00:00:00.000There's been a lot of panic recently, especially in the conservative commentariat, over the increasing desire expressed by young white Americans to receive representation as a collective political bloc.
00:00:12.200At some level, this is understandable. Race isn't the healthiest fixation when it comes to understanding identity, but the approach conservative critics have taken is extremely misguided.
00:00:21.520For decades, whites have watched every other group in America successfully demand political action as a bloc from both the left and the right.
00:00:30.520Democrats build their entire party around racial grievance, but even conservatives are quick to speak to the needs of minority communities as a collective group.
00:00:39.960Despite attacking the concept of identity politics, Republicans are more than happy to cater to them for any group except their core constituency, white Americans.
00:00:49.860If conservatives are truly worried about the rise in white identitarianism, they need to stop lecturing young white Americans and start addressing the behaviors of the communities they currently pander to.
00:01:02.560First, it's probably worth defining our terms. Race and ethnicity are often used interchangeably in modern discussion, but they're not the same.
00:01:11.140Race is a macro category, while ethnicity is more of a particular micro category.
00:01:16.400Peoples as diverse as the Swedes, Italians, Irish, and French, they're all considered white.
00:01:23.100And Ethiopians, Nigerians, African pygmies, and Somalians, they're all considered black.
00:01:29.020Now, these categories like white and black, they certainly mean something.
00:01:32.420I'm not saying race doesn't exist, but ethnos tends to be a more organic and useful way to understand these groups when you can access it.
00:01:40.320Now, ironically, ethnocentrism is a characteristic that varies wildly between races and is particularly low among white Europeans and their descendants.
00:01:49.560If you were to take a United States primarily comprised of residents of European extraction and add some immigrants, you're likely going to have a pretty tolerant and accepting society.
00:02:00.380Even the new arrivals, who might be predisposed to ethnocentrism, are less likely to maintain it because there's simply not enough of their co-ethnics around to take advantage of the tribal strategy.
00:02:11.200This means that assimilation is far more likely to occur.
00:02:14.240It's also important to remember that identity is not a binary, but a series of nested interests which can be more or less salient depending on scale.
00:02:23.780When societies are small, aspects like tribe and ethnos are often primary.
00:02:29.160But as civilization grows and needs to include new members, the focus of identity shifts to larger macro characteristics that can encompass more people, like religion.
00:02:38.640White Americans used to have very defined ethnic conclays with almost exclusively Irish, Italian, Dutch, and German neighborhoods and towns across the United States.
00:02:50.760In some places, the American government had to work very hard to break the exclusive nature of German communities, all but forcing them to send their children to schools where they would have to learn English.
00:03:01.920Today, while the echoes of European ethnos still exist in the traditions of many American communities, these groups now fully conceive of themselves as Americans.
00:03:12.680The problem comes when the government imports large blocks of people into the country who share the same ethnicity and have not gone through this process of scaling up their identity.
00:03:22.160These new arrivals have zero problems with ethnocentrism because they can and will leverage that strategy for all its advantages.
00:03:29.800They see no reason to adopt a different political understanding because their co-ethnics are there to ensure that they'll be elevated by nepotism and never need to assimilate.
00:03:40.240Employment, education, marriage, and community can all be had almost exclusively inside their ethnic conclave.
00:03:47.900In a system where one group has to rely on pure individual meritocracy, while the others are allowed to operate on collective ethnocentrism, tribalism wins.
00:04:00.400Once it reveals itself as the superior strategy, the salience of race skyrockets.
00:04:06.120When young whites see everyone else deploying tribalism and winning, they start to ask the obvious question,
00:04:12.560why are we the only group that's denied the winning strategy?
00:04:16.900Now, of course, it's not just that tribalism seems to work for all the other groups,
00:04:22.160but it's also that the system has been explicitly rigged against white males.
00:04:26.960Jacob Savage's article, The Lost Generation in Compaq magazine,
00:04:30.900recently made waves by laying out the obscene degree to which universities, media outlets, and corporations
00:04:37.280have intentionally shut white men out of major institutions.
00:04:41.340He laid out all of the narrative, but he also laid out the statistics, and they were absolutely staggering.
00:04:48.000That piece got more attention because it came from a leftist, but conservatives like Jeremy Carle and Heather MacDonald
00:04:54.580have been warning about the problems for years.
00:04:58.400Whites, especially young white men, aren't allowed to advocate as a group like everyone else gets to,
00:05:04.280but they are allowed to be punished as a group.
00:05:07.300Telling them that identity politics is bad, and then sitting by and watching while whites are punished explicitly
00:05:12.600for their identity is a strategy that will kind of arrive at predictable results.