So You Want a Revolution

On his Gray Mirror Substack, Curtis Yarvin is proposing that the only way forward is the singularity of a democratically elected president who, for the time being, acts as an absolute monarch.

And the Z-man is talking about the fantasy of a two-party political system.

In reality, America is a one party system. It has been since Gettysburg. The differences between the two parties are miniscule. This is why public policy never changes when the party in charge changes. The mild reforms of the Reagan years were followed by a consensus that remains in place to this day. There is some tinkering around the edges to keep up appearances, but otherwise the results of each election have no impact on public policy or the priorities of government.

But why? Why didn't Ronald Reagan cut spending? Why didn't the Supreme Court vote down the unconstitutional Obamacare, and why didn't the Republican Congress of 2017-18 repeal Obamacare?

The answer, of course, is Chantrill's Law, that you cannot repeal a government program. Why? Because every program is some grant of loot and plunder to somebody's political supporters.

Reform Social Security? Even though you might lay out how it will benefit everyone, present beneficiaries are going to suspect that there's a catch, and whatabout their checks.

Reform education? There are millions of folks working in the current system and any change threatens their paychecks. And they have unions breathing down the necks of the politicians.

And so on. This means there is no prospect of "change" until everything is so screwed up that people are ready to give up their share of the loot in return for the promise of a strong leader to lead them to safety.

The story of Hitler demonstrates this. In the years from 1871-1914 Germans were eager to become the equal -- or better -- of the nations of Europe, full of plans to expand the boundaries and create an empire. The disaster of 1918 was a bolt from the blue, utterly unthinkable. And then it got worse, with hyperinflation as the German government failed to balance its books. Then, of course, came the crash of 1929 and things got worse again. What do you expect the Germans, or any people, to do when disaster strikes like that? What any people does in this situation is: it elects a strong leader. It forgets all the privileges and carve-outs and benefits, because they are all Gone with the Wind already. They just want to be saved from disaster.

Will that disaster happen here? Really, my guess is that it won't. Again, Germany's experience is telling. The US has not lost a world war, and been utterly humiliated by the victors. We still have the world's default currency, and that won't change for a decade or two. The Democrats' vote-bank is likely to suffer in the years ahead as Hispanics seem to be moving into the middle class and voting like it.

But in the long run, I'd say, the current system, whether the dysfunctional Uniparty of the Zman's analysis or the dysfunctional oligarchy of Yarvin's analysis, cannot say No. It cannot say to the beneficiaries of the government's 36 percent share of GDP, sorry, but you are going to have to take a cut. It dare not. And so the system will collapse, and people will demand a strong leader.

In the short term we could well see a replay of the 1970s where the ineffectual "stagflation" of the Carter years led to the election of the "amiable dunce" Ronald Reagan. One thing about Ronald Reagan: he may not have reduced spending but he stopped it increasing. I suspect that the spending plans of the Biden administration, that are simply distribution of loot and plunder to lefty interest groups, will inspire a reaction similar to the Reagan revolution.

In the long run, I think we humans have an existential challenge. The story of all previous human government has been dividing and/or conquering and divvying up the loot among the supporters. I suggest that this age-old human culture has reached an end. In the old days "to the victor the spoils" actually worked for the victor -- even though it meant death and destruction to the loser.

But I think that in the industrial and post-industrial era, the victor of a military struggle or a political struggle hurts himself if he resorts to loot and plunder. That's because the real source of wealth today is not gold or oil or broad rich acres but the "intangible capital" inside peoples' heads. The victors get richer by putting the losers back to profitable work rather than plundering them of everything they own.

But I expect it will take a thousand years for humans to change society to reflect this truth.

The "Four Americas" and My Three Peoples

As usual, during the night, I awoke to realize something. Thanks, unconscious, you're a real pal!

I thought to myself: how does the Four Americas of The Atlantic's George Packer and his "How America Fractured into Four Parts" match up with my reductive Three Peoples theory? 

