After several painful years of committing what may be called slow-motion suicide, pop singer Whitney Houston has perished at the age of 48, another wretchedly pitiful casualty of celebrity self-induced crapulence. Her burial earlier this month was accompanied by the same sort of flamboyant pomp and colorful fanfare that attended the funeral of Michael Jackson three years ago, and many of the usual suspects were on hand to exploit the tragedy of an early death for the purposes of egregious self-promotion. (Whenever someone Black and famous dies, that tubby walrus-like buffoon Al “Tawana Told the Truth” Sharpton seems to take it as his cue to stick his mug into every TV camera in sight and pontificate in his inimitably greasy way about America’s innumerable social ills, until you wish some renegade reporter would have the decency to smack him over the head with his microphone and yell, “Prophesy to us, O ebony Savior… Who hath struck you?”)

I am not immune to the pathos surrounding Ms. Houston’s demise, and I will pray for her eternal soul. The truth is, though, that her music was crap.

This is not to say that Mrs. Bobby Brown wasn’t immensely talented, of course. Her voice possessed magnificent range, and at one time (long ago) she comported herself with dignity, poise, and class. But talent, range, dignity, poise, and class aren’t everything. In particular, they don’t make crappy music into good music.

I am a child of the 80s who remembers Whitney’s fresh-faced heyday, and well do I recall how much I despised every single W.H.
song that invariably rocketed to the top of Casey Kasem’s charts. Today, in my old age, I’m a bit more mellow on most issues, but I still regard the Whitney canon with trepidation, dismay, and horror. In particular I particularly cringe and moan deliriously, as might a man with a simultaneous toothache and migraine, when I consider the awesome awfulness of that trilogy of '80s ballad standards: “Saving All My Love For You,” “I Will Always Love You,” and (saving the worst for last) “The Greatest Love of All.”

Aesthetically speaking, “Saving” tries for a kind of torch-song vibe, but the attempt at sexiness falls flat; in fact, it’s even
somewhat gross, perhaps even icky. “We’ll be maa-aa-king love the whole night through!” Whitney growls in the song’s climactic final verse. Really? The “whole night”? Is that even possible? If it were possible, would it be desirable? Wouldn’t it hurt after
a couple of hours? Wouldn’t it eventually just get boring? Count me out, Miss Whit. A man needs his sleep.

As for “I Will Always Love You,” I’ll admit I remember nothing about the song save for the chorus, which is twenty seconds of sheer octave-scaling aural frightfulness. It is so vocally overcooked, lays on the “passionate devotion” thing so thickly, gets so in-your-face with its virtuoso protestation of fealty, that you just want to run away in terror, with your hands clasped over
your ears. I really feel for any guy whose girlfriend tells him that she wants this musical equivalent of waterboarding to be “our song.” I’d say best get out before she smothers you with a pillow while you’re sleeping, or stabs you with a restaurant fork in a jealous rage after growing convinced that you flirted with that pretty waitress when you asked her to put extra mayonnaise on your sandwich. We must recognize psycho-bait when we hear it, and “I Will Always Love You” is, indeed, an effective dog-whistle to psychos everywhere. Not to mention that the plaintive whines of bitch-dogs in heat are more pleasing to the human ear than the song’s screechy, gushing, relentlessly insistent refrain.

But finally, we arrive at the most appalling of destinations in this musical triptych—on the infernal shore that yawns before the harsh, hell-blasted realm that is “The Greatest Love of All.”

Let us pause, with a shudder, to consider the grotesque, demonic audacity of the song’s very title. Without a trace of irony, it takes the beautiful poetry of St. Paul (“the greatest of these is love”), and shamelessly inverts its underpinning ethos. For the “greatest” love, in the song’s twisted perspective, isn’t love of others (charitos) or love of God (agape), but love of self. “Greatest” is hardly the first song to glorify narcissism; indeed, modern pop stardom is all about saying “Worship me, ye lowly minions!” But it’s usually done with a sort of flair, and a healthy sense of humor. Think of Whitney’s own '80s contemporary Madonna and her cheeky “Material Girl” persona. Or consider Johnny Rotten’s snarling declaration:“I’ve got no feelings for anybody else, except for myself, my beautiful self!”

But John Lydon’s sneering hunchbacked-ogre stage persona and Ms. Ciccone’s intentionally provocative undulating/gyrating/moaning “virgin-touched-for-the-first-time” act are both obvious examples of shtick. By contrast, Whitney’s “Greatest Love” musical manifesto comes through as thoroughly sincere; she promotes self-centeredness with the rapt enthusiasm of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. Indeed, the tone of the song is nothing if not self-congratulatory; the speaker is very taken with herself, in a manner that resembles the smug, maudlin narrator of Frank Sinatra’sinsufferable “My Way” (expertly sent up in Sid Vicious’s far superior punk-rock cover several years later). She clearly expects praise and plaudits for bravely choosing her life-philosophy and succeeding against all odds—she graciously awaits our applause for having learned to make love to herself her whole life through.

But “Greatest” in fact exceeds the odium of “My Way” because it is far more grandiose. In fact, the speaker actually has the gall to begin with a brazenly shameless shout-out to “the children,” whom she “believes are our future.” This sounds like a profound and portentous claim, but it’s really quite inane. Can one truly “believe” something that is axiomatically true? Does it make sense to “believe” that water is wet, or that a circle is round?

In any case, after imploring us to “show (the children) all the beauty they possess inside,” she gets to the heart and soul of the matter; just as the children need to recognize their true inner wonderfulness, so she “decided long ago” to recognize and pay homage to her own greatness:

I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone’s shadow

If I fail, if I succeed, at least I live as I believe

No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity!”

Ah, but they can! And they will. You don’t have to be a debauched junkie to recognize this fact. One’s bid for dignity is sure to fail, because living in our world means rendering oneself helpless against the manifold forces of de-dignification, checked off in Prince Hamlet’s lengthy laundry list of all-too-common human agonies, to wit:

The whips and scorns of time

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely

The insolence of office, the law’s delay

And the respect that patient merit of the unworthy takes… 

Such indignities, and probably worse, simply cannot be avoided as long as we trudge through this mortal coil. Moreover, the truth is that, as anti-modernist guru Tyler Durden tells his disciples in Chuck Paulanik’s novel Fight Club, none of us are, as the bogus self-esteem movement would have it, “sacred unique snowflakes of special unique specialness.” In fact, if we are honest with ourselves we will admit that there is much within us that is in fact ugly, appalling, and undesirable. Self-love, then, must be tempered with a sober self-knowledge, which means acknowledging that we are largely unlovely creatures, riddled with sin. Thus “Greatest Love’s” crescendo of a coda, which counsels…

If by chance that special place

That you’ve been dreaming of

Leads you to a lonely place

Find your strength in love

May light perpetual shine upon her now, and may she know a peace that transcends the dubious self-love she so unfortunately rhapsodized in her ghastliest and most memorable hit song.

Andy Nowicki joins Richard to discuss his recent journey "behind the Rainbow curtain" to experience firsthand the life and culture of South Africa's Boer people.

In our modern Western societies, liberals do all the laughing, and conservatives do all the crying. Liberals may find this an extraordinary assertion, given that over the past century their preferred political parties have spent more time out of power than their conservative rivals, and, indeed, no radical Left party has ever held a parliamentary or congressional majority. Yet, this view is only possible if one regards a Labour or a Democratic party as ‘the Left’, and a Conservative or a Republican party as ‘the Right’—that is, if one considers politics to be limited to liberal politics, and regards the negation of liberalism as a negation of politics. The reality is that in modern Western societies, both ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’ consist of liberals, only they come in two flavours: radical and less radical. And whether one is called liberal or conservative is simply a matter of degree, not of having a fundamentally different worldview. The result has been that the dominant political outlook in the West has drifted ever ‘Leftwards’. It has been only the speed of the drift that has changed from time to time.

This is not to deny the existence of conservatism. Conservatism is real. This is to say that conservatism, even in its most extreme forms, operates against, and is inevitably dragged along by, this Leftward-drifting background. And this is crucial if we are to have a true understanding of modern conservatism and why conservatives are always losing, even when electoral victories create the illusion that conservatives are frequently winning.

