But just because American GIs fought Nazis didn’t necessarily make them Maoist thugs, as @tcjfs pointed out.
And another user, @pnin1957, brought up statistics suggesting that the American GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy would have been veritable shitlords today.
These are the results of a 1942 survey of white enlisted personnel in the US military that were uncovered by Think Progress in 2010 (PDF).
This was reflected in American society at large:
Most civilians and military personnel opposed racial integration. One month before President Truman’s Executive Order, a Gallup poll showed that 63% of American adults endorsed the separation of Blacks and Whites in the military; only 26% supported integration. A 1949 survey of white Army personnel revealed that 32% completely opposed racial integration in any form, and 61% opposed integration if it meant that Whites and Blacks would share sleeping quarters and mess halls.
Just like Muhammad Ali in the 1970s, virtually no whites approved of marriages between whites and blacks in 1959.
And even in 1965, when social mores began loosening up, a narrow majority still approved of actual state laws banning the practice.
Some more polls from @tcjfs.
The people who fought the Nazis don’t appear to have been very Alt Left at all.
Very, very problematic.
And here’s the kicker: These Alt Right or even “Neo-Nazi” views percolated throughout the entire society.
For instance, take the British thinker Bertrand Russell. He wrote the world’s best known popular history of Western philosophy. He was dismissed and almost went to jail for pacifism during WW1. He stood as a suffragette candidate in 1907. He was one of the first to champion sex education and the end of Victorian sexual mores. For all intents and purposes, he was the Chomsky of his time.
And yet, here are his thoughts on… “The Case for White Australia” in 1950 (h/t @whyvert).
Even though Russell’s views on race were very progressive for the time, the ways in which he presented his arguments would have resulted in his immediate excommunication from today’s handshakeworthy society.
How the worm has turned! (with caveats)
Except the anti-Russian sentiment, I suppose. That’s always a constant.
Wow – pretty amazing stuff. The significant jump in attitudes in the late 90s.
So…what’s everybody think? Any chance for anti-miscegenation laws to come back or is that horse completely out of the barn? And if they do, how would they be defined? Europeans can only marry Europeans (so like Asians and Middle Easterners are out)? Or would it just be the old Whites and Blacks aren’t kosher?
Peace.
You could do much the same for attitudes on homosexual behaviour, on feminism, and on internationalism.
Basically the triumph of the socially radical left in the C20th was pretty much complete in the liberal democracies of the US sphere (and arguably it’s inevitable in a liberal democracy that social radicalism powered by identity lobbies will triumph, but that’s another question). The triumph is so complete that people today think establishment politicians aren’t “left-wing” despite their complete endorsement of all those dogmas of social radicalism. They are radical not just in the relative sense of being arguments for radical changes to society, but in the more fundamental sense of advocating the imposition of ideologically constructed untruths upon society (men and women are the same, homosexuality is no different from normal sexual activity, nations are meaningless, “there’s no such thing as race”, etc).
By the standards prevailing when the oldest living people today were born, every society of the US sphere is controlled by the radical left. That’s the scale of the problem faced by conservatives. Conserving the present is conserving a radically left-wing society. We are left in the inherently contradictory position of conservatives having to advocate radical measures of their own just to try to retrieve some of the ground lost in one long lifetime.
However much all these changes seem to be set in stone from our close-up perspective (and as per my post above I’m not just talking about race, but all the other dogmas of the triumphant left), there’s no reason to suppose they are, and good reason to suppose they are not. To believe they are set in stone forever is to accept the leftist confusion of change with “progress”, Obama’s “arc of history”.
And it can be refuted merely by pointing out how impossible the present changes would have seemed to people in the past.
In addition, it is plausible to expect some kind of pendulum in such matters. Complete triumph itself generates resistance, over a timescale of generations, and since these leftist dogmas are just that – ideologically based dogmas rather than understanding of reality – we can expect them to generate ever-increasing problems as societies try to live by them. I think it’s clear that process is well underway.
Almost? Russell definitely did go to jail. He was sent Lytton Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians” to read there, and laughed so uproariously that the warden intervened, reminding him that prison was supposed to be a place of punishment.
