Inductivist

If people didn't know better, they might think from my last post on too much population growth in Africa that I am a white nationalist (WN). I am not. There are crucial differences between them and me.

While members of a movement do not agree on everything, I assume most WNs believe that the white race has an ultimate value, I suppose the ultimate value, at least for whites. My attitude is basically the same as it was 20 years ago. I place a high value on my family, my country, and humanity (and God, if we want to go beyond the natural world). The welfare of these groups tends to be enhanced by white people. Thriving is correlated with whites. They are a means to the desired ends of human success, achievement, and virtuosity. I'm not saying whites are only valuable because they benefit others. I'm saying they have the same value as all humans, but they contribute more. They are needed more.

Since my family and I are white, our fate is tied up with that of whites, but the fate of America and of other races depend on how whites are doing as well. The main difference between me and the run-of-the-mill conservative is that I recognize the overwhelming power of genes. Group differences simply cannot be wished away. The market cannot solve all our problems. We have to deal with these realities. And while I disagree with WNs (I focus on only one difference here), their intelligent representatives are much more in touch with social reality than the Loony Left is.

Steve Sailer writes on Twitter:

As I've been saying for going on 20 years now, if you want America to have a nonracialized political system like, say, New Hampshire's instead of a racialized one like Mississippi's, then cut down on immigration. But Democrats want to win by government electing a new people.

So many elite conservatives are lamenting the current embrace of anti-foreigner populism over intellectual conservatism.  A recent example is Matt Lewis' Too Dumb to Fail. His message seems to be that we need to sell smart conservatism to the masses who are inclined to be stupid.

But look at the above map. Five important states--Texas, Florida, Virginia, Arizona, and Nevada--have large foreign-born populations, and I showed previously that our current foreign-born are typically non-white, and some are non-Christian. And those folks and their descendants do not vote Republican. And they never will vote majority Republican.

Who is stupid, exactly?

GSS participants were asked if they thought that porn should be illegal. I looked to see which characteristics predict answering yes (sample size = 12,246):


Logistic Regression Coefficients

Age .03
Sex .81
Educ -.04
IQ -.01
Income -.01
Church attendance .19
Conservatism .21
Year -.01

All the relationships are statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence level (two-tailed test).  Making porn illegal is favored by people who are: older, female, less educated, less intelligent, poorer, more religious, and more conservative. In addition, support for getting rid of the stuff has dropped over the past 40 years.

The coefficients are not standardized, so don't try to estimate the strength of a relationship from the numbers. Actually, it looks like the most powerful predictors are: age, religiosity, sex, and conservatism, in that order. I was surprised to see that almost half of women support banning pornography, and this number has changed little in 40 years.

Dana Carvey was on to something with his SNL "Church Lady." Funny stuff, but call me crazy: I respect old religious women.

Blacks seem to do a little better in more conservative regions.

Using GSS data for the nine U.S. regions, I calculated the Pearson correlations between: 1) the percent of black men who are married, 2) the mean level of church attendance (for all races), and 3) the mean level of political conservatism (for all races).

All correlations are positive and very strong: percent married/church attendance, .84; and percent married/political conservatism, .66. (While we're at it, the correlation between attendance and conservatism across the nine regions is .89. Religiosity and conservatism are, empirically, practically the same thing.)

These are results from a new Gallup poll. Explain to me how conservatives are such bigots when they like a black man more than eight out of nine white candidates (or potential candidates). And Cain isn't even white on the inside like Obama. He's a real black man.

This study shows that stereotyping by whites drops if the environment is orderly. The implication for people wanting to increase the comfort level among races is conservative: you need to maintain a clean, safe living space. That means that cops, not graffiti, must seen as cool.

On the other hand, disorderliness may be an accurate and important signal of risk. It doesn't make sense to clean up an environment if it tricks people into being comfortable in an objectively dangerous place.

Another point: In one experiment, whites sat as close to a black confederate as a white one, as long as the scene was clean and orderly. Does this square with the whites-as-natural-haters meme that they would sit just as close to a strange black man as a white one?