It would be wrong, however, to attribute the endless defeat of conservatism entirely to the Leftward drift of the modern political cosmos. That would an abrogation of conservatives’ responsibility for their own defeats. Conservatives are responsible for their own defeats. The causes stem less from liberalism’s dominance, than from the very premise of conservatism. Triumphant liberalism is made possible by conservatism, while triumphant conservatism leads eventually to liberalism. Anyone dreaming of ‘taking back his country’ by supporting the conservative movement, and baffled by its inability to stop the march of liberalism, has yet to understand the nature of his cause. The brutal truth: he is wasting his time.

Defeating liberalism requires acceptance of two fundamental statements.

• Traditionalism is not conservatism.
• Liberal defeat implies conservative defeat.

Much of our ongoing conversation about the future of Western society has focused on the deconstruction of liberalism. Not much of it has focused on a deconstruction of conservatism. Most deconstructions of conservatism have come from the Left, and, as we will see, there is good reason for this. It is time conservatism be deconstructed from outside the Left (and therefore also the Right). I say ‘also’ because neither conservatism nor traditionalism I class as ‘the Right’. Neither do I accept that ‘Right wing’ is the opposite of ‘Left wing’; ‘the Right’ is predicated on ‘the Left’, and is therefore not independent of ‘the Left’. Consequently, any use of the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ coming from this camp is and has always been expedient; I expect such terms to disappear from current usage once the political paradigm has fundamentally changed.

Below I describe eight salient traits that define conservatism, explain the long-term pattern of conservative defeats, and show how liberalism and conservatism are complementary and mutually reinforcing partners, rather than contrasting enemies.

Anatomy of Conservatism

Fear

Proponents of the radical Left like to describe the politics of the Right as ‘the politics of fear’. Leftist propaganda may be full of invidious characterisations, false dichotomies, and outright lies, but this is one observation that, when applied to conservatism, is entirely correct. The reason conservatives conserve and are suspicious of youth and innovation is that they fear change. Conservatives prefer order, fixity, stability, and predictable outcomes. One of their favourite refrains is ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. There is some wisdom in that, and there are, indeed, advantages to this view, since it requires less effort, permits forward planning, and reduces the likelihood of stressful situations. Once a successful business or living formula is found, one can settle quite comfortably into a reassuring routine in a slow world of certainties, which at best allows for gradual and tightly controlled evolution. Change ends the routine, breaks the formula, disrupts plans, and lead to stressful situations that demand effort and speed, cause stress and uncertainty, and may have unpredictable outcomes. Conserving is therefore an avoidance strategy by risk-averse individuals who do not enjoy the challenge of thinking creatively and adapting to new situations. For conservatives change is an evil to be feared.

No answers

We can deduce then that the reason conservatives fear change is that they are not very creative. Creativity, after all, involves breaking the mould, startling associations, unpredictability. Conservatives are disturbed by change because they generally know not how to respond. This is the primary reason why, when change does occur, as it inevitably does, their response tends to be slow and to focus on managing symptoms rather than addressing causes. This is also the primary reason why they either plan well ahead against every imaginable contingency or remain in a state of denial until faced with immediate unavoidable danger. Conservatives are first motivated by fear and then paralysed by it.

Defensive

Unfortunately for conservatives, the world is ever changing, the universe runs in cycles, and anything alive is always subject to unpredictable changes in state. Because they generally have no answers, this puts conservatives always on the defensive. The only time conservatives take aggressive action is when planning against possible disruptions to their placid life. They are the last to show initiative in anything else because being a pioneer is risky, fraught with stress and uncertainties. Thus, conservatism is always a resistance movement, a movement permanently on the back foot, fighting a tide that keeps on coming. The conservatives’ main preoccupation is holding on to their positions, and ensuring that, when retreat becomes inevitable, their new position is as close as possible to their old one. Once settled into a new position, any lull in the tide becomes an opportunity to recover the previous position. However, because lulls do not last long enough and recovering lost positions is difficult, the recovery is at best partial, never wholly successful. Conservatives are consequently always seen as failures and sell-outs, since eventually they are always forced to compromise.

Necrophiles

Their lack of creativity leads conservatives to look for answers in the past. This goes beyond learning the lessons from history. Averse to risk, they mistrust novelty, which makes their present merely a continuation of the past. In this they contrast against both liberals and traditionalists: for the former the present is a delay of the future, for the latter it is a moment between what was and will be. At the same time, conservatives resemble the liberals, and contrast against traditionalists more than they think. One reason is that they confuse tradition with conservation, overlooking that tradition involves cyclical renewal rather than museological restoration. Museological restoration is what conservatives are about. Their domain is the domain of the dead, embalmed or kept alive artificially with systems of life support. Another reason is that both liberals and conservatives are obsessed with the past: because they love it much, conservatives complain that things of the past are dying out; because they hate it much, liberals complain that things of the past are not dying out soon enough! One is necrophile, the other a murderer. Both are about death. In contrast, traditionalism is about life, for life is a cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and renewal.

Boring

Fear, resistance to change, lack of creativity, and an infatuation with dead things makes conservatives boring. Dead things can be interesting, of course, and in our modern throwaway society, dead things can have the appeal of the exotic, particularly since they belong to a time when the emphasis was on quality rather than quantity. Quality, understood both as high quality and possessing qualities, is linked to rarity or uniqueness, excitement or surprise, and, therefore, creativity or unpredictability. Conservatives, however, conserve because they long for a world of certainties—slow, secure, comfortable, and with predictable outcomes. Granted: such an existence can be pleasant given optimal conditions, and it may indeed be recommended in a variety of situations, but it is not exciting. Excitement involves precisely the conditions and altered states that conservatives fear and seek to avoid. It thus becomes difficult to get excited about anything conservative.

Old

There are good reasons why conservatism is associated with old age. As a person grows old he loses his taste for excitement; his constitution is less robust, he has less energy, he has fewer reserves, he has rigidified in mind and body, and he is less capable of the rapid, flexible responses demanded by intense situations and sudden shocks. It makes sense for a person to become more conservative as he grows old, but this is hardly a process relished by anyone. Once old enough to be taken seriously, the desire is always to remain young and delay the signs of old age. Expressing boredom by saying that something ‘got old’ implies a periodic need for change. Conservatives oppose change, so they get old very fast.

Irrelevant

Preoccupation with the past, resistance to change, and mistrust of novelty eventually makes conservatives irrelevant. This is particularly the case in a world predicated on the desirability of progress and constant innovation. Conservatives end up becoming political antiquarians, rather than effective powerbrokers: they operate not as leaders of men, but as curators in a museum.

Losers

Sooner of later, through their refusal to adapt until they become irrelevant, conservatives are constantly left behind, waving a fist at the world with angry incomprehension. Because eventually survival necessitates periodic surrenders and regroupings at positions further to the Left, conservatives come to be seen as spineless, as people always in retreat, as, in short, losers. The effective function of a conservative in present-day society is to organise surrender, to ensure retreats are orderly, to keep up vain hopes or a restoration, so that there is never risk of a revolutionary uprising.

Liberalism’s Best Ally

With the above in mind, it is hard not to see conservatism as liberalism’s own controlled opposition: it may not be that way, but the effect is certainly the same. Conservatism provides periodic respite after a bout of liberalism, allowing citizens to adapt and grow accustomed to its effects before the next wave of liberalisation. Worse still, conservative causes, because they eventually always become irrelevant, provide a rationale for liberalism, supplying proof for the Left of why it is and should remain the only game in town. Liberals love conservatives.

Conservatism and Tradition

Conservatism does not have to be liberalism’s best ally: conservatism can be the best ally of any anti-establishment movement, since it always comes to represent the boring alternative. Conservatives defend the familiar, but familiarity breeds contempt, so over time people lose respect for what is and grow willing to experience some turbulence—results may be unpredictable and may indeed turn out to be negative, but at least the turbulence makes people feel alive, like there is something they can be actively involved in. In the age of liberalism, conservatism is fundamentally liberal: it does not defend tradition, since liberalism has caused it to be forgotten for the most part, but an earlier version of liberalism. In an age of tradition, conservatism could well be the best ally of a rival tradition, since conservatism always stagnates what is, thus increasing receptivity over time to any kind of change. Thus conservatism sets the conditions for destructive forms of change.

