How Catholics Transformed America (What Colin Woodard's American Nations Gets Wrong about Yankees)
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Summary
Colin Woodard's new book, American Nations, does a lot of things right, but it gets some things wrong. And one of the biggest things he gets wrong is that he completely misunderstands the Yankee culture.
Transcript
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Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. We were listening to the audiobook for
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American Nations by Colin Woodard. And we're likely going to do a series of episodes on them.
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This is a guy who divided America into 11 different populations with different histories.
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I'll put it on the screen here. I think he gets most things right. He wrote the book as a direct
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follow-up to another book that we mention all the time on the show called Albion's Seed that talks
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about the four founding cultures of America. By historian David Hackett Fisher, which was written
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in either late 80s or early 90s. So this answer is a much more modern take and quite interesting.
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Well, but it also does something quite different than Fisher's book. And I think it gets some
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things wrong. And one of the things that gets wrong, we're going to be talking about on this video,
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because I think he completely misunderstands the Yankee culture. So first, I'm going to talk a
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little bit about Albion's Seed, so you can get a little prep of this and why Albion's Seed doesn't
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help us as much understand modern America as this follow-up book does. Specifically, Albion's Seed,
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they divide the original Americans into four distinct cultural groups, which is accurate.
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The Puritans, the Quakers, the Backwoods people, and the Cavaliers. Now, what was interesting about
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these four groups, is I remember I was talking to somebody about this, and they kept trying to guess.
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They were like, who are the Catholics? Which one is the Catholics? And they go, like, I would go to
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the first and they go, oh, the next is the Catholic group. Or I mentioned the Cavaliers. And they go,
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oh, that must be the Catholic group. And I had to break to them something that is kind of, I think,
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tough for a lot of Catholics today, because they get this sort of retelling of American history that
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tries to include them in parts of American history that they just were not players in. During the time
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of the American Revolution, only 1.5% of America was Catholic. And people are like,
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Maryland. Maryland was a Catholic colony, wasn't it? At the time of the revolution,
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less than 10% of the population in Maryland was Catholic. There was just no significant Catholic
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population in early America. However, that is not true of America today. Even when we're talking
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about significant declines in religiosity in America, you can look at something like Massachusetts,
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for example. And can you guess the percentage in 1990 of Americans in Massachusetts who identified
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So we can go over some other New England states. You get 26% of New Hampshire, one of the least
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Catholic of the New England states, is incredibly Catholic. 22% of Vermont, another low Catholic
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population of the New England states, identifies as Catholic. That is absolutely wild in terms
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of how much of the population of New England Catholics make up. So the thing that the guy gets
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wrong in this book is he does get right. The Quakers, who ended up making up the Midlands
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population, were widely out-competed by an alliance of the Backwoods people and the German
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immigrants who basically ended up erasing their cultural footprint until they came warring
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back with a vengeance through the woke revolution, which we will do another episode on how that
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evolved out of Quakerism. We talk about it heavily in the book, The Pragmatist Guide to
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Crafting Religion. However, he incorrectly claims the Yankees evolved out of the Puritans,
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when in reality, the Puritans basically went extinct in the same way that the Quakers do. Oh,
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yes, they make up some small sliver of American population, but their ideals and their world
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vision was pretty much completely erased, except for some small bubbles in places like New Hampshire,
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which I think holds more to the Puritan political framing. But largely speaking,
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they were erased by the many waves of Catholic immigrants that mostly settled in the urban
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centers of New England. As to places why Vermont and New Hampshire were not as affected, it's because
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their population doesn't live in urban centers, and most of the Catholic population went to settle in
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urban centers. So if you look here at his map, and then contrast it with the concentration of Catholics
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in different parts of America, it is very clear that three of the regions that he carved out are
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actually specifically Catholic cultural units. Here we are talking about Yankeedom, the left coast,
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and El Norte. This is the northeastern United States, this is the far western coast of the United
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States, and this is the Hispanic immigrant part of the United States. Every one of these has had an
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enormous impact on America's cultural history. And as such, Catholicism has had an enormous impact
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on America's cultural history. Now, another thing that people get super wrong about Catholics,
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modern Catholics, is they go, oh, Catholics, solid conservative voter place. Life begins at
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conception and all, right? As of 2022, what percentage of Catholics identified with the Democratic Party
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versus the Republican Party? Oh, that's a good question. I would say probably 68% of Catholics
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identify with the Democratic Party because it focuses more on this top-down control and charitable giving
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to the weak, right? It's 42% with the Democratic Party, 38% with the Republican Party.
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Oh, okay. So the rest are unaffiliated. Yeah, 20% are unaffiliated. There's still way more,
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and they used to be even higher with the Democratic Party. So in the election cycle before that,
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in the 2020 election cycle, it was 45% identified with the Democratic Party. And then if you look at
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exit polling, it's even worse. So you look at 2020, 52% of Catholic voters voted for Joe Biden.
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52%. Yeah, yeah. I would think that the majority of Catholics are going Democrat.
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Yeah. Here I have contrasted two maps for you. One map is the percent of Catholics in different
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counties of America, and the other map is how those counties voted. You can see there is almost a direct
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overlap to which counties went Democrat. And this is in the most recent election cycle. This is
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this election cycle, which counties are hotly contested, which ones are not. So this is not just a
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historic thing. And I think a lot of people think that they're a Republican faction. Catholics at all
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voting with Republicans is actually a fairly modern thing. In the 1970s, so again, I mentioned this on
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the show, but a lot of people don't know this. The Republican Party ended up having to take a pro-life
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stance. It was a majority. The Republican Party was the pro-choice like before, which much more fit was
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Republican values because the Protestant tradition generally believes that life begins like 12 weeks
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after conception, as Catholics did before about 200 years ago. You know, like Thomas the Poinus and
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Augustus the Hippo used to believe this, but they did this shift recently with Pope Python. I've gone
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into that in another episode. Don't need to go into it here. But one, it was the, you know, Protestant
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religious thing to do, and it was the free choice thing to do, which is what Republicans were
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historically about. And so they did this switch in the 1970s, specifically as a tactic to try to get
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some Catholics to vote Republican. And while it swung some Catholics their way, it has always been the
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minority of Catholics who this appealed to. And it was really just the single issue voters, because
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other than that issue, and we'll get into why the Catholics vote and the Catholic cultural perception
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much more aligns with the Democratic Party. And I also think people forget how recently Catholics were
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accepted as a mainstream block within American society. You know, I'm just baffled where you'll
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get these like Catholic LARPers today. Like they don't, they're not actually culturally Catholic,
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like Nick Fuentes, right? Who like are aligning was like the KKK. The KKK hunted and lynched Catholics
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just as much as they did blacks. What? Yes, they hated Catholic. The three groups that the KKK was about
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getting rid of or removing from power were blacks, Jews, and Catholics.
