The Social Fabric Has Come Undone
Tell me how this ends.
There’s a troubling video making the rounds on social media. Some things really need no description:
Let me start off by saying that whatever sentiments those kids harbor towards the police, it isn’t fear. At such a young age, they’re already provoking cops, the people charged with using deadly force to keep the peace, and the parents are nowhere to be found. I don’t care what your opinion on race, poverty, or whatever in this country is - this is a very bad sign of where these kids are headed and where we’re headed.
Rod Dreher of The American Conservative, currently spending the summer in Vienna, Austria, had this to say about the video [bold mine]:
Now, to business: I was communicating last week with a friend from Baton Rouge who recently moved with his wife and kids when he took a job elsewhere, and who is bearish on the city’s future. He said that the truth is, violent crime is really bad there, and it’s never going to get much better. The truth is, he said, that the crime is overwhelmingly committed by young black males, usually victimizing other black people. He doesn’t see things getting any better because the multigenerational poverty of north Baton Rouge, which is predominantly black, is tied to the collapse of the black family.
My contribution to the conversation was to relate an anecdote I’ve shared with you readers before: something I heard from an older white friend who lived in north Baton Rouge until fairly recently, the only white person in his neighborhood. He told me that the collapse of the family was at the root of all the problems he saw in his neighborhood. He was close to the grandmothers and grandfathers of his own generation who lived in the block, and said that those elderly men and women are the last things standing between the community and anarchy. And they are dying out. I asked this older white man what white Baton Rougeans can do to help. He said that he was at a loss to know, saying that whatever solution is going to have to come from within the black community, because whites have zero authority or trust among black folks.
Crime may be bad now, but it can get much, much worse. We’re often told that the current crime surge is a right-wing media narrative, based on the fact crime rates are still far lower than they were in the early 1990s. While true, our crime rates are also more or less where they were in the early 1960s. We all know what happened that decade and after. After hitting a 50-year low in 2014, crime rates have steadily risen since then. It’s a bit too late to still be saying “We’re living in the safest time in American history.”
More from Dreher:
I was just on the phone talking with a criminologist friend, who has a paper soon to be published, predicting a future of more violent crime and turmoil based on two social trends: the inability of larger numbers of young males to find a permanent marriage partner, and the steady proliferation of fatherlessness, as the family crumbles. The paper will soon be published, so I can share it with you then. His essay is based on data and historical analysis. He says that the historical record of civilizations shows that polygyny is the normal form of social order. That is, strong and wealthy men attract a large number of wives, who prefer to share a rich husband with other women than to struggle in life alongside a poor husband devoted exclusively to them. Current social science shows that for women, social status and financial resources are what women find most attractive in a man; for me, it’s the physical attractiveness of the woman. The real-world result of contemporary social and economic dynamics are that a small percentage of men are competing for a majority of women, and a majority of men are competing for a relatively small number of women. It seems that as Christianity, with its social norms, fades away, the old ways are reasserting themselves.
Tell me how this ends. Better yet, tell me how this doesn’t lead to a more chaotic, disorderly, and violent future. Feminists can scream babble on social media about how #TheFutureIsFemale and how the diminishing status of men is a good thing for society. History shows us otherwise. That majority of men who lose out are either going to die early or self-destruct in some other fashion. Or, they’re going to be mobilized into some kind of force capable of applying violence in organized manner.
Of course, life isn’t some simple morality play. Sometimes, a society needs large numbers of men willing to participate in violence to protect it from threats. If, for example, the state continues to abdicate its responsibility to ensure public safety, there may be no choice but for young men to fill the void and do the hard, dangerous work of defending their homes and communities. They already do it in Mexico, where cartels control over a third of the country. In many of these cartel-run areas, there exists no law and order or the police and local governments are in bed with the cartels. These places have no choice but for everyday Mexicans to arm up and form self-defense groups (what some might call “militias”) so they can protect themselves from criminals and establish some semblance of safety and order.
Generally, however, large numbers of men with nothing going for them is a recipe for cataclysm and upheaval. I wrote a few entries ago that the unwillingness of women to get bloodied in no way rules out armed conflict. As long as there are plenty of men willing to get into the fight on either side, large-scale violence will always be a possibility.
