Based Camp - How Catholics Transformed America (What Colin Woodard's American Nations Gets Wrong about Yankees)

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. We were listening to the audiobook for

00:00:05.740 American Nations by Colin Woodard. And we're likely going to do a series of episodes on them.

00:00:10.520 This is a guy who divided America into 11 different populations with different histories.

00:00:15.120 I'll put it on the screen here. I think he gets most things right. He wrote the book as a direct

00:00:19.680 follow-up to another book that we mention all the time on the show called Albion's Seed that talks

00:00:25.360 about the four founding cultures of America. By historian David Hackett Fisher, which was written

00:00:31.720 in either late 80s or early 90s. So this answer is a much more modern take and quite interesting.

00:00:38.420 Well, but it also does something quite different than Fisher's book. And I think it gets some

00:00:43.700 things wrong. And one of the things that gets wrong, we're going to be talking about on this video,

00:00:47.260 because I think he completely misunderstands the Yankee culture. So first, I'm going to talk a

00:00:51.900 little bit about Albion's Seed, so you can get a little prep of this and why Albion's Seed doesn't

00:00:56.240 help us as much understand modern America as this follow-up book does. Specifically, Albion's Seed,

00:01:02.500 they divide the original Americans into four distinct cultural groups, which is accurate. 0.99

00:01:08.280 The Puritans, the Quakers, the Backwoods people, and the Cavaliers. Now, what was interesting about

00:01:15.520 these four groups, is I remember I was talking to somebody about this, and they kept trying to guess.

00:01:19.780 They were like, who are the Catholics? Which one is the Catholics? And they go, like, I would go to 0.97

00:01:23.280 the first and they go, oh, the next is the Catholic group. Or I mentioned the Cavaliers. And they go, 0.59

00:01:26.380 oh, that must be the Catholic group. And I had to break to them something that is kind of, I think,

00:01:30.980 tough for a lot of Catholics today, because they get this sort of retelling of American history that 1.00

00:01:36.320 tries to include them in parts of American history that they just were not players in. During the time

00:01:42.020 of the American Revolution, only 1.5% of America was Catholic. And people are like,

00:01:46.960 Maryland. Maryland was a Catholic colony, wasn't it? At the time of the revolution,

00:01:51.400 less than 10% of the population in Maryland was Catholic. There was just no significant Catholic

00:01:56.700 population in early America. However, that is not true of America today. Even when we're talking

00:02:05.600 about significant declines in religiosity in America, you can look at something like Massachusetts,

00:02:13.840 for example. And can you guess the percentage in 1990 of Americans in Massachusetts who identified

00:02:21.860 as Catholics?

00:02:25.140 4%.

00:02:25.700 54%.

00:02:27.420 Holy smokes!

00:02:29.220 Do you know what it was in 2010?

00:02:34.120 38?

00:02:36.220 45%.

00:02:36.700 Okay.

00:02:37.900 Would you like to know more?

00:02:39.020 So we can go over some other New England states. You get 26% of New Hampshire, one of the least

00:02:46.660 Catholic of the New England states, is incredibly Catholic. 22% of Vermont, another low Catholic

00:02:52.900 population of the New England states, identifies as Catholic. That is absolutely wild in terms 1.00

00:03:01.640 of how much of the population of New England Catholics make up. So the thing that the guy gets

00:03:08.100 wrong in this book is he does get right. The Quakers, who ended up making up the Midlands 1.00

00:03:13.900 population, were widely out-competed by an alliance of the Backwoods people and the German 0.99

00:03:21.040 immigrants who basically ended up erasing their cultural footprint until they came warring 0.96

00:03:26.300 back with a vengeance through the woke revolution, which we will do another episode on how that

00:03:31.560 evolved out of Quakerism. We talk about it heavily in the book, The Pragmatist Guide to

00:03:34.560 Crafting Religion. However, he incorrectly claims the Yankees evolved out of the Puritans,

00:03:40.300 when in reality, the Puritans basically went extinct in the same way that the Quakers do. Oh, 1.00

00:03:45.620 yes, they make up some small sliver of American population, but their ideals and their world

00:03:51.720 vision was pretty much completely erased, except for some small bubbles in places like New Hampshire,

00:03:59.560 which I think holds more to the Puritan political framing. But largely speaking,

00:04:04.740 they were erased by the many waves of Catholic immigrants that mostly settled in the urban