H/T Jason Malloy

TGGP directs us to an excellent GSS study by James Lindgren which shows that redistributionists (liberals) are more racist, angrier, less altruistic, and less happy than anti-redistributrionists (conservatives):

In debates over the roles of law and government in promoting the equality of income or in redistributing the fruits of capitalism, widely different motives are attributed to those who favor or oppose capitalism or income redistribution. According to one view, largely accepted in the academic social psychology literature (Jost et al. 2003), opposition to income redistribution and support for capitalism reflect an orientation toward social dominance, a desire to dominate other groups. According to another view that goes back at least to the nineteenth century origins of Marxism, anti-capitalism and a support for greater legal efforts to redistribute income reflect envy for the property of others and a frustration with one’s lot in a capitalist system.


In this paper I expand and test the social dominance thesis using sixteen nationally representative General Social Surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center between 1980 and 2004. Because few questions of interest were asked in most years or of most respondents, the sample sizes used for analyses vary from 535 to 15,743.

I first show that respondents who express traditionally racist views (on segregation, interracial marriage, and inborn racial abilities) tend to support greater income redistribution. Traditional racists also tend to oppose free-market capitalism and its consequences, wanting the government to guarantee jobs for everyone and fix prices, wages, and profits. Next, I report a similar pattern for those who express intolerance for unpopular groups on the fifteen Stouffer tolerance questions (regarding racists, homosexuals, communists, extreme militarists, and atheists). Those who express less tolerance for unpopular groups tend to favor income redistribution and oppose capitalism.

Then I present the results of six full latent variable structural equation models. The latent variables traditional racism (Model 1: r=.27) and intolerance (Model 2: r=.31) predict the latent variable income redistribution. Similarly, the latent variables traditional racism (Model 3: r=.33) and intolerance (Model 4: r=.36) predict anti-capitalism. Controlling for education, income (log), gender, and age (Models 5 and 6), the effects of the racism and intolerance predictors on redistribution and intolerance are reduced, but remain significant. Thus the preference against income redistribution, for example, is not just the result of income or education - rather, the data are consistent with racism and intolerance continuing to play a small, but significant role in explaining the support for income redistribution and anti-capitalism. The data are broadly inconsistent with the standard belief in the social psychology literature that pro-capitalist and anti-redistributionist views are positively associated with racism.

I then explore an alternative hypothesis, showing that, compared to anti-redistributionists, strong redistributionists have about two to three times higher odds of reporting that in the prior seven days they were angry, mad at someone, outraged, sad, lonely, and had trouble shaking the blues. Similarly, anti-redistributionists had about two to four times higher odds of reporting being happy or at ease. Not only do redistributionists report more anger, but they report that their anger lasts longer. When asked about the last time they were angry, strong redistributionists were more than twice as likely as strong opponents of leveling to admit that they responded to their anger by plotting revenge. Last, both redistributionists and anti-capitalists expressed lower overall happiness, less happy marriages, and lower satisfaction with their financial situations and with their jobs or housework.

Further, in the 2002 and 2004 General Social Surveys anti-redistributionists were generally more likely to report altruistic behavior. In particular, those who opposed more government redistribution of income were much more likely to donate money to charities, religious organizations, and political candidates. The one sort of altruistic behavior that the redistributionists were more likely to engage in was giving money to a homeless person on the street.

Evidence from sixteen national representative samples from 1980 through 2004 tends to suggest that Social Dominance Orientation has been in part misconceived. In the United States, segments of the academic community seem to have reversed the relationship between pro-capitalism and income redistribution on the one hand, and racism and intolerance on the other. Those who support capitalism and oppose greater income redistribution tend to be better educated, to have higher family incomes, to be less traditionally racist, and to be less intolerant of unpopular groups. Those who oppose greater redistribution also tend to be more generous in donating to charities and more likely to engage in some other altruistic behavior. The academic assumption that anti-capitalism and opposition to income redistribution reflect an orientation toward social dominance seems unwarranted.

My wife and I stand with our brothers and sisters who will be marching for life in DC tomorrow. I've posted a clip by one of my favorite priests, Father John Corapi (you can watch him on EWTN). I like to call him General Corapi.  Would that all eunuchs for Christ had his cajones.

