[Bret L]

Suicide--Or Murder? Kaufmann's Rise and Fall of Anglo-America

By Kevin MacDonald

"Eric P. Kaufmann's The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America presents the case that Anglo-America committed what one might call "suicide by idea": White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants were motivated to give up ethnic hegemony by their attachment to Enlightenment ideals of individualism and liberty. Anglo-Americans simply followed these ideals of the Enlightenment to their logical conclusion. The result: immigration was opened up to all peoples of the world, multiculturalism became the cultural ideal, and WASPS willingly allowed themselves to be displaced from their preeminent position among the elites of business, media, politics, and the academic world.

Kaufmann, who is Reader in Politics and Sociology at London
University's Birkbeck College, explicitly rejects the proposal that
the decline of Anglo-America occurred as a result of an attack by some
external force. His concept is therefore a direct contrast to my view,
argued at length in my book The Culture of Critique, that the rise of
Jews to elite status in the United States and the influence of
particular Jewish intellectual and political movements, especially the
push for mass and indiscriminate immigration, were key contributions--
necessary conditions--to the demise of WASP America.

My view is that the outcome was the result of ethnic conflict over the
construction of culture (PDF), that is, the rules and norms by which a
society functions. Indeed, the fall of Anglo-Saxon America is a
textbook case of how deadly the conflict over the construction of
culture can be.

In this review --an adapted version of a longer paper posted on my
Occidental Observer website--I will show where Kaufmann goes wrong,
mainly because he ignores the Jewish role in the decline of Anglo-
America. But it must be said that he provides a fascinating historical
overview. In this respect, his book resembles a similar conceptually
faulty but factually rich work: Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century.

As Kaufman notes, it was not very long ago that America strongly
asserted that it was a nation of Northwestern Europeans -- and intended
to stay that way. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act was carefully designed to
preserve the ethnic status quo as of 1890, thereby ensuring the
dominance of Anglo-Americans. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act
reiterated the preference for Northwestern Europe and was passed over
President Truman's veto.

But only a decade later, in the 1960s, White America began the process
of ethnic and cultural suicide:

"By the 1960s, as if by magic, the centuries-old machinery of WASP
America began to stall like the spacecraft of Martian invaders in the
contemporary hit film, War of the Worlds. In 1960, the first non-
Protestant president was elected. In 1965, the national origins quota
regime for immigration was replaced by a 'color-blind' system.
Meanwhile, Anglo-Protestants faded from the class photos of the
economic, political, and cultural elite -- their numbers declining
rapidly, year upon year, in the universities, boardrooms, cabinets,
courts, and legislatures. At the mass level, the cords holding Anglo-
Protestant Americans together began to unwind as secular associations
and mainline churches lost millions of members while the first truly
national, non-WASP cultural icons appeared." (pp. 2-3)

Of course, other ethnic groups have gone into historical decline or
have been replaced by force. But the decline of Anglo-America seems
mysterious. There are no visible conquering armies that would easily
explain their impending exit from the stage of history.

Despite its obvious importance as an historical phenomenon, however,
as Kaufmann notes there has been almost no academic attention to the
causes of this very precipitous decline. Perhaps some things are
better left unsaid--at least until the losers of this revolution are
safely relegated to a powerless position.

That the victors do indeed deliberately intend to make their
revolution permanent is to my mind proven by the move, both here and
abroad, towards "Hate" laws, which would make a discussion such as
this very hazardous. In my view, America's successor order is likely
to be far more like traditional Jewish society, with high levels of
social control over behavior and thought--and quite different from
America of the Founding Fathers. Coercion rather than Liberty will be
the hallmark.

Freedom, Representative Government, and Individualism as Anglo-Saxon
Ethnic Traits

Confident assertions of White ethnic identity are virtually non-
existent these days. However, Kaufmann shows that in the 18th and 19th
centuries, Anglo-Americans had a strong sense that they were the
biological descendants of freedom loving Anglo-Saxon tribes: "The New
England town meeting was likened to the Anglo-Saxon tribal council,
and the statements of Tacitus regarding the free, egalitarian
qualities of the Anglo-Saxons were given an American
interpretation" (p. 18). The "Yeoman Farmer" was considered the ethnic
prototype. In 1776 after drafting the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson
stated that Americans are

"the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a
pillar of fire by night; and on the other side, Hengist and Horsa, the
Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and
whose political principles and form of government we have assumed".
(pp. 17-18; emphasis in text).