00:04:11.360 centers of New England. As to places why Vermont and New Hampshire were not as affected, it's because

00:04:17.960 their population doesn't live in urban centers, and most of the Catholic population went to settle in

00:04:23.880 urban centers. So if you look here at his map, and then contrast it with the concentration of Catholics 0.67

00:04:30.780 in different parts of America, it is very clear that three of the regions that he carved out are

00:04:37.320 actually specifically Catholic cultural units. Here we are talking about Yankeedom, the left coast,

00:04:45.340 and El Norte. This is the northeastern United States, this is the far western coast of the United

00:04:51.680 States, and this is the Hispanic immigrant part of the United States. Every one of these has had an

00:04:57.100 enormous impact on America's cultural history. And as such, Catholicism has had an enormous impact 0.94

00:05:02.800 on America's cultural history. Now, another thing that people get super wrong about Catholics,

00:05:07.580 modern Catholics, is they go, oh, Catholics, solid conservative voter place. Life begins at

00:05:13.160 conception and all, right? As of 2022, what percentage of Catholics identified with the Democratic Party

00:05:19.920 versus the Republican Party? Oh, that's a good question. I would say probably 68% of Catholics

00:05:29.160 identify with the Democratic Party because it focuses more on this top-down control and charitable giving

00:05:38.760 to the weak, right? It's 42% with the Democratic Party, 38% with the Republican Party.

00:05:45.720 Oh, okay. So the rest are unaffiliated. Yeah, 20% are unaffiliated. There's still way more,

00:05:51.360 and they used to be even higher with the Democratic Party. So in the election cycle before that,

00:05:56.580 in the 2020 election cycle, it was 45% identified with the Democratic Party. And then if you look at

00:06:02.980 exit polling, it's even worse. So you look at 2020, 52% of Catholic voters voted for Joe Biden.

00:06:09.060 52%. Yeah, yeah. I would think that the majority of Catholics are going Democrat.

00:06:14.460 Yeah. Here I have contrasted two maps for you. One map is the percent of Catholics in different

00:06:21.460 counties of America, and the other map is how those counties voted. You can see there is almost a direct

00:06:27.680 overlap to which counties went Democrat. And this is in the most recent election cycle. This is

00:06:32.960 this election cycle, which counties are hotly contested, which ones are not. So this is not just a

00:06:37.660 historic thing. And I think a lot of people think that they're a Republican faction. Catholics at all 0.99

00:06:42.760 voting with Republicans is actually a fairly modern thing. In the 1970s, so again, I mentioned this on

00:06:49.380 the show, but a lot of people don't know this. The Republican Party ended up having to take a pro-life

00:06:55.740 stance. It was a majority. The Republican Party was the pro-choice like before, which much more fit was

00:07:00.720 Republican values because the Protestant tradition generally believes that life begins like 12 weeks

00:07:05.940 after conception, as Catholics did before about 200 years ago. You know, like Thomas the Poinus and 1.00

00:07:10.600 Augustus the Hippo used to believe this, but they did this shift recently with Pope Python. I've gone

00:07:14.240 into that in another episode. Don't need to go into it here. But one, it was the, you know, Protestant

00:07:18.980 religious thing to do, and it was the free choice thing to do, which is what Republicans were

00:07:23.160 historically about. And so they did this switch in the 1970s, specifically as a tactic to try to get

00:07:30.380 some Catholics to vote Republican. And while it swung some Catholics their way, it has always been the 0.95

00:07:37.640 minority of Catholics who this appealed to. And it was really just the single issue voters, because

00:07:43.840 other than that issue, and we'll get into why the Catholics vote and the Catholic cultural perception

00:07:49.060 much more aligns with the Democratic Party. And I also think people forget how recently Catholics were

00:07:55.440 accepted as a mainstream block within American society. You know, I'm just baffled where you'll

00:08:03.080 get these like Catholic LARPers today. Like they don't, they're not actually culturally Catholic,

00:08:08.220 like Nick Fuentes, right? Who like are aligning was like the KKK. The KKK hunted and lynched Catholics

00:08:15.640 just as much as they did blacks. What? Yes, they hated Catholic. The three groups that the KKK was about 0.91

00:08:24.340 getting rid of or removing from power were blacks, Jews, and Catholics. 0.97

00:08:29.600 Oh, what? Okay. How did I live my entire life not knowing this? 0.99

00:08:35.700 Well, because there's been this like rewriting of history as like Catholics were this group that was 1.00

00:08:40.300 always here. And weren't this incredibly discriminated against group that was because,

00:08:45.520 you know, you can't have like Irish as a discriminated group in modern progressive. You

00:08:49.540 can't have Italians. But there were lots of signs, you know, you look, you go back to these 1.00

00:08:53.620 immigration waves. And it was, you know, Irish need not apply here. Italian need not apply here. 0.97

00:08:58.920 There was this huge fear of the Catholic immigrant waves and that they would change our culture.