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Oh, what? Okay. How did I live my entire life not knowing this?
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Well, because there's been this like rewriting of history as like Catholics were this group that was
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always here. And weren't this incredibly discriminated against group that was because,
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you know, you can't have like Irish as a discriminated group in modern progressive. You
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can't have Italians. But there were lots of signs, you know, you look, you go back to these
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immigration waves. And it was, you know, Irish need not apply here. Italian need not apply here.
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There was this huge fear of the Catholic immigrant waves and that they would change our culture.
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And they saw these people in the same way that many people today, I actually say much worse than
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most people look at Hispanic immigrants today. They saw them as an intrinsically criminal people.
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Because most of the Catholic immigrant waves came with large organized crime, much larger than the
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current Hispanic wave. Like people can think about Hispanic organized crime. They are nothing
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compared to like the mob or the mafia. The mob was the Irish wave and the mafia was the Italian wave,
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which basically controlled huge portions of American urban centers. Like people were terrified.
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So you've got to keep that in mind as well. Right. And when Kennedy, who was the first Catholic
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president that we had, was running for office, it was a huge thing. Like it was like,
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is he going to be loyal to the Pope or to America? Can a Catholic be president? This was a big thing
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that people saw beforehand. Like they were like, I do. It was a big belief before that the Catholics
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couldn't be president. Like, because fundamentally they're loyal to their religion and their religion
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is loyal to a foreign power, i.e. the Vatican, i.e. he can't be president. Right. And, and people are
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like, come on, Catholics aren't Democrats. Who was our last president? The Catholic Joe Biden.
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You know, keep this in mind, right? So we've got to break through a number of things. One,
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Catholics were a discriminated group for a long time in American history. It only recently came
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out of this discriminated status. This discriminated identity hugely shaped their cultural history,
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the way they impacted American politics, and the way they created. I think he is right about the
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boundary he drew around Yankeedom. I think he is wrong about what influenced their value set
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or how they came to exist as a cultural group. We are going to do a different episode on why the
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Yankee Puritans went extinct and what ended up happening to America's Calvinists, because they
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didn't go purely extinct. They ended up merging with the backwoods culture. And you see a lot of this
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even in his book. And the backwoods people were already predominantly Calvinist. These were the
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incredibly violent woodland people who ended up creating greater Appalachia, which is where my
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people are from. And I think people see this in my kids as like these sort of uncouth, violent,
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like us as well. Like we prefer the lower arts. You know, we are not concerned with sort of signaling
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high class. In fact, that would be considered like a very low class thing to do within the greater
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Appalachian cultural system. But we will get to a whole different episode talking about that.
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I want to focus now on how Catholics changed America. So when Catholics came into the United
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States, they behaved very differently than basically any cultural group that we had had
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in the United States before. Typically, and I've talked about this in other episodes, but
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it's worth noting. During the recent sort of battle that we had as a country, you had, this
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was over the COVID vaccines. You had two different ways of relating to truth. You had one group
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who said, well, truth should be determined by people who spent their entire lives studying a
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subject and then who are certified by a central bureaucracy. And then another group who said,
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in this case, the university system, that central bureaucracy is prone to corruption.
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Instead, we should all determine truths for ourselves based on our own research.
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Wouldn't you know it, this actually broke out. If you look at the areas that were more pro
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really strict COVID restrictions and everything like that, you basically look at the percentage
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of Catholic descendants living in an area and you will see a direct correlation to, did they go
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with the expert consensus or were they more about figuring this out on your own? Now, I should note,
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I actually think that both of these systems for determining truth are important and a society
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is healthier when you have both of them. Otherwise, you go full QAnon where everyone is,
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everything is a conspiracy. You can't trust anything. And I don't think QAnon is wrong about everything,
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but I think that, you know, there is sort of a full conspiracy brain thing, or you go full like
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zero COVID, China, the experts can't have been wrong the first time. So we have to keep doubling down.
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So I think that America benefits from having these two populations, but this, this flip is what we
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had during the reformation, right? Like that's why the Catholics took this mindset. The reformation is
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also one group saying truth should be determined by people who spent their entire life studying a
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subject. And then who have been certified by central bureaucracy, i.e. the priest system.
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And then another group who said, no, no, no, truth should be determined by individuals studying the
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Bible themselves. And then you have the secondary thing with the Catholic group that made them very
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different. So in the first great awakening in America, we'll have another episode on this, how it
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was sort of like the first social media movement is the Catholics when they were choosing, you know,
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who would be appointed priests who would, you know, speak to people. One, the people couldn't
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even understand what they were saying most of the time because they were saying it in one language
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and it was a language that people didn't speak. They were promoted through a bureaucracy. In the
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early American colonies during this like fiery Protestant great awakening period, people would go
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to the church. There'd be like four churches in a town and you would choose the one that spoke to
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you most. It was like using early social media channels, but it led to a very different way of
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relating to your faith. It was like a very fiery driven way. Right. Like, well, it made you have
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sort of the difference between religion almost as a public utility. Like you go to the local public
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school, just like you'd go to the local Catholic church versus like a startup world that, that
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Protestant preachers were the original social media platforms. And we were recently on a road trip.
