Three comments on “White-Collar Supremacy”

Three comments out of seven hundred responses to the NYT opinion piece by Kelly J. Baker I mentioned earlier.

“sjaco” from northern Nevada:

Ok, I guess I get what the author is getting at. Over 60 million people voted for Trump lets call that set T. Of the set of T a small subset of maybe 100 or 200 are racists, lets call that set R. What the author, and the NYT in general is saying is that if one is a member of T then that one is also a member of R.

Hard to argue with this. The Washington Post reports that 275 people showed up for Richard Spencer’s pathetic gathering in Washington, D.C.

“Dougal E” from Texas writes:

There are millions of people in this country who think there should be a revolution and that the masses should seize the means of production and establish a socialist state. Why is it that the New York Times never profiles them?

Spencer is an idiot who is allowing himself to be used by left-wing media in exchange for the notoriety of being a right-wing lunatic. The two-sides, i.e. mainstream media and white nationalists deserve each other. Trump wants nothing to do with them. He welcomed their votes because they understood the need to reform our system of immigration and that’s all. That is the sensible position. Open borders is not working as a way to allow new immigrants into the country.

This is not so well put, perhaps, but the comment reminds the reader that opposition to mass immigration has been critical to Trump’s popularity. I don’t know what percent of immigration restrictionists are motivated by racism, and to what degree. It is possible, however, to be skeptical about immigration even while admitting the virtues of potential immigrants.

A member of group A can rate the average member of group B above the average member of group A on her own scale of values (roughly speaking, “on average they are better people than us“) yet still oppose members of B settling in large numbers in the areas where A is the majority population. She could argue that would lead to overcrowding and/or intergroup conflict and/or fierce competition for limited resources and opportunities (access to education and health care, for one). Or she could simply say, “They are good people but I’d rather not let them in. Just because.”

Next, “Mark Plus” from Mayer, Arizona:

People still don’t get it. The Alt Right presents a challenge to our elites’ childish utopianism about race, immigration, feminism and sexual degeneracy, in that it emphasizes that you can’t make the tragedy of the human condition go away through politics. We have inequality, hierarchy and patriarchy because of the obdurate reality of man’s nature, and not because some mean white men hold power and enforce arbitrary rules.

This is a deeply conservative view: “you can’t make the tragedy of the human condition go away through politics.” I cannot disagree with this core idea, but I cannot agree with the overall anthropological argument: our human nature being imperfect, we can still take the edge off the ugliness and suffering inflicted on ourselves and other people by our hereditary sickness. I dislike judgmental terms like “sexual degeneracy” and don’t think that patriarchy is a necessary condition for a well-ordered society.

However, hierarchies and inequality arise more or less naturally at the first attempt at specialization. The New York Times and the Washington Post are staunch defenders of hierarchy in the business of reporting news. The big fight is over which hierarchies are good and righteous and which are evil and oppressive. Abolishing them all is hardly on the table.

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