Guest Post: Surprised by Trump's Popularity in Appalachia? Don't Be.

Today's guest post comes from Joshua Wilkey's "This Appalachian Life" Blog and is Entitled Surprised by Trump's Popularity in Appalachia?  Don't be.  While I am a Trump fan, he wasn't my first choice to be President from the Republicans that ran for Election to hold the job.  But he angers the establishment, both Democrats and Republicans.  That's a good thing, because the Establishment Political Class has not been anything but a hinderance for American Citizens.

I say this because it's obvious that Wilkey doesn't like Trump.  In reading this article, you can see that Wilkey doesn't trust Trump, doesn't care for his crudeness, isn't convinced that he didn't collude with the Russians (note that this post was written on October 18, 2019 - 7 days later, the Washington Post would uncover that the Hillary Clinton Campaign and The Democrat Nation Committe had paid to have the fictional stories of Russian Collusion and "Golden Showers" written and these were passed through the office of Republican  - RINO - Senator John McCain), and tries to tie Trump together with Don Blankenship, a wealthy CEO of Massey Energy that was convicted of conspiracy to violate Federal Law by ignoring safety violations at the company's Upper Big Branch Coal Mine, killing 29 coal Miners in a collapse at that mine.

However, Wilkey hits the nail square stating that "Those who voted for Trump generally do not care what those outside the region think of their political leanings, and they aren’t reading USA Today."  He also notes the disdain of Democrats towards the residents of Appalachia and the coal it produces by its miners.  I believe that this was true for many in America, outside of Appalachia about Barack Obama and an accurate perception of Hillary Clinton.

Above all, Wilkey, who is from western North Carolina, understands the politics of the region and he tries to explain it to those who read his blog.  So without further ado, I'll let him tell the tale.

Surprised by Trump's Popularity in Appalachia? Don't Be.

October 18, 2017

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Joshua Wilkey

For those of us who study Appalachia's politics, Trumps popularity comes as no surprise.

Appalachia has long existed outside the economic norms of the United States, and often, it exists outside the norms of American politics, too. The result is that it is sometimes difficult for those who are not from the region, or who haven’t studied it carefully, to understand the region’s politics.

Because a full 95% of the counties in Appalachia swung toward Trump in the election, many were shocked when the President’s first budget proposal sought to slash government agencies and programs thought to be vital to the region. The Roanoke Times declared: “Trump backhands Appalachia.” USA Today arguedthat “Trump budget beats down Appalachia.” In my own back yard, the Asheville Citizen-Times was less aggressive: “Trump’s proposed budget has Appalachia worried.”

I understand why people question the seemingly unwavering support of Trump’s candidacy (and now, his presidency), by folks in Appalachia. Plenty of ink has been spilled since November by various writers and journalists attempting to explain the phenomenon. For some, it boils down to a single issue: coal. For others, it is about elitism. Perhaps the most common argument is that supporting Trump is a sort of hail-Mary pass aimed at economic survival or improvement.

There’s truth in all of these arguments, but there are also other forces at play. Many of those who continue to question the logic of Appalachia so heartily supporting Trump live outside the region and lack the historical or cultural context to understand the complex processes that drive Appalachian politics.

In many ways, those who point to elitism as the root of Appalachia’s disdain for Democratic political candidates at the national level are right. In short, Hillary Clinton simply didn’t belong not so much because she’s an outsider (so is Trump) but because she vocally opposed what many in Appalachia view to be the region’s lifeblood. Clinton went so far as to say: “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” when asked at a debate about the future of fossil fuels. Her answer, and the snark with which she delivered it, played well with her more urban supporters, but it fell flat in Appalachia. Rejecting coal, for many, meant rejecting Appalachian culture. Coal and outsider elitism are bound up as part of the same whole and it is impossible to consider one without considering the other. Combine Clinton’s flippant remarks about coal miners with Trump’s donning of a miner’s hardhat at a campaign rally in West Virginia, and it isn’t difficult to see why many in Appalachia put their chips on Trump’s number.

Those who voted for Trump generally do not care what those outside the region think of their political leanings, and they aren’t reading USA Today. They are, however, posting pictures of train-loads of coal on their Facebook walls, attributing the mining of those tons of coal directly to Trump, and they are sharing social media memes that criticize mainstream media outlets. The consumption and regurgitation of only those talking points that confirm their previously-held beliefs is not a practice unique to Appalachia. It happens all over the US. With Trump, however, many in Appalachia are motivated and perhaps even predisposed to support him by deeply embedded forces.  To properly understand the Trump phenomenon in Appalachia, one must understand the region’s political and economic power structures.

Perhaps more important than any other factor is the reality that Trump came to Appalachia and said, essentially, “I know that you exist and I’m going to help you.” He walked onto a stage in Charleston, West Virginia, in May of 2016, donned a miner’s hardhat, and told the coal miners in attendance that they should get ready to start mining more coal. Politics are often deeply personal in the hills of Appalachia, and the region has so long been ignored by most Americans that it is truly meaningful when a national political candidate not only visits the region but vows his support for their cause. They view every short ton of coal extracted from their region as further proof that Trump cares about them. Never mind that Trump’s proposals are considered by outsiders to be disastrous for the region, or that coal has never been the sort of blessing for the region that coal boosters would have us believe. In Trump, many Appalachian people found an ally who they believed would fight for them.

For many, fighting for them does not mean the same thing as it means to the rest of America. Most people in Appalachia view the notion that those outside the region know what’s best for them as yet another exercise in elitism. In fact, I myself hold this same view. It is offensive and insulting for many of us when those who know nothing about our region’s culture or heritage, apart from perhaps what they’ve seen on reality TV or the in film Deliverance come to our mountains and try to tell us dumb hillbillies what we need. In Trump, Appalachian people found someone who listened to them and what they said they need – namely more coal mining – and pledged his support. While I disagree with the notion that more coal is what Appalachia needs to thrive economically, I cannot fault my neighbors for embracing a leader who took the time to acknowledge and value their own solutions to their problems. Instead, I am heartbroken that so many of my neighbors have yet again been led astray by a political leader preying on their vulnerability for personal and political gain.

For Appalachian people so accustomed to rough and dirty politics, their allegiance to Trump meant that they would support him come what may. They don’t care about his alleged collusion with Russia, nor do they care that he is crude, crass, or short on intellect. Many are encouraged, not disheartened, by actions like the pardoning of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He’s their guy, he says he looks after “his” people, and demonstrates it by doing things like pardoning Arpaio. In Appalachia, that still means something.

For those of us who study politics and power in Appalachia, Trump’s popularity here is no surprise. In Appalachia, there’s a long history of people supporting morally bankrupt and blatantly corrupt leaders. In fact, I would argue, based on my own scholarly work, that central Appalachia is the most politically corrupt place in the United States. Behaviors some of us view with distaste – vote buying, self-enrichment, and egomaniacal self-advancing policies – are just business as usual in Appalachia.

