Ross Douthat: White Identity Politics Can Be Suppressed

Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress.

Ross Douthat is trying to get a rise out of us.

New York Times:

“Last week I wrote a column that simultaneously argued that conservatism has a problem with white-nationalist infiltration and that liberalism, influenced by the revival of racial chauvinism in the Trump era, is increasingly tempted to smear mainstream conservatives as racist.

The response was varied, but a common critique from the left was that any defense of individual conservatives from the charge of racism is basically irrelevant to the underlying structural reality that the Trump era has exposed — which is that the American right’s coalition is founded on racism, endures because of racism and has no future as a morally decent force unless it is essentially refounded, its racist roots torn out. …”

I read last week’s column about White Nationalism.

I didn’t bother to respond to it because I was busy with other things. This week’s column is also about the quarantine on White Nationalism. Ross Douthat seems to be worried about the stability of that barrier which has taken a tremendous blow in the Blompf era even with the censorship.

The quarantine isn’t coming back for a number of reasons:

1.) The quarantine was a unique product of the Thirty Glorious Years which are never coming back. The Greatest Generation, Silent Generation and the Boomers will all be dead or dying soon and the generations that will follow them were formed by a very different America.

2.) Historically speaking, America’s bouts of racial egalitarianism have been the byproduct of wars and a confident, triumphant liberalism. The American Revolution led to a short burst of racial egalitarianism. The War Between the States led to a short burst of racial egalitarianism. World War II and the Cold War led to a longer burst of racial egalitarianism. In all of these cases, it was confident White Northerners who were victorious in a war who pushed these values into the mainstream only to quickly retreat from them. This is what happened from the Jefferson presidency to Lincoln. It happened again from Redemption through the Great Depression. The retrenchment is happening again with Trump.

3.) The cause of this historical pattern is the demographic makeup of the American North which until quite recently was over 90% White. After the American Revolution, the War Between the States and World War II, it was possible to be a racial liberal in the North because racial problems were something that other people dealt with like Southerners or Nazi Germany. Notice how the Civil Rights Movement ran out of gas as soon as Martin Luther King, Jr. went to Chicago and blacks rioted in Watts and Detroit and other Northern cities. Backlash politics gave us the Nixon presidency.

4.) As of 2019, America as a whole now has the demographics of the Deep South. In fact, Alabama is whiter than the national average. The South’s racial problems have been nationalized. While the South has changed since World War II, it hasn’t changed nearly as much as the North and West. Led by California, the North and West have changed faster than the South. In the process, White Northerners and Westerners have been exposed to “diversity” in a way that was never true in the past.

5.) The future of White America is the past of Mississippi or South Carolina which were majority black until the 20th century. In less than a decade, the country as a whole will be returned to the Reconstruction era under the thumb of one of these “woke” progressive Democrats.

6.) The quarantine was a product of the age of film and television and the consolidation of the mass media in the 20th century. This is also never coming back and censorship is a last ditch effort to preserve the status quo. Even with the censorship, this effort will prove unsuccessful.

7.) The confidence and trust that Americans had in the mainstream media and institutions in the Thirty Glorious Years is similarly a ship that has sailed. The liberal establishment has lost its legitimacy. It was a confident and triumphant liberalism that imposed its values after three major wars. The situation that liberalism is facing today is more similar to the legitimacy crisis and revolt that brought down communism. Millions of people on both the Left and Right have stopped believing in liberalism.

8.) Conservatism will run out of White voters in the 2020s as the Silent Generation and the Boomers die off. In spite of Ross’s happy talk, the fate of the Republican Party nationwide will be its fate in California.

9.) There isn’t going to be any solution to the immigration crisis which is ultimately a proxy for resentment about demographic change.

10.) Religious conservatives have been totally defeated in the culture war. Younger generations reject the family, reject Christianity and reject patriotism. There is no possible scenario in which these people gain the upper hand and convince young people to embrace Judeo-Christianity. No, their loss of influence is rapidly accelerating and soon they will be marginalized as “fringe.”

11.) Blompf and the GOP are on Twitter every day doing minority outreach. They are so desperate for non-White support that A$AP Rocky was sprung from prison. They passed criminal justice reform too. Conservatism doesn’t appeal to racial minorities because of its economic policies.

12.) After 40 years of mainstream conservatism, it has succeeded in deracinating White America and institutionalizing neoliberalism. The smoldering cauldron of resentment is a product of the success that conservatism has had in fulfilling its project of creating the deracinated, powerless, atomized, mentally ill individualist lorded over by unaccountable corporations and rocked by wave after wave of social revolutions that have destabilized and unraveled the social order.

We’re on the doorstep of the future that White Nationalists have worried about for the past 50 years. Twenty years ago, White Nationalists were concerned about the 2020s, 2030s and 2040s. I’m bullish on White identity politics because now that the future for White people is about to arrive after Trump it won’t be something that only intelligent, highly educated and ethical people who worried about trends and who were easily marginalized by conservatives as “racists” in the 20th century have to deal with. We’re about to finally enter the post-racial paradise of a White minority America.