Tom’s Big Picture

In the first part in this series, I made a case that our lives and the lives of our children are enriched by our ethnocultural identity, as any attempt to erase human distinctions of culture and ethnicity is an attempt to recreate Babel and against God’s ordained order. Even with a Christian veneer and its illusory potential to end interethnic conflict, the end of nations and groups is as sterile and undesirable a goal now as it was then.

Furthermore, we descendents of Northern and Western Europe (the English Isles, Ireland, France, Italy, Holland, Belgium, the Germanic countries, Scandanavia, Spain, etc) have a tendency to ignore cultural distinctions, simply because we imagine (vainly) that there is some sort of abstract “universal man” that can be elevated beyond ethnocultural divisions into global brotherhood. Ironically, this delusion of “universal man” is only possible in the relatively genetically homogenous countries of Western Europe: just like New England liberals, whose experiences with “diversity” are rather limited, Western Europeans and their descendents tend to assume that everyone is like them and would behave as they would- that is, civilly and politely, respecting law and order, the only sort of society where universal rights and equality are possible.

But the reality of the diversity of humanity means that this multicultural ideal will not be achieved in either this world or the world to come. God has ordained us not as men in a general sense, but as specific men (and women) in a specific nation; we cannot and should not attempt to overcome it, as I believe it a blessing of God’s wisdom. Thus, while we should seek peace with other groups and seek to minimize offense to other groups insofar as possible (under the regime of political correctness, the definition of “offensive” has continually been ratcheted down, particularly when it comes to Westerners), it is proper and desirable to have a strong sense of identity with our nation and people.

Secondly, the ease of modern travel and movement of peoples ensures that multiculturalism is to some degree an accomplished fact; our people will never again enjoy the insulation of their idyllic Christian societies as in times past. There’s no going back to the little Christian villages in a Thomas Kincaid painting. We must develop a cultural immune system to deal with competitive threats from other groups instead of assuming that the rest of humanity will treat us as fairly as we are inclined to treat them. If we maintain our Pollyanna-ish view of other cultures and their intentions, we are setting our children up for extreme gullibility when dealing with other competitive groups who do not share our delusions. In our own times, this fundamental gullibility is the root cause of the doom of our nation, both culturally and economically through our insane immigration and trade policies respectively.

I next approach the most difficult part of my task, especially as an American. Who is the ethnocultural group to whom I owe my loyalty? It cannot be simply “citizens of the United States”, as our government’s immigration policies have ensured that this country will never truly be a nation again. The word “nation” itself is derived from a Latin root meaning birth: think of words like neo-natal and the Nativity. A true nation must be bound by both blood and soil: related genetically through an extended kinship network while also occupying a defensible piece of land. So “citizens of the US” fails as an appropriate group for this particular extended loyalty, as we are no longer a nation in the proper sense that serves anyone’s genetic interest.

However, rejecting US citizenship alone as a definition of the group, we find little comfort in the old national distinctions of Europe. If you’re like me, your ancestry looks like a map of Europe: English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, French, German. All of these groups are separate nations, yet one cannot be a member of them all, lest we lose the very essence of nationality. In addition, while I appreciate the historical culture and civilization of my European forebears, the modern nations of Europe are at least as alien to my interests as our own government; European countries are even farther down the road of destruction, embracing immigration, multiculturalism and secularism to a much greater extent than the United States. So being descended from multiple European heritages, I cannot simply pick one, nor even if I could, I cannot very easily be “loyal” to nations separated from me by an ocean of water and an ideological gulf of globalist secularism.

Furthermore, the current cultures of many European countries are not worthy of anyone’s loyalty- as Steve Sailer points out, the average American is far healthier than the average Brit. Our path and the paths of our cousins across the ocean seem permanently divergent. To the extent there is hope for our people, that hope is here where we retain at least some of the historical virtue that built our civilization.

Yet we can still construct an approximate picture of the American cultural identity. A large majority of Americans (70% of white Americans, in fact) are descended from the English colonists here when the country was founded. The colonists, however, were not uniform in composition but instead, according to the definitive Albion’s Seed by historian David Hackett Fischer (this book, written by a Northerner, is a bit slanted towards the Northern ethnic groups, particularly in its selective portrayal of leading Virginian patriarchs as sexually immoral), represented four distinct English ethnic groups:

Fisher identified four “folkways” from Britain that spread out across the continent westward at roughly the latitudes at which their ancestors first settled. They remain highly influential in American politics to this day.

