Category Archives: Racism

Libertarian Fictions

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A drawing of a jester in a pointy hat. His body is a book and he is holding a book.
Because the world does not obey their ideology, libertarians prefer to send us to fictional places where their ideas actually work.

Libertarians love making stuff up. I don’t mean the counterfactual stories they tell when you point out some wonderful thing the government has supplied such as the eradication of smallpox, aka World’s Greatest Killer. Facts like that are always met with the response, “Well, a free market would have eradicated smallpox better, stronger, faster.” These fact-free assertions probably make them feel better, but I doubt anyone save the libertarian tribe takes them seriously. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway argue, the libertarian free market existed “precisely never. There has never been a time in human history when markets met these conditions, and there is no reason to think that such conditions could ever exist” (p. 418). Nor am I discussing the truly dangerous fiction they peddle to the world, such as the “Great Barrington Declaration” on the Covid pandemic or the fantasy of climate-change denialism, largely fueled by libertarians and their fossil-fuel-burning patrons. Or the “right” to poison themselves with raw milk. Thank goodness we took care of smallpox before the libertarian propaganda machine got going. “The solution is not vaccines but herd immunity!” “Um, actually, there is no proof that smallpox ever killed anyone!” or “It is my right to get a highly contagious disease with a 35% mortality rate! My body is my property!” No, my subject here is the actual make-believe world at the heart of libertarian ideology. If allowed to create a world in line with their politics, what would that world look like?”

Galt’s Gulch

A gulch in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado
An actual gulch in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. I’m sure no one would notice if it suddenly went missing.

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957) is for those who think the problems of the world owe to the fact that people aren’t selfish enough and things would be better off if the good people just retreated to Galt’s Gulch and let a few billion people die as a result. These billions are “parasites” and, although Rand does not tell us directly, obviously must include the disabled and children. In Rand’s tale, those looters deserve to die.

Rand’s heroes are Übermenschen who retreat to a mysterious “Galt’s Gulch” hidden in the Colorado mountains and create a capitalist utopia. How does it remain hidden in a state where the federal government owns about a third of the real estate? Rand never explains this problem. In this place, these fierce individualists, beholden to no one but themselves, must take an “Galt’s Oath” named after cult leader founder John Galt to never give anything to anyone. What happens if someone, asserting their individuality does not take the oath? Rand never tells us. True individualism, it turns out is not thinking for yourself but acting and thinking exactly like Rand Galt does. You may want to feed your children and expect nothing in return, but that is a violation of the Galt’s Prime Directive so you should charge them or let them starve. If you choose to give them food, you aren’t an individualist. In Rand’s account, Galt’s Gulch is almost entirely populated by men. We can assume that the rugged individualist man returning home after working ruggedly individualistically is presented a bill by his ruggedly individualistic wife for doing laundry and vacuuming. I assume that she only prepared dinner for herself, and if he wants to eat, that will cost him.

What happens if a parasitic looter enters the gulch? Well, that’s impossible, you see because Galt created a mysterious shield that made the Gulch invisible. Does he give this protection to all inhabitants in violation of his oath? Rand never notes how he is paid for it, nor does she explain what would happen to a free-rider who doesn’t pay Galt yet obviously remains protected from the looters. There is no police force to enforce the (unwritten?) contract between Galt and the inhabitants.

In this capitalistic paradise, there are mineral mines and industrial production. What happens to the pollution caused by these enterprises? Rand is silent on this. Are children allowed (or required) to pay their way by working in a mine with no safety standards? Rand doesn’t say. Colorado has a semi-arid climate and the politics of water use are intense. Rand does not mention of where the water for all this comes from. Even a parasitic looter who works for the State of Colorado would notice the missing water. However, Rand just fiats away any real-world problems and hopes that no one notices them.