00:09:06.660 And they saw these people in the same way that many people today, I actually say much worse than

00:09:13.180 most people look at Hispanic immigrants today. They saw them as an intrinsically criminal people.

00:09:18.240 Because most of the Catholic immigrant waves came with large organized crime, much larger than the 0.98

00:09:22.660 current Hispanic wave. Like people can think about Hispanic organized crime. They are nothing 0.98

00:09:26.580 compared to like the mob or the mafia. The mob was the Irish wave and the mafia was the Italian wave,

00:09:32.320 which basically controlled huge portions of American urban centers. Like people were terrified.

00:09:39.380 So you've got to keep that in mind as well. Right. And when Kennedy, who was the first Catholic

00:09:44.900 president that we had, was running for office, it was a huge thing. Like it was like,

00:09:49.240 is he going to be loyal to the Pope or to America? Can a Catholic be president? This was a big thing 1.00

00:09:55.740 that people saw beforehand. Like they were like, I do. It was a big belief before that the Catholics

00:09:59.900 couldn't be president. Like, because fundamentally they're loyal to their religion and their religion

00:10:04.600 is loyal to a foreign power, i.e. the Vatican, i.e. he can't be president. Right. And, and people are

00:10:11.520 like, come on, Catholics aren't Democrats. Who was our last president? The Catholic Joe Biden.

00:10:17.580 You know, keep this in mind, right? So we've got to break through a number of things. One,

00:10:21.560 Catholics were a discriminated group for a long time in American history. It only recently came

00:10:26.340 out of this discriminated status. This discriminated identity hugely shaped their cultural history,

00:10:32.600 the way they impacted American politics, and the way they created. I think he is right about the

00:10:38.720 boundary he drew around Yankeedom. I think he is wrong about what influenced their value set

00:10:43.880 or how they came to exist as a cultural group. We are going to do a different episode on why the

00:10:50.240 Yankee Puritans went extinct and what ended up happening to America's Calvinists, because they 1.00

00:10:55.840 didn't go purely extinct. They ended up merging with the backwoods culture. And you see a lot of this

00:11:01.020 even in his book. And the backwoods people were already predominantly Calvinist. These were the

00:11:06.400 incredibly violent woodland people who ended up creating greater Appalachia, which is where my 1.00

00:11:11.780 people are from. And I think people see this in my kids as like these sort of uncouth, violent, 0.79

00:11:17.020 like us as well. Like we prefer the lower arts. You know, we are not concerned with sort of signaling

00:11:22.740 high class. In fact, that would be considered like a very low class thing to do within the greater

00:11:28.620 Appalachian cultural system. But we will get to a whole different episode talking about that.

00:11:32.680 I want to focus now on how Catholics changed America. So when Catholics came into the United 1.00

00:11:38.900 States, they behaved very differently than basically any cultural group that we had had

00:11:44.180 in the United States before. Typically, and I've talked about this in other episodes, but

00:11:49.020 it's worth noting. During the recent sort of battle that we had as a country, you had, this

00:11:57.260 was over the COVID vaccines. You had two different ways of relating to truth. You had one group

00:12:02.060 who said, well, truth should be determined by people who spent their entire lives studying a

00:12:05.720 subject and then who are certified by a central bureaucracy. And then another group who said,

00:12:10.180 in this case, the university system, that central bureaucracy is prone to corruption.

00:12:14.140 Instead, we should all determine truths for ourselves based on our own research.

