The Republic died 100 years ago. Diversity is killing the corrupt Empire that replaced the Republic.
Morry Rotenberg
3 years ago
There is no mention of the 800 pound Gorilla that is Marxism. The Cultural Marxists have marched through all of our civic institutions beginning with the academy and culminating in a fourth estate which has morphed into the most dangerous fifth column the USA has ever seen. Our citizens including the Oligarchs and what passes for journalists have been marinating in Marxist claptrap since kindergarten and are dedicated to “fundamentally transforming” this country into a Communist nightmare.
The Frankfurt School, that 1930s German intellectual Marxist group which decided the way to bring Marxism was destroy Western values. It moved to Columbia University in the 1950s and began its serious path if infiltrating all Academia with the Liberal/Left sickness which is so rampant today. Google them to see. plus the 11 points of them.
“Cultural Marxism” isn’t Marxism, or even communism. You wouldn’t have woke capital if it were. Tim Cook can change his pronouns, or argue for racial equality or gender equality or trans equality but he’s not going to ask for equal pay for all workers, no dividends to owners, Apple as a worker co-operative or owned by the state, any time soon.
Albert Kensington
3 years ago
“But then the “average” Americans were becoming sidelined in the country’s story as, post-1965 immigration reform, the country became multicultural,”
Reform is a term that should be advisedly qualified by speech marks – Putnam argued that the greater the diversity the less the trust.
If the United States with it’s overarching monument to the Enlightenment – the Constitution – can’t make diversity work what price the tribally based West European nations?
Is the US doing that badly, whining about the Sixties aside? Remember that in 1945, the US was the last man standing, and so for the next 30 years or so bestrode the world. It was inevitable that new powers, actors, and conditions would arise, and the US ruling class chose to embark on a misconceived course of inept imperialism to try to keep its position. Imperialism, in the modern world, has inevitably led to physical, financial, and moral disaster: consider Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Japan, and so on. The US took its turn at the poisoned trough and still cannot turn away. Meanwhile it is said the Chinese want to step up to it. Let them, perhaps? Then we in the West can get back to whining about how letting the Colored into the Club ruined everything.
The empire is part of the problem. Diversity is driven by imperial needs. Some commentators have urged the US to expand its population to 1 billion to better fight a future China. This would leave European Americans at 20% or so. I can’t imagine that being a stable State, even if CRT didn’t exist. That future US would be driven apart by ethnic and racial disparities.
The American Constitution was never meant for anyone other than Western Eurpean Christians. All nations are tribally based, it’s practically a tautology. The state and the nation must never be confused. Civic nationalism is passing, and there will be war.
Diversity means actually accepting and respecting those with different values, not just ethnicity or sexual proclivities. As indicated in the article the essential right is freedom of assembly. Once this freedom is taken away – which is what is happening then all others fall.
the esential right is freedom from want, as FDR nad Henry Wallace knew – this is a class issue, a matter that ideologues like Leo Strauss were little concerned about.
Jeffrey Chongsathien
3 years ago
Nixon taking the dollar off the Gold Standard was the beginning of the end.
Wasn’t this just a reflection of the hubris of believing America’s productive capacity was so great that the Vietnam War, a huge armaments programme, confronting the commies wherever they were to be found, Johnson’s “Great Society” were all simultaneously affordable?
Well, yes, but that doesn’t alter the fact that it was the beginning of the end for economic fairness and the working classes etc. Essentially, it ushered in an era where your prosperity depended almost totally on your proximity to the creation of fiat money and not on your ability to produce something useful or desirable.
A fun thing to read. The ability to grab some created out of air fiat money being wealth. But it still comes down to making and selling stuff, real stuff and real services, being what money is. I believe you are a banker so see money totally different than us who work with real things, and we both are likely right.
What probably mattered more was the end of Keynesian economics.
Malcolm Webb
3 years ago
America is caught up in the deep fog of a Post Modernist nightmare but eventually objective truth will out as reality dawns and a principled politician or two arrives on the scene to welcome it. It might be quite a wait though, as the smoke of the appallingly mismanaged war against Covid 19 has promoted yet more fallacies as fact and once more obscured the truth – for a while.