Consider that Appalachia is the region that still overwhelmingly supports villains like Don Blankenship. For those unfamiliar with the name, Blankenship was once the CEO of Massey Energy. He was convicted in 2015 of conspiring to violate federal law by ignoring safety violations at the company’s Upper Big Branch Mine. As a result of Massey’s actions, the court determined, 29 miners died in an explosion that could have been prevented.

In 2009, as many as 100,000 people turned out for a pro-coal rally on Labor Day sponsored by Blankenship and Massey. The rally featured conservative heroes Ted Nugent and Sean Hannity, among others. Clad in an American flag shirt, Blankenship declared that “America’s working families are under attack.” Taxation and regulation, he argued, were the primary enemies of coal miners.

Of course, taxation and regulation are in fact the enemy of the coal barons, but Blankenship was able to successfully tie his own self-interest to that of rank and file coal miners. Despite what many view as behavior antagonistic to the best interest of workers and of the communities in which Massey operated, Blankenship made a rather compelling case that when Massey Energy was successful, so, too, was Appalachia. A rising financial tide for Blankenship’s boat, in short, would be a rising tide for the region, too. So it is with Trump, it seems. Many blue-collar workers in Appalachia have connected their own futures to the success they hope to see Trump achieve.

While many of us view this false correlation as ridiculous at face value, the folks in Appalachia who flocked to Blankenship’s 2009 rally did not view it that way. Blankenship himself boasted that he spent one million dollars to put on the event, and for many in attendance, it was an indication of Blankenship’s deep commitment to his workers and to the region. When one considers Blankenship’s efforts in comparison to Democrats like Clinton and President Obama who were pretty blatant about their disdain for the coal industry, it becomes pretty obvious who many in the region believe they should be supporting.

Mother Jones writer Tim Murphy writes that Blankenship “transformed West Virginia physically and politically.” This is certainly true. He pumped millions of dollars into the coffers of Republican candidates for office. However, he was most certainly not the first coal baron to spend millions to buy political power in the coalfields. In fact, the region’s history is full of corrupt by charismatic politicians who won the hearts and minds of the people even though their interests were largely selfish in nature.

It isn’t just in industry that personalities like Blankenship find success and support. At a local level, politics in central Appalachia are often driven by oversized characters who thrive via a unique flavor of populism. Over and again, people in the region elect local political leaders who are blatantly corrupt and self-serving. What these corrupt local leaders usually share in common is a commitment to local people and an antagonistic approach to outsiders.

Knott County, Kentucky is a prime example of the way corruption is confronted differently in many parts of Appalachia than it is in most of the rest of the US. In 2006, Randy Thompson was appointed as Knott County Judge Executive, and was elected for a full term later that same year. Thompson, a prominent local business and media leader who owned a popular local radio station, was appointed to replace Donnie Newsome who resigned after being convicted of vote-buying. Newsome, it’s worth noting, had run the county from prison for ten months before resigning.

Before Thompson could even complete his first full term in office, he, too, was convicted of vote-buying. In 2008, Thompson was found guilty of designing a scheme through which he was guaranteed political support and votes in exchange for paving private driveways with county materials and equipment. Thompson appealed.

In the meantime, having served his sentence, Newsome had his civil rights restored by the Governor of Kentucky and decided to try once again to become Judge Executive. In 2010, Newsome, previously convicted of vote-buying, briefly ran against Thompson, convicted of the same crime but still awaiting appeal. Newsome was defeated in the primary, but Thompson was reelected by the very voters the court determined he had cheated just a few years before. Thompson continued to serve as Judge Executive until he was forced by a judge to resign his office while serving his prison sentence. It is such a complicated web of corruption and elections that one almost needs a diagram to understand it. 

There exists an extensive and often heartbreaking historical context to explain why Appalachia is different from the rest of the US both politically and economically. Much of the explanation traces back to a history of resource extraction and the takeover of the region by coal companies who bought local politicians and ruled with iron fists. To most outsiders who are unfamiliar with this historical context, Appalachia’s brand of politics is baffling. However, when one considers that felons convicted of vote-buying can be reelected despite their crimes, and that Blankenship, a villain of cartoonish proportions, can attract 100,000 people to a Labor Day rally, it becomes easier to understand why Trump, who has no real operable solutions to the problems faced by most in Appalachia, was able to win in so many of the region’s poorest counties.

The single worst mistake outsiders can make when attempting to interpret the actions of voters in Appalachia is to assume that they are simply too dumb to know any better. This is not the case. It is also not accurate to say that everyone in Appalachia supports Trump or Blankenship or corrupt local officials. It is worth noting that while a majority of voters in 95% of all counties in Appalachia voted for President Trump, that is not the same thing as 95% of Appalachia supporting him. Appalachia has a long history of resistance. However, the region has been so thoroughly defeated in so many ways over the course of multiple generations that those who resist often end up either giving up or moving away. Sometimes, they are defeated over and over until they just stop trying even if they can’t afford to leave.

Appalachia is America’s most neglected region. Despite efforts by the Appalachian Regional Commission and multitudes of federal elected officials, it is still a region in crisis. In many counties, the poverty rate tops thirty percent. In some, it tops forty percent. Those who spend any time in the region realize quickly that the people are in dire need of hope.

In Donald Trump, many in Appalachia found that hope. Because their region has functioned so far askew of American political norms for so long, they are able to overlook Trump’s very evident flaws. After all, generations of corrupt Appalachian politicians have helped their constituents while simultaneously enriching themselves and maintaining power in dubious or illegal ways.

I would argue that many in Appalachia voted for Donald Trump in 2016 for the same reason that they voted for Randy Thompson in 2010. In both cases, they were supporting their guy. When Trump he said, over and over, that he was the only one who could fix the mess, he was echoing generations of Appalachian politicians. It is no wonder so many in Appalachia voted for him.

Until the Democratic Party first acknowledges that Appalachia does indeed exist and then offers the region some sort of tangible hope, those in the hills and hollers of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky will continue to vote for the candidate who puts on a hard hat and says “I recognize that you exist, and I’m going to help you.”

The KEY INDICATOR of a Culture's Suicidal Tendencies - Part 1

As a “Bonnie Scot” (clan Buchanan on my Father’s side, clan Gordon on my Mother’s side), I’m interested in seeing if my racial and cultural heritage is ready and willing to commit suicide.  The Universal Basic Income is a (if not THE) KEY INDICATOR of that tendency, as it teaches young people NOT TO WORK for money.  It teaches that a basic income is a right.  
 
