Here is Steve Martin's "The Death of Socrates" from the early 1980s. I often cite this sketch as evidence of how America turned anti-intellectual over the course of the 1980s. The dopes won. If SNL did this sketch today most of the audience would have to Google Socrates if they cared to get the joke.
I hope you didn’t wet your whistle from that red cup being offered to you. It may have been roofied or even worse. I’ve read that hemlock tea has some serious side effects.
Europe lacks the ability to find a populist leader like Trump who goes against the grain of official thought. That gets to the heart of the European problem. The national leaders want a largely ineffective political union in order to preserve their own standing, so will not ultimately give up control of federal issues like borders. Therefore they appoint uncharismatic ex-politicians like Donald Tusk or the Austrian lady with seven children to pan-European offices. Maybe instead of national leaders one should just say “France”, as without France the rest of middle Europe might unite more easily behind a Germanic emperor who would have the legitimacy to enact more pro-European policies (as they occasionally did in the Middle Ages and in 1940-41). But this would diminish “la gloire” of the French president, so it doesn’t happen and the European Union remains the repository of globalist thinking.
I see you made some accommodations for a European audience such as using metric and dropping your colloquialism of Merkel's Boner as they are probably not conversant in the 1908 National League pennant race and think of the New York Giants as the team that beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl twice
I’ve often wondered how much the wholesale slaughter of the often most intelligent, certainly the bravest, of the young European men of 1914-1918, 1939-1945 before many of the them had a chance to reproduce, changed the character of succeeding generations in a way that can never be measured.
The weakness of the men of western Europe would be baffling to the men of 1914.
It's an interesting question. The war seems like a big genetic filter, but did the remaining people contain the genetic info to produce the normal distribution of temperaments? I don't think we know enough about cognitive genetics to say. Nurture could be a much bigger factor. Disastrous wars, even ones you win, can change the attitudes of the survivors. After WWII there was a whole lotta wondering what the point of all that was.
Theoretical tradeoffs between big and little polities is all well and good, but it was not lost on the architects (Founding Fathers) of the US continental nation that they were getting a nation and a continent together in part because of their shared culture and language.
This is what Europe lacked ever since the Romans stopped enforcing Roman law and Latin language in the prior millennium.
Yeah contiguity is relevant, but if you don't have the language and the rules of those on the opposite bank of the river, the continentalist task is at best an uphill battle. The ancient Romans did quite literally wage that uphill battle and—after wading through blood—did enjoy the fruits of continentalism for a few centuries. More recently, Napoleon and Hitler tried to repeat the Roman feat, but after the uphill-wading-through-blood part, their respective continental moments were both astonishingly fleeting, (and arguably both were done in by perfidious Albion's competing Noncontiguous Imperial scheming).
Ironically, the misdeeds of the past may have inadvertently set the stage for a rebirth of the European continental nation. The British Noncontiguous Empire is now dismantled and discredited, but Anglophone dominance resulting from the World Wars has created a foundational trans-European language and culture once more.* And Merkel's Mistake and its ongoing consequences has provided every European town and village with a concrete, visceral demonstration of the threat to Europeans from aliens, fulfilling Ronald Reagan's formerly bafflingly sci-fi prophecy.
The table is now set. The question (as commenter SJ averred) is, is there a New Napoleon or European Trump who will grasp the chalice and drink to the New Europe? Or will the banquet be devoured by the invaders?
Or will it be a century-long Neo-Roman slog to rebuild, one bloody uphill battle at a time?
---------
* Yeah, it's a crappy culture, but it's a continentally SHARED crappy culture.
I'm baffled by how anyone smart enough to make it to the UN could be baffled by Reagan's Sci-fi musing. It's obviously true, and the correct use of science fiction. He also told the story so economically that Hemingway would be proud.
I don't grok how someone could be as smart as Powell and not get it. Ah well, I guess different people are different. I suppose that's what makes them different.
You don't have to be very smart to get to the UN, just utterly convention-following. The UN is literally the congress of convention-followers.
Reagan's parable wasn't logically difficult, it's just that 40 years ago sci-fi tropes were culturally baffling for the soi-disant high-culture grandees who attend these things.
Anyway, the point is that unlike 40 years ago, when the alien threat was largely abstract and theoretical, now it's ostentatiously swaggering on every High Street.
