Casey's View on American Unrest

[Wake-up!]

From: Doug Casey's International Man

"America is a marvelous idea, a unique idea, fantastic idea. I'm extremely pro-American. But America has ceased to exist."

Longtime readers will recognize this. It's one of Doug Casey's more memorable quotes. I'm sharing it with you today because Doug said something last week that touched on this radical idea. He said the United States could break apart due to racial tensions. Most people haven't considered this possibility. After all, the U.S. is supposedly a "melting pot" where different races can coexist peacefully. So, a few days ago, I called Doug to learn why he thinks this.

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Justin: Doug, the last time we spoke, you said the United States could break apart because of racial tensions. Why do you think that?

Doug: Well, I used to know a guy by the name of Michael Hart. He would come to our Eris Society meetings in Aspen. Eris was a private annual event I ran for 30 years, for authors, scientists, and people who were well-known for something. It enabled people who might not otherwise meet to get to know each other and exchange ideas. Michael was a university prof, best known for his book "The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential People in History". One year, he gave a speech about how the U.S. was going to break up into smaller countries, and part of it would be on racial lines. I thought that unlikely at the time; it was about 1990. Now, I think Michael may have been right.

I'll explain why in a minute. But we should first discuss the origins of democracy. Democracy originated in 6th-century BC Greece. It was a unique and workable method of governance for city-states of a few thousand people. And in the case of Athens, as many as 40,000 people. But these people all shared a common language. They worshipped the same gods. They were the same ethnicity. They had the same customs and beliefs. They were like an extended clan with many similarities. Differences were among individuals, not groups.

When the U.S. democracy was started, it was much like that. It was very much like a Greek city-state, an extended one. Everybody shared culture, ethnicity, language, habits, and so forth, with just minor regional differences.[Wake-up Note: He's glossy over the fact America had had New England, Poletown, Germantown, Little Italy, Irishtown, etc. in larger cities since the Colonies were settled.] People saw themselves first as New Yorkers, Virginians, or whatever, just as the Greeks saw themselves first as Athenians, Thebans, Corinthians, or many scores of other polities. As you know I don't believe in democracy, I believe in personal freedom. Democracy is workable enough in something like a cohesive city-state. But absolutely not once voters get involved in economic issues—the poor will always vote themselves a free lunch, and the rich will buy votes to give themselves more. Democracy always devolves into class warfare.

In ancient Greece, if you weren't a landowner you weren't respected. In the U.S., voting rules were determined by the States, and originally, everywhere, you had to be a landowner. That meant you had something to lose. But that's not the case anymore.

Justin: What's changed?

Doug: For one thing, anybody can vote. People who are penniless. Eighteen-year-olds who have no knowledge or experience and are fresh out of the indoctrination of high school. Lots of non-citizens, probably millions, manage to vote. Voting has become, as H.L. Mencken said, just an advance auction on stolen goods.

For another thing, today, the United States is multicultural. America used to have its own distinct culture; the U.S. no longer stands for anything. Race is just the most obvious thing that divides people. You can see that somebody's of a different race just by looking at them. The old saying about birds of a feather flocking together is basically true. It's very politically incorrect to make that observation, of course. Certainly if you're white. But it's factually accurate. Most things that are PC fly in the face of reality.

If people are of a different race, it increases the chances that they're not going to share other things. The key, for a rational person, is to judge people as individuals. Race, sex, religion, and cultural background are quick indicators of who a person might be. As are dress, accent, attitude, and what they say among many other indicators. You need as much data as you can get to help you judge what the other person will do, and who he is. It's actually quite stupid to not discriminate among people you encounter. But then the whole PC movement is quite stupid by its very nature.

But, back to the subject, you can't have a multicultural democracy. And you especially can't have one where the government is making laws that have to do with economics...where it allocates wealth from one group to another group. So, sure. The U.S. is going to break apart, and you can certainly see it happening along racial lines. The active racism among many blacks isn't an anomaly.

Justin: I agree that racial tensions are rising in this country. But that's clearly not the only source of tension. What else might cause the U.S. to break apart?

Doug: Cultural differences. The Pacific Northwest draws people who like the idea of ecotopia. Southern California draws a very different type of person than Northern California does. People that live in Las Vegas are quite different from the people that live in Omaha, and very different again from people that live in New York. The U.S. has turned into a domestic empire. It's no longer the country that it was when it was founded. And the constitution itself has changed at least as much. It's a dead letter. Mainly window dressing. It's been interpreted out of existence.