The bourgeois Puritans, intellectual and moralistic, largely originated in Eastern England. From 1629 to 1640, they settled New England, and their descendents later spread across northern tier states like Minnesota, Washington, and Oregon. (The most famous representatives are the Adams family.)

Cavalier aristocrats and their indentured servants from class-ridden Southern England moved to the lowland South from 1642-1675. George Washington and George Wallace illustrate the South’s gentleman and populist sides, respectively.

Calm and business-like Quakers and others from the North Midlands of England and Wales settled Pennsylvania and the rest of the Delaware Valley in 1675-1725. They invited German Mennonites and others of compatible habits to join them. Pennsylvanians spread out across the Middle West. Although he was born in Boston, Ben Franklin became their ideal.

Finally, the bellicose folks from the violent Scottish-English border region - and especially their descendents who had settled Ulster - came to the Appalachian backcountry from 1718 to 1775. Their descendents spread west across the upper South. The prototype: the ferocious Andy Jackson. They’re typically called “Scots-Irish,” although Fischer doesn’t like the term because it makes them sound as if they spoke Celtic languages, when they actually spoke English and were culturally quite different from Scottish Highlanders or Irish Catholics.
These four cultural patterns were carried. They also later attracted European immigrants who shared many of their values. For example, Scandinavians followed Puritans to Minnesota.

The two Southern groups have been the most belligerent. And the Scots-Irish in a class by themselves in their taste for raising hell - both at home and abroad. Patriotism and physical courage are both central to the backcountry tradition, as reflected in the very high rates of military enlistment among the Scots-Irish. (Stock car racing, which was originally dominated by fearless ex-moonshine runners like Junior Johnson, is the backcountry’s signature sport.)

History tells us that colonies are essentially cultural time capsules. Their isolation from the mother country in a new and wild frontier tends to encourage conservatism as they seek a cultural anchor to cope with an uncertain future. So while England continued down the secularist path pointing out of the Enlightenment, American remained as a cultural anachronism reflecting the beliefs and politics of 18th century England, or even earlier, in the case of Virginia. So while America is a younger nation that England, it is older in a cultural sense, and has retained more of its virtue, since the latter has pursued a generally downward course in our age.

Consider the following description of Old Virginia from the book Rebel’s Recollections by Eggleston (I must give credit to H. W. Crocker’s excellent book Robert E. Lee on Leadership, a gift my wife bought for me after hearing about it on American Family Radio, for bringing this quote to my attention; the first time I read it I believe my blood pressure dropped about 10 points, just the description of this idyllic past…):

It was a very beautiful and enjoyable life that the Virginians led in that ancient time, for it certainly seems ages ago, before the war came to turn ideas upside down and convert the picturesque commonwealth into a commonplace, modern state. It was a soft, dreamy, deliciously quiet life, a life of repose, an old life, with all its sharp corners and rough surfaces long ago worn round and smooth. Everything fitted everything else, and every point in it was as well settled as to leave no work of improvement for anybody to do. The Virginians were satisfied with things as they were, and if there were reformers born among them, they went elsewhere to work their changes. Society in the Old Dominion was like a well-rolled and closely packed gravel walk, in which each pebble has found precisely the place it fits best. There was no giving way under one’s feet, no uncomfortable grinding of loose materials as one walked about over the firm and long-used ways of the Virginia social life.

By far the dominant cultural groups of the original four are the Virginians and the Scots-Irish, both merging into a common cultural entity in the South and spreading much of their folkways to other states of the union. The backcountry of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Ohio were also primarly populated by this group. This is also the group most hated by the elites in the media, who are primarily the liberal descendents of the Puritans (and immigrant groups who all-too-eagerly internalized the hostility of the New England elites to the rest of the country), who having burned out their faith with legalism proceeded to annoy the rest of the country with various extra-Biblical fanaticisms: abolitionism, Prohibitionism, Planned Parenthood, gun control, forced busing, etc. The liberal elites in New York hate the Scots-Irish probably more than any other group. Senator-elect Jim Webb from Virginia (no political endorsement here implied, though this post-election column in the WSJ is very encouraging from an economic nationalism point-of-view) writes of this marginalization in his excellent book about the Scots-Irish (who he describes as America’s largest and most invisible ethnic group), Born Fighting (full excerpt here):

Standing on the mountain, I worry that when this generation dies, the memory of those who went before me will be lost just as completely, buried under the avalanche of stories that have on occasion ridiculed my people and trivialized their journey. They came with nothing, and for a complicated set of reasons, many of them still have nothing. The slurs stick to me, standing on these graves. Rednecks. Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me.

