trying to replace the american dream

in moderation, tolerance is a virtue but in excess it becomes the direst of vices

zohran’s innuagural speech was quite the revelation.

say what you will about mamdani, but the man knows his audience:

“we will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

this bald statement, shocking in its un-americanism, resonates easily with immigrants from places where “the role of government is to codify which tribes may without repercussion plunder the others” but what people miss is that it is also the exact sort of invitation to adult romper room that the midwit and sub-midwit domestic youth, raised on DEI and “everyone gets a trophy” and over-educated in the false promises of cargo cult college, are clamoring for.

it’s a magical land where others take care of you and you never really need to grow up or do hard things or stew in jealousy of the people who are doing better than you are. these are easy troops to mobilize. your failure to launch and attain the status of the secret special you that you know in your bones to be your deserved lot in life is never your fault. someone did it to you. so let’s get them!

the politics of envy as self-righteousness find unerring mark and fertile soil among overproduced elites. they are the 50th and 60th percentiles led to expect 90th percentile lives and careers that were never in the cards for them, hungry in their overwrought expectations and entitled by the grievance cultures in which they were weaned. they are sure that they are somehow put out, put upon, and that someone has cheated them. it turns out that the equity, inclusion, and participation prizes and gold stars that they were told to expect were never real.

but they want them just the same.

so they reach out for “collectivism” that warm and fuzzy sounding set of ideals that has killed more millions than world wars could ever dream of. they clamor to invite the vampire in because they think it will be snuggly instead of cold.

and he knows exactly what he’s selling: the trade of liberty for comfort that inevitably leaves you with neither.

but these kids do not know that. they just hear “safe and collective” and line up to get some.

it’s always the young, overeducated midwits who do this. that is always the marxist vanguard. they always do this for exactly these reasons. this may well be why marxists are always so keen to over-educate the midwit cohort.

and by the time they realize how empty this promise is and always was, well, it’s generally much too late.

new york has a lot of competing power bases and i’m not sure just how much of his own way mamdani will be able to get, but to the extent he does, it will not go well for gotham. i do not envy them the lesson they have coming.

if they think rugged individualism is frigid, wait until they try what passes for blankets under communism.

but this does not happen in a vacuum.

you cannot just plant ideologies such as these that refute the idea of the individual in favor of the collective and invert the idea of the rights of that individual standing paramount to the whims of the demos and passions of the mob into healthy soil and expect it to find root.

“democracy” is an un-american concept.

and somehow, we have lost this idea, but it’s bedrock truth:

“but we voted for this” is a stunningly un-american concept, an idea and ideology anathema to the founding principles of our republic.

the whole point was that no one should ever have the power to vote for such things because such power is that most implacable and terrifying form of tyranny: a tyranny of the majority.

america was set up to prevent that, to elevate the individual and render him safe in his ruggedness.

so how did we get to here?

let’s run a quick thought experiment:

if your goal was to get away with vast crimes, outrages, and civilization-scale plunder of high agency, first world people, how would you do it?

such societies are notably resilient. they do not just cough up the loot or give up their culture. if you take them on head on, they will fight you and you will lose.

so you have to come at them sideways. you must first eliminate the will to fight. you have to make them want to be conquered. and you do that by making conquest seem like virtue.

you erect a set of inverted values where successful civilization is decried as oppressive and fascist. rights are evil and cold. taking by force that which was earned and giving it to those who did not earn it is justice. wanting anything other is “privilege” and you need to be rounded up and re-educated like kulaks.

emotive empathy slop is easy to sell and at the margin there are always marginal people willing to sell you down the river for a cookie, especially if it’s one you paid to bake.

and predictable people lap this up in predictable ways.

but the real capper is when you make a virtue of “tolerance” and push the idea long past breaking and into self-harm.

tolerance, like many things, is a goldilocks virtue that must be neither too hot nor too cold. one must have some, but too much is at least as harmful as too little and rapidly becomes much more so.

but “intolerance” is such an effective epithet that when wielded maliciously at people who really are good people, possessed of empathy and charity and trust, it can easily expand to excuse a multitude of truly egregiously immoral sins.

it turns people’s minds and ethics inside out and gets them to applaud their own attackers. and this only works in successful cultures. you could never convince poor people scratching at subsistence of ideas like these, they are luxury beliefs with some sort of seemingly veblen aspect where the higher the price goes, the more people want the product.