Sure, the U.S. is going to break up; throughout history the colors of the map on the wall have always been running. I don't think the racial situation in the near term is going to get better. And the breakdown of the culture is definitely getting worse.

On the other hand, there's more racial intermingling and marriage now than there's ever been in the past. If we look down the road 1,000 years or so, racial distinctions will probably disappear. The average person will probably look like most Brazilians. Brazil, incidentally, is theoretically an integrated country—but there's still a huge amount of racism. Go farther into the future, when homo sapiens has conquered the planets and hopefully the stars, and we'll likely transform not only into new races, but new species. But I don't think any of us are looking that far ahead

Justin: What about political tensions? Because, as I'm sure you've seen, the far-left and far-right are becoming more and more antagonistic. In some cases, they've even become violent towards each other. Could radical political ideologies cause the country to break apart?

Doug: Yes, I think so. In the late '60s and the early '70s, hundreds of bombings took place at universities, banks, and all kinds of places. The National Guard was in cities like Detroit during the riots, and they were raking buildings with .50 caliber machine guns. It was wild. I don't think most remember this. At least, I don't see it being brought up anywhere. I lived in Washington DC then. It seemed like there was tear gas in the air half the time I went out on a date on a Friday or Saturday night. But as wild and wooly as things were back then, what we have now is much more serious.

The racial element is still there, but the ideological element is even more pronounced. In those days, people at least talked to each other. You could have a disagreement, and it was a simple difference of opinion. It's much worse now. Today, there's a visceral hatred between the left and the right, between the people that live in the so-called red counties and blue counties. You add that to the racial situation. Then throw in the fact that the rich are getting richer at an exponential rate while the middle class is disappearing.

And let's not forget the large-scale subsidized migration of people from totally alien Third World hellholes. This is not what the U.S. was founded on. Before changes in the immigration law that were made in the '60s, immigrants were culturally compatible opportunity seekers that were coming to America to improve themselves. Now, people from all kinds of alien places are being imported by the hundreds of thousands by NGOs; they then go on welfare in enclaves in different places around the country. This is unlikely to end well. The U.S. is no longer a country.

That said, I'm actually for open borders. But it's only possible if, A, there is zero welfare to attract the wrong types. And, B, all property was privately owned, to help ensure everyone is self-supporting.

Justin: But Doug, aren't you against large nation states? Would the Divided States of America be better?

Doug: Absolutely. In my ideal world, there would be approximately seven billion little nation states on the planet, all of them independent. It would be excellent if the U.S. split into smaller entities, where the people that lived in these entities shared more in common with each other. And let me go further. I think it was a mistake for the U.S. to have come together with the Constitution of 1789. The Articles of Confederation should have stayed in existence, with a few modifications. The Constitutional Convention of 1789 was actually a coup. A successful, non-violent coup. Most people didn't really care because the government was such a trivial factor in their lives in those days.

I'm just afraid that when the U.S. breaks up, which inevitably it will, it may not be peaceful. The existence of the USA—which is now just one of 200 other nation states, no longer anything special—is not part of the cosmic firmament. The original founding ideas of America expressed in the Declaration of Independence have been lost, washed away. The absence of those principles is why I say it's going to come to a bad end.

Justin: Do you think the United States will dissolve over time? Or will something set this in motion, possibly a financial or economic crisis?

Doug: An economic crisis always brings things to the fore. When the standard of living is dropping, the government inevitably finds somebody or something to blame...anything other than itself. Usually, they point the finger at foreigners. But if you get the wrong people in the government, they can point fingers at domestic enemies, the way the Germans did with the Jews in the '30s, or the way the Soviets did with the Kulaks at the same time. Or the way the Chinese did with its enemies of the State under Mao. There are many, many other examples. Political power attracts the worst kind of people—and then brings out the worst in them.

Economic turmoil causes social turmoil and political turmoil. And one of the things that scares me most is that if things get spooky within the U.S., people in the government will try to find a foreign enemy in order to "unite" the country.

Incidentally, I don't feel that uniting the country is necessarily a good idea. It all depends on which direction they're united towards, and united against what. And do the people of the United States have enough in common anymore to even be united? I think not, in an age of multiculturalism. There are a lot of problems, and they're bubbling to the surface. When the economy gets bad, which it will, I think the pot will boil over.