This people gave our country great things, including its most definitive culture. Its bloodlines have flowed in the veins of at least a dozen presidents, and in many of our greatest soldiers. It created and still perpetuates the most distinctly American form of music. It is imbued with a unique and unforgiving code of personal honor, less ritualized but every bit as powerful as the samurai code. Its legacy is broad, in many ways defining the attitudes and values of the military, of working-class America, and even of the peculiarly populist form of American democracy itself. And yet its story has been lost under the weight of more recent immigrations, revisionist historians, and common ignorance.

Walking down the mountain and driving back toward the world that these people made possible for me, I make a simple vow. Or maybe I simply hear them, calling to me from the place where I will someday join them.

The contributions of this culture are too great to be forgotten as America rushes forward into yet another redefinition of itself. And in a society obsessed with multicultural jealousies, those who cannot articulate their ethnic origins are doomed to a form of social and political isolation. My culture needs to rediscover itself, and in so doing to regain its power to shape the direction of America.

The Scots-Irish, generally poor and non-slave-owning, formed the backbone of both the Union and Confederate armies in that fratricidal struggle; in the North particularly, where the rich could buy themselves out of service, poor pioneers fought a war to benefit monied interests in the railroads and manufacturing mills. And today, America’s military might is largely composed of Scots-Irish soldiers and Scots-Irish officers. And while we hear a lot in our Bible studies about the military toughness of the ancient Israelites, it must be remembered that while the Jews were conquered and ultimately destroyed as a geographic state by the Romans, the Scots-Irish were nearly alone as a people never conquered by Rome. In fact, the Romans so feared this people (a pre-Christian Scots-Irish tradition was displaying the taxidermied heads of Roman officers as trophies in their living rooms) that they built Hadrian’s Wall all the way across the British Isle to keep them out of Roman-governed areas of England.

So America is not an abstract concept, but rather the specific cultural creation of a specific ethnic group, notably three subcultures of England and the Scots-Irish. And there should be our loyalty- to our people, as they actually exist in the country today. I would expand this to include other European groups who have completely and finally assimilated into the larger group, and except for reference to their last names, are indistinguishable in any other way from the founding groups. This is the group to whom we owe our loyalty: simply the American people as they existed historically and their descendents.

In my next post on this topic I will discuss what this loyalty and identity should mean to us practically, and ways to turn an abstract appreciation of one’s culture into an experiential plan of action for our families.

Republicans are already cleaning up their act in response to their thumping:

Republicans vacating the Capitol are dumping a big spring cleaning job on Democrats moving in. GOP leaders have opted to leave behind almost a half-trillion-dollar clutter of unfinished spending bills,

There’s also no guarantee that Republicans will pass a multibillion-dollar measure to prevent a cut in fees to doctors treating Medicare patients.

And specifically:

Driving the decision to quit and go home rather than finish the remaining budget work is a determined effort by a group of conservative Republicans to prevent putting a GOP stamp on spending bills covering 13 Cabinet Departments - and loaded with thousands of homestate projects derided as “pork” by critics.

Some Republicans on Capitol Hill would rather complete this year’s budget work and have the GOP’s imprint rather than a Democratic one on how federal agencies will be spending their money through next September. However, conservatives such as Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., fear doing that would leave as the GOP’s legacy a foot-tall bill containing thousands of parochial projects. Last week they seized the upper hand by employing delaying tactics to drag the budget process to a halt in the Senate.

“The last thing Republicans need is an end-of-Congress spending spree as our last parting shot as we walk out the door,” said DeMint spokesman Wesley Denton.

It seems too good to be true- the federal government coming to a grinding halt because of lack of Congressional funds- just like the good old days of gridlock in the 90’s. 

I had some concerns about Franklin when it was revealed in 2004 that he met with anti-Christian bigot Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League to assure him that he would make sure that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ would not be “misinterpreted” by the Christian community- as in, we lowly peasants couldn’t handle the raw gospel message (with its account of Jesus’ murder at the behest of, hold your hats, Jews and Jewish leaders, not Buddhists or Druids) without helpful “interpretation” to make sure we didn’t spontaneously re-enact the Kristelnacht.

