At HBDBooks, Richard Hoste quotes Kevin MacDonald as saying:
“The main thrusts of Jewish activism against European ethnic and cultural hegemony have focused on three critical power centers in the United States: The academic world of information in the social sciences and humanities, the political world where public policy on immigration and other ethnic issues is decided, and the mass media where “ways of seeing” are presented to the public.”
Sabril, a commenter, sarcastically responds:
“Lucky for places like Sweden that they have essentially no Jews conspiring to push liberal policies on immigration and such.”
Hoste responds with:
“As far as why Sweden and other European countries are more PC than the US, part of that can be blamed on the fact that those states have histories of more centralized governments. Thus, the insane elites are able to do much more damage. Italy has always had a week national government, and they’re less PC than other Europeans. American liberals always had the constitution in their way. They would eventually ignore the document piece by piece, but they couldn’t do it all at once.”
Quotidian, another commenter, responds to Sabril’s comments in general with:
Commenter Sabril is a highly dishonest Jew who cannot be trusted. He is best ignored.
Sabril’s specific point above seems pretty straightforward and important. Countries with fewer Jews have more liberal policies, therefore Jews per se aren’t to blame. Although I recognize that some people have (ethnic) motives which determine the views they tend to take, and Sabril might be ethnically motivated, this is a view that I also have considered. So saying someone like Sabril is Jewish, so the point doesn’t need to be discussed, isn’t sufficient.
(Quotidian’s point can also be applied against himself. Perhaps he wants to find a cause that isn’t with the group he identifies with, and so is disinclined to give Sabril’s reason due process.)
If people want to say the problems stem from Jewish elite liberals (JELs) because those elites are Jewish (as opposed to their tending to be liberal due to their intellectual propensities, historical geographic concentration in the U.S., or whatever, where other liberals would have done the same things if JELs weren’t around), then there needs to be a robust response to Sabril’s basic kind of point.
Hoste above says it’s because Sweden’s government is more centralized than the U.S. The basic idea seems to be that:
1. If a state is more centralized like in Sweden’s case, ideas generated elsewhere (as by JELs) or locally be elite liberals (ELs) could then be more quickly disseminated through a state, by its own ELs.
This could be one part of a response. Another aspect he lights upon is:
2. The U.S. has (or used to have) a strong Constitution that limited the political and judicial elites’ abilities to push forward liberal changes. (Partially, I assume this is because the Constitution slows down the development of a centralized federal government.)
Other possibilities:
3. Countries like Sweden historically have had less exposure to HBD, and so are more easily taken in by theories that downplay it. (I don’t think this is right, as their elite liberal tendencies extend to categories beyond HBD.)
4. Countries like Sweden are more influenced by other English-speaking countries, such as the U.S., which in turn do have a large number of ELs and JELs.
5. Countries like Sweden are smaller (in terms of population), and so have less of a ‘native’ cognoscenti which compete with (bad) ideas generated elsewhere. Countries like Italy, Spain, or France have greater cultural “centers of mass.”
As far as MacDonald’s basic argument above about liberal influence as distinctly Jewish influence (and not generic liberal influence), my guess is something like this:
1. Jewish-Americans (JAs) tend to be more intellectually successful. This leads to them disproportionately becoming elites who have influence over intellectual currents.
2. JAs also tend to take certain liberal views because they tend to be intellectually successful.
3. JAs tend to take or create certain liberal views because of their ethnic identity and historical motives.
1., 2., and 3. causally reinforce each other, and are difficult to separate.
My guess is that the U.S. would have had significantly less movement towards the liberal end without the JELs who started becoming prominent in the early 20th century. My guess is that the force would have been diminished to 7/10 or even 5/10s of what it was. This wouldn’t have merely slowed the progress of liberals by 7/10s or 5/10s. My guess is that the political trajectory of the U.S. and the rest of the world would have been significantly altered.
This is because in politics you often need a critical mass to achieve forward movement. Political change is very much a vector of political forces, some opposing, some adding. At 7/10s or 5/10s, my guess is that many political battles would have been lost by liberals, to the extent that the political tide of the last 50 years may have been in a completely different direction. Without the influence of JELs in the U.S. and Europe, my guess is that not just the U.S. but the West’s political trajectory in the past 50 years would have been significantly attenuated in the liberal direction.
Having said that, one can appropriately diagnose the source of various EL ideologies, or the animating principles, and many of these may, in fact, come from specific Jewish concerns. I don’t know. Once it comes to actual argumentation, however, elite liberalism (ELism) has to be dealt with on its logical merits. This takes careful, patient documentation and logic (appeals to emotion are important, but one without the other is typically insufficient, especially when dealing with other elites). Trying to argue, as Quotidian does, that an argument’s originator is of Jewish identity or ancestry, and therefore should not be listened to, is not going to help much in conversing with elites who might otherwise be open to critiques of various points in ELism.
A robust response to Sabril’s basic point would be useful, if in fact there is a robust response available. If people such as Quotidian want to blaim ELism on particularly Jewish sources, they need to offer such an account, not merely engage in ad hominems.
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