December 5, 2012

Which big ethnic group went MIA during the Sixties?

I'm thinking of this in a highly stylized sense, but I've always had the impression that the big ethnic group that played a major role in American popular culture in the 1950s (especially music) and then again in the 1970s (especially movies), but mostly sat out on The Sixties was Italian-Americans.

Another theory of the Sixties: Vatican II

One frustration of historical analysis is that one's confident proclamation that "Y inevitably caused Z" often leads to rejoinders that "X just as inevitably caused Y, so, really, X caused Z. And, while we're at it, what about W?"

Therefore, it's attractive to look for non-inevitable events as causes. A reader writes:
I enjoyed your post on Takimag today, as I have appreciated so much of your writing online over the years. What prompts me to write just now is that I too have pondered “the Sixties” for quite some time. I do not have an answer to the mystery of why the 1960s happened as they did, but one thing I do know is that the mystery is larger than your column indicates. 
As you know, in France “the Sixties” are “’68,” and their “‘68ers” are our “Boomers,” more or less. Since so much of what we associate with “the Sixties” in the U.S. really refers to the period of 1968-74, I more often contemplate the question of why “1968” happened. And the big problem, or mystery, is that 1968 happened most everywhere. There was a ’68 in France, in Germany, in the U.S., in Mexico City, in Japan, and even---one could say---in Prague. There were smaller eruptions in England, in Canada, in Italy, etc. In each of these countries, the political narrative focuses on pretty much local concerns: In the U.S., it is a matter of racial justice and the Vietnam War. In Germany, it is a matter of the sons coming to realize the sins of the fathers during WWII. In France, it is a combination of Algerian decolonization and sexual freedom for students. And so on. The problem is that there are so many discreetly local “causes,” and yet there is a single, global “effect”---revolution by the young. For there to be so global an effect, there must be a global cause, I should think. What can it be? It cannot be racial justice, surely, for that had next to nothing to do with France or Germany, or hardly anywhere else than the U.S. 
For some in Europe, the global narrative concerns a generational coming to terms with the sins of the fathers during WWII. That makes some sense ---after all, the World War was a global experience, and no one on the continent was spared a great deal of sordidness in 1939-45. But in the U.S., WWII remains the Good War, so it cannot possibly be the case that 1968 represents our coming-to-terms with the sins of the fathers. Some American writers suggest that it is oral contraceptives, a technological development, that did it. But could that really explain Mexico City? And how could that revolution in the intimate sphere be related to the quite political nature of the agitation we associate with 1968/the Sixties anyway? 
The only original speculation I could offer is that it might have had something to do with Vatican II. The thought would be that, ever since 1789, the West, broadly, had sought a happy medium between the poles of Revolution and Reaction, and the Catholic Church represented the latter pole. In Vatican II, the Church seemed suddenly to leave the field, or indeed, seemed to throw itself on to the other pole. This created a disorientation of the entire political spectrum---for where is the golden mean between the French Revolution and a no-less Revolutionary Church? I am drawn to this sort of speculation because it is a cause no less extensive than its effect---though of course Japan represents the hard case even there. 
In any event, it remains a great mystery---much more mysterious than 1848, for example. I’m glad to find someone else who finds it all equally puzzling, rather than something to be taken for granted.

This has the advantage of putting the Sixties into a long historical-ideological framework that would have made sense to Voltaire, Napoleon, Zola, and many others. The recent triumph of the English language as the global lingua franca has helped Americans forget how central France, with its triangle of Revolution-State-Church, was to how educated people all over the world thought. But you can still see some of the power of this way of thinking in the seemingly bizarre global popularity of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, which, in its lowbrow way, tapped into the power of centuries of anti-Vatican cultural energy.

Political trends in Western Europe in the 1950s were not bad for the Church. Christian Democrats were doing well in many countries, and the strong new De Gaulle government in France represented about as much as the Church could reasonably hope for out of that crucial country.

