National Review speeds toward irrelevancy:
Normally I would ignore a run of the mill writer from a past its prime publication still living on the legacy of its founder, but Kevin Williamson’s attack on the white middle class is so beyond the pale that it cannot be ignored.
Incredibly, the National Review writer proclaimed in this month’s cover article that those who are being left behind through the global trade agenda and shipping jobs overseas are somehow responsible for not adapting to the new economic reality. “[N]obody did this to them. They failed themselves,” writes Williamson…
It gets better. “It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that,” adds Williamson.
“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible,” he writes.
This is a phenomenon I expect will ultimately be seen through the prism of r/K, because it is similar to the cycles of civilizations. Within the society, one group will work hard, succeed, and enjoy the fruits of that success. As it does, it will gradually grow competition and conflict averse, and it will take the resources it generates for granted. Other groups which are not as successful will grow more aggressive and competitive. If they are inherently capable, this will lead them to produce wealth as well, but if not, that resource restriction will just feed off itself, producing resentment, anger, and aggression.
Soon they will begin to appear as a threat. If the economics are right, these poorer groups may begin to be appeased by the wealthier rabbitized group, in an effort to avoid aggression and competition with them by rabbitizing them.
What you have here in the working class whites is an inherently capable group which produced wealth and comfort, was rabbitized, and whose money was then exploited by the establishment for purposes of rabbitizing any group who could reasonably have been a threat. Now, as economic conditions deteriorate, the rabbits at the top are running out of the rabbtizing money they have been using to keep everyone below them docile and copacetic. Anger is building, and one group is seen as posing more of a threat to their comfortable little establishment applecart than the others.
If you listen to this cry, for white working Americans to just die, you can hear the pained squeal of a rabbit, wishing that the enemy they know will destroy them would just be lifted from their world by the hand of God, so they wouldn’t have to endure what they know is inevitable. He says they deserve to die it as if it is inevitable, to assuage his own sense of panic at the thought that it might not be. In this article, Williamson is both betraying his fear that this group will one day be his downfall, and he is giving you a window into the K-ifying stimuli working whites are going to be exposed to in the coming decades.
He is also revealing that like rabbits, the GOP establishment views Americans as its enemies, and it is importing foreign immigrants as quickly as possible to create a countervailing force that will oppose that enemy for them. Once you realize that, then their commitment to that cause, even at risk of the party’s destruction, makes perfect sense.
The establishment is wise to fear working whites more than everyone else. We have yet to see K-selected working whites, as a group, head into that realm of K where one wants to see their enemy miserable or destroyed. We see #blacklivesmatters stopping traffic on freeways. We see Bernie supporters raiding Trump rallies and throwing blows. We see blacks rioting in various places for various reasons. We even see pogues like Williamson saying working whites should die. But you don’t see K-selected working whites in that space, where they want to take aggressive action. I would say that the last time they were in that space was the Civil War. For now, they are content to merely attend a Trump rally.
The resource restriction we have today is nothing, and yet it has produced a political revolution. Now imagine if, in our lifetimes, we see a full on US fiscal apocalypse. As that happens expect attacks on working whites, like in this case, to increase. As they do, the K-ification of the working whites will accelerate, to the point they are as driven to act as any leftist rioter. Now imagine what will happen when working whites get as angry as the LA rioters. They won’t riot. They will war. That is a big difference.
Where this ends will depend solely on economic conditions. Given I cannot see any way our nation can avoid an outright fiscal apocalypse, were I an establishment hack like Williamson I would keep my head down, lest I gain a wider reputation.
Troubled times approach – Trump is just the harbinger.
[…] Working Whites Are Now Exposed To K-Stimuli […]
A lot of us will pass on before we get the chance to get even, unfortunately. the numbers just aren’t there yet for the war to break out. Thanks for the encouraging words; they make me somewhat optimistic about our race and our culture surviving in some enclave after the mad max comes down.
Spot on. If anything, elites should see Trump as a necessary release valve and help elect him so as to stave off something, or someone, much more intense down the line.
Alas, they won’t do that and thus seal their own fate.
If you haven’t seen it already, take a look at Orban’s speech from March 15th and his rousing call for Europeans to wake and stand in opposition to the forces aligned against us.http://gatesofvienna.net/2016/03/viktor-orban-the-time-has-come-for-opposition-and-resistance/
Williamson (just look at a photo of his porcine face) is merely projecting his own sense of uselessness, as a hack writer for a has-been magazine, onto the class he undoubtedly emerged from. Those “working-class whites” he disdains are still capable of gainful employment and possessed of useful skills; him, not at all. He’s just a low-level swine feeding at the trough of Beltway wankery.
Do you have any thoughts on “The Walking Dead”? I’ve always thought zombie movies have a natural tension between r and K. It’s r in that it is random mortality and free resources (i.e. all the super markets full of canned goods). It’s K in that it’s a small group using violence to defend itself from outside threats while protecting children.
