Amy Wax, “national conservatism,” and the dark dream of a whiter America

By Zack Beauchamp @zackbeauchampzack @vox.com  Jul 23, 2019, 8:30am EDT

Wax promoted the idea of “cultural-distance nationalism,” or the belief that “we are better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically, at least in fact if not formally, by people from the first world, from the West, than by people from countries that had failed to advance.” She went on, “Let us be candid. Europe and the first world, to which the United States belongs, remain mostly white, for now; and the third world, although mixed, contains a lot of non-white people. Embracing cultural distance, cultural-distance nationalism, means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.”

People of Western origin are more scrupulous, empirical, and orderly than people of non-Western origin, and that women are less intellectual than men.

White people litter less than people of color.

If you think the Australia and Canada points system and restrictions don’t have a differential racial impact, you are kidding yourself. They do. But nobody calls them white supremacist. Well, a few people do. [Laughs.]

Why are successful, peaceful, orderly, prosperous, technologically advanced, democratically sound countries so rare and so few, and why do they clump up in one tiny corner of the globe, namely Europe, the Anglosphere? 

I consider that very closely related to the lack of commitment to empiricism, the lack of a cultural practice of attention to evidence, rigor, analysis, facts. They all work together, so I think that when we say colonialism, do they mean that if it weren’t for colonialism, Malaysia would be Denmark? 

What is the significance of a common ethnicity in producing a common culture or a sense of solidarity with other people? I guess I would have to say it doesn’t have zero role, but all it means to me is that it’s important for the group that produced the culture that we value to be numerous, to have a dominant, numerical role, to be most people. So I would say our country’s culture is best preserved if most of the people in our country are of European origins, because those are the people that created our system, but that certainly doesn’t exclude bringing in other people.

Sociologists don’t study this stuff, because sociology now is so politically valenced that these topics just don’t get looked at. The data just doesn’t get looked at, so I can’t give you data. I can give you this, though, which is just, it’s anecdote, no better or worse, observation. I’ve been in many different places. I’ve been all over the world and all over the country. I notice differences. There are differences. Now, what accounts for them, it’s probably complex.

I notice that these are places that people love to go. They love to go and hang out with other people from the quote-unquote “same ethnicity” in nice, quasi-European, decorous, neat, clean, quiet, litter-free, beautifully maintained, orderly places. That’s where they like to go.

“[NYU professor] Larry Mead, in his new book The Burdens of Freedom, has argued that individualism —a key source of Western and American order, dynamism and strength — is a distinctly First World attribute that is difficult to impart to outsiders and that it is key to maintaining our freedoms and prosperity,” Wax says. “These insights are supported by the European experience with Muslim immigration ... and by the multigenerational trajectory of Hispanics in the United States.”

And when it comes to immigration, few dare to challenge a pie in the sky version of what the dissident right has called “the dogma of magic dirt”: People who come to the US, no matter from what cultural background, will quickly come to think, live, and act just like us.

Our legacy population is demoralized, beleaguered, and disorganized.