I just watch The Choice 2020. As a non American I was surprised there was no discussion on policy and objectives. It was all about person – neither of whom were people I would like to vote for to run a country. Our media have to pull up their socks. What are the real problems? Where is the vision for the people really? Is there only one leader or is there a team running the country?
The results would suggest the people did not find what they wanted either.
This is very true, but the question is what would be the vision defining the objectives? Without a goal, it’s hard to achieve anything… I’m working on a goal people can get behind… Wish me luck.
Aaron Kevali
3 years ago
This may just be the most important article on UnHerd, and Ed West at his absolute best.
You cannot have anti-racism as a serious value and respect freedom in any meaningful way. The Civil Rights Act was an abomination that effectively cancelled the Constitution. The culture wars have moved on to browbeating white people who won’t have sex with black people. All discrimination, not matter how intimate and personal, must be eliminated. It will fail of course, and take the rotten system with it. If we’re lucky, Czechslovakia will be our model. If unlucky, Yugoslavia.
Martin Luther King was a corrupt fiend, a liar, adulterer, and rapist. But he wrote pretty speeches that make us feel good.
mark taha
3 years ago
Caldwell is right. There’s been a new and far worse Mccarthyism for decades conducted by the Politically Correct brigade – even Trump failed to stop.them.
Giles Chance
3 years ago
In 1950, America was a country to be imitated. In 2021, who wants to copy a deeply polarised, violent society, the richest there has ever been with very high levels of poverty, in which many people hate themselves and believe that a million dollars solves everything ? America is no longer part of the solution. America is now the problem.
Brian Bieron
3 years ago
Yes, Trump was the Archie Bunker President and the divisions in America are best seen as being on a relatively straight line from the 1960’s and the Cultural Revolution.
But the endless carping about how bad the economy is for most people, whether coming from the left or right, is a load of crap. When you factor in government transfer payments, real incomes for every quintile are meaningfully up. And as anyone who came of age in the 1970’s knows, living conditions are far, far better for most everyone (air conditioning, telecommunications, automobiles, entertainment, home square footage and bathrooms).
Indeed! I am so sick of hearing how awful poverty is these days when it is quite apparent our societal problems have almost nothing to do with it. The real problems are unsayable in polite company, but in summary:
1) diversity (collapsed fertility/mass-migration) 2) loss of Christianity (nothing even remotely capable of substituting) 3) abandonment of history/law/cuture (i.e. post-modernism, critical theory)
Yes, and to add to what you are saying, wage increases aren’t including health care costs borne by the employer. One year we got minimal pay increases, but the health premium paid by the employer doubled. Health costs go up every year without exception. This should be counted as income.
Er, no. That’s just an inflationary cost that eats into incomes. It doesn’t matter if the wage earner has to pay this after he earns his wages, or the employer beforehand, it’s a reduction in disposable income. House prices and university costs are other major costs.
If you need a government subsidy to keep the bottom quintile where it was then that’s a failure of the system.
Otto Christensen
3 years ago
After reading this review I will not be reading Caldwell’s cliche social theories. The book, as reviewed, a collection of extreme ideological assumptions and selected facts like the nonsense about CEO’s only being paid marginally more than workers in the supposedly egalitarian 1950’s or ignoring the disparity between old money and workers, is a typical collection of speculative conspiracies that is today so much in vogue. There is an element of guilt sellers within American society, a locked down block in a city does not constitute the anarchy of a nation, that trigger media however it is a huge misunderstanding of the America to presume it is in decline. America, i predict, will reinvent itself again and again as it has done in the past, not only as it has done since the 1950’s. The two active « ideological » realities in America today are a small minority of whiners, spoiled plutocrats and revisionists and the rest. So tired of everything being explained from a 1950’s narrow Orwellian point of view.
Well I definitely think your opinion trumps his facts.