OT, but that’s an excellent Tweet, AK:
Beyond the bounds of Twitter’s length constraints I suppose, but it’s also worth bearing in mind that although the motion was opposed by 9 countries, apart from the US and Israel the other seven countries in total represented just 32.4m people, less than 0.5% of global population.
It’s not so much a group of dissenting countries as a collection of trivial US hangers on and supplicants.
Hey Randal,
I agree with you on the major points – especially regarding the assumptions of progress and pendulums that balance things out. But in reality, would this particular view find serious traction in our interconnected world. Because that level of interconnectedness is also part of reality.
So for instance, I could find it potentially becoming acceptable for people to start saying*; “I don’t want my daughter marrying a Chinese or Black guy” publicly without censure, but actual laws? And then how would they be defined, where is the delineation?
Agree here – the systemic problems (part of which is just inability to sustain population numbers) are just too much for the long run, something else will arise out of the ashes.
However, part of me thinks, beyond a certain minority of supporters, anti-miscegenation is as likely to come back as legalized slavery.
Of course all bets are off in case of zombie apocalypse or massive sun flare that puts us technologically back in the 18th century.
Peace.
*Note: I say this as a guy who whole-heartedly supports legally restricting certain couplings – of course, my criteria is religious, but you get my drift.
Despite the decades long propaganda, I don’t that 87% of whites would be happy with their daughter marrying a black. My guess is that a lot of these surveys have people answering the question based on fear of being caught saying the incorrect things (even if they are anonymous surveys).
What’s unlikely to be repeated are particular forms that reflected particularities of the societies in which they occurred.
So societal recognition of the relevance of race to such decisions will likely return, because it is just a return to reality, and that might well give rise to social controls ultimately ending in laws analogous to the old miscegenation laws, but even if laws do arise they are unlikely to be exactly the same or justified in the same ways.
The point is that the underlying attitudes will return and the laws might follow if there is a societal need for them.
Howe & Strauss in their famous ‘Fourth Turning’ book, argued that in a 60-80 year cycle many key things circle back around, and indeed the newest generation is quite into alt-right memes … Here’s a CNN screenshot of a young ‘future shitlord’ who seized the moment when President Trump did a surprise pop-in on his school group visiting the White House
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b0dccd779bdc88cc74460781e20445e6f3e441cde725ca9d6e605faeedb61799.jpg
These findings underscore once again that “public opinion” counts for almost nothing in the long run. It also shows that elites are not only one the driving forces of society, but perhaps the only one. When you have an elite consensus, it will overpower public resistance in the long run.
The idea of public & grassroots revolts are charming and attractive, but they almost always fail. Even when they supposedly “succeed” (like Russian Revolution), they are more often than not just led by a small minority of high IQ activists which are spearheading the charge, and just whipping the people into fury.
Didn’t Russell think that Stalin was basically a Eurasian ( literally ) despot just like Lenin.
The thing about Mongols is they’re best restricted to Mongolia.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
One of the great strengths of the United States is that in many ways it has been molded into a society that truly offers all peoples from around the planet opportunities to succeed, more so than just about anywhere else. Blacks, Asians, Hispanics and others have dutifully fulfilled their place within military structures, and any idea that the US will revert to a different paradigm that may have been popular over a half century ago is living in a fantasy world.
Rather like the Ukraine is living in a fantasy world that it will reclaim the Crimea and the Donbass.
Even more absurd is the idea that it can cozy up to the EU without taking masses of 3rd World Immigrants.
Forget about the Mr, you’re nothing but a cretinous hack
The US has a massively dysfunctional (and quite criminal) black underclass, and the only “solution” so far seems to be to lock up huge numbers of black men in a prison system that has no parallels in other developed countries (even increasingly “diverse” ones).
Bit much to brag about better opportunities than anywhere else when America can’t even really solve its traditional race problem (sure, Asians and other immigrants do well in the US…but they’d probably do so in many other places as well).
Anatoly, can you check your first link? I’m getting an error from Twitter when I click on it.
Interesting chart on attitudes toward intermarriage. One anecdotal comment: growing up, I had a classmate who was the product of a marriage between a white man and a black woman. He was the same age as me, born in the early ’70s, so it’s interesting that ~75% of Americans would have disapproved of his parents’ marriage. But they were well accepted in my neighborhood and my parents’ social circle. It probably helped that the black woman had a PhD.