I first noticed, yesterday, that Packer's view of America was a "View from the Window of the Ruling Class Club," another world, separate from the corridors of power trod by our rulers. But now it's time to Be Like Ike, and make the problem bigger.

Let's lay out the Four Americas, as described by George Packer:

Free America. That's the old Buckley conservatism, the anti-Communists, and the libertarians.

Smart America. That's the high-cognitive-skill folks with advanced degrees that work as salaried employees in tech, the professions, journalism and the arts.

Real America. These folk believe that the real heart of America is the "common people that work with their hands," a "country of white people."

Just America. Young "people coming of age in the disillusioned 2000s were handed powerful ideas about social justice to explain their world... They converged and recombined in American university classrooms, where two generations of students were taught to think as critical theorists."

Before I bring the hammer down, let's just rehearse my Three Peoples.

People of the Creative Self "These are people that want to live a creative life, maybe as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary."

People of the Responsible Self "Call them commoners, citizens, middling sorts, 'deplorables,' these are people... that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law."

People of the Subordinate Self "Call them slaves, serfs, workers, clients, marginalized, these are people that do not experience 'agency.'" They are somebody's subordinate.

Let us re-describe the Four Americas in their relationship to the ruling class and the ruling class's political formula of fighting systemic racism. And let's figure out how they fit in my reductive Three Peoples system.

Free America. These are the defeated foes of the ruling class that once hoped at least to sit at the table with the educated ruling class. Don't worry about they, they're done. They are, to me, People of the Creative Self.

Smart America. These are people that have thrived under the bureaucratic rule of the educated ruling class. They are good at education and taking exams and converting their skills into salaried positions approved by the rulers. They eagerly display BLM signs in front of their houses and deplatform people that peddle in "disinformation." They are, of course, People of the Creative Self.

Real America. These are people that don't have the intellectual chops, the cognitive skills to make it in Smart America. They are commoners that do the ordinary work of society: technicians rather than techies. Racist-sexist-homophobes, every one. The are, obviously, People of the Responsible Self, often in danger of falling into the world of the Subordinate Self.

Just America. These are people that have been screwed by the political and educational system set up by their liberal educated-class parents. They are almost all white, but don't talk about that. They are would-be People of the Creative Self only they'll never make it. So they think of themselves as helpless victims, "fake" People of the Subordinate Self.

Golly Geewillikins. Godfrey Daniels. Mother of Pearl.

First, this Fractured America is mostly an tableau of upper-class America, the People of the Creative Self. In other words it is the actual ruling class viewing the next class down as representing the whole of America. Almost everyone in the Four Americas -- except the dastardly "deplorables" -- is a member or would-be member of the creative class.

Second, there is no real mention for the underclass, the Clients of Curtis Yarvin's Three Layers, the People of the Subordinate Self in my Three Peoples, except as a back-handed insults about "vodka in plastic cups" and "missing teeth from crystal meth." They sorta exist in Real America, in the lower section of Real America, in the 21st century collapse that "happened in the shadow of historic failures" like the Iraq war and the Great Recession. They get a fake entry as the wokey social-justice activists -- the "trained Marxists" of BLM -- but they don't really exist in George Packer's world. 

Third, you can see why Big Tech is down for the ruling class's program of beating up white deplorables. They are the fortunate sons of our educated ruling class, that happen to have the intellectual chops to thrive in the world that the educated class created over the last century. Why rock the boat?

Fourth, you can understand the lefty wokies and their rage. It's fiendish really. These young people, that have fake degrees in activism, that don't have the chops for the high-status salaried professions, are being drafted into the educated-class's activist army that is beating up ordinary Commoners because they are all systemic "white oppressors."

Here's what I think. 

The one vital need in every ruling class is to have a real understanding of the people that they rule. Otherwise that ruling class is not long for this world. If the rest of the ruling class thinks like George Packer, then they got a problem.