By contrast, tradition is evolution, and so long as it avoids the trap of conservatism (stagnation), those within the tradition remain engaged with it. This is not to say that traditions are immune from self-destructive events and should never be abandoned: hypertely, maladaption, or pathological evolution, for example, can destroy a tradition from within. However, that is outside our scope here.

Confusion of Tradition and Conservation

In the age of liberalism, because it has forgotten tradition, tradition is confused with conservation. Thus some conservatives describe themselves as traditionalists, even though they are just archaic liberals. Some self-described traditionalists may erroneously adopt conservative traits, perhaps out of a confused desire to reject liberalism’s notions of progress. Tradition and conservation are distinct and separate processes. Liberalism may contain its own traditions. Liberalism may also become conservative in its rejection of tradition. Likewise for conservatism, except that it rejects liberalism and does so only ostensibly, not in practice.

End of Liberalism

Ending liberalism requires an end to conservatism. We should never call ourselves conservatives. The distinction between tradition and conservation must always be made, for transcending the present ‘Left’-‘Right’ paradigm of modern democratic politics in the West demands a great sorting of what is traditional from what is conservative, so that the former can be rediscovered, and the latter discarded as part of the liberal apparatus.

In doing so we must be alert to the trap of reaction. Reactionaries are defined by their enemies, and thus become trapped in their enemies’ constructions, false dichotomies, and unspoken assumptions. Rather than rejection, the key word is transcendence. The end of liberalism is achieved through its transcendence, its relegation into irrelevance.

Given the confusion of our times, it must be stressed that tradition is not about returning to an imagined past, or about reviving a practice that was forgotten so that it may be continued exactly as it was when it was abandoned. There may have been a valid reason for abandoning a particular practice, and the institution of a new practice may have been required in order for the tradition successfully to continue. A tradition, once rediscovered, must be carried forward. Continuation is not endless replication.

After Liberalism

The measure of our success in this enterprise will be seen in the language.

We know liberalism has been successful because many of us ended up defining ourselves as a negation of everything that defined liberalism. Many of the words used to describe our political positions are prefixed with ‘anti-‘. This represented an adoption by ‘anti-liberals’ of negative identities manufactured by liberals for purposes of affirming themselves in ways that suited their convenience and flattered their vanity.

Ending liberalism implies, therefore, the development of a terminology that transcends liberalism’s constructions. Only when they begin describing themselves as a negation of what we are will we know we have been successful, for their lack of an affirmative, positive vocabulary will be indicative that their identity has been fully deconstructed and is then socially, morally, and philosophically beyond the pale.

Developing such a vocabulary, however, is a function of our determining once again who we are and what we are about. Without a metaphysics to define the tradition and drive it forward, any attempt at a cultural revolution will fail. A people need a metaphysics if they are to tell their story. If the story of who we are and where we are going cannot be told for lack of a defining metaphysic, any attempt at a cultural revolution will need to rely on former stories, will therefore lapse into conservatism, and thus into tedium and irrelevance.

After Conservatism

One cannot be for Western culture if one is not for the things that define Western culture. A metaphysics, and therefore ‘our story’, is defined through art. Art, in the broadest possible sense, gives expression to values, ideals, and sentiments that a people share and feel in the core of their beings, but which often cannot be articulated in words. Therefore, the battle for Western identity is waged at this level, not in the political field, even if identity is a political matter. Similarly, any attempt to use art for political purposes fails, because politics, being merely the art of the possible, is defined by culture, not the other way around.

In the search for ‘our story’, we must not confuse art with craft. Craftmanship may be defined by tradition, and a tradition may find expression in crafts, making them ‘traditional’, but the two are not synonymous. Similarly, craftsmanship may improve art, but craft is not art anymore than art is craft. Art explores and defines. Craft reproduces and perpetuates. Thus, art is to tradition what craft is to conservatism. This is why contemporary art, being an extreme expression of liberal ideals, is without craftsmanship, and why art with craftsmanship is considered conservative, illustration, or ‘outsider’.

Those concerned with the continuity of the West often treat reading strictly non-fiction and classics as proof of their seriousness and dedication, but ironically it will be when they start reading fiction and making new fiction that they will be at their most serious and dedicated. If tradition implies continuity and not simple replication, then it also implies ongoing creation and not simple preservation.

After Tradition

No tradition has eternal life. Ours will some day end. Liberalism sees its fulfilment as the end of history, but that is their cosmology, not ours. Therefore, liberalism does not—and should never—indicate to us that we have reached the end of the line. The degeneration of the West is tied to the degeneration of liberalism. The West will be renewed when the liberals come crashing down. They will be reduced to an obsolete and irrelevant subculture living off memories and preoccupied with conserving whatever they have left. Once regenerated, the West will continue until its tradition self-destructs or is replaced by another. Whatever tradition replaces ours may be autochthonous, but it could well be the tradition of another race. If that proves so, that will be the end of our race. Thus, so long as our race remains vibrant, able to give birth to new metaphysics when old ones die, we may live on, and be masters of our destiny.

The recent exchange of friendly fire on this site between Colin Buchan Liddell, Andy Nowicki and Paul Deussen (not to mention readers’ comments) has raised the interesting subject of humour in politics.

Humour is an unpredictable weapon, which can easily explode in a user’s face. Humour is very personal, and what seems vastly funny to one person will not seem remotely so to another. To take an everyday example, I have always loved Laurel and Hardy, but I have never liked Charlie Chaplin (too preachy, too saccharine, too stagy); others may find that inexplicable.

Probably all of us have at some time made jocular comments to people who took them in the wrong way. Probably all of us have found ourselves at some stage sitting stony-faced while everyone else around us is “corpsing” – or the other way around.

Humour is part of our personality phenotype – some of us like surrealism or word play, others prefer slapstick or bottom jokes (Rabelais devotes a whole chapter of Gargantua to defecation), while some seem to have no zest for amusement at all. Humour is also highly contextual, with different kinds of humour finding favour in different periods, countries, classes and communities; all jokes are in some way “in-jokes” that rely on specific and often subconscious shared assumptions.

For this reason, humour dates very quickly – despite the cinéaste snobs who tell us certain comedians, shows or texts are classics ‘everyone’ ought to find amusing (Chaplin is a good example). It takes rare genius to transcend period and circumstances; what seemed roaringly funny to audiences in 1930 or 1970 usually now seems flat, or we enjoy it largely ironically, through a nostalgic prism. Shows like Bilko, the Ealing comedies or the Carry On films are enjoyable partly because of their datedness, their kitsch reflection of what looks like a more agreeable social order – a time when, whatever their other shortcomings, Britain was British and America American. With comedy, you really ‘had to have been there’.

Political humour is of a different order from other humour, because the ingredients of spontaneity and simple joy have been replaced by the perceived need ‘to make a point’. Probably only those who already strongly agree with whatever that point is will really relish the humour, and even then it is a vinegarish kind of relish – a slightly savage sense of “Serves you right!” as they peruse some supposedly biting editorial or look greedily at some caricature of some hated politician impaled on a policy. Implicit in most jokes are schadenfreude and the comforting conceit that the butt of the joke is in some way inferior to the teller – stupider, uglier, fatter, smellier, clumsier, unluckier, or whatever it may be. In political humour this dark edge is brought out until it almost completely overshadows the humorous elements. Political comedy is ponderous, and often predictable – humour used as a bludgeon rather than a rapier.

Celebrated political satires like Samuel Butler’s anti-Puritan Hudibras (published between 1663 and 1678) or Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729) were both popular and influential, but I doubt anyone ever really laughed at them. We read them now purely for their historical rather than their hysterical qualities. Likewise, we admire the skill of 18^th/19^th cartoonists like Gillray, Rowlandson or the Cruikshanks, but we are unlikely to think them actually funny. I have a 1791 Gillray print, “French Democrats Surprizing the Royal Runaways” (Republican troops apprehending the fleeing King Louis XVI) and while the faces and poses of the protagonists are rendered with verve, the effect is more engaging than exhilarating. Caricatures of world-engulfing emperors or tyrants hovering over the chamber-pot were edgy (and risky to publish) – but were they ever actually amusing? Yet I would rather flick through a Gillray compendium than watch the 1980s series Spitting Image, which seems to have dated much more quickly than Gillray and his contemporaries. (This is not because Spitting Image was boringly leftist, although it was – the Conservative-supporting Jim Davidson has fared even worse in the obsolescence stakes.)