In TWD the focus appears to be on the latter. Most of the plots revolve around Rick’s group annihilating with prejudice some other group that wants to kill them. I’m not sure if it’s realistic that they would still be engaged in that 4 years after the apocalypse instead of settling to a fortified community. Maybe that symbolizes some K-anxiety that the show has basically turned into an elaborate, violent, monster-movie version of Survivor?
I never thought of it in terms of random mortality and free food. Interesting. That gives it a sort of at the edge of Utopia theme.
I always saw it as a mixture of trying to survive the really bad, while keeping the assholes from fucking things up worse. I always thought if it was a much happier time, it wouldn’t have caught on. But with the underlying angst of people knowing that something bad is stalking the nation in the future, it feels like you might learn something that would be useful in the future. So to that end, see it as K-strategists planning for the future.
Can the old communist trade unions be classified as K? Given that they arose as a result of their atrocious working conditions and poverty. Which then made them amenable to marxism promising equality and a utopia.
I don’t know. Where r/K really breaks down is when loyalty or opportunity begins to affect joining with, or opposing other groups which are very r or K. Very K-people can be wrapped into r movements due to loyalty, and very r people can end up leading K-movements for opportunity. It can make differentiating people based on the groups they associate with difficult.
There must be a way to make K-stimuli permanent and inescapable especially for rabbits. Would that even be possible?
The only way I see it happen is if harshness culled society to the point only warriors existed, and the warriors had experienced rabbitism, and decided to impose cultural traditions that culled all rabbits from influence. Something like if you wanted to vote or occupy office, you have to endure cage matches that kill many of the participants, or something similar. Would Hillary or Bernie, or Obama step into such a ring? Would Donald?
But as one can see by how extreme it appears now, it wouldn’t just happen. You’d have to have an extreme period of harshness to change the psychologies first, and even then the resultant success might weaken later generations enough to allow a gradual weakening of the system with rules over time.
Would space given its perpetual scarcity qualify as a permanent K-selection environment?
A Heinleinian Timocracy (Starship Troopers, expanded upon in the Carreraverse) would sort of do that, now that you mention it.
In short. No neither a K nor r society is stable.
AC actually discusses this. If the society is r like now, the resources get consumed and becomes K. If on the other hand it is K, every K will work to make things easier and give rise to r children or grandchildren.
The first historian to notice this was an Islamic historian (whose name eludes me). He noticed that there was a constant turn over of leadership where the Grandfather was a desert nomad who overthrew the cities government. His son (the father) was a desert child but a city man who ran a very good city only to have a son (the grandson) who was a city boy and who was decadent and was overthrown by the next desert warrior. (K to mix to r and then back to K).
This is the general cycle. Some parents can avoid it by teaching the K virtue to their kids and making them live it (early childhood chores, no free money, or in todays parlance cell phones or cars before the child can afford them, etc) But we must as a culture be willing to suffer the exercise of the practice to have the chance of victory on game day. the problem is we as a culture never remember to inflict hardship on our children.
Tribal cultures always had initiation rituals that made boys into men. And until recently when the modern world intruded always retained them.
Why can’t they be a permanent K-stimulus for male children on the cusp of manhood? Or will that be compromised as well?
r/k doesn’t fit everything. This is about status. He believes he has status and the working class none. I wonder what he’ll do if the NR folds and he becomes a poor White like so many others? After all the elites only support him if it serves their interest. He any, at any time, can just be dumped like the rest of us. Will he just shoot himself then realizing his uselessness? I think there needs to be some realization that in 20 to 25 years almost ALL regular jobs will vanish for humans as robots and computers will do all the work.
It is status, but I think status and r/K are interlinked. You could get status, and not become a douche like this, if you were enough of a K-strategist. I think the douchieness is about becoming rabbitized due to the dopamine (and consequent amygdala atrophy) produced by the status. You don’t want to compete. You fear the free competition of ideas and the free competition of men who espouse them, to the point you just want them to go away by any means. Aggression or competitiveness is not just scary, and you not only don’t like it – it is morally wrong, in a cosmic sense. Anyone who opposes you should die – that is the only moral course. These are the types of absolutes which take the strain off the amygdala, by justifying why there shouldn’t be free open competition. It is the beginning of arguing that cheating, or believing the ends justify the means to avoid competition isn’t morally wrong, but rather is the only good course forward.
The mistake made by Williamson on this is one of over simplification. He confounds the idea that when someone’s job no longer makes economic sense, that the task is now out dated (example, horse and buggy whips). This is not true of west Texas oil. Oil is very much current tech. What makes it not as economically viable is law and regulation.
Even worse, the ability of other groups to use the government to make it to costly to operate oil rigs. The point isn’t that we can’t extract resources as cheaply as the Chinese, Saudi’s or any other country. the US worker has tools that generally make him much more efficient at that extraction and thus more cost effective, even when the basic regulations to protect the environment are taken into effect. No the problem is that the defense against the regulation both in the production and in the long years afterward (see EPA and the Colorado mine spill of last year, guess who is on the hook for the clean up???). So we outsource not just the job, but the massive pollution that other countries allow.
Genius stuff