But really, it's not surprising that George Packer is dealing in fantasy and only thinking about people on the next step lower in the political and cultural hierarchy. For one thing, it is only those people that count, that are likely to mount a cultural or political challenge to our ruling class. Yep, no mention of the rising Hispanics, who are starting to vote Republican. No mention of the "oppressed peoples" of the underclass, the folks that have really taken it on the chin from the ruling class's race politics of the last half-century and the inflexible top-down culture of the administrative state. No mention of Asians, who are beginning to feel the whip of race-conscious government.

Could the omission of ordinary middle-class Hispanics and Asians from the Four Americas be a mistake? Or would it just complicate the agenda of the ruling class in the Biden years, so better not think about it?

Let's just say that if the clueless clots of Just America that "literally know nothing" -- in the words of Ben Rhodes -- ever got a clue, they might not continue as the useful idiots of the ruling class.

Might not, of course. I don't have much confidence in that. But you never know.

The View from the Window of the Ruling Class Club

Over at The Atlantic they know that something is wrong. Goldwater, Reagan, Bush, Trump. Really, darling, how can anyone stand it? 

So George Pasker has written about "How America Fractured into Four Parts:" Free America, Smart America, Real America, Just America.

Over at Free America we have the coalition of traditionalists, anti-Communists, and libertarians. Although traditionalism and anti-Communism have died out, libertarianism is still strong: people still read Ayn Rand. By the way, did you know that Barry Goldwater was a segregationist?

Then there is Smart America, the folks in the knowledge economy,

salaried professionals in information technology, computer engineering, scientific research, design, management consulting, the upper civil service, financial analysis, law, journalism, the arts, higher education. 

They are smart and know how to play the credentials game, for themselves and their children.

Then there is Real America, whose members believe in the "idea that the authentic heart of democracy beats hardest in common people who work with their hands." Sarah Palin is the archetype, and Trump is the modern pied-piper. From time to time, Real America has been interracial, but that always dissolves because "white supremacy."

Real America has always needed to feel that both a shiftless underclass and a parasitic elite depend on its labor. In this way, it renders the Black working class invisible.

By the way, here is Packer's view of Trump.

Throughout his adult life, Trump has been hostile to Black people, contemptuous of women, vicious about immigrants from poor countries, and cruel toward the weak. 

Really? I had no idea.  

Finally there is Just America. It sees through the lies of Free America and Smart America. It sees "the country is less a project of self-government to be improved than a site of continuous wrong to be battled."

It does the hard, essential thing that the other three narratives avoid, that white Americans have avoided throughout history. It forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today—the betrayal of equality that has always been the country’s great moral shame, the heart of its social problems.

So, it stands to reason that the ruling class should back the truth-seekers of Just America and teach the rest of America a lesson. On with The Project!

What is clear to me is the "tell." There is no discussion of the ruling class as actors in this play. They are the Brit colonialists up at Shimla drinking their gin-and-tonics at the club, and worrying that "the natives are restless." The only time that "Progressives" are mentioned is when Packer states that

Progressives, shocked by the readiness of half the country to support this hateful man [Trump], seized on racism as the single cause and set out to disprove every alternative.

Oh really! I had no idea! That our ruling class used "racism" as a club to beat back the monstrous challenge to their divine right to rule.

But this was too simplistic, says Packer. "Racism is such an irreducible evil" that it allowed Progressives to ignore the "grievances of their compatriots down in the lowlands" etc.

See what is going on here? A little ideological leak from Mt. Olympus, giving us peasants a brief look at what our rulers are really thinking. Hey, what's a ruler to do when the peasants start grumbling?

Now I interpret Packer's Four Americas as four reactions to a century of Progressive rule by the educated ruling class.

I'd say that Free America is a principled objection to the top-down administrative state with its programs-for-all and its regulatory ethos, both from a traditional humans-as-social-animals perspective and from a markets perspective.

I'd say that Smart America is people doing what they are told: get an education, get a credential, and take your place in the ordered hierarchy that the rulers have designed for you. It works pretty well for the cognitive elite.

