Is Demographics Really Destiny?

Today Elon Musk tweeted out ‘demographics is destiny’. This, of course, was the mantra of the Alt Right in its 1.0 version between 2014 and 2017. To be clear, Musk does not mean it in the Alt Right sense, he means it in the sense of total population. He believes that population needs to keep growing; I think he’s wrong. The Alt Right 1.0, and many people who remain from that milieu, believe that racial percentages will dictate the fates of their nations. For example, that because the white population is below birth replacement and immigrant populations are above birth replacement, the destiny of their nations is something like white genocide unless something is done. Again, I believe they are wrong, at least in this sense. This will likely be a shock to most readers, who I imagine believe that ‘demographics are destiny’ in either the Musk version or in the Alt Right version, or both. Musk’s argument is about population growth as opposed to depopulation; this will have to wait for another article because here I wish to explain why I disagree with the Alt Right 1.0 thesis.

First, however, an important caveat. ‘Demographics is destiny’ is not the same as the acknowledgement that ‘race is real’. This was another Alt Right 1.0 thesis which gets tangled up in the first one. For example, if you change the population of a city – let us say, Detroit – from white to black, then the results speak for themselves: the crime-rate and all other indicators will change from those typical of whites to those typical of blacks. Likewise, if cockneys move out of East London and into Essex, and if South Asians move into East London, then Essex becomes more cockney and East London becomes more South Asian. And, likewise, the crime rate and all other indicators will change from those typical of cockneys to those typical of South Asians. However, in neither case does this mean that the whites are done for: all that has happened is that they have moved from one place to another and temporarily surrendered their former home to another group. I will return to this later.

The classic version of ‘demographics is destiny’, in its Alt Right incarnation, came from an analysis of the US electoral map. Democrats import foreigners who give them votes in exchange for gibs: the calculus is the same for Labour in this country. As the demographics of each state change, so too does the colour of the state from red to blue. This was demographics as electoral destiny. Kentucky is still over 85% white, for example, and it has reliably voted for Mitch McConnell since 1985! Wahoo, what a result for Kentucky! Incidentally, Kentucky has a higher crime rate than Michigan, even though Detroit is in Michigan. The murder-rate of Louisville, KY (75% white) is 23 per 100,000 which is 13.5 times more violent than Sadiq Khan’s London (49.6% white, 1.7 per 100,000). Of course, dear reader, we both know why that is! 76% of those homicides in Louisville are by the 22.2% black population, whereas the non-whites in London tend to be of a different stock who typically have crime rates about the same as or lower than whites. But the point, if it is not already obvious, is that electoral destiny is basically meaningless. I need not rant about the Tories or the GOP: if it is not already obvious to you that these are your absolute enemies, perhaps even worse than the left, then you’re in the wrong place. Incidentally, three of the whitest states – Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire – are also among the most Democrat and most liberal. Those are the sorts of places where a Republican like Susan Collins is basically a liberal democrat in all but name.

Some people, Greg Johnson, for example, want to protect this first thesis and he remains a populist in the truest sense and even defends democracy and aspects of liberalism; accordingly, he’s spoken out against my elitism, elite theory-in-general, and against ‘Machiavellian’ analysis several times (have a look on Counter-Currents). I will dedicate an article to dealing with some of the issues he has brought up in the coming weeks. For now, I will simply say I am not convinced by his attempts to reframe my realism as utopianism and his own blue-eyed idealism as realism. Realism is not a liberal fiction invented by Thomas Hobbes, or whatever it is he argued, it’s all there in Polybius, Tacitus, and Livy: the historians that directly influenced Machiavelli.

The second, perhaps more widely applied version of ‘demographics is destiny’ is in the idea that demographic replacement will doom our nations and ultimately the white race itself. It is this second, stronger, thesis on which I wish to spend the remainder of the article.