There was a time when politicians could make even very barbed jokes and it would not necessarily harm their political prospects. For example, when Benjamin Disraeli was asked to explain the difference between misfortune and calamity, he replied:

“If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be misfortune. If somebody pulled him out, it would be a calamity.”

Australia’s fourth Prime Minister George Reid was being heckled at an early 20^th century public meeting by someone who pointed to Reid’s paunch and shouted, “What are you going to call it, George?” Reid replied: “If it’s a boy, I’ll call it after myself. If it’s a girl I’ll call it Victoria. But if, as I strongly suspect, it’s nothing but piss and wind, I’ll name it after you.”

More recently again, there are countless anecdotes (some apocryphal) of Churchill’s wit, such as the time a female Labour MP remarked acidly “If I were your wife, I’d put poison in your coffee”, to which he returned “If I were your husband, madam, I’d drink it!”

These sorts of things were uttered at a time when people understood intuitively that not everything was political, and politics was in any case about more than just being universally acceptable. Politicians then had a right to a private life, and private opinions. There was also a sense of proportion; nobody really thought that Disraeli wanted Gladstone drowned. It was a joke, and while the notoriously dour Gladstone probably did not like it much, such squibs were essentially distractions from soon-to-be-resumed substantive debate. Having a sense of humour may not have helped politicians like Disraeli attain high office, but it did not hinder them either.

A dwindling number of comedian-politicians survived into the Thatcher period and even beyond, tolerated or even liked by their party leaders, but significantly never entrusted with high office. The most famous was the roué-raconteur Alan Clark, who delighted in scandalizing the sort of people who like to be scandalized. His career was littered with post-prandial extravagances – being drunk at the dispatch box, praising English football hooligans, saying that “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” was the best song in Cabaret, rejoicing in the news of Israeli troops shooting Palestinian rioters, pulling faces and mouthing to a Guardian journalist the words “Isn’t it awful?” behind then party leader William Hague’s back, when Hague was delivering a make-or-break speech.

It is impossible to imagine Thatcher or Major ever having said anything remotely similar. It would somehow not have seemed “prime ministerial” – and this is why senior politicians usually employ attack dogs to lampoon their opponents and say the things the dignity of their office precludes them from saying.

Now, however, everything is political, all politics are portentous, and for politicians “every moment is a defining moment” (T. Blair). There has also been the freezing effect of political correctness, or the possibility of PC disapproval, which makes politicians weigh every word before they speak. Mainstream politics and public culture are increasingly characterized by a dull and pompous conformity in which everything has become a ‘serious ishoo’. Another contributory factor is that politics now is a profession rather than a public duty, which makes politicians worried about risking their livelihoods.

As an example of how much less tolerant of humour politics are today, last April David Cameron was widely criticized for telling a more than usually hysterical female Labour MP to “calm down, dear”. This rather lame remark implied (to the left) that Cameron held a blatantly patronizing and sickening and – err – err – blatantly patronizing and sickening attitude that needed to be stamped out so that women legislators who should be treated exactly the same as male legislators could be – err – treated differently. No witty riposte – just whining bluster and muttered outrage, the sort of afflatus for which George Reid could have found a name.

Another problem of political humour is that it is often taken at face value by those at whom it is aimed, who of course have a vested interest in trying to portray your jeux d’esprit in the worst possible light. Sometimes, your opponent may genuinely have no sense of humour; on other occasions they will know you are joking but will nonetheless pretend that you are not because ‘this is a subject no-one should joke about’. This is particularly apposite to those on the right, whose motivations and actions are almost always given the worst possible construction. When tempted to satirize some more than usually stupid PC standpoint, we should stop and consider how our caustic satire would look to casual readers if presented to them on the front page of a mass-circulation newspaper or on TV with all the jocularity carefully excised.

There is much scope for humour in what we do, and a lot of what the left does is intrinsically risible. It also does us a great deal of good to whistle in what can often seem like darkness. But before we press that significant “Send”, we should stop for a moment and wonder whether our very individual ideas of humour are likelier to aid or to alienate.

I couldn't help being reminded of this excellent sketch by comedy duo Mitchell & Webb after a quick visit to the BBC website to see how the news of the riot protesting against paedophile Muslim gangs was playing out on Britain's politically correct state broadcaster. I was not disappointed.

While the BNP website was reporting "running battles" between "300 local anti-grooming protesters" and police and Muslim taxi-drivers, all connected to the issue of the 'grooming' of underage White girls by Muslim gangs, the BBC had miraculously reduced it to an attack on a takeaway restaurant by "gangs of youth," as if it were a tiff about being overcharged for a doner kebab or mere youthful exuberance.

Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010

By Charles Murray
New York, NY: Crown Forum, 2012

Reviewed by F. Roger Devlin

At 416 pages, Coming Apart is Charles Murray’s most substantial offering since 2003’sHuman Accomplishment. It continues a theme familiar to readers of The Bell Curve: increasing American social stratification. Murray focuses on whites because otherwise the social trends he describes might lazily be explained away as effects of demographic change; he demonstrates that the trends are almost wholly unaffected by race or immigration. As he notes, a constant focus on how racial minorities ‘lag’ whites serves to distract attention from important changes in the benchmark population itself.

The author begins with a description of American life on the eve of the Kennedy assassination, highlighting everything which would shock the younger generation: just three TV channels; no Thai restaurants; ‘coffee’ meant Maxwell House. If you missed a movie when it was in the theaters, you would not get to see it at all.

The products of the entertainment industry still usually validated American norms. Subjects such as abortion and homosexuality were never touched upon in television shows, only rarely and disapprovingly in movies. Most liberals were willing to say that extramarital sex was wrong. Only three and one-half percent of American families were headed by a divorced parent. In many neighborhoods, houses were left unlocked and children could go about unsupervised.

But American women had “much to be outraged about,” the author tells us, such as being expected to marry and have children! If Murray gets portrayed as a ‘hard-rightist,’ it is only because presenting data honestly is now all such a designation requires or implies.

Such class differentiation as existed in 1963 was only reluctantly acknowledged: ninety-five percent of Americans described themselves as either working class or middle class. Poor people refused to think of themselves as lower class, and rich people were almost as reluctant to be considered upper class. A typical house in exclusive Chevy Chase, Maryland cost only twice as much as the nationwide average. People who could afford luxury cars often refrained from a fear of seeming ‘ostentatious’ – an old protestant pejorative which has now mostly disappeared from American English.

This was still recognizably the American society observed by Tocqueville one-hundred-thirty years before: “In the United States, the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people. On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every day.”

The people who had risen to the top in 1963 had little in common except their success. Most had grown up in middle-class or working-class families, and they retained the preferences and tastes of those milieus. Their status was precarious, and often not successfully transmitted across even a single generation. In other words, America was ruled by a rapidly circulating elite, not by an upper class. (The “old money” families of Philadelphia, New York and Boston were an exception, but their numbers were tiny and as a class they had no influence on the nation’s destiny.)

Coming Apart tells the story of how this equilibrium was upset in the years that followed. Murray first discusses the rise of a new upper class; then, turning to the opposite end of the social scale, he shows how the white working class has deteriorated into a proletariat.

The new upper class is a product of our higher-tech economy, which relies heavily on people with exceptional cognitive abilities. A young person with outstanding mathematical ability might formerly have aspired to become a college professor; today he can make a killing writing code or managing a quant fund. Business decision-making has also become more complex and the stakes are higher. “Today, if a first-rate attorney can add ten percent to the probability of getting a favorable decision on a regulatory ruling worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he is worth his many-hundreds-of-dollars-per-hour rate.”

The more efficient exploitation of cognitive ability has created enormous new wealth, but the benefits have been concentrated heavily at the very top of the income distribution. For over half of America, income has remained flat in real terms since around 1970.

American Family Income Distribution

Economic change alone cannot explain how this new elite has become a self-perpetuatingclass. For this we must look at postwar developments in higher education.