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And I was looking at in an old new England town that we were driving through, like all the different,
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very old churches in that town and feeling like, wow, like each of these feels kind of like a
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different social media platform. And we had these basically like local entrepreneurs raising money
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from benefactors who were hoping to get an ROI on their investment in terms of social capital prestige,
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and maybe, you know, like better odds of going to heaven or being among the elect, whatever it might be
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to, you know, to invest in these, in these, in these preachers who then were trying to get audiences
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and get the network effects. And they're very much like early social media platforms. It is a chicken
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and egg problem of like, you know, well, can I get a great congregation, you know, but can I also get
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the best, you know, like preacher? It's a really interesting question. And so, yeah, I see what you're
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saying. This is so interesting. Pretty much all of the other early American cultural groups
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had a massive distrust of authority, and they had a massive distrust of bureaucracies and everything
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like that. And the Catholics didn't have this, which allowed them to do something very unique
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in terms of how they were able to integrate themselves into American society. So there were
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two things that they did. One, we got to talk about organized crime, because organized crime wasn't just
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organized crime. It was an alternate government structure that this group was using to both provide
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social services to their own people, which the organized crime organizations often did. They
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were providing, you know, orphanages, they were providing help to the local Catholic community,
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they were providing with food and everything like that. And this was a discriminated community,
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right? But they also provided rules for that community and order for that community that
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superseded the local government's order. But something very interesting happened because they were able to
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form these large counter bureaucracies to the existing bureaucracies of the regions that they were
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moving into. But then they began to quickly integrate with the local regions. Specifically,
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this is where the stereotype of the Irish cop comes from in American history. They quickly took over
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pretty much all of the government bureaucratic positions, specifically the cops and other government
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bureaucracies in the large urban centers where they were. They were hugely disproportionately
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represented there. We even see this today in American politics, where if you look at the Supreme Court,
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it has been hugely, hugely, hugely overwhelmingly Catholic. And I'll add in posts, like, just how
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overwhelmingly Catholic. I think it's like 80% Catholic or something.
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So as of the last Supreme Court, for Supreme Court justices raised in Catholic families,
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you had John Roberts, Claris Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett,
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Neil Gorsuch, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor. That's a 78% Catholic majority in a Supreme Court.
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Within a country that only has a Catholic population of 20%.
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Absolutely wild. And so they were sort of like bureaucratic specialists. And it led to the culture
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that they were building in New England to have an incredible, this Yankee culture, to have an
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incredible trust of bureaucracies and respect for bureaucratic traditions. So if you look at most of the
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other cultural groups, they would have looked down on, for example, lawyers, especially wealthy
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lawyers. So, and you see this in my family history. Remember, I read that story about my ancestor who
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was like really into getting educated and everything like that. Well, he always called himself, he said,
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well, I'm a bacon and eggs lawyer. You know, he never wanted people to know that he wasn't a
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subsistence liver, that he lived on a subsistence lifestyle, but he was a lawyer. And we'll get into
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why the Beckwoods people wanted to be seen as living on a subsistence lifestyle and not accumulating
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capital, because that was very important to their cultural tradition. But within the Catholic
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culture, no, this wasn't true. You know, being a lawyer, being a judge, being a police officer,
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This led to Catholics taking on a very unique role in the early economic hubs of America. When the
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Catholic immigrant waves came in, because they were much more comfortable taking these sort of
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bureaucratic positions than the Protestants were, they were able to flood local institutions like the
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police, for example, and build a majority Catholic police force really, really quickly after their
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immigration waves came in. And it was actually the rise of the majority Catholic police force
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that led to the fall of the mob, because there wasn't a need for an external bureaucratic operation
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to protect the Catholics when the Catholics controlled the police force. This is where you get that like
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stereotypical police officer's name of Murphy, you know, but it wasn't just the police force. It was
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also the legal system. It was also the governing bureaucracy. It was every bureaucratic layer became
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majority Catholic about a generation and a half after the first major Catholic immigration waves.
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And so it moved the Yankee culture into being a much more pro bureaucratic culture. But it also
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made it a culture that fundamentally, I think, didn't understand some of the things like the older
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parts of American culture. So one of the things recently, like if you talk about like the gay marriage
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stuff, and like, oh, gays shouldn't be allowed to get married in the United States. And I've noticed
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disproportionately, it's the Catholic conservatives who push this, which from an actual American
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perspective is a very queer thing to be pushing, because some religions within America do believe
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that gays can get married. And if you are pushing that, then you are saying that the government should
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have the ability to choose how the Christian Bible should be interpreted. And this was actually one of the
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things that led to the revolution. So leading up to the revolution, one of the really like core evil
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things that the British government did, is they said that the Presbyterian, the Calvinist ministers
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could not marry people. And they sent over Anglican ministers to marry people, saying that we should
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have control over who marries and who doesn't marry, and the traditions within which they marry. And this
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too, you know, the traditional American system was seen as horrifying. So during the revolution,
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I think a lot of people misunderstand the revolution's framing. So from the perspective
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of most of the revolutionary, it's the way it's taught in school today, I think to be more inclusive,
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is that they were mostly annoyed about just the taxes that they were under. But that's not really
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the way most of the revolutionaries thought about it. Most of the revolutionaries were like
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religious extremists, Calvinists, 70% of the white population in America, this is according to the
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Heritage Foundation, which is, you know, a core conservative organization, were Calvinists during
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the American Revolution. And they saw the British Anglicans who were trying to impose their religious
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system on them as a Catholic light or a Catholic-like group trying to force them to live a more Catholic
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lifestyle. Yeah, still very much establishment, because the whole thing is, you know, let me interpret
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for myself or let my community interpret for themselves, you know, without me. It wasn't just that,
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it was the way that the Anglican, the Anglican Church is very Catholic in a lot of its traditions.
