Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, is a classic in race studies. Below, a few excerpts from the first chapter, “Race and democracy” (no ellipsis added):
In the democratic forms of government the operation of universal suffrage tends toward the selection of the average man for public office rather than the man qualified by birth, education and integrity. How this scheme of administration will ultimately work out remains to be seen but from a racial point of view it will inevitably increase the preponderance of the lower types and cause a corresponding loss of efficiency in the community as a whole.
The tendency in a democracy is toward a standardization of type and a diminution of the influence of genius.
In the French Revolution the majority, calling itself “the people,” deliberately endeavored to destroy the higher type and something of the same sort was in a measure done after the American Revolution by the expulsion of the Loyalists and the confiscation of their lands, with a resultant loss to the growing nation of good race strains, which were in the next century replaced by immigrants of far lower type.
In America we have nearly succeeded in destroying the privilege of birth; that is, the intellectual and moral advantage a man of good stock brings into the world with him. We are now engaged in destroying the privilege of wealth; that is, the reward of successful intelligence and industry and in some quarters there is developing a tendency to attack the privilege of intellect and to deprive a man of the advantage gained from an early and thorough classical education.
In an aristocratic as distinguished from a plutocratic or democratic organization the intellectual and talented classes form the point of the lance while the massive shaft represents the body of the population and adds by its bulk and weight to the penetrative impact of the tip. In a democratic system this concentrated force is dispersed throughout the mass. It supplies, to be sure, a certain amount of leaven but in the long run the force and genius of the small minority is dissipated, and its efficiency lost. Vox populi, so far from being Vox Dei, thus becomes an unending wail for rights and never a chant of duty.
While democracy is fatal to progress when two races of unequal value live side by side, an aristocracy may be equally injurious whenever, in order to purchase a few generations of ease and luxury, slaves or immigrants are imported to do the heavy work. It was a form of aristocracy that brought slaves to the American colonies and the West Indies and if there had been an aristocratic form of governmental control in California, Chinese coolies and Japanese laborers would now form the controlling element, so far as numbers are concerned, on the Pacific coast.
It was the upper classes who encouraged the introduction of immigrant labor to work American factories and mines and it is the native American gentleman who builds a palace on the countryside and who introduces as servants all manner of foreigners into purely American districts. The farming and artisan classes of America did not take alarm until it was too late and they are now seriously threatened with extermination in many parts of the country. In Rome, also, it was the plebeian, who first went under in the competition with slaves but the patrician followed in his turn a few generations later.
The West Indian sugar planters flourished in the eighteenth century and produced some strong men; today from the same causes they have vanished from the scene.
During the last century the New England manufacturer imported the Irish and French Canadians and the resultant fall in the New England birthrate at once became ominous. The refusal of the native American to work with his hands when he can hire or import serfs to do manual labor for him is the prelude to his extinction and the immigrant laborers are now breeding out their masters and killing by filth and by crowding as effectively as by the sword.
Thus the American sold his birthright in a continent to solve a labor problem. Instead of retaining political control and making citizenship an honorable and valued privilege, he entrusted the government of his country and the maintenance of his ideals to races who have never yet succeeded in governing themselves, much less any one else.
Associated with this advance of democracy and the transfer of power from the higher to the lower races, from the intellectual to the plebeian class, we find the spread of socialism and the recrudescence of obsolete religious forms.
10 replies on “Race and democracy”
Interesting post, and website. Tell me Chechar, if you don’t mind, what is it like being a Criollo? What I mean is:
1) How are you treated by the other groups?
2) What is their image of you guys?
3) Are wealthier Criollos lost in indulgence, and how do they treat less monied Criollos?
4) Are Criollos “on the run” or “slated for extinction?”
5) Are Criollos quicker to be aware of their difference?
6) Have you red this type of interpretation of Criollos: [link]
7) Have you hears of the “Caste War” or the “republic of Yucatan?”
8) Do you feel Criollos are in anyway hated by the others?
1) You mean here in Mexico? Fairly well. There’s no race war going on here I believe because after 500 years of race-blind Catholicism the mestization is almost complete.
2) Whose image? The overwhelming majority of the Mexicans are genotypally, though not phenotypally, mestizos. Even many of the blond, blue-eyed ones may have an Amerindian ancestor. Ironically, the general image of the population is that the fairest specimens are the whiter.
3) Criollos here have become incredibly stupid, retarded and completely deracinated in race matters. If you read Spanish I could give you a link to a specific post in my other blog. But at least wealthier criollos don’t treat bad the other ones.
4) After the fall of New Spain Christian and liberal values created a virus in the criollo mind that only a Thoroughgoing Racial Renaissance Throughout the North could have a chance to kill. Presently criollos are even in worse shape than their Anglo neighbors precisely because almost all have mestizo relatives or loved ones.