I recently had this article brought to my attention regarding the removal of religous literature from Samaritan’s Purse packages:

It is a Christian charity bringing Christmas cheer to needy children abroad.

So its decision to ban Jesus, God and anything else connected with its own faith has been greeted with little short of puzzlement.

Operation Christmas Child, run by the charity Samaritan’s Purse, sends festive packages to deprived youngsters in countries ravaged by war and famine.

Donors are asked to pack shoeboxes with a cuddly toy, a toothbrush and toothpaste, soap and flannel, notepads, colouring books and crayons - but nothing to do with Christmas.

Stories from the Bible, images of Jesus and any other Christian literature are expressely forbidden - in case Muslims are offended.

Specifically:

“Ideally, a child would receive a present with a Madonna and Child card, but if that is not possible, it is more important than the aid gets through than the Christian message.”

No, the aid is NOT important. That’s social-gospel Marxist wealth-redistributing nonsense. We meet the need so we CAN share the gospel.

If this is true, it’s sad because it means our leaders have partially internalized political correctness, censoring themselves preemptively to gain approval.

Merry Christmas, Franklin!

Response from Samaritan’s Purse Here:

www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52982

A cause for hope: it looks like the “Happy Holidays” push is dead-on-arrival this year; most retailers are returning to “Merry Christmas” lest they provoke the wrath of the majority of Americans who consider themselves at least nominally Christian.  The people who run the retail stores like our money more than they hate our Savior.  And they really hate our Savior, so that tells you how much they like our money.

On the flip side, I hear of some people rejecting the cultural side of Christmas, including Christmas trees, presents, Santa Claus, etc.  I think that’s a tad overreactive- Christmas is a unifying celebration of our common religion and culture, and while there was a definite secularizing push in the 20th century (complete with Christ-free carols and the retailization of the holy day), that does not mean that any extra-Biblical Christmas themes are inherently wrong, just overpromoted by the usual suspects.  Similarly, sex is over-promoted in our culture, but this does not mean it is wrong in the proper context.

We need to remember the “golden mean” that our wise Greek forebears taught us- let us neither slavishly follow the culture nor slavishly react to it, but rather enjoy our freedom in Christ to the fullest.  Or as another wise man put it, all things in moderation.

There’s enough room at Christmas-time for the Nativity and the Christmas tree.

A friend of mine has a theory about the long-range effects of massive contraception and low fertility. Basically, he thinks that people who don’t naturally like children are going to have their genes eliminated from the future of humanity.

It makes sense- many psychological traits are genetic, and “degree of liking children” is likely at least partially genetic. Before contraception, the only thing required to procreate was to enjoy sex. Now, you have to enjoy children as well, since you can separate the former from the latter.

This seems to be the case- I was researching the Robinson curriculum recently for homeschooling, and I noticed that Robinson has some odd ways of caring for his kids. Notably, he never leaves them with anyone or a babysitter, presumably out of some sort of worry that someone else can’t take care of them even for a little while- he claims his children are always with him.

Now that’s someone who enjoys children, to the point of extremity- Robinson is a widower with six children. And his genes will be well-represented in the next generation.

I’ll add my own corollary to my friend’s hypothesis: the future will be composed of the descendants of those individuals who tend to like children OR tend to be too stupid, apathetic or incompetent to use birth control properly. Many Christians like to pretend otherwise, but on the other side of the bell curve there are a lot of people who can’t handle taking a pill everyday, whose procreation patterns more resemble cats than humans.

So we’ll have a child-obsessed homeschooling high-fertility overclass with a massive high-fertility low-IQ underclass. Should be interesting to see what happens when the two groups collide politically.

A Congressman, Mark Foley, who co-chairs the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus is known to have sexually propositioned teenage boys. Majority Leader Dennis Hastert knows about it, but does nothing.

The leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard, quits his pastorship over (apparently somewhat true) allegations of drug use and meetings with a male prostitute.

Another male prostitute, Jeff Guckert, with no press credentials, is given an all-access pass to White House press briefings, under a fake name, Jeff Gannon, to throw softball questions to the President’s press secretary. Only someone at the very top could authorize the issuing of ID by the Secret Service under a fake name and without a background check.

