Debate: Can the US Political System Solve the Race Problem (2015)
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This will be the first debate that American Renaissance has ever sponsored, and we're all looking forward to it.
The question before the floor is, can the American political system be used to solve the race problem?
And to put the emphasis more on can it be used to solve rather than the emphasis on the race problem, I've more or less defined what the solution would be.
It would be more or less the adoption of the two points I raise in my talk, namely that there is a difference in intelligence and temperament for biological reasons between the races, and that humans are tribal, and policy would more or less reflect that.
Is that something that we can achieve through the political system?
Now, each side would get two...
Five-minute speeches to present its side, and also two three-minute opportunities to refute the other side.
And then we plan to have five minutes of free exchange afterwards.
Now, when we are finished, I will ask for a show of hands as to how many people's minds have actually been changed by this debate.
So, please think for a moment quietly to yourselves.
Whether you do believe that the American system can, the political system, can be used to solve the race problem in the way that I described it.
In other words, that policy would reflect race differences in IQ and temperament, and also the tribal nature of human beings.
Just think to yourself whether you think that could work.
That can be achieved politically, and then afterwards, I will ask people if their minds have changed.
So, I'd like to introduce our panelists on both sides.
For the affirmative, we have on the far right, Peter Rimlow, the grand impresario of Videre.
We have John Derbyshire, raconteur, bon vivant, author, and presiding genius of the Derbyshire media empire.
And we note that the affirmative banner is carried by immigrants.
Now, do they, thanks to their broader and more objective perspective, see things more clearly than we?
Or are they just ignorant foreigners?
We'll soon find out.
For the negative, we have here the heart, soul, lungs, and gizzard of National Policy Institute, Richard Spencer, and the legendary Sam Dixon.
I would consider these two most formidable teams, and I'm glad I'm not in the line of fire.
So, for the affirmative, five minutes to make its case.
Immigrants, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Jared.
I'm just going to offer you six rays of hope.
That race realism can be made mainstream.
And one of them is in two parts, so perhaps it's really seven.
One, politics follows culture.
Big cultural changes don't happen because of politics.
Far more often, politics follows culture, often reluctantly.
Homosexual marriage didn't go from being a joke to being conventional wisdom because politicians willed it so.
The politicians tagged along behind media and show business elites, who in turn were capitalizing on changes of sensibility in the broad upper middle classes.
So that's my ray of light number one.
Politics follows culture.
Number two, nothing grows to the sky.
Public attitudes ebb and flow.
The English Puritans banned Christmas and stoned adulterers.
Fifty years later came the license and gaiety of the Restoration.
A century and a half later, Regency dissipation gave way to Victorian primness.
How much further can we go in the direction of reality denial and ethnomasochism?
The nation has twice voted for Barack Obama as president.
An affirmative action hire whose previous executive experience was running a playgroup in Chicago.
What next?
President Duane Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho?
Those of you who get the reference.
Number three, redressing the balance.
George Canning, a 19th century British foreign secretary who encouraged Spain's South American colonies to seek their independence, Canning, as every English schoolboy used to know, boasted that he had called the new world into existence to redress the balance of the old.
Race realism may come to acceptance by a reverse process, the old world redressing the balance of the new.
This is the two-parter.
Number 3A, the balance may be redressed from the western end of Eurasia, as the current European trend...
To more nationalistic parties getting more acceptance comes across the Atlantic.
Point three, part B. The balance may be redressed from the other end of the Eurasian landmass, the Asian end, as China, which is very race-realist, becomes a major power.
When Taylor Wang went into orbit on the space shuttle in 1985, China's government TV network marveled that he was, quote, the first descendant of the Yellow Emperor to travel in space.
Even in the aggressively Anglo-Saxon USA of 1961, it's hard to imagine Walter Cronkite hailing Alan Shepard as the first descendant of Alfred the Great to travel in space.
Four, good for the Jews.
I don't think it's controversial to say that in bringing about big cultural changes in our country, Jewish elites in the media, arts, show business, and the intelligentsia have immensely disproportionate influence.
They have been energetic proponents of multiculturalism and white race guilt, but the mass immigration of anti-Semitic Muslims into European countries may turn this around.
Five, genomic technology.
Technology creates tremendous cultural transformations.
TV, cheap air travel, the contraceptive pill.
Genomic science coming up.
When designer babies are routine and genetic and genomic topics are everyday conversation among middle class people.
Race realism will be much more acceptable.
Finally, number six, a possible breakup of the two-party system.
We're so used to two-party politics, we think it's cast in stone.
It's not.
It may be just a legacy from the industrial age.