As a cultural historian, Kaufmann views ethnic self-conceptions as
fallacies. But in fact it is entirely reasonable to look for the
particular traits and tendencies of Europeans as adaptations to
prolonged life in a situation characterized by harsh climates and the
relative absence of between-group competition. I have argued that
evolution in the North has predisposed Europeans to the following two
critical traits that are entirely unique among the traditional
cultures of the world:

A de-emphasis on extended kinship relationships and a relative lack of
ethnocentrism.

A tendency toward individualism and all of its implications:
individual rights against the state, representative government, moral
universalism, and science.

In other words, Jefferson was quite probably correct to view the Anglo-
Saxon tendencies toward individualism and representative government as
ethnic traits.

A critical feature of individualism is that group boundaries are
relatively permeable and assimilation is the norm. As Kaufmann notes,
even in the 19th century, individualism resulted in assimilation
rather than maintaining impermeable boundaries with other Whites:
"Interethnic relations followed a pattern of Anglo-conformity. ...
Immigrants were to be made into American WASPs by absorbing American
English, American Liberty, and American Protestantism and, ultimately,
by intermarrying with Americans". (p. 19).

There was an assumption, even among many liberals, that these ethnic
Others would look and act like Anglo-Americans. In the 19th century,
liberals typically had "an optimistic, expansionist Anglo-conformism
that accepted the immigrants, provided they looked like Anglo-
Protestants and assimilated to the WASP mytho-symbolic corpus". (p.
37).

Intellectually, the ideal of assimilation was often grounded in
Lamarckian rather than Darwinian thinking. Lamarckians believed that
people could pass on to their descendants traits which they had
acquired during their lifetimes. With Lamarck rather than Darwin as
inspiration, race and culture were conflated. Liberal intellectuals
thought that blacks would become White with more education, like "the
running of a dirty stream into a pellucid lake which eventually clears
leaving no trace of mud". (p. 56). Immigrants of all strains could
become good Anglo-Saxons.

Lamarck's theory has always been a darling of the left because it
holds the promise that inherited traits can easily be changed simply
by changing the environment. It is no accident that Lamarckism became
official ideology in the Soviet Union, and among many Jewish leftists,
precisely because it implied that it would be quite easy to mold the
new Soviet man -- just as Lysenko thought it would be easy to develop
crops that could flourish in cold climates.

In the hands of the Anglo-Saxon assimilationists, Lamarckism was part
of the optimistic spirit of elite 19th-century liberal intellectuals
who envisioned a future America to be people just like themselves, no
matter what their origins.

The Period of Ethnic Defense: 1880-1965

The view that America was the product of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity
coincided with optimistic ideas among elite liberal intellectuals
about an Anglo-Saxon future. Towards the end of the 19th century,
however, as America was coming to grips with large-scale immigration
from Southern and Eastern Europe, such optimistic views of an Anglo-
Saxon future began to fade. A large number of the immigrants were
(correctly) seen as politically radical and socially inassimilable.

The decades leading up to the passage of the 1924 immigration law were
a period of ethnic defense. Optimistic, liberal views on immigration
persisted among a small group of intellectuals, but they were
displaced politically. Among many intellectuals, Darwinism rather
than Lamarckism won the day.

The result was an effective alliance between the Boston, Puritan-
descended intellectual elite and rural Whites in an effort to prevent
being overwhelmed by this threat. "Whenever the northeastern 'WASP'
elite make common cause with their less prestigious but more numerous
provincial kin, Anglo-Protestant ethnic nationalism revives". (p.
26).