And this week we get confirmation of the open secret that Ken Mehlman, the outgoing chair of the Republican Party, is a homosexual.

I recently read a very well-written political thriller called The Hunt for Confederate Gold. It’s a great novel, very entertaining, written in parallel across two time periods. One of the characters in the book is a Christian FBI agent who has a healthy family life, a successful career and who plays by the rules and does his job. However, he finds that his career is limited to essentially a middle-management position in the FBI despite his being better-qualified than his peers for further promotion. The reason, according to the character: he lacks a “control file”. The character then explains how high positions in the federal government can only be obtained by people who have a “control file”, which is essentially a file of evidence that enables the government to control the person, usually through threatened revelation of sexual indiscretions. The character also explained that in the current cultural environment, mere adultery or homosexuality isn’t enough to always control a person, so the preferred method is for the government to promote a known pedophile to positions of power (according to the character, there is a large pedophile ring in the federal government and Congress), ensuring control over the person to prevent whistleblowing on the government’s various illegal and unconstitutional activities.

When I first read this passage in the book, I thought it great fodder for a conspiratorial political thriller. After the last year of events, it sounds more plausible.

Open homosexuality is indicative of the last stages of a civilization’s decline, when the artificial world created by the surplus economy finally collapses upon itself and chokes off the ultimate source of all wealth- human life- by disconnecting sexual pleasure from procreation. And when the “conservative” party is itself eaten up with sexual perversion, we can really begin to smell the stench of gangrene in our dying nation.

Yet, there is hope. We basically have two problems: we Texans, Southerners and other people living in the heartland of the country between the two coasts are joined at the hip in a political system with California and New York. Second, our political system is designed to promote sociopaths like the individuals above, providing a leadership more morally degenerate than the people at large (whether Congressmen or mega-church preachers like Haggard, those most successful in the two fields tend to be those individuals who have the least hesitance and most efficiency in asking other people to part with their hard-earned money, or bargaining intangibles like access for money, thus sociopaths by definition).

While I have a lot of criticism for the national Republican Party, I have a lot of respect for the Republicans I know in the area, the people actively involved in the party at the local level. The platform of the Texas Republican Party is an excellent statement of conservatism, and reflects the views of the grassroots of the party.

However, the conservative views of Texas Republicans can never be implemented nationwide- they are too conservative for much of the country, especially in swing states needed to build a national majority. This effectively limits what can be done nationally to save the country to those policies that are supported by soccer moms in Ohio. That’s why we get stupid feel-good policies like tax cuts with no spending constraints and bans on sucking the brains out of half-born babies while still allowing babies in the womb to get torn up limb by limb with a vacuum pump.

This is why I have little hope for the country as a whole, but great hope for our region. The people of our region have retained more of their virtue and conservatism- traits that enable them to support political systems that reflect a healthier society. Long-term-oriented leaders of Texas, the South, and the Heartland should be looking for ways to divorce the populace’s political loyalties to the nation as a whole (tactically, a good starting point would be legislative nullification of unconstitutional acts of federal judges), and prepare them for the opportunity to abandon the sinking ship of state that will inevitably come to visit our evil national government. That’s why I will focus most of my political effort in the future at the state and local level, where there is more hope.

As most people predicted, it looks like the Democrats have taken the HOR (an appropriate acronym if I may say so) and possibly the Senate. The Evil Party has beaten the Stupid Party.

While the Stupid Party was squandering their 12-year window of power (now possibly permanently gone due to demographic trends unfixable except by extreme measures), Pat Buchanan was a voice in the wilderness, calling Republicans to use their power to build an American Nationalism that would put the American people first and build a permanent majority.

He wrote three books laying out his agenda:

1. The Great Betrayal - a book showing how corporate globalists with no sense of loyalty or caring (but rather contempt for) the wage-earning people of our country used free-trade ideology to hollow out America’s industrial base, while long-term-oriented nationalists in Asia (many large Japanese corporations, for example, have 100-year business plans) used the opportunity to build their own industrial systems at the expense of the American worker.

2. A Republic, Not an Empire- Buchanan’s warning against American foreign interventionism in the spirit of Washington’s warning to avoid “foreign entanglements”.