By the way, I need to get me a job on the East Coast so I can participate in all the great political events I miss. Did you get the word that the National Policy Institute is going to stream live the American Renaissance conference in North Carolina on Feb. 5-6? I plan to put on a suit and tie just so it feels like I'm there. I've never attended, but I remember when I first saw Jared Taylor on C-SPAN in 1996. I had read The Bell Curve but thought the AmRen folks were nuts. Later, I read Paved with Good Intentions and all the other great race realist books from the 1990s, and was convinced by 1998. If there were any lingering doubts, they were completely destroyed when I read Jensen's g Factor.

I just read Auster's Path to National Suicide and want to cry that I didn't not read it when it first came out in 1990. According to the book, "his appearance on CNN’s “Crossfire” in 1991 marked the first time the cultural impact of immigration was critically discussed on national television." I was just a kid at the time, and "Crossfire" got me interested in politics. Just my luck that I missed the program with Auster--I might have avoided years of liberal foolishness.

What is the ideological center of contemporary conservatism?  In his book We Are Doomed, John Derbyshire described the phenomenon of the "metrocon"--urban conservatives who sympathesize with conservatives who live in the sticks--authentic conservatives--but who have lifestyles more similar to cosmopolitan liberals. To illustrate real conservatives, he writes about people from small-town America who believe that homosexuality should be illegal. Now that is a true conservative. Derbyshire doesn't know a single metrocon who thinks that homosexual behavior should be against the law. 

Is there something to this idea that anti-homosexuality shows us what is at the heart of rank-and-file conservatism? Many liberals would argue this; that hate is at its core.  Actually, the truth is that love is at the center of it; love of tradition, love of one's fathers. 

At the same time, the recent debate over raising the taxes of the rich led some liberals to contend that the Holy Grail of conservatism is protecting wealthy Americans. Conservatives are obsessed with economic freedom for the privileged. 

So which is it? I don't have access to a question about favoring laws against homosexuality, but the GSS does ask if homosexual sex is wrong. Respondents are also asked about taxes on the wealthy with answers ranging from "much too low" to "much too high." I correlated these measures with the degree to which one is politically conservative. The correlation between conservatism and wanting lower taxes for the rich is .16. The conservatism/anti-homosexual sex correlation, by constrast, is .39--much stronger. 

Another way of looking at it is percentages. Seventy-nine percent of those who describe themselves as conservative think homosexual sex is almost alway or always wrong. Only 49 percent of conservatives say that the taxes paid by the wealthy are "too high" or "much too high." Opposing homosexual sex captures conservatism better than concern about high taxes for the rich.  

Many who read this blog consider cognitive ability to be extremely valuable. It is. But let's not go overboard. In my view, brain horsepower sometimes gets us in trouble. 

Youthfulness illustrates this. IQ peaks among young people and gradually declines over the lifecourse. I've never been a mental powerlifter, but I was stronger 20 years ago. 

Only an ideologue would deny that young people are often foolish. They do and think foolish things. Prudence, wisdom, judgment--all these require more than the ability to reason abstractly. 

Reasonable people would agree that it's a bad idea for 14 year old kids to be having sex. Most people don't arrive at that position through rational argument, but it seems to me wise nevertheless. Problem is, the people who agree with me tend to be dumb and uneducated. 

The General Social Survey asked participants if it's wrong for young teenagers to have sex. I estimated a model of the relationship between the answer to that question and three predictors: age, IQ, and educational level (sample size = 11, 359).     

Here are the results:

OLS regression coefficients (standardized)
Age .20
IQ -.02
Education -.05

All the relationships are statistically significant (although the IQ and education effects are weak). Older, dumber, and less educated people are more likely to think it's wrong. Of course, the discomfort that many intelligent people have with the concept of wrongness is at play here.

I can imagine myself as a teen arguing, "No harm is done if two young people have sex. It's consensual. They're giving each other pleasure--how can that be bad?" I can also see me debating my parents and winning. Their arguments would go something like, "It's just wrong. God says so."  With maybe a "the girl might get pregnant"  thrown in. On rational grounds, I would probably win the debate, but the inarticulate grownups are right. Teen sex is a bad idea--they arrived at the reasonable view through tradition and by sensing it. This ability needs to be understood and valued alongside mental ability. Conservative thought, of course, has always recognized the wisdom found in instinct and tradition.