I'd say that Real America is people that have fallen out of the system, the grand plan of the Olympian progressive gods, and they look to an older America for inspiration.

I'd say that Just America is people that know that something is wrong, but being creatures of the system, have no ideological tools to critique the society that progressives have created and grown except the lefty rubbish that they have been carefully taught. They want more of the same, the sweeties, because that's all they know.

This is the point at which I like to bring up my chart of government spending since 1900.

I just suggest to all the world that when you look at government spending growing from 7 percent of GDP to the present 35ish percent (leaving out the various peaks responding to wars and crises) on all kinds of top-down programs you are bound to say to yourself: Hmm, I'll bet that at least half of that growth is a bad idea that doesn't make America a juster or more prosperous society, but just Makes Things Worse.

It doesn't take genius or conspiracy theory to come to this notion. Anyone that has lived in the world knows that there are lots of good ideas abroad in the world, but not so many good ideas that actually work.

God only knows what it is going to take to fix America, especially when we see the ruling class spinning such fanciful tales to itself.

Murray Facing Reality, Yes You Liberals

The point of Charles Murray's Facing Reality is quite simple. Whatever you fervently believe with every cell in your activist brain, liberals, human groups are different.

(The bigger meaning of Facing Reality)

That means that if you use government or secular religion to force group outcomes to be "representative" of society as a whole you are going to have to use force. A lot of force.

And even when you use force, it will probably not make much difference.

Charles Murray has spent his life showing liberals how their fervent beliefs are in fact virtue-signalling fantasies -- from way back before "virtue-signalling" became a thing. Let's recapitulate.

In Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, 323 pages, published in 1984, Murray wrote that the Great Society was a wrong turn and failed, and that liberals should know it because they instrumented all the wonderful new programs so they could boast about their successes, so the numbers are all there for anyone that cares. But the liberals didn't want to write about the failures. So they didn't.

In The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, 845 pages, published in 1994 and co-written with Richard Herrnstein, Murray argued that the future would belong to those with more "cognitive ability." I.e., black Americans would not do well in the job market of the future. Liberals said that Murray was a racist.

In Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, 407 pages, published in 2012, Murray wrote that, considering only white Americans, the cognitively able were doing fine with great careers and merger marriages (of cognitive able men to cognitively able women), the middle 50 percent were doing so-so, and at the bottom the cognitively disabled men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much.

Now in Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America, 151 pages, published in 2021, Murray says told-ya so liberals. Groups that test with lower IQ have worse outcomes in life and work and crime. Period, full stop, science.

For me Facing Reality crystallized two notions that hadn't previously crystallized in my brain.

First, I have known for a while that humans do not give up their fervent beliefs when presented with "science" that demonstrates their ideas are wrong. Not at all. Instead humans go for one more Big Push, a Reign of Terror, a Great Purge, a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Only when their brilliant ideas lie around them in graveyards from here to the horizon do people give up on their glorious vision of a better world. So this is it. This is our Great Purge. That is the meaning of "systemic racism" and Wokism and pushing Critical Race Theory into the nation's schools. Liberals instinctively know their ideas have failed. So the response is to destroy their political opponents. Humans always do things like that when things start going wrong. 

Second, "woke" corporations are a natural and physical response by corporations to the double-bind the Civil Rights era puts on them. The original Civil Rights Act in Title VII provided for affirmative action and the idea that the only way to show an absence of bias was by showing that a corporation's workforce "looked like America" from janitor to CEO. Thus, if a traditionally marginalized group is "underrepresented" at any level in a corporation then the corporation is just sitting there, like a rabbit before a coyote, easy prey for any lefty activist group hungry for a nice tasty lunch today. But, because of the distribution of cognitive ability in different groups it is physically impossible to achieve this. So all a corporation can do is salute and contribute to BLM and close the accounts of Republican candidates at their bank.

So, if gubmint programs can't achieve what they promise to do, because reality, what is the point of them? The point is that every government program is a war on some horrid monster, and the noble supporters can expect loot and plunder from here to eternity.

