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November 16, 2006
Webb of Confusion
This, on Webb's populism, strikes me as quite right:
Let me try to explain it succinctly. Those who've grown up among the Ulster diaspora are particularly prone to taking sides, to looking at the world as a battle of "us and them". When voting, they're not really looking at what a candidate is for, but rather who a candidate is for. Right-wingers have successfully wooed Ulsterites by characterizing "them" as San Francisco liberals. Webb is arguing that the more appropriate "them" would be Wall Street profiteers.
True enough, and it's precisely that aptitude for target choice that makes Webb's election thrilling. Nevertheless, the racial undertones of his op-ed are troubling. The financial, journalistic, and political elite certainly come in for a lashing. But I got the distinct impression that Webb was also hinting at a Protestant-Jewish overclass that was promoting, on eugenic grounds, the interests of Asians and South Indians while blocking Mexicans, Blacks, and Scots-Irish. But as I said, it's vague stuff, so I'll leave it to individual interpretation. What do you make of this graf?
an unspoken insinuation seems to be inundating our national debate: Certain immigrant groups have the "right genetics" and thus are natural entrants to the "overclass," while others, as well as those who come from stock that has been here for 200 years and have not made it to the top, simply don't possess the necessary attributes.
November 16, 2006 | Permalink
Comments
It could just be that he is pointing out how some members of our society are trying to justify their immense wealth and power as a matter of natural attributes. This would mean that they shouldn't be penalized for controlling so much of the country's wealth, because despite whatever evidence is to the contrary, they didn't acquire it from gaming the system.
I'm not sure if the foregoing makes much sense, but that puts it right there with Webb's graf, I guess.
Posted by: Stephen | Nov 16, 2006 12:46:19 AM
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Obviously I can't rule out some dog whistle that I don't know about. But it sounds like a straightforward description of what Bell Curve right-wingers appear to believe.
Posted by: hf | Nov 16, 2006 12:55:11 AM
Do Bell Curver right wingers believe Scots-Irish are dumb? As that's who the last clause is referring to.
Posted by: Ezra | Nov 16, 2006 12:59:00 AM
You should read more Steve Sailer. Asians and Jews are high IQ groups, whites are average IQ and blacks and latinos are low IQ groups. So if you believe IQ is innate and that it is natural for society to favor high IQ individuals then a sort of racial hierarchy is inevitable. Webb is reacting against this but on what grounds is not precisely clear. Obviously the whole subject is very sensitive.
Posted by: James B. Shearer | Nov 16, 2006 1:04:49 AM
Why do you think the last clause is referring to Scots-Irish? As I said in the earlier thread I think in context it is a clear reference to black Americans. As far as I know Bell Curvers have nothing in particular against Scots-Irish.
Posted by: James B. Shearer | Nov 16, 2006 1:08:23 AM
Ezra said -
Do Bell Curver right wingers believe Scots-Irish are dumb? As that's who the last clause is referring to.
Absolutely, at least among the more "intellectual" of them, who are capable of distinguishing that caucasians come from a variety of racial backgrounds too. I have known a few people who don't even think it's particularly racist to believe that some races have an inherent, genetic predisposition towards more or less intelligence, honesty, the whole gammit of skills and abilities. And a few of them had no trouble putting the Irish into the catagory of lower intelligence. Though they would add, that their strength is in sheer physical strength and endurance, as though generalizing them with some "positive" traits, makes it ok to generalize them with negative ones.
Folks who take that mentality to the level that you see in Webb's descriptive, attempt to generalize skill-set, racialy/ethnicly across the board. To a small degree, I think this is with some eugenics in mind. I think though, that the "elite overclass" being insinuated, is based more on social theorists who place too much emphasis on genetics than any attempt at practical public policy. Certainly we musn't forget the insane attempts at eugenics as public policy, our own country delved in, in the fifties, but to take people like that too seriously is a mistake. That said, I would have thought the same thing about womens rights before the last six years happened.