At one time, geography largely determined where most people went to college; even the Ivy League catered to the Northeastern social elite rather than the cognitive elite of the entire nation. Since the 1960s, however, our higher education system has come to function as a sorting mechanism for grouping youngsters according to intellectual ability. An American’s cognitive ability can, with ever-increasing exactness, be inferred from the college he attended.

Murray defines the cognitive elite as the top five centiles of cognitive ability. By 2000, just forty-one schools took in half these students. Today, “the typical classroom in an elite school has no one outside the top decile of cognitive ability, and many who are in the top hundredth or thousandth.”

As the author notes, most Americans’ notion of meritocracy is that all the brainy kids scattered across the fruited plains should be offered the same chance to develop their talents. The social class of one’s parents is not supposed to matter. This is not how things worked out, for two reasons: 1) cognitive ability is significantly heritable, and 2) it is now the major determinant of social status.

College education occupies young people during their prime mate-seeking years. Combine this fact with the cognitive sorting now performed by the college admissions process and you get intellectual homogamy: people marrying those with similar cognitive ability. This level of ability tends rather strongly to get passed on to their offspring. Most children within the cognitive elite have parents with an average IQ of 117 or more. Only about 14 percent of them are produced by parents from the bottom half of the distribution.

So while the brilliant son of a plumber from Podunk will still occasionally break into the Ivy League, there will never be enough others like him to determine the character of those schools. Most of his classmates will come from affluent families, and a disproportionate number from the new upper class itself. American meritocracy has ended up producing something like a hereditary upper class.

As Murray acknowledges, this new class has its virtues: they are well-mannered, make good neighbors, seldom get divorced, are devoted parents, careful about their health, and make sincere efforts to be socially responsible. At times, such virtues are driven to comic excess. The obsessive parenting of the new upper class has earned them the nickname “helicopter parents” from harried college administrators. Certain members insist upon drinking their fair-trade organically-grown coffee only from recycled mugs. Others not only jog and take the latest vitamin supplement daily, but react with moral abhorrence to second-hand smoke and saturated fats. The author recommends David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise as a witty anthropological description of this new ‘bourgeois bohemian’ class.

“The culture of the new upper class carries with it an unmistakable whiff of ‘we’re better than the rabble,’” observes Murray. So, as a technical term to designate that class’s members, he suggests “Overeducated Elitist Snobs.” (The small-town Iowa boy still shows through Murray’s Harvard varnish.) He even includes a quiz by which the reader can gauge his own level of elitist snobbery. If you don’t know who Jimmie Johnson is, you may be in trouble.

Like everyone else, Overeducated Elitist Snobs prefer to live near others who share their background, tastes and concerns. Once they concentrate in significant numbers in any neighborhood, they inevitably begin to reshape it in their own image.

When Murray was at Harvard between 1961 and 1965, he reports, the students and professors of Cambridge, Massachusetts did not command the necessary critical mass. The town had some funky bookshops and folk-music joints, but the local eateries still catered to the working class majority. Harvard kids still rubbed shoulders with ordinary Americans.

Over the following generation, the working class was driven out by high-tech professionals and research organizations. Greasy-spoon diners gave way to gourmet espresso bars. A geographical and mental bubble grew up around the inhabitants of Cambridge.

The same process has been occurring in other college towns, the Philadelphia suburbs, Austin, TX, Seattle and elsewhere. These places have become the ‘Bourgeois Bohemian Paradises’ where you can find asiago-encrusted focaccia served with tarragon-infused olive oil after midnight.

To define such neighborhoods objectively, Murray created a scoring system that combined average income with percentage of college graduates. Then he ranked zip code areas nationwide. Those with scores in the top five centiles he designated “SuperZips.” There are 882 of them in America.

As of 2000, the SuperZips were still eighty-two percent white (including Jewish), while the percentage of whites in the rest of the country had sunk to just sixty-eight. Asians were eight percent in SuperZips, three in the rest of the country. Blacks and Latinos were three percent each in SuperZips, but twelve and six, respectively, elsewhere. A second edition ofComing Apart will update these figures from 2010 census data.

SuperZips tend to cluster together. The four largest clusters surround New York, Washington, San Francisco and Los Angeles, which together account for thirty-nine percent of America’s SuperZip inhabitants. Smaller clusters are associated with Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. Large swaths of America contain no such zip codes.

Why is the clustering of SuperZips important? “A class that makes decisions affecting the lives of everyone else, but doesn’t know much about how everybody else lives, is vulnerable to making mistakes.” They think having cheap Central American gardeners and nannies is terrific. It doesn’t occur to them that the policies which provide their servants also result in Blacks shot dead in the streets of South Central Los Angeles or less affluent White families forced to flee to Colorado. (My example, not Murray’s)

It will come as no surprise that a class so alienated from the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans tends to be liberal. This tendency is especially strong in the four largest SuperZip clusters around New York, Washington, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Conservative SuperZips of a sort can be found elsewhere, but the inhabitants are readingThe Wall Street Journal, not The Occidental Quarterly. Murray emphasizes that the shared culture of the new upper class is remarkably constant across the political spectrum.

After a hundred-odd pages on Overeducated Elitist Snobs, Coming Apart shifts its focus to the bottom end of the social spectrum: the new lower class. In the older America, ‘lower-class’ referred only to blacks, “the broken down denizens of the Bowery and Skid Row, or the people known as white trash.” Apart from blacks, such people were numerically insignificant. The working class was something altogether different. Indeed,

for most of its history, working-class America was America. In 1900, 90 percent of American workers were employed in low-level white-collar or technical jobs, manual and service jobs, or worked on farms. Even in 1960, 81 percent of workers were still employed in those jobs.

Most of America’s ‘poor’ were simply working-class people who didn’t make a lot of money.

Since the 1960s, white working-class America has suffered a catastrophic decline in virtue. Referring explicitly to Aristotle, Murray defines virtue as the habits which people require to live satisfying lives and which communities require to function as communities. A well-policed authoritarian state may be able to carry on after a fashion, if not prosper, in the absence of the virtues. America, however, has traditionally allowed its citizens a large measure of personal freedom:

Americans were subject to criminal law, which forbade the usual crimes against person and property, and to tort law, which regulated civil disputes. But otherwise, Americans faced few legal restrictions on their freedom of action and no legal obligations to their neighbors except to refrain from harming them. The guides to their behavior at any more subtle level had to come from within.

Such internal principles are precisely what the now-unfashionable term ‘virtue’ signifies. Murray distinguishes four virtues which have been especially important in the history of America: industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity.

Industriousness refers to “the bone-deep American assumption that life is to be spent getting ahead through hard work, making a better life for oneself and one’s children.” Henry Adams pointed out that the spirit of industriousness affected those on the bottom of American society more powerfully than those on the top:

Reversing the old-world system, the American stimulant increased in energy as it reached the lowest and most ignorant class, whirling them upward as in the blast of a furnace. The penniless and homeless Scotch or Irish immigrant was caught and consumed by it; for every stroke of the axe and the hoe made him a capitalist, and made gentlemen of his children.

America was understood by both natives and immigrants as a land of opportunity, and the most characteristically American of virtues was the industriousness which permitted Americans to take advantage of their opportunities.

Honesty is a necessary precondition for a republican constitution and a free market. One Scottish visitor remarked upon the tedious regularity with which Americans would ask him whether he did not admire “the extraordinary respect which the people pay to the law.” Our limited data indicate a very low crime rate in early America: one study of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, found an average rate of prosecution for theft of 2.7 per 10,000 population between 1760 and 1810. Tocqueville remarked upon how few public officers were charged with apprehending crime. Sympathy for criminals was nearly non-existent.

Marriage is properly an institution rather than a virtue, of course, but it involves the exercise of certain virtues: loyalty and sexual temperance at a minimum, usually patience as well. There is little explicit evidence for the importance of marriage in early American society because the matter was regarded as self-evident; indeed, our current confusion about the nature and purpose of marriage has no precedent in history.

Some observers, however, did remark on the seriousness with which Americans took their marital vows. Tocqueville wrote that Americans “consider marriage as a covenant which is often onerous, but every condition of which the parties are strictly bound to fulfill.” And the Austrian-born immigrant Francis Grund said: “I consider the domestic virtue of the Americans as the principle source of all their other qualities.”