In January 1959, Pope John XXIII called for a Second Vatican Council. This was a pretty evitable decision. Wikipedia says:
This sudden announcement, which caught the Curia by surprise, caused little initial official comment from Church insiders. Reaction to the announcement was widespread and largely positive from both religious and secular leaders outside the Catholic Church,[7] and the council was formally summoned by the apostolic constitutionHumanae Salutis on 25 December 1961.[8][9] In various discussions before the Council actually convened, Pope John often said that it was time to open the windows of the Church to let in some fresh air.[10]

Between early 1959 and when Vatican II opened in 1962, there were important events in rich and fast-growing North America. In Quebec, French secularists took power in July 1960 away from French clericalists. That same year, John F. Kennedy's declaration to Protestant ministers that the Vatican would have no control over him, followed by his subsequent election, was a huge event, but whether JFK's election marked an opportunity or a setback for the Church was unclear.

So, the notion that Vatican II may have played the role of an "unforced error" (as they say in tennis) might make sense. 

Presidential shootings and mythos

My current Taki's column doesn't attempt to provide an all-around theory of the causes of the Sixties, it just offer a couple of ideas to help explain why there's a consensus that the Sixties didn't start until after JFK's assassination. For example, Charles Murray's Coming Apart starts with a description of what life was like in America in the third week of November 1963. In various statistical measures, you can see inflection points in 1964-65. 

This is important for assessing gradualist theories, such as Kevin Drum's not implausible idea that the long buildup of lead in the environment slowly undermined inhibition control. But we also saw a distinct hinge of a history in the mid-1960s that happened fast enough to raise doubts about purely gradualist theories being sufficient. 

By the way, my instant reaction when hearing that President Reagan had been shot in March 1981 was, "Oh, no, hear we go again." Disorder was winning over order again. But then, the President didn't die. 

I have this unprovable theory that the series of reassuring and humorously defiant jokes Reagan told between getting shot and going under on the operating table played some kind of weirdly powerful role in the national mood, even in why the Eighties turned out differently than the Sixties.

What caused the Sixties?

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:
The great mystery of my lifetime has been the 1960s. It’s worth returning to this vast subject periodically as new perspectives unveil themselves. 
The closest thing to a successful prophecy of that era was made by science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein in his 1941 Future History chart, in which he foresaw the coming “Crazy Years” when there would be a “gradual deterioration of mores, orientation and social institutions, terminating in mass psychoses….” (By the late 60s, hippies were so drug-addled that they made Heinlein’s self-indulgent 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land into a cult novel.)

Read the whole thing there.

December 4, 2012

Douthat: "Don't Mention the Decadence"

Ross Douthat got a lot of backtalk from NYT commenters who didn't like his suggestion that below-replacement fertility in America is a sign of "decadence." The consensus was that America has too many people already so what we need is more immigration. 

Now, Ross responds in "Don't Mention the Decadence."

Let me point out an example of a country with a culture that's not decadent, at least as measured by Total Fertility Rate.

Many have suggested that low fertility is an automatic accompaniment of an advanced economy, high technology, limited land, and/or high real estate prices. That's close to being always true. Yet ... there's one high tech economy with famously limited land and soaring real estate prices where fertility among the majority was high and is going higher. Meanwhile, fertility among minorities is dropping. 

This happens to be the one wealthy white country where the majority believe they deserve to outbreed minorities and feel no compunction about talking and writing about how to make that happen, even in public, from the lowest to the highest strata of society.

From Wikipedia on Demographics of Israel:
Fertility Rates, by Age and Religion[40]
YearTotalJewsMuslimsChristiansDruzeOthers
20103.032.973.752.142.481.64
20113.002.983.512.192.331.75
Jewish TFR increased by 10.2% during 1998–2009, and was recorded at 2.90 during 2009. During the same time period, Arab TFR decreased by 20.5%. Muslim TFR was measured at 3.73 for 2009. During 2000, the Arab TFR in Jerusalem (4.43) was higher than that of the Jews residing there (3.79). But as of 2009, Jewish TFR in Jerusalem was measured higher than the Arab TFR (2010: 4.26 vs 3.85, 2009: 4.16 vs 3.87). TFR for Arab residents in the West Bank was measured at 3.05 in 2010,[41] while that for the Jewish residents was reported at 5.10 children per woman.[42]

Is Swedish political correctness really Swedish ethnocentrism in disguise?