Charles Rense
3 years ago
Unless it’s the 1860s, he’s not a very thorough historian.
Andrew Baldwin
3 years ago
Ed’s review is fascinating. Haven’t read Caldwell’s book but a VOX interview with the author by Sean Illing makes clear that Caldwell wasn’t opposed to the civil rights movement and desegregation, but didn’t like busing to integrate American schools or the affirmative action movement in general. It made me think of the controversy over Harper Lee’s sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird”, which inexplicably was described as revealing Atticus Finch as an anti-black bigot. Anyone who actually read the book would see this was not the case. Atticus opposed busing to integrate schools as did his more idealistic daughter Scout. He was willing to occupy a platform at a public meeting with a white racist because they both opposed busing, which his daughter thought that this was indefensible. Anyway, Caldwell doesn’t believe that the civil rights movement was a mistake, only that it was taken too far.
But it was a mistake. Demonstrably, and in every conceivable way. Historians (probably Chinese) will look back on this in a century or two and laugh softly to themselves at how foolish white nations destroyed their posterity in order to look and feel good.
There probably won’t be a war, there doesn’t need to be. But yeah, decadence is a nice one-word summary.
Dave Weeden
3 years ago
Very good piece, Ed. But if Unherd is going to run quite so many book reviews, it should really have a special section for them.
Aaron Kevali
3 years ago
“certain whites, however, far from feeling the shame of racism, stood in a newfound moral effulgence as fighters against it, sharing a little bit of Martin Luther King’s glory.”
I wonder who these (((certain whites))) would be?
justimax8391
3 years ago
the review of Mr Caldwell’s contribution is depressing, firstly as it labels him a “great mind” – an unfortunate solecism,imho- but above all because it thrashes about unhappily over the key issue, as Leo Strauss remarks, of society. Now Mr West may recall that our own dear Mrs Thatcher very properly pooh-poohed the idea that society exists . Her US counterpart,Mr Reagan, whose misdeeds towards his own people make Mr Trump look like a choirboy, deliberately destroyed the US economy, transforming the State into a tool of Wall Street and the Pentagon, in short, of the military-industrial complex which Ike had warned against in 1954. I would gather that , however admiring of his great mind Mr West may be, Mr Caldwell fails entirely to provide the kind of analysis of the US situation which ,say, Thomas Frank offers.
Michael North
3 years ago
I couldn’t be bothered to read the above – I am saying that increasingly often these days. What fractured the USA was the Vietnam war. It has never recovered from the divisions that created nor learned any lessons.
Jonathan Barker
3 years ago
I found this review to be nothing more than a collection of the usual right-wing cliches”. And by the way what does the word nomenclature “conservative” really mean?
Was mainstream American culture prior to the sixties really deeply moral and/or “religious”?
All religions and the “God”-ideas upon which they are based are merely and only projections of the individual and/or collective psychology of those who make them and are consoled by those religions and “God”-ideas. They then inevitably use their “god”-ideas to reduce the Living Divine Reality to the mortal meat-body scale ONLY. Thereby effectively enslaving the Living Divine Reality and (again) inevitably using their tribalistic cultic “God” to justify all of the inevitable horrors that such cultic religiosity generates, especially when their tribalistic cult has hundreds of millions of true believers, and is very closely entangled with the militaristic power structures of their particular state – “God” is always with us in our murderously reasonable imperial misadventures.
I know of a profoundly conservative (but not in any sense right wing) Spiritual Philosopher who while being deeply sympathetic with the travails of the usual or normal human being who as he puts it really do live lives of quiet desparation gives a comprehensive critique of the religious, political and economic lies upon which mainstream American culture was and is based.
Diversity is going to kill the American Republic.
I agree with the sentiment-something is going to die, but I don’t think it will be the Republic.
Oh it will be.
It’s taking a mighty long time to do it. It’s been a circus of diversity since 1776, if not 1609 or 1492, and it’s still a republic, sort of.
Pre 1960s immigration reform the population was overwhelmingly European. Huge difference now.
