Amerika

From Steve Sailer at VDARE, quoting The Intercept, an insight into what drives people to the genteel Nietzschean far-Right that is the Alt Right:

A surprising number of alt-right leaders come from a single wealthy liberal enclave: the west side of Los Angeles.

Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site that bears his name, was raised in Brentwood, at the center of the west side, and was living there when he died in 2012. Bannon, before becoming famous as the chairman of Breitbart and then Trump’s ideologue, was a Hollywood producer who sent his daughters to a private school in Brentwood. Stephen Miller, the 31-year-old presidential adviser who has been wildly provocative on immigration issues, was raised in neighboring Santa Monica, also known as the People’s Republic of Santa Monica because of its liberal politics.

This might seem weird. …But look again. While Trump got far fewer votes than Clinton, California’s population is so large that the only other state where Trump got more votes was Texas (which he won).

The article does not look deeply into the causes of this, but here is a supposition:

The experience of Leftism drives people toward Right-wing causes. Normally, they would be politically inert and go with the flow, or even take moderate positions where they borrow some from Left and Right causes. But when they experience Leftism in action, they see how not only are its results bad, but that it is pathological and will not stop until it achieves Soviet-style collapse.

In California, the Left has run amok for decades, and they have turned California into a prototype for the Leftist Amerika: mostly third world minorities doing menial labor, with massive taxes paying for it all, and the super-rich are the only ones who turn out well and they run just about everything.

That was a limiting factor, perhaps, until oil and Hollywood made some very shady characters into the super-rich. Normally this is solved by finding them good wives, who tend to make the next generation into actual human beings. But these new super-rich chose wives like them, glorified bar girls and carnies, and so made themselves an empire based on manipulation, lies and greed.

Someone living in West Hollywood however knows more than the average person. They are wealthy or at least prosperous, and so have some knowledge of business leadership, finance, politics, law and technology. They have institutional memory of how the changes affected the state over the generations. They also understand what it would take to undo the mess.

As a result, these people — like those from Texas and Southern France — tend to be radicalized. They realize that history is not a question of individual decisions, but the curve that those decisions indicate, and so any step toward Leftism is agreement to carry it all the way. For this reason, they tend toward foundational Rightism because there must be an alternative to even moderate Leftism.

Another factor here is that these tend to be the children of the wealthy. Having grown up in prosperous surroundings, they saw what afflicted their parents, which was getting worked to death just to build up enough of a pile of wealth to rise above the crisis exploding in slow motion around them.

Many have observed that the first generation builds, and the second attempts to expand on that, while the third tends to fritter it away, having given up hope. After observing their parents and grandparents exhaust themselves on work, the grandchildren want no part of it. Perhaps the second generation is trying to break the cycle, and escape labor for the dying to have health instead.

Tags: alt-right, leftism, west hollywood