Open Borders writes up that World Values Survey on the attitudes of people in 48 countries toward immigration policy:
Several countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America also seem to have more open borders supporters than any of the rich countries, except Sweden, which appears to be an outlier, with a far more pro-open borders populace of any rich country included in the survey.

My hunch is that over time, the Swedes have become ethnocentric about their political correctness. Being true believers in stupid stuff is how they show that Swedes are superior to the other Nordics, those virtually subhuman vermin. "We're Swedes, we're not like those horrible racist Danes, who have been so insensitive as to try to crack down on arranged cousin marriages of young Pakistani girls for the purposes of immigration fraud!"

Thank goodness at least one GOP Great Hispanic Hope isn't just another Cuban white guy, but is instead a genuine Mexican mestizo who is succeeding despite his lack of White Privilege and the virulent hate directed at his ancestors

George P. Bush

He's baaaack

I was starting to feel sorry for George W. Bush because he'd been so sad after he apologized in his memoir for his Ownership Society wrecking the economy. But, he's got family business to take care of, preparing the ascent of Jeb's kids:
Bush to host conference on immigration  
DALLAS (AP) — Former President George W. Bush is set to give opening remarks at a conference on the benefits of immigrants to the U.S. economy. 
The Tuesday conference is hosted by the George W. Bush Institute and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. It is part of a Bush Institute initiative on finding ways to achieve a 4 percent gross domestic product growth. 

No mention of 4 percent gross domestic growth per capita.
A book the institute released over the summer notes immigrants help grow the economy by increasing the labor force

See?
and filling niche jobs.

Mass immigration to fill niche jobs -- what could make more sense?

George, I can't start to miss you if you don't stay away.

I wonder if this is some kind of explicit deal George and Jeb worked out around 1998: George would get to run for President in return for letting in lots of illegal Mexican aliens, whose kids would vote for Jeb's kids?

Or maybe George H.W. wrote that stuff into NAFTA about ruining the poor Mexican corn farmers to pave the way for Jeb's election?

Okay, okay, I admit it's conspiracy theorizing to imagine that George H.W., George W., and Jeb might ever get together and talk about what's best for the Bushes and how to make it happen, so forget I ever said it. That was just crazy talk.

The popularity of Open Borders in Burkina Faso: Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose

The results of international surveys typically aren't usually terribly plausible, but a World Values Survey on immigration ideologies in 48 countries seems likely.

A glance at the table shows there’s a moderately high correlation between holding theoretical open borders views and living in the kind of country that nobody in their right minds wants to immigrate into.

Here’s your top ten most pro-Open Borders countries: Vietnam, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Mali, Morocco, Romania, Uruguay, Peru, and India.

Yup, those are some real high desirability destinations.

(In case you are wondering, Israel, whose government uses the term "illegal infiltrator" to describe "undocumented workers," was apparently not surveyed.)

In contrast, the ten most anti-open borders countries are ones that have a lot to lose and are in more danger of losing it.

South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are rich, competent, nationalist NE Asian countries. Norway and Australia are rich whitopias. Trinidad is the richest country in its region due to oil, and it already has a lot of ethnic tensions that don't need augmenting. Thailand and Malaysia are among the richer countries in their regions, with poor, heavily populated neighbors such as Burma, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

Egypt and Jordan are interesting. I suspect their attitudes are similar to Israel’s, and for the same reasons.

1) None of those three countries wants the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. They all remember what happened when Jordan kicked out the Palestinians in 1970 and they moved to Lebanon: that upset Lebanon’s delicate balance of power and 15 years of civil war ensued.

2) Egypt, Jordan, and Israel are all on the land route from sub-Saharan Africa to the rich North. They would all be overrun with sub-Saharans. Middle Easterners notice how Col. Qaddafi’s policy of inviting in large numbers of sub-Saharans did not improve his popularity with native Libyans.

December 3, 2012

Sailer's Law of Neologisms

I kind of like the phrase "The Endimenment" to describe contemporary times, especially because it's one of those phrases, like "dumb and dumber," that's hard to pronounce without sounding like an idiot: The Endimememenment ...

So, will this neologism sweep the Anglosphere?