The Republic died 100 years ago. Diversity is killing the corrupt Empire that replaced the Republic.
There is no mention of the 800 pound Gorilla that is Marxism. The Cultural Marxists have marched through all of our civic institutions beginning with the academy and culminating in a fourth estate which has morphed into the most dangerous fifth column the USA has ever seen. Our citizens including the Oligarchs and what passes for journalists have been marinating in Marxist claptrap since kindergarten and are dedicated to “fundamentally transforming” this country into a Communist nightmare.
The Frankfurt School, that 1930s German intellectual Marxist group which decided the way to bring Marxism was destroy Western values. It moved to Columbia University in the 1950s and began its serious path if infiltrating all Academia with the Liberal/Left sickness which is so rampant today. Google them to see. plus the 11 points of them.
I see that 11 points dismissed as a conspiracy when I google it.
“Cultural Marxism” isn’t Marxism, or even communism. You wouldn’t have woke capital if it were. Tim Cook can change his pronouns, or argue for racial equality or gender equality or trans equality but he’s not going to ask for equal pay for all workers, no dividends to owners, Apple as a worker co-operative or owned by the state, any time soon.
“But then the “average” Americans were becoming sidelined in the country’s story as, post-1965 immigration reform, the country became multicultural,”
Reform is a term that should be advisedly qualified by speech marks – Putnam argued that the greater the diversity the less the trust.
If the United States with it’s overarching monument to the Enlightenment – the Constitution – can’t make diversity work what price the tribally based West European nations?
Is the US doing that badly, whining about the Sixties aside? Remember that in 1945, the US was the last man standing, and so for the next 30 years or so bestrode the world. It was inevitable that new powers, actors, and conditions would arise, and the US ruling class chose to embark on a misconceived course of inept imperialism to try to keep its position. Imperialism, in the modern world, has inevitably led to physical, financial, and moral disaster: consider Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Japan, and so on. The US took its turn at the poisoned trough and still cannot turn away. Meanwhile it is said the Chinese want to step up to it. Let them, perhaps? Then we in the West can get back to whining about how letting the Colored into the Club ruined everything.
The empire is part of the problem. Diversity is driven by imperial needs. Some commentators have urged the US to expand its population to 1 billion to better fight a future China. This would leave European Americans at 20% or so. I can’t imagine that being a stable State, even if CRT didn’t exist. That future US would be driven apart by ethnic and racial disparities.
The American Constitution was never meant for anyone other than Western Eurpean Christians. All nations are tribally based, it’s practically a tautology. The state and the nation must never be confused. Civic nationalism is passing, and there will be war.
Diversity means actually accepting and respecting those with different values, not just ethnicity or sexual proclivities. As indicated in the article the essential right is freedom of assembly. Once this freedom is taken away – which is what is happening then all others fall.
the esential right is freedom from want, as FDR nad Henry Wallace knew – this is a class issue, a matter that ideologues like Leo Strauss were little concerned about.
Nixon taking the dollar off the Gold Standard was the beginning of the end.
Yes, For all of us.
Wasn’t this just a reflection of the hubris of believing America’s productive capacity was so great that the Vietnam War, a huge armaments programme, confronting the commies wherever they were to be found, Johnson’s “Great Society” were all simultaneously affordable?
Well, yes, but that doesn’t alter the fact that it was the beginning of the end for economic fairness and the working classes etc. Essentially, it ushered in an era where your prosperity depended almost totally on your proximity to the creation of fiat money and not on your ability to produce something useful or desirable.
A fun thing to read. The ability to grab some created out of air fiat money being wealth. But it still comes down to making and selling stuff, real stuff and real services, being what money is. I believe you are a banker so see money totally different than us who work with real things, and we both are likely right.
Money no longer had to actually be worth anything…
you can easily buy gold tonight. or gold ETF.
What probably mattered more was the end of Keynesian economics.
America is caught up in the deep fog of a Post Modernist nightmare but eventually objective truth will out as reality dawns and a principled politician or two arrives on the scene to welcome it. It might be quite a wait though, as the smoke of the appallingly mismanaged war against Covid 19 has promoted yet more fallacies as fact and once more obscured the truth – for a while.
