Unprecedented. By Michael Anton. Is the US going the way of Rome? Not really. It’s possibly much worse.

Classic cycle theory presupposes an ethnically, linguistically, and religiously unified people. Indeed, in his Politics, Aristotle says that “dissimilarity of stock is conducive to factional conflict,” i.e., ethnic differences in and of themselves, irrespective of disagreements over regime form (typically few versus many), can drive revolution. Aristotle seems to admit the possibility of assimilation: dissimilarity, he says, leads to conflict “until a cooperative spirit develops.” But he cites no examples, forcing one to wonder how likely it is for this theoretical possibility to be actualized in the real world.

Tribalism trumps everything:

It seems, instead, that the fundamental conflict between the few and the many emerges only where the more fundamental conflict between differing peoples is absent. Where it is not, the few and the many alike rally to their fellow ethnics; ethnicity itself, rather than “class,” is their prime motivator.

Multi-ethnic polities are hardly unknown to history. Of these, Aristotle gives several examples — all of which ended up fighting civil wars along ethnic lines.

The most common (one may say only) way that multi-ethnic societies have been successfully governed is centrally, from the top, by some form of one-man rule, whether monarchical, Caesarist, or tyrannical. This, ultimately, is how Rome “solved” the problem of admitting so many foreigners to citizenship, to say nothing of its far-flung conquest of peoples whom it never made citizens. In more recent times, one may think of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Tito’s Yugoslavia.

The USA today:

At first glance, it seems to belie Aristotle’s implied assertion that regime-ending ethnic conflict is unavoidable wherever more than one group lives under the same government. Americans pride themselves, and their country, on their exceptional track record of assimilating peoples from all over the world.

Yet before we congratulate ourselves overmuch, let us reflect, first, on the fact that the United States has not merely abandoned but utterly repudiated the traditional understanding of assimilation, which is now denounced by all elite opinion as “racist” and evil. Not only does no American institution encourage (much less demand) assimilation, they all foment the opposite. Immigrants to America are exhorted to embrace their native cultures and taught that the country to which they’ve chosen to immigrate is the worst in world history, whose people and institutions are intent on harming them, and that their own cultures are infinitely superior. …

No nation in recorded history has ever willingly opened its doors to millions of immigrants only to insist that they must never adapt to the traditional ways of their new country — indeed, insisting that they forever remain as foreign as the day they arrived.

Similarly, no country in recorded history has ever welcomed millions with the message that their new country, along with its existing citizens, are inherently evil and out to get them.

Second, assimilation works best among peoples with some common underlying similarity, whether political, linguistic, ethnic, religious, or cultural (preferably a combination of all these). Its effectiveness declines as the differences among the disparate peoples increase. Historically, the closer in the above categories an immigrant group was to founding-stock Americans, the more quickly and smoothly its members assimilated. American immigration policy and practice has drifted steadily away from prioritizing this practice. … America now takes in, and has been importing for more than fifty years, people from every part of the globe, of every faith, speaking every language. This, too, has never before happened in world history.

Third is the size of the wave. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but if we count immigrants legal and illegal plus all their direct descendants, then something like a hundred million newcomers have arrived in America since 1965. … In 1965, there were just under two hundred million Americans. Today it is estimated that 333 million live within our borders. At least two-thirds of that growth has been immigrant-driven. This large a migration wave, in so short a time, to one country, from so many different sources, has also never happened before in human history.

Need a “respectable” source to vouch for that? Here’s Bill Clinton in 1998:

“But now we are being tested again — by a new wave of immigration larger than any in a century, far more diverse than any in our history. Each year, nearly a million people come legally to America. Today, nearly one in ten people in America was born in another country; one in five schoolchildren are from immigrant families. Today, largely because of immigration, there is no majority race in Hawaii or Houston or New York City. Within five years there will be no majority race in our largest state, California. In a little more than fifty years, there will be no majority race in the United States [applause]. No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time.”

Note the applause. The venue of the above speech was a university commencement: a sitting president addressing freshly minted college graduates and their parents, i.e., the elite speaking to the elite. Demographic decline was literally applauded. …

No native-born population of any country has ever literally cheered its own dispossession.

That which cannot be said:

The “Great Replacement” is happening, not just in America but throughout the West. Elites both deny and affirm it.