Posted by: DuWayne | Nov 16, 2006 1:34:10 AM
Seems pretty straightforward to me: european immigrants are fabulous individuals whose success is natural and deserved, while the other kind, including the kind that came here in chains, are too dumb to make progress.
Posted by: craigie | Nov 16, 2006 1:36:01 AM
the scots irish have been here a lot longer than 200 years--they were shipped over here in indentured droves very early. I don't think it necessarily means them. I also don't think it can mean, on its face, the jews since they, too, have been over here for more than 200 years. I think "genetics" is a code word for "race" but I don't think it makes sense to see this as also being a code word for "jewish/protestant" overlords.
aimai
Posted by: aimai | Nov 16, 2006 2:15:57 AM
I think the genetics and eugenics arguments are just ways for the simpleton to look at life. In reality there are too many variables that make us who we are, and to boil them down to just genetics is just silly. Even if genetics were the sole factor, just those alone are too complex for most people to generalize. Jews, Blacks, Latinos, are all quite varied in a genetic sense. Some subgroups within them are even known for their genetic individuality like the askanazie jews.
It boils down to people who may be experts in one field, say economics, foreign policy, or politics writing papers to change the world. They want a simple way to explain why so many asians are in my physics and math classes, so many latinos are at the drive through.
It plays nicely to our ego to think that any success that the majority have is genetic, and shared by the rest of us. While at the same time it frees us from any responsibility if the other groups just have a genetic predisposition to low class status.
generally its crap.
Posted by: david b | Nov 16, 2006 3:20:36 AM
to paraphrase gertrude stein, a redneck is a redneck is a redneck.
iirc, ezra, you were born and raised in southern california and now live in d.c. therefore, you weren't surrounded by scots-irish.
thank your deity that you weren't. they aren't the biggest ethnic group in central indiana, but they have large numbers.
they often tend to be belligerent, willfully ignorant and resentful of anyone not like them -- or who they see as higher than them in the social-economic ladder.
they share too much of a mindset with richard nixon, except he was a lot smarter than they are.
and it isn't genetics that make them that way -- it's ethnic group solidarity.
you hard-core democrats may cheer on webb's election to the senate over allen, but to me, he was truly the lesser of two evils.
there's a saying in central indiana -- you can take the billy out of the hills, but you can't take the hills out of the billy.
and it surprised me that paul gigot and those slime in the wsjb opinion department ran his essay. i guess they think the enemy of my enemy is my ally.
Posted by: harry near indy | Nov 16, 2006 5:23:53 AM
Gertrude Stein is spinning in her grave at the use to which you put her words, bigoted asshole.
Posted by: NBarnes | Nov 16, 2006 5:52:54 AM
By calling the attitude he describes as a stealth force in the national debate, Webb is pretty clearly implicitly criticizing it. It's true that Webb is trying to identify a common cause between poor whites and poor minorities by criticizing a pernicious Social Darwinism, but he's not criticizing all the winners in this elitist vision, just those who subscribe to the vision.
Posted by: apantomimehorse | Nov 16, 2006 5:57:16 AM
It seems obvious to me he's criticising the point of view that says, for example, Asians and WASPs are inherently "good immigrants", whereas other groups are feckless and lazy. And that because these differences are inherent, the inequalities between ethnic groups are natural and there's no point trying to rectify them.
I don't think he's trying to set the underclass against the overclass along ethnic lines. He's disputing the validity of the concept of an ethnic overclass at all. Certainly it's an attempt to bridge the divide between the white working class and the working class in minorities, but I don't think he's doing so in opposition to any particular ethnic grouping, except in so far as the people who espouse Bell Curve type ideas are of a given ethnicity.
Posted by: Ginger Yellow | Nov 16, 2006 7:25:06 AM
I've heard Webb talk of Scots-Irish in this context before, which is why I'm pretty sure he's referring to them. I could be wrong, but I don't think so.
Posted by: Ezra | Nov 16, 2006 8:13:46 AM
"What do you make of this graf"?
What I make of it is that we (and that includes me) have elected a novelist to the Senate.