3. The Death of the West- Buchanan’s arguments for preserving the ethnic center of the country as a necessary (but not sufficient) prerequisite to national identity and historical continuity with America as it actually existed in the past. He also identifies leftist social movements (primarily the Frankfurt School Communist intellectuals originally based in Germany but who relocated to New York in 1933 to get out of Dodge) that used Freudian pseudoscience to pathologize normal family relations (particularly families with strong father figures) and patriotism as precursors to “fascism” (fascism here defined as any non-socialist political system). Bizarre Liberal Fact: The Frankfurt School is a lot of the reason why you rarely see strong father figures in sitcoms, commercials or movies- the Hollywood Left literally thinks that strong fathers lead to Hitler and gas chambers, so they always present fathers (and particularly white male fathers) as bumbling, dorky, goofy and/or stupid.

Buchanan’s two other recent books (Where the Right Went Wrong and State of Emergency), are basically updates to #2 and #3 respectively.

One of the striking features of this election is that the most powerful potential issue for Republicans- illegal immigration- was taken off the table by Bush and the Wall Street Republican crowd’s insistence on an endless supply of cheap labor to compete with native wage-earners. Those of us who have nice middle-class jobs (and in this area, nice middle class jobs associated with manufacturing that is hard to relocate to China) may have a hard time sympathizing with the typical working person- but the median wage adjusted for inflation in this country has not increased in 30 years. As much as we may care about abortion or other social issues, I cannot blame people for voting against a party that they believe (and rightly so) does not care about their situation if they are struggling to provide for their family- there is an incredible amount of humiliation and loss of dignity for a working person who can no longer count on a $15-20 an hour job in a factory, but instead must deliver pizza or take a telemarketing job for $9 an hour. We need a new Republican nationalism to bring the working people of this country back into the conservative party.

While the ethnic lobbies in the Democratic Party are just as pro-immigration as Republican elites, many Democrats DID campaign on anti-globalization and anti-unfair-trade issues, and succeeded. Republicans who voted for NAFTA or CAFTA (both documents that surrender US sovereignty to international courts) were caught in the crossfire.

Links and analysis:

buchanan.org/blog/?p=532

buchanan.org/blog/?p=382

For most real conservatives, the presidency of George W. Bush has been a disappointment. He has three major accomplishments: 1) tax cuts, 2) decent Supreme Court justices, and 3) excellent initial response to 9/11 and prevention of another attack. While he has been much superior to Al Gore or John Kerry, many of us hoped for more from Bush, a man who seemed like “one of us” instead of just the latest lesser of two evils (this is debatable, though, as the man was born in Connecticut and lived in a Yankeefied upper crust suburb of Dallas before buying his ranch shortly after being elected President).

His tax cuts have been offset by spiraling deficits that our children will have to pay or will lead to the bankruptcy of the government. His Supreme Court picks, while decent so far, are not men with strong conservative records or scholarship (thus sending a message to talented judges to keep their mouth shut about their conservative views or they will never be appointed as a justice)- and this is forgetting the Harriet Miers debacle, where Bush tried to appoint a pro-choice mediocre-skilled crony to the nation’s highest court.

The “War on Terror” has the longest list of caveats. Bin Laden is still at large. Conservatives who once made fun of liberal attempts to use the military for “nation building” defend, with a straight face, efforts to do just that in Iraq. Saddam was our Middle-Eastern puppet dictator who ran off his leash- the rational response would have been to kill Saddam and install another puppet. Instead, we are wasting billions of dollars and hundreds of lives on an occupation trying to turn hateful people with their nasty narrow-minded little religion (with its beliefs in Sharia and female circumcision) into Jeffersonian democrats. Nobody handed America its freedom on a plate- it was bought with our own blood. When Middle Easterners want to be free, they will have to pay the same price. It cannot be paid for them.

This delusion that all peoples everywhere are yearning for Western-style liberties and democratic institutions is at the heart of Bush’s failed Iraq policy. People groups and nations tend to do what they want to do- it is arrogant to assume that we know better what they want than they do.