When Murray named his fourth American virtue ‘religiosity,’ I suspected it might be simply an unforthright way of saying ‘Christianity.’ Yet it is not specifically Christian doctrine he has in mind. In part, religiosity consists in the ethical monotheism bequeathed to Christendom by the Old Testament. John Adams, who was fully cognizant of America’s debt to Greece and Rome, wrote:

I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation [by propagating] to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.

Religion is also a crucial source of what sociologists call ‘social capital.’ Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) has noted that “nearly half of all associational memberships are church-related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context.” But this is not all: religious persons also account for a disproportionate share of social capital which is not explicitly religious:

People who say religion is very important to them are much more likely than other persons to visit friends, to entertain at home, to attend club meetings, and to belong to sports groups; professional and academic societies; youth groups; service clubs; hobby or garden clubs; literary, art, discussion and study groups; fraternities and sororities; farm organizations; political clubs; nationality groups; and other miscellaneous groups.

And Putnam is referring to religion’s role in society today!

The decline in the four American virtues was preceded, as the author points out, by a subtle change in American thinking:

The belief that being a good American involved behaving in certain kinds of ways, and that the nation itself relied upon a certain kind of people in order to succeed, had begun to fade [by 1950] and has not revived. It came to be tacitly assumed that the American system itself would work under any circumstances as long as we got the laws right.

Murray then documents that decline, restricting his study to white Americans between the ages of 30 and 49 (‘prime age adults’), who have normally completed their educations and are engaged in careers and/or raising families. Within this set, he defines the working classas those with no more than a high school diploma, who work in blue collar, service, or low-level white collar jobs, or are not working. In 1960, this class included sixty-four percent of prime age Whites; by 2010, it had shrunk to thirty. The author’s principle finding is that the decline in the four American virtues has been steepest among this class.

According to a widespread perception, more prosperous Americans have become highly secular, while those in modest circumstances have tended to remain religious. Murray’s data do not bear this out. According to the annual General Social Survey (GSS), unbelievers account for twenty-one percent of the working class, slightly higher than the figure for the upper middle class.

But besides outright unbelievers, there is a larger set of people who may feel they ‘ought’ to be more religious, and who state a religious preference, but also acknowledge they do not attend worship services more than once a year. Murray denominates this group the “de facto seculars.” It is here that the decline in working class religiosity becomes especially apparent. Adding the two classes together, we find the total level of secularization approaching sixty percent. For the upper middle class, the figure is still around forty, though also growing.

Of working class whites who remain religious, an increasing share has turned to fundamentalist denominations. Such groups are more inclined to wear their religious commitments on their sleeves. Murray believes the increase in these high-profile believers explains the misperception that the working class as a whole has remained religious.

Criminal statistics show a large rise in crime affecting the white working class. Murray computes the proportion of prisoners in the adult working class population and finds that between 1974 and 2004 it grew by a factor of five. The corresponding statistics for the upper middle class are extremely low and remained largely unchanged during the same period.

There has been a well-publicized forty percent drop in crime since 1991, but this does not necessarily reflect a decline in criminality. The American prison population has exploded during the same period. We may just be getting better at locking criminals up.

Criminal statistics clearly do not tell the whole story of the decline in honesty. As Murray observes: “It would be nice to know if there have been trends in the consistency with which people keep their word, insist on taking personal responsibility for their mistakes, and tell the cashier when they have been given too much change.” But it is not easy to find data of this type. He does mention that the “a quadrupling of personal bankruptcies over a period [1986-2005] that included one of the most prosperous decades in American history looks suspiciously like a decline in personal integrity.” He was unable to disaggregate this data by social class.

Murray illustrates his statistics with anecdotes concerning a largely white working class neighborhood in Philadelphia called Fishtown. Back in the early 1970s, the place was the despair of social workers, who could not understand why residents would be disinclined to have governmental ‘help’ administered to them; one concluded they were “psychologically unable to face up to their social, cultural and economic deprivation.” Unfortunately, Fishtown has made a lot of progress since then.

In earlier days, the neighborhood was strongly Catholic. Most children attended parochial school, and “the church’s teachings—among others, that the home is a domestic church—gave validation to the core values of Fishtown.” By the late 1990s, one sociologist described religious observance thus:

Typical attire for most men at mass [includes] blue jeans, sneakers, and “Eagles” jackets with hoods. Older people and some younger parents in their 20s and 30s genuflected before entering the pews. I did not see any children performing this ritual, or saying any prayers for that matter. Most were standing around with their coats on throughout the service; they looked rather blank.

One Fishtown parochial school closed due to low enrollment in 2006; a second followed in 2011.

Crime was not much of a problem in earlier days, when residents sometimes administered rough justice without resorting to the police. If you found your car broken into, “you went to where the [glue sniffers] hung out, bashed some heads and found out who did it easy enough.” Even the local gangs “were kind of like vigilantes—beat the crap out of thieves, dopeheads, etc.”

When intact families were the rule in Fishtown, there was a great deal of solidarity between them:

If a neighbor saw a child misbehaving, it was considered appropriate for the neighbor to intervene. The parents would be grateful when they found out, and they would take the word of the neighbor if the child protested his innocence.

The increasingly common unmarried and divorced Fishtowners are less likely to behave this way today, and many parents try to curry favor with their children through lax discipline. One Fishtown woman’s apathy at the deteriorating situation has become so conspicuous that it has earned her the nickname “Not-my-kid Sue.”

Perhaps the biggest changes to come over white working-class neighborhoods like Fishtown in recent decades has been a decline in marriage. In 1960, over eighty percent of prime age working class whites were married; the figure has since plummeted to around fifty. Meanwhile, the number who have never married has risen from under ten percent to about twenty-five. He claims the increase “was driven mostly by the retreat of men from the marriage market.”

The decline in marriage has impaired the happiness of adults, but it has been catastrophic for the rising generation. Whether one considers delinquency, criminality, school problems, physical or emotional health or early mortality, children do best when raised by biological parents who remain married and worst when raised by a single mother (results for children of divorced parents fall in the middle).

The number of children born to white, unwed mothers has skyrocketed from three percent in 1960 to nearly thirty percent today. For mothers without a high school diploma, the figure is now around sixty percent. Many of these mothers are teenagers, and their children often end up being raised by the grandparents. Yet among mothers with a college degree, the proportion of unmarried births has yet to rise above three percent.

As marriage has declined, so has male industriousness. White men with only a high school education began dropping out of the labor force in the 1970s; the figure stood at twelve percent on the eve of the current recession. Since the 1980s, working class men have also become more likely than the American population as a whole to be unemployed (but seeking work), and twenty percent of them with employment of some kind are working fewer than forty hours a week. Murray sees no explanation for this, merely noting that it mainly affects the working class. I shall offer some thoughts of my own below.

One small but telling statistic concerns working class men who claim to be unable to work due to a physical disability. As the author notes, this figure must have gone down since 1960, given medical advances and the proliferation of labor saving devices. Yet it has risen from two percent to an utterly incredible ten percent. Disability has become a racket.

A time-use study cited by Murray reveals that “between 1985 and 2005, men who had not completed high school increased their leisure time by eight hours a week.” The greatest share of this increase was devoted to television viewing, followed by sleeping.

Murray recognizes the strong correlation between the declines in marriage and in male industriousness. Unmarried men are over three and a half times more likely to be out of the labor force than married men, between two and three more times likely to be unemployed but looking, and at least half again as likely to be working fewer than forty hours a week. Some of this difference is due to the preference of women for hardworking men, but more is probably due to the effect on men of marriage itself.

These patterns are also apparent in the history of Fishtown. One local mother reported that her sixteen-year-old daughter had been to six baby showers in four months—just a modest fraction of her fifty-two pregnant classmates. The mother estimated the comparable number from her own youth at around four per year.

A nun teaching at this same Catholic school remarks that some women in the neighborhood are married to men who seem less like husbands than extra sons: “There are women with two bags of groceries in their hands, children hanging on to both sides of their coats, and the husband with his computer game walking behind her down the street. There’s something wrong here!”