Posted by: ostap | Nov 16, 2006 8:39:19 AM
thank your deity that you weren't. they aren't the biggest ethnic group in central indiana, but they have large numbers.
they often tend to be belligerent, willfully ignorant and resentful of anyone not like them -- or who they see as higher than them in the social-economic ladder.
they share too much of a mindset with richard nixon, except he was a lot smarter than they are.
and it isn't genetics that make them that way -- it's ethnic group solidarity. "
lol I don't know if I should agree or condem. My family and I are moving out of Indiana. We just got tired of hearing "I'm not a racist, but those blacks..."! Or the little extra effort make to be nice to my wife when they find out she is Jewish.
This is just perfect: "they often tend to be belligerent, willfully ignorant and resentful of anyone not like them". Willfully ignorant - yep.
Posted by: mickslam | Nov 16, 2006 9:15:52 AM
Someone may have mentioned this, but Scots-Irish people are overwhelmingly Protestant themselves. They don't call it Katholic Kentucky.
Posted by: aeroman | Nov 16, 2006 9:20:04 AM
Disclaimer: I'm one of "belligerent, willfully ignorant and resentful" Scots-Irish people myself.
Posted by: aeroman | Nov 16, 2006 9:22:42 AM
Even growing up as part of the Ulster diaspora it is not always easy to understand why we are like we are. Reading The Scotch-Irish by James Leyburn and Albion's Seed by Fischer helped me by putting my own family history into a broader historical and cultural context. I haven't read Webb's book yet but hope to do so soon.
I don't know if Bell Curvers think us dumb but I do know it doesn't help close the current cultural divide that the Scotch-Irish a/k/a rednecks, particularly southern rednecks, are one of the few, if not only, remaining groups that the pseudo-intellectual elite consider it politically correct to revile.
Posted by: Molly McRae | Nov 16, 2006 9:31:45 AM
EZRA! A Protestant-Jewish overclass? The whole point of Ulsterist Ressentiment is that the drunkard criminal Catholic peasants are destroying our sacred values by imposing the Pope's secret directions and flooding our schools with their dozens of illiterate children.
Posted by: Marshall | Nov 16, 2006 9:38:41 AM
Count me as among those who find efforts to explain & describe why & how certain Americans are the way they are by where they may have come from 200 years ago, a place they have zero in common with now, to be next to worthless.
Posted by: DRR | Nov 16, 2006 9:39:04 AM
DDR-
Just think about GWB and how his grandfather went to Yale for a few minutes.
Posted by: mickslam | Nov 16, 2006 9:47:54 AM
I think Webb is saying that some bigots believe certain groups of immigrants are destined never to be on top of the pile, as are other ethnic groups -- like his own beloved Scots-Irish -- who have been in the U.S. for centuries, and entirely because they don't have the genetic makeup to succeed.
He's talking about the views of people like the late Al Campanis, who said blacks don't have "some of the necessities" to be effective managers (and, even more bizarrely, said something about their lack of buoyancy).
In the end, I think Webb's attacking the notion of a permanent underclass.
Posted by: peter snees | Nov 16, 2006 11:04:32 AM
I think he was trying to keep things generic. There are various ethnic groups who have high self-regard and disdain other ethnicities.
He's saying everybody should just cut this out.
Posted by: NotThatMo | Nov 16, 2006 11:16:49 AM
Webb's argument is against the establishment of an aristocratic class. As someone else post, he is not against wealth in general. He is against the kind of aristocratic class stratification that dominated Europe. I don't see this as confused or racist at all sense he includes everyone in there, and you are adding the differences through your own interpretations of what he said.