I'd wager I have more contempt for the UN than you, but I concede that to be one of the people in the chairs you have to have at least 1 std above median intelligence. That's more than enough to understand. I guess it doesn't compute if your entire career is based on mediating squabbles between countries. Almost all conflict is based on the human instinct to fight other groups for control of land. If Reagan made you realize how pointless and psychological it all is, that could make you feel bad.
OTOH, are we sure that 40% of people of earth wouldn't go "I for one welcome our new ant overlords"?
Harry Turtledove wrote a series of alternative history books based on the premise of an alien invasion during World War 2 and the resulting cooperation of warring nations against the space invaders. At least I think that’s what happens in the books; I haven’t read them.
"A foundational trans-European language and culture". Conceivably, but I doubt it.
According to the EU's statistics, about half its citizens claim to be competent in English. But persuasive political rhetoric requires more than competence. It involves allusions, quotations, slogans, historical points of reference, nicknames, jokes. "This is our most incompetent government since King Ethelred the Unready. The prime minister parrots the language of Conservatism but he is a closet Whig. As Disraeli said to Queen Victoria..." and so on. In France, no doubt, this dreadful government of ours would be physiocratic, hexagonal and as hopeless as Necker, or something of the sort.
No European politician has won a continent-wide following because it is not possible to engage with the entire continent in this kind of way. Even that half of the audience who understood the words would not understand on the level of cultural language.
A continent-wide politician doesn't have to be spectacularly popular, he just has to be more popular than the existing politicians. Given that Europe's 'mainstream' (Starmer, Macron, Merz) politicians are all spectacularly *un*popular, that is a low bar. (It's a funny irony that the leaders of the supposed 'democracies' are unpopular, while the 'dictatorial' 'authoritarians' are relatively popular, especially in their own countries, while the 'democrats' are unpopular everywhere, lol.)
Trump is popular in the US because of his perceived authenticity: that he talks like a regular guy doing regular things about real stuff. No one expects, or even wants, learned allusions, esoteric historical references, or any kind of intellectualism from Trump. They just want him to fire the elites, deport the illegals, crush their enemies, drive them before him, hear the lamentations of their women, etc. They want the barbaric. Trump delivers.
Anyhow, I don't think a single sui generis European politician is really necessary. Europe already has its Orban/Meloni/Visegrad leaders. They just have to move from the fringe to the core. The 'mainstream' establishment senses this, and fears it.
The language that matters even more than English is the language of action. "Mass migration is an unstoppable force of nature we just have to accept!"? Trump's action showed how false this is. No one is missing this lesson. No amount of British witticisms, French double entendres, or German slogans can compete with that.
Excellent Steve. As always, sensible and right on point. Hopefully the assembled continentals will take your observations and implied recommendations and translate them into coherent policy positions to advocate. I'd really like it if my kids (and someday grandkids, etc.) could visit the old ancestral continent and islands (have to throw in a nod to my English/Scottish/Irish ancestors) and actually enjoy it.
The speech was excellent to read. The most profound part was Steve Sailer's explanation of the lefties' affinities. Their first affinity is their own lefty circle. Their second affinity are peoples they don't really know, the others from far away. Their last affinity is to those who are closer to them but with different values. In reality, these closer peoples with different values are hated by the left. A lefty living in Manhattan or Georgetown have much greater affinity for the Hispanic busboy they don't know who works at their favorite restaurant than they do a rancher in North Dakota, a Greenville SC car dealer or a Texas roughneck drilling for oil. Lefties despise these people for being Trumpers.
Think about Bill Kristol. About five years ago he said he preferred the Hispanic illegal aliens who work rather than the white Americans who won't work. Hatred just oozed from Kristol's lips. Yet I am sure Kristol has little to do with either the Hispanics who work landscaping his yard or bussing tables in his favorite restaurants or the conservative whites who do the bulk of the real work of our nation. Kristol lives in a tight little cocoon.
I've done some reading (by which I mean YouTube viewing) about the Mongol invasions, over the past few months. The defenders on the border with the Golden Horde (Hungarians?) would ask the princes of Europe for a little help and the responses were surprisingly mixed. I wonder about the psychology, the motivations...the difference between the logical self preservation response/long term thinking and the petty squabbling they chose instead.
