Kevin MacDonald
February 19, 2009
It seems that the signs of white dispossession are everywhere these days. Edmund Connelly describes how non-Jewish whites are being pushed out of elite institutions like Harvard. An article titled “The end of white America” catalogues the lack of cultural confidence of whites these days. It quotes a student who says “To be white is to be culturally broke."
Writing in vdare.com, David A. Yeagley quotes one of his female students saying “Look ... I don’t see anything about my culture to be proud of. It’s all nothing. My race is just nothing.” Yeagley notes the Cheyenne saying, “A nation is never defeated until the hearts of its women are on the ground.” And he places this in the context of the recent election in which 46% of white women voted for Obama compared to 41% of white men.
These percentages are somewhat inflated because they include Jews and immigrants, such as South Asians, who are classified as white but do not identify with the European-American majority. Nevertheless, they do point to a significant gender gap. While it is certainly true that voting for McCain-Palin is not a sign of white consciousness — even implicitly, it is also the case that voting for Obama is a good sign of a lack of racial consciousness for European Americans.
The good news, of course, is that a majority of white women did not vote for Obama. And, as Steve Sailer has shown for the 2004 election, if one separated out women who are married and have children, the results would show an even greater tendency to vote against Obama.
Nevertheless, there is a real problem. Those of us with some acquaintance with European-Americans who do have an explicit ethnic identity and a sense of their ethnic interests are quite aware that there is a very large sex ratio imbalance at gatherings of like-minded people. The attendees are almost all male — an exception being the redoubtable Virginia Abernethy. And there are stories of men who have stopped attending meetings or who provide support only in the most furtive manner, mainly because their wives are afraid that the attitudes of their husbands could become public and ruin their social life. Making such things public is just the sort of thing that organizations like the SPLC and the ADL love to do.
Judith Warner of the New York Times describes the result of an informal "email inquiry" on women's reactions to Obama. Some imagined having sex with Obama and replacing Michelle Obama as First Lady. Others imagined themselves at social engagements with Obama. All wanted deeply to have some of the Obama aura rub off on them. Warner's email contacts doubtless reflect her liberal readership, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if they are quite general, especially among white women who voted for Obama.
What does an evolutionary psychologist say about all this? Parenthetically, I realize that the great majority of Americans do not believe in evolution. Nevertheless, evolutionary theory is a very powerful and scientifically credible way of looking at human behavior. It is no accident that one of the main strands of Jewish intellectual activism over the last century has been to oppose evolutionary theory as an explanatory tool in the social sciences. Darwin did indeed have a dangerous idea — dangerous to Jews because it provides a rational grounding for the ethnic identity and interests of European-derived peoples.
Evolution is also dangerous to Jews because it provides a compelling account of Judaism as an ethnic phenomenon. It is also capable of explaining the main instances of historical anti-Semitism as involving ethnic conflict and competition between Jews and non-Jews rather than simply as Jewish victimization. And it sheds light on Jewish intellectual and political activity in Western societies since the Enlightenment. It also points up the glaring hypocrisy in contemporary Jewish life between the triumph of racial Zionism in Israel and Jewish activism in Western societies in opposition to the ethnic identities and interests of European-derived peoples.
In view of all this, it is not at all surprising that Jewish intellectual activists would regard evolutionary thinking as a dangerous idea indeed.
The evolutionary theory of sex is one of the bedrocks of evolutionary psychology — probably accounting for half of all the research in the field. The basic idea is simple: Females invest a relatively large amount of time and energy in reproduction. In the world we evolved in, the only way for women to reproduce was to endure a 38-week pregnancy and then nurse the child for an even longer period. Even after nursing, child care was mainly a female responsibility.
Because women are committed to this very large investment, they become very valuable in the mating game. And because they are valuable, they become discriminating maters: Just as a worker who puts in more time and energy is in a better bargaining position than one who puts in little time and energy, women become the choosers in the mating game.
And what do women want? Women are expected to want men who have high social status. From an evolutionary perspective, such men are attractive because they may be willing to provide valuable resources that would help in supporting the mother and raising the children. (When men do contribute resources, they also become choosy, but that's another story.) And even if a wealthy man does not provide resources, he is likely to have good genes — genes that predispose his children to be successful.