If the two-party duopoly is broken, there will be more political space for viewpoints out of the mainstream and more general willingness to engage with them.
Six points of light.
Thank you.
The negative now has five minutes to make a presentation.
Well, I have to refute the optimist, the author of We Are Doomed, who is now the champion of the democratic system.
But here's why I think democracy will not work and is not useful to us.
I have to say that...
I'll start with quoting the Kaiser Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary, who said that the problem with democracy is that it requires extraordinary things of very ordinary people.
Americans are inclined to hear that and sort of...
Oh yes, that requires extraordinary things of ordinary people.
They think it's some kind of left-handed compliment to democracy.
But it's not.
It's a very sound and sensible observation.
Democracy in and of itself, even in a monoracial democracy, is hopeless.
Because it does require that ordinary people do things that they're not competent to do.
The other thing is, I'm going to deal with the problems of democracy, both theoretical and practical.
I look at the practical record.
We have a consistent record of failure in democracies throughout the entire English-speaking world.
Where has the solution to the racial problem ever come from a democracy?
We can look back to the 1920s, where there was a temporary cessation in America of immigration, but this was quickly overcome, and exactly because, as the Kaiser Franz Josef would predict, because the average person has a short attention span,
and the people who manipulate democracy...
Are able to manipulate that short attention span and to focus people on irrelevant issues, issues of politicians' sex lives or whether they drive to New Hampshire with a dog on the roof of their car.
They can create these phony issues to confuse the average person.
And the average person is incapable of sustaining the kind of long-term sustained policies that our race has to have in order to survive.
It also ignores the demographic realities.
If you have any degree of non-whites in a white society, they will outbreed the whites.
We cannot expect intelligent white women to outbreed Haitian immigrants.
There's no way you're going to get intelligent white women to have 11 or 12 children, nor is this environmentally desirable.
Inevitably, there can be no solution.
through the democratic process because the demographics will doom that solution and the swelling ranks of the inferior and of the non-white Will eventually overcome us.
And they're not about to respect our turf.
Just as in Rhodesia and South Africa, they're not going to live in squalor and poverty in their hovels and look across the fence and see a splendid mansion with a swimming pool and not take that away.
We need...
Long-term leadership.
We need to think in terms of long-term leadership.
We need an aristocracy, which we have lost.
In America, I don't know that we ever had much of one.
But we need something like the Roman Catholic Church's College of Cardinals to guide us.
Democracy is also a diversion.
It's psychologically poisonous.
It involves our people in the system.
They become participants in the systems.
They root for the systems teams that are on the...
We need for white people to abjure the realm.
We need for them to unplug the emotional connection with democracy and elections and the system.
We need for white people to open their minds to the infinity of possibilities.
Right now, I think whites think in terms of two things.
One is...
Mr. Smith goes to Washington, which is this proposition, I think, plainly stated.
The other is some sort of tremendous race war in which we emerge triumphant over the bodies of our enemies.
There are many, many other possibilities.
We really need to consider those possibilities and to build a white...
A separate white culture.
The best thing we could have would be, in my opinion, a bunch of white Ghandis to simply act outside the system and to withdraw consent from the system, and the system would then collapse.
The system can only endure so long as whites are emotionally plugged in to the system.
And a practical example of that is the New York Police Department, who turned their backs on de Blasio and forced him to back down in a non-elective manner.
Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of other incidents, and you have the solution.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yes, we now have three minutes from the affirmative side.
Refutation. Thank you, Sam.
When I saw the title of this talk, my first thought was, oh, it's reform against revolution.
You can do things within the system we've got, or you can overturn the system and burn everything down and start again.
Peter and I, obviously, if you want to look at it that way, Peter and I are on the reform side.
These gentlemen are on the revolutionary side.
And indeed, Sam just said, if we do this, this, and this, quote, the system will collapse.
I, by temperament, am not a revolutionary, and I think you can make a very good historical case, whatever your temperament, that revolution is a really, really bad idea.
Just draw up a list in your mind of historical revolutions.
The Chinese, the Russian, the French Revolution.
There were mountains of corpses.
There were rivers of blood.
Be careful what you wish for.
I don't think we should hope for revolution.
Americans tend to have the wrong idea about this because you learn in high school that you had a revolution.
It was a spiffing success and created this country.
Well, yeah, but that was the exception.
Most revolutions are not like the American Revolution.
And in fact, people who've had real revolutions kind of scoff at your revolution and say, That wasn't a real revolution.
I used to teach in China, in communist China, and I got a good look at the textbooks that they use on things like world history.
