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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5631 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 12, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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The main recruiting tactic of white nationalists majoritarians is to argue that wokeness is being fueled by America's increasing diversity and, therefore, decreasing diversity will decrease wokeness. I used to believe that, but at some point I realized that the drivers of wokeness are affluent whites and Asians, not Hispanic immigrants. This doesn't mean that Hispanics are opposed to wokeness, but rather, that even if the white share of the population stopped declining, wokeness would continue marching through the institutions.

I've believed this for a couple years now, so I don't care about immigration as much as I did during Trumpmania. However, is there any reason to believe that increased Hispanic immigration would help combat wokeness? I understand that most Hispanics vote Democrat and likely always will, but one can vote for them for reasons unrelated to wokeness, and wokeness could be a dividing line for the party at some point. We already saw signs of that with the "Bernie Bro" discourse.

(Wokeness, for the purposes of this and any other post I make, is defined as the belief that any disparate outcome between groups is the self-evident result of systemic oppression and, therefore, must be counteracted. Other terms often used to describe this ideology are "social justice", "identity politics", "neo-Marxism", "post-modern neo-Marxism", "Critical Race Theory", "disparate impact", "anti-racism", "intersectionality", and "intersectional feminism". One of the weird quirks of this ideological movement is that anytime its opponents start addressing it by name, its proponents abandon that name and switch to a new one. This makes it almost impossible for anyone to discuss the ideology; it's hard to discuss something without a name. I've settled on wokeness.)

I used to believe that, but at some point I realized that the drivers of wokeness are affluent whites and Asians, not Hispanic immigrants.

The wokes would have no racial wedge to drive between people if everyone were the same race. They would get less/no votes from pandering to minorities by peddling an explicit ethnic spoils system. It is very difficult to have a BLM movement or affirmative action when black people are a rounding error in your country. Wokeism thrives on an ideology of "enrich X at the cost of the majority/hated groups", so without an X to enrich, and receive patronage from, it would fall apart.

I agree. I guess this has backfired. I was hoping to be talked down, not up. But the truth matters. I thank you for your honesty.

As far as I can tell, Hispanics will change their identification to the winning side and are no strangers to racial grievance policies, so they will keep their heads down and play within the system unless a critical mass of anti-woke elites emerges that they can rally behind. Asians are more directly harmed by affirmative action and other woke policies, and so they may be the first movers in this situation. An Asian-led political coalition with Hispanic support rising out of California to overthrow its white Democratic gerontocracy would certainly be far more interesting than the endless rehash of 1960's protests and civil rights debates about black and white issues that we have all been trapped in for decades now.

Hispanics are primarily conservative. Cf. latinx adoption, Catholicism and booming protestantism, that nearly all Hispanics are descended from Spaniards (so more colonial and slave owning heritage than American whites!)... Even in the universities, adoptions of the core woke tenets don't penetrate very far. (N.b. I am more familiar with the upperclasses in Latin America itself, though growing up in a poor Hispanic US barrio.) But certainly when your parents are encouraging you to have kids at 18, throwing a celebratory party etc. and telling you not to waste your time with college... Isn't that what conservative intellectuals espouse today?

That said, educational attainment's not so bad either. My grandfather was an electrical engineer with patents for computer memory, after picking fruit as a kid. I have an uncle building rockets at Blue Origin (which don't work!) A cousin with a PhD, another doing networking for Starlink etc. besides myself. Two uncles and some cousins voted for Trump etc. my mom voted straight Republican until Romney. This is quite average.

Remember, the lower class and indigenous (not the same!) Hispanics built pyramids and did cool math (besides the flower wars and sacrifices...) The middle and upperclasses are mostly European (the Lebanese made tacos al pastor, Germans brought beer and banda (polka, corridos) music etc.). The non-lowest majority are very mixed. There's a lot of potential here. There are serious problems with the culture/mindset overall - but the non-Hispanic West isn't different there, unfortunately.

is there any reason to believe that increased Hispanic immigration would help combat wokeness

To discuss this in depth, it's important to first point out that Hispanic is a made up category with very different elements. Traditionally it was made up of Cubans in Florida, Puerto Ricans in the NYC area, and Northern Mexicans in the Southwest.

