he recent terrorist attack in Dallas has shown, among other things, that the
United States is still riven by ethnic discord. Why is this? Conventional wisdom has
been that it results from a failure of leadership from our politicians and the divisive
ideology of Democrats and political activists.
Perhaps the root cause can be traced to the destructive effect of the government's social programs, which have led to the near-destruction of black families and the pervasive idea that the role of government is to control and redistribute wealth and promote social change. As a result, the government gets progressively bigger; it now consumes 41.5% of our GDP and provides mainly chaos in return.
No one can say we're not getting our money's worth. As government gets bigger, we can expect to get even more chaos for our buck. This is because governments benefit from chaos, and therefore knowingly or unknowingly create policies that produce it. Yet paradoxically, that chaos also means that big megastates are inherently unstable.
Although the term ‘tribe’ has acquired negative connotations, nations were originally based on self-governing tribes—ethnonations, if you will. Nations that continued on this trajectory, such as Israel, Northern Ireland, the Scandinavian states, and Canada, have much less internal stress than those that did not.
A megastate dilutes self-government, rendering democracy ineffectual and unresponsive, and it undermines tribal identities, which provide a sense of permanency for individuals. We now have three examples of this. All three exhibit or exhibited signs of stress with bad consequences for their citizens.
- Soviet Union
The former Soviet Union, a collection of 16 mutually incompatible states, was so fragile it needed a totalitarian system to hold it together. When that weakened, the union immediately shattered along the same ethnotribal fault lines from which it had been created, providing unmistakable evidence of their endurance.
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European Union
The EU, a megastate of 28 member states, is also unstable, as Brexit and the Greek crisis showed. It too can only be held together by force; it is no coincidence that its organization is highly undemocratic. It has only been able to achieve further integration by thwarting the will of the majority.
Although we think of Europeans as ethnically homogeneous, the national boundaries in Europe don't coincide with ethnicities. Eupedia has many maps showing the distribution of mitochondrial DNA haplogroups and Y chromosome DNA, which are genetic proxies for ethnicity. Other maps show cultural and ethnic boundaries; the boundaries differ slightly, but they all look more natural than the current map of Europe. And within each is a group struggling for the right to govern themselves and determine their own fate, but overruled by a distant bureaucracy.
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United States
The third example is the United States. Originally intended to be a loose federation of self-governing states, it is mutating into a toxic megastate that, increasingly, is held together by force. Although once thought of as a ‘melting pot,’ political, regional, and ethnic tensions have produced a century of internal stress. Government expansion has had little effect on these tensions and arguably exacerbated them.
Political and ethnic tensions are only one indicator of stress. Fertility rate is another. Before it broke up, the fertility rate in the USSR was barely above 1.2—a death spiral. European fertility rates are barely higher, with a total EU rate of 1.58 and many countries in the 1.3 range. America props its birthrate up by throwing open its borders, admitting vast numbers of immigrants from Mexico and Central America. The EU tried the same, and the resulting stresses led to its fracture.
Fertility rate depends primarily on psychological stability. The lowest fertility rates are seen in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, all of which have both high education and integration of women in the workforce. So it is not the size of the state per se that is important, but the possibility of a future for their children and control over one's destiny. This is supported by the fact that since the USSR broke up, the fertility rate of its constituent states has shot up, nearly approaching replacement level.
This suggests that the one-world government that some envision would be even more unstable than the Soviet Union. It might start out as a loose federation, but history shows that federations inevitably evolve into systems with greater central control. Ultimately a world government could be held together only by a brutal exercise of force.
This being the case, it would make sense to move gradually in the opposite direction, toward self-government, or even ethnonations.
The American media-government complex encourages tribal sentiment among women and ethnic minorities. They advocate tribal homelands for the Kurds, Armenians, and other tribal groups. Yet they also bombard us with propaganda to make our own citizens reluctant to discuss self-government or celebrate our tribal identity. What do the Kurds have that we don't? The answer is that self-government threatens establishment multiculturalist ideology; yet multiculturalism itself is increasingly discredited, in part due to the chaos it produced in Europe.
Even so, the propaganda has been remarkably effective. Even some conservatives have begun to adopt the beliefs and vocabulary of the opposition. They now use, without irony, terms like gender identity, person of color, and income inequality, and criticize anyone who brings up alternative views as crude, racist and xenophobic.
Of course nations must accommodate, welcome, and protect different ethnic groups within their borders. Infusion of different ideas and values can benefit a society. But one of those ideas is that a homeland, where a cohesive group can govern itself according to their own values, produces creativity, prosperity, and peace. What is remarkable is that this idea is so controversial.