Of course not. The basic rule is that clever, self-explanatory new terms virtually never catch on. For years, the Atlantic Monthly had a back page contest asking readers to invent new words to meet unfilled needs in the language. They published hundreds of brilliant neologisms, not one of which I ever noticed anywhere else again.

Instead, what mostly catches on are  phrases like "jump the shark" (2,150,000 page hits on Google) that just make us dumberer.

Economist: Where to be born in 2013

The Economist's forecast of where the best places to be born in 2013 will eventually turn out to be is extremely Sailerian (i.e., tediously sensible): Switzerland is at the top, Nigeria at the bottom.

Does this represent a new trend toward acceptance of my philosophy of forecasting?

I predict that boring forecasts will sweep the media! (Odds that I turn out to be triumphantly correct: 0.01%; odds that my forecast is too boring to be remembered: 99.99%. Ergo: I can't lose.)

John Derbyshire's reader's guide to keeping up with the "Dark Enlightenment"

At VDARE.com, the Derb reviews his Google Reader list.

I'm of two minds about this spreading phrase "Dark Enlightenment."

Personally, I've increasingly found over the years that I most identify with the thinking of that cheerful, optimistic symbol of the Light Enlightenment, Ben Franklin. Perhaps it's just The Endimenment I object to?

By the way, "The Endimenment" has never appeared online before in the history of Google.

The boring route to GOP Electoral College triumph in 2016

A friend of mine who is a Democratic operative points out that Romney could have won in the Electoral College with various combinations of 3 of these 4 states: Florida (29 electoral votes), Pennsylvania (20), Ohio (18), and Michigan (16). Romney needed 64 more votes, so FL, PA, and OH would have worked or FL, PA, and MI (but FL, OH, MI would have come up 1 short).

He argues that the GOP would be best off adopting strategies aimed at Northern suburbs. I haven't been to Florida in 20 years, so I don't know what to make of this claim, but he says that, for all its exoticism, Florida also has much in common with Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan due to retirement patterns and the like. There are a lot of voters in Florida who are pretty much Northern suburbanites by background.
I'm writing my chapter on the Industrial States (many of which are your Big 10 states) and found out that your Big 10 idea can work.  Romney essentially lost the election in 3 or four states: Florida, Penn. Ohio or Michigan.  ...

What do all four states have in common?  Lots of suburbanites and/or retired blue collar workers.  Florida nows swings with the rest of Northern suburbia.  Tipping the Sunshine State to Romney would have given him 235 votes.  Adding Penn (20 votes & Michigan (16) would have given him 271, despite the loss in the national popular vote (due to huge Obama margins in New York, Chicago, LA and San Francisco).

Here's the stat that will have Republicans tearing their hair out: if Romney had just matched Jerry Ford's 1976 performance in the suburbs of Philly and Detroit, he would have carried those two key states and (assuming Florida also swung) won the Electoral College ala Bush in 2000. ...

Rove has talents; he is an expert on getting white Southern Democrats to defect.  But he never learned how to appeal to Northern suburbanites....and the GOP already has the South in their hip pocket, so Rove is no longer needed....But somehow I imagine Jeb will call him in 2016...

The weirdness of it all

I've added a couple of more faces to my gallery of Latinos frequently called upon by the media as natural interlocutors on the subject of immigration amnesty. 

A commenter points out:
Now, anywhere else in the world if a distinct population group (white hispanics) were in power and an oppressed group (hispanic hispanics) were fleeing en masse, the US would lead the way at the UN in calling that 'ethnic cleansing' and we'd promptly establish embargoes, no-fly zones and call for NATO forces to be sent in. Remember what happened when all those Albanians fled Kosovo? 
Yet, with the current situation not only do we not call it ethnic cleansing, which I think would not be too hard a case to make, but the white hispanics actually get to negotiate on behalf of the oppressed hispanic hispanics in this country. 

This widespread assumption that Sen. Marco Rubio, a tanned Cubano, should negotiate a deal with the Democrats over amnesty for Mexicans is pretty weird when you stop and think about.

So don't.