The last time I saw that classmate, incidentally, was when he stopped into a store where I worked when I was 17. I was mopping the floor, and he mentioned he’d been accepted to Princeton.
Ukraine already controls more than 50% of the Donbas. Get your facts straight before you start your adolescent name calling, Verymuchabore.
A point Steve Sailer has made about integration in the U.S. military is that it’s limited to those who score high enough on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, which is a de facto IQ test. Once you sort for people above a certain level of IQ, integration becomes much more feasible.
I agree that we won’t see a return to de jure segregation, but the salient question is what will happen to policies designed to force integration that wouldn’t occur otherwise (e.g., Section 8 housing subsidies, Affirmative Action, etc.). It’s entirely possible that these will go away in the future.
A country that consists of inferior races is going to have inferior outcomes. You may be either too stupid or too indoctrinated with magic dirt theory to know these obvious truths, but a nation with the demographics of Brazil is going to end with an army like Brazil. Last time I checked, Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, in fact the majority of the worlds countries, don’t stop others from joining their army once they become citizens, funny how this “great strength” of all of these countries doesn’t actually produce the outcomes you think it should.
Frankly, I wonder if there was a significant public shift against interracial marriage in the late 19th and early 20th century. After all, even though only 52% of Northern Whites opposed anti-miscegenation laws in 1965, it is worth noting that all Northern U.S. states other than Indiana repealed their anti-miscegenation laws (if they actually had such laws in the first place, that is) by 1887:
http://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx
Would the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws throughout almost the entire Northern U.S. have been possible had there been as much support for anti-miscegenation laws in the Northern U.S. as was in 1965?
At the time Bertrand Russell also advocated preemptive nuclear war against Soviet Union. (just like many high IQ people of the time, including John von Neumann, the smartest person that ever lived)
http://www.academia.edu/9452633/Bertrand_Russells_Advocacy_of_Preemptive_War_1945-1949
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/htmlreader/TEOTW/chap02.html
Just another example showing that high, even very high, intelligence is no defence against being wrong, even catastrophically wrong.
Nor is even general good sense allied to extremely high intelligence and education proof against making such errors – Enoch Powell, arguably one of the most intelligent and best educated British politicians ever, and certainly one of those with the most sensible opinions generally, came out for unilateral British nuclear disarmament.
Every 86 years a new source of conflict replaces the previous source of conflict in the English-speaking world.
1517 Reformation
1603 Stuarts ascend English throne
1689 Glorious Revolution
1775 American Revolution
1861 Civil War
1947 Cold War
2033 ?
Entitlement programs will always be a question, depending on the political climate. Historically poorer American ethnic groups will still apply in higher numbers, where they will pursue either a career, or shorter term stays, where they’ll be able to take advantage of educational opportunities that they might be less inclined to pursue outside of the military. Qualification tests will ensure that a certain minimum standard in IQ and psychological profile are maintained. The military, after all, needn’t become a free for all for otherwise unsavory and imbecilic types.
The US has always attracted the world’s brightest and best, therefore I wouldn’t worry too much about some sort of a Brazilian scenario. As long as the US tax code is more attractive than Europe’s, many of Europe’s best and brightest (not just East European either) from countries like Germany, France, Sweden, Great Britain will continue to emigrate to the US. Trump is doing his part to keep the tax climate very competitive, in case you hadn’t noticed. 🙂
That hasn’t always been the case outside of the military. Both IQ and psychological standards have been lowered in police departments, for example, leading to tragic results, such as the blonde lady killed by the Somali cop.
Mongols never had despots. (This is why they could never hold an empire together.)
“Asian despotism” is a Chinese and/or Persian thing.
Kudos to Russia for being a relatively tolerant place where different ethnic groups have made great contributions to that most great nation.
A related article on that subject:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/12/12/countering-anti-russian-propaganda.html
OT: What do you think about this, Anatoly? Expected?
https://unv.is/washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/12/20/trump-administration-approves-lethal-arms-sales-to-ukraine
Do you think there will be more, and if so, to what extent? I’d be interested to reading your views. Same goes for other Russian posters here.
Asian despotism is a French thing. Montesquieu came up with this fantastic concept (a state based on tyranny, without laws and private property) in order veiled criticism of the French monarchy. To the real States of the East (where there were laws, private property, etc.) this concept is irrelevant (although widely used in the propaganda).