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And so they saw, and even its belief system, because that's what, I mean, when Henry VIII,
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Henry VIII didn't really want to get rid of all of the great ceremony of the church. He liked all that
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stuff. He liked the hierarchy. He liked the ceremony. He just felt he had a duty to his people to produce
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an error, and he felt like due to church politics, he wasn't able to do that. He never really wanted to move
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away from the Catholic vibe. He wasn't ever really sold on the Puritan ideal of like, we need to
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reinvent this from scratch. And because of that, the Church of England, the Anglican Church, always
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very much looked Catholic from the perspective of the Protestant immigrants. And so when they were
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fighting the revolution, to many of them, this was a holy religious war against a group that they saw
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as representing sort of the devil or the Antichrist. And so there was a huge anti, and this is where
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this anti-Catholic sentiment came from. I'm not saying it was a good thing, but it's important
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to understand how strong it was in the early colonies. And so the Yankees then came, and this
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is also why many of the Catholics settled in the same areas and settled in this New England area,
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because that's where the ports were, that they were dropping off the immigrants. And when the
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immigrants came into those ports, if they moved too far from these New England ports where the
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immigrants, the Ellis Island and stuff like that, where they were coming in, they would face an
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extreme amount of discrimination, possibly get killed. As I mentioned, you know, the KKK and the
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lynch mobs and stuff like that. There was a very strong motivation to not move from these ports of
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entry, which is why you have such a Catholic concentration in America. And then here, I'll put a
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map here on screen of where the Catholics actually live in America. And so I think that that is a
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fundamental thing he got wrong. Puritan ideology, which was mostly built around a hatred of authority,
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a hatred of bureaucracy, a hatred of, yeah, they wanted to create utopian experiments, but it is
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very important that these utopian experiments were always meant to be small scale towns that would do
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things in different ways. You can think of them very similar to the way we see things is, is that
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Puritan experiments, the different towns would run things in different ways. And those ways,
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like the way that the towns were different was very important. You would then go live in the town
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or follow the preacher that was most affiliated with your way of doing things. Yes, it was a city
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on a hill, but it was a city on the hill that was downstream of these influencer-like early churches
00:24:06.100
that led to the Great Awakening. It was not downstream of the government bureaucracy. They did not have trust
00:24:12.140
in the government bureaucracy one iota. And you see this in the early days as well. If you look at their
00:24:17.540
writings and stuff like that, that trust did not descend from their utopian vision. It stemmed from
00:24:23.680
the Catholic utopian visions. And another change that happened with the Yankee ideology that came
00:24:29.340
with the Catholics is the Puritan ethical system was always very consequential. It was sort of like
00:24:34.820
trying to find out why God laid the rules down that he laid and then follow those rules. The Catholic
00:24:40.220
system was much more deontological. You know, help the poor, don't have abortions,
00:24:45.860
be a good people in this wisey way. It was a set of rules, which was also not the way many other early
00:24:52.460
American cultures understood ethical systems and was brought by the Catholics and then became an
00:24:57.960
important framing of reference for the modern Democratic Party. So that's important to note as
00:25:03.900
well as this shift to this deontological ethical system, which was brought by the Catholics and a shift
00:25:10.620
towards, I'd say, sort of government services, which they were much more comfortable with because
00:25:15.840
the church had been offering them historically. Like, yeah, it sort of just switched from the
00:25:19.960
church offering them to the government offering them. But if the government's controlled by
00:25:24.120
Catholics, who cares? It's still the church. Yeah, if the government's controlled by Catholics,
00:25:27.340
then who cares? Yeah, just get the taxpayers to tithe in addition to the Catholics, which is
00:25:31.000
better, I guess. Another huge difference between the Catholics and the other founding groups of
00:25:36.780
America is that they were much, much less ideologically pluralistic. Whereas, you know,
00:25:42.480
the Quakers and the Puritans, who both were pretty rigidly pluralistic, and then even the
00:25:48.560
backwoods people, while they would fight with the Native Americans, and we'll go into this a lot more
00:25:52.160
in the next episode, they didn't really look down on them in the same way, in that they would often
00:25:57.660
marry them, they would often adopt their customs. The Catholic immigrant group was anti-pluralistic
00:26:03.360
in the extreme. If you look at the Catholic cultural centers in America, they were often the areas where we
00:26:10.420
were most likely to have race riots in a historic basis. I mean, a couple famous ones are the Boston
00:26:17.160
burning crisis, or the Boston draft riot that occurred during the Civil War, because there were
00:26:23.080
many southern sympathizers in Boston during the war. As to why the Catholic population was so much less
00:26:29.060
pluralistic, culturally speaking, than the other populations, there are two core reasons. One, if you
00:26:34.600
are a discriminated group, you are always going to be more kind of racist than non-discriminated
00:26:41.380
groups. You even see this in our society, where you have this moral license to act more racist if
00:26:49.340
Harrison, why haven't you called? You know how I worry.
00:26:54.020
I'm giving it up, Maggie. I'm quitting the force. It seems like every time we frame a rich black guy,
00:26:59.200
he's back out on the streets in no time. Not another word of that kind of talk, Harrison Yates.
00:27:03.700
I know you. Framing rich black men for crimes they didn't commit is in your blood. Wiping that rich,
00:27:09.620
smug smile off their faces is the only thing that puts a smile on yours. You're a good cop,
00:27:14.120
Harrison Yates. You don't have to question that. And you're a good wife, Maggie.
00:27:18.340
Hey, where are you going? I think I've got a little more work to do.
00:27:23.640
And as to why populations that are at the top of society are more likely to be pluralistic,
00:27:30.300
it's because they've already won in a pluralistic system. So they feel that, well, if you don't put
00:27:35.820
any more rules on, we'll continue to win. Whereas people who are at the bottom of an existing system
00:27:41.200
are like, well, if you added some more rules, then our group might end up doing better. So let's do
00:27:46.300
that. Let's rig things in our favor. Pluralism is always the path favored by any group that thinks
00:27:52.980
that they can naturally outcompete other groups. But in addition to that, you also just had, you
00:27:57.980
know, the syllabus of errors, for example, from Pope Pius IX, which said that essentially Catholics
00:28:03.180
should try to take control of whatever country they're living in and make it a Catholic state,
00:28:08.920
theocratic state. It is in the Catholic tradition to attempt to use the faith to control a government
00:28:17.740
and then use the government to legislate morality, where that was never really true of the Protestant
00:28:23.120
traditions. They believed that you could set up individual towns that might legislate morality,
00:28:28.220
but the moral ideas of one town are going to be very different than the moral ideas of another town.
00:28:32.800
So you wouldn't want the town next door legislating your morality because you have this
00:28:36.200
decentralized nature of the religion, whereas the Catholic tradition was historically very,
00:28:41.920
very centralized. So it made sense to centralize the way the government was legislating morality.
00:28:47.960
Of these reasons, one thing you will note, it is only this last one that applies to all Catholics
00:28:54.280
rather than just the discriminated American Catholic groups. And this is why in other countries,
00:28:59.980
Catholic populations are much more pluralistic than the early Catholic American immigrants.
