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One of the less stupid notions to come out of LessWrong was the idea of making one's beliefs "pay rent"
The fundamental problem with HBD as it is typically advocated by dissident progressives and users here on theMotte is that if the hypothesis is correct (and that is a big "IF") the actual benefit/utility to adopting "HBD Awareness" over some flavor of "colorblind meritocracy" will be less than zero. Accordingly I feel that it only appropriate to question why certain individuals/users seem to be so invested in their opposition to "blank slatism". I have my theories but none that are likely to be considered "charitable" or "kind" by the mod team.
Have you considered that people are just really unhappy that wealth and status are siphoned from productive, law-abiding people and given to non-productive and violent people? Consider the story of the dangerous teen who was going to die of a heart condition, got a transplant refused for being obviously low-value, got national press attention for being black, got the heart transplant and promptly got himself killed in a police chase a couple of years later?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/anthony-stokes-teen-who-got-heart-transplant-dies-car-chase-n334001
Can't you conceive that people think it's unjust? There's not many spare hearts floating around, he was given a rare chance due to race (and naivete) and squandered it.
Or the Nightmare Vision Rosedale thread where this liberal sees a formerly white suburb being violently ethnically cleansed by blacks but he and the authority figures can only process it through the lens of 'damn, it'd be racial dynamite - we'd better cover it up so the Klan doesn't hear about this!' and 'well pretty soon the problem will be solved because there won't be any more elderly whites living here'.
https://twitter.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/1414619671056297984
Or the Rotherham grooming scandal where vast-majority Pakistani Muslims were raping vast-majority white girls only for the police to cover it up lest they seem racist. That got swept under the rug, along with all kinds of cases where blacks murder whites - but there's always coverage on the latest updates for the Emmett Till case, or the ongoing worship of George Floyd as some kind of secular saint. The privileging of blacks over experienced air traffic controllers recently, or pervasive diversity quotas throughout the Anglosphere (the RAF for instance). University entrance quotas.
People think these things are unjust and they see HBD as a way to counter the root cause - the narrative of white racism causing innately equal groups to stratify. They see insult as well as injury when the media goes out of its way to present whites as incompetent, bad-tempered and criminal: https://twitter.com/stupidwhiteads
What happened to colour-blind meritocracy? It got eaten by DEI because blank-slatists conclude that different outcomes are caused by discrimination. Unless you have HBD, there's no chance of getting colour-blind meritocracy. The fallback narrative of 'oh, if we went out and told US blacks they were actually just stupid and violent, they'd have a massive violent tantrum' is silly. They already are massively violent and bitterly resentful of whites. Strengthening and heightening that attitude with anti-white media worsens the problem. What kind of social stability are you buying that's worth wrecked cities, obliterated communities, endless crime, occasional mass riots and (since in this context we're accepting HBD but being too cowardly to admit it) knowing that you'll be paying this price forever?
If we don't get rid of the racism narrative now, what's going to happen when hundreds of millions of 'climate refugees' show up from sub-Saharan Africa complaining that we oppressed them/droughted them and demand free things? Or when superintelligence gets made by the Google/Microsoft blob that pre-program in the racism narrative?
I can conceive it I just don't believe that's the real motive.
I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now that their chief opponents are secular academics rather than conservative Christians. As I've said before, the party (and the Partisans) of Woodrow Wilson, never changed sides, just their branding. Whether it's white hoods in 1920 or black hoodies in 2020 it's the same fundamentally anti-american (and dare I say it anti-western) bullshit. The greatest trick the DNC ever played was convincing the media and a whole generation of idiots with PHDs that they weren't the real racists.
Looking at the election map of 1916, I see Wilson opposed by a coalition of New England Yankees and the places they settled in the upper Midwest. As best I can tell, these same Yankees and their intellectual descendants at the colleges they founded are the ones in charge of the Democratic Party today and peddling the latest
racist"anti-racist" dogma.I think the fact that New Hampshire broke the other way kind of throws a wrench into your theory.
That the brahmins in Cambridge and New Haven hadn't quite achieved the level of state control that they wield now doesn't mean that they weren't backing Wilson
New Hampshire has always seemed like the odd man out in New England to me due to its strong Scotch-Irish/Libertarian heritage, but I digress.
Having considered it more, I suppose I can agree with a version of your thesis that goes like this (writing this out more for my own understanding than yours):
What those in the early-20th century called Progressivism produced a generation of technocrats (including Wilson, Hoover, FDR, etc.) who for several decades controlled both political parties while fighting a (to them very real and serious but to outsiders insignificant) battle amongst themselves. The technocrats recently lost control of the Republican party and what many HBD-believing folks on the new/dissident/alt/whatever-right are trying to do is re-establish the yang to the Democrats' yin while ignoring the bubbling cauldron of resentment into which both the current elites and their would-be shadow elites are soon to fall.
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