The Cuban refugees were frequently educated and anti communist, so they have been accessible to voting republican for a while.

The Hispanics being bussed to the southern border in those caravans are a different demographic. From southern Mexico or central America. Bottom social tier in their original countries. Often completely illiterate, unable to read English or Spanish. Due to "bilingual" education, which in practice means doing HS in Spanish, their children never learn college level English. The education system fudges the numbers by giving them affirmative action entrance, throwing them in remedial classes, letting them wash out, then declaring them as having "some college" in statistics.

So the parents and children end up to some degree reliant on social programs run by the PMC. They aren't in any position to fight wokeism.

Venezuelans fleeing Maduro tend to be more similar Cubans but they aren't going to have any desire to rock the boat.

Besides, the woke don't have any objection to making exceptions for non-whites. You won't see them pushing "gender affirming care" on Somali Muslims. The famous famous "gay wedding cake" couple drove way out into the boonies to find a Christian baker who had a problem making the cake, while ignoring Muslim bakeries a few miles away from their home who had similar objections.

So I think that while Hispanic immigrants that get into the PMC would be culturally less supportive of wokeism, they would tend to see it as either helpful to their careers or not worth opposing.

Would you care to cite any sources for those education claims?

Sincerely, a Texan.

Due to "bilingual" education, which in practice means doing HS in Spanish, their children never learn college level English.

This is not accurate: High school is not and has not been all in Spanish. Perhaps in the future, but... California for example only removed the (English for Children) 1996 ban in 2016. (PLIC was offered for a few years in the early 90s.)

  • currently few teachers credentialed for another language

  • core subjects are in English (math, science) - there's no current model to do those in another language in highschool

  • higher income monolingual parents are using this to teach their kids Mandarin

  • these programs concentrate on elementary school immersion

  • these programs leverage non-public heritage classes (like Saturday Chinese schools) established to keep kids from losing their home culture (it's not hard to just speak to your kids in your language and teach them, but immigrants aren't generally aware of how language acquisition works.) You end up with 2, 3, 4th etc. generation kids with no connection to the local language, a terrible command of Spanish but perfectly fine English. (Honestly, growing up in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood and going back, I believe complaints about closed off immigrant neighborhoods self perpetuating are solely based on ignorance and memories of them having just arrived in the 80s or 90s. Even the gangbangers primarily use English.)

Going to school myself, only 3 of us spoke English in 1st grade (across all 1st grade classes, and the Vietnamese twins learned Spanish by exposure) - but by 3rd grade everyone had learned. Unlike 20 years ago, only 40% are ESL now. Nowadays they have more kids in the Vietnamese programs than Spanish.

Anyway, education in Spanish or English would be better than what we actually got. I literally had 2-3 actual classes. In all others (including APs), teachers would put movies kids brought in all day and we'd talk or such. I got a lot out of this - reading almost the whole time, eventually going through language learning and programming textbooks.

So to clarify: This is not accurate. These (lower class) Hispanics aren't doing high school in Spanish, because they aren't really getting an education at all. That said, I'm also in Mexico at the moment and quite a lot of Hispanics (and American whites) are studying here (due to the cost) in Spanish. A few girls doing computer science, veterinary medicine, geology...

Do you think that immigration from more intelligent and educated people would be beneficial in the fight against wokeism? I fear that education in this country is indoctrination, so it just makes the problem worse.

Also, what's PMC?

Usually "Professional-Managerial Class."

Depending on who's asking, it could mean the educated, the non-manual laborers, or just the vague upper-middle class. I'm of the opinion that it is a kludge to adapt Marxism to service economies, which allow social climbing without getting ahold of capital. But the important bit is that it's a convenient outgroup.

But the primary forces against wokeness are white. See the US election results. Whites are far and away the most Republican-aligned population. The main people complaining about wokeness are all white. If the US was permanently ruled by Dems, would it not become woker than it is today?