00:29:05.460
Yeah. And this is another thing. And again, I should know, like I have nothing against the Catholics,
00:29:09.460
just culturally, it's sort of because we are just in for the future of the culture. It's like oil and water for us.
00:29:14.800
And one thing I was thinking about is how much of an easier time, like a huge portion of our friend group
00:29:19.960
is Latin American immigrants, which I think is another thing that people really miss is how similar
00:29:23.860
the current Latin American immigrants are dispositionally to the Irish when they first immigrated
00:29:28.080
or to the Italians when they first immigrated. Very, very similar cultural systems.
00:29:32.700
And it can be hidden when we talk about Latin American immigrants,
00:29:36.460
they are one step removed Spanish immigrants. Okay. They are from Southern Europe,
00:29:41.620
you know, just like the Italian immigrant waves were. Yes, there's some Native American DNA in them,
00:29:47.760
but I think in the majority of cases, it's a minority. This is mostly a Spanish Portuguese immigrant group.
00:29:54.080
When I Google this, I get answers between 60% and 80%. So it is the majority. And I point this out not
00:30:01.520
because like European DNA is better or something like that. But just culturally speaking, these
00:30:07.660
individuals are really not that different from the Italian immigration wave, which was just another
00:30:12.240
wave of Southern European immigrants who were majority Catholic coming into the United States.
00:30:17.060
The thing that is different is not the nature of this immigrant wave, but the nature of America now,
00:30:23.180
i.e. all the social services that we offer as a country. You cannot offer social services to immigrants
00:30:29.640
and have porous borders. That's just stupid because that's going to disproportionately select for the least
00:30:36.720
And so a lot of people can, one, forget that, but two, they can forget how similar they were to these early waves.
00:30:43.020
And it's like, why do I, why do I have so many more friends in this group? And I think it's because
00:30:46.100
when I talk with them, they know that their value systems aren't American and they're like, okay with
00:30:52.040
that. They're like, oh, well, you know, maybe we can adopt to a more American system or learn about
00:30:55.960
the American system and learn about how to make our value systems sort of align with the American value
00:31:01.280
system. Whereas these older, because there's been so much sort of cultural brainwashing to, to try to
00:31:07.720
integrate the Catholic population, which I appreciate, you know, like Columbus Day and stuff like that,
00:31:11.060
that was created to integrate this discriminated population to make an Italian, one of the like
00:31:16.360
founding American forefathers, because there, there weren't really any important American
00:31:20.320
forefathers. There were a few like random ones, but not really. So they had to go, oh, Columbus,
00:31:24.020
that's the American Catholic, you know, forefather, but they now like, I'll talk to them. I'll be like,
00:31:29.580
well, these are American conservative values. And I'll be like, those are not American conservative
00:31:32.980
values. Those are Catholic values that you brought over in one of the immigrant waves. And, and some parts of
00:31:37.220
the conservative party have gotten confused about value sets and they'll start spouting value sets.
00:31:41.920
And I'm like, no, that's a Catholic thing. And this is, this is where you've gotten sort of two
00:31:45.800
groups of Catholics in American politics now, which is the, the core group, which moved to sort of the
00:31:51.700
Democrat faction. And then the more extreme religious group, which is sort of very deontologically
00:31:57.480
ethical and has moved into the conservative bureaucracy. And that's where they played a huge role in
00:32:03.440
shaping America as well. The, while Catholics make up the minority of the conservative party,
00:32:09.600
right. And, and the minority of Catholics are conservatives. They were the only faction was
00:32:13.700
in the conservative party that could really stomach staffing bureaucratic positions. Only other group
00:32:20.880
that really could, and is a vast minority of Americans. And I'll add the statistic here is Mormons.
00:32:25.740
Mormons make up only 1.2% of the American population, which is why they alone cannot staff the
00:32:31.520
conservative bureaucracy. Basically of the conservative political alliance, the only true
00:32:36.120
groups that could really suck up and stomach listening to an incompetent bureaucratic authority
00:32:41.540
were the Catholics and the Mormons, because they were used to that was in their church structures.
00:32:45.420
I mean, so they make up a huge amount of the conservative, like intellectual factor and the
00:32:51.260
conservative bureaucratic machinery, which shapes in the way that, that sort of policies filter
00:32:56.940
through that machinery, a lot of conservative policy. So that's also really important in terms
00:33:02.800
of how they, they, they shaped American history through the way that they affected that.
00:33:07.620
Yeah. You've, you've been pretty organized with this. So I'm trying to think. And you surprised me
00:33:12.640
with some interesting facts too. I would just, I guess, like your thoughts on like the implications of
00:33:17.860
what this means for the future of both the Republican and Democrat party. And where do you think
00:33:22.340
Catholics are going to go? Also, do you think that their influence is on the rise or do you think
00:33:26.900
it's going to decline given current Catholic birth rates? So Catholics influence is definitely
00:33:33.080
both on the rise and in the decline, right? I feel like there's an argument for both.
00:33:38.180
No, there's two different Catholic factions or there's a number of different Catholic factions.
00:33:41.480
And we'll talk about the ones that are going to rise and the ones that are going to fall apart.
