The Elites Have Lost the Right to Rule

Thomas Friedman, establishment mouthpiece, has written one of the more arrogant and telling pieces ever to come from his august pen: Can't Keep a Bad Idea Down.

I confess, I find it dispiriting to read the polls and see candidates, mostly Republicans, leading in various midterm races while promoting many of the very same ideas that got us into this mess. Am I hearing right?

Let’s have more tax cuts, unlinked to any specific spending cuts and while we’re still fighting two wars — because that worked so well during the Bush years to make our economy strong and our deficit small. Let’s immediately cut government spending, instead of phasing cuts in gradually, while we’re still mired in a recession — because that worked so well in the Great Depression. Let’s roll back financial regulation — because we’ve learned from experience that Wall Street can police itself and average Americans will never have to bail it out.

Interesting that while he disparages anything that would limit the power of the government and allow people to keep more of their money away from government pickpockets, he seems so lacking in self-awareness that he doesn't realize that he's only arguing for the self-interests of himself and of his class, the elite. He's also reduced to lying: for instance, FDR massively increased government spending and thereby kept us in a depression for another eight years. While I certainly wouldn't argue for no financial regulation, we've had an abundance of it, and that is precisely what has gotten us into our current mess.

The fact is, the federal and state governments, i.e. Tom Friedman's kind of people, are precisely who has run this country into the ground. Yet he wants more and more of this, and thinks people will be stupid or blind enough not to see that he and his kind have ruined the country.

Let’s have no limits on corporate campaign spending so oil and coal companies can more easily and anonymously strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its powers to limit pollution in the air our kids breathe.

Translation: businesses that actually produce something that people need - as opposed to the parasites in government - should be disarmed so that they cannot fight back.

Let’s pay for more tax cuts by uncovering waste I can’t identify, fraud I haven’t found and abuse that I’ll get back to you on later.

Translation: my friends in the government can spend your money better than you can. If he can't identify waste, let me help: start by abolishing the Departments of Education and Energy, ending all foreign aid, and stopping those two ridiculous wars he's so enamored of.

The elite have lost the right to run the country. From the housing bubble to the subsequent bust, from the debasement of the dollar to the decline of manufacturing, from the massive bailouts of the TBTF banks to our impossible debt to the invasion from the south, the elites have been responsible for it all. They've run the nation into the ground, and then call for the hair of the dog.

I'll end with an excerpt from a piece by Mike Krieger, The Tipping Point Has Arrived:

I believe we have finally breached the tipping point in the socio-political landscape of the United States of America. There will be no going back from here. Everyone on all levels of society including the elites must make a choice. Will you stand for real reform and an end of the feudalistic rule of the oligarchs and their paid-off puppets that line the streets of Washington D.C., or will you keep your mouth shut and play the old and dying game in the context of a completely different cultural environment?

While many will disagree with what I am about to say, I believe the oligarchs and the Federal Reserve have already lost.

This will not be clear to the vast majority at this time because the powerful institutions that dominate and rob us will continue to fight for survival but the wind is already blowing in a different direction and cannot be reversed. The smart elites are starting to see this and are hedging their bets. The dumb or stubborn ones may want to start looking at countries with non-extradition treaties or start blowing the whistle on someone above them and fast. The window of opportunity to make the choice is closely quickly. “I was just following orders” will not cut it when the dollar collapses and Disneyland shuts down. There have not been any major arrests and people have seemingly gotten away with all their frauds and crimes. This too will change and 2011 will represent a change in trend in this regard. We have entered the terminal phase of this ponzi scheme economy and those responsible for its creation and its continued support at the expense of the vast majority of the populace will see their foul deeds rise to the surface.

Interview with a Reactionary

Robert Stark of The Voice of Reason Radio Network interviewed me today, the broadcast having been tonight. You can download the MP3 and listen here.