Kaufmann notes that business interests remained opposed to immigration
restriction. But he fails to mention the very strong role that Jewish
organizations played in delaying immigration restriction until the
1920s--long after popular opinion demanded restriction. For example,
writing in 1914, sociologist Edward A. Ross believed that liberal
immigration policy was exclusively a Jewish issue:

"Although theirs is but a seventh of our net immigration, they led the
fight on the Immigration Commission's bill. The power of the million
Jews in the Metropolis lined up the Congressional delegation from New
York in solid opposition to the literacy test. The systematic campaign
in newspapers and magazines to break down all arguments for
restriction and to calm nativist fears is waged by and for one race.
Hebrew money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its
numerous publications. From the paper before the commercial body or
the scientific association to the heavy treatise produced with the aid
of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the literature that proves the blessings
of immigration to all classes in America emanates from subtle Hebrew
brains." (E. A. Ross, The Old World and the New: The Significance of
Past and Present Immigration to the American People. 1914, 144-145)

Kaufmann attributes the desire to end immigration to the realization
that the new immigrants would not convert to Protestantism and to the
rise of race theories--although he does not really discuss the
latter.

This is a major failing. One of the most important trends beginning
around 1900 was the rise of Darwinism. As I have noted elsewhere, the
early part of the 20th century was the high water mark of Darwinism in
the social sciences. It was common at that time to think that there
were important differences between the races -- that races differed in
intelligence and in moral qualities. Not only did races differ, but
they were in competition with each other for supremacy. Schooled in
the theories of Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, Henry Pratt
Fairchild, William Ripley, Gustav Le Bon, Charles Davenport, and
William McDougall, many among the American elite viewed themselves as
members of a particular race and believed that racial homogeneity was
the sine qua non of every stable nation state. They regarded their
racial group as uniquely talented and possessed of a high moral
sense.

But, more importantly, whatever the talents and vulnerabilities of
their race, they held it in the highest importance to retain control
over the lands they had inherited as a result of the exploits of their
ancestors who had conquered the continent and tamed the wilderness.
And despite the power that their race held at the present, there was
dark foreboding about the future, reflected in the titles of some of
the classic works of the period: Grant's The Passing of the Great Race
and Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy
and The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man.

Kaufmann's lack of discussion of the eclipse of racial Darwinism is a
significant omission. It was a major objective of Jewish intellectual
and political movements, particularly Boasian anthropology. By 1915
the Boasians controlled the American Anthropological Association and
held a two-thirds majority on its Executive Board. By 1926 every major
department of anthropology was headed by Boas's students, the majority
of whom were Jewish.

Kauffman quotes historian John Higham, who noted that, by the time of
the immigration enthusiasts' final victory in 1965, the Boasian
perspective had become standard academic wisdom. The result was that
"it became intellectually fashionable to discount the very existence
of persistent ethnic differences. The whole reaction deprived popular
race feelings of a powerful ideological weapon."

Thus the demise of Darwinism had major consequences. It removed the
only intellectually viable source of opposition to cosmopolitan
ideology and a cultural pluralist model of America. In the absence of
an intellectually respectable defense, ethnic defense was left to
conservative religion and the popular folk attitudes of the less
educated. These were no match for the cosmopolitan intellectuals who
quickly became ensconced in all the elite institutions of the US--
especially the media and the academic world.

The Rise of Jewish Influence

The late 1930s saw the rise of the New York Intellectuals, a movement
that I consider among several influential Jewish intellectual and
political movements in my book The Culture of Critique.

Kaufmann claims that the Anglo-Saxon and Jewish influences in the New
York Intellectuals were equal and influenced each other in dialectical
fashion. But I provide several reasons for preferring my view in the
longer version of this essay: the opinion of other scholars of the
role of the Jewish presence among the New York Intellectuals; evidence
that the Jewish New York Intellectuals had a strong Jewish identity;
the anti-nationalist tendencies of Jewish intellectuals in other
countries, and the fact that the organized Jewish community not only
funded the activities of the New York Intellectuals, Boasian
anthropology, and the Frankfurt School, but also spent lavishly to
promote these ideas in schools and the mass media.

Kaufmann also fails to recognize that many of the basic ideas of the
New York Intellectuals derived from other Jewish intellectual
movements, particularly psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School. For
example, the elitist, anti-populist attitudes of the Frankfurt School
paralleled the attitudes of the New York Intellectuals and likely
influenced them, and indeed some of the New York Intellectuals are
also associated with the Frankfurt School (see Ch. 5 of C of C).

Common themes in this body of writing are hostility to American
populism, the need for leadership by an elite cadre of intellectuals,
and the belief that concerns about ethnic displacement and the rise of
the power of ethnic minorities are irrational and indicative of
psychiatric disorder.