Once you destroy the work ethos in any people group, its people become a useless liability.  There won't be innovation, nor inventions.And I’m not saying that their won’t be a “remanent” of that heritage that won’t choose to work hard and be productive - there is always a remanent group that chooses to do hard things.  But remnants, by definition are less than the majority of the group.

Just a few years ago, Great Britain allowed Scotland to vote on whether it wants to secede from Great Britain.  For those who wanted to leave (primarily the Scottish National Party or SNP), having the resources to leave Great Britain and having control over those resources was a key point.  (Full disclosure:  Great Britain ran the "Better Together" Campaign, to persuade the Scots to remain in the British Union.  Basically, they said that if Scotland were to secede form Great Britain, that they wouldn't get the great trade with the rest of Europe, because they would not be part of the European Union.  But now that the British voted to leave the European Union, the "Better Together" argument is no longer valid!). Scotland, on the north end of the largest of the British Islands, had colder rainier weather.  The land was rocky and the climate didn't produce great harvests.  But for Scotland, not being blessed with resources that allowed great agricultural resources was always a plus, as it caused great minds to find innovative ways to do new things.  Many great inventions in the world were invented by Scots.  Many people in Britain are worried about life without their Scottish brothers and their natural resources and talents.

Scotland is blessed with Oil Reserves in the North Sea that could provide this universal basic income, IF they aren't declared non accessible by the European Union.

But, to see the future, if Scotland decides to go with a universal basic income, witness the chaos in Black America today.  With a basic Income for the black family in America (welfare - by Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society") guaranteed by the government, there is no need for men.  Because there is no need for men, there are no male role models to show young men how to work hard, show what is acceptable behavior (decorum) and to enforce these unwritten traditions of American society.

And although the Black American societal culture is matriarchical, the lack of men available to mentor boys into men, allows causes them to turn to their base instincts and to run wild.  What we get is an incredible black on black murder rate, a corresponding unemployment rate, an astonishing amount of theft, a tragic rate girls bearing children, without being married (and the fathers taking no responsibility for their off-spring) and an unacceptable lack basic education skills that are generally attained.  If you NEVER have to sacrifice and work for anything, you choose for that need to become a “right.”  

The only people in the welfare group that come out ahead are the criminals and poverty pimps, but I repeat myself.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/scotland/universal-basic-income-risks-diverting-cash-to-better-off-zbrfvk59q

Universal basic income ‘risks diverting cash to better off’

MisplacedOctober 23 2017, 12:01am,

Providing all citizens with a universal basic income would risk harming the poorest in society, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and adviser to the SNP government has warned.

Joseph Stiglitz, a member of the Scottish government’s council of economic advisers, said he feared that if the policy were adopted cash would be diverted from the poorest to the better off.

Nicola Sturgeon has vowed to press ahead with plans to explore such a policy, which is commonly understood to mean that welfare payments are replaced with a guaranteed income for everybody, and has offered government funding for research schemes.

Professor Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank who holds a chair at Columbia University, said it would be better to focus on creating jobs while ensuring the most vulnerable were supported.

He said: “I do worry about two things. One, that there are fiscal constraints and should the scarce money be used to give everyone a basic amount or should it be targeted at those who have particularly strong needs? I think there needs to be some targeting.

“Secondly, over the long run our responsibility as a society is to make sure that everybody who wants a job can get one, and the underlying problems of lack of employment and lack of adequate pay — anybody who works full time ought to have a liveable income — those are the issues in the long run that we need to address.”

Last week Ms Sturgeon said she would press ahead with work to look into the feasibility of the policy, with the government funding research by councils. She has admitted that a basic income “might turn out not to be feasible”, though the policy is popular with left-wing SNP members. She has stressed that work is at an early stage.

Civil servants have warned Ms Sturgeon that she does not have the powers to replace existing benefits with a universal basic income because the UK government still controls most welfare payments. In a briefing, the first minister was also told that the policy would be unpopular with the public and prohibitively expensive, at an estimated £12.3 billion, roughly the same as is spent on the NHS or about a third of the Scottish government’s total budget.

Professor Stiglitz, a left-wing economist who also advises Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, also backed the transfer of new immigration powers to Holyrood, saying there were “differences in values and in economic needs” between Scotland and the rest of the UK. He said: “It seems to me that it is certainly an appropriate issue to be on the table that Scotland should have the powers to go its own way in migration policy.”

Professor Stiglitz said that he remained sympathetic to Scottish independence, despite his links to Labour, which opposes another referendum, and that he believed Brexit had strengthened the case for leaving the UK. He said: “If the issue were on the table today I would still be sympathetic towards it. The question right now that’s absorbing all the political energies in the UK is Brexit. Typically, societies have the energy to solve only one big problem at a time.”

Guest Post: How to Not Fall For and Accept the Left's Premise That We Are ALL Guilty of Racism and Slavery

I keep running into such GREAT Blogs and Articles that are prescient, specifically about the ARTIFICIAL CHARGES OF RACISM AND SLAVERY continually leveled at the "right" by the Poverty Pimps (we'll include former Divider-in-Chief and Community activist, Barack Obama in this group). 

Today's blog post comes from Selwyn Duke via the American Thinker Blog.  

October 11, 2017

Now, We Know My Mother Has Flaws, But...

By Selwyn Duke

There’s a disclaimer many of us have been conditioned to utter, quite reflexively, and it’s something that has got to stop. When preparing a defense of the United States (against, lamentably, other “Americans”), we may preface it with, “Well, I know our country isn’t perfect” or, as pundit Tucker Carlson said while debating a bigoted lawyer last month, “I don’t deny…that this country is flawed….” Actually, our perspective is flawed.

To gain some perspective, imagine you were giving a speech about your mother and opened with, “Now, we know my mother has flaws, but….” Sound good?

Consider the message sent. Since we’re all imperfect, it’s a given your mother has flaws and, therefore, it isn’t something you’d normally even think to mention. Thus, the very act of mentioning it involves the implication that your mother isn’t just saddled with the usual imperfections — but that she’s uniquely flawed. It’s not something you do unless she’s a somewhat horrible person.

Or you’re a horrible child — or a horribly brainwashed one.

Of course, if America were uniquely flawed, it would follow that there are a host of nations better. If we know of one, we may want to consider moving there. If we don’t, we should stop parroting that stupid disclaimer. Russians don’t do it. Chinese don’t do it. Japanese don’t do it. Not even Sudanese, Iranians or North Koreans do it.

In fact, while there’s no nation without sin, can you think of one beyond the waning West whose citizens feel compelled to issue self-flagellating we’re-so-flawed utterances? So why do many Americans, despite occupying history’s greatest nation, feel such a compulsion? What are they comparing America to? Heaven?

Speaking of the spirit world, many cultures would engage in ancestor worship. We engage in ancestor condemnation. Just recently, while defending Columbus Day against Indigenous Peoples Day dunderheads, a quite well-meaning commentator wrote that there “are 364 other days in the year on which we could acknowledge the sins of our ancestors….”

