 11:32 AM on August 8:

People like people who are like themselves. It is a law of nature. Opposites may attract for a short of time, but it never works out. Really I think the attraction amongst opposites isn’t so much an attraction as it is a rebellion against the norm. Or maybe it’s a curiosity of some sort. But opposites never work out. There is no common interests between whites and any other race, period. We used to know that, now we are multi-cultied to death. Multiculturalism goes against all the norms of nature. It will not work regardless of how much money and brainwashing is used to get the results that they desire.

12 — Jake Prufrock wrote at 5:30 AM on August 9:

The red-blue election map is really next-to-worthless, even when broken down by counties rather than states. To have a meaningful map, the colors should depend upon the breakdowns of the vote, with pure red meaning unanimously Republican, and pure blue (or violet) meaning unanimously Democratic. Most states, counties, or even precincts would be much closer to yellow or green (think ‘Roy G. Biv’ from your grade-school Art class) than to either extreme of the color spectrum.

Secondly, the brightness of the respective colorizations would need to be based upon population densities. In the map shown, for instance, the few million people in Chicago, who typically vote overwhelmingly Democratic, are almost unnoticeable among the surrounding sea of red, most of which is rural Illinois. These typical red-blue maps always make it look as if the country is overwhelmingly conservative, when it is obviously well-divided between the two duopolistic parties that have held a stranglehold on American politics since the middle of the 19th Century, with yet about a third of us instead considering ourselves independents (albeit individually tending to vote much more often with one of the two main parties than with the other).

There is undoubtedly an overwhelming disconnect between our ruling elites— in government, the mass media and academia— and the masses; but, the masses, as evidenced by voting behavior, are fairly well spread out along the political spectrum that is fatuously collapsed into the simple, and utterly simplistic, dichotomy of left-right, ‘liberal-conservative’ or Democratic-Republican. The on-line test that places one’s political position within a 2-D square (rather than along a 1-D line segment), based upon a set of questions that track social issues, on the one hand, and economic issues, on the other, is a step in the correct direction in moving away from the inane belief that, for instance, everyone who goes to church is a political ‘conservative’, while everyone who opposes the death penalty is a political ‘liberal’.

It would be even more helpful if political terminology returned to its origins, such that genuine socialists, and even card-carrying Communists, were not ludicrously referred to as ‘liberals’ (as if they were heirs to Adam Smith!) or ‘progressives’ (as if they were heirs to Teddy Roosevelt!), while genuine fascists and neo-Nazis were no longer considered ‘conservatives’. Much of what passes for ideological warfare today is essentially an internecine struggle between left-wing collectivists (socialists, etc.) and right-wing collectivists (fascists, neo-conservatives, etc.). As Hayek explained in “The Road to Serfdom” sixty-five years ago, collectivism is collectivism, whether it is nationalistic and right-wing or globalistic and left-wing— and either flavor is inherently totalitarian!

Those who wish to have either integration or segregation enforced by government, rather than by the free choices of individuals, are totalitarians, whether they call themselves what they truly are or hide behind our contemporary (and euphemistic) political misnomers like ‘liberals’, ‘progressives’, ‘conservatives’ or ‘patriots’.

13 — sandstorm wrote at 9:47 AM on August 10:

GeoffM wrote at 5:48 AM on August 8: It will be interesting to see how this all pans out. In the UK native Brits are leaving the cities in droves to get away from the unwanted immigrants flooding the country. Many are leaving the UK altogether, like me, to live in places like rural France. At least the French authorities still allow gun ownership and the Gendarmerie isn’t staffed with ethnics, gays and marxists like in the UK.

Yes, but isn’t it a shame you had to move out of your country of birth to find security.

14 — Thomas Jackson wrote at 12:25 PM on August 10:

We already know how this story pans out..anywhere African-Americans or Latinos concentrate themselves and their dysfunctional self-destructive cultures, European-Americans (Red or Blue) flee.

Once the Afros or Latinos gain control of the government and the local treasury, the process accelerates until their is a complete implosion (ref. Detroit, LA county, Mexican border towns).

15 — GeoffM wrote at 8:09 AM on August 11:

Sandstorm.

Yes you are quite right. But after 7 years living in London I can see the writing on the wall.

Read The Camp of Saints - written first published in 1973 but could have been written yesterday.

The book describes a mass immigration to France but frankly the UK is the target with hundreds of thousands a year coming in, often with bogus holiday visa’s, student visa’s, asylum claims or just plain illegal.

They are not sent back. Major cities which were 99% white in the 60’s are now majority black.

Anarchy looms.

16 — ghw wrote at 8:13 AM on August 11:

the political spectrum [has] fatuously collapsed into the utterly simplistic, dichotomy of left-right, ‘liberal-conservative’ or Democratic-Republican. [as, for example] the inane belief that, for instance, everyone who goes to church is a political ‘conservative’, while everyone who opposes the death penalty is a political ‘liberal’.

It would be more helpful if political terminology returned to its origins, such that genuine socialists, and even card-carrying Communists, were not ludicrously referred to as ‘liberals’ (as if they were heirs to Adam Smith!) or ‘progressives’ (as if they were heirs to Teddy Roosevelt!), while genuine fascists and neo-Nazis were no longer considered ‘conservatives’.
—Jake Profrock
…………………………….

Many thanks to Mr.Prufrock for this excellent comment. I have written repeatedly on the misapplication of the terms “liberal” and “conservative”… at least within the standard, classic meaning of those terms… but I have just about given up. It is very frustrating. What passes for “liberal” today — the anti-liberties, anti-free-speech totalitarian fanatics of the extreme left — are ANYTHING BUT “liberals” in the true sense. They are the diametrical opposite of everything that is liberal! True liberals do not seek to silence the opposition. True liberals do not suppress discussion and outlaw dissent. They do not punish disbelievers. They do not disrupt meetings, shout down or threaten their opponents. There is nothing “liberal” about a communist! It may be that there are no true liberals (or “progressives”) left today, but their titles have been mis-appropriated by usurpers. And quite a few so-called “conservatives” are often just as authoritarian — or would be if they could — especially the religious right-wingers, and do not seek so much to conserve anything worth preserving as to institute a new right-wing regime that could be just as oppressive and intolerant as the Left.

In short, our old terminologies seem to have become obsolete and inadequate for today’s realities. We need new words.

17 — A Swain wrote at 6:13 PM on August 11:

I’m not convinced by this argument that people relocate according to their political leanings.

To my mind, it’s everything to do with the prospect of economic betterment via perceived improved employment prospects and basic racial consciousness translating as preferring to be amongst those of one’s own race.

18 — Anonymous wrote at 5:45 PM on August 13:

“Major cities which were 99% white in the 60’s are now majority black. Anarchy looms.”

Not really. As long as society is obsessed with ‘affirmative action’ type programs, and as long as all problems, in history and in the present, are blamed on ignorant whites, blacks remain happy and whites remain afraid to even talk about it.

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