Then again, the media was totally on board in the summer of 2001 with George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell negotiating an immigration foreign policy deal with Vicente Fox and Foreign Secretary Jorge G. Castaneda. (House Republicans quietly sank it a few days before 9/11.) By the way, did you ever get a gander at those guys? Mexican politicians try to stay tanned (which isn't hard to do at 7,000 feet altitude and 19 degrees of latitude), but still ...

Fox looked like the actor Televisa would choose to play Don Draper's role in the Mexico City-set telenovela remake of Mad Men. And Castaneda, whose mom was a Soviet translator at the UN, was known in Mexico as El Guero. Castaneda, on the other hand,  has this whole Miami Vice thing going:

My commenter continues:
If the US were the least bit consistent with its foreign policy, they'd train and arm the hispanic hispanics and send them back to Mexico to overthrow the white hispanics and maybe help create a nation where the masses might actually be able to own property and make a living. In fact, many on the right might actually suppport this type of intervention if it could help spread the wealth in Mexico.

Well, let's not do that. 

Yet ... can we at least remind ourselves that Mexico is home to the world's richest man? Granted, Carlos Slim (nee Salim)  bailed out the New York Times, so that's not really considered an appropriate topic for discussion in the national news, but the notion that all these people have to move to America because there's no money in Mexico seem to be overlooking a few folks.

Here's what Castaneda had to say about modern Mexico in 1997:
A government undersecretary (one level down from the top echelon of public service) earned in 1994 (prior to devaluation) approximately $180,000 after taxes … -- almost twice what his U.S. counterpart earned before taxes. His chauffeur (provided by the government, of course) made about $7,500 a year. The official addresses the employee with the familiar "tu," while the latter must speak to the former with the respectful "usted." The official and his peers in the business and intellectual elites of the nation tend to be white (there are exceptions, but they are becoming scarcer), well educated, and well traveled abroad. They send their two children to private schools, removed from the world of the employee. The employee and his peers tend to be mestizo, many are barely literate, and they have four or five children, most of whom will be able to attend school only through the fifth grade."

Castaneda went on to argue that America better not try to tighten the border, because without that safety valve, the poor of Mexico would rise up and slit the throats of the rich, and by the time the rich got done getting their revenge (and, trust me, they would get their revenge), their'd be 10 million refugees over the border.

December 2, 2012

My review of Tom Wolfe's "Back to Blood"

In VDARE.com, I review Tom Wolfe's new novel Back to Blood:
Back To Blood reminds me that the conservative Brain Trust has long assumed that immigrants will become more Republican as they assimilate. Yet, in Miami, where the immigrants started out as fanatical Republicans for foreign policy reasons, the American-born Cubans have been trending Democratic. ... 
Wolfe’s novel sheds some light on this pattern. Although the Miami Cubans in Back To Blood are all white conservatives, they see Anglo whites as The Other: “Americanos.” They use this term even when, as in policeman Nestor Camacho's case, they can’t actually speak much Spanish themselves. ... 
On the other hand, Wolfe emphasizes, the younger Cubans like Nestor and Magdalena are constantly reminded when they speak to Americanos that their vocabularies in English tend to be smaller, which leaves them embarrassed and unhappy.

Read the whole thing there.

Medical marijuana smokers unsurprisingly unclear on concept

From the Los Angeles Daily News:
Survey: One in 7 of state's nighttime drivers under the influence of drugs 
By Susan Abram, Staff Writer

Sometimes, they come through DUI checkpoints smoking a joint. 
"They'll say, I've got a medical card," said Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy Sgt. Philip Brooks, of the drivers who get stopped. 
"And we'll say, that doesn't matter. Smoke that at home and don't drive." 
While they don't all come through checkpoints smoking marijuana, an increased number of motorists are getting caught driving drugged. It's happening at DUI checkpoints on curved roads through Malibu's canyons and it's happening across the state. 
"Half of those caught are impaired due to drugs," said Brooks of the Malibu/Lost Hills Station. 
"It's hard to say, but the biggest problem right now is medical marijuana," he added. "People seem to think it's a legal substance."

A teacher in the Inland Empire emailed me that quite a few of his failing students tell him that smoking dope is good for them, because: "It's medicine."

In general, sophisticated libertarian concepts (such as, oh, "Just because the government legalizes it doesn't mean you should do it") don't work that well for minors with 2 digit IQs and heads full of THC.