Topics we covered included:

• Calfornia—elections, environmental & demographic problems;
• The New Elite;
• The War on Drugs;
• The Tea Party movement—nationwide elections, accusations of racism, and implicit Whiteness over fear of demographic displacement;
• The agenda behind mass immigration & multiculturalism;
• Partisan politics;
• Beinart calls out the ADL;
• The situation in Europe & Thilo Sarrazin in Germany.

Thanks to Robert Stark for having me. We'll be doing a second interview to be broadcast next week.

World Corruption Index

The map depicts the level of corruption in the world's nations, as determined by Transparency International. Denmark, New Zealand, and Singapore are tied for first place as the least corrupt countries, and the U.S. does not even make the top 20.

What jumps out from the map is the correlation between corruption and levels of trust. Trust and corruption could be considered the flip side of each other: if you trust people and your government, one important reason will be because you believe that they are not corrupt. Conversely, if your country is corrupt, you won't trust people. Indeed, Transparency International itself makes the relationship explicit by saying, "Transparency and accountability are critical to restoring trust and turning back the tide of corruption." Western European countries and the Anglosphere have the highest levels of trust, which in turn is correlated with GDP; that can also be seen on the map. Note that the country in Latin America with the lowest levels of corruption, and presumably the highest levels of trust, is Chile, which stands out as having the highest GDP per capita there.

Robert Putnam's work has shown that diversity increases levels of distrust. That could partially explain why the U.S. doesn't make the top 20 in terms of least corruption, and why we'll probably remain out of the top 20.

The New Elite

Charles Murray believes that the Tea Party is correct in their assertion that a new elite rules the country. He sees this as a vindication of his and Herrnstein's thesis in The Bell Curve, viz. that the nation has become more segregated by cognitive ability.

What Herrnstein and I did not fully appreciate 16 years ago was how relentless this segregation would be. It is hard to get numbers -- no survey has samples large enough to calibrate precisely what's going on with the top percentiles of the population that I'm talking about -- but the numbers we do have, combined with qualitative data provided by observers such as Brooks, Florida and Bill Bishop, in his book "The Big Sort," are persuasive.

We know, for one thing, that the New Elite clusters in a comparatively small number of cities and in selected neighborhoods in those cities. This concentration isn't limited to the elite neighborhoods of Washington, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and San Francisco. It extends to university cities with ancillary high-tech jobs, such as Austin and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle.

Naturally, most of the elite have left-wing views:

Part of the isolation is political. In that Harvard survey I mentioned, 72 percent of Harvard seniors said their beliefs were to the left of the nation as a whole, compared with 10 percent who said theirs were to the right of it. The political preferences of academics and journalists among the New Elite also conform to the suspicions of the tea party.

Here's where I might disagree with Murray: his contention that many of the elite may actually be patriotic:

The bubble that encases the New Elite crosses ideological lines and includes far too many of the people who have influence, great or small, on the course of the nation. They are not defective in their patriotism or lacking a generous spirit toward their fellow citizens. They are merely isolated and ignorant. The members of the New Elite may love America, but, increasingly, they are not of it.

If liberal political commentary is at all representative, most of the elite has nothing but contempt for ordinary Americans, for flyover country. The other day, Rob Reiner, admittedly ultraliberal, compared the Tea Party to Hitler, to the general approval of host and audience on the Bill Maher show.

In turn, contempt for the elites, for the Ivy League, Wall Street, the Congress, does seem to be among the main, though relatively hidden, motivations of the Tea Party.

Murray doesn't mention affirmative action or immigration, and while the beneficiaries of AA or immigrants aren't necessarily a part of the New Elite, these policies are very much their creatures, and these also motivate the Tea Party movement.

