Tag: decline and fall

Because the USA as a whole is rapidly going the way of DC and Detroit:

For the first time, minorities make up a majority of babies in the U.S., part of a sweeping race change and growing age divide between mostly white, older Americans and predominantly minority youths that could reshape government policies.

Preliminary census estimates also show the share of African-American households headed by women – made up of mostly single mothers – now exceeds African-American households with married couples, a sign of declining U.S. marriages overall but also continuing challenges for black youths without involved fathers.

The findings, based on the latest government data, offer a preview of final 2010 census results being released this summer that provide detailed breakdowns by age, race and householder relationships such as same-sex couples.

Demographers say the numbers provide the clearest confirmation yet of a changing social order, one in which racial and ethnic minorities will become the U.S. majority by midcentury.

I understand that a lot of people believe that this increasing vibrancy is a good thing for the nation because “diversity is strength”. The fact that this charming equalitarian belief happens to fly in the face of every relevant historical example as well as the recent societal patterns doesn’t appear to bother them in the slightest. One need only look at the governance of any non-white majority city to see what is in the cards for the USA as a whole; when Los Angeles or Mexico City are your rosy scenarios, well, you’re pretty much out of luck.

The thing that the multicultural and racial fantasists can’t seem to understand is that culture is malleable. The non-European immigrants, forced and voluntary, are not going to be magically transmogrified by the laws and social mores they find, they are instead going to transform them to their liking. Victor Davis Hanson describes, in ominous detail, precisely how that process has taken place in his California valley:

Last week was another somewhat depressing chapter in a now long saga of living where I was born. I returned to the farm from leading a European military history tour, and experienced the following — mind you, after a number of thefts the month prior (barn, shop, etc.):

1) I left my chainsaw in the driveway to use the restroom inside the house. Someone driving buy saw it. He slammed on the brakes, stole it, and drove off. Neat, quick, easy. Mind you there was only a 5-minute hiatus in between my cutting. And the driver was a random passer-by. That suggests to me that a high number of rural Fresno County motorists can prove to be opportunistic thieves at any given moment. The saw was new; I liked it — an off-the-shelf $400 Echo that ran well. I assume it will be sold off at a rural intersection in these parts, or the nearby swap meet for about $60. I doubt the thief was a professional woodsman who needed a tool of the trade to survive.

2) On the next night, three 15-hp agriculture pumps on our farm were vandalized — all the copper wire was torn out of the electrical conduits. The repairs to each one might run $500; yet, the value of the wire could not be over $50. I was told by neighbors that reports and descriptions of the law-breakers focused on youthful thieves casing the countryside — in official parlance a “gang,” and in the neighborhood politically-incorrect patois “cholos” — like the fellow who recently drove in, in his new lowered shiny red pickup (hydraulic lifters are not cheap), inquiring about buying “scrap” and “just looking” before I ran him out….

I conclude that most Americans would agree that chain-sawing a peach tree or pumping irrigation water enriches the nation, while cruising around looking to destroy such activity does not. The latter represents the sort of social parasitism that I read about each Saturday night in our environs (and, in terms of illegal immigration, once wrote about in Mexifornia — a book I seem doomed to relive in Ground Hog fashion each day — nearly a decade ago): gangbanger A shoots up gangbanger B; B goes to emergency room for publicly funded $250,000 worth of surgery and post-op treatment by C, an MD, who otherwise would have been insulted and intimidated by A or B should he have met either earlier in the day. Indeed, C is more likely to be ridiculed or sued by B than thanked. And yet C does not need either A or B; both need the former in extremis.

Where does this all end — these open borders, unsustainable entitlements and public union benefits and salaries, these revolving door prisons and Al Gore-like energy fantasies?

We are left with a paradox. The taxpayer cannot indefinitely fund the emergency room treatment for the shooter and his victim on Saturday night if society cannot put a tool down for five minutes without a likely theft, or a farmer cannot turn on a 50-year old pump without expecting its electrical connections to have been ripped out. Civilization simply cannot function that way for either the productive citizen or the parasite, who still needs a live host.

