From Vox Day’s blog Extremists vs moderates
The reality is that every successful movement requires both its extremists and its moderates. See Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army, or the Palestine Zionist Executive and the Irgun. In this case, the core problem that the moderates face is that no matter how flawless their optics might be, their position simply isn’t a viable one. Like communism, like socialism, like secular humanism, civic nationalism has been thoroughly tried and tested. And it has failed, even more spectacularly than these other ideological catastrophes.
Like it or not, civil nationalism has been a success in the US. It has proven to be a successful governmental and social framework for uniting hundreds of millions of people that are otherwise ethnically, racially, and culturally distinct, and maintaining order. Civil unrest and violence in the US has been in decline for decades, even centuries in spite of the trend of increasing diversity in for the past 2 centuries, as far back as Irish, Italian, and Chinese immigration in the 1800s. There is so little unrest that a campus scuffle in which there are maybe only a few injuries and small property damage, makes national and global news as if America is in dire crisis. Contrast that to the Kent State shootings, in 1970 , in which 4 people were killed. This is a huge sample of empirical evidence to work with. Most unrest is perpetrated by homogeneous populations, as the Rodney King and Watts riots showed. The almost forgotten Astor Place Riot of 1849 at the Astor Opera House in Manhattan, New York City, was over class division within an otherwise racially homogeneous white population, and far worse than the unrest we see today, which resulted in 25 deaths and 120 injuries as military police opened fire in the crowd of rioters. In spite of decreasing unionization and increasing diversity, the last major labor riot that resulted in injuries and unrest was St. Petersburg sanitation strike of 1968. What the evidence of shows is that these incidents of unrest tend to involve a high degree of class struggle and are perpetrated by homogeneous populations, either culturally, racially, or socioeconomically. And second, social unrest in the US peaked in the 60s and 70s , yet America is even more diverse now than then. Meanwhile, outside of the US, countries that are more homogeneous such as Brazil, Hong Kong, Chile, Turkey, Spain, Italy, Lebanon, and France have seen much more unrest than the US and have weaker economies. The unrest is by homogeneous protesters over social or economic issues against a target of similar race, religion, and ethnicity, such as French working-class Yellow Vest movement protesting against the French government elite. This is a dispute over class, not race. As I discussed last week, in spite of the insistence by many of a supposed rising tide of right-wing nationalism, extremism, populism, and anti-democracy, the evidence still suggests liberal democracy and neoliberalism are doing well. The question that Vox and others cannot answer is, if ethnic, cultural, and racial diversity is supposed to be destabilizing and cause unrest, why would elites want it? Why would elites knowingly advocate policy that jeopardizes their power? My argument is that increasing diversity has a socially stabilizing effect. This is not some sort of profound, new insight. Prison guards for example have long known that order is maintained by breaking up groups.
I’m not saying I support civic nationalism, but I oppose the willful denial of reality. I consider this to be a reality-based blog first and foremost. The views, perspectives espoused here are my best attempts at gauging reality as it is.