I just watch The Choice 2020. As a non American I was surprised there was no discussion on policy and objectives. It was all about person – neither of whom were people I would like to vote for to run a country. Our media have to pull up their socks. What are the real problems? Where is the vision for the people really? Is there only one leader or is there a team running the country?
The results would suggest the people did not find what they wanted either.
This is very true, but the question is what would be the vision defining the objectives? Without a goal, it’s hard to achieve anything… I’m working on a goal people can get behind… Wish me luck.
This may just be the most important article on UnHerd, and Ed West at his absolute best.
You cannot have anti-racism as a serious value and respect freedom in any meaningful way. The Civil Rights Act was an abomination that effectively cancelled the Constitution. The culture wars have moved on to browbeating white people who won’t have sex with black people. All discrimination, not matter how intimate and personal, must be eliminated. It will fail of course, and take the rotten system with it. If we’re lucky, Czechslovakia will be our model. If unlucky, Yugoslavia.
Martin Luther King was a corrupt fiend, a liar, adulterer, and rapist. But he wrote pretty speeches that make us feel good.
Caldwell is right. There’s been a new and far worse Mccarthyism for decades conducted by the Politically Correct brigade – even Trump failed to stop.them.
In 1950, America was a country to be imitated. In 2021, who wants to copy a deeply polarised, violent society, the richest there has ever been with very high levels of poverty, in which many people hate themselves and believe that a million dollars solves everything ? America is no longer part of the solution. America is now the problem.
Yes, Trump was the Archie Bunker President and the divisions in America are best seen as being on a relatively straight line from the 1960’s and the Cultural Revolution.
But the endless carping about how bad the economy is for most people, whether coming from the left or right, is a load of crap. When you factor in government transfer payments, real incomes for every quintile are meaningfully up. And as anyone who came of age in the 1970’s knows, living conditions are far, far better for most everyone (air conditioning, telecommunications, automobiles, entertainment, home square footage and bathrooms).
Indeed! I am so sick of hearing how awful poverty is these days when it is quite apparent our societal problems have almost nothing to do with it. The real problems are unsayable in polite company, but in summary:
1) diversity (collapsed fertility/mass-migration)
2) loss of Christianity (nothing even remotely capable of substituting)
3) abandonment of history/law/cuture (i.e. post-modernism, critical theory)
Yes, and to add to what you are saying, wage increases aren’t including health care costs borne by the employer. One year we got minimal pay increases, but the health premium paid by the employer doubled. Health costs go up every year without exception. This should be counted as income.
Er, no. That’s just an inflationary cost that eats into incomes. It doesn’t matter if the wage earner has to pay this after he earns his wages, or the employer beforehand, it’s a reduction in disposable income. House prices and university costs are other major costs.
You’re making my point for me. It “eats into incomes” is another way of saying what I said. Starting a comment “er” or “um” is condescending.
It eats into incomes is another way of saying inflation. Inflation is included when we talk about real wages.
If you need a government subsidy to keep the bottom quintile where it was then that’s a failure of the system.
After reading this review I will not be reading Caldwell’s cliche social theories. The book, as reviewed, a collection of extreme ideological assumptions and selected facts like the nonsense about CEO’s only being paid marginally more than workers in the supposedly egalitarian 1950’s or ignoring the disparity between old money and workers, is a typical collection of speculative conspiracies that is today so much in vogue. There is an element of guilt sellers within American society, a locked down block in a city does not constitute the anarchy of a nation, that trigger media however it is a huge misunderstanding of the America to presume it is in decline. America, i predict, will reinvent itself again and again as it has done in the past, not only as it has done since the 1950’s. The two active « ideological » realities in America today are a small minority of whiners, spoiled plutocrats and revisionists and the rest. So tired of everything being explained from a 1950’s narrow Orwellian point of view.
I’m glad you don’t have read something to reject it. You’ll do very well in our dystopian future.