One group of Fishtown men calls itself the Sunshine Club. They work summers on the Jersey Shore, then get “some stupid job for a couple of months just to get time in to collect unemployment for the rest of the year until summer rolled around again.”

Another set of men prefer to live off their girlfriends‘ welfare checks; they are known as ‘runners,’ because they must constantly move to keep one step ahead of child support collectors, the police, their girlfriends or their children.

Murray writes that “being a single mother is tough, and it is appropriate to sympathize with women who are in that situation.” He does not say it is appropriate to be sympathetic to the manchildren of Fishtown, and most readers will be left with the impression that what they need is a good kick in the pants. Yet I wonder whether the same factors did not produce the undesirable behavior of both men and women that he notes today.

In the America of 1963, a high school graduate might expect to find a job which would allow him to marry and permit his wife the leisure to stay home raising a few children. He could buy a freestanding house and a car, and still afford to take the family on a two week vacation every summer. The wife would have been reared with a view to preparing her for the duties of marriage and motherhood; she may even have taken ‘Home Ec’ in school.

Then gradually, beginning in the 1960s, women became convinced marriage was an imposition to be ‘outraged’ about. Helen Gurley Brown began whispering in their ears that an independent career path could be filled with exciting romances involving attractive men, free of the ‘drudgery’ to which marriage consigned their mothers. The family income was abolished in favor of ‘equal pay for equal work.’ The law was changed to permit women to divorce their husbands unilaterally and without grounds. (Wives are responsible for around ninety percent of divorces.)

None of this much affects the men at the top of the income and status hierarchy. They make enough money that even women with personal incomes perceive them as supporters and are willing to marry them. If a wife leaves after the baby is born, child support payments are manageable and a replacement wife is easily found.

The Fishtown girls who might have married working men in 1960 may well be earning more than such men today just by sitting at desks entering data. They can obtain higher quality sperm from more desirable men without submitting to the constraints of lifelong monogamy; the ‘ex’ and/or the taxpayer is made to provide for any resulting children. They even enjoy the sympathy of male commentators for the terrible hardship all this supposedly represents. Is it any wonder such women are reluctant to devote their lives to raising the children of ill-paid construction workers?

The contemporary Fishtown man, his wages reduced by female competition and the ever-decreasing market value of upper-body strength, has correspondingly slim chances of earning enough to make himself an acceptable suitor to any woman with an income of her own. These men are not ‘retreating from the marriage market’; they are being driven from it as a matter of deliberate policy.

Even if a particular working class man beats the odds and finds a girl to marry, he cannot expect the satisfaction of supporting her; she may well end up supporting him. And what self-respecting man wants to end up like that poor sap uselessly tagging along behind his wife who just bought all the groceries?

But this is still not the worst. Prospective husbands stand a good chance of losing everything in the divorce settlement within a few years of the wedding. Child support is not so easy when it must be paid through low-skilled labor. Even if you avoid being jailed as a ‘deadbeat dad,’ you will certainly not have enough left over to contemplate a second marriage.

In short, the American dream of a home and family through honest labor is now far out of reach for an increasing number of low-status men. Under these circumstances, what is such a man to do with his life? I’d say an unconstrained bachelor existence with plenty of time for amusements looks very much like a rational choice. The male commentariat may make you out to be a bum, but that sure beats years of performing all the hard work traditionally required to support a family and then not getting the family.

Aristotle understood that certain virtues have social presuppositions: liberality, for example, can hardly be expected from persons living hand-to-mouth. Male industriousness, I would suggest, also presupposes certain social arrangements. Monogamy and the family wage system give you the Irish immigrant who strives to make gentlemen of his children with every blow of his axe; liberated women earning equal pay for their equal work bring forth the men of the Sunshine Club.

So single motherhood and the decline in male industriousness our author describes cannot be spirited away simply by getting men and women to the altar. ‘Outrageous’ though it may seem to a generation steeped in feminist propaganda, the natural economic basis of marriage must also be restored. White men are programmed by evolution to be providers. If you deliberately rearrange society to render this function superfluous, do you have any right to complain when men stop knocking themselves out to perform it?

Murray goes on to describe “the selective collapse of American community”—selective because, so far, it has largely spared the upper middle class.

One of the best known passages in Democracy in America discusses how ‘Americans are forever forming associations,’ and a look at almost any American locality one hundred years ago reveals a complicated interweaving of fraternal, charitable, educational, civic and religious associations busily engaged in all sorts of activities. Biographies of eminent Americans of years gone by are apt to include so bewildering a variety of memberships that the modern reader is left wondering how anyone could have found time for all of them.

Another defining quality of American society was the extent of its neighborliness, i.e., voluntary assistance among unrelated people who happen to live alongside one another. This made the community in which one grew up an important aspect of an American’s identity. One reason the Fishtown of years gone by was so dear to the people who lived there was that neighbors helped one another, looking out for one another’s children and informally exchanging services.

By the 2000s, seventy-five percent of Fishtown residents were socially disengaged, meaning that they no longer belonged to any “sports clubs, hobby clubs, fraternal organizations, nationality organizations (e.g., Sons of Italy) or veterans groups.” Eighty-two percent were civically disengaged, meaning they belonged to no “service groups, youth groups (e.g., being a Scoutmaster), school service groups or local political organizations.”

Much of this decline is due to the erosion of social trust: the expectation that the people around you will do the right thing. Whites’ estimation of the trustworthiness, fairness and helpfulness of others has declined across the board, but that of working class neighborhoods has declined more steeply and from an already lower base.

Robert Putnam’s research has demonstrated that social trust erodes as ethnic diversity increases. This erosion occurs even within each particular ethnic group in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. (Putnam suppressed these results for several years, embarrassed that they contradicted liberal happy-talk.)

The author expresses the hope that the distrust which has accompanied ethnic diversification will diminish over time, but acknowledges that this is only a hope. Of course, we never had to take the gamble: it was decided upon for us by irresponsible elites who have bought their own way out of all the negative consequences.

Murray moves on to a fine discussion of happiness in the spirit of Aristotle. He identifies four principle factors that go to make up a successful human life: family, vocation, community and faith. It is not difficult to see how each of these components of the good life is related, respectively, to the virtues of marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity. Easy as it is to ridicule the old Stoic doctrine that virtue equals happiness, it is also easy to demonstrate a high correlation between the two, especially on the level of society as a whole. A hardworking nation of harmonious families actively involved with one another and living according to the tenets of a generally accepted religious teaching—this is about the closest approach to blessedness compatible with the human condition.

Crunching the data on reported happiness, Murray finds that marriage and vocation are the two most important factors. There is also a strong synergy between them: the benefit from a satisfying vocation (often but not always one’s paid employment) combined with a happy family life is greater than the sum of each considered separately.

It seems reasonably clear that religion plays a significant role in human flourishing, but the precise nature of its role remains elusive. In Murray’s data set, only twenty-three percent of those who never attend religious services describe themselves as ‘very happy.’ This figure gradually rises in tandem with frequency of attendance, reaching forty-nine percent among those who attend more than weekly. Mere belief does not seem to do anything for people apart from participation in worship services and the life of a congregation; on the other hand, Murray’s data do not support Pascal’s famous recommendation that merely going through the motions will cure unbelief.

I can think of one significant fact which seems to fly in the face of the religiosity-happiness correlation: Denmark, with the highest self-reported happiness in the world, is also the most secular nation in Europe. I have no explanation for this.

High levels of community involvement also correlate positively with reported happiness. Volunteering and charitable giving make the biggest difference, but group membership and activities, informal social interaction and even electoral politics also produce benefits.

Income, once it rises above the subsistence level, does not correlate well with reported happiness: “there is no inherent barrier to happiness for a person with a low level of education holding a low-skill job.” But all the virtues that do promote happiness are presently deteriorating among lower-income Americans.

Toward the end of the book, Murray integrates nonwhites into his data. “It was a surprise to me and perhaps it will be a surprise to you: Expanding the data to include all Americans makes hardly any difference at all.” From this he infers:

We are one nation, indivisible, in terms of whites and people of color. Differences in the fortunes of different ethnic groups persist, but white America is not headed in one direction and nonwhite America in another.