The thesis of my book, The Populist Delusion (2022, buy it now, etc), is that the organised minority are the decisive factor in any society. This is also a dominant secondary theme in my forthcoming book, in many ways a sequel, The Prophets of Doom, which in the main looks at cyclical theories of civilisational history. Every thinker I cover in that book – Giambattista Vico, Thomas Carlyle, Arthur de Gobineau, Brooks Adams, Oswald Spengler, Pitirim Sorokin, Arnold Toynbee, Julius Evola, John Bagot Glubb, Joseph Tainter, and Peter Turchin – take the elitist line. This is not because they were all devotees of Mosca, Pareto and Michels, most of them likely had not read them (Spengler and Evola certainly both read Pareto, less sure on the others), but rather because, as students of history, each of them recognised Mosca’s law and the iron law of oligarchy as basic facts of human societies. When Spengler discusses culture, he is discussing high culture; when he talks about civilisation, he is talking about a ruling class. The same is true of Toynbee who speaks explicitly of a ‘creative minority’. None of the eleven thinkers cares an iota for the make up of the masses. The only thing that really matters in the long-run is what the elites do. The fate of empires, the destinies of nations, and so on, are almost exclusively decided by a few exceptional men. That has not suddenly changed because our governments proclaim themselves ‘liberal democracies’ or because you imagine your vote matters.

‘Whites’ in the West are broadly made up of two groups, one bad, the other worse: white liberals are bad; white conservatives are worse. If ‘demographics is destiny’ then what are we to make of these two abject groups, who surely bring shame to their people when viewed in the longue durée and are completely unworthy of their ancestors? Was it the destiny of whites to become libtard or conservatard? Whites managed this with, in some cases, almost entirely white majority nations, so where does that leave the thesis? Now most white nationalist types at this point would point to an external factor that has brainwashed or otherwise led whites astray. For example, they might say that Jewish groups at some point between 1890 and 1945 successfully subverted Western institutions, turned whites against themselves, fomented out-group preference and all but outlawed white in-group preference. Suppose this is your theory about ‘what happened’, is it an example of ‘demographics is destiny’ or is it an example of an organised minority dictating the direction of an elite from the top down? Note that at no point in history have Jews been anything close to a majority population in Europe or America. I ask you: were demographics their destiny? They are not even strictly against miscegenation: what they have done throughout their history is to maintain a tight network while making vertical relationships with power. This has made them very influential and over-index massively both in terms of national histories and on the world stage even though their general neglect of making horizontal relationships has often meant that they have not been very popular among the general population. But as with all other history, the truth of the various Jewish expulsions has come down to elite alliances: when they back the wrong horse or piss off the wrong horse, Power arrays against them.

Elites will transform populations to be some reflection of themselves. For example, when Germany had a National Socialist elite, the nation reflected the character of that elite, the demographics of the nation changed to reflect what that elite wanted. Currently we have elites who seek to transform every nation into a rainbow nation. There is a tendency to think of the changes they are making as being irreparable and permanent. However, massive migrations have happened in the past. In 1947, the Partition of India saw 18 million people move either to or from the newly formed Muslim regions that are now Bangladesh and Pakistan. In Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Tony Judt points out some seldom-acknowledged and inconvenient facts:

The continent of Europe was once an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities and nations. Many of its cities – particularly the smaller ones at the intersection of old and new imperial boundaries, such as Trieste, Sarajevo, Salonika, Cernovitz, Odessa or Vilna – were truly multicultural societies avant le mot, where Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and others lived in familiar juxtaposition. We should not idealise this old Europe. What the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called ‘the incredible, almost comical melting-pot of peoples and nationalities sizzling dangerously in the very heart of Europe’ was periodically rent with riots, massacres and pogroms – but it was real, and it survived into living memory.