That aspect of history is seldom covered. This is most likely because it's difficult. I couldn't explain to an outsider some of the reactions people have to Trump policy. I have no hope of understanding why people did illogical things in the past.
Europe *should* have an easier time expelling their aliens--just stop the free stuff.
I thought the alligators and big raids were brilliant ways to scare illegals into self-deporting (amplified by horrified Dems), and then Trump started on about farm and hospitality workers getting a reprieve. If he were testing the waters or trying to show how much opposition to that there is, he should have let someone else propose it.
Someone on X posted a probably fake letter from DHS imposing a huge fine ($1.8M) for being here illegally and recommending leaving within a week. Make it real, Donald!
> The problem seems to be largely sociological. The kind of people who go to work for pan-European institutions tend to see their mission in life not as working for the good of Europeans so much as warring on nationalists within Europe. Thus, importing millions of non-Europeans ...
...
After all, European values require the sweeping away of Europeans.<
Good point about European institutions and that final values/sweeping line another great iSteve one-liner.
That's the thing. All this endless blather about "Europe"--which is actually quite reasonable--but seemingly zero desire to protect the actually important thing about Europe--European people and nations, but in fact, the reverse the demand to destroy it. It is logically ... nuts! Insane.
Essentially European elites because of our post-1945 dominance have been pickled in the minoritarian diversity glop from America. The shrinking of the world, especially the West has meant all the toxic bilge pumped out from post-coup America has polluted the brains of "educated elites" across the West. (And even further afield but especially the West.) Our racial dramas, our minoritarian bilge, our "diversity" happy talk ... have become--been imposed--pan-Western. The same dumb, cancerous, anti-national, anti-civilizational ideas that allow elites to virtue signal dominate both here and there.
Steve, great picture of you giving your speech, how was the cocktail?
Steve looks surprisingly buff in a toga.
Maybe this is the way to go instead of that jacket-and-tie headshot contest Steve had a few months back.
Here is Steve Martin's "The Death of Socrates" from the early 1980s. I often cite this sketch as evidence of how America turned anti-intellectual over the course of the 1980s. The dopes won. If SNL did this sketch today most of the audience would have to Google Socrates if they cared to get the joke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdHp0FmEr78
The current SNL crowd would be appalled by the lack of diversity. There have been no jokes on SNL for many years.
I hope you didn’t wet your whistle from that red cup being offered to you. It may have been roofied or even worse. I’ve read that hemlock tea has some serious side effects.
Europe lacks the ability to find a populist leader like Trump who goes against the grain of official thought. That gets to the heart of the European problem. The national leaders want a largely ineffective political union in order to preserve their own standing, so will not ultimately give up control of federal issues like borders. Therefore they appoint uncharismatic ex-politicians like Donald Tusk or the Austrian lady with seven children to pan-European offices. Maybe instead of national leaders one should just say “France”, as without France the rest of middle Europe might unite more easily behind a Germanic emperor who would have the legitimacy to enact more pro-European policies (as they occasionally did in the Middle Ages and in 1940-41). But this would diminish “la gloire” of the French president, so it doesn’t happen and the European Union remains the repository of globalist thinking.
Europe just can't avail themselves of the "white polite" thing. Even when they are staring straight in the face of their own demise.
I see you made some accommodations for a European audience such as using metric and dropping your colloquialism of Merkel's Boner as they are probably not conversant in the 1908 National League pennant race and think of the New York Giants as the team that beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl twice
Merkel still can't live his "boner" down. And Fred Merkel died in 1956, Daytona Beach of all places.
Only because it helps to distinguish between the Giant and the German, the former is Fred Merkle
Not many people know of Merkel's boner of 1908.
I’ve often wondered how much the wholesale slaughter of the often most intelligent, certainly the bravest, of the young European men of 1914-1918, 1939-1945 before many of the them had a chance to reproduce, changed the character of succeeding generations in a way that can never be measured.
The weakness of the men of western Europe would be baffling to the men of 1914.
It's an interesting question. The war seems like a big genetic filter, but did the remaining people contain the genetic info to produce the normal distribution of temperaments? I don't think we know enough about cognitive genetics to say. Nurture could be a much bigger factor. Disastrous wars, even ones you win, can change the attitudes of the survivors. After WWII there was a whole lotta wondering what the point of all that was.