Rise of the West

Stanford prof Ian Morris attempts to explain Western dominance through geography: Latitudes not Attitudes: How Geography Explains History. His explanation seems to have a lot in common with Jared Diamond's in Guns, Germs, and Steel, which also argued that geography set the stage for Western supremacy. Morris takes a few liberties with history, for example with this:

Many historians suggest that there is something unique about western culture. Just look, they say, at the philosophy of Socrates, the wisdom of the Bible, or the glories of Leonardo da Vinci; since antiquity, the West has simply outshone the rest. Such cultural comparisons, however, are notoriously subjective. Socrates, for instance, was certainly a great thinker; but the years in which he was active, during the fifth century bc, were also the age of the Hebrew prophets in Israel, of the Buddha and the founders of Jainism in India, of Confucius and the first Daoists in China. All these sages wrestled with much the same questions as Socrates (Can I know reality? What is the good life? How do we perfect society?) and the thoughts of each became ‘the classics’, timeless masterpieces that have defined the meanings of life for millions of people ever since.

Comparing Socrates and the rest of Greek philosophy to the Hebrew prophets or the Buddha is like comparing Einstein to an alchemist. And the selection of Socrates glosses over other Greeks who could be more properly called scientists, such as Aristotle or Eratosthenes. There is just no comparison between the inventors of free inquiry and science to the founders of religions.

The real conundrum in explaining the rise of the West is why China didn't become more powerful. Morris believes that the closer proximity of Britain, as compared to China, to the New World explains a lot. Unfortunately for this thesis, France, Spain are about equally close, and they had the advantage of larger populations.

If we were to grant that the West and China were about equally capable of technological and scientific development, a better explanation of the West's dominance lies with the Military Revolution starting around 1500. Mobile artillery, the trace italienne (artillery fortress), and the capital ship gave the West military superiority at a time when the world was wide open for conquest.

Of course, technology travels, and other non-Western nations soon adopted some of these military innovations, yet that didn't stop Western dominance, including over China. So while military superiority was important, and geography played a role, we must look elsewhere for the roots of the rise of the West.

The Rich Are Different from You and Me, They Have Higher DHEA Levels

Hormone research suggests rich live longer
A hormone which is more plentiful in wealthier people has been linked to longer life.

DHEAS - or dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate - is produced by the brain, adrenal glands and sexual organs and is a guide to life expectancy.

Researchers from University College London, working on the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, found evidence that biological ageing is slower among people with better socio-economic circumstances.

It found that the wealthier people were, the higher their levels of DHEAS.

The discovery raises the possibility that the hormone could be artificially produced and used to make people live longer.

The scientists also found that those with higher levels of it tended to do greater amounts of exercise, lead a more active life with lots of pastimes, and have more friends and family.

Production of it is greatest during childhood and the teenage years, before it gradually declines through adult life - by the age of 80 it could be just 10 per cent of the peak level of teenagers.

Having more DHEAS in the body is linked to a better memory and ability to cope with mental tasks, particularly in men.

What seems to be going on here is that wealth is correlated with IQ, which in turn is positively correlated with health and longevity. DHEAS is likely just one of many factors or markers that correlate with wealth and IQ; indeed, the article mentions another one, IGF-1, that is found in higher levels in the wealthy.

It's been suggested that higher IQ people have better compliance with doctors' advice, as well as being more health conscious (higher conscientiousness, thus higher future time orientation) and therefore not only leading a healthier lifestyle, but more cognizant of the circumstances in which they need to see a doctor.

But there's another possibility, which probably explains the current results with DHEAS, and that is the fitness factor. Higher IQ is an indication of a brain that functions better - it's been said that processing speed of the brain basically is IQ; when the brain is firing on all cylinders, so is the entire body associated with that brain, due to the "phenotype-wide fitness factor". That's why (see the link) sperm quality is associated with IQ, the association not being "mediated by age, body mass index, days of sexual abstinence, service in Vietnam, or use of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or hard drugs", i.e. it's mostly genetic.

All this also implies that wealth has a genetic component.

By the way, it's strange that the article says that the "discovery raises the possibility that the hormone could be artificially produced and used to make people live longer", because DHEA is readily available now at your corner drug store. But if the result is due to the fitness factor, taking it doesn't necessarily mean that it will improve health.

Juan Williams Fired for Comments on Muslims

Williams said something true, and not even on NPR, but we fired him anyway:

NPR has terminated its contract with Juan Williams, one of its senior news analysts, after he made comments about Muslims on the Fox News Channel. [...]