00:12:19.440 Wouldn't you know it, this actually broke out. If you look at the areas that were more pro

00:12:24.540 really strict COVID restrictions and everything like that, you basically look at the percentage

00:12:29.380 of Catholic descendants living in an area and you will see a direct correlation to, did they go

00:12:34.700 with the expert consensus or were they more about figuring this out on your own? Now, I should note,

00:12:38.780 I actually think that both of these systems for determining truth are important and a society

00:12:42.520 is healthier when you have both of them. Otherwise, you go full QAnon where everyone is,

00:12:47.460 everything is a conspiracy. You can't trust anything. And I don't think QAnon is wrong about everything,

00:12:51.320 but I think that, you know, there is sort of a full conspiracy brain thing, or you go full like

00:12:56.640 zero COVID, China, the experts can't have been wrong the first time. So we have to keep doubling down. 0.87

00:13:02.400 So I think that America benefits from having these two populations, but this, this flip is what we 0.88

00:13:08.080 had during the reformation, right? Like that's why the Catholics took this mindset. The reformation is 0.69

00:13:13.000 also one group saying truth should be determined by people who spent their entire life studying a

00:13:17.380 subject. And then who have been certified by central bureaucracy, i.e. the priest system.

00:13:22.360 And then another group who said, no, no, no, truth should be determined by individuals studying the

00:13:28.020 Bible themselves. And then you have the secondary thing with the Catholic group that made them very 0.98

00:13:34.320 different. So in the first great awakening in America, we'll have another episode on this, how it

00:13:38.660 was sort of like the first social media movement is the Catholics when they were choosing, you know,

00:13:43.480 who would be appointed priests who would, you know, speak to people. One, the people couldn't

00:13:48.020 even understand what they were saying most of the time because they were saying it in one language

00:13:50.900 and it was a language that people didn't speak. They were promoted through a bureaucracy. In the

00:13:56.080 early American colonies during this like fiery Protestant great awakening period, people would go 0.86

00:14:01.180 to the church. There'd be like four churches in a town and you would choose the one that spoke to

00:14:04.880 you most. It was like using early social media channels, but it led to a very different way of

00:14:11.060 relating to your faith. It was like a very fiery driven way. Right. Like, well, it made you have

00:14:16.480 sort of the difference between religion almost as a public utility. Like you go to the local public

00:14:22.080 school, just like you'd go to the local Catholic church versus like a startup world that, that

00:14:27.940 Protestant preachers were the original social media platforms. And we were recently on a road trip.

00:14:35.920 And I was looking at in an old new England town that we were driving through, like all the different,

00:14:41.720 very old churches in that town and feeling like, wow, like each of these feels kind of like a

00:14:47.400 different social media platform. And we had these basically like local entrepreneurs raising money

00:14:53.260 from benefactors who were hoping to get an ROI on their investment in terms of social capital prestige,

00:14:58.500 and maybe, you know, like better odds of going to heaven or being among the elect, whatever it might be

00:15:04.300 to, you know, to invest in these, in these, in these preachers who then were trying to get audiences

00:15:09.620 and get the network effects. And they're very much like early social media platforms. It is a chicken

00:15:14.560 and egg problem of like, you know, well, can I get a great congregation, you know, but can I also get

00:15:20.020 the best, you know, like preacher? It's a really interesting question. And so, yeah, I see what you're

00:15:24.020 saying. This is so interesting. Pretty much all of the other early American cultural groups

00:15:28.660 had a massive distrust of authority, and they had a massive distrust of bureaucracies and everything

00:15:35.700 like that. And the Catholics didn't have this, which allowed them to do something very unique

00:15:42.180 in terms of how they were able to integrate themselves into American society. So there were

00:15:47.140 two things that they did. One, we got to talk about organized crime, because organized crime wasn't just

00:15:52.080 organized crime. It was an alternate government structure that this group was using to both provide

00:15:58.120 social services to their own people, which the organized crime organizations often did. They

00:16:02.200 were providing, you know, orphanages, they were providing help to the local Catholic community,

00:16:07.160 they were providing with food and everything like that. And this was a discriminated community,

00:16:11.380 right? But they also provided rules for that community and order for that community that

00:16:16.380 superseded the local government's order. But something very interesting happened because they were able to

00:16:21.420 form these large counter bureaucracies to the existing bureaucracies of the regions that they were

00:16:27.400 moving into. But then they began to quickly integrate with the local regions. Specifically,

00:16:33.180 this is where the stereotype of the Irish cop comes from in American history. They quickly took over

00:16:39.800 pretty much all of the government bureaucratic positions, specifically the cops and other government

00:16:45.820 bureaucracies in the large urban centers where they were. They were hugely disproportionately

00:16:50.360 represented there. We even see this today in American politics, where if you look at the Supreme Court,

00:16:55.760 it has been hugely, hugely, hugely overwhelmingly Catholic. And I'll add in posts, like, just how

00:17:01.260 overwhelmingly Catholic. I think it's like 80% Catholic or something.