Of course, Bush is not entirely to blame. He is a man with a bit of a messianic complex, with a lot of stubbornness, and thus ripe for manipulation from realist conspirators. Chief among the manipulators are a group of foreign-policy agitators commonly known as the “neoconservatives”- generally, these people are New York intellectuals who were Communist radicals in the 1960’s who converted to conservatism in the 1970’s. Politically, they are at odds with true conservatives because they support every destructive policy wrought by JFK and LBJ. On foreign policy issues, however, they have successfully perverted the average American’s healthy non-interventionist instincts into the swaggering militarism we see today. They are political parasites who seek a host to do their bidding, and Bush was the perfect mark. Now, however, they are jumping ship and sticking Bush with the blame as the failure of their policies becomes manifest:

www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612

In 2004, Pat Buchanan extended a olive branch to Bush from traditional conservatives- he urged conservatives to vote for Bush in hopes he would dump the neoconservative infiltrators in his second term and work for important conservative issues, like securing the borders.

Instead, Bush has stubbornly stuck to his program, pushing for more blood and treasure wasted in a Middle Eastern hellhole while supporting amnesty for illegal aliens. Bush and the Congressional Republicans continued massive deficit spending, brought federal regulation of local schools, while doing little to nothing on the issues their base cares about.

They made their bed, and tomorrow they get to lay in it.

The larger issue is why does this happen? As I will discuss in a subsequent post, the dominant ethnic group in the US is the Scots-Irish. This group’s biggest flaw is their tendency to idealize their leaders. There are a lot of people in this country who believe their president can do no wrong, and no amount of information or data will shake that belief. They take their blind faith in the leader as a token of their own virtue and the virtue of the nation. There are a lot of historical parallels for such hero-worship, but none of them are indicative of a political environment that is conducive to sustaining the republican government our forefathers gave us.

Do you think the GOP deserves to lose?

buchanan.org/blog/?p=407

I won’t vote Democrat, but I will be leaving a lot of my ballot blank tomorrow.

These posts are going to take a while, so I am going to break them up into 1.5 page sections.

In the previous post, I proposed that Christians (or people in general) owe a higher duty to their own people and nation, analogous to the duty they owe to their own families:

But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. 1 Timothy 5:8

Recent studies in genetics have measured the genetic distance between family members and nations. These studies indicate that we are as related to our nationality relative to the rest of humanity as we are to our own families relative to our nations. Therefore, our nation deserves our loyalty over the rest of the world to exactly the same extent that our families deserve our loyalty over other families.

For example, there is a very small genetic distance between siblings, who on average share 50% of genes from a common pool between mother and father. However, this 50% is not quite accurate- usually the shared genetic interest is much higher. This is because most marriages are between people who are fairly closely related, i.e. of the same nationality (this should not surprise us, given the challenges of marriage, that seeking common biocultural ground with one’s spouse is a desired and healthy way to prevent potential problems). Thus, a marriage between two Chinese people (a husband and wife that share many of the same genes) would result in a family with a much greater common genetic interest than a random pairing. Similarly, in my family, my wife and I have a really hard time determining who our children most resemble, because our own baby pictures look so similar- and our genetic backgrounds are very similar as well. People of the same nationality or very closely related nationalities share more of a common interest because they share a common genetic origin in their ancestors.

So what? Why do measures of genetic interest matter in our families?

First of all, there is some scriptural justification for such a position. The Bible in many places speaks of a blessing associated with one’s physical seed, in the promises to Abraham. Children also, and number of descendents, are spoken of as blessings from God. “Seed”, as used in this context, refers specifically to one’s genetic line. We may infer from the great genealogies given of Christ in the gospels that heritage, genetics, one’s ancestors and one’s line of descendents are legitimate topics of concern and discussion. Abraham, likewise, speaks very passionately about the genetic qualities of a wife for Isaac:

“I want you to swear by the LORD, the God of heaven and the God of earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I am living, but will go to my country and my own relatives and get a wife for my son Isaac” Genesis 24:2-4

Remember, at this time Abraham’s servants were circumcised, sort of proto-Jews before the Law had been fully revealed. Thus, Abraham’s command was not merely a warning to find a wife of spiritual purity (as any of the servant girls would have sufficed, or a Canaanite convert), but also a command to find Isaac a wife of his own people, something he wanted so strongly that he made them swear an oath to God.

Second, we may appeal to natural law. A tautology of nature is that the current inhabitants of the Earth are those who have survived and whose ancestors have successfully reproduced themselves. The instinct of survival, of seeing one’s own kind continue to inhabit the Earth, is so strong that its absence is necessarily pathological, but again we see many Christian leaders (SBC leader Al Mohler excepted: www.albertmohler.com/commentary_read.php?cdate=2006-03-01 and
www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=18-09-021-v and www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9812/articles/contraception.html#mohler) who are apathetic about the fertility rates among Westerners, but who instead blather about “the emerging church” and get excited about the multicultural ruin of our nation. This is deeply pathological of contemporary Western peoples, as even single-celled organisms such as an amoeba have a basic instinct to reproduce and survive.