Back to Dreher once more. This part troubled me deeply:
Anyway, the Baton Rouge friend with whom I was writing says his family members living there are going to have to make some hard decisions soon about whether or not to stay in the city, or move to some suburb. It’s all about spreading crime, and the conviction that the black community there is going to remain mired in family breakdown, and the criminality and chaos it causes. I realized, thinking about that conversation, that we might well be reaching a point in the life of our country in which we give up on the idea of full racial integration, as people retribalize for the sake of protection. I raised this issue with a Hungarian interlocutor the other day (not the NYC guy), and told him that it’s not a racial thing for me, that I would rather be the only white guy in a neighborhood filled with middle-class Asians or Indians — people who had strong families and who lived orderly lives.
The Hungarian visibly struggled to understand, and politely suggested that I was naive. The way of the world is solidarity with blood, he said. The only way Hungarians have been able to hold their nation together over the many violent centuries living here on the Carpathian plain is by being absolutely rock-solid in blood loyalty. He suggested to me that America is a far outlier in world history in promising solidarity based not on tribe, on ethnos, but on ideas. I could tell he was too polite to say it, but that he didn’t think we were going to be able to hold it together, not with our elite institutions destroying those bedrock American ideals, and pushing retribalization from the Left. I wish I thought he was wrong.
Personally, I don’t believe race relations are anywhere near as bad as they sometimes seem. I think the Democratic Party, the media, and the universities try very hard to drive a wedge between Whites and all the other races, but for the most part, it’s falling on deaf ears. Just look at how public opinion of Hispanic/Latino Americans tracks with that of Whites. Asians are more or less split down the middle, with Blacks obviously an outlier with their deep-seated loyalty to the Left. If anyone’s tribalized in this country, it’s Black Americans. Despite the incessant alarm about “White supremacy” and the growing threat of “White nationalism,” Whites continue to remain among the least racially-conscious people in America.
Despite America’s sordid racial history, ethno-nationalism has never been a major undercurrent in this country. Part of the reason is because there’s really only been one nation - the United States. We’re not a place where the land is associated with any specific peoples, like Japan or Korea, where only a single ethnicity has continuously occupied that soil for centuries upon centuries. Even if you believe, as I do, that our culture is distinctly Anglo, the term encompasses a substantial geographic area in Europe. I won’t say diversity is our strength, but it’s certainly our feature and has been from the start. One of the nice things about diversity is that it gets us used to being around different people. It’s easy to take for granted, but for much of human history, it wasn’t always easy. With different ethnicities and races come different cultures, languages, values, and in turn, different interests.
And that’s just it - we’re not the Balkans, yet we’ve still seen significant racial conflict in this country. It troubles me to think this could again become a part of our landscape. The fault line, as I’ve explained before, is crime. While not all criminals are Black (prisons are majority White), it’s an unfortunate fact that crime is a part of Black American existence in a way it simply isn’t for other Americans. The fact that other races have assimilated fairly easily, I believe, has a lot to do with the fact crime isn’t a demographic-wide issue for them as it is for Blacks, who are equally over-represented as perpetrators and victims. The more crime becomes associated with Blacks and Black communities, the more self-segregation will occur and the greater the racial animosity will be. It’ll threaten to unravel the tremendous progress made since the 1960s, progress that was made with nothing but blood, sweat, and tears by so many people of all races on all sides of the divide.
Here’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Imagine having this happen to you and not being able to do anything about it because not only would they all turn on you if you did, but nobody would defend you (see Jose Alba of New York City):
You don’t hear much about it in the news, but social media does a good job of showing there really is a racial angle to crime and it’s not what everyone thinks it is. The victimization of Asian-Americans, in particular, has been fully exposed in the current crime surge. Here’s an incident that happened in Los Angeles last month (WARNING: graphic content):
Here’s a blatant instance of racism against an Asian-American worker. Again, you didn’t hear about this in the national media:
Such a stark divide is emerging between one demographic in this country and everyone else. This isn’t good for either side: one is becoming more tribalized and distant from the rest of society, while the other is having to tolerate victimization and an anarcho-tyrannical state which is allowing it to happen. There’s something deeply unstable about this arrangement.
Again, I don’t see a race war happening in this country and I don’t see us going down the road of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, either. The history simply isn’t there for that. But just as diversity is a feature of America, the next civil armed conflict will be diverse in nature as well and you’d be wishful to think there won’t be a racial component to it.
So many fault-lines and pressure points are piling up. The divergence between men and women, one race becoming increasingly at odds with the others, little children who’ve already decided they’re going to be on the wrong side of the law - how do we avoid a civil war in a situation like this?
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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