He continued: “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Mr. Williams also made reference to the Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty this month to trying to plant a car bomb in Times Square. “He said the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts,” Mr. Williams said.

NPR said in its statement that the remarks “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”

The lesson here: don't question diversity or the Religion of Peace or you'll lose your job.

Lefty groups like NPR used to place great emphasis on free speech and "speaking truth to power", but now emphasize the necessity of never deviating from the party line.

The first act of my administration will be the defunding of public broadcasting.

The Dark World of American Xenophobia

Writing in the LA Times, Gregory Rodriguez wonders why white Americans are so reluctant to allow their country to be taken over by outsiders: Never mind La Raza, only whites are racist:

One school of thought has it that, despite America's melting-pot mythos, a deep-seated strain of racism and disdain for strangers simply runs through the American character.

Right, every other group in the world is just itching to have their nations dissolve and themselves become a minority in their ancestral homelands.

Another holds that our ambivalence toward the "other" is tied to economic cycles and flares up in times of great social uncertainty. By that explanation, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant fervor are right on time, a perfect match for the Great Recession.

God bless the Great Recession, I say. If that's what it takes to make Americans that they're up to their knees in deep doo-doo, then it's welcome. I recently described the ultimate cause of American decline as complacency, and if we're to reverse the decline, complacency must be destroyed.

This argument sees American unity built on a somewhat fragile foundation. Instead of the shared ethnicity, religion and mores that bind together many nation states, we have only the political ideal of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Rodriguez is just making this shit up as he goes along. The fact that until recently we had an 85% or so white Christian majority, and thus plenty of shared ethnicity, religion, and mores, he just conveniently glosses over. Or lies, to put it succinctly.

Swiss psychoanalyst Arno Gruen [Jewish - DM] has argued that xenophobia and extreme nationalistic fervor in individuals is often compensation for "inner emptiness." It's an observation that seems to fit American unease all too well.

Rodriguez can't just come out and say that he is on board with a member of the Jewish-invented and -dominated Frankfurt School, a branch of sociology-psychology whose main purpose is the pathologizing of white Christians.

This is the world of the American multicult, which issues relentless propaganda directed against American whites trying to get them to release their already weakened grip on their country. And it's published and approved by the mainstream LA Times.

Free Pollard!

Those hard-line rightwingers at Frum Forum have got their priorities straight: Free Jonathan Pollard! According to them, he wasn't really spying, he was "spying" for Israel, so he therefore deserves to be free. Nothing is keeping him in prison but, according to the author of the piece, Peter Worthington, our "vindictiveness". He's been "maliciously and wrongly persecuted in the U.S.".

Whose side are the neocons on? I think the question almost answers itself.

The Rise and Fall of America

It's all pretty simple, really.

Around the turn of the 20th century, Britain was the world's greatest power, with vast imperial resources, sound money, and great self-confidence. Germany and France were not far behind. Then, in 1914, Europe went to war.

Meanwhile, the United States sat protected by two oceans, and had a conservative outlook and was disposed to look on business favorably. The American people were known for their independence and hardworking habits. Except for the last bit, it mostly sat out World War I.

Later we had the Great Depression, which affected the entire world.

Then, Europe went to war again. This time, the U.S. did not sit it out, but was nevertheless shielded from the destruction and impoverishment that the formerly leading powers endured, not to mention that the number of Americans killed was orders of magnitude lower for America than for many of the other belligerents.

We were the last man standing.

Sometime after World war II, the US dollar became the world's reserve currency. Due to worldwide destruction as well as the communist takeover of many countries, which necessarily makes countries poorer, The U.S. was the industrial powerhouse of the world.

That's when we started to become complacent. We thought we were special, and that our power and wealth would continue forever. We thought that the sexual revolution and mass immigration couldn't even put a dent in our society because, well, because we were America.