According to that article, there appears to be a difference of opinion between Fiona Hill and Kurt Volker.
That take is pretty much in line with these:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/04/13/trump-appoints-fiona-hill-russia-adviser-national-security-council.html
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/11/30/us-envoy-ukraine-about-fail-in-his-mission.html
In US foreign policy establishment circles, Hill is a relative moderate with some shortcomings, when compared to Volker, whose overly partisan pro-Kiev regime demeanor is well evident.
You clearly do not read much of what is written at Unz.com, if you did then you would know that America is certainly not getting the best people, nor are formerly white countries sending people to America (as the demographic numbers are so bad that they cannot simply send white people anymore).
As a general rule, the adult population of today does not compare favorably to the adult population of 1948. However, human beings remain human beings, so some species of moral slobbery do evaporate as others appear. That certain caste attitudes have gone by the boards is a cultural improvement.
Section 8 has a contextually inconsequential number of beneficiaries. AA does not ‘force integration’. Segregation in work places was never that important. What it does is short-circuit the recruitment and promotion process.
On the contrary, I enjoy reading the UNZ Review that I discovered about a year ago. I applaud Ron Unz for also including more alt left articles here at his website lately, for which he has experienced some flack (I’m no lefty myself). I’d invite you to widen your own horizons though, for there’s plenty of information about young European immigrants moving to the US to escape the onerous tax codes in Europe and its heavy bureaucratic systems. There’s more out there than just the UNZ review and Breitbart (I try to get a balanced view):
ww.economist.com/node/13216037
There’s a lot more of this kind of stuff out there to be read.
The most arresting wartime poll result:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/147805.Troubling_the_Waters
P. 81
I am fully aware of the propaganda of The Economist (I stupidly had a subscription for years), it is virulently anti white and it does not expand its own horizons by believing that racial differences do not exist, thus making all its pro mass immigration mantras invalid.
Silicon Valley has become a place full of brown nerds from India and some yellow ones from East Asia. It is absolutely anti white, Twitter, Google and Facebook have become absolutely anti white SJW organizations, one can argue if these over hyped gossip enablers are actually great innovation hubs, but it cannot be argued that if you are pro white you cannot support them in any way.
Do you like the idea to overrun Ukraine with brown nerds to make some extra cash? (actually the fact is the common man will not have a significant increase in income).
I think it goes back a good deal farther than that.
Herodotus and other Greek writers, for example, saw a great difference between Greek and Oriental practices. Greeks were free men, Persians, Egyptians,etc. were all slaves of their King and proud of it.
The Hellenistic kingdoms became orientalized and the process was repeated by the Roman view of the eastern kingdoms.
The Romans became orientalized themselves, eventually becoming the Byzantines, who were viewed in pretty much the same way by barbaric western Europeans during the middle ages.
The funny part about all this is that there has never been, except perhaps for brief periods, a true autocracy without factions and politics. In the “despotisms” the politics was just below the surface. A “despot” who lost sight of this fact and started believing his own propaganda tended to get killed, often by his own guards.
None of this is to say that the perceptions of eastern tyranny by westerners was accurate, just that they really did see it that way.
http://www.tank-net.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=38893&page=858#entry1343038
‘Propaganda of the Economist’ yet I notice that you weren’t able to identify one factual error in the article? The idea that European entrepreneurs have been leaving Europe in droves is not difficult to substantiate – the internet has many articles that subtantiate this point, from statistical analysis to personal blogsites. Here’s one taken from a personal blogsite. If you don’t agree with the author’s conclusions, try not to call it ‘propaganda’ but offer an intelligent response:
https://dri.es/entrepreneurs-not-the-government-will-save-europes-economy
Did you actually read my comment? Silicon Valley is become a brown nerd hub, why you would find this brown nerd hub desirable is beyond me. And stop trying to conflate this with European immigration, it has absolutely nothing to do with European movement of people, the amount is so miniscule that is can be treated as basically zero.
More importantly, answer the question, are you happy with a flood of brown nerds and black Sub Saharans into Ukraine? Don’t avoid it by citing stuff that has nothing to do with the issue, just answer the question.