Theoretical tradeoffs between big and little polities is all well and good, but it was not lost on the architects (Founding Fathers) of the US continental nation that they were getting a nation and a continent together in part because of their shared culture and language.
This is what Europe lacked ever since the Romans stopped enforcing Roman law and Latin language in the prior millennium.
Yeah contiguity is relevant, but if you don't have the language and the rules of those on the opposite bank of the river, the continentalist task is at best an uphill battle. The ancient Romans did quite literally wage that uphill battle and—after wading through blood—did enjoy the fruits of continentalism for a few centuries. More recently, Napoleon and Hitler tried to repeat the Roman feat, but after the uphill-wading-through-blood part, their respective continental moments were both astonishingly fleeting, (and arguably both were done in by perfidious Albion's competing Noncontiguous Imperial scheming).
Ironically, the misdeeds of the past may have inadvertently set the stage for a rebirth of the European continental nation. The British Noncontiguous Empire is now dismantled and discredited, but Anglophone dominance resulting from the World Wars has created a foundational trans-European language and culture once more.* And Merkel's Mistake and its ongoing consequences has provided every European town and village with a concrete, visceral demonstration of the threat to Europeans from aliens, fulfilling Ronald Reagan's formerly bafflingly sci-fi prophecy.
The table is now set. The question (as commenter SJ averred) is, is there a New Napoleon or European Trump who will grasp the chalice and drink to the New Europe? Or will the banquet be devoured by the invaders?
Or will it be a century-long Neo-Roman slog to rebuild, one bloody uphill battle at a time?
---------
* Yeah, it's a crappy culture, but it's a continentally SHARED crappy culture.
I'm baffled by how anyone smart enough to make it to the UN could be baffled by Reagan's Sci-fi musing. It's obviously true, and the correct use of science fiction. He also told the story so economically that Hemingway would be proud.
When Colin Powell was Reagan's National Security Adviser, he'd get weirded out by Reagan's flying saucer parable. He never got the point.
I don't grok how someone could be as smart as Powell and not get it. Ah well, I guess different people are different. I suppose that's what makes them different.
You don't have to be very smart to get to the UN, just utterly convention-following. The UN is literally the congress of convention-followers.
Reagan's parable wasn't logically difficult, it's just that 40 years ago sci-fi tropes were culturally baffling for the soi-disant high-culture grandees who attend these things.
Anyway, the point is that unlike 40 years ago, when the alien threat was largely abstract and theoretical, now it's ostentatiously swaggering on every High Street.
I'd wager I have more contempt for the UN than you, but I concede that to be one of the people in the chairs you have to have at least 1 std above median intelligence. That's more than enough to understand. I guess it doesn't compute if your entire career is based on mediating squabbles between countries. Almost all conflict is based on the human instinct to fight other groups for control of land. If Reagan made you realize how pointless and psychological it all is, that could make you feel bad.
OTOH, are we sure that 40% of people of earth wouldn't go "I for one welcome our new ant overlords"?
Harry Turtledove wrote a series of alternative history books based on the premise of an alien invasion during World War 2 and the resulting cooperation of warring nations against the space invaders. At least I think that’s what happens in the books; I haven’t read them.
"A foundational trans-European language and culture". Conceivably, but I doubt it.
According to the EU's statistics, about half its citizens claim to be competent in English. But persuasive political rhetoric requires more than competence. It involves allusions, quotations, slogans, historical points of reference, nicknames, jokes. "This is our most incompetent government since King Ethelred the Unready. The prime minister parrots the language of Conservatism but he is a closet Whig. As Disraeli said to Queen Victoria..." and so on. In France, no doubt, this dreadful government of ours would be physiocratic, hexagonal and as hopeless as Necker, or something of the sort.
No European politician has won a continent-wide following because it is not possible to engage with the entire continent in this kind of way. Even that half of the audience who understood the words would not understand on the level of cultural language.
A continent-wide politician doesn't have to be spectacularly popular, he just has to be more popular than the existing politicians. Given that Europe's 'mainstream' (Starmer, Macron, Merz) politicians are all spectacularly *un*popular, that is a low bar. (It's a funny irony that the leaders of the supposed 'democracies' are unpopular, while the 'dictatorial' 'authoritarians' are relatively popular, especially in their own countries, while the 'democrats' are unpopular everywhere, lol.)