00:17:05.380 So as of the last Supreme Court, for Supreme Court justices raised in Catholic families,

00:17:09.900 you had John Roberts, Claris Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett,

00:17:17.240 Neil Gorsuch, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor. That's a 78% Catholic majority in a Supreme Court.

00:17:25.080 Within a country that only has a Catholic population of 20%.

00:17:29.080 Absolutely wild. And so they were sort of like bureaucratic specialists. And it led to the culture

00:17:36.700 that they were building in New England to have an incredible, this Yankee culture, to have an

00:17:42.340 incredible trust of bureaucracies and respect for bureaucratic traditions. So if you look at most of the

00:17:50.660 other cultural groups, they would have looked down on, for example, lawyers, especially wealthy

00:17:56.660 lawyers. So, and you see this in my family history. Remember, I read that story about my ancestor who

00:18:01.580 was like really into getting educated and everything like that. Well, he always called himself, he said,

00:18:05.140 well, I'm a bacon and eggs lawyer. You know, he never wanted people to know that he wasn't a

00:18:09.880 subsistence liver, that he lived on a subsistence lifestyle, but he was a lawyer. And we'll get into

00:18:16.120 why the Beckwoods people wanted to be seen as living on a subsistence lifestyle and not accumulating

00:18:19.980 capital, because that was very important to their cultural tradition. But within the Catholic

00:18:24.040 culture, no, this wasn't true. You know, being a lawyer, being a judge, being a police officer,

00:18:28.120 these were all very respected traditions.

00:18:30.220 This led to Catholics taking on a very unique role in the early economic hubs of America. When the

00:18:39.280 Catholic immigrant waves came in, because they were much more comfortable taking these sort of

00:18:43.040 bureaucratic positions than the Protestants were, they were able to flood local institutions like the 0.59

00:18:49.920 police, for example, and build a majority Catholic police force really, really quickly after their

00:18:56.920 immigration waves came in. And it was actually the rise of the majority Catholic police force

00:19:01.820 that led to the fall of the mob, because there wasn't a need for an external bureaucratic operation

00:19:09.320 to protect the Catholics when the Catholics controlled the police force. This is where you get that like 0.93

00:19:13.580 stereotypical police officer's name of Murphy, you know, but it wasn't just the police force. It was

00:19:18.760 also the legal system. It was also the governing bureaucracy. It was every bureaucratic layer became

00:19:25.440 majority Catholic about a generation and a half after the first major Catholic immigration waves.

00:19:31.540 And so it moved the Yankee culture into being a much more pro bureaucratic culture. But it also 0.85

00:19:38.720 made it a culture that fundamentally, I think, didn't understand some of the things like the older

00:19:44.720 parts of American culture. So one of the things recently, like if you talk about like the gay marriage

00:19:49.720 stuff, and like, oh, gays shouldn't be allowed to get married in the United States. And I've noticed 1.00

00:19:54.720 disproportionately, it's the Catholic conservatives who push this, which from an actual American

00:20:00.460 perspective is a very queer thing to be pushing, because some religions within America do believe

00:20:06.940 that gays can get married. And if you are pushing that, then you are saying that the government should

00:20:11.660 have the ability to choose how the Christian Bible should be interpreted. And this was actually one of the

00:20:16.580 things that led to the revolution. So leading up to the revolution, one of the really like core evil

00:20:22.340 things that the British government did, is they said that the Presbyterian, the Calvinist ministers

00:20:29.220 could not marry people. And they sent over Anglican ministers to marry people, saying that we should 0.94

00:20:34.240 have control over who marries and who doesn't marry, and the traditions within which they marry. And this

00:20:39.940 too, you know, the traditional American system was seen as horrifying. So during the revolution,

00:20:46.660 I think a lot of people misunderstand the revolution's framing. So from the perspective

00:20:51.140 of most of the revolutionary, it's the way it's taught in school today, I think to be more inclusive,

00:20:55.660 is that they were mostly annoyed about just the taxes that they were under. But that's not really

00:21:02.180 the way most of the revolutionaries thought about it. Most of the revolutionaries were like

00:21:06.400 religious extremists, Calvinists, 70% of the white population in America, this is according to the

00:21:12.240 Heritage Foundation, which is, you know, a core conservative organization, were Calvinists during

00:21:17.040 the American Revolution. And they saw the British Anglicans who were trying to impose their religious

00:21:23.120 system on them as a Catholic light or a Catholic-like group trying to force them to live a more Catholic

00:21:30.320 lifestyle. Yeah, still very much establishment, because the whole thing is, you know, let me interpret

00:21:35.200 for myself or let my community interpret for themselves, you know, without me. It wasn't just that,

00:21:40.040 it was the way that the Anglican, the Anglican Church is very Catholic in a lot of its traditions.