5) IMO the dark browns are the ones who are more racially conscious here. You will be amazed to know how hard they would like to have a much lighter skin.
6) No.
7) Yes, and I have another post entry in my blog in Spanish about it that I could link.
8) No. As I said, mestization is so complete in Mexico that racial grudges have almost completely melted in the melting-pot. Genetically, what is left of New Spain has been almost destroyed in modern Mexico by the amazing, exponential reproduction of the light and dark browns. And that’s precisely what the US and Europe must prevent in their own lands. Here whites will become completely extinct unless something really big and drastic happens within the white psyche in the Western world at both sides of the Atlantic. (That’s why I am a fan of Covington and NS.)
By the by, I don’t want to do any sort of activism here precisely because the melting-pot zeitgeist has been accepted as normal by almost every white here. (I would call “whites” and not “criollos” those Mexicans who, like my late aunt, are undistinguishable from the fairest specimens of the Nordish type.)
Well, that was interesting and disconcerting at once. Perhaps the criollo situation is bette in other Latin American countries.
Anyway, yes, I can read Spanish so you can post any links you wish, they are appreciated.
By the way, I heard that Leon State was the whitest and also that there are many in Guadalajara, do you think there would ever be split?
One last thing, I know what a ‘castizo’ is, but what is an ‘harnizo’?
Thanks again.
Argentina and Uruguay (and some parts of Brazil) are far whiter than Mexico. Recently my mother visited Buenos Aires and commented that an old family friend who used to live here recounted that long ago whites were cannibalized in some town by Amerindians; but that those Amerinds were exterminated after the atrocity (I guess that’s why there are almost none there).
These exchanges between me and another native Mexican (he’s from French and Iberian ancestry) will give you an idea of the racial chimera that Mexico is; and here I briefly mention the caste wars of Yucatán.
I mentioned my late aunt above, who was so white that she felt comfortable with white Americans in her vacation house at Houston. Her brother still lives and after many decades of living here escaped Mexico City for Leon (he is also undistinguishable from Nordish whites). When I say that white Mexicans are clueless that race matters is patent with his son, my cousin, who as a boy had the blondest (Scandinavian blond) hair I’ve ever seen in a relative. Nowadays it shocks me to find in Facebook pages that these close relatives are being photographed with darkies… I don’t even want to ask them whether some of these brownies are the product of recent mestization but it’s obvious that, while they escaped the big city for a whiter state, for criollos race is secondary to social class (contrary to the Jews, who would never miscegenate so crudely).
Your mention of Guadalajara reminds me a blond neighbor girl who was born in that city and that I fancied a lot when I was much younger: a truly white Mexican as beautiful as the girl whose pic I’ve added in my latest post.
Never heard of “harnizo”. After mestization started in the 16th century race classifications went to such levels of ridiculous detail here that I lost all count.
Thanks for the links. It is interesting that class matters so much to criollos. That’s too bad. Yeah, all Argentines I’ve met have been European. Does Mexico have mestizo elite or a criollo elite? When do you think the mestization became irreversible?
Mestization became irreversible almost right after the conquerors stepped into the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico, when the Amerindians gave their daughters as presents to the Conquerors. Nothing could stop this process: the drive was to get American gold and Christianity already had a long history of allowing mongrelization since the Byzantine Empire. In Christian universalism you are forced to chose a fellow Christian above your own kin (e.g., a bachelor Spaniard marrying an Indian conversa rather than, say, an English heretic even though the latter is ethnically closer to you than the Amerind).
After the Independence the mestizos became empowered, but since the criollos have higher IQs the meritocracy, together with what was left of the old caste system, made them easy for remaining in key positions of culture and power. (You might find interesting to learn that, among the Mexican intellectuals, the idols of my youth used to be Octavio Paz, a pure criollo, and Enrique Krauze, of Jewish ancestry.)
I’ve head of Paz, not Krauze though. I’ll have to check into them. I believe Paz was to have said “tell me how you died and I’ll tell you who you are.”
After I became racially conscious I wrote about the Paz and Krauze in Spanish. They are mentors no more.
Thank you for those links as well Chechar. Aside from Borrego and Vasconcelos, I don’t know of too many Mexican historians of the old times.
Krauze is an historian by profession and in 1990, together with Paz, the dynamic duo invited international celebrities in the intellectual world such as Czesław Miłosz, Hugh Thomas, Daniel Bell, Ágnes Heller, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Jean-François Revel, Michael Ignatieff, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Edwards and Carlos Franqui to discuss the collapse of communism on Mexican TV. Unfortunately, because as a reaction to the Spanish clergy almost all Spanish-speaking intellectuals are extreme liberals, their views are traitorous from the ethnic viewpoint (as I explained in my post on Ted Koppel’s interview of Paz and others).