Well I definitely think your opinion trumps his facts.
Unless it’s the 1860s, he’s not a very thorough historian.
Ed’s review is fascinating. Haven’t read Caldwell’s book but a VOX interview with the author by Sean Illing makes clear that Caldwell wasn’t opposed to the civil rights movement and desegregation, but didn’t like busing to integrate American schools or the affirmative action movement in general. It made me think of the controversy over Harper Lee’s sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird”, which inexplicably was described as revealing Atticus Finch as an anti-black bigot. Anyone who actually read the book would see this was not the case. Atticus opposed busing to integrate schools as did his more idealistic daughter Scout. He was willing to occupy a platform at a public meeting with a white racist because they both opposed busing, which his daughter thought that this was indefensible. Anyway, Caldwell doesn’t believe that the civil rights movement was a mistake, only that it was taken too far.
But it was a mistake. Demonstrably, and in every conceivable way. Historians (probably Chinese) will look back on this in a century or two and laugh softly to themselves at how foolish white nations destroyed their posterity in order to look and feel good.
We used to call such idiotic behaviour decadence.
Also shame was a great teacher, but that to has been abandoned.
We all going to have to seriously “toughen up” if we hope to triumph in the forthcoming Great China War.
There probably won’t be a war, there doesn’t need to be. But yeah, decadence is a nice one-word summary.
Very good piece, Ed. But if Unherd is going to run quite so many book reviews, it should really have a special section for them.
“certain whites, however, far from feeling the shame of racism, stood in a newfound moral effulgence as fighters against it, sharing a little bit of Martin Luther King’s glory.”
I wonder who these (((certain whites))) would be?
the review of Mr Caldwell’s contribution is depressing, firstly as it labels him a “great mind” – an unfortunate solecism,imho- but above all because it thrashes about unhappily over the key issue, as Leo Strauss remarks, of society. Now Mr West may recall that our own dear Mrs Thatcher very properly pooh-poohed the idea that society exists . Her US counterpart,Mr Reagan, whose misdeeds towards his own people make Mr Trump look like a choirboy, deliberately destroyed the US economy, transforming the State into a tool of Wall Street and the Pentagon, in short, of the military-industrial complex which Ike had warned against in 1954. I would gather that , however admiring of his great mind Mr West may be, Mr Caldwell fails entirely to provide the kind of analysis of the US situation which ,say, Thomas Frank offers.
I couldn’t be bothered to read the above – I am saying that increasingly often these days.
What fractured the USA was the Vietnam war.
It has never recovered from the divisions that created nor learned any lessons.
I found this review to be nothing more than a collection of the usual right-wing cliches”.
And by the way what does the word nomenclature “conservative” really mean?
Was mainstream American culture prior to the sixties really deeply moral and/or “religious”?
All religions and the “God”-ideas upon which they are based are merely and only projections of the individual and/or collective psychology of those who make them and are consoled by those religions and “God”-ideas. They then inevitably use their “god”-ideas to reduce the Living Divine Reality to the mortal meat-body scale ONLY. Thereby effectively enslaving the Living Divine Reality and (again) inevitably using their tribalistic cultic “God” to justify all of the inevitable horrors that such cultic religiosity generates, especially when their tribalistic cult has hundreds of millions of true believers, and is very closely entangled with the militaristic power structures of their particular state – “God” is always with us in our murderously reasonable imperial misadventures.
I know of a profoundly conservative (but not in any sense right wing) Spiritual Philosopher who while being deeply sympathetic with the travails of the usual or normal human being who as he puts it really do live lives of quiet desparation gives a comprehensive critique of the religious, political and economic lies upon which mainstream American culture was and is based.
“Barker” indeed.
Deconstruction – check
Incoherent – check
Sixth-Form atheism – check
Moralistic – check
Largely off-topic – check
All right, who is this “Spiritual Philosopher” of whom you speak?
Don’t engage him Tom. He sounds like teenaged gamma-male autist – verdixt: unsalvageable.