More on Status Competition

November 17, 2008 Hunter Wallace Uncategorized 11

A response to a commentator at Mangan’s Miscellany.

“So the relevant question is how society got to that point.”

The principle of non-discrimination, which shouldn’t be confused with tolerance, wasn’t broadly accepted by elite liberals in the 1920s. This had changed by 1945 when the United Nations was founded. In the 1920s, only the far left communist fringe in the United States consistently opposed racial discrimination.

“In answering that question, we must accept the sincerity of liberal ideas and deal with them as such, as Mr. Auster recommends.”

“Sincerity” is not an explanation. Of course contemporary liberals believe that non-discrimination is true and good. The same is true now of gay marriage, but that wasn’t always the case. Why did they change their minds?

“Blithely dismissing a bunch of college kids’ liberalism as status-driven is one thing, but blithely dismissing our society’s dominant liberal beliefs (that created the context for college kids to view liberalism as a status symbol) as such is quite another, and is quite beside the point.”

Status competition amongst elite liberals explains (in large part) why fringe causes eventually enter mainstream American political discourse.

About Hunter Wallace 12392 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

10 Comments

  1. Great post, lots of good info there. Have you ever thought about writing a book about race relations through the course of American history. It would be a good counter to all that multicult garbage that is passed off as “high-quality academic work”.

    Also, by the way, did you hear about Dr. Brandt? He was banned from GdV because, get this, the admin staff claimed he was a “government agent”…LOL!

  3. “Status competition amongst elite liberals explains (in large part) why fringe causes eventually enter mainstream American political discourse.” ( — Prozium)

    Then what determines which fringe causes confer status, leading to their entering mainstream discourse? How come it’s only stuff Jews love, like racial integration?

    I once read that when Jacqui Kennedy was First Lady she did some horseback riding which was covered by the press, which led to picketing of the White House by a fringe group demanding her horse’s privates be covered next time with a diaper, because the public display of horse genitals was indecent. (That’s a true story, I did read that: not making that up.)

    How come adherence to that particular fringe group didn’t confer status at the time, followed by the need to put diapers on horses entering mainstream political debate?

    How come only stuff like ending segregation confered status at that time, and only that entered debate (exactly the stuff Jews adore)?

  4. Exactly three years ago I was banned from GdV for life, for having some Jewish ancestry. (I’m Catholic, neither of my parents was Jewish — this Jewish ancestry of mine is at the grandparent level — and I’ve never been Jewish, or considered myself Jewish, or identified as Jewish.) I’d been a good participant up to that point, apart from saying once that 1) I liked Poles, and once that 2) I liked Jews. Everything else I posted during my roughly six-months’ membership met with general approval. I asked to be allowed back in about a year ago. The monitor whom I asked told me with regret that he was favorable to my request but when he put it to the others it was turned down by them.

  5. I chose an extreme example there, in my question about “status,” but didn’t mean to be facetious at all: I trust you get my point — why did only a certain sort of fringe issue confer status and never another sort which might theoretically just as well have conferred it? Not putting horses in diapers of course, forget that — but other stuff which theoretically could have BUT NEVER DID CONFER IT after a certain point during the fifties and early sixties. Why the pattern? Why not a different pattern? (My answer? The Jewish influence.)

  6. And yes, your oft-made point about the D.C. WASP establishment wanting to be rid of segregation’s utility to the USSR as a way to score propaganda points at our expense is also valid, so it wasn’t just the Jews. It was multifactorial at the time. After the mid-sixties, however, culpability for it became way more lop-sided toward the Jews, would be my impression.

  7. Jews are the richest, media savy ethnic group in America and thus have disproportionate influence over the social agenda of the progressive left.

  8. IMO liberals didn’t really shift over until the later 1960s. JFK and RFK didn’t do anything for snivel rights and RFK even had MLK actively spied on! Also Bertrand Russel was pretty racialist as well.

    No, only Frankfurt School Marxists were into this stuff until they managed to (through some mechanism, probably jewish control of the media) break out in the later 1960s and start effecting the libs.

  10. I’ll cross quote my point.

    The cultural differences were more pronounced back then so politically, it was easier to emphasize racial differences. American imperialism had not yet penetrated the psychology of non-white races. Now the cultural differences aren’t as pronounced, so it is more difficult to emphasize racial differences without causing a disruption by people who prefer the image of everyone holding hands beneath the rainbow. Biologically they still exist but culturally people don’t want to rock the boat.

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