00:33:44.600
First, the one that is just been absolutely murdered recently. It used to be that the bureaucratic
00:33:50.740
apparatus of both the conservatives and the Democrats was mostly Catholic run. But the
00:33:56.560
super virus that we talk about, the urban monoculture, this sort of mimetic virus has
00:34:00.500
specialized at spreading within bureaucracies and absolutely annihilated the progressive leaning
00:34:06.480
Catholic church. It has torn through it, you know, led to huge amounts of deconversions,
00:34:12.220
led to huge amounts of like culturally moving away from what was a traditionally Catholic value
00:34:17.100
system, traditional Catholic beliefs. And so they're basically Catholics in name only at this
00:34:22.600
point, the ones who stayed within the bureaucratic apparatus of the Democratic Party. And they've
00:34:27.760
also become incredibly low fertility, even lower fertility. As we've mentioned, the average Catholic
00:34:32.600
in America that was born in America, not that immigrated is lower fertility than the average
00:34:37.700
American. So they just got hit really hard by the urban monoculture, much harder than other
00:34:43.020
groups, because they were bureaucratic specialists. And then another group comes in,
00:34:47.480
pacmanning the bureaucracy, and unfortunately, it ate them. Then you have the deontological Catholics
00:34:54.580
that had historically been really like, like super strongly deontological Catholics, like this is what's
00:34:59.840
true. And the deontologists of all groups, we've talked about this in another episode of the Mormons,
00:35:04.980
the Catholics, all of them ended up losing their positions of power, because they have been
00:35:10.860
unable to motivate intergenerational faith, they are much more likely to deconvert than the
00:35:16.500
consequentialists of the various religious systems, who are actually like actively having a theological
00:35:20.800
conversation instead of like, this is how I aesthetically be a Catholic. This is how and we
00:35:25.640
saw this was in the Mormon community as well, which had a large deontological faction, was like,
00:35:29.740
yeah, I think the classic version of this is girl defined, which is now, you know, in the process of
00:35:34.640
deconversion, her husband's in the process of deconversion, and many signs point to, you know,
00:35:39.120
one of them being in the process of deconversion, which I think shows, you know, it's very bad at
00:35:43.440
intergenerationally keeping people involved in this age of the internet. And it also was unable to
00:35:49.460
motivate a high fertility rate, as we've just seen in the data. And as we've anecdotally seen
00:35:54.340
interviewing fans and stuff like that, it seems that the Mormons that are actually staying in
00:35:58.200
their religion are staying fire in their religion, and are still high fertility and with the Catholics
00:36:02.800
are moving to this more consequentialist understanding of their religion, which leads to a more
00:36:07.820
active and living discussion of the religious texts that doesn't just say, well, this is the
00:36:13.360
way we do it, because this is the way we've always done it. It's more like, well, what did God intend
00:36:17.060
by this? What did God intend by this? How can we do this better? Because when you have that, you're able
00:36:21.900
to update much faster, and you're able to have better explanations to your kids for why you do things
00:36:27.160
that the urban monoculture disagrees with. So I actually think that this new faction of Catholics
00:36:32.400
that we've seen sort of bubbling up and becoming very lively within the conservative space,
00:36:36.460
which is the new wave conservative intellectual Catholics, I think that's the faction that's
00:36:41.840
going to do really well. And you've seen them create these all-Catholic towns and everything
00:36:46.200
like that. And they're a group of Catholics that I fully align with. When I talk with them,
00:36:50.200
I have no trouble understanding them. I have no trouble talking to them. When I talk with the
00:36:54.240
deontological Catholic faction, the way that they logically structure their arguments is so foreign to
00:36:59.620
me. Even if I like them as people and everything like that, I genuinely, there isn't a lot of
00:37:04.420
interinterpretability between the way I logically structure my ideas and the way they logically
00:37:09.960
structure their ideas. They'll be like, don't you know about the doctrine of the body? And that shows
00:37:15.460
why blowjobs are bad. And that shows why IVF is bad. And I'm like, who wrote this? Somebody in the
00:37:22.040
1700s. And I'm like, what? Yeah, it's so unmoored from the way that you relate to religion.
00:37:28.480
Yeah, yeah. There's much more respect for antiquity as being a sign of truth. Like if something has long
00:37:35.020
been, and it's interesting, this respect for antiquity within the Catholic intellectuals I talked
00:37:41.400
to, and this is another interesting thing that Catholics brought, is the Protestants generally,
00:37:46.160
the early waves of the Protestants really had no respect for the non-Christian intellectuals,
00:37:50.980
historically speaking. Whereas the Catholics have had a deep respect for people like Aristotle,
00:37:56.480
people like Plato. Yeah. Like they really cared about the classic intellectuals. And so they-
00:38:02.680
Well, and they also did so much to integrate other traditions and partially an effort to integrate them
00:38:09.660
into the Catholic fold to say, hey, we'll just bring in your holidays. We'll figure out a way to make
00:38:14.940
this Catholic and to accommodate. Whereas more Protestant religions, especially more Calvinistic
00:38:21.480
religions with limited atonement are like, I'm not going to like you. I'm not going to try to bring
00:38:26.840
you in. Like, no, not engaging, much more isolationist. The argument that a lot of our holidays are
00:38:35.360
descended from pagan holidays is mostly fallacious. And we'll likely do episodes on the various holidays
00:38:40.540
about why it's fallacious, that these are not actually mostly Christian holidays. They may have
00:38:44.940
taken some elements from earlier holidays, but Catholics did genuinely adopt a lot of,
00:38:51.840
I mean, pagan, I think is a loaded word, but a lot of ideas that came from non-Christian thinkers
00:39:01.300
and allowed those ideas, I think to the benefit of our society, to percolate into the educated life
00:39:08.000
of our society. Because the way that the Catholic group related to education was very different than
00:39:13.820
the way the Protestant group related to education. Both groups valued education. Like that was part of
00:39:18.940
the social status that you would have within various, not all Protestant groups valued education. When we
00:39:24.160
talk more about the other early American groups, not all of them valued education, but some of them did.
00:39:29.380
Like the Puritans heavily valued education. But what did that mean to a Puritan? You know, that meant
00:39:35.340
a consequentialist form of education. Education that allowed you to do things in the world. What did education
00:39:41.900
mean in terms of the Catholic value hierarchy? It was you've got to know all the rules. This is why they were
00:39:46.460
so good at like law and stuff like that, and why they ended up dominating the profession. You had to know
00:39:51.740
all of the ancient thinkers. You needed to know all of the ancient writers. You needed to know all of the
00:39:56.240
famous paintings. You needed to know, it is sort of like a study of the classics, really, right?
00:40:01.820
Where we're like really what the Catholics meant by education and engineering and Bible memorization.
00:40:08.580
And what are the latest like biblical theories and metaphysical theories is what the Puritans meant
00:40:13.760
by education. And these are two completely different understandings of education. And I think
00:40:18.460
that the country has been better for both of them existing. Like I'm not the type of guy who would
00:40:23.720
come in and say like, we need to cancel the humanities, right? Like I think that there is some utility and
00:40:29.500
some people specializing in them, right? Like, so this is me talking about a group that is very
00:40:33.740
culturally different than what it values for me, but it brought a lot of that in. And it brought a lot
00:40:37.420
of that into New England. That's another thing that the Yankee culture has that many other American
00:40:42.540
cultures don't, which is a value of the high arts, i.e., you know, orchestra and art museums and,
00:40:52.620
you know, the classical paintings and sculptures and artists, you know, all this pagan stuff.