Two cheers for the Obama Era fertility crisis

Ross Douthat writes in the NYT:
More Babies, Please

IN the eternally recurring debates about whether some rival great power will knock the United States off its global perch, there has always been one excellent reason to bet on a second American century: We have more babies than the competition. 
It’s a near-universal law that modernity reduces fertility. But compared with the swiftly aging nations of East Asia and Western Europe, the American birthrate has proved consistently resilient, hovering around the level required to keep a population stable or growing over the long run. ...
If, that is, our dynamism persists. But that’s no longer a sure thing. American fertility plunged with the stock market in 2008, and it hasn’t recovered. Last week, the Pew Research Center reported that U.S. birthrates hit the lowest rate ever recorded in 2011, with just 63 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. (The rate was 71 per 1,000 in 1990.) For the first time in recent memory, Americans are having fewer babies than the French or British. 

The biggest plunge in fertility since the Subprime Bubble was among unmarried illegal immigrant women. Fertility among married white American-born citizens has been more stable.

Is that so awful?

Conversely, at the peak of the Bush Housing Bubble, births to unmarried Hispanic women grew 9.6% from 2005 to 2006, while births to married white women fell.

Was that so healthy?
But deeper forces than the financial crisis may keep American fertility rates depressed. Foreign-born birthrates will probably gradually recover from their current nadir, but with fertility in decline across Mexico and Latin America, it isn’t clear that the United States can continue to rely heavily on immigrant birthrates to help drive population growth.

The tragedy of declining fertility in Mexico and how it dooms America to defeat in World War III for lack of cannon fodder or whatever seems overstated. After all, total fertility rates plunged in Mexico throughout recent decades, while they were higher among Mexicans in America in 2006 than in 1986 (before the last amnesty set off a massive baby boom among ex-illegals).

Why? A big reason is that because those who can't afford to have as many children as they want in their own countries come here to have them.

The 2012 Spam Juggernaut

My inbox used to be stuffed with unwanted emails, all promising me prosperity in return for a small amount of cash upfront, from people with names like Ngowa Mbube, Prince Goodluck Obasanjo, and Barack Obama. 

But then my spam filters started to delete these automatically, so, I completely missed out on the Great Presidential Email Offensive of 2012. From Bloomberg News on the Science behind it:
The appeals were the product of rigorous experimentation by a large team of analysts. “We did extensive A-B testing not just on the subject lines and the amount of money we would ask people for,” says Amelia Showalter, director of digital analytics, “but on the messages themselves and even the formatting.” 
The campaign would test multiple drafts and subject lines—often as many as 18 variations—before picking a winner to blast out to tens of millions of subscribers.  
It quickly became clear that a casual tone was usually most effective. “The subject lines that worked best were things you might see in your in-box from other people,” Fallsgraff says. “ ‘Hey’ was probably the best one we had over the duration.” Another blockbuster in June simply read, “I will be outspent.” According to testing data shared with Bloomberg Businessweek, that outperformed 17 other variants and raised more than $2.6 million. 
Writers, analysts, and managers routinely bet on which lines would perform best and worst. “We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing,” says Showalter. “Every time something really ugly won, it would shock me: giant-size fonts for links, plain-text links vs. pretty ‘Donate’ buttons. Eventually we got to thinking, ‘How could we make things even less attractive?’ That’s how we arrived at the ugly yellow highlighting on the sections we wanted to draw people’s eye to.” 
Another unexpected hit: profanity. Dropping in mild curse words such as “Hell yeah, I like Obamacare” got big clicks. But these triumphs were fleeting. There was no such thing as the perfect e-mail; every breakthrough had a shelf life. “Eventually the novelty wore off, and we had to go back and retest,” says Showalter. 
Fortunately for Obama and all political campaigns that will follow, the tests did yield one major counterintuitive insight: Most people have a nearly limitless capacity for e-mail and won’t unsubscribe no matter how many they’re sent. “At the end, we had 18 or 20 writers going at this stuff for as many hours a day as they could stay awake,” says Fallsgraff. “The data didn’t show any negative consequences to sending more.”