Where VDH and other nominal social conservatives go wrong is to imagine that this has anything to do with illegal immigration. It has to do with the ethnic and racial makeup of the country. As we have seen everywhere from Atlanta and Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, a society can not only survive, but thrive, with a small dash of vibrancy. A country that is 90 European, 5 percent African, and 5 percent Hispanic might well benefit from the additional heterodoxy provided by the minorities, while a country that is 40 percent European, 20 percent African, and 40 percent Hispanic is going to be riven by a constant battle for government spoils of the sort that distracts the elites of most of the nations in the third world.

But it is obviously too late now to save the nation as a whole. There is no coherent nation anymore. Those who hope to save a vestige of what was once America would do well to ally themselves with the likes of La Raza, who will probably be one of the more important forces in ultimately ending the ill-starred Union.

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.””
— Robert A. Heinlein

Rep. Ron Paul expects the usual kabuki:

Al Hunt: Do you think Congress will pass an Extension.

Ron Paul: I do. This will go up until the last minute, then they will raise the debt ceiling.

Al Hunt: Your speaker John Boehner says he will absolutely insist on a dollar of spending reduction for every dollar the debt ceiling goes up. Do you take that seriously?

Ron Paul: I don’t take that seriously. President Reagan wanted two dollars of cuts. The deficit exploded. Do you think the American people will believe that we are going to cut in the future? The only budget that counts is this year. 10-year programs are pie-in-the-sky talking. This year our obligations are five trillion dollars.

Al Hunt: The idea of a spending cap that takes place in ten years does not appeal to you?

Ron Paul: A 10-year spending cap is too little, too late. No one is going to believe it. All governments when they get this far into debt, default. They don’t default by not paying the bills. We will always pay the bills. The default comes from the devaluation of the currency.

The outcome is predictable enough. Republicans will talk a brave game, come up with some ludicrous “mechanism” that will allow them to pretend that they actually accomplished something, then business will proceed as usual. There is simply no way that the political class in the USA is going to directly address, let alone actually attempt fixing, the severe financial and economic problems facing the nation.

Voting for Republicans or Tea Partiers isn’t going to accomplish anything. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it if it makes you feel better, just don’t expect anything substantive to come of it. At least the Romans got some music out of it. What do Americans get as their nation burns? Weiner tweets.

“Help” from the United Nations:

Five thousand dead, 300,000 ill, and a medical emergency that has already lasted six months; now the people of Haiti have someone to blame for the cholera outbreak which has swept through their earthquake-ravaged country: the blue-helmeted peacekeepers of the United Nations.

An official report into the ongoing epidemic, which began last October, has concluded that it was almost certainly caused by a poorly constructed sanitation system installed at a rural camp used by several hundred UN troops from Nepal.

The virulent strain of cholera bacteria began infecting locals after faecal matter from their base seeped from badly designed septic pits into the Meye River, a tributary of the Artibonite River in the country’s central region.

The United Nations is far worse than the joke many people believe it to be. If it ever obtains the genuine global power it seeks, the 5,000 Haitians it killed in the last six months will look like the smallest of rounding errors.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that there was a legitimate reason underlying the imperialist European’s concept of the White Man’s Burden. Those who harbor a distaste for observable reality can shriek “racism” all they like, but no amount of moral self-preening or politically correct histrionics is going to change the fact that certain groups have repeatedly and reliably demonstrated a complete inability to maintain the societal infrastructure that is required to sustain Western-style civilization. There is no need to delve into potential biological or cultural explanations to simply observe what is not only historically and empirically obvious, but increasingly undeniable.

According to a new report, 47 percent of Detroiters are ”functionally illiterate.” The alarming new statistics were released by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund on Wednesday. WWJ Newsradio 950 spoke with the Fund’s Director, Karen Tyler-Ruiz, who explained exactly what this means.

“Not able to fill out basic forms, for getting a job — those types of basic everyday (things). Reading a prescription; what’s on the bottle, how many you should take… just your basic everyday tasks,” she said. “I don’t really know how they get by, but they do. Are they getting by well? Well, that’s another question,” Tyler-Ruiz said.