Yet we became even wealthier. Because of the dollar's status as reserve currency for the world, we were able to finance our wealth by issuing lots of debt. Our wealth was an illusion; in reality we were borrowing money to pay for our goodies. Meanwhile, the rest of the world had recovered, and other formerly poor countries - the "Third World" - had started to advance.

But, we were not special. American greatness owed itself to three things: geography with its protection against invasion - and it didn't hurt to have two weak neighbors; the American people, comprised mainly of descendants of Europeans; and a system of limited government, rule of law, and capitalism. All of these advantages are now either gone or have been greatly diminished. The majority American people are on the decline, due to mass immigration of non-European peoples and the proliferation of their descendants. This has also had its effects on the geographic advantage, for while this still prevents armies and navies from reaching us, it hasn't prevented scores of millions of people from coming to live here. The government has become much larger, takes an increasing share of the economy, has made many people dependent upon it, and has become very much anti-business and pro-redistribution.

Now we owe more money than we can ever possibly repay. Living standards are on the decline, because our manufacturing base has been hollowed out, and we can no longer borrow more money to keep up. There's no consensus that we must stop the madness of big government and vast debt, because complacency, easy living, and immigration have created a population that depends on the government and wants to see it expand, not diminish.

The only thing left is to inflate, or hyperinflate, our way out of debt, which will likely destroy the economy. But even should we see our way out of that, the fundamental problems will remain, and our advantages will still be gone.

The only thing left is decline.

Wilders to be acquitted?

Prosecutors ask for Wilders acquittal on all charges:

AMSTERDAM | Fri Oct 15, 2010 10:50am EDT

AMSTERDAM Oct 15 (Reuters) - Prosecutors asked a Dutch court on Friday to acquit anti-immigration lawmaker Geert Wilders on charges of inciting hatred and discrimination against Muslims.

Prosecutors, who had already called on the court to drop a charge that Wilders insulted Muslims by comparing Islam to Nazism, said his comments targeted Islam and not Muslims as a group. They said he also had the right as a politician to make statements about perceived problems in society.

Looks to me that the prosecutors know either that they have a losing case, or that the public in the Netherlands will be outraged by a conviction.

Does that mean that it is now acceptable to want to stop Muslim immigration in Europe? The tide appears to be turning. The world economic crisis is not in the control of the managerial elite, and now Europeans and Americans both are even less willing to see their nations transformed and their jobs erased due to immigration.

(Hat tip: Chris.)

Why the Japanese are so intelligent

These two charts come from the paper Distribution, interconversion, and dose response of n–3 fatty acids in humans, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The first shows the tissue distribution of omega-3 fatty acids, which have come under scrutiny in recent years as being critically important for health, as well as their relative under-consumption by most Westerners. Omega-6 fatty acids are over-consumed by Westerners, mainly in the form of vegetable oil. The chart shows the high concentration of DHA, one of the omega-3 fatty acids, in the brain (cerebral cortex).

The second chart shows reported concentrations of omega-3 in human milk from various countries. Since omega-3's are critically important for brain development, and since Japan has the highest reported concentration, it's not much of a stretch to think that this could well be involved in the higher IQ of the Japanese.

That is not to say that the heritable fraction of IQ is not as or more important, but it seems unlikely that the nutritional element here plays no role.

The Japanese are also perhaps the world's greatest consumers of iodine, which is also critically important for brain development, and which is correlated with IQ in children (pdf).

Both omega-3 fatty acids and iodine are abundant in fish. It seems that the old saw that fish is brain food is not off the mark.

Sox Sabotaged by Soy, Sucky Science

What happens when a professional sports team takes advice from an up-to-date, modern nutritionist? Their bones break. Paul Jaminet makes a good case that the broken-bone-plagued Boston Red Sox owe their injuries and their poor performance this year to malnourishment at the hands of a nutritionist who advises them to eat whole grains and avoid fat. At least 4 players had broken bones this year, the player who most closely followed the advice missing 144 games due to hairline fractures that wouldn't heal.

Unfortunately, the same nutritionist advises cancer patients on what to eat. I wonder how that's working out.