00:40:59.580
And I think that a lot of, if the large Catholic immigrant ways hadn't come to America,
00:41:04.540
I think that generally as Americans, we'd see that stuff with the same disdain that many of our
00:41:09.620
Puritan ancestors did, if you come from one of those Puritan groups. And so they began to elevate
00:41:16.600
those arts. And I also think that that is why you see those arts being more practice and more
00:41:23.160
culturally lauded in the areas where you had more Catholic immigrant ways and specifically was in
00:41:28.840
Yankee culture, which really values the high arts much more than other American cultures. I think it
00:41:35.740
also explains as we're having this new political realignment in America, where the greater Appalachian
00:41:41.580
cultural group is like a key player in this new political alignment in America is it has moved to
00:41:49.140
Yeah. Well, it was also where I grew up in Texas, you know, in rural Texas and J.D. Vance represents
00:41:53.260
it and everything like that. But J.D. Vance, remember, converted to Catholicism, which I think
00:41:57.940
is because, you know, we can talk about why in a different episode. But the greater Appalachian
00:42:03.500
cultural group always had a great, even more than the Puritans did, disdain for the high arts.
00:42:09.400
And they specifically were known for people who interacted with them as having an unusual amount of
00:42:14.760
celebration was like the low arts. Like they would party and everything like that a lot. Like they
00:42:19.800
liked enjoying their lives, but they knew that that enjoyment was a sin. The enjoyment that came
00:42:25.160
from drinking and jigging and all of the fiddling and everything like that. They were like, yeah,
00:42:29.700
unlike the Puritans, they were like, yeah, this is a sin, but like, it's fun and we're humans. So
00:42:34.380
whatever, right? We just recognize it as a sin. Whereas, and so it led to them because they didn't
00:42:40.700
distinguish between different types of arts. Whereas I think within the deontological ethical
00:42:45.280
system that the Catholics had, that sort of entertainment is much more sinful than the
00:42:50.260
entertainment that you get from going to an orchestra or the entertainment that you get from
00:42:56.180
going to an art museum. Whereas they would actually see those forms of entertainment as being even more
00:43:00.940
sinful because you're combining sin and pride, like regular sin. And then in addition to that pride.
00:43:06.740
And so they always look to like low culture forms of entertainment. And I think that this is why,
00:43:12.240
and I think that this is very odd to people is how much of Trump's base is really into what I would
00:43:16.420
call low culture, like from Warhammer, like God, Emperor Trump, like all of the anime memes for Trump,
00:43:22.100
all of the 4chan for Trump and stuff like that. This like rebellious, intentionally low culture group.
00:43:28.420
Why are they moving to Trump? It is because they are coming from this greater Appalachian cultural
00:43:34.260
group that always elevated low culture. And that you're seeing this clash with the historically
00:43:40.140
Catholic ideas around like what is sin and what is not sin, right? Which is, which is really interesting
00:43:48.720
This 11 cultures are nations within America concept, I think also much better helps understand the current
00:43:55.380
political realignment in America. Here, I have put a map on the screen that shows each of them
00:44:01.560
colored by how they voted in the last election cycle, how far red or blue they are. And what you
00:44:08.600
will notice is Trump's core, core, core base. It's not the deep South. It's not the far West. It's
00:44:15.400
greater Appalachia. Greater Appalachia is, and this is, you know, my people, the furthest pro-Trump group.
00:44:22.880
These are the descendants of the uncouth, violent, backwards people who are very different than like
00:44:30.200
the deep South that used to be the GOP Inc.'s core base. Another really interesting thing to people is
00:44:37.820
Yankeedom is actually one of the least far democratic factions, with the core democratic factions actually
00:44:46.820
being the left coast and as well as the Tidewater Basin, with the recent Hispanic immigrant regions of
00:44:55.540
the United States being far, far, far more blue than the far northeast of the United States. I think what also might
00:45:03.040
surprise people is that the left coast is more blue than the New Netherlands area or the New York area. So the far
00:45:10.800
western coast of the United States is even more blue than the more blue New York area, by a pretty significant
00:45:18.420
margin. Did you have any final thoughts on this, Simone? Only that I loved getting your take on this.
00:45:24.760
When I was going through the book with you in our long car ride, I was not having these thoughts.
00:45:29.580
And I just love that you add a whole new layer to the things that even I'm consuming. So thanks for that.
00:45:35.180
I mean, he, I found it so interesting in the book that he was like, oh yes, you have a cultural
00:45:39.240
continuity from the Puritans till today. And I was like, you are underestimating the size. If you look at the
00:45:44.160
immigrant ways, like, remember I was talking like, how do you get like 50% Catholic population in these
00:45:47.920
regions? Well, you just have to look at the immigrant ways. At certain times in cities like
00:45:52.600
Boston, 37% of the population with a first generation Catholic immigrant, like huge chunks.
00:45:59.080
Imagine if one of our major cities in the U S right now was that percentage first generation immigrant
00:46:04.060
people would like, like these were immigrant waves that in terms of their effects on the local areas,
00:46:10.260
absolutely dwarfed what we are dealing with today from Latin America, which by the way, I would note
00:46:16.660
is a very normal Catholic immigrant wave. And, and people can be like, well, they're Democrats.
00:46:23.080
It's like the Catholic immigrant waves are always Democrats. And they're like, but, but, but they,
00:46:27.760
they have different values than us. The Catholic immigrant waves always had different, they bring
00:46:31.700
organized crime. The Catholic immigrant waves always bring organized crime. And, and it is interesting
00:46:36.600
to me that you have these like performative individuals like Nick Fuentes who was like, I hate the
00:46:40.900
immigrant waves. And I'm like, how can you do that? These are like trad cast. Like, what, what are you talking
00:46:45.400
about? And they're going to end up, I think, sorting out. Now, this is an interesting thing. I think
00:46:50.300
that, so here's another question people can ask. They can say, will the living versions of the
00:46:54.540
Catholic tradition end up citing more with the progressive faction or more with the conservative
00:46:59.300
faction as the urban monoculture begins to clean out the people who it was able to infect through
00:47:05.280
mimetic sterilization? Uh, I think after it cleans out, I think that they are again going to make up
00:47:10.280
the core of the progressive faction. Totally agree. That has always been the, the idea that
00:47:15.500
the government should enforce a value system. That's always been the, the progressive ideology,
00:47:20.000
the idea that the government should provide services to the poor and the needy. That's
00:47:24.600
always been Catholic and progressive ideology. The idea that bureaucracies are the best way to solve
00:47:29.060
things. And that authority should be decided by people who spent their entire life studying a subject.