My, how the Overton Window has shifted! In 20 years, conservatives will be fully on board with tranny bathrooms, Black Lives Matter and all the other lefty stuff.
I agree with your point – so far as tech is concerned, Europe largely functions as a human capital repository for Silicon Valley.
Plenty of Germans decamping for California due to nicer climate and lower taxes, at least back in the 2000s (met a few).
You don’t have to wait that long, they are doing it now already, you will find NRO articles endorsing both BLM and transgender rights. The time span from being against homosexual marriage to declaring it a conservative value was 4 months if I can recall.
Good post, Anatoly. I’ve mentioned a few times Unz is startling for its good anachronism. This is the commonsensical way educated people of good will used to talk about the issues of the day a century ago, before common sense was whisked away in the aftermath of the 1914-1945 wars and the 1960s upheavals.
Am wondering whether anyone has done speculative writing on how young Americans of 1942 may have responded had they known what the America of 2012 was to be. I’m thinking of C. M. Kornbluth’s short story “Two Dooms”, in which a Los Alamos scientist has his doubts about the Manhattan Project eliminated after seeing a Nazi- and Japanese-occupied America in a drug-induced dream. Maybe speculative fiction might be a good way of selling our concerns a little better.
Yeah, and it will remain so. It’s called survival of the fittest and the most capable! Go find yourself a forest in Idaho or a mountain in Appalachia to live in if you don’t like it.
“If the British soldiers on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 could look forward to the end of the century and see what England has become, they would not have bothered to advance another 40 yards up the beach.”
— David Irving, circa 1999
I am glad you are making my point, as good as it gets in fact, proving to morons like Mr Hack what the people they adore really think about things.
Yes, that’s spot on. And the difficulty is that people with conservative/traditionalist leanings are (naturally) temperamentally inclined to think that all they have to do is to try to maintain the status quo. The idea of having to think and operate like a radical and advocate drastic and sweeping changes frightens and upsets them.
The other problem is that conservatives/traditionalists under the age of 50 just can’t imagine a truly conservative/traditionalist society. They’ve never experienced such a society. They’ve internalised so much socially radical dogma without realising it. They can’t imagine a society in which men go out to work and women stay home and keep house and raise the children. They can’t imagine a society in which homosexuality is regarded as being unhealthy and unnatural and destructive. They can’t imagine a society in which sex is something you do after you get married. Or a society in which marriage is considered to be a permanent arrangement.
They think they’re conservative but they aren’t really.
There is one way it might come back. If American blacks realise that miscegenation is a disaster for them – if they realise that it will mean their eventual erasure as a distinct population and a distinct culture. Also if indigenous peoples like Australian Aboriginals and American Indians realise that it means extinction for them in the long term.
It won’t get traction if pushed by whites but it might get traction if pushed by non-whites.
I can’t think of a single one that has succeeded. It’s always a revolutionary vanguard of some sort pushing things, which means it’s a new elite displacing an old elite, or it’s one part of the elite turning against the rest of the elite, or there’s an outside power that determines the outcome.
In English history the Reformation and the Civil War were rising new elites displacing declining older elites. The Glorious Revolution was actually a successful Dutch invasion.
The outcome of the American Revolution was decided by the French.
The Russian Revolution – a rising new intellectual elite displacing the old elite.
The Chinese Revolution – only succeeded because the Kuomintang had been fatally weakened by the war against Japan plus the communists had Soviet aid.
Chartism was arguably a grassroots revolt. It was crushed.
No problem. It seems that even Karlin shares in my views. He even points out that there are plenty of white Europeans (Germans) moving to California to take advantage of its warm weather (and business climate too, see comment # 42).
High, even very high, intelligence tends to lead people to accept incredibly stupid ideas that sound great in theory but won’t work in practice. Very high IQ people love theories. People with moderate IQ tend to rely on observations of the real world.
My own ideological and historical framework was enormously transformed during my creation of my periodical archiving system during the 2000s, now recently incorporated into this website at http://www.unz.com/print/
The system contains a good fraction of all the mainstream and elite American publications of the last 150-200 years, most of them otherwise nowhere else available, and although nearly all my time was spent on the software side of things, I obviously couldn’t help noticing the Tables of Contents, and occasionally glanced at some of the articles. I had always thought of myself as a knowledgeable and well-read individual, but I was utterly stunned by what I discovered. I’ve occasionally mentioned a few tidbits here and there to eminent, elderly academics whom I’m friendly with, and they seem just as shocked.