Thus, all politics is about ginning up a war on some frightful enemy and then sharing the loot out among the supporters. There are four ways to do this.

You can declare some small neighboring country an enemy and invade and conquer them, as Bismarck did to Denmark (!) in 1862. This is the best strategy, because it unites the whole country against an insignificant foe that can't really fight back.

You can declare that Japs and Nazis are the enemy and have a world war over it. This is obviously a high risk strategy: what if you lose? But still, you get to unite the whole country to fight the monsters: keep your fingers crossed.

You can declare some large minority to be an enemy and fight a culture war against them, as the left is doing right now against "white supremacists." The danger is that you might ignite a real civil war, as happened in the US culture war of the 1850s. But nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

You can declare a small minority to be the cause of all our problems, and unite the rest of the country against them, as Hitler did with the Jews. Not much fun for the small minority. Hey, I wonder if the current liberal use of blacks as a helpless victim small minority might not rebound in a "backlash."

See, I think that the real need for liberals to "face reality" is that there is a good chance that their present way of dividing the nation -- as all politics does -- might work against them. What if whites and Latinos and Asians all decide that low IQ blacks are a problem in the workforce, and a menace on the streets? You can say that the group differences between blacks and the rest mean that blacks are helpless victims. Or you can decide that since blacks commit about 50 percent of all murders that blacks are an existential problem. 

Suppose we experience the US politics of the last 50 years as a continuous effort of liberals to insist that blacks are "helpless victims" and to cancel anyone that disagrees, because raciss.

In the end life, the universe, and everything is a throw of the dice. That's what modern "science" says.

Murray Facing Reality: the Outcome

OK. So the two truths in Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America are that Americans of different races, as groups, have different cognitive ability and they have different crime rates. But what does it all mean?

(Back to Murray Facing Reality: The Setup)

What it means is that liberal governance, based upon the idea that the only just society is a society in which everything in all walks of life should be racially balanced, is going to make things worse.

Let us leave aside the trivial meaning, when it comes to crime. The job of the police is to crack the heads of lower-class thugs whether they are 19th century Irish, 20th century Italians, or 21st century blacks. If you don't police the young thugs then you will get vigilantes and gangs stepping in to keep the peace. And we don't want that, right, liberals?

No, the bigger problem is that the policy of race norming in the workplace cannot work: forcing every corporation, at every level, to display the right proportion of races. In fact, it will make everyone angry, from whites and Asians diversified out of jobs for which they are best qualified to blacks boosted up into jobs beyond their cognitive comfort zone.

Let's look at the problem both at the average and at the extreme.

At the average you have the average black at at IQ of 91 and an average white at an IQ of 103. Now, as Murray says, studies show that IQ is a good predictor of performance. This means that if you hire an average black for a position he/she will perform worse than an average white.

Do you see the problem here? It is that the average white around the office will think that the average black is a fool and a dunce, because the average black in the office with an IQ of 91 will be performing a lot worse than the average white in the office with an IQ of 103.

Let's suppose that science tells us that for a particular job a corporation needs an employee with an IQ of 103 and it hires on that basis. OK, right away it means that the pool of blacks will be smaller than the pool of whites. If our employer is completely race blind and hires only on the basis of IQ that means that blacks will be "underrepresented" throughout the corporation at jobs that require an IQ level of 103.

I don't think that the bean-counters at race-enforcement central are going to like that.

Now let's talk about the extreme. Let's talk about a job that needs an IQ of about 135, such as "a full professorship at an elite university" or "a senior position in the IT industry." What is the talent pool of 25-29 year-olds in the whole United States, by race, for that job?

[You are talking] about 2,800 Africans and 9,500 Latins compared to 50,700 Asians and 160,100 Europeans.

In other words there are 57 whites nationwide that could do the job for every one black. So, if you were conducting a totally colorblind job search then you would hire a black once in every 50 job searches.

Imagine what the race-counters at race-enforcement central would say about that! 