00:47:33.480
Like it aligns very closely. The only reason why conservatives were ever able to peel off any
00:47:39.360
Catholic faction was because of the anti-abortion thing. That was it. That was the only thing that
00:47:46.060
we ever had to get in the Catholic. Culturally, there is just no alignment there. And I don't have
00:47:52.500
a problem with that. You know, I think the country is better for having a two-party system. Do I think
00:47:55.640
our country would be better if we lived under a Republican dictatorship? Absolutely not. So long as the
00:48:00.460
parties can both play fair, which unfortunately we might be moving out of that system. And that
00:48:05.040
really scares me. But I think that people should be like, yes, I have criticisms of a cultural group
00:48:10.720
because they are different from me, right? Like when I criticize Catholics, I'm criticizing them
00:48:15.080
because they are different from me, not because they are worse from me. Okay. But of course, when I'm
00:48:20.600
judging the morality of an action or like, should you approach things this way? Or should you approach
00:48:24.220
it this way? I'm going to approach it using the measuring stack of my own cultural perspective,
00:48:28.080
which is going to be very different than their cultural perspective. Exactly.
00:48:31.580
That's totally fine. I should be able to have these types of ideas and say, well, they do things
00:48:37.480
in this way. And my culture does, you know, shame's doing things this way for X historical reason,
00:48:42.240
right? You know, which we'll get into in another episode as to why the backwoods culture ended up
00:48:47.460
merging with the Puritan culture and why it became so, well, it didn't really end up merging. They
00:48:52.900
basically formed a caste system where you had a Puritan upper class in most of their population,
00:48:57.560
because they really didn't like running for elected positions as much as other groups.
00:49:01.160
So they typically use like the educated Puritan group to run things. And the two groups basically
00:49:05.120
completely merged into each other over American history because they were both Calvinist anyway.
00:49:10.480
And so to understand why did they hate high culture so much, I think is really interesting.
00:49:14.800
Why do they value the things they value is really interesting. And why did they survive while the
00:49:19.500
traditional Puritan groups didn't survive? That's also really interesting as to why the Catholics
00:49:25.580
survived. This is also an interesting question. I think it was because while they had this strict
00:49:30.660
deontological ethical system, they also understood that they would break it. And they had a system
00:49:36.380
for dealing was when they broke it. Confession, which I think is like one of the most genius pieces
00:49:42.680
It's like it creates a market failure and the solution all in its own little system that sort
00:49:49.320
of just generates its own flywheel of energy as it moves forward.
00:49:52.600
What do you mean by that? I don't understand the market failure.
00:49:58.180
It's creating a bunch of deontological rules that you're going to break.
00:50:01.500
Oh, yeah. So it creates all these rules, but then you break them because you go out drinking.
00:50:05.180
Yeah. It makes the impossible to follow standards. And then it creates a solution for when you break
00:50:09.960
those standards. And just like I'm saying, it creates this flywheel. It creates this economy
00:50:17.020
Instead of just being like the backwoods people, which were like, well, we had these impossible
00:50:21.180
standards, which are even stricter, but we also know that humanity is wretched and we
00:50:26.960
must learn to accept our wretchedness. Where the Puritans were like, humanity is wretched
00:50:31.600
and we should strive to be as perfect as we can. Whereas in the Catholics, it was like, you
00:50:36.520
should strive to be kind of perfect, like generally good, but like also you're going to sin.
00:50:40.560
So go to confession, which is maybe an interesting sort of in between these two other perspectives
00:50:46.600
on morality. And I think people see us and our perspective on morality really heavily
00:50:51.920
colored by this backwoods culture's moral systems. When they see us be like, oh, you
00:50:56.380
have all these super strict moral values, but we're also like, yeah, but you know, you're
00:51:00.000
going to sin. So let's party. So long as it doesn't distract from your ability to be a
00:51:04.780
good person in terms of your efficacy as a human.
00:51:07.220
Okay. Well, the final thing I note here that something that became part of the Yankee
00:51:10.700
cultural system that people might be underestimating is I actually think that downstream of this
00:51:15.740
Catholic cultural group became the Yankee love of sports and baseball and sports more
00:51:20.620
broadly, which is to say, if you look at Catholic majority countries and you look at the places
00:51:24.220
that are, you know, have the, the craziest soccer fans and stuff like that, I think it has
00:51:30.260
to do with the way that they relate to entertainment. Whereas the Puritan cultural groups mostly
00:51:36.280
saw sports is as sinful as like gay sex, for instance, the, the Catholics did, they sort
00:51:42.340
of had these carve outs of this isn't unethical. And so those are the things they do. Anyway,
00:51:45.920
love you to Desimone. I'm going to go find out who's ringing our doorbell and get the kids.
00:51:49.940
I love you too. Do you want me to go get them immediately?
00:51:52.580
Give me a chance to do some diaper change cleanup.
00:52:00.200
I don't know. Oh, I'm going to reheat yesterday's.
00:52:02.060
Ah, with white rice. Do you want fried rice or plain white rice?
00:52:08.240
Plain without added vegetables, but with shallots, right?
00:52:23.300
So, so I got a, I got a question for you, Octavian.
00:52:42.280
Are you going to become a Catholic when you grow up?
00:52:50.280
Octavian, here's, here's a question I have for you.
00:53:27.820
Can you promise them you won't take over the world?
00:54:18.240
Okay, so he stops being a Catholic when he's dirty?
00:54:21.860
But when you get the dirt off, then he's a Catholic.
00:54:33.780
That was about to get very problematic, Octavian.