For years I’ve told people I felt a little like an earnest young Soviet researcher who happened to be digging through the musty Kremlin archives in 1980 and was absolutely shocked to discover that Trotsky was not the notorious Nazi spy he’d always assumed, but had actually been a top figure in the Bolshevik Revolution (considering the numerous Russians on this thread, I should emphasize that this is merely a joke rather than a serious statement).
Given that the corpus of publications I’ve accumulated is pretty much unique, and the readership traffic it has received has been dismally low, it wouldn’t surprise me if I’m just about the only person in the world aware of many of these things. And I’m therefore very much hoping to finally get around to writing some of them up once my current software development system has been completed.
What are the terms that should be used for “true” and “false” conservatism?
You must belong to one of those subset of low IQ whites (crackers) that lost his job to one of those high IQ ‘brown skinned’ tech nerds (Indians) that you love to hate, and therefore have a chip on your shoulder? 🙂
The other problem is that conservatives/traditionalists under the age of 50 just can’t imagine a truly conservative/traditionalist society. They’ve never experienced such a society. They’ve internalised so much socially radical dogma without realising it. They can’t imagine a society in which men go out to work and women stay home and keep house and raise the children. They can’t imagine a society in which homosexuality is regarded as being unhealthy and unnatural and destructive. They can’t imagine a society in which sex is something you do after you get married. Or a society in which marriage is considered to be a permanent arrangement.
I think you’ve confused ‘conservative / traditionalists under the age of 50’ with a certain porous and socially-anxious evangelical type. There aren’t many traditionalists among Millennials, but the ones there are are cognizant of what the rules are.
That aside, there was an ample population of married women in the workforce in 1957 (fully 1/3 of the workforce was female) and farm wives were never lacking in tasks that had to be attended to for the family’s welfare. At the same time, stay-at-home-mothers haven’t disappeared. They’re less numerous and more socially isolated than they used to be, however. The big behavioral changes in the last 60 years were in professional-managerial class households, not among more rank-and-file Americans.
The fellow displaced was likely an ordinary suburban chap who was laid off at some point past his 50th birthday, not a ‘cracker’.
We’re of course talking about hypothetical situations here. If you’re really a ‘free marketer’ as most of the readers of this site are, then market forces will dictate to the employer who he can employ at the lowest price. The situation that you infer is not a new one, and it doesn’t just include workers of color displacing white native workers. Plenty of older white workers have been displaced by white younger workers too – older workers shouldn’t be surprised, and should plan accordingly. The idea of cradle to grave employment is a thing of the past, and smacks of socialist or at least liberal values anyway.
Given that the corpus of publications I’ve accumulated is pretty much unique, and the readership traffic it has received has been dismally low, it wouldn’t surprise me if I’m just about the only person in the world aware of many of these things. And I’m therefore very much hoping to finally get around to writing some of them up once my current software development system has been completed.
As a start, why don’t you provide a list of some of the items that “we” would be likely to find of particular interest, and that we most likely know nothing about?
Well, here’s one small example…
If you go to any of the main archives pages, near the top there’s a “dynamic cloud” containing the names of the authors writing during that period, weighted by their number of articles. Since these are drawn from many America’s leading publications, in very rough terms, this might be considered a metric of their prominence. Here’s an example:
http://www.unz.com/print/192/Articles/
Look these names over, and ask yourself how many of them are familiar to you. I was quite surprised to discover that some of the most renowned and prominent American academic figures had disappeared so thoroughly that not only had I never heard of them, but top professors in their own specialized fields have never heard of them either.
When something similar happened in the USSR under Stalin during the 1930s, it was called a “purge”…
How can you actually read the articles? I only see options for mailing and printing them, is there a way to increase the size of the scans and read them online?
We’re of course talking about hypothetical situations here. If you’re really a ‘free marketer’ as most of the readers of this site are, then market forces will dictate to the employer who he can employ at the lowest price. The situation that you infer is not a new one, and it doesn’t just include workers of color displacing white native workers. Plenty of older white workers have been displaced by white younger workers too – older workers shouldn’t be surprised, and should plan accordingly. The idea of cradle to grave employment is a thing of the past, and smacks of socialist or at least liberal values anyway.