Is South Africa not woke? They've made a big effort on anti-racism, social justice and affirmative action for blacks. Whites are a very small proportion of the population, they do not drive South Africa's political apparatus in the current era.

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I understand. I used to read VDare daily. But must the Democrats always be woke? Couldn't changing demographics also change the party?

How would they change the party and make it less woke?

If a faction in a country becomes stronger, then the parties would be more likely to cater to them. If the political strength of whites increased in the US, it would become less woke since wokeness is disadvantageous to whites. If the political strength of Hispanics increased, then people would be more likely to cater to them. Since wokeness is advantageous for them, wokeness would increase.

There might be some complicated contingent power struggle between the non-white demographics. But the simplest conclusion is surely the above.

You might have a similarly complicated result like 'if we lose this war then divisions amongst the enemy coalition will open up and allow us to retake whatever we've lost and secure ultimate victory' but that doesn't really work as a strategy. Far better, safer and more reliable to win the war!

Wokeness is most obviously disadvantageous to whites, but it's also disadvantageous to Asians and Indians, even if they're currently too indoctrinated by the culture of the upper class to realize it. And while Hispanics can certainly benefit from wokeness, I think it's possible that their lack of white guilt will allow them to see right through the black race-hustling. The issue, as I see it, isn't that these groups won't object to wokeness, but rather, that they'll continue voting Democrat in spite of their objections to wokeness. And as true as this may be, it doesn't mean that they can't change the party.. right?

But maybe I'm just working backwards to reach a conclusion I'm comfortable with. I was a white whatever-you-want-to-call-it for years, and I've been actively trying to deradicalize myself from the Great Replacement stuff because being a white nationalist has been psychologically damaging for me, not to mention an intellectual dead end. (I like Bryan Caplan, but his book on open borders doesn't seem to acknowledge the wokeness problem.)

It's actually weird to me how many white nationalists and sympathizers there are here, considering I got banned from the Discord linked in the sidebar of this website for, in large part, being a white nationalist who's impervious to criticisms of white nationalism. Not that I'm not making any sort of value judgement. I don't think holding those views makes a person morally inferior, and I think they're more reasonable than a lot of a lot of views that are considered mainstream. I'm just surprised.

(I am defining "white nationalist" as the way normies define it. There's an interesting phenomenon where, to most people, wanting to maintain a de facto white majority in the United States makes you a white nationalist, but the only people who call themselves white nationalists are people who want to start a de jure white ethnostate, usually someplace in Europe. VDare vehemently denies being a white nationalist website, but everyone outside the website says that it is one.)

AstralCodexten discord and the motte are totally different things! There's a reason they're separate, why the motte left Scott's site and then reddit. It's like being banned from East Germany, you're still fine in West Germany.

but it's also disadvantageous to Asians and Indians

To some extent, I suppose.

psychologically damaging for me, not to mention an intellectual dead end.

What do you mean by this? Psychologically damaging I fully understand. But the basic ideas are sound, are they not? It might be alarming, stressful and disturbing to know that your plane is crashing but it's still important information. Even if any single person can't do anything about it, pointing it out can help. Eventually there might be an option to try to wake up the pilot or storm the cockpit.

Caplan has some good ideas but just undoing all borders is a recipe for disaster. They exist for good reason. The effects on society of open-slather immigration, effects on welfare, language, infrastructure (most Western countries are already struggling to keep up with housing, let alone increase it)... HBD alone is sufficient to nix it, even without the unpleasantness we've seen with Middle Eastern immigration to the West in recent years.

Did you read his graphic novel about open borders? It was great at addressing the economic arguments, just not the cultural ones.

And I say it's a dead end because there's nothing that can be done. Even if we fixed immigration, the call is coming from inside the house. Americans really buy into wokeness, and the people pushing it the hardest are paradoxically the people who have the most to lose from it.

the call is coming from inside the house. Americans really buy into wokeness

Eh, not buying it. If that was true, they wouldn't need such heavy handed censorship. The American elites do, and they don't have anything to lose from it. Although there's the question if they actually believe it, or are pushing it cynically.

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