site banner

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.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.)

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.

/images/16788795733569317.webp

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.