this is how you teach the scions of success to abhor themselves and in their self loathing to give away the game their forebears won for them. they do not understand the trade because they did not build the worlds they inhabit nor grasp that which they give away. they are the bitter children of privilege who return shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves as the third generation.

and the opposite of “resilient” is not “fragile”; it’s “self loathing.”

if you can convince a whole culture to feel guilt about its success and the aspects of its identity conducive to creating such things and then overload it on the idea of toxic levels of “tolerance” you can break it completely with invading peoples and pirate culture.

each new instance of theft, rape, street blockage and harassment and crowding out of your kids from their own schools is just “culture” and every time you tolerate it, you show what a good and evolved person you are.

becky from vassar and thayer from oberlin will line up to bray for “queers for palestine” as they applaud people who would happily throw them off buildings. it’s just an amazing spectacle.

the same people who tell you you cannot have a prayer before a football game will help block streets for prayer rugs because the name of the god sounds foreign and they cannot wait to show off how “tolerant” they are and call you words ending in “ist” or “phobic.”

they style themselves the breakers of the very chains that they are fashioning for themselves and anyone unfortunate enough to be trying to share a civilization with them.

they have mistaken surrender for heroism.

i think it’s about status.

marxists always seem to seek it and to uncouple it from “being productive” and status is always relative and zero sum. so importing or championing people you see as “inferiors” is a way to both virtue signal and to surround yourself with “mascots” to whom you are “superior,” cementing your own place in the hierarchy.

they assume that these people will be grateful and like them for this sponsorship, that they will be biddable and meek. the idea that they, the “elites” who imagine themselves the acme of moral liberatordom, will be seen as stupid and hated for it is a totally foreign idea. so they do not see the punch coming.

the reality is that this mascotism encourages and incites all manner of aggressive and predatory behavior. pirate cultures perceive failure to resist as weakness and weakness as invitation. the nicer you try to be, the worse they will get and the more friends they will bring to the party.

“free stuff” does not satiate them, it makes them hungrier.

you’re the easy mark.

“tolerance” for the intolerable is not a virtue.

it’s hairshirt self-flagellation and submission.

it’s fifth column conquest.

and that is how one culture is eaten and subsumed by another, how the barbarians darken the age of rome, and how civilizations fall:

it has nothing to do with rich or productive or moral or smart.

it’s just a category error on what is tolerable.

the virtue of “some tolerance” becomes the vice of “overtolerance” and forges the iron for the choke collar of depredation and plunder that squeezes your once flourishing society to death like some sort of civilizational garrote.

those who would plunder you ape morality that is, in reality, the disdain of the conqueror for a victim who gave up without a fight.

and ask yourself: how else could they possibly see this?

what other inference could one even draw from a host society whose response to being plundered is to seek to find ways to hide the crime?

and so now return to the thought experiment: if you sought to conquer high functioning, high trust society and infest it with raiders and wreckers, what would you do?

is there any way you could improve upon this idea of cultivating and inculcating over-tolerance to the point of wrecker reverance? and is there any better spread vector than public schools?

then maybe ask if this is why these same people are so opposed to school choice.

they know full well that it would break their power.

anyone who allows his enemy to educate his children is an abject fool and shall not long keep what they have built.

i suspect that the fact that a lot of this coincides both temporally and by political faction with the collapse in childbirth is not a coincidence. (conservatives in the US have a healthy birthrate, it’s just the left where it’s collapsing which is part of why their politicians are such avid importers of new voters.) a great deal of these policies is the hijacking of the nurture instinct and the replacement of family and own tribe with statism and invading ethos.

you raise the kids on this, send 50% to an institution like college that was really only supposed to be for the top 5-10%, promise them all top decile outcomes, and faster than you can say “elite overproduction” you have a permanently offended class that, despite being the richest generation in american history age for age, feels dispossessed.

you tell them their dream is dead.

you tell them that they lack agency, that rugged individualism is bad and lonely and that the colletivist borg is snugglebear warm and that only the state can provide comfort.

you weaponize their empathy against themselves and voila, you have sheep not only voting for wolves but actually helping them to eat the lambs and hide the crime.

and that, my friends, is no way to live.

kind of obvious once you see it, no?