This point should be emphasized. The New York Intellectuals and the
Frankfurt School developed a widely disseminated theory, based on
psychoanalysis (itself a Jewish intellectual movement, see Ch. 4 of
Cof C), in which concerns by Anglo-Saxons about their ethnic
displacement and the rise of power of ethnic minorities were
indications of psychopathology. Although this theory lacked empirical
support, and would have been viewed as ridiculous had Darwinism
survived in the social sciences, the displacement of Whites had
developed an intellectually respectable and therefore powerful
rationale.

The ideology of White suicide was therefore not just a self-
destructive heritage of the ideals of the Enlightenment, but included
a large injection of psychoanalysis and Marxism as formulated by the
Frankfurt School and disseminated by the New York Intellectuals.

As Kaufmann notes (p. 165), a critical source of the success of the
New York Intellectuals was that they were welcomed by elite
universities and the media. The New York Intellectuals achieved
"cultural hegemony" (p. 166); they had captured America from the top-
down, leaving American dominant ethnicity "rudderless. It was now only
a question of time before cosmopolitanism would achieve the
institutional inertia necessary for it to triumph as a mass
phenomenon" (p. 166). The American dominant ethnicity was left
defenseless because of the triumph of Boasian anthropology and the
demise of Darwinism in the social sciences.

Kaufmann also stresses the rise of national media with liberal values,
resulting in broad exposure to "the New York/Washington/Hollywood
elite" (p. 189), with the result that "increased exposure to social
idealism brought on by higher education and, vicariously, by a higher-
educated media, socialized a larger proportion of Americans into a
liberal worldview". (p. 190).

Although he emphasizes the role of the media in the decline of Anglo-
Saxon America and mentions the very large Jewish overrepresentation in
the media, Kaufmann fails to consider how this might affect the
attitudes championed by the media. . My review of this topic is here
under the heading "Jews and the Media: Ways of Seeing," I note that
ethnic Jews have a very large influence on the media -- far larger than
any other identifiable group. And I show that the attitudes promoted
by Jews in the media are influenced by their Jewish identity. The
fact that the media championed values that facilitated the demise of
Anglo-Saxon America therefore may be seen as a consequence of Jewish
influence.

Conclusion: The Fall of the Anglo-Saxons

Kaufmann charts the decline of Anglo-Saxons and the rise of the Jews
in all areas of the American elite, from university departments of
political science to the federal civil service. "For twenty years, the
de-WASP-ing of the ruling elite in America has proceeded at a
breathtaking pace." Kaufmann cites the important study of Lerner et
al. (American Elites, 1996) showing that by the1990s there were
"roughly the same proportion of WASPs and Jews at the elite levels of
the federal civil service, and a greater proportion of Jewish elites
among corporate lawyers." Jews outnumbered Anglo-Saxons 58-21 among
elites in television, 48 to 25 among "public interest" elites, and 40
to 21 among legal elites. The same study found that, "in stark
contrast to the Jews, WASPs were not overrepresented within the ranks
of the national elite."

Given that Jews constituted less than 3% of the population, these are
very high overrepresentations indeed. In contrast, White Protestants
became underrepresented in corporate elites by the 1980s, and there
was a steady decline in their political power in Congress.

Even people of mixed European heritage now tend to identify with the
non-Anglo-Saxon side of the family. For example, people of Italian-
Scottish descent chose to identify themselves as Italian by a 3-1
ratio. There was also a heavy decline in White associational patterns
and social capital, as described by Robert Putnam: Elks, Shriners,
Jaycees, Masons all suffered major declines.

Kaufmann is also correct in noting the gap between elite and non-elite
White opinion. Kaufmann emphasizes the class difference among Whites:
"We may even surmise a long-run scenario in which lower-status whites
retreat to a rural, interior ethnic 'homeland,' while upper-status
whites pursue their modern lifestyle orientation in the nation's more
dynamic, increasingly hybridized, white-minority cities" (pp. 262-
263).

Kaufmann quotes Michael Lind: "during the years that the political
class has been almost unanimously in favor of present or higher
levels of legal immigration, an overwhelming majority of Americans of
all races have favored restriction, a fact that speaks volumes about
the alienation of the American ascendancy from the majority's
interests and concerns ... like free-market globalism, immigration is
an issue that pits the affluent top 20 percent against the wage-
earning majority below." (p. 273).