Of course, in fact one third of the hirees would be Asian, because the average Asian has an IQ of 108 to the average white's IQ of 103 even though Asians are only about 6 percent of the population. So Asians would be way overrepresented in the top-dog jobs. Right now, as we all know, the race-counters at Ivy League colleges discriminate against Asians because otherwise they would be the majority of students!

Ok, now let's forget about the race-counters at race central. Let's think instead about ordinary people. Suppose we proceed on our current diversity and inclusion course and preferentially hire blacks for elite positions. What would that mean to the people boosted up into positions for which they do not have the cognitive chops?

Well, we know what it means at elite colleges, which search out blacks to study at their universities. Studies show that blacks -- and kids in general -- fail when they study at a university where the rest of the student body has much higher cognitive ability than they do. I think the gold standard on this finding is Mismatch by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. They showed that black students -- er, students in general -- do much better when they go to a college with a student body that matches their test results than when they go to an elite college where the other students have significantly higher test results.

If we project this finding from the university to the workplace, then we are looking at blacks who are much more likely to fail at their jobs than their white counterparts -- because they have a significantly lower cognitive ability than the job requires.

And one thing more. If corporations hire unqualified people for their top jobs then the performance of these folks playing out of their league is going to lower the performance of the corporation as a whole and that is going to affect the lower-level employees -- not to mention the customers.

We are actually seeing this work out in real time at shops like The New York Times where "midwit" journalists such as Nikole Hannah-Jones -- of the "1619 Project" -- and Mara Gay -- troubled by American flags on Memorial Day weekend -- make fools of themselves by parroting the elite conventional wisdom without having the chops to perform on the elite stage.

And that is to say nothing of the ordinary middle-class whites that get shouldered out of the ordinary middle-class jobs for which they are qualified in order to satisfy the moral preenings of the educated ruling class.

There's another problem with race-conscious hiring, particularly in government: "aggressive affirmative action" at the city level means less competent police, prosecutors, health-care workers and K-12 public school teachers. It's the science.

The presence of incompetent or marginally competent people in those jobs is only occasionally important to members of America's upper middle class... The burden... is borne overwhelmingly by America's poorest and most vulnerable populations.

You may say that the poorest and most vulnerable populations can do something about that by voting the rascals out. You may say that our liberal friends are devoted above all else to government services that help the poorest and most vulnerable. I couldn't possibly comment. 

Let us give Charles Murray the last word.

The problem, he says, is that "affirmative action" morphed from "initiatives... to seek out qualified Blacks who were being overlooked" into "government-sponsored preferential treatment in determining who gets the educations and the jobs."

The solution, he says, is to "Eliminate all forms of government-sponsored treatment by race."

And the place to start is "to restore the American creed as the ideal shared by a consensus of the electorate." 

The Democrats need to treat racial preference policies "as pragmatic measures to deal with residual racism... and disassociate himself from the rhetoric of systemic racism."

The Republicans "must stop posturing as the guardians of true Americanism and instead say... that the people who love this country have always been on both sides of the political spectrum and still are today."

I said I'd give Charles Murray the last word. And I will, for today. But not tomorrow.

Murray Facing Reality: The Setup

I had an aha moment in the first chapters of Charles Murray's short polemic Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America. Nothing remarkable really. As he says in the introduction:

American White, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distributions of cognitive ability.

That was what The Bell Curve was all about back in the 1990s.

American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime.

Sorry liberals. Those are Facts, backed up by Science. And you are the Party of Science, remember?

His book made me realize what "systemic racism" and wokism is all about.

It is about the fact that to our liberal friends it cannot be true that the whole liberal project is a steaming pile of ordure. 

America's problems cannot be because ruling-class liberals have been wrong and wrong again and that their vision to make America into a just and equal society will never work. No, it's all the fault of those racist sexist homophobic evil white supremacists and right-wing extremists.They are what holds us back. It must be, because liberals are the good guys.

