Responding to Proposition Natalism

1,352 words

By now you’ve seen Steve King’s tweet about how babies have to be ours for our civilization to continue. He’s the same Representative from Iowa who once said Whites made more contributions to Western civilization than any other “subgroup.” (Unfortunately, he caved under pressure recently and tried to explain that he didn’t mean what he said.)

Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies. https://t.co/4nxLipafWO

— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) March 12, 2017

The reactions from the Left have been that this makes him Hitler reborn. All babies are our babies! If you think it matters that there’s always been a large white majority in the United States that has hugely contributed to making us who we are as Americans, you’re a bad person. If you think it’s good that people of color will replace them as the majority in the next two decades thanks to immigration and fertility rates, then you’re a good person. In their paradigm, American society pre-today has basically been retconned as National Socialist. So yes, the men who founded this country “for ourselves and our posterity” were full-on KKK Nazi supremacists [sic], since they limited immigration and naturalization to “free white persons of good character.” If you want children in your likeness and image, you’re an immoral, disgusting un-person.

The insanity of this narrative is apparent. But better were the mortified, more simplistic kneejerk responses from America’s NPCs:

What is “our civilization”?

Who are “our babies”?

What did he mean by this?!?!?!

Having spent a few hours in the trenches of King’s official Facebook page reading and trolling the comments, I learned a lot about what Boomers, catladies, new atheists, and Jews think about white Christian conservatives, Western civilization, and demographic changes. Or rather, had my well-field-researched sketches of their views (re)confirmed. Basically white = bad, POC = good. You’re a bigot if you flip those. I claim we’re all equal, but also that whites deserve to become a minority in their own countries. And of course: wow, just wow!

Twitter is generally more entertaining. Prominent cuckservative Rick Wilson said “the West” had to be about either “values” or “race,” and implied that King had made the wrong choice. Actually, wanting to maintain your values while peopling your society with those who do not share them is the wrong choice. The CIA’s Egg McMuffin chastised King for promoting “the un-American ideas of White Nationalism;” you know, like two centuries of having an eighty-five to ninety percent white country and banning most immigration from outside of Europe. A Microsoft employee named Craig Beilinson mewled, “You know that you were ‘somebody else’s baby’ too, right? Or do you not understand how this works?” Indeed, a lot of people do not understand how this works. Other than Jontron, apparently. (Does this mean we’re finally getting ethics in video game journalism?)

In my opinion, the best tweet was from Chelsea Clinton, who kvetched that “[c]learly the Congressman does not view all our children as, well, all our children. Particularly ironic & painful on Purim.” Now, according to the Jews, Purim is the celebration of a thwarted attempt to commit genocide against them by the Persians. Imagine if the Persians had succeeded . . . for what is genocide if not ultimately replacement by other people’s babies? Ironic indeed.

What makes King’s comments so spectacular in every sense is that they touched on a very raw nerve for the politics of any society, the politics of reproduction. That is to say, babies. To be precise, King tweeted that “culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” This is truer in a settler-colonial society, or “a nation of immigrants,” than anywhere else. In such a society, the most precious material you have is babies. Without children, nothing you build upon the land being settled will matter. It will revert to nothing when you die. It will be left as ruins and fold back into the dust.

Any healthy people knows it must reproduce. Call it a covenant with God, call it instinct, call it the selfish gene, call it love – it doesn’t matter. If you don’t leave your genes behind or advance those who have them, your impact on humanity is only going to last for as long as you’re remembered. If enough people fail to reproduce, or enough outgroups fill the gap, the tribe dies and takes its culture with it.

This is what the significance of our babies as opposed to someone else’s means. Our babies are our continuity as a people, nation, and civilization. Someone else’s babies are exactly that: the continuity of a different people, nation, and civilization.

Let’s get abstract here for a bit, since most Americans seem to be pants-on-head retarded about this. Let’s say there’s a tribe of Red People. There are one hundred Red couples of childbearing age. They average about two kids, so two hundred Red People will be born over, say, twenty years. But for each of those twenty years, more Blue People enter Redland than there are Red People born. Therefore, most of the growth in Redland is due to Blue immigration. And it just keeps happening, and then one day, most children in Redland are Blue. The Red People will become a minority not long after (and now there are Purple People, too).

Now, whether this matters depends on which tribe you care about. If you prefer Blue People, just admit this is so and openly side with them. But don’t for one second try to convince me that Blue is Red, or that Blue children are Red children, because you don’t actually believe your own universalist bullshit. If you did, you’d actually want what’s best for your own people, not everyone but your own people. You’d love thy actual neighbor. This isn’t an issue for the pro-immigration Blues. They’re just naturally acting in favor of themselves. It’s the pro-immigration Reds of whom we should be deeply skeptical. Why is it that you want Redland to become Blue? The burden is on you to justify supporting this change, not on me to explain why I am opposed to becoming a minority.

Why am I telling you a childish allegory about immigration? Because this is all about children.

On one side, we have what could be called kin-based natalists, who believe that the children of their own kind are their successors. This includes most of the animal kingdom and most human societies. On the other, we have proposition natalists, who believe all children are their successors. Like civic nationalists, who think anyone can be made into an American (so let’s transplant Somalis into Minnesota), the proposition natalist looks at America’s majority non-white toddlers (most of whom have shallow generational ties to this land) and says, “These are our children.” In other words, they’re Americans because they were born here, not because of lineage or any sort of predefined in-group ties. (Though if I had a child in China with another white person, that child would never be Chinese!)

I don’t think there’s any middle ground between the rival natalisms short of being an assimilationist, which is ultimately what King tried to paint himself as after being barraged for two days straight. Of course, we can’t have a multiracial monoculture either, because reasons. The Left says it’s “racist” to conform to white standards, so that’s out the window. Nationalists say they don’t want any more immigrants who can’t or won’t assimilate. (And the Alt Right says you can’t make an African into an Anglo-Saxon.)

So really, the compromise is thus to stop letting in people for whom it would be “racist” to force them to assimilate, not demanding that Berbers, Bengalis, and Bhutanese people be white-presenting. But that would mean having a whites-only immigration policy.

Which would also be “racist.”

“Racism” is the sanest choice, then. Sorry, but it’s true. Proposition natalism is never going to work; it just creates a perpetual identity crisis. Trying to build a universal tribe is a doomed ambition.

This article originally appeared at The Right Stuff.