Posted by: akaison | Nov 16, 2006 11:20:16 AM
Remember- historically, as to the aristocratic class, his point is spot on. The aristocrats didn't know of genetics, but they did think they were made better by God. That there is some natural law in nature, rather than those of man, which explain why they, the aristocrats were at the top of society. This is the dynamic- the certainty that they deserve to be wealthy above all others, that is at the heart of the conservative position on wealth. Ironically, I first thought of that when I read Andrew Sullivans discussion of the certainty versus doubt when it comes to theocons. I wanted to tell him, but didn't waste my time, that the same certainty can be applied to the thinking of economic conservatives- that they are fundamentalist in that they believe they are by natural law deserviing of their positions rather than aknowledging it was partly work, partly luck, partly other people and partly that they were maybe smart (although they need not be smart).
Posted by: akaison | Nov 16, 2006 11:23:38 AM
DRR,
Au contraire! I think such discussions are taking us ever closer to the very uncomfortable but very necessary discovery of precisely what things are genetic and what are not.
Look, I'm right there with those who condemn the stealth racism (or any other kind of -ism, stealth or otherwise), but do we all believe that the Human Genome Project is going to yield nothing but good news, cures for disease, and ponies for everyone? We need to come to grips right now with the idea that the more we know about the human genome, the more we're going to find out that we're born to have certain attributes and some of those attributes are going to be shown to have direct causal connections with the hot-button areas of humanity like skin color, ethnic origin and religious preference (perhaps even, God help us, political leaning).
Sometime in the next generation, we will settle many debates in the area of nature vs. nurture. At some point, we will have to say "it is what it is" about certain human attributes. Our character (which I believe to be a learned attribute, though I know I may one day be proven wrong) will be revealed in how we respond to this knowledge.
Posted by: Rick | Nov 16, 2006 12:29:16 PM
Webb's not looking for specific racial or religious to target. While his Scots-Irish provide a touchstone, I think he's generalizing their concerns to other struggling groups. The basic thrust of his argument is that he doesn't accept market forces as a sacred arbiter of winners and losers. (For instance, there are a lot of Vietnam vets out there who put their lives on the line for their country-- to fight communism-- and what material things do they have to show for it? Those brave folks are winners in Webb's eyes even if they live in a cardboard box.)
I would suggest that the folks who throw the term "redneck" around should be careful with their complaints. First of all, the original rednecks were probably Scottish Covenanters, so it's a term derisive to a legitimate ethnic group. Secondly, despite the tensions that exist between the two groups, Blacks and the Scots-Irish share many cultural traits and attitudes-- Fundamentalist religion, BBQ, an arguably greater tendency to resort to violence to protect honor, etc. I think Webb knows that and so he's likely to see the Ulster diaspora and African-Americans as natural allies.
(And as an aside, I'd say that institutions which are seeking to diversify racially should consider taking a good look at their assumptions toward white southerners. If your institution disparages the cultural touchstones of the Scots-Irish, there's a good chance you're going to put off many Blacks as well.)
Posted by: withrow | Nov 16, 2006 12:55:11 PM
I would suggest that the folks who throw the term "redneck" around should be careful with their complaints.
You don't understand the game as it is played here, withrow. Group stereotypes and predjudice is only evil when used by the right. If the left uses them, it's call generalizations and is completely accepted. You will hear not only redneck, but mouthbreathers and many terms utililizing the term "white".
Posted by: Fred Jones | Nov 16, 2006 1:17:55 PM
Ezra, perhaps Webb was intending to refer to Scots-Irish but the 99% (including me) of the readers of the WSJ who are unfamiliar with Webb's other writings will take him to be referring to blacks.
Btw if you read Steve Sailer you would know Charles Murphy the coauthor of The Bell Curve is himself Scots-Irish. A quote from Murphy
:
"Sometimes these preferences for one’s own group are rational, sometimes not. I am proud of being Scots-Irish, for example, even though the Scots-Irish group means for violence, drunkenness, and general disagreeableness seem to have been far above those of other immigrant groups. But the Scots-Irish made great pioneers—that’s the part of my heritage that I choose to value. ... "
Posted by: James B. Shearer | Nov 16, 2006 2:01:29 PM
I think Webb, and the new blood are definitely going to surprise people with the clarity that they bring to the national stage. I haven't heard anyone talk about the fact we are all in this boat together in a long time, and I think there is a real need for that. I was impressed that he wasn't even putting down wealth generation so much as the notion that somehow that makes one more special than others in society for sucess.