When they write op-eds in The New York Times entitled “We Can Replace Them,” that’s a good thing and the phenomenon under discussion is absolutely right and just. When you notice and express the mildest wish not to be replaced, it’s a racist conspiracy theory that you are evil for even mentioning — your evil being further proof that you deserve to be replaced.

They get to say it; you’re required not merely to pretend that you didn’t hear it but also to insist that they never said it. No majority stock in any nation has ever deliberately sought its own replacement, much less insisted that those who might have misgivings lie to themselves that it’s not happening.

The “Great Replacement” is not just happening; under the Biden-Harris regime, it is accelerating. Among the few promises Biden has kept are those not to build a single new inch of the border wall or to enforce immigration laws. As a result, illegal migrants are pouring across the southern border at an unprecedented rate.

The ridiculous former practice of “catch-and-release” — catch an illegal immigrant, release him on American soil — has been replaced by “catch-and-bus” or even “catch-and-airlift.” The U.S. government places illegal border-crossers on buses and planes and distributes them throughout the heartland, unannounced, often followed by official denials. Naturally, none of these people is vetted in any way — not for covid, which has the rest of us in semi-permanent lockdown, nor for criminal records or anything else. Couple this with the regime’s policy to settle throughout middle America as many unvetted Afghans as possible — some of whom are likely terrorists, several of whom have already committed sex crimes — and it is fair to describe current practice as demographic warfare.

The concept is not exactly new; tyrants have been known from time immemorial to move populations around so as to hold conquests more securely. What’s unprecedented is a regime importing foreigners to harm its own people.

The question of immigration is inseparable from that of race. “Critical Race Theory,” much in the news lately, is but the latest iteration of intellectual and academic anti-whiteness that has been central to leftist ideology since the mid-1960s.

The ur-specimen is Susan Sontag’s 1967 belch that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” Examples are so numerous today that cataloguing them all would be a full-time job for an entire think tank — but a pointless one, since the Left will in the same breath deny and affirm their own words quoted back to them: “We didn’t say that, and it’s good that we did.”

Many whites, apparently, believe they deserve to be replaced because their race makes them uniquely, and irredeemably, evil. While cultural self-loathing is hardly unknown to history, I know of none so explicitly race-based or widespread — or so eager to pursue self-abnegation all the way to the end.

This hatred of the core stock of the nation, by other members of that same stock, also appears to be unprecedented. Examples can be found of a new elite rising to preeminence above an older one, which it then displaces with prejudice. But of a ruling class coming to despise its own (broadly speaking) ethnic group and seeking ways to rob their fellow co-ethnics of power, standing, and influence? I can’t think of any other such cases.

The matter becomes even more complicated when one reflects that this is mostly an intra-white civil war. One group of whites pronounces the entire white race evil, seeks policies to hurt it, but somehow exempts itself. So far, these upper-caste whites have found ways to protect their own privilege but haven’t developed consistent rhetoric to defend that privilege. They appear to believe that no matter how much anti-white poison they vomit or how many destructive policies they enact, none will ever blow back on them. In particular, they seem to believe that the “allies” in whom they stir up anti-white hatred will never turn and bite them; at least, they appear not to have seriously considered the possibility. This situation, too, is unprecedented. …

Ugly, with crashing fertility:

A tyrant fears a healthy population, to be sure, because such is always a threat to his power. This fear typically inspires little beyond efforts to ensure that the population is dependent and unarmed — two aims of our overlords, it need hardly be added.

But our elites also go much further. They seem determined to make the American population fat, weak, ugly, lethargic, drug-addled, screen-addicted, and hyper-sexualized, the men effeminate and the women masculine. …

An odd feature of our time is the coupling of mass hyper-sexualization with mass barrenness. Some argue, plausibly, that the link is direct: hyper-sexualization disconnected from procreation inevitably leads to fewer babies. The degree to which crashing fertility is simply an effect of modernity versus a deliberate plan by our rulers is an open question. It is certainly true that every economically and technologically developed society, regardless of region, culture, race, or religion, suffers from cratering birthrates.

But it’s also true that our rulers advocate and celebrate careerism, consumerism, self-centeredness, casual sex, delayed marriage, (let us say) “non-fecund” couplings, and, where and if all that fails, small families — “for the environment,” you understand. In other words, when and where the (allegedly) inexorable process of modernity is overcome by the innate human desire for love and family, the regime eagerly steps in with propaganda to bully men and women out of such longings.