Trump is popular in the US because of his perceived authenticity: that he talks like a regular guy doing regular things about real stuff. No one expects, or even wants, learned allusions, esoteric historical references, or any kind of intellectualism from Trump. They just want him to fire the elites, deport the illegals, crush their enemies, drive them before him, hear the lamentations of their women, etc. They want the barbaric. Trump delivers.
Anyhow, I don't think a single sui generis European politician is really necessary. Europe already has its Orban/Meloni/Visegrad leaders. They just have to move from the fringe to the core. The 'mainstream' establishment senses this, and fears it.
The language that matters even more than English is the language of action. "Mass migration is an unstoppable force of nature we just have to accept!"? Trump's action showed how false this is. No one is missing this lesson. No amount of British witticisms, French double entendres, or German slogans can compete with that.
Excellent Steve. As always, sensible and right on point. Hopefully the assembled continentals will take your observations and implied recommendations and translate them into coherent policy positions to advocate. I'd really like it if my kids (and someday grandkids, etc.) could visit the old ancestral continent and islands (have to throw in a nod to my English/Scottish/Irish ancestors) and actually enjoy it.
The speech was excellent to read. The most profound part was Steve Sailer's explanation of the lefties' affinities. Their first affinity is their own lefty circle. Their second affinity are peoples they don't really know, the others from far away. Their last affinity is to those who are closer to them but with different values. In reality, these closer peoples with different values are hated by the left. A lefty living in Manhattan or Georgetown have much greater affinity for the Hispanic busboy they don't know who works at their favorite restaurant than they do a rancher in North Dakota, a Greenville SC car dealer or a Texas roughneck drilling for oil. Lefties despise these people for being Trumpers.
Think about Bill Kristol. About five years ago he said he preferred the Hispanic illegal aliens who work rather than the white Americans who won't work. Hatred just oozed from Kristol's lips. Yet I am sure Kristol has little to do with either the Hispanics who work landscaping his yard or bussing tables in his favorite restaurants or the conservative whites who do the bulk of the real work of our nation. Kristol lives in a tight little cocoon.
I've done some reading (by which I mean YouTube viewing) about the Mongol invasions, over the past few months. The defenders on the border with the Golden Horde (Hungarians?) would ask the princes of Europe for a little help and the responses were surprisingly mixed. I wonder about the psychology, the motivations...the difference between the logical self preservation response/long term thinking and the petty squabbling they chose instead.
That aspect of history is seldom covered. This is most likely because it's difficult. I couldn't explain to an outsider some of the reactions people have to Trump policy. I have no hope of understanding why people did illogical things in the past.
Europe *should* have an easier time expelling their aliens--just stop the free stuff.
I thought the alligators and big raids were brilliant ways to scare illegals into self-deporting (amplified by horrified Dems), and then Trump started on about farm and hospitality workers getting a reprieve. If he were testing the waters or trying to show how much opposition to that there is, he should have let someone else propose it.
Someone on X posted a probably fake letter from DHS imposing a huge fine ($1.8M) for being here illegally and recommending leaving within a week. Make it real, Donald!
> The problem seems to be largely sociological. The kind of people who go to work for pan-European institutions tend to see their mission in life not as working for the good of Europeans so much as warring on nationalists within Europe. Thus, importing millions of non-Europeans ...
...
After all, European values require the sweeping away of Europeans.<
Good point about European institutions and that final values/sweeping line another great iSteve one-liner.
That's the thing. All this endless blather about "Europe"--which is actually quite reasonable--but seemingly zero desire to protect the actually important thing about Europe--European people and nations, but in fact, the reverse the demand to destroy it. It is logically ... nuts! Insane.
Essentially European elites because of our post-1945 dominance have been pickled in the minoritarian diversity glop from America. The shrinking of the world, especially the West has meant all the toxic bilge pumped out from post-coup America has polluted the brains of "educated elites" across the West. (And even further afield but especially the West.) Our racial dramas, our minoritarian bilge, our "diversity" happy talk ... have become--been imposed--pan-Western. The same dumb, cancerous, anti-national, anti-civilizational ideas that allow elites to virtue signal dominate both here and there.