Sorry, but I don’t do ancestors. First, I’ll consider condemning our forebears when other groups and nations begin condemning theirs. Second, I’m no more responsible for their trespasses than I am for their triumphs. (Speaking of which, when I start getting royalty checks for all the inventions and innovations birthed by history’s great white men, I’ll consider offering reparations.) Lastly, I have no interest in continually “acknowledging” my ancestors’ sins — I have enough problems with my own.

This brings us to another aspect of this matter, one well illustrated by another comment Tucker Carlson made: that our country “is deeply flawed on questions of race.”Actually, no, it’s not. As in the 1990s Rwandan genocide, racial/ethnic/tribal/religious conflicts elsewhere often have resulted in massive bloodshed. In contrast, it’s hard to think of a nation in which so many disparate peoples get along as well as in the U.S. (though the Left is trying feverishly to change that). The point is that in all this talk about “our flaws,” we’re not even talking about “our” flaws.We’re talking about the flaws of people long dead (that is, when the flaws aren’t wholly imaginary).

In other words, we’re fighting yesterday’s battles — harping on our ancestors’ sins in an infinite loop — and ignoring today’s.

As to this, if a man seeing a therapist fixated constantly on his late father’s faults, wouldn’t the therapist point out that, not only is he living in the past, but that incessantly focusing on another’s flaws can be a way of avoiding having to confront your own?

Leftists haven’t the foggiest idea what our “flaws” are for the simple reason that, being moral relativists/nihilists (not believing in Truth, absolute by definition), they have no standard of perfection to use as a yardstick. And if you have no objective standard of right, you can’t know what’s wrong — not any more than you could identify unhealthful foods without believing in and knowing the rules of human nutrition.

We do have real flaws, today, now, things such as confusion over marriage, sex and the sexes (“transgender” agenda); the mainstreaming of perversion; decadent entertainment; rampant vulgarity; racial demagoguery; profligate spending; leftist propaganda everywhere; and, what lies at the heart of it all, moral relativism. But it’s easier to talk about those dastardly dead white males — they’re not around to defend themselves.  

One of the great victories of the Left is that it has woven so many of its suppositions so seamlessly into the culture that even good people accept them, unknowingly, unthinkingly. 

Thus will we utter, cowed and callow, “Look, I know our country has flaws….”

The irony is that if we could purge so-called leftism from the hearts and minds of Americans, most of our flaws would be gone overnight.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

 I've stated in some of my other blog posts, that there is no one who experienced slavery in America first hand that is still living.  Only they have the legal standing to challenge the rest of the country about racism.  And only those who made others into slaves and kept them as slaves can be legally challenged for reparations and penalized for their lawless behavior.  They can't be penalized for boorish, crude or unseemly behavior.   Their heirs do not.have standing to file suit or be prosecuted or  to be penalized or incarcerated for this behavior.  The law deals with aggrieved parties and those who illegally, crudely or boorishly treated them.  Sorry, Poverty Pimps, Black Lives Matter and other Racial Justice Warriors, although you might believe that there is no statute of limitations for the Grievances which you perceive were done against others with darker skin, these perceived grievances weren't done against you and you NEED TO DROP THE INSULT, DISRESPECT and AFFRONT AND GET ON WITH YOUR LIFE. 

Now, if America were really a racist nation, would white people fought other white people over slavery?  Instead, wouldn't they have worked together to kill off those of whom they thought were lesser in stature?  Wouldn't they have committed genocide?  Yet, they didn't.  Americans, being a highly Christian nation, based on the belief system and the culture, understood that these were people.    While many had to work hard lives, many were also respected and loved by their owners, trusted with positions within the familial organizations.  Though they worked menial jobs and often worked their whole lives to pay off the debt their "owners" paid to those who transported them from Africa to America.  (Full disclosure:  While I find this practice abhorrent, my maternal ancestors worked as indentured servants (sold themselves into slavery) in order to purchase passage to America from Scotland.  I also don't care for the fact that Georgia was established as a debtors prison/colony, where those who accrued debts and could not pay them off were sent to work off their debt.  This practice was just one step above the debtor's prisons of England in the 1600 - 1700s.). 

So the question of "should black or dark skinned Americans be angry at the circumstances of how they arrived in America?"  Possibly, but what can the anger they feel do for them?  

• If it can be used as a motivation to achieve gainful status in life, without gloating, it will have been transformed from a negative to a positive.  
• If it can serve as a reminder of how not to treat others, it will have been transformed into a positive.  
• Even IF it can be rightly aimed at the Islamic tribes that first captured their ancestors as slaves, before selling them to traders, who made profits on their future labors over the cost of transporting them to a place where they could be sold, that can be a positive thing.  

But endless whining about how ones ancestors were mistreated by "white people, with privilege (in a white, European society, come to America)" and talk of reparations and payback is all that is achieved (as the poverty pimps would stoke them on to do), then we will become a country permanently divided and our current state is as good as it will ever get.

Guest Post : Rewriting History

This letter is a response to Black Students attending Oxford as Rhodes Scholars wanting to remove the statue of Oxford Benefactor, Cecil Rhodes.  It should be read on every campus in the U.S. as well.

I have no idea whether this "letter" is true or not.  One can only pray that it is.  It's far past time that someone, anyone respond in this manner, if not these words.  As the only group of people who find a reason in their religion and culture to enslave and kill those who aren't of their mindset, shouldn't we collectively be against Muslims and Islam, their backward religion, culture and mindset, rather than trying to rewrite history and immolate western culture and everything in it?  As William Wilberforce gave his life to end slavery in England, abolitionists in America readily died for that cause over 150 years ago, slavery only exists in the unenlightened Arab-Muslim culture.  I find it ironic that Black Americans are trying to use race as a cudgel against white Americans that haven't had the opportunity to own a slave in over 150 years.  And along the same lines, racism has been eradicated in 99.9999% of White America.  It only exists in Black America any more.

*******************************************

Dear Scrotty Students,

Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort and well being of many generations of Oxford students – a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter and more deserving than you.
This does not necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime – but then we don’t have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago. Autres temps, autres moeurs*. If you don’t understand what this means – and it would not remotely surprise us if that were the case – then we really think you should ask yourself the question: “Why am I at Oxford?”

Oxford, let us remind you, is the world’s second oldest extant university. Scholars have been studying here since at least the 11th century. We’ve played a major part in the invention of Western civilisation, from the 12th century intellectual renaissance through the Enlightenment and beyond. Our alumni include William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, William Tyndale, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Erasmus, Sir Christopher Wren, William Penn, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Robert Hooke, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Emily Davison, Cardinal Newman, Julie Cocks. We’re a big deal. And most of the people privileged to come and study here are conscious of what a big deal we are. Oxford is their alma mater – their dear mother – and they respect and revere her accordingly.

