The third degree of hostility

On the left, the Elliot Rodger murders are being blamed on privileged, entitled, white male rage. An example is a piece in Salon by Brittney Cooper with the following heading and subheading:

White guy killer syndrome: Elliot Rodger’s deadly, privileged rage

Can I go ahead and scream yet? It's time for America to admit what it's long resisted: White male privilege kills

Leftists like Brittney Cooper picked up on Elliot Rodger's sense of entitlement and fitted it very quickly to their belief that white males are a privileged class in society.

They did so despite the fact that Elliot Rodger identified as Eurasian rather than as white and that he ended up expressing hatred for both white men and women.

But the bigger picture is that leftist magazines like Salon feel comfortable expressing such open hostility toward white men. A sample of how Brittney Cooper feels about us:

But I am saying that we cannot understand Elliot Rodger’s clear mental health issues and view of himself as the supremely forsaken victim here outside a context of racism, white supremacy and patriarchy. I’m also saying that white male privilege might be considered a mental health issue, because it allows these dudes to move through the world believing that their happiness, pleasure and well-being matters more than the death and suffering of others.

This is madness.

But it is neither singular, nor anomalous. Every few years, the American public has to watch in horror as some white kid goes on a rampage, killing everything from babies to old people. Yet, neither the press nor the law will understand such perpetrators as monsters or terrorists. Few will have a conversation about white male pathology and the ways that systems of whiteness and patriarchy continue to produce white men who think like this.

We're being associated here with baby killing.

This is the third degree of hostility toward white people. The first degree began back in the late 1800s, when the Anglo-centric view of the classical liberals of the time, in which Anglo-Americans were thought to have a special dispensation to bring freedom to the world, and immigrants were therefore expected to assimilate to Anglo-Saxonism, was replaced with a pluralistic view in which all ethnic groups were to contribute equally to the American project.

This left the mainstream ethnic identity in a difficult situation as it had historic claims to be something more than just one element in a melting pot; for the new understanding to work, the mainstream ethnic group had to be reduced to something less than it had been. But it was still allowed to be one positive element in the mix.

The second degree of hostility arose at around the time of WWI. This was when Anglo intellectuals, feeling alienated from the mainstream culture, began to assert the idea that there was no worthy Anglo-American culture, and that Anglo-Americans should therefore be cosmopolitans intent on enjoying the vibrant cultures of others instead.

The third degree of hostility is the more aggressive one which asserts not just that Anglos, but whites in general, not only have no historic claim to be anything more than one element of America, and not only have no genuine culture of their own, but worse yet are responsible for systems of hatred and discrimination designed to harm others.

You can find expressions of all three degrees of hostility toward whites in America. But, clearly, Brittney Cooper prefers the third degree.

The traditionalist response to the Elliot Rodger crimes was put well by Jack Cashill (about whose politics I know very little):

Yes, there is a sickness afoot in the land, but feminists have no more hope of curing it with sexual harassment laws or enforced sensitivity training than Rodger did with his “day of retribution.”

Valenti and others on the left failed to see that this sickness set in when they and their ideological allies began to dismantle protective institutions of lasting value like family, community, nation, faith and married love.

...One Twitter post in defense of the parents sheds unwitting light on the world Rodger inhabited.

“Elliot Rodger’s parents gave, gave, gave,” reads the tweet. “Money. Housing. Resources. Therapy. Life Coaches. They got the police involved. Nothing happened.”

Here is what their parents did not give their son: a home, a neighborhood, a community, a church, a faith, a God, their time, their attention.

Feminists often talk about patriarchy as a negative thing, as a system designed to privilege men and oppress women. But in my understanding a patriarch is a man of culture and character who understands the need to uphold in society the kind of structures that Jack Cashill talks about. To describe a man as a patriarch of his community ought to be considered a very great compliment.

Modern Western society lacks patriarchs and so our young men are left with a "thin" understanding in which life is thought to be simply about having fun. In a well-balanced society fathers would be responsible not just for providing (being out of the home in pursuit of a career) but for cultivating in their sons and in the wider community a sense of the importance of:

• masculine character, with a corresponding pride in manhood
• family lineage, of ancestry and of the good name of the family
• the history of one's own people/ethny
• a man's role within the family as a husband and father
• men's role within the community, as protectors and as patriarchs
• one's faith; what one owes to God; of reverence and piety
• of culture as a higher expression of individual personality, of national character and of the spiritual life
• a connection to the land and to nature; a love of place

We traditionalists have to hold to this understanding at a time when the surrounding culture does not support us. We need to create the space which will not only allow us to hold firm, but one day to push back and retake some of the ground that has been lost.