Between 1914 and 1945, however, that Europe was smashed into the dust. The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking, into the second half of the twentieth century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after World War Two Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities – the Jews in France, for example—represented a tiny percentage of the population at large and were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream. Only Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union – an empire, not a country and anyway only part-European, as already noted – stood aside from this new, serially homogenous Europe.[1]

I hope you noticed what he said, I’ll write it again in italics for Billy at the back: Europe was a multicultural melting-pot and then separated back into ethnically-homogenous nations. Later he provides some startling numbers:

• Hitler and Stalin between them displaced or moved over 30 million people between 1939 and 1943, including 750,000 Polish peasants expelled from Western Poland.

• 160,000 Turks from Bulgaria to Turkey.

• 120,000 Slovaks from Hungary to Czechoslovakia in exchange for 120,000 Hungarians.

• 400,000 people from southern Yugoslavia to northern Yugoslavia.

• 600,000 Germans and Italians back to Germany and Italy from Yugoslavia.

• 623,000 Germans back to Germany from Hungary.

• 786,000 Germans back to Germany from Romania.

• 1.3 million Germans back to Germany from Poland.

• Poland’s population was 68% Pole in 1938 but nearly 100% Pole by 1946.

• Czechoslovakia’s population before the war was 22% German, 5% Hungarian, 3% Carpathian Ukrainians and 1.5% Jewish, was by 1946 almost exclusively Czech and Slovak.

• Of the 55,000 Czechoslovak Jews who survived the war, all but 16,000 would leave by 1950.

• 2 million French returned to France.

• 1.6 million Poles returned to Poland.

• 700,000 Italians returned to Italy.

• 300,000 Dutch returned to the Netherlands.

• 300,000 Belgians returned to Belgium.[2]

I hope the point I am making is clear. What has happened before, can happen again, will happen again. Things can change quickly. The entire world can be reordered in just a few years. And this happened at least twice during the Twentieth-century, if not three times. If you imagine large numbers of people cannot be moved in a short space of time, the data is all there. But more to the point: Europe was seldom more European than it was in the years directly following the war owing to the ethnic sorting that Judt outlines. If demographics really is destiny, then what the hell happened? Hitler’s work was largely done for him after the war. Germany was a lot more German in 1946 than it was in 1939. It’s obvious that the decisive factor is not demographics but something quite different: the makeup of elites, the will of the elites. Currently, elites in Europe jump to an American tune. Americans love the idea of the melting pot, they seek to transform every other nation into a version of itself. Europeans do not love the idea of the melting pot and like oil separates from water, Europeans simply do not integrate with foreign populations.

And this is where I provide a rare white pill: the melting pot – even in delusional, idiotic America – is a fiction. The many peoples who have arrived in Britain over the past thirty years, for example, have not simply vanished into some conglomerate British identity, they remain identifiably part of their own people. That is why dozens of Indian publications gushed with pride when Rishi Sunak became the prime minister. That is why the fabled ‘Windrush Generation’ are not mistaken for actual British people. Or, to use an extreme example, why Kurds, after literally hundreds of years of occupation by Persians, Arabs, Turks, and so on still think of themselves as Kurds. Multiculturalism does not work, but integration is a pipe-dream, which is to say that, aside from some exceptional cases, it simply does not exist. But what does this mean in practice? It means that just as in 1946 when no one had trouble telling a German from a Slovak or a Turk from a Hungarian, today no one has trouble telling a Somali from an Indian or from Dave from Yorkshire. So long as this remains the case – and it will because this is what humans are like – the possibility will remain for mass movements along the lines of those outlined by Judt after the war. When push comes to shove, every migrant has some idea of where they would go should the shit hit the fan: back to their homelands. The notion that peoples who self-identify as Indian could never go back to India, for example, is nonsensical. They can and would and will when the time comes. What we have today are de facto segregated ethnic communities who could easily be separated – as oil and water – in any war or postwar scenario. What the enemy wants is impossible: decades have shown it, history has shown it.

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[1] Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York and London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 8-9.

[2] Ibid., pp. 24-9.