Dietary advice that ignores the evolutionary history of man is worthless, which means that about 90% of it is worthless. The low-fat paradigm arguably has given us the obesity epidemic, yet the mainstream refuses to even countenance this. A recent paper skewers conventional dietary guidelines, saying that they're based on "incomplete science" and "weak evidence", and that there's no evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy.

If you want a mens sana in corpore sano, ignore mainstream dietary advice.

A Moment for Optimism

Optimism is very uncharacteristic here, but let's note at least in passing the American who beat all estimates and punched a hole to reach those trapped Chilean miners (who, by the way, are all men). Driller from Denver becomes Chile mine rescue hero:

SAN JOSE MINE, Chile – Jeff Hart was drilling water wells for the U.S. Army's forward operating bases in Afghanistan when he got the call to fly to Chile.

He spent the next 33 days on his feet, operating the drill that finally provided a way out Saturday for 33 trapped miners.

"You have to feel through your feet what the drill is doing; it's a vibration you get so that you know what's happening," explained Hart, a contractor from Denver, Colorado.

A muscular, taciturn man with callused hands and a sunburned face, Hart normally pounds rock for oil or water.

He's used to extreme conditions while he works the hydraulic levers that guide the drills' hammers.

But this was something different — 33 lives were depending on him.

"I was nervous today," said Hart, 40.

He joked that he thought it was his heart stopping when he felt an unexplained "pop" just before the drill broke through into a chamber far underground. "I didn't want anything to go wrong."

Within hours after the gold and copper mine collapsed Aug. 5, Chile's government realized the mine's owners were ill-equipped to handle the rescue and asked the state-owned Codelco mining company to take the lead.

Codelco turned to Geotec Boyles Bros., a U.S.-Chilean company, to handle the "Plan B" escape shaft, one of three simultaneous drilling efforts that raced to reach the miners.

Geotec operations manager James Stefanic said he quickly assembled "a top of the line team" of drillers who are intimately familiar with the key equipment, including engineers from two Pennsylvania companies — Schramm Inc., which makes the T130 drill, and Center Rock Inc., which makes the drill bits.

He finally punched through Saturday, and then returned home.

The story echoes that of many Westerns: big, "taciturn" American, just doing his job with lives at stake, and then quietly going on his way, not one to stand in the spotlight for his moment of glory.

The equipment was American, too.

White people: is there nothing they can't do?

Why Intelligent People Drink More

Satoshi Kanazawa muses on why intelligent people drink more alcohol. Studies make clear that correlates of IQ, such as income or education, do not affect the result; when these are controlled for, IQ still positively correlates with the amount of drinking. Kanazawa suggests that his hypothesis, namely that intelligence mainly deals with evolutionarily novel aspects of the environment, could account for this result. Since the drinking of alcohol is a recent development, and the more intelligent engage in more evolutionary novel behavior, they drink more.

Could be. But maybe since alcohol has so many deleterious consequences, those with a lower IQ can't handle these consequences, and either drink themselves out of the system, e.g. through incarceration or disability, or otherwise quit drinking altogether. Considerations like this make me skeptical of the purported beneficial effects of alcohol on health: many teetotalers will be former alcoholics or people who cannot drink due to ill health, while many drinkers will have higher IQs, which is in itself correlated with better health.

Here's another reason that I offer only half-facetiously. The more intelligent are able to see reality more clearly, and the reality they see is not a pretty sight. Therefore they drink more to dull their perceptions of reality and, to quote Johnson, ease the pain of being a man. The less intelligent are satisfied with TV, sports, and celebrities.

The Greatest and Most Successful Pseudoscientific Fraud

Hal Lewis, "Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter", along with a number of other important advisory posts, has written a letter of resignation from the American Physical Society. An excerpt:

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d'être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

Lewis goes on to list his reasons to think that the APS is corrupt, bought by money coming from the promoters of the global warming scam.