I don’t believe this optimistic conclusion is warranted, for two reasons. Firstly, it is contradicted by Robert Putnam’s evidence that racial diversity adversely affects social trust. Murray’s warning—“don’t kid yourselves that we are looking at stresses that could be remedied by restricting immigration”—is unconvincing in this context. Stopping and reversing ethnic diversification might not restore the American sense of community all by itself, but there is every reason to expect it would do a great deal of good.

Secondly, racial conflict tends to express itself politically, and hence tends not to show up in the sorts of social surveys from which the author derived his data set; in Murray’s terminology, it is an artifact of the study. It is true whites have begun suffering from a number of problems formerly associated with the black underclass, but this newfound community in vice and social pathology no more makes whites and blacks indivisible than our pre-existing solidarity in wearing shoes or watching television. If anything, a mutual decline in virtue is likely to intensify political conflict over government benefits.

America in the early twenty-first century is still a powerful and prosperous country but, as the author observes, it is rapidly losing the special qualities which made it a distinctive nation. He compares the process to the transition from republic to empire in ancient Rome:

In terms of wealth, military might, and territorial reach, Rome was at its peak under the emperors. But Rome’s initial downward step, five centuries before the eventual fall of the Western Roman Empire, was the loss of the republic. Was that loss important? Not in material terms, but for Romans who treasured the republic, it was a tragedy that no amount of imperial splendor could redeem.

By analogy, the soul of America was the unprecedented freedom it granted private citizens to shape their lives as they wished, leaving them to face the consequences of their own behavior. The very fabric of American society grew out of such freedom, as Murray explains:

Marriage is a strong and vital institution because the family has the responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the family does them. Communities are strong and vital because the community has the responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the community does them. [From such responsibility,] an elaborate web of expectations, rewards, and punishments evolves over time that leads to norms of good behavior that support families and communities in performing their functions. When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, the web frays [and behavior deteriorates].

In essence, this is what is happening to America, and the poorest, least educated class has been first to feel the effects. The disease is progressive, however, since the welfare state inevitably tries to palliate the unfortunate results it produces by assuming still greater responsibilities. But this process cannot go on forever, and eventually civilization becomes unsustainable.

Can America expect five hundred years of imperial grandeur before the final curtain? Apparently, Murray thinks so. Nothing in Coming Apart surprised me as much as the following passage which occurs early on:

The economic dynamics that have produced the class society I deplore have fostered the blossoming of America’s human capital. These dynamics will increase, not diminish, our competitiveness on the world stage in the years ahead. Nor do I forecast decline in America’s military and diplomatic supremacy.

I take this to mean that the new economy’s success in turning high intelligence to account more than makes up for the inefficiencies of the welfare state and military adventurism.

Many nationalists treat it as axiomatic that the Washington regime’s ability to squander its subjects’ wealth, courage and ingenuity will eventually overcome any possible economic arrangement. If Murray is correct, however, the post-collapse strategy recommended by nationalist luminaries such as Guillaume Faye and Yggdrasil could prove dangerously mistaken.

Murray has his own version of the ‘worse is better’ strategy, however, involving the increasingly obvious unsustainability of the welfare state. When the large nations of Northern Europe begin falling into chaos of the sort Greece has recently experienced, it is just possible that Americans will reconsider their options and change direction in time. Alternatively, the irrationality of our own welfare system may soon become apparent to even the dimmest social democrat. Whatever the merits of the welfare state’s core goal—providing a basic income for all American adults—it could now be achieved simply by cashing out all current income transfer programs. (See 2006’s In Our Hands for an argument that this could be done while leaving Americans responsible for their own lives.)

Murray’s final hope is for what economist Robert Fogel has called a ‘Fourth Great Awakening.’ Historians commonly speak of three “Great Awakenings” in American history: in the 1730s, the early decades of the 1800s, and the period 1880-1910. Each was characterized by charismatic revivalism and brought otherwise unforeseeable political change with it. The last Great Awakening ushered in the progressive era, whose message of uplift for the poor is repeated by liberals to this day. But, as Fogel says, such slogans have little resonance for an age when “even the poor are materially rich by the standards prevailing a century ago and where many of those who are materially rich are spiritually deprived.”

Amen to that. Murray remarks upon how many persons of our day seem to live according to the principle that “the purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible, and the purpose of government is to make it as easy as possible to do so.” Many are happy to pay the taxes on which the underclass subsists as long as it frees them from any personal involvement with such people.

The author does not try to predict the specific form a new Great Revival would take, but he expects a return to civic engagement may form a part of it: “age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well-lived requires engagement with those around us.”

As Murray acknowledges, many among our elites behave reasonably responsibly on a personal level, including staying married and investing in their offspring. But a healthy and self-confident elite would do more: they would ‘preach what they practice’ and set a better tone for the rest of society. They would demand more of themselves than a life of eating health food and being ‘tolerant.’

If the present elite experiences no Great Awakening soon, perhaps some other class of men will. They might even end up providing America with its next ruling elite.

The contentious reaction to Liddell’s satirical article about Black genocide has provided us with a unique opportunity to reconsider our strategy as a revolutionary movement.

I usually enjoy Liddell’s intelligent writing, but I agree with critics that he failed in this case to promote our cause. The exact meaning of his article was not easily indiscernible, and he may have frightened away visitors without offering anything substantial to compensate for this loss. Truly, there must be a better way to electrify our audience without sending newcomers running to the hills.

Those who spoke in Liddell’s defense argued that it would be a mistake to abandon our beliefs in order to attract members of the leftist herd. Liddell himself has urged us not to let the PC mob dictate our parameters.  I agree with these cautionary assessments, but if we are to be an effective vanguard rather than just another White Nationalist website, then we must strive to present our ideas in ways that can appeal to potential recruits who are still straddling the fence. Many of us once sat there. Have you asked yourself lately what brought you down from that fence and guided you to where you are today?

For the majority of us, I suspect our journey began with an intuitive recognition that something was not quite right with the world . . . and likely something was deeply wrong with it.  

Indeed, our first unconscious step towards the alternative Right was probably living though experiences that bore no resemble to the multicultural paradise promised to us by the prophets of liberalism. These “moments of awakening” compelled us to question the egalitarian orthodoxy and seek answers outside the mainstream sources of information.

The addition of Jonathan Bowden to the Vanguard podcast has generated an enthusiastic response! So much so that we blew through the bandwidth limits of our podcast hosting service, causing our monthly payments to increase rather dramatically. 

The good news is that we've found a hosting service that has much more attractive monthly rates.  

The bad news is that we had to cancel our old RSS feed, which means that those of you who downloaded the podcasts via iTunes need to subscribe to a new Vanguard podcast.  

Here are the links:

We apologize for the inconvenience; we simply had to make the move.  

Jonathan and Richard discuss the Homosexual Question. Topics include the history and biological nature of homosexuality as well as the rise of gay marriage to become one of the most important political shibboleths of the 21st century.

In "Harrison Bergeron," Kurt Vonnegut imagines a world in the not-too-distant future in which all Americans are finally equal: the intelligent are fitted with distracting radio transmitters so they cannot think deeply; athletes and dancers are required to wear weights to handicap any performance; everyone who is beautiful is masked.

Who would have guessed that something like the nightmarish egalitarianism Vonnegut describes would be implemented in the United States Army?  

Stars and Stripes:

CAMP ZAMA, Japan – The Army is ordering its hardened combat veterans to wear fake breasts and empathy bellies so they can better understand how pregnant soldiers feel during physical training.

This week, 14 noncommissioned officers at Camp Zama took turns wearing the “pregnancy simulators” as they stretched, twisted and exercised during a three-day class that teaches them to serve as fitness instructors for pregnant soldiers and new mothers.

Army enlisted leaders all over the world are being ordered to take the Pregnancy Postpartum Physical Training Exercise Leaders Course, or PPPT, according to U.S. Army Medical Activity Japan health promotion educator Jana York.

Developed by the Army in 2008, the course includes aerobics classes, pool sessions and classroom studies on the physiology of pregnant women. The NCOs learn special exercises for pregnant women, who shouldn’t push themselves too hard or participate in high-impact activities such as snowboarding, bungee jumping or horse riding, York said.

Long before the American Empire is ended by a patriotic Old Believers like Ron Paul, it will collapse under the weight of equality.