And what were your ancestors doing in that period? Living in mud huts, mainly. Sure we’ll concede you the short lived Southern African civilisation of Great Zimbabwe. But let’s be brutally honest here. The contribution of the Bantu tribes to modern civilisation has been as near as damn it to zilch.

You’ll probably say that’s “racist”. But it’s what we here at Oxford prefer to call “true.” Perhaps the rules are different at other universities. In fact, we know things are different at other universities. We’ve watched with horror at what has been happening across the pond from the University of Missouri to the University of Virginia and even to revered institutions like Harvard and Yale: the “safe spaces”; the #blacklivesmatter; the creeping cultural relativism; the stifling political correctness; what Allan Bloom rightly called “the closing of the American mind”. At Oxford however, we will always prefer facts and free, open debate to petty grievance-mongering, identity politics and empty sloganeering. The day we cease to do so is the day we lose the right to call ourselves the world’s greatest university.

Of course, you are perfectly within your rights to squander your time at Oxford on silly, vexatious, single-issue political campaigns. (Though it does make us wonder how stringent the vetting procedure is these days for Rhodes scholarships and even more so, for Mandela Rhodes scholarships) We are well used to seeing undergraduates – or, in your case – postgraduates, making idiots of themselves. Just don’t expect us to indulge your idiocy, let alone genuflect before it. You may be black – “BME” as the grisly modern terminology has it – but we are colour blind.

 We have been educating gifted undergraduates from our former colonies, our Empire, our Commonwealth and beyond for many generations. We do not discriminate over sex, race, colour or creed. We do, however, discriminate according to intellect.

That means, inter alia, that when our undergrads or postgrads come up with fatuous ideas, we don’t pat them on the back, give them a red rosette and say: “Ooh, you’re black and you come from South Africa. What a clever chap you are!”  No. We prefer to see the quality of those ideas tested in the crucible of public debate. That’s another key part of the Oxford intellectual tradition you see: you can argue any damn thing you like but you need to be able to justify it with facts and logic – otherwise your idea is worthless.

This ludicrous notion you have that a bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes should be removed from Oriel College, because it’s symbolic of “institutional racism” and “white slavery”. Well even if it is – which we dispute – so bloody what?  Any undergraduate so feeble-minded that they can’t pass a bronze statue without having their “safe space” violated really does not deserve to be here.  And besides, if we were to remove Rhodes’s statue on the premise that his life wasn’t blemish-free, where would we stop?  As one of our alumni Dan Hannan has pointed out, Oriel’s other benefactors include two kings so awful – Edward II and Charles I – that their subjects had them killed.  The college opposite – Christ Church – was built by a murderous, thieving bully who bumped off two of his wives.  Thomas Jefferson kept slaves: does that invalidate the US Constitution?  Winston Churchill had unenlightened views about Muslims and India:  was he then the wrong man to lead Britain in the war?”

Actually, we’ll go further than that.  Your Rhodes Must Fall campaign is not merely fatuous but ugly, vandalistic and dangerous.  We agree with Oxford historian RW Johnson that what you are trying to do here is no different from what ISIS and the Al-Qaeda have been doing to artefacts in places like Mali and Syria.  You are murdering history.

And who are you, anyway, to be lecturing Oxford University on how it should order its affairs?  Your #rhodesmustfall campaign, we understand, originates in South Africa and was initiated by a black activist who told one of his lecturers “whites have to be killed”. One of you – Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh – is the privileged son of a rich politician and a member of a party whose slogan is “Kill the Boer; Kill the Farmer”; another of you, Ntokozo Qwabe, who is only in Oxford as a beneficiary of a Rhodes scholarship, has boasted about the need for “socially conscious black students” to “dominate white universities, and do so ruthlessly and decisively!
Great.  That’s just what Oxford University needs.  Some cultural enrichment from the land of Winnie Mandela, burning tyre necklaces, an AIDS epidemic almost entirely the result of government indifference and ignorance, one of the world’s highest per capita murder rates, institutionalised corruption, tribal politics, anti-white racism and a collapsing economy.  Please name which of the above items you think will enhance the lives of the 22,000 students studying here at Oxford.

And then please explain what it is that makes your attention grabbing campaign to remove a listed statue from an Oxford college more urgent, more deserving than the desire of probably at least 20,000 of those 22,000 students to enjoy their time here unencumbered by the irritation of spoilt, ungrateful little tossers on scholarships they clearly don’t merit using racial politics and cheap guilt-tripping to ruin the life and fabric of our beloved university.

Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you.

Yours,
Oriel College, Oxford
*Autres temps, autres moeurs – Other times, other customs: in other eras people behaved differently.
Interestingly, Chris Patten (Lord Patten of Barnes), The Chancellor of Oxford University, was on the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 yesterday on precisely the same topic. The Daily Telegraph headline yesterday was "Oxford will not rewrite history".

Patten commented "Education is not indoctrination. Our history is not a blank page on which we can write our own version of what it should have been according to our contemporary views and prejudice"

Guest Post: Nationalism versus Globalism

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Appeared in: Volume 12, Number 1
Published on: July 10, 2016 

NATIONALISM RISING

When and Why Nationalism Beats GlobalismJONATHAN HAIDT

And how moral psychology can help explain and reduce tensions between the two.

What on earth is going on in the Western democracies? From the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and an assortment of right-wing parties across Europe through the June 23 Brexit vote, many on the Left have the sense that something dangerous and ugly is spreading: right-wing populism, seen as the Zika virus of politics. Something has gotten into “those people” that makes them vote in ways that seem—to their critics—likely to harm their own material interests, at least if their leaders follow through in implementing isolationist policies that slow economic growth.

Most analyses published since the Brexit vote focus on economic factors and some version of the “left behind” thesis—globalization has raised prosperity all over the world, with the striking exception of the working classes in Western societies. These less educated members of the richest countries lost access to well-paid but relatively low-skilled jobs, which were shipped overseas or given to immigrants willing to work for less. In communities where wages have stagnated or declined, the ever-rising opulence, rents, and confidence of London and other super-cities has bred resentment.

A smaller set of analyses, particularly in the United States, has focused on the psychological trait of authoritarianismto explain why these populist movements are often so hostile to immigration, and why they usually have an outright racist fringe.

Globalization and authoritarianism are both essential parts of the story, but in this essay I will put them together in a new way. I’ll tell a story with four chapters that begins by endorsing the distinction made by the intellectual historian Michael Lind, and other commentators, between globalists and nationalists—these are good descriptions of the two teams of combatants emerging in so many Western nations. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French National Front, pointed to the same dividing line last December when she portrayed the battle in France as one between “globalists” and “patriots.”