The point is that, over fifty years since the civil rights acts, it is intolerable to our liberal friends that there are still large group differences in America, particularly between white and black. Their faith was and is that civil rights law would eliminate group differences, and inaugurate a new era of equality. Somebody, somewhere, somehow has sabotaged the holy quest, and they must be stopped.

The whole point of Murray's book is to tell liberals: No. Your vision was always fatally flawed, and the last 50 years has proved it. Humans are different, liberals, and the differences mean different outcomes, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Because we have not talked openly about group differences, we have kidded ourselves that the differences are temporary and can be made to go away. The next big push... No Child Left Behind in 2001 or a campaign to root out systemic racism in 2021 will change things.

Remember "Big Push?" That's what the Brits called their failed offensives on the western front in World War I. 

So Murray says no to the next Big Push. "[M]ean differences between groups are a reality and will be with us indefinitely." But against that is the saving faith, not just for liberals but for conservatives who say:

"The differences must be temporary. If they aren't... but they must be."

Sorry Charlie. There are real differences between the races in America. And there always will be. And that means different outcomes. You know what happened with the Big Pushes of World War I? They killed off the flower of youthful Britain. And France and Germany too.

OK. Let's get down to race. Just a social construction, after all.

America is multiracial America. Murray dissects it in three different ways: overall, Big City America, and America Outside the Big Cities.

Murray	Colloq.	Total US	Big-City	Rest of US
Total Population		325m	127m	198m
European	White	60%	45%	71%
Latin	Hispanic	18%	25%	14%
African	Black	13%	17%	10%
Asian	Asian	6%	9%	3%

You can see that America is still majority white, overall and in the rest of America. But whites are a minority in Big City America.

Now Murray gets down to brass tacks. Specifically:

1. When Africans, Asians, Europeans and Latins take cognitive ability tests, their "mean" results are different.
2. Race differences between Africans and Europeans in cognitive ability have not changed since the 1980s.
3. The tests predict future outcomes.

Do you see the point here? It is that you cannot expect populations with different cognitive abilities to have similar performance.

And you can see why our liberal friends are foaming at the CRT mouth. If we have been spending hundreds of billions every year on "helping" the marginalized and the oppressed it cannot be -- it cannot be -- that in the case of Africans (blacks) the whole effort is a big fat zero. There must be "malevolence" preventing it, because, per Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return:

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

There must be a fault. And since it can't be the educated, evolved liberal elite, and it can't be the helpless victims of the marginalized. Well, you get the point.

The test scores between Africans and Europeans are about one standard deviation, between Latins and Europeans is about 0.7 of a standard deviation. And Asians test about 0.25 of a standard deviation better than Europeans.

That mans that Asians are going to outperform Europeans are going to outperform Latins are going to outperform Africans. Period.

The point is that if you, the ruling class, want to make the proportions of workers in jobs and professions "look like America" you are going to have to go beyond affirmative action and diversity. You are going to have to blacken the entire white America as systemic racists and send them to the back of the line.

And here are the latest IQ numbers:

	IQ
European	103
African	91
Latin	94
Asian	108

If you construct bell curves of the IQ distribution of each of the four race categories there is plenty of overlap. So there are plenty of bright Africans, and plenty of dumb Europeans. But...

Since the most prestigious, powerful and highest paying jobs are so concentrated among people on the right-hand side of the [bell curve], a variety of important social and economic consequences... are inevitable.

In other words, there is no way in hell that it is possible for average people to succeed at the demanding jobs leading great institutions, creating new businesses, and ruling the nation. And that is what our liberal friends cannot allow themselves to think, let alone to admit.

And it gets worse. But that is for next time.

Is Forgiveness in Politics Ever Possible?

At American Greatness today Clifford Angell Bates, Jr. proposes in "Grievance and Forgiveness or Civil Strife" that the only way to end the current race war is for blacks to forgive whites for the crime of slavery and Jim Crow.

Really? Forgiveness? How often does that happen in the world of politics and love and war?