I should mention that this tautology (i.e. something that is self-evidently true) of survival is used as the basis of the theory of evolution, and this kernel of truth is what makes the logical errors of macro-evolutionary thinking (i.e. the magical faith that structures such as the eye or whale sonar could have occurred from natural selection) possible. Remember my meta-hypothesis that all lies and evil are based on a twisting of the truth.

Legitimate Christian criticisms of evolution center around the idea of macro-evolution, which is the now-discredited idea that structures of irreducible complexity (e.g. the eye, whale sonar, the flagellum, etc) that are clearly marvels of engineering (thus creating uncomfortable questions of who that engineer could be for agnostics and atheists) could spontaneously result from natural selection alone. The usual macro-evolutionist response to these arguments is to trot out the old standby of the peppered moth, the famous moth whose camouflage coloring changed in response to the deposits of soot on trees during the Industrial Revolution.

This macro-evolutionist argument is a straw-man argument, as no serious Creationist disputes what is quite obviously a micro-evolutionary process- the fact that random mutation and natural selection could lead to moths changing pigmentation does nothing to explain how irreducibly complex mechanical structures could have evolved.

We are also subjected to reverse-straw-man arguments forwarded by some “Christians” who use Christian distaste for macroevolutionary pseudoscience as a way to front their left-wing agenda. Some practitioners and advocates of the heretical, extra-Scriptural, globalist (and Communist) “social gospel” have now come into the Church and told us that because evolution is untrue, genetics do not matter. That concern over genetics is in fact an indication of spiritual darkness and evil, because evil Nazis cared about genetics as well. Generally, if someone brings up Nazism (or any of the other “isms” liberals use to push conservatives around), you can be pretty sure they’re “pounding the table” rhetorically to make up for their lack of valid arguments. I’m sure Hitler brushed his teeth, but this doesn’t make a case against oral hygiene.

This argument is invalid because its premise (that evolution as applied to human groups is a lie) is incorrect. All genetic variation in humans is due to micro-evolution, a phenomenon that is real and serious Creationists acknowledge. And it can happen fairly quickly, well within the 6000-year timeframe of Young Earth Creationists (I myself lean toward the Old Earth view for practical reasons, but that’s another article). If you doubt the rapidity and effectiveness of micro-evolution to produce such changes, I remind you that a single natural source (the wolf) led to all of the variations we see in breeds of dogs- the difference in temperament, intelligence and size between a Great Dane and Chihuahua are all the results of a relatively short period of selective breeding, merely an artificially guided process of micro-evolution.

When we consider sociobiological variation in human groups, we are discussing micro-evolution. All human groups share the same basic anatomical structures, with variation of degree, not irreducibly complex changes. For example, the sub-Saharan African disease sickle-cell anemia is a microevolved adaptation to protect against malaria; of course, absent the threat of malaria it is maladapative. This is but one example of minor microevolved differences among human groups. In any case, it matters little whether they are microevolved or God-created, as they are measurable facts.

While these differences are minor genetically, they can have a great outcome on the ability of some of these groups to meet the relatively unstable high threshold for Western-style civilizations (for example, the rolling back of traditional Western liberties with the passage of the PATRIOT Act is one of the necessary consequences of allowing hostile Middle Eastern aliens, who have never had the self-restraint to enjoy Western-style liberties, to live in our midst). These differences, of course, are inconvenient truths for all Marxists (who live in an imaginary make-believe world where equality is the default state of nature, and inequality is always an artificial result of oppression), including those of the “social gospel” variety who call themselves Christians.

Thus, concern for one’s genetic interests has at least some Scriptural support, is not contrary to biological realities or the result of macro-evolutionary pseudoscientific thinking. And since it is real, it is not evil, and is a valid area of Christian concern and analysis, as all truth is God’s truth.

In the next post I will seek to illuminate who exactly constitutes the American nationality that should command our loyalty. And I promise I will get to the point with practical advice in helping our families recover their lost cultural identity and rich Western heritage.