The median retirement age in this country is 63 and that incorporates the effect of disability benefits and early retirement for the military and civil service. The problem referred to is local to technical and professional-managerial employments and can be persistent no matter what the reserve wage of the displaced employee is. (See Clayton Cramer about his experiences as a laid-off programmer over 50). If what’s happened in my own circle of acquaintances is any guide, you need to go into an entirely different line of work in order to stay employed.
It’s actually quite unusual in the workforce at large that displaced workers are expected to train their replacements. The stories you hear about are in IT.
Although I can sympathize and even empathize with what is going on, what’s the alternative? Forcing private employers to keep and even promote older workers over younger ones? Isn’t what we’re describing here just a real life example of Darwinism, and ‘survival of the fittest’? Nobody ever said that life was fair or not full of surprises and pain?…
Unfortunately, about half the articles are from extant publications and are still under copyright, and since this isn’t Russia I’m too cautious to make them available in readable form. But roughly a million or so articles and books are fully readable in the system, and you can see the titles and authors of everything.
For those of you unaware, American copyright law has been getting more and more ridiculous over the decades due to the corrupt machinations of wealthy corporations, and although none of them care anything about old books and articles, the unavailability of these amount to collateral damage:
http://www.unz.com/runz/the-bitter-legacy-of-mickey-mouse/
If my system gets a more use and greater visibility, I’m hoping that more publications will grant me the rights to make their archives readable. For example, a year or two ago I was totally shocked to discover that the staff at The Atlantic actually used my system as the only means of navigating their own 150 years worth of archives, and they were very eager to get access to their own PDFs as well. I tried to work out a deal in which I would give them copies of everything in exchange for their authorizing me to make their archives publicly readable, but their lawyers weren’t sure whether even they fully controlled their own copyrights, so nothing happened.
Like I said, American copyright law is totally ridiculous…
I tried to read an article from The Nation from 1927 (!), is even that still under copyright? Sounds excessive indeed…but still, great resource you’ve created here, must be a real treasure trove for anybody who wants to research the history of American thought and journalism.
Good question. I wish I had an answer!
Terms like left, right, capitalism, socialism, liberal, conservative don’t mean what they meant half a century ago. Today those terms have no clear meaning at all. We can’t even use terms like traditionalist. There are plenty of people who claim to be traditionalist Christians who are actually out-and-out liberals and who support social policies that would (quite correctly) have been regarded as dangerously and foolishly radical a few decades ago.We can’t use the word reactionary since it’s been claimed by the neo-reactionaries. And now we have neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, neoliberals and even paleo-libertarians! And we have the alt-right, the alt-left, the alt-lite, the alt-west and the alt-white.
Has the term alt-conservative been claimed yet? What about paleo-reactionary?
Most false conservatives are simply pro-capitalist liberals.
I’m certainly no free marketeer. Do the majority here fall into that category? You might be right about that.
It might smack of socialism but I’m not sure it has any connection with liberal values.
If it’s a socialist value then mark me down as a socialist.
Although I can sympathize and even empathize with what is going on, what’s the alternative? Forcing private employers to keep and even promote older workers over younger ones?
One facility for this sort of thing in tech would be anomalies in the immigration law which allow employers to import replacement workers from India and the Far East. You can start by refashioning immigration law, distributing settler’s visas on a first-come-first-serve basis among those who meet preliminary requirements for a spot in the queue (e.g. demonstrated English proficiency). That’s the only policy response I can think of; employment discrimination law I think causes more problems than it solves. One of the curious about employment discrimination law in the US though is how it can generate inefficiencies over here while being routinely flouted over there.
Since it’s not my trade, I don’t know whether you have these practices because older workers in these sectors actually are not worth hiring or whether it’s just a fashion which persists because there isn’t a competitive disadvantage in so doing – everyone else is doing the same thing. (I know in the tech sector they were willing 20 years ago to employ older programmers to work out some anomalies in COBOL programming that were due to cause trouble).
The idea of cradle to grave employment is a thing of the past,
That’s a common Japanese practice which has been atypical even there. It wasn’t seen in this country outside of abiding family businesses, the public sector, and higher education.