Despite her claims that her system is realistic and rational, Rand’s utopia is rife with contradictions and waves away any true problems of the world, “Rand’s utopia is not only inconsistent in description but simply not plausible in reality. Her idealized version of society is flawed in terms of sociological and economic and political laws and rests on a distorted view of human psychology” (p. 258)

Gumption Island

Largely forgotten today, Felix Morley (1894-1982) was a giant of the post-World War II libertarian movement. He won a Pulitzer for his editorial writing at the Washington Post, criticizing Roosevelt and the New Deal. After World War II, Morley wrote regular columns for Nation’s Business and Barron’s Weekly, co-founded the conservative newspaper Human Events, and enjoyed regular broadcast gigs on radio and television:

Morley was also on the advisory board of Spiritual Mobilization, a libertarian organization that promoted free-market ideas to the clergy, and he was a founding member of the Mont Pererin Society. The libertarian Volker Fund awarded Morley the William Volker Distinguished Service Award in 1961.

In 1956, Morley published Gumption Island, a novel he described as a “political fantasy,” in which Gibson Island, where Morley made his home was transformed into a libertarian utopial. Morley wanted to use his novel to both explain his ideal political order and to to explore race relations, “Knowing this island and its people, both white and black, I have long speculated how they would react, individually and collectively, if thrown into a ‘state of nature” (Morley to J.H. Gipson, March 19, 1954, Box 33 in Morley Papers, Hoover Presidential Library). Much more than his non-fiction, Gumption Island reveals the racism underneath Morley’s political thought.

In the novel, the Soviets drop a “Q-bomb” which sends a small island of homeowners back to the age of the dinosaurs and they must create a livable political order. There are two notable aspects of Morley’s politics, as revealed in the book that bear mentioning.

First, Jews controlled money and banking on the island. Albert Adler, one of the island’s few Jews, argued that money had to be fixed to the gold standard to prevent the manipulation of currency by government. He argued,’ For good historical reasons, every intelligent Jew understands the significance of gold. As a matter of fact, between ourselves, I’m wearing a beltful of double eagles at this minute. I’ve never travelled anywhere without them, since 1932. It’s funny to think that now I’ve carried these five hundred gold dollars back fifty million years” (92).  Finally, Adler lends the community his gold with the guarantee that there will be no manipulation of the gold reserve and that he and another person will be in complete control of the bank and have the sole power to appoint their own successors. Later in the novel, a motion is made to force the bank to pay the profits of the bank to the island’s Director of Finance. Adler blocks the move by telling the islanders, “If that motion is carried…I may feel it necessary to withdraw the gold reserve, which is not an asset of the bank, but a personal loan of my private property.” Morley thus recreates the stereotype of the money-grubbing Jew, the sole control of the economy.

Second, Morley wrote all African-American characters in a minstrel show dialect, even though by the 1950s such a dialect was increasingly recognized as reflecting an ugly racist stereotype. White immigrant characters, such as the Polish immigrant who connived with the Soviets to set the Q-bomb, as well as a Russian pilot who had been thrown into the past with the Gumption Island residents, were presented as speaking unaccented English. While listening to the white islanders discussing Plato, Bill Jefferson, portrayed as a leader in the African-American community, thinks to himself, “I guess…that Ah jes’ ain’t intellectualy competent. With all this yak-yak, they’s clean forgot Ah’s supposed to pick up a load o’ wood fo’ the hospital.” After he returned to the African-American community and reported what he had seen and heard in the white home, they agreed not to participate in governing the island. As one character put it, “I guess we got to leave it to the white folks to give the orders…so long as they treat us decent.” In Morley’s libertarian social order, African Americans happily give up any political power because they realize their own incapacity to govern.

In the 1950s libertarians imagined their utopias as places where pollution didn’t exist, where children were “free” to work or starve, and where “individualism” meant surrendering your free choice to act altruistically. A place where the Jewish racial trait of hoarding gold allowed them to control the economy, and African Americans were happy in their servitude. You and I might call such places nightmares, but libertarians call them paradise.

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Race Scientists Ask You Believe in Impossible Things

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The White Queen and Alice from Alice Through the Looking Glass
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

When racial hereditarian researchers tell you they are objective scientists only concerned with the rigorous scientific pursuit of truth, what else do you need to believe to accept that claim? What are the markers of an open-minded researcher who is completely nonpartisan politically? We would expect that person to be careful not to entangle themselves and their research with those who are pursuing political ends; those who seek to use the mask of science to advance specific policy options and social orders. We would not expect them to draw upon political writers as authorities for their scientific claims. We would not expect them to collaborate with people pushing a political agenda.