00:21:44.840 And so they saw, and even its belief system, because that's what, I mean, when Henry VIII,

00:21:50.200 Henry VIII didn't really want to get rid of all of the great ceremony of the church. He liked all that

00:21:56.260 stuff. He liked the hierarchy. He liked the ceremony. He just felt he had a duty to his people to produce

00:22:01.720 an error, and he felt like due to church politics, he wasn't able to do that. He never really wanted to move

00:22:06.880 away from the Catholic vibe. He wasn't ever really sold on the Puritan ideal of like, we need to

00:22:13.280 reinvent this from scratch. And because of that, the Church of England, the Anglican Church, always

00:22:18.100 very much looked Catholic from the perspective of the Protestant immigrants. And so when they were 0.96

00:22:24.420 fighting the revolution, to many of them, this was a holy religious war against a group that they saw 0.95

00:22:30.320 as representing sort of the devil or the Antichrist. And so there was a huge anti, and this is where

00:22:36.420 this anti-Catholic sentiment came from. I'm not saying it was a good thing, but it's important 1.00

00:22:39.740 to understand how strong it was in the early colonies. And so the Yankees then came, and this

00:22:47.340 is also why many of the Catholics settled in the same areas and settled in this New England area,

00:22:51.340 because that's where the ports were, that they were dropping off the immigrants. And when the

00:22:56.240 immigrants came into those ports, if they moved too far from these New England ports where the

00:23:01.040 immigrants, the Ellis Island and stuff like that, where they were coming in, they would face an

00:23:04.540 extreme amount of discrimination, possibly get killed. As I mentioned, you know, the KKK and the

00:23:09.880 lynch mobs and stuff like that. There was a very strong motivation to not move from these ports of 1.00

00:23:14.860 entry, which is why you have such a Catholic concentration in America. And then here, I'll put a 0.61

00:23:19.100 map here on screen of where the Catholics actually live in America. And so I think that that is a

00:23:24.340 fundamental thing he got wrong. Puritan ideology, which was mostly built around a hatred of authority,

00:23:31.440 a hatred of bureaucracy, a hatred of, yeah, they wanted to create utopian experiments, but it is

00:23:36.900 very important that these utopian experiments were always meant to be small scale towns that would do

00:23:42.220 things in different ways. You can think of them very similar to the way we see things is, is that

00:23:46.600 Puritan experiments, the different towns would run things in different ways. And those ways,

00:23:51.840 like the way that the towns were different was very important. You would then go live in the town

00:23:55.280 or follow the preacher that was most affiliated with your way of doing things. Yes, it was a city

00:24:00.440 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 0.53

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 0.80

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 0.99

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 0.84

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, 0.99

00:25:27.340 then who cares? Yeah, just get the taxpayers to tithe in addition to the Catholics, which is 0.98

00:25:31.000 better, I guess. Another huge difference between the Catholics and the other founding groups of 0.78

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 0.63

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

00:26:47.060 you are among a discriminated population.

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, 1.00

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, 0.99

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, 0.97

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, 0.50

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, 0.98

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 0.99

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, 0.99

00:30:23.180 i.e. all the social services that we offer as a country. You cannot offer social services to immigrants 1.00

00:30:29.640 and have porous borders. That's just stupid because that's going to disproportionately select for the least 0.99

00:30:35.440 productive immigrants. 0.99

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 0.83

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 0.76

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 0.77

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 1.00

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. 0.83

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 1.00

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 0.98

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 1.00

00:34:54.580 that had historically been really like, like super strongly deontological Catholics, like this is what's 0.98

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 1.00

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 0.97

00:35:58.200 their religion are staying fire in their religion, and are still high fertility and with the Catholics 1.00

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 0.90

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 0.99

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 0.95

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 1.00

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

00:41:46.140 become- As represented by J.D. Vance, yeah.

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 1.00

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

00:43:47.300 to me.