But rather than focusing on the nationalists as the people who need to be explained by experts, I’ll begin the story with the globalists. I’ll show how globalization and rising prosperity have changed the values and behavior of the urban elite, leading them to talk and act in ways that unwittingly activate authoritarian tendencies in a subset of the nationalists. I’ll show why immigration has been so central in nearly all right-wing populist movements. It’s not just the spark, it’s the explosive material, and those who dismiss anti-immigrant sentiment as mere racism have missed several important aspects of moral psychology related to the general human need to live in a stable and coherent moral order. Once moral psychology is brought into the story and added on to the economic and authoritarianism explanations, it becomes possible to offer some advice for reducing the intensity of the recent wave of conflicts.

Chapter One: The Rise of the Globalists

As nations grow prosperous, their values change in predictable ways. The most detailed longitudinal research on these changes comes from the World Values Survey, which asks representative samples of people in dozens of countries about their values and beliefs. The WVS has now collected and published data in six “waves” since the early 1980s; the most recent survey included sixty countries. Nearly all of the countries are now far wealthier than they were in the 1980s, and many made a transition from communism to capitalism and from dictatorship to democracy in the interim. How did these momentous changes affect their values?

Each country has followed a unique trajectory, but if we zoom out far enough some general trends emergefrom the WVS data. Countries seem to move in two directions, along two axes: first, as they industrialize, they move away from “traditional values” in which religion, ritual, and deference to authorities are important, and toward “secular rational” values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering based on rational considerations. Second, as they grow wealthier and more citizens move into the service sector, nations move away from “survival values” emphasizing the economic and physical security found in one’s family, tribe, and other parochial groups, toward “self-expression” or “emancipative values” that emphasize individual rights and protections—not just for oneself, but as a matter of principle, for everyone. Here is a summary of those changes from the introduction to Christian Welzel’s enlightening book Freedom Rising:

…fading existential pressures [i.e., threats and challenges to survival] open people’s minds, making them prioritize freedom over security, autonomy over authority, diversity over uniformity, and creativity over discipline. By the same token, persistent existential pressures keep people’s minds closed, in which case they emphasize the opposite priorities…the existentially relieved state of mind is the source of tolerance and solidarity beyond one’s in-group; the existentially stressed state of mind is the source of discrimination and hostility against out-groups.

Democratic capitalism—in societies with good rule of law and non-corrupt institutions—has generated steady increases in living standards and existential security for many decades now. As societies become more prosperous and safe, they generally become more open and tolerant. Combined with vastly greater access to the food, movies, and consumer products of other cultures brought to us by globalization and the internet, this openness leads almost inevitably to the rise of a cosmopolitan attitude, usually most visible in the young urban elite. Local ties weaken, parochialism becomes a dirty word, and people begin to think of their fellow human beings as fellow “citizens of the world” (to quote candidate Barack Obama in Berlin in 2008). The word “cosmopolitan” comes from Greek roots meaning, literally, “citizen of the world.” Cosmopolitans embrace diversity and welcome immigration, often turning those topics into litmus tests for moral respectability.

For example, in 2007, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave a speech that included the phrase, “British jobs for British workers.” The phrase provoked anger and scorn from many of Brown’s colleagues in the Labour party. In an essay in Prospect, David Goodhart described the scene at a British center-left social event a few days after Brown’s remark:

The people around me entered a bidding war to express their outrage at Brown’s slogan which was finally triumphantly closed by one who declared, to general approval, that it was “racism, pure and simple.” I remember thinking afterwards how odd the conversation would have sounded to most other people in this country. Gordon Brown’s phrase may have been clumsy and cynical but he didn’t actually say British jobs for white British workers. In most other places in the world today, and indeed probably in Britain itself until about 25 years ago, such a statement about a job preference for national citizens would have seemed so banal as to be hardly worth uttering. Now the language of liberal universalism has ruled it beyond the pale.

The shift that Goodhart notes among the Left-leaning British elite is related to the shift toward “emancipative” values described by Welzel. Parochialism is bad and universalism is good. Goodhart quotes George Monbiot, a leading figure of the British Left:

Internationalism…tells us that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington…. Patriotism, if it means anything, tells us we should favour the interests of British people [before the Congolese]. How do you reconcile this choice with liberalism? How…do you distinguish it from racism?

Monbiot’s claim that patriotism is indistinguishable from racism illustrates the universalism that has characterized elements of the globalist Left in many Western nations for several decades. John Lennon wrote the globalist anthem in 1971. After asking us to imagine that there’s no heaven, and before asking us to imagine no possessions, Lennon asks us to:

Imagine there’s no countries; it isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.

This is a vision of heaven for multicultural globalists. But it’s naiveté, sacrilege, and treason for nationalists.

Chapter Two: Globalists and Nationalists Grow Further Apart on Immigration

Nationalists see patriotism as a virtue; they think their country and its culture are unique and worth preserving. This is a real moral commitment, not a pose to cover up racist bigotry. Some nationalists do believe that their country is better than all others, and some nationalisms are plainly illiberal and overtly racist. But as many defenders of patriotism have pointed out, you love your spouse because she or he is yours, not because you think your spouse is superior to all others. Nationalists feel a bond with their country, and they believe that this bond imposes moral obligations both ways: Citizens have a duty to love and serve their country, and governments are duty bound to protect their own people. Governments should place their citizens interests above the interests of people in other countries.

There is nothing necessarily racist or base about this arrangement or social contract. Having a shared sense of identity, norms, and history generally promotes trust. Having no such shared sense leads to the condition that the sociologist Émile Durkheim described as “anomie” or normlessness. Societies with high trust, or high social capital, produce many beneficial outcomes for their citizens: lower crime rates, lower transaction costs for businesses, higher levels of prosperity, and a propensity toward generosity, among others. A liberal nationalist can reasonably argue that the debate over immigration policy in Europe is not a case of what is moral versus what is base, but a case of two clashing moral visions, incommensurate (à la Isaiah Berlin). The trick, from this point of view, is figuring out how to balance reasonable concerns about the integrity of one’s own community with the obligation to welcome strangers, particularly strangers in dire need.

So how have nationalists and globalists responded to the European immigration crisis? For the past year or two we’ve all seen shocking images of refugees washing up alive and dead on European beaches, marching in long lines across south eastern Europe, scaling fences, filling train stations, and hiding and dying in trucks and train tunnels. If you’re a European globalist, you were probably thrilled in August 2015 when Angela Merkel announced Germany’s open-door policy to refugees and asylum seekers. There are millions of people in need, and (according to some globalists) national borders are arbitrary and immoral.