In a recent article, Michael Woodley, Matthew A. Sarraf & Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre write that they believe the Holocaust happened. They also want to make clear that They are “hereditarians” not racists. Nor are they eugenicists. Oh, and Woodley especially wants us to know that he had nothing to do with his work being cited by the Buffalo shooter who killed African Americans in the name of racial purity. (I know what you are thinking, “Where does Woodley stand on the existence of Bigfoot?” Well, he appears to think the jury’s still out on that question).

Of course, anyone who must take to print to deny they are Holocaust deniers, a scientific racist, a eugenicist an inspiration for a racist terrorist might want to stop and think about why they are so characterized by so many people. An obvious question is, “Maybe it is me?” It appears that the authors never ask themselves that question. They portray themselves as objective scientists and their many, many critics must simply misunderstand the nature of science and objective inquiry because they are so blinded by “leftist” ideology. To believe their claims, you must believe a host of other impossible claims they use to support it.

Go to Page Two

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F.A. Hayek and the False Promise of a Racially Just Libertarianism

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The cover of Andrew Koppelman's book, Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed

In his new book, Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed, Andrew Koppelman, the John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University attempts to rescue libertarianism from itself by centering the work of Freidrich A. Hayek, one of the most distinguished economists of the twentieth century. Toward the end of the book, Koppelman discusses Barry Goldwater “who admired and sometimes quoted Hayek…After he had the [1964 Republican] nomination [for the Presidency], Goldwater (himself no racist) voted against the Civil Rights Act on libertarian grounds: ‘the freedom to associate means the same thing as the freedom not to associate.'” (p. 188). On the following page, he writes, “Reagan succeeded in shifting American politics–and American understandings of liberty, in Hayekian direction. He used the word freedom in his speeches more than any president before or since” (p, 189). Nestled between those two sentences is this one: “Libertarianism in all the forms we have examined is firmly opposed to racism. We have seen no trace of it in any of the arguments we have surveyed” (p. 189). That Koppelman cannot see any “trace of racism” in Goldwater parroting standard segregationist lines to oppose the Civil Rights Act or in Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” environmental racism, and generally throttling any antiracism in the Republican party underscores the flaws of his analysis of the history of libertarian ideology and racism.

In some respects Koppelman tells a story that parallels Matt Zwolinksi & John Tomasi’s The Individualists. Both books tell a story of libertarian ideas that, somehow, lost their way. What was once a philosophy that championed freedom for all became, or is in danger of becoming, a philosophy of reaction and repression. For Zwolinski & Tomasi it was a reactionary turn the movement took in the second half of the twentieth century. For Koppelman, the problem is similar: it is that libertarianism has misunderstood its own founding ideas; for him, libertarians are too entranced by the views of Ayn Rand and Murray N. Rothbard instead of F.A. Hayek, libertarianism’s true founder because “American libertarianism began with Hayek” (p. 7).

One reason Koppelman argues that Hayek is properly viewed as the founder of libertarianism is that Koppelman believes that nearly every viable option in today’s political landscape opposes the planned economy that Hayek feared. “Excerpt for a politically impossible fringe, the American left aims for a generous welfare state–more generous than the present one–in the context of capitalism” (p. 4-5). Yes, even Bernie Sanders (p. 5, 35). According to Koppelman, “The ideas of Hayek, valuing markets because they promise a better life for everyone are today commonplace in the Democratic Party” (p. 13). For Koppelman, the enemies of libertarianism come from the right, not the left. Libertarian ideas are threatened by Republican embrace of “Christian fundamentalism and Trumpian racist, xenophobic nationalism” (p. 12).The question then becomes, does Hayekian libertarianism give Koppelman the tools he needs to combat racism? To answer that question, I will examine how Hayek fits into the history of the relationship between libertarian thought and racist thought. Despite attempts at “revisionist” history from twenty-first century libertarians, the libertarian tradition they’ve inherited was either an active participant in building a racist society or passive observers of it. Looking to libertarian ideology to somehow be an active warrior against racism at this late date might be possible, but to do so libertarians need to honestly evaluate their own past.

Page Two will explore these difficulties.

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Another Distorted History of Libertarianism and Racial Justice

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Some religious traditions, most famously, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, practice the Baptism of the Dead. In this practice, the Church baptizes a living person who is acting as a proxy for a deceased person in order to ensure that that deceased person gains entry into Heaven. Often this practice has met with vigorous objections from leaders of other faiths who find the practice disrespectful to their own faiths.