Posted by: akaison | Nov 16, 2006 2:46:45 PM
By and large the only readers of Steve Sailer and Vdare.com are white supremacists. Richard J. Herrnstein Charles Murphy' book The Bell Curve has been completely discredited. Bad science gives erroneous conclusions every time.
Posted by: Mike | Nov 16, 2006 3:03:07 PM
I interpreted that last quote as alluding to a question I often heard in college in the late 80s, which was 'why haven't blacks moved up the income ladder like other immigrants have?' It was a very 'Charles Murray-inspired' question, since the implied answer was that there was something inherent faultly about either African-American culture or genetics. Webb clearly thinks it's a stupid, bigoted question (and kudos to him for thinking that).
Posted by: Mike the Mad Biologist | Nov 16, 2006 3:12:51 PM
I think instead of attempting to read between the lines on what Webb might have meant Ezra should be asking a different question, does Webb have a point?
I think he might.
Posted by: Daniel | Nov 16, 2006 3:14:32 PM
re Daniel's point
Why are you trying to find some hidden agenda here anyway? Why can't a duck just be a duck.
Posted by: akaison | Nov 16, 2006 3:29:26 PM
Posted by: withrow | Nov 16, 2006 9:55:11 AM
(And as an aside, I'd say that institutions which are seeking to diversify racially should consider taking a good look at their assumptions toward white southerners. If your institution disparages the cultural touchstones of the Scots-Irish, there's a good chance you're going to put off many Blacks as well.)
An excellent point ... indeed, an important facet of the progressive 50 State Strategy is to bring people up from the grass roots all around the country, so that rather than "we" citizens in New England or The Foundry talking about "those" citizens in Dixie or Mexamerica, ( cf. The Nine Nations of North America), it is a process of "we progressives from around the country" forming a coalition that is not locked out of any region of the country.
Posted by: BruceMcF | Nov 16, 2006 3:47:57 PM
Well, if the Scots-Irish from Central Indiana are jerks, do I get a pass being Welsh-Irish-German from Central Indiana?
I am confused, actally. Are we talking about the Scots that moved to Northern Ireland and then to America? I can only trace my family back to 1810 Cty Roscommon, and with a name like McManus I have always wondered where it came from before that. I guess I could be Scots-Irish-Welsh-German. And 1/16 Potawatami.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Nov 16, 2006 4:31:01 PM
Bob, yes, that's the group we're talking about - at least that's the definition I learned growing up Scots-Irish in heavily Scots-Irish East Tennessee.
Posted by: aeroman | Nov 16, 2006 6:21:28 PM
'Let me try to explain it succinctly. Those who've grown up among the Ulster diaspora are particularly prone to taking sides, to looking at the world as a battle of "us and them". '
Well, a more sociological point of view would be that the Protestant Scots-Irish still in Northern Ireland had a tendency to form cross-class alliances against the Catholics (in the form of the Orange Order). Class based politics lost out to sectarian-based politics based on a fear of loss of their culture. What's the Matter With Kansas is a lot easier to perceive if you bear that in mind.
Posted by: Urinated State of America | Nov 16, 2006 6:25:47 PM
"Asians and South Indians" --- last time I checked India was in Asia, and why South Indians in particular? I think North Indians have been successful too in the USA.
-pm
Posted by: PM | Nov 16, 2006 9:29:55 PM
As a Scot-Irish American Hillbilly, the thought that Webb speaks for me is offensive. He participates with the party of slavery. The party that supports the killing of the unborm. The party of secularism. The party that finds God in public offensive. The party that has run from every challenging dictator to democracy and freedom since WW11. However he will not be the only and the last Scot that betrayed his own people's principles to gain power and prestige. I suspect he yearns to be the next Scot-Irish president and he will " bow his kneee" to the devil to get there.
Posted by: Paul Clark | Dec 6, 2006 9:15:54 PM