Congruent with the argument in The Culture of Critique, Kaufmann
proposes that once the new value set was institutionalized, it became
the focus of status competition within the boundaries set by these
movements (p. 247). Kaufmann rejects the logical possibility that
Anglo-Saxon decline was caused by the rise of long-subordinate social
groups, for example blacks. But, as I have noted, he does not even
consider Jewish influence or ambitions as a factor.

A final lapse in Kaufmann's argument: he never mentions coercion and
the penalties that are imposed on people who dissent from the elite
cosmopolitan consensus. The fact is, Whites who violate these
strictures are severely censured -- a phenomenon with which I have
considerable personal experience.

Kaufmann presents the views of elite Whites who are cooperating in the
demise of their own people as nothing more than the enlightened
opinions of an intellectual and moral elite. But it is far more than
that. Since the 1960s, Whites who depart from the consensus of
cosmopolitanism have been penalized in a wide variety of ways -- from
lack of access to the mainstream media, to firing from their jobs, to
social opprobrium. Conversely, those who collaborate are rewarded.
This revolution is neither peaceful nor bloodless.

Moreover, the same forces which have legitimated and institutionalized
the cosmopolitan zeitgeist for Whites are endeavoring to make this
revolution permanent by enacting "hate" laws prohibiting the
expression of ideas that conflict with their version of reality. For
example, the organized Jewish community is deeply involved in
advocating restrictions on free speech in America and throughout the
West. The result is that conservatives are forced to couch their ideas
in the Universalist language of cosmopolitanism. Kaufmann points out
those even measures of White ethnic defense such as Official English
measures and immigration restriction have had to be couched in the
language of civic universalism.

Shamefully, Kaufmann himself is entirely on board with the idea that
cosmopolitanism will have to resort to social controls to make its
victory permanent: "Institutional pressure must be brought to bear on
ethnic revival [of Whites], prompting the communitarian impulse to
discharge itself along liberal lines" (p. 301).

This shows that although the cosmopolitan revolution took advantage of
pre-existing Anglo-Saxon tendencies toward individualism, in the end
the institutional structure that is being pursued after attaining
power is profoundly anti-individualist. America remains somewhat of a
laggard in these trends because of the First Amendment, but other
Western societies, lacking such formal declarations of individual
rights, have succumbed to a stifling political correctness that
essentially legislates the triumph of cosmopolitanism - and Western
suicide.

If a robust Darwinian intellectual elite had remained in place despite
the assaults of the Boasians, the Frankfurt School, the Marxists, and
the New York Intellectuals, the cosmopolitan revolution never would
have occurred. The Anglo-Saxon movement of ethnic defense culminating
in the immigration law of 1924 would have become institutionalized. A
robust, sophisticated Darwinian culture would have provided a powerful
argument for ethnic defense. Critically, such a defense would have
emphasized creating a culture in which individualism was seen as a
valuable Anglo-Saxon ethnic trait -- as was the case during the 18th
and 19th centuries. Immigration policy would have been carefully
formulated to ensure that immigrants were similar to the founding
stock and to ensure the continued dominance of peoples prone to
individualism -- just as American immigration policy was in fact
crafted until 1965. This ethnic defense would have been energized by
the sociobiological revolution of the 1970s and the firm mathematical
grounding for the understanding that all peoples have ethnic genetic
interests.

Instead, in cosmopolitan post-America, even the sociobiological
revolution has been stripped of its most dangerous and powerful ideas.
As Frank Salter has shown, the revolution in population genetics of
the1970s demonstrated very clearly that people controlling a piece of
land have a huge genetic interest in preserving their control--but
this finding has been suppressed and misinterpreted by people at the
top of the academic hierarchy.

This suppression must continue--because cosmopolitanism has a
hopelessly shaky intellectual basis. Built on theories that were
motivated far more by ethnic interests of the rising elite of Jewish
intellectuals than by a respect for scientific truth, cosmopolitanism
has no choice but to secure its future by coercion.

And for the Anglo-Saxon Americans--indeed all Christian-stock
Americans--this substitution of cultures is a disaster of cataclysmic
proportions."


If you want to email or print out, format by clicking on this
permanent URL:
http://www.vdare.com/macdonald/090729_kaufmann.htm