Then at Spiked! Frank Furedi deplores that "The culture war is real and it's getting worse" even while the left proposes that the whole idea of a culture war is a fantasy. But it makes sense that the left insists "there's nothing to see here; move right along."

Not being open about the existential nature of their crusade is integral to today’s cultural warriors against Enlightenment values. They prefer to convince the public that the culture war is a myth rather than admit that they are engaged in an ‘all or nothing’ struggle against some of society’s most important values and achievements.

This, a day after I commented on Gregory Clark at the end of his The Son Also Rises that maybe we still need some kind of gubmint effort to do something about inequality -- even though there has been precious little success on the 200-year gubmint war on unequality.

So, I am inspired to do my double Ike-Einstein act, and make the problem bigger, while making it as simple as possible but no simpler.

We must understand that men are only united when they are fighting an existential battle against annihilation. The rest of the time they are bickering among themselves. And the folks that are ginning up divisions and grievances and rage are generally classified by the cognoscenti as "politicians."

(Women are always bickering among themselves, only they won't admit it.)

Why is this? It is simple, really. The job of human males -- and it is their only job -- is to defend the homeland, the food-growing territory of the band from marauders. Alternatively, they can be pre-emptive and raid the neighboring band and kill the men and enslave the women and loot the village before the neighboring village does it to them.

You can see that in our own time, when food-growing land isn't a big deal -- as the twelve grain ships usually anchored off West Vancouver, BC waiting their turn to load up at the grain terminals mutely attest -- there is a problem. What are the men to do?

Well, they can fake it. OMG those bloody Nazis, Commies, Ay-rabs, whatever, if their taste is for foreign wars.

Or, OMG those bloody racists, bitter-clingers, deplorables, white supremacists, if their taste is for civil wars.

Finally, for the really cunning that just want to unite the people on the cheap without a foreign war or a civil war, there is the small minority as the enemy, OMG those Jews. Or overseas Chinese. Or Copts.

And because every man is really a pirate inside, the wise leader of his people will offer loot and plunder to his supporters.

You will notice that every election -- every election  -- comes down to the perfidious behavior of the "Other" and the rightful reward of loot and plunder to the voters of the winning side. That is why, for instance, Donald Trump offered tax cuts and tariffs to the voters of 2016 and today Joe Biden is offering trillions in loot and plunder which is partly "infrastructure" but mostly straight out grants to every liberal interest group imaginable.

But, of course, politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion and so it is usual for political movements and parties and ruling classes to dress up their naked war-plus-loot-and-plunder politics as a religious and moral war on evil to make sure that the evil get their just desserts and have to pay just reparations forever. Then, of course, there is no question about getting second thoughts about plundering the chaps next door. They are evil! They had it coming!

That is what the culture war is all about. It is a war against the middle America of responsible Americans, because the ruling class of the educated and evolved needs an enemy for their over-under politics of race and gender. And notice that nobody is proposing that we all just get together and work it out and forgive our enemies. The solution to the plague of white supremacy is for whites to confess their sins and take the knee.

But when will it ever end?

The lesson, I think, comes from the Treaty of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648. The idea was that the various peoples should take their religion from the religion of their ruler; otherwise shut up or move to the German state with your religion. But this idea was not reached in rational and logical debate by enlightened and evolved philosophers. It was reached in the exhaustion and horror of a frightful war fought mainly over the German lands in which, it is said, 30 percent of the German people lost their lives.

The equivalent for the United States would be that the Civil War of 1861-65 resulted in 10 million dead instead of the advertised 700,000, or a civil war in our time that resulted in 100 million dead.

I would imagine that a civil war here that caused 100 million dead might cause the various culture warriors to cool their jets for a couple of years. But don't worry: they'd be back.

So yeah. Don't expect any forgiveness from blacks in the current row over Black Lives Matter and reparations. And don't expect any relief from the culture war. That's not how the world works.

The bigger question is whether we can figure out a way to domesticate our politics in the same way that we domesticated our men from piracy and dueling into organized sports.

There's gotta be a way. I just don't have a clue how to do it.