But the globalists are concentrated in the capital cities, commercial hubs, and university towns—the places that are furthest along on the values shift found in the World Values Survey data. Figure 1 shows this geographic disjunction in the UK, using data collected in 2014. Positive sentiment toward immigrants is plotted on the Y axis, and desire for Britain to leave the EU on the X axis. Residents of Inner London are extreme outliers on both dimensions when compared to other cities and regions of the UK, and even when compared to residents of outer London.

Figure 1. British towns that favor Brexit have more negative views of immigrants. Inner London is an outlier.

Source: Centre for European Reform, using 2014 data from Nick Vivyan and Chris Hanretty, ‘Estimating Constituency Opinion.’

But if you are a European nationalist, watching the nightly news may have felt like watching the spread of the Zika virus, moving steadily northward from the chaos zones of southwest Asia and north Africa. Only a few right-wing nationalist leaders tried to stop it, such as Victor Orban in Hungary. The globalist elite seemed to be cheering the human tidal wave onward, welcoming it into the heart of Europe, and then demanding that every country accept and resettle a large number of refugees.

And these demands, epicentered in Brussels, came after decades of debate in which nationalists had been arguing that Europe has already been too open and had already taken in so many Muslim immigrants that the cultures and traditions of European societies were threatened. Long before the flow of Syrian asylum seekers arrived in Europe there were initiatives to ban minarets in Switzerland and burkas in France. There were riots in Arab neighborhoods of Paris and Marseilles, and attacks on Jews and synagogues throughout Europe. There were hidden terrorist cells that planned and executed the attacks of September 11 in the United States, attacks on trains and buses in Madrid and London, and the slaughter of the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris.

By the summer of 2015 the nationalist side was already at the boiling point, shouting “enough is enough, close the tap,” when the globalists proclaimed, “let us open the floodgates, it’s the compassionate thing to do, and if you oppose us you are a racist.” Might that not provoke even fairly reasonable people to rage? Might that not make many of them more receptive to arguments, ideas, and political parties that lean toward the illiberal side of nationalism and that were considered taboo just a few years earlier?

Chapter Three: Muslim Immigration Triggers the Authoritarian Alarm

Nationalists in Europe have been objecting to mass immigration for decades, so the gigantic surge of asylum seekers in 2015 was bound to increase their anger and their support for right-wing nationalist parties. Globalists tend to explain these reactions as “racism, pure and simple,” or as the small-minded small-town selfishness of people who don’t want to lose either jobs or benefits to foreigners.

Racism is clearly evident in some of the things that some nationalists say in interviews, chant at soccer matches, or write on the Internet with the protection of anonymity. But “racism” is a shallow term when used as an explanation. It asserts that there are some people who just don’t like anyone different from themselves—particularly if they have darker skin. They have no valid reason for this dislike; they just dislike difference, and that’s all we need to know to understand their rage.

But that is not all we need to know. On closer inspection, racism usually turns out to be deeply bound up with moral concerns. (I use the term “moral” here in a purely descriptive sense to mean concerns that seem—for the people we are discussing—to be matters of good and evil; I am not saying that racism is in fact morally good or morally correct.) People don’t hate others just because they have darker skin or differently shaped noses; they hate people whom they perceive as having values that are incompatible with their own, or who (they believe) engage in behaviors they find abhorrent, or whom they perceive to be a threat to something they hold dear. These moral concerns may be out of touch with reality, and they are routinely amplified by demagogues. But if we want to understand the recent rise of right-wing populist movements, then “racism” can’t be the stopping point; it must be the beginning of the inquiry.

Among the most important guides in this inquiry is the political scientist Karen Stenner. In 2005 Stenner published a book called The Authoritarian Dynamic, an academic work full of graphs, descriptions of regression analyses, and discussions of scholarly disputes over the nature of authoritarianism. (It therefore has not had a wide readership.) Her core finding is that authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. It is rather a psychological predisposition to become intolerant when the person perceives a certain kind of threat. It’s as though some people have a button on their foreheads, and when the button is pushed, they suddenly become intensely focused on defending their in-group, kicking out foreigners and non-conformists, and stamping out dissent within the group. At those times they are more attracted to strongmen and the use of force. At other times, when they perceive no such threat, they are not unusually intolerant. So the key is to understand what pushes that button.

The answer, Stenner suggests, is what she calls “normative threat,” which basically means a threat to the integrity of the moral order (as they perceive it). It is the perception that “we” are coming apart:

The experience or perception of disobedience to group authorities or authorities unworthy of respect, nonconformity to group norms or norms proving questionable, lack of consensus in group values and beliefs and, in general, diversity and freedom ‘run amok’ should activate the predisposition and increase the manifestation of these characteristic attitudes and behaviors.

So authoritarians are not being selfish. They are not trying to protect their wallets or even their families. They are trying to protect their group or society. Some authoritarians see their race or bloodline as the thing to be protected, and these people make up the deeply racist subset of right-wing populist movements, including the fringe that is sometimes attracted to neo-Nazism. They would not even accept immigrants who fully assimilated to the culture. But more typically, in modern Europe and America, it is the nation and its culture that nationalists want to preserve.

Stenner identifies authoritarians in her many studies by the degree to which they endorse a few items about the most important values children should learn at home, for example, “obedience” (vs. “independence” and “tolerance and respect for other people”). She then describes a series of studies she did using a variety of methods and cross-national datasets. In one set of experiments she asked Americans to read fabricated news stories about how their nation is changing. When they read that Americans are changing in ways that make them more similar to each other, authoritarians were no more racist and intolerant than others. But when Stenner gave them a news story suggesting that Americans are becoming more morally diverse, the button got pushed, the “authoritarian dynamic” kicked in, and they became more racist and intolerant. For example, “maintaining order in the nation” became a higher national priority while “protecting freedom of speech” became a lower priority. They became more critical of homosexuality, abortion, and divorce.

One of Stenner’s most helpful contributions is her finding that authoritarians are psychologically distinct from “status quo conservatives” who are the more prototypical conservatives—cautious about radical change. Status quo conservatives compose the long and distinguished lineage from Edmund Burke’s prescient reflections and fears about the early years of the French revolution through William F. Buckley’s statement that his conservative magazine National Reviewwould “stand athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’”

Status quo conservatives are not natural allies of authoritarians, who often favor radical change and are willing to take big risks to implement untested policies. This is why so many Republicans—and nearly all conservative intellectuals—oppose Donald Trump; he is simply not a conservative by the test of temperament or values. But status quo conservatives can be drawn into alliance with authoritarians when they perceive that progressives have subverted the country’s traditions and identity so badly that dramatic political actions (such as Brexit, or banning Muslim immigration to the United States) are seen as the only remaining way of yelling “Stop!” Brexit can seem less radical than the prospect of absorption into the “ever closer union” of the EU.