Now, perhaps those who believe in racial, cultural, national, and ethnic equality will find this piece of evidence unconvincing too. Perhaps 47 percent isn’t high enough to concern them, or perhaps they’ll put it down to some mysterious cultural change that happens to coincide with the transformation of the racial demographics of Detroit. Or perhaps they will suspect semantic games behind ill-defined terms such as “functionally illiterate”. Such excuses may smack of willful obtuseness, but are not entirely unreasonable.

So, here’s the question. Precisely how bad will things have to get before you abandon your belief in racial, cultural, national, religious, and ethnic equality? 100 percent illiteracy? 80 percent illegitimacy? Cannibalism and necrophilia in the streets? Or will it take the complete abandonment of a once-thriving metropolis before you are willing to admit that there actually might be some real science behind the idea that all human beings are not, in fact, equal in any material manner and that civilization depends upon recognizing those material inequalities and taking them into account?

It’s easy to avoid having a serious discussion on such matters by simply throwing rhetorical bombs. “Do you seriously believe blacks shouldn’t be permitted to vote, you horrible racist?” “Do you seriously believe the citizen children of hard-working, law-abiding undocumented Mexicans should be forcibly deported to a country they have never even seen, you cruel and hateful person?” Gasps and feigned horror all round. But such rhetorical devices are nothing more than cheap appeals to emotion and won’t delay the collapse of Western civilization by so much as a single day. So, here is my question in return. “Do you believe [population] should be permitted [action] if that permission demonstrably bears a high probability of leading to societal collapse?” That is the pertinent question that must precede any rational discussion of the subject.

We don’t permit children to vote. Are they not people? We don’t permit foreigners to vote. Are they, too, not people? We don’t even permit ex-criminals to vote even though they are both adults and citizens. And they’re also people, however much we might like to pretend otherwise. So, it’s clearly not a question of democratic limits being intrinsically illegitimate, but rather what is deemed to be in the interest of the nation.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I would much rather live in a safe, prosperous, and free society where I am not permitted to vote and am not even a fully equal member of society than in a third-world hellhole where I can vote every single day on whether clay or dirt will be distributed for dinner by the elected government. There is far more to human liberty than voting.

The end of the equalitarian era is rapidly approaching due to the same sort of intrinsic contradictions that sank Soviet economic communism. And like it or not, this almost surely means a return to the historical norm of open racism on all sides. As the Christian influence on the law subsides, there simply is no more basis for the idea that all men are created equal.

VDH skillfully elucidates the historically obvious:

Does “decline” mean inevitable collapse, like an aging person whose mind and body have become enfeebled? That was certainly the view of the ancients, who felt civilizations had finite life-spans (see Jacqueline de Romilly’s The Rise and Fall of States According to Greek Authors.) Do environmental catastrophes, resource depletion, or foreign armies end societies? They can, as the complex pyramidal societies from the Minoans and Mycenaeans to the Mayans and Aztecs learned.

All that said, decline is far more often a choice, not a preordained destiny. There was no reason that Athens at 338 B.C. needed to lose to Philip at Chaironeia or even that the loss there meant the end of Greek freedom. Macedonian forces were a fraction of the size of a far larger Persian force that had swept from the north into a far weaker Athens in 480 B.C. No law said that drama of the quality of the Orestia, Oedipus, Ajax, Bacchae, and Medea had to give way to the sitcoms of Middle and New comedy of the fourth century B.C. By September 1945, England had far more of its industrial base intact than had Germany or Japan, and had suffered far fewer losses, both material and human, since 1939 than either of the defeated Axis powers whose entire national ideologies had been rendered bankrupt and their people reduced to global pariahs. Why, then, did a country that produced the sort of four-engine bombers en masse that its wartime adversaries could not, or a Spitfire fighter better than any produced by Japan or Germany until the advent of the jet, end up decades later with unsold Jaguars while Mercedes and Lexus swept world markets? And why did a bombed out Frankfurt and Tokyo (200,000 incinerated in March 1945 alone) rather quickly out-produce a less damaged Liverpool (e.g., 4,000 killed in the blitz) or Manchester? Clearly the UKchose a path in 1945-9 that a once flattened Germany and Japan did not.