In any case, women do indeed prefer wealthy, high-status men. For example, a recent study found that wealthy men give women more orgasms: "The pleasure women get from making love is directly linked to the size of their partner’s bank balance." Other research shows that women are likely to choose higher status men than their husbands when they have affairs, resulting in the possibility of a lower status male helping to raise the children of a higher-status male.
What about the idea that evolutionary theory implies that people should be attracted to people who are genetically like themselves? Evolutionary theory predicts that women will be attracted to men who are genetically similar to themselves compared to men who are from a different race or ethnic group. For one thing, this makes them more closely related to their own children.
The problem is that this attraction to genetically similar mates is only part of the story. It must compete with the tendency to be attracted to wealthy, powerful men. And quite clearly, the phenomenon where large numbers of white women fantasize about having a relationship with Obama reflects his power and social status, not attraction to a genetically similar person.
The media is a major part of the hostile elite, so it is not surprising that it has played a leading role in the idolization of Obama — the slobbering love affair between the mainstream media and Obama. It's the same role that Edmund Connelly has called attention to in his writing on the images of blacks created by Hollywood in recent decades. Black action heroes are now household names, and more than one commentator has pointed out that there were several black presidents in the movies and on television long before Obama was elected.
These images from the media tap into women's psychological attraction to high-status males. It was probably fairly common for white women to fantasize about having sex with Will Smith or Denzel Washington or even the "wise and saintly" Morgan Freeman long before the world had ever heard of Barack Obama.
Another sex difference that contributes to women's political behavior is that women are generally more nurturant, affectionate, empathic, and caring than men. This is another aspect of female psychology that can easily be derived from evolutionary thinking — the vital importance of nurturing children and developing close family relationships in our evolutionary past. Thus it is not surprising that many of Judith Warner's women not only fantasize about having sex with Obama, they see themselves married to him and becoming First Lady. They develop a close and caring relationship with him, or they see him as a good friend. I suppose this is also the reason why women are more likely than men to support social programs that promise to aid children and poor people.
This relatively greater empathy and nurturance was certainly adaptive in a world of family groups and close relatives. But in the modern world, it can easily lead to maladaptive altruism and ignoring real dangers. For example, white women enamored of images of sexy, high-status black males are not informed by the mainstream media of the very large racial imbalance in crime, particularly black men raping white women.
Another problem with women being relatively high in nurturance and empathy is that these traits are linked to greater compliance and greater inclination to seek the approval and affection of others. Again, these are very adaptive traits in the world of small groups and close relatives. But in a world dominated by elites that are hostile to the interests of whites, these traits can lead to mindless acceptance of anti-white cultural norms. Challenging social norms — even ones that are obviously against one's interests — carries a very high psychological cost to people who seek the approval and affection of others.
This implies that once the intellectual and political movements described in The Culture of Critique had seized the intellectual and moral high ground, they became difficult indeed to dislodge. Challenging these norms brings accusations of moral turpitude ringing down from the most prestigious political, media and academic institutions of the society. People who seek the approval and affection of others are definitely not inclined to go there. This in turn may well be a large part of the explanation for why there are so few women at gatherings of European-Americans concerned about the future of their people and culture.
This paints a fairly bleak picture. But there are some rays of hope. It is likely that at some point the gap between rhetoric and reality in American life will be so large that no one will believe what they are hearing from the hostile elites that dominate public discourse — much like the Soviet Union in the decades before its fall. When that happens, the cultural icons promoted by the media will lose their credibility and allure as well.
And because of the internet, the opportunity to hear divergent opinions and become aware of information that is suppressed by the mainstream media has never been greater. All around us we can see the collapse and increasing irrelevance of the old media. The internet has already created communities where prestige and social approval can be obtained completely outside the norms created by our hostile elites. And at least some of these communities are dedicated to transforming America by asserting the legitimacy of white identities and interests.
The dispossession of whites is already substantial, but it promises to be a whole lot more obvious as time goes on. As whites become a minority, it is difficult to imagine that they won't develop more of a group consciousness and challenge the prevailing anti-white norms. And that includes even the more nurturant and empathic among us.