So now we can see why immigration—particularly the recent surge in Muslim immigration from Syria—has caused such powerfully polarized reactions in so many European countries, and even in the United States where the number of Muslim immigrants is low. Muslim Middle Eastern immigrants are seen by nationalists as posing a far greater threat of terrorism than are immigrants from any other region or religion. But Stenner invites us to look past the security threat and examine the normative threat. Islam asks adherents to live in ways that can make assimilation into secular egalitarian Western societies more difficult compared to other groups. (The same can be said for Orthodox Jews, and Stenner’s authoritarian dynamic can help explain why we are seeing a resurgence of right-wing anti-Semitism in the United States.) Muslims don’t just observe different customs in their private lives; they often request and receive accommodations in law and policy from their host countries, particularly in matters related to gender. Some of the most pitched battles of recent decades in France and other European countries have been fought over the veiling and covering of women, and the related need for privacy and gender segregation. For example, some public swimming pools in Swedennow offer times of day when only women are allowed to swim. This runs contrary to strong Swedish values regarding gender equality and non-differentiation.

So whether you are a status quo conservative concerned about rapid change or an authoritarian who is hypersensitive to normative threat, high levels of Muslim immigration into your Western nation are likely to threaten your core moral concerns. But as soon as you speak up to voice those concerns, globalists will scorn you as a racist and a rube. When the globalists—even those who run the center-right parties in your country—come down on you like that, where can you turn? The answer, increasingly, is to the far right-wing nationalist parties in Europe, and to Donald Trump, who just engineered a hostile takeover of the Republican Party in America.

The Authoritarian Dynamic was published in 2005 and the word “Muslim” occurs just six times (in contrast to 100 appearances of the word “black”). But Stenner’s book offers a kind of Rosetta stone for interpreting the rise of right-wing populism and its focus on Muslims in 2016. Stenner notes that her theory “explains the kind of intolerance that seems to ‘come out of nowhere,’ that can spring up in tolerant and intolerant cultures alike, producing sudden changes in behavior that cannot be accounted for by slowly changing cultural traditions.”

She contrasts her theory with those who see an unstoppable tide of history moving away from traditions and “toward greater respect for individual freedom and difference,” and who expect people to continue evolving “into more perfect liberal democratic citizens.“ She does not say which theorists she has in mind, but Welzel and his World Values Survey collaborators, as well as Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, seem to be likely candidates. Stenner does not share the optimism of those theorists about the future of Western liberal democracies. She acknowledges the general trends toward tolerance, but she predicts that these very trends create conditions that hyper-activate authoritarians and produce a powerful backlash. She offered this prophecy:

[T]he increasing license allowed by those evolving cultures generates the very conditions guaranteed to goad latent authoritarians to sudden and intense, perhaps violent, and almost certainly unexpected, expressions of intolerance. Likewise, then, if intolerance is more a product of individual psychology than of cultural norms…we get a different vision of the future, and a different understanding of whose problem this is and will be, than if intolerance is an almost accidental by-product of simple attachment to tradition. The kind of intolerance that springs from aberrant individual psychology, rather than the disinterested absorption of pervasive cultural norms, is bound to be more passionate and irrational, less predictable, less amenable to persuasion, and more aggravated than educated by the cultural promotion of tolerance [emphasis added].

Writing in 2004, Stenner predicted that “intolerance is not a thing of the past, it is very much a thing of the future.”

Chapter Four: What Now?

The upshot of all this is that the answer to the question we began with—What on earth is going on?—cannot be found just by looking at the nationalists and pointing to their economic conditions and the racism that some of them do indeed display. One must first look at the globalists, and at how their changing values may drive many of their fellow citizens to support right-wing political leaders. In particular, globalists often support high levels of immigration and reductions in national sovereignty; they tend to see transnational entities such as the European Union as being morally superior to nation-states; and they vilify the nationalists and their patriotism as “racism pure and simple.” These actions press the “normative threat” button in the minds of those who are predisposed to authoritarianism, and these actions can drive status quo conservatives to join authoritarians in fighting back against the globalists and their universalistic projects.

If this argument is correct, then it leads to a clear set of policy prescriptions for globalists. First and foremost: Think carefully about the way your country handles immigration and try to manage it in a way that is less likely to provoke an authoritarian reaction. Pay attention to three key variables: the percentage of foreign-born residents at any given time, the degree of moral difference of each incoming group, and the degree of assimilation being achieved by each group’s children.

Legal immigration from morally different cultures is not problematic even with low levels of assimilation if the numbers are kept low; small ethnic enclaves are not a normative threat to any sizable body politic. Moderate levels of immigration by morally different ethnic groups are fine, too, as long as the immigrants are seen as successfully assimilating to the host culture. When immigrants seem eager to embrace the language, values, and customs of their new land, it affirms nationalists’ sense of pride that their nation is good, valuable, and attractive to foreigners. But whenever a country has historically high levels of immigration, from countries with very different moralities, and without a strong and successful assimilationist program, it is virtually certain that there will be an authoritarian counter-reaction, and you can expect many status quo conservatives to support it.

Stenner ends The Authoritarian Dynamicwith some specific and constructive advice:

[A]ll the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness…. Ultimately, nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals, institutions, and processes. And regrettably, nothing is more certain to provoke increased expression of their latent predispositions than the likes of “multicultural education,” bilingual policies, and nonassimilation.

If Stenner is correct, then her work has profound implications, not just for America, which was the focus of her book, but perhaps even more so for Europe. Donald Tusk, the current president of the European Council, recently gave a speech to a conclave of center-right Christian Democratic leaders (who, as members of the educated elite, are still generally globalists). Painfully aware of the new authoritarian supremacy in his native Poland, he chastised himself and his colleagues for pushing a “utopia of Europe without nation-states.” This, he said, has caused the recent Euroskeptic backlash: “Obsessed with the idea of instant and total integration, we failed to notice that ordinary people, the citizens of Europe, do not share our Euro-enthusiasm.”

Democracy requires letting ordinary citizens speak. The majority spoke in Britain on June 23, and majorities of similar mien may soon make themselves heard in other European countries, and possibly in the United States in November. The year 2016 will likely be remembered as a major turning point in the trajectory of Western democracies. Those who truly want to understand what is happening should carefully consider the complex interplay of globalization, immigration, and changing values.

If the story I have told here is correct, then the globalists could easily speak, act, and legislate in ways that drain passions and votes away from nationalist parties, but this would require some deep rethinking about the value of national identities and cohesive moral communities. It would require abandoning the multicultural approach to immigration and embracing assimilation.

The great question for Western nations after 2016 may be this: How do we reap the gains of global cooperation in trade, culture, education, human rights, and environmental protection while respecting—rather than diluting or crushing—the world’s many local, national, and other “parochial” identities, each with its own traditions and moral order? In what kind of world can globalists and nationalists live together in peace?

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor in the Business and Society Program at New York University—Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

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