When libertarians write the history of their ideology in matters of race they tend toward a similar practice. Historical figures are torn from their contexts and declared “libertarians” in order to, metaphorically, get libertarians into the Kingdom of Free Market Heaven. Often the historical figures are a bizarre hodgepodge of folks, usually chosen more for their appealing views on racial justice than on their advocacy of views normally thought of as the centerpieces of libertarian thought such as the non-aggression principle, capitalism, property rights, or strict individualism. The most egregious example of libertarians trying retroactively baptize a historical figure as one of their own is when they try to claim that Martin Luther King, Jr., noted socialist, was a libertarian (examples: here, here, and here).

In their new book The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism, Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi know better than to try to retroactively enroll MLK as a libertarian, indeed, they point out that many libertarians object to MLK’s ideas (pp. 220, 358). These are real scholars publishing with Princeton University Press, not some blogger on the internet like some people around here. On the other hand, Zwolinski and Tomasi cite a whole lot of bloggers in their chapter on “Racial Justice and Individualism” which is my focus, so perhaps the playing field is more even than I thought.

Zwolinski and Tomasi seem well aware of philosopher Stephen Toulmin’s adage that “Definitions are like belts. The shorter they are, the more elastic they need to be. A short belt reveals nothing about its wearer: by stretching it can be made to fit almost anybody…Yet the hope of hitting on some definition which is at one and the same time satisfactory and brief dies hard” (p. 18). They opt for “satisfactory” rather than “brief” and devote their first chapter to answering the question, “What is Libertarianism?” and draw careful distinctions among “classical liberals,” “neoliberalism,” and “Strict libertarians.” That last category is itself comprised of deontic libertarians, who are guided entirely by inflexible principles and consequentialist libertarians who “evaluates the consequences not of specific policies but of general principles and retains its commitment to those principles even if they (seem to) fail in particular instances” (p. 16). As an aside: keep an eye on that parenthetical “seem to,” it will become important later. Zwolinski & Tomasi often label failures of libertarianism, no matter how big or well documented as seemings. Libertarianism can only “seem” to fail, not actually fail.

Their summary of libertarianism gives us this:

Libertarianism is best understood as a cluster concept. We see libertarianism as a distinctive combination of six key commitments: property rights, negative liberty, individualism, free markets, a skepticism of authority, and a belief in the explanatory and normative significance of spontaneous order. (p. 6)

It is the jockeying among those various elements that make libertarianism so slippery a concept: just which element should be weighted the most, for example? It is also these differing commitments that seem to open the door to reactionary libertarianism. In Zwolinski & Tomasi’s history, libertarianism grew out of an absolute commitment to individualism and negative liberty first embaced by certain 19th century figures’ opposition to slavery. In the twentieth century libertarianism took a reactionary turn in defense of the status quo, and is now embroiled in controversy over which path the “Liberty Movement” will take here in the 21st century: radical or reactionary? (Spoiler alert: they don’t tell you).

I will focus on Chapter 7, “Racial Justice and Individualism” since that is the chapter that is most relevant to my work and expertise. Buckle up and go to page 2.

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South Carolina wants to ban genetic science

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A poem published right after South Carolina started the Civil War declaring they did it for “freedom.”

South Carolina, despite their claims to contrary, has never been a state eager to embrace racial justice. The latest example of the state’s regressive racial thinking is Proposed Bill SC S0424. Like many states ruled by conservatives, the Palmetto State’s legislature is in a tizzy about what they think Critical Race Theory (CRT) is. Because those spreading the moral panic about CRT lie about it and the white legislators who listen to them don’t really care about what CRT actually, many legislatures are proposing the “banning” the teaching of CRT. South Carolina has proposed legislation that is the perfect exemplar of the deep and eagerly embraced ignorance of the anti-CRT crowd. Proposed Bill SC S0424 reads, in part:

(9) an individual must be compelled to affirm, accept, adopt, profess, or adhere to concepts, forms of language, or definitions not firmly and widely established, empirically or scientifically accurate, or that are controversial or theoretical, such as:

         (a) gender theory, including nonbinary pronouns or honorifics;

