There was space to imagine a new politics that would occur outside the familiar contours. Many intellectuals rushed to fill it. The New York Times argued that Lind presented “a highly distorted portrait of Trump supporters as victims” and suggested that Lind should break out of his institutional confines and go into the heartland to do some firsthand reporting of his own. One-person, one-vote democracy is dangerous and intolerable, because the genetically inferior majority might vote to tax and redistribute the income and wealth of the genetically superior minority. First, and most strangely, while he identifies some extreme ideas in circulation among progressive elites and intellectuals, he does not identify a single initiative of the Biden administration, or the Democratic Party generally, anywhere in his piece. The closest he comes is citing a statement by Julián Castro during his 2020 campaign, which sunk without a trace. Indeed, the predecessors of today’s eugenicons, American eugenicists of the 1920s, would have objected to the very idea of a pan-white category. Many of them believed that there were three European “races”—the Nordic, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean—and that Jews and people of Arab descent like Hanania weren’t white people at all, but “oriental” Semites who should be kept from immigrating lest they pollute the American gene pool. In a 1921 Good Housekeeping essay titled “Whose Country Is This?,” soon-to-be Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared: “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.” For Coolidge, coding Italians or Poles as the amalgamated “white” equal of the distinctly Nordic race would have been a category error.

In line with much left-wing thinking, Lind takes aim at these powerful managerial elites, arguing that more than thirty years of technocratic neoliberal revolution have created the conditions for a populist revolt. However, this hasn’t given rise to Karl Marx’s “class struggle” between the industrial proletariat and capitalist class . Instead, Lind describes a ruthless Hobbesian war of all against all, taking place in spheres of culture, economy, and politics, in which the working class has little to no agency. This provides some of the main insights of his book — but also an inability to wrestle with the new political realities of our time. Pointing Out Liberal Hypocrisy T he editors have been kind enough to give me space to respond to Michael Lind’s reply to my article on the us Constitution in nlr 232. footnote 1 An American Manifesto for a Desirable Future" (review of Lind, Michael, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution). Bernstein, Richard, The New York Times, July 5, 1995. Lind: That is absolutely right. There is a moral difference that you can document. In my book, I point out that in the United States, working-class people are more likely to describe children as a joy, and upper-middle class professionals are more likely to describe them as a burden. It is hard to separate the culture and the economics because the morality of the college-educated professional elite (to which I belong) is shaped by its career pattern. That is, you go to a university, preferably a prestigious one, usually outside of the town or county or region that you were born in. You then travel thousands of miles to a major city to pursue your career, and you hardly ever see anyone else in your family, your parents, your aunts, your uncles, your cousins. And that is necessary if you want to flourish on Wall Street or in Hollywood or in Washington DC or in London, as the case may be. Michael Lind’s The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite follows from a series of works on the “ white working class” published in the wake of the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election. Seeking to redefine class in terms of cultural belonging and territorial rootedness, these works have dovetailed with a discussion of the new “ professional-managerial class,” who want to run society according to liberal and technocratic principles. These are the same “metropolitan elites” from whom Lind wants to “save democracy.”

To which Sailer replied: “If white women don’t wise up to [the] rewards of marrying geeks, the Eurasian kids of the future will tend to do extremely well on the math portion of the SAT and thus will be well set to prosper in the increasingly technology-dominated economy.” In the postwar period, the news industry was heavily localized and designed to reach a mass readership. Today, the mainstream media is overwhelmingly concentrated in high-cost coastal cities, and major publications are increasingly reliant on subscription revenue. These realities have increased the class homogeneity of major newsrooms, and led their outlets to cater (even more) to college-educated urbanites, who are uniquely willing and able to pay for journalism. The result is a mainstream discourse that privileges the perspective and sensibilities of urban professionals. You can even divide the intelligentsia among social scientists, and artists and creative people. When it comes to art, our view of the arts comes from early 19th-century German romanticism. In the arts, instead of focusing on traditions passed on by craftsmen, there is the original genius who overthrows everything done before, and comes up with something uniquely individual. In social science, the premise is that society is a subject of scientific study, like physics. And just as you would not use 1950s physics, why would you use 1950s politics or economics? You make a name as a social scientist by overthrowing everything done before last week. And of course, if you are a corporation, everything has to be new and improved. You have what to my mind is an ultimately unsustainable strategy by an elite which pretty much wants to overthrow all existing cultural traditions as though they were consumer products on the production line. I do not think that is sustainable.

The overlap between libertarianism and eugenic conservatism can be considerable. In public, libertarians usually defend their anti-statist creed in terms of individual rights or Benthamite utilitarianism, arguing that a minimal state would produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Yet eugenic conservatism and libertarianism have often complemented each other. For libertarians at a loss to explain why wealth and power are concentrated in market societies, eugenicons have an answer: Rich people and rich families are genetically superior. And for eugenicons in search of a political program short of radical “ethnostate” proposals, libertarianism provides a second-best solution. The danger that resources will be redistributed from the productive, eugenic rich to the parasitic, dysgenic masses can be minimized by shrinking the state and lowering taxation. So can transferring functions from the government, where numbers count, to the market, dominated by a small number of wealthy capitalists defined as “the cognitive elite.” When Hanania, outed as “Richard Hoste,” declared that he had seen the light and abandoned eugenic racism and classism for “classical liberalism,” that is, libertarianism, this was just flipping the same coin over to the other face.If the eugenicons were without influence, they could safely be ignored. The problem is that the they have a large and apparently growing influence within the conservative establishment, and are even finding a sympathetic hearing in New York’s so-called post-left scene: some former Bernie Sanders and Democratic Socialists of America types who—owing to bitterness over cancellation, publicity-driven addiction to épater les bourgeois, or both—now increasingly toy with “race realism.”