Change of Thought

As this is apropos of just about everything we discuss here, from game to immigration to the decline of the West, let's take a look at Lawrence Auster's post, How is a return to a traditional society possible? The setting is the recent suicide of a Rutgers freshman after his "friends" put online a video of him engaged in a homosexual liaison. Auster:

The only solution lies outside that system. Namely, society needs to return to traditional morality, under which (a) sexual relations are only recognized and approved by society inside marriage, and non-marital relationships are not given any public recognition or status; (b) homosexual acts are considered wrong; and (c) sexual relations are not permitted in college dorms, males and females are housed in separate dorms, and the opposite sexes are not permitted to visit the other sex's dorms except during certain prescribed hours.

After a reader asks how Auster's solution could possibly come about, he replies:

As happens so often when readers ask how a re-traditionalized America could come into being, you seem to assume that I am advocating some program that would make this happen, and you are wondering what this program could be. I have no such program. I have no idea of forcing America to change. The change from the historical America to the hyper liberal America today was, above all, a change in thought. If the traditional America of 50 or 100 years ago could change into the hyper liberal America of today through a change in thought, then hyper liberal America could change into a re-traditionalized America through a change in thought. But such a change can only begin through a change in the mind and soul of each one of us. If that change could occur in one person, or in ten people, then it can occur in a thousand people, or in a million people. 

"A change in thought" has obviously occurred in a million different ways - our attitudes toward sexual matters, race, religion, even things like going into debt: society views all of these in strikingly different ways than it did a generation or two ago. But, why did our attitudes change? Auster has written many times about the responsibility of liberalism as a mode of thought for our current difficulties. He's written that most conservatives in reality think in liberal terms. If we accept that, why should everyone have turned liberal?

I hate to go all Marxist here, but one reason people have changed their attitudes toward a more liberal view is because they can. For example, the advent of effective birth control changed sexual mores: once one could prevent extramarital sex from producing illegitimate offspring, which long historical experience taught would either impoverish the mother or burden society, people no longer saw the need to disapprove of unmarried people having sex. And in fact, outside the fervently religious, it appears that not many people do in fact disapprove.

What about attitudes toward race, or nationalism, or feminism? Some of the change has come about because of constant propaganda (as with sex also), but also because the consequences have seemed so unremarkable. I believe that it is not a coincidence that, for example, opposition to birthright citizenship has become an issue just now, when the economy is in the tank and the future looks grim. For those with relatively short time horizons, which I would consider the majority in this country, while the economy was expanding and house prices rising, they (we) could afford to overlook this issue; now, not so much. It's staring us in the face.

We could analyze many other issues in this way. The point here being that "a change of thought" is only possible when people feel the consequences of their current ways. (Not that I think Auster would disagree with that.) Absent a new rise of religion, which issues commands divorced from expediency, I rather doubt that most people will change their minds on the morality of extramarital sex. They see no reason to, and see every advantage in not doing so.

Ideas have consequences, but social change, for example in technology or personal income, has consequences on ideas. That's why so many convicted felons get religion in prison: they now need it. The social disapproval of homosexuality has its roots, I hazard a guess, in the need for a society's growth, to which everyone is supposed to contribute. But we don't seem to see the need for that now; there are plenty of people, so along with the reduction in family size, another consequence is the gradual disappearance of social disapproval of homosexuality.

One person can have a change of thought, but for society as a whole this is not easily done.

Update: Auster responds at the original post. At first his response was reasonable, but then, unable to help himself, he added:

...Mangan deserves, from the point of view of strict justice, to be dismissed forever as a deranged anti-Semite and never to be quoted or discussed again by rational people. And even from his own point of view, since he has said that everything I write, on whatever subject, is really about helping the Jews, he himself has no basis for understanding my current argument for a return to traditionalism to be about a return to traditionalism, rather than about helping the Jews. Here, however, I will leave aside for the moment the fact that Mangan has disqualified himself as a participant in rational discussion. I will reply to his present argument, which is rational and worth replying to.

And he claims not to reduce everything to the interests of his tribe.