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 1.00

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 1.00

00:46:04.060 people would like, like these were immigrant waves that in terms of their effects on the local areas, 0.90

00:46:10.260 absolutely dwarfed what we are dealing with today from Latin America, which by the way, I would note 0.97

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, 1.00

00:46:27.760 they have different values than us. The Catholic immigrant waves always had different, they bring 1.00

00:46:31.700 organized crime. The Catholic immigrant waves always bring organized crime. And, and it is interesting 1.00

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 0.83

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 1.00

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 1.00

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

00:49:41.080 of social technology anyone has ever...

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.

00:49:54.640 It's sending in confession.

00:49:56.400 But what's the market failure it's creating?

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.

00:50:04.720 I mean...

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

00:50:15.220 that propels the church forward.

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 1.00

00:50:31.600 and we should strive to be as perfect as we can. Whereas in the Catholics, it was like, you 0.99

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 0.71

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 1.00

00:51:42.340 of had these carve outs of this isn't unethical. And so those are the things they do. Anyway, 0.97

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. 0.55

00:51:55.560 All right. Love you. Bye.

00:51:57.020 Love you too. What should I make for dinner?

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?

00:52:05.580 Uh, fried rice, if you don't mind making it.

00:52:08.240 Plain without added vegetables, but with shallots, right?

00:52:12.980 Oh, well, I'll wing it.

00:52:15.980 Octavian, you farted. 0.99

00:52:18.420 Yes, that was so silly. 0.99

00:52:21.280 I don't know. That was silly. That was gross. 0.98

00:52:23.300 So, so I got a, I got a question for you, Octavian.

00:52:30.620 Do you, what do you think of Catholics?

00:52:34.020 Yes.

00:52:35.100 Catholics are a yes for you? 0.98

00:52:37.320 Yes.

00:52:37.900 Are they the best people?

00:52:39.220 Yes.

00:52:40.080 They are?

00:52:41.240 Yes.

00:52:42.280 Are you going to become a Catholic when you grow up?

00:52:47.840 Wait, you got to give it, what?

00:52:50.280 Octavian, here's, here's a question I have for you.

00:52:52.760 What?

00:52:54.480 Do you think that sports are evil?

00:52:59.420 No.

00:53:01.120 Okay, what's evil?

00:53:04.300 And the bad guys are evil.

00:53:07.260 Bad guys are evil?

00:53:08.780 What are some of the things that bad guys do?

00:53:11.140 They do bad stuff.

00:53:13.320 Like, what do they do that's bad?

00:53:14.840 They take over the city.

00:53:17.120 They take over the city?

00:53:18.500 Yes.

00:53:19.180 Do you want to take over the city one day?

00:53:21.080 No.

00:53:21.560 You don't want to take over the city?

00:53:23.360 Do you want to take over the world?

00:53:25.020 No, I'm not.

00:53:26.460 You're not going to take over the world?

00:53:27.820 Can you promise them you won't take over the world?

00:53:30.300 I promise I will not take over the world.

00:53:33.220 What did you bring to the house today?

00:53:35.820 What's in the package? 0.98

00:53:36.440 What's in the package is a stinky teddy bear. 0.79

00:53:40.380 I made daddy to clean it. 0.87

00:53:43.800 Daddy.

00:53:44.760 So I just got my stinky teddy bear in the box.

00:53:49.700 What I did, I made daddy to clean it.

00:53:53.160 Is he your friend?

00:53:56.500 Yes.

00:53:57.940 Is the teddy bear a Catholic? 1.00

00:54:00.620 Well, he's dirty. 0.99

00:54:02.680 So, yes. 0.99

00:54:04.500 Wait, what? 0.77

00:54:05.860 Well, if he's dirty, then no.

00:54:09.480 If he's clean, then yes.

00:54:11.800 If my teddy's clean, then yes.

00:54:14.060 Or if my teddy's dirty, then no. 0.92

00:54:18.240 Okay, so he stops being a Catholic when he's dirty? 0.98

00:54:20.660 Oh, there's dirty. 0.98

00:54:21.860 But when you get the dirt off, then he's a Catholic. 0.92

00:54:25.060 Because Catholics are clean, right? 0.99

00:54:26.900 Yes.

00:54:28.260 Okay, that's much better.

00:54:30.640 I kind of cleaned it for me.

00:54:33.780 That was about to get very problematic, Octavian.

00:54:36.720 Oh.

Based Camp - August 06, 2024

How Catholics Transformed America (What Colin Woodard's American Nations Gets Wrong about Yankees)

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