         (b) unconscious or implicit bias; or

         (c) that race or biological sex are social constructs;

I’m going to leave aside the gender issues in the post and focus on the idea that race is a social construct. It would seem that South Carolina wants to ban ideas like this one:

In one word, the term race is only a product of our mental activities, the work of our intellect, and outside all reality. Science had need of races as hypothetical limits, and these “products of art,” to use Lamarck’s expression, have become concrete realities for the vulgar. Races as irreducible categories only exist as fictions in our brains. They exist in us but not outside us. We can never sufficiently insist on this fact, which is elementary and undeniable to all truly scientific minds and to those desirous above all of ascertaining the truth.

That quotation is not from some wild-eyed “Cultural Marxist” but from French writer, Jean Finot’s book Race Prejudice published in English in 1907. In the subsequent century, Finot has been proven correct, “truly scientific minds” know that “races as irreducible categories only exist as fictions in our brains.” If South Carolina had its way, its schoolchildren would not be taught the best genetic science of the 21st century.

On the next page, I’ll explain why.

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The Survival of the Unfit: Darwinism, Race, and Eugenics in the United States

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This is a paper that I first presented at a workshop at the University of Mississippi in 2012. I submitted it to a journal soon after and got a “Revise and Resubmit.” I then moved, switched computers and it got lost somewhere in all that. When I re-discovered it recently, I realized that it was really too late for me to bring it up-to-date with current work on eugenics given my other writing commitments. Therefore, I decided to post it here for anyone interested in these historical issues. I still like the paper and think it has something important to say.

Abstract: The historical relationship among Darwinism, eugenics, and racism is notoriously difficult to unravel. Eugenicists worried about the “survival of the unfit,” a phrase that should, prima facia, be nonsense for those with a Darwinian worldview in the early twentieth century. To be “fit” in a Darwinian sense meant adapted well enough to the environment to out-survive (and out-reproduce) one’s competitors. For eugenicists, the measure for “fit” could not be those best adapted to the environment in this way because they were concerned with the opposite situation: those who thriving and yet were “unfit.” Additionally, historians now reject the idea that eugenics was necessarily founded on racist assumptions. We can address these problems by examining the different forms of Darwinism adopted by early twentieth-century notions of “fitness” and how the term was interpreted in the context of American debates about immigration restriction and race. For some eugenicists, the idea of panmixia allowed them to argue that the unfit were outcompeting the fit. For others, notably Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn the idea of organic selection provided them with a Darwinian mechanism that solved the problem of the “survival of the unfit.”

Keywords:  Darwinism; Eugenics; Racism; Fitness; Panmixia; Organic Selection

CONTINUED ON PAGE TWO

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Genetics and Progressives

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Kathryn Paige Harden. 2021. The genetic lottery: why DNA matters for social equality. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Katheryn Paige Harden’s new book, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality hovers between a plea and a demand that social scientists incorporate behavior genetics into their research. Unfortunately, the book is based on a series of false assumptions about the social sciences that undercut the book’s central thesis.

Social scientists, Harden warns, “have been trained to view the results of behavior genetics with fear and loathing” (p. 277). Indeed, they are guilty of committing a violent crime:

The tacit collusion in some areas of the social sciences to ignore genetic differences…is wrong. It is wrong in the way that robbing banks is wrong. It is stealing. It’s stealing people’s time when researchers work to churn out critically flawed scientific papers, and other researchers chase false leads that go no where. It’s stealing people’s money when taxpayers and private foundations support policies premised on the shakiest of causal foundations. Failing to take genetics seriously is a scientific practice that pervasively undermines our stated goal of understanding society so that we can improve it. (p. 186)

Well, anyone accusing their colleagues of being the moral equivalent of a stick-up artist must have good grounds to do so. Moreover, they must come from a research tradition that has never been guilty of “churning out critically flawed scientific papers!” Unfortunately, Harden misrepresents the fields the criticizes. She shifts standards of evidence to suit her pre-conceived goals. Most importantly, she fails to show that behavior genetics is at all relevant for the values and policies she endorses.

[Continued on page 2]

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Libertarians and Holocaust Denial

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Photo by MARCIN CZERNIAWSKI on Unsplash

After a long covid delay, my paper, “The Pre-History of American Holocaust Denial” is finally published at the journal, American Jewish History. It is part of a special double issue on American antisemitism. The roster of authors is distinguished and I’m honored and delighted to find myself in their company.