I suppose there is a near-historical precedent for this, namely China’s one-child policy, in effect from 1980 to 2015. But that was implemented to relieve (it was thought) a looming Malthusian crisis, a fear that cannot reasonably apply to contemporary America, whose birthrate is 1.64 and falling like a stone.

One attempts to state the following as delicately as possible, even though regime propaganda on this score is anything but delicate, but today the ugliness extends to people. One hesitates also to say anything that could be interpreted as praise of underwear ads, but, within living memory, the sirens of Times Square billboards were lithe and lovely; today they are, quite deliberately, obese and angry.

That is, when they’re not cross-dressers or pierced like an East Village junkie and tattooed like a C-list porn star. All this, we are commanded to believe, is “beautiful,” though no healthy person does. The point seems to be humiliation: forcing us little people to say “the thing which is not.” That trick is also as old as the hills, but the deliberate promotion of ugliness seems to be a new way to play it. Antiquity abounded in wicked tyrants, yet try to find an ancient statue anywhere near as hideous as a modern lingerie model.

But in terms of what we choose to elevate, nothing illustrates the perversity of present America more than the deification of George Floyd. …

We must confront the painful fact that Floyd did not, according to moral standards that for centuries were taken for granted, live a life worthy of admiration, much less of veneration. Yet our society treats him as a saint, if not something higher. The pagan gods were not always well-behaved, to say the least. But has any people ever chosen such an undeserving object of worship? …

Crime:

No society, whether free or despotic, benefits from crime, all else being equal — though it’s certainly true that a tyrant can find it useful to exempt his own partisans from criminal enforcement, and even to encourage them to terrorize his enemies. Criminals being criminals, this is a hard dynamic to keep from spinning out of control. In 2020, for instance, the ruling class unleashed blm hordes and Antifa predators, plus assorted rioters and looters, to despoil and burn some 220 American cities.

Sacking was not uncommon in the ancient world. Rome was sacked many times, but always by foreigners and never at the instigation of her leading citizens: the senate never riled up the plebs to scorch the Capitoline. Yet in the summer of 2020, our ruling class actively encouraged, through state-aligned media, the repeated sacking of Manhattan, the very beating heart of the Davos Archipelago, where our richest and most powerful overlords live and work. They fired up mobs to trash huge swaths of Washington, D.C., their cherished imperial capital, which to this day has yet to recover. …

Erasing our culture, completely:

The most ferocious revolutionaries of yesteryear didn’t do this. The Jacobins changed the calendar and guillotined a lot of nobles but otherwise allowed France to remain French. The Bolsheviks did not touch the Russian literary or concert canons; to the contrary, they celebrated both. Mao made an attempt to start over — until the more sensible Party bosses realized that the old man (and especially his wife) had lost their minds and were destroying China, sidelined him, and quietly put an end to the Cultural Revolution four years before formally declaring mission accomplished. …

Our overlords, by contrast, insist on changing everything and will not stop until everything familiar is gone. When this is pointed out, they smirk about the “slippery-slope fallacy” and gleefully lie. That will never happen, they say, until they insist on it, and, once accomplished, move on to the next target. They are cultural locusts devouring everything in their path. If the internal “logic” (if one may use that word in this context) of their passionate hatred is allowed to play out, no statue can be left standing, no traditional holiday observed, no name unchanged. …

Incompetence is growing in leaps and bounds:

Our regime cannot, at present, unload a cargo ship, stock a store shelf, run a clean election, handle parental complaints at a school board meeting, pass a budget bill, treat a cold variant, keep order in the streets, defeat a third world country, or even evacuate said country cleanly. And that’s to say nothing of all the things it should be doing, that all non-joke countries do, that it refuses to do.

If our ruling class has a plan, it would seem to be to destroy the society and institutions from which they, at present, are the largest — one is tempted to say only — beneficiaries. Do they think they can benefit more from the wreckage? Or are they driven by hatreds that blind them to self-interest? Perhaps they’re simply insane?

Read it all.

Australia takes in more immigrants per capita than the US, even accounting for the illegal immigration. Maybe we’re next.

hat-tip Scott of the Pacific