If Rome was supposedly “doomed” by the 5th century A.D., why did the Eastern Empire last another 1,000 years? Why was 1978 America a very different place than either 1955 or 1985 or 1996?

What the deeply knowledgeable VDH fails to acknowledge is that America does not face a choice because America has already collectively made it. Decline is no longer merely an option, it is a strong probability.

VDH notes two of the most significant factors, but fails to note that they are done deals. The explosion of wealth he cites was largely fraudulent, being based on a massive expansion of debt on the part of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and to a lesser extent Generation X that robbed from the following generations. The inevitable debt-deleveraging, combined with the tens of millions of largely useless immigrants, now all but guarantees decline. It doesn’t necessarily guarantee fall, however, only a retreat from a historically exceptional nation to an unexceptional one where the citizenry is helplessly subject to the whimsical rule of an aristocratic class. That this aristocracy is one of credentials and connections rather than blood and birth does not change its intrinsic lack of regard for the will of its subjects.

The New York Times ponders a seeming imponderable:

AT first glance, the numbers released by the Census Bureau last week showing a precipitous drop in Detroit’s population — 25 percent over the last decade — seem to bear a silver lining: most of those leaving the city are blacks headed to the suburbs, once the refuge of mid-century white flight.

But a closer analysis of the data suggests that the story of housing discrimination that has dominated American urban life since the early 20th century is far from over. In the Detroit metropolitan area, blacks are moving into so-called secondhand suburbs: established communities with deteriorating housing stock that are falling out of favor with younger white homebuyers. If historical trends hold, these suburbs will likely shift from white to black — and soon look much like Detroit itself, with resegregated schools, dwindling tax bases and decaying public services.

And why might that be? How do these urban dystopias continue to keep sprouting up around the country? Since we obviously know that all people are the same everywhere, what could possibly explain this bizarre tendency towards economic disintegration and social breakdown that appears to follow blacks around like an inexplicable curse?

The unusual thing about the NYT article is the way it avoids playing the usual racism card. When it mentions the way in which “the city’s whites fought what they called the “Negro invasion” with every tool at their disposal”, it doesn’t frame the description of the historical resistance with the usual delegitimizing codewords, probably because the historical fears of Detroit’s white populace were ultimately proven to underestimate the negative consequences of the Great Migration. I doubt even the most pessimistic white racist could have imagined the decrepit state to which Detroit has declined in 60 years.

The article is somewhat amusing in how it laments the fate of the black recon elements. “Much to their chagrin, many new black suburbanites found that integration was just a phase between when the first blacks moved in and the last whites took their children out of the public schools.” One would think that black people who don’t want to live with black people should understand that white people don’t want to live with them either.

In society after society, the same pattern is repeated. Majority populations will tolerate a minority population up to a certain point, which is somewhere between two and ten percent of the population. More than that and the minority population will begin to demand societal modifications to suit itself by virtue of its size, at which point the majority population will quite reasonably begin to react in a distinctly hostile manner. If there is room to retreat, the majority population will retreat. If there is not, there will either be violence or the eventual disappearance of the erstwhile majority population.

But keep in mind that the trends ebb and flow. In the nineteenth century, it was thought that the black race was on a demographic decline to extinction. In the twenty-first, it is sometimes assumed that the white race is. Neither is likely true, and now that the Hispanic population exceeds the black population in the United States, the monochromatic lens through which most race relations are viewed is increasingly irrelevant.

The dream isn’t deferred, it is simply impossible because it is nothing more than a delusion that one racial populations will behave in exactly the same manner as another one. Since this has never happened yet in the recorded history of the human race, it seems more than a little quixotic to believe that because individuals have surmounted their racial, ethnic, and cultural differences, entire populations not only can, but will.