Holocaust denial is the idea that the Nazi genocide of European Jews has been greatly exaggerated or, in its most severe form, never actually happened. It is, quite correctly, labeled an extreme form of antisemitism. In the United States, the Institute for Historical Review, founded in the late 1970s. My paper focuses on the decades before that, from the end of World War II to the founding of the IHR.

Here are some of the highlights of my paper:

There is more, all fully documented from archival sources. All of this is not in spite of libertarian ideology but a consequence of it: they were isolationists and were perfectly willing to distort the history of World War II to suit their ends. They made active alliances with overt antisemitic, right-wing activists and, in many cases, shared their antisemitism. It is time the libertarians stopped denying their ugly history regarding Holocaust denial and started taking responsibility for it.


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Eugenics: Not Well-Born

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Karl Pearson, ed., The Treasury of Human Inheritance. (London: Dulau & Co., 1909): 284.

“Eugenics” means “well-born.” The term was coined by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton in the nineteenth century. Despite thinking of it as a science, it was not. “Eugenics,” wrote Frank Dikötter, “was not so much a clear set of scientific principles as a ‘modern’ way
of talking about social problems in biologizing terms.” The way to understand eugenics is not as a branch of biology, but a branch of politics. If science asks questions of fact: “What can we discover about the natural world?” politics is about what we should do: “What kind of actions should our society undertake?” Misunderstanding this basic distinction and you misunderstand the nature of eugenics.

Eugenics, which flourished in the years before World War II, was meant to help the human race improve itself by encouraging desirable people to pass on their genes and discouraging undesirable people to pass on their genes. There are lots of problems with this idea: Who decides what’s desirable or undesirable? How do we encourage or discourage people from reproducing? And the history of eugenics includes lots of bad, bad policies. Before World War II, in the United States, eugenic thought contributed to restricting immigration on racial grounds, forcibly sterilizing people against their wills, segregating people in institutions, prohibiting inter-racial marriages, and, in the case of Nazi Germany, contributing to genocide. On the other hand, it did a lot of good like……well…..actually no one thinks anything good came out of eugenics when it was in its heyday. It did great harm and absolutely no good whatsoever.

Naturally, there are people who want to bring it back. Let’s find out why they are wrong.

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Anglo-Saxon Democracy

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British Library, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms The Eadwine Psalter, Canterbury, ca 1150 On the left Christ freeing Adam & Eve from hell; center, an angel announcing Christ's resurrection to the myrhhbearing women.
British Library, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms
The Eadwine Psalter, Canterbury, ca 1150
On the left Christ freeing Adam & Eve from hell; center, an angel announcing Christ’s resurrection to the myrhhbearing women.

The rump faction of Pro-Trump America Firsters in Congress have announced a bold, new America First plan to rescue us all from strictly imaginary dangers like election fraud, immigration, solar power, public health lockdowns, the Chinese Commies, and, my personal favorite “progressive indoctrination and enrichment of an out-of-control elite oligarchy,” which I’m pretty sure is me and my friends. Except they spelled “progressive” as “progessive” so maybe they are talking about someone else entirely.

The whole agenda is the unappetizing meal left under the heat lamps on the buffet table of the Trump administration. This, however, caught my eye:

The America First Caucus recognizes that our country is more than a mass of consumers or a series of abstract ideas. America is a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions. History has shown that societal trust and political unity are threatened when foreign citizens are imported en-masse into a country, particularly without institutional support for assimilation and an expansive welfare state to bail them out should they fail to contribute positively to the country.

That whole “Anglo-Saxon political tradition” has an interesting history. I’ve touched on some of this before when I wrote about W. Cleon Skousen, right wing “scholar” beloved of neo-Confederates, right-wing paramilitary troops, and Charles Koch (who says conservatives don’t have a big tent?). His terrible book, The 5,000-Year Leap is filled with references to the Anglo-Saxon traditions upon which this country was supposedly based. As it happens, there is an interesting history in American political thought being invoked here and, of course, it is a racist one. Let’s dig into the Angles and the Saxons and how Americans have abused their name!

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