Let me tell you that from their point of view, and I'm sure it was the same in the Soviet Union, the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, not a real revolution.
And anyway, Anglo-Saxons are just not very revolutionary.
We're not a revolutionary race.
We're not a revolutionary people.
Ethnie, whatever you want to say.
So I'm going to stick with reform.
I'm also going to stick with my comment that politics, at least in our Anglo-Saxon tradition, arises out of culture.
And that the changes we want are not to be brought about, probably, by political action.
They're to be brought about not by changing the system, but by changing minds.
Lots of minds.
Changing the culture.
And then...
Political changes will follow.
As for events, not only we can change the minds, events change.
How many times have you seen that picture taken from a helicopter of the boat in the Mediterranean full of illegal immigrants trying to get across the Mediterranean?
Do you know the picture I mean?
That boat just crammed to the gunwales with people trying to get from North Africa across the Mediterranean.
Pictures like that do almost as much as we can do with our persuasion and our talks and our conferences to change people's minds.
people's minds will change.
Thank you.
Yes, now there will be a three minute refutation by the negative side.
When you're digging yourself into a hole, The first thing you need to do is stop digging.
It's really no point in talking about reforms, tempting as that is, and say that, oh, well, we promise we're going to slow the rate at which we dig ourselves into the hole this year.
Or, we're going to dig ourselves into the hole again this year, but we're going to stop firmly at 18 feet and no further.
None of that is really solving the fundamental problem.
And we are only going to solve that fundamental problem through some kind of dramatic, new, creative action.
So I feel, in a way, John Darbyshire, when he says things like, politics follow culture, I totally agree with that.
I think politics is a lagging indicator.
It's a very late lagging indicator.
But he's, in a way, Arguing for our side, this need that we need to do something different, this need for our movement not to simply think that we can twist a knob here or pull a lever here,
that we can vote for some hardcore Republican there, so on and so forth, but that we really start finding...
Creative new solutions.
That we think maybe this hole is going to fill up with water and we're going to swim out.
Maybe we're going to develop some new technique, but we need to start doing that now.
And as long as we wait in finding this new creative effort, we have a humongous opportunity cost.
We're focusing again and again on something that can't possibly change the outcome.
It can't possibly change the fate that our race is going to experience in the North American continent.
Immigration is a dynamic process.
That is, the longer it goes on, the more difficult it would be to change the demographic reality of the United States.
Reform is not really a reasonable option that we need to think about.
We need to think about creative solutions.
We need to think about changing the culture that's going to change politics further down the line.
Thank you.
Now we have another five-minute exposition by the affirmative side.
Thank you, Congressman.
You know, John has just said that he's a reformist by temperament.
Ironically, I don't think I am.
I think I'm a radical by temperament.
And so I don't view being on this side here with a great deal of enthusiasm.
I just think I have to be on this side.
The issue isn't not whether the American political system will solve the race problem, it's can it solve the race problem.
Now, as I said earlier, I spent many years in financial journalism writing about extremely arcane and boring topics.
But I did used to like writing about the traders, the speculators.
And if you talk to them, you find that they tend to have rules about how they operate under extreme pressure.
Sometimes you'll see them in the office, they're tied up on, they write them out of my hand and stick them up with scotch tape on the wall.
And it says things like,"If it goes down 10%, sell!" They have rules of that kind because they know that when they're under pressure, they won't remember these rules.
Jesse Livermore actually gave a large sort of money to his wife and told her, at some point along here in our marriage, I'm going to come to you and say, I have this margin position and a margin call, and I want you to give me this money so that I can stay in this position because it's going to make money in the long run.
Don't give it to me.
Now, that's how I feel about politics.
I've several times in the course of my life looked at situations and drawn conclusions which, although they're accurate and I think still a good speculation, were too early.
Too early.
Always too early.
I remember in 1968, during the upheavals in France, all the liberals...
I was at college in England, and all these liberals and college students thought it was obvious that de Gaulle was going to have to resign.
And this was a position the British government had.
And in fact, subsequently, when there were similar upheavals in Northern Ireland, they did force the Stormont government, which was the democratically elected government, where they just forced it out of office because they were so frightened.
I thought this was nonsense.
The obvious solution was a military coup.
De Gaulle should simply have a military coup.
Everybody thought this was awful.
De Gaulle did something quite different.
He held an election, which he won overwhelmingly.
I never forgot that.
My solution was just too radical.
Similarly, you know, in Canada, when I was first in Canada in the 1970s, the Convention of Wisdom was that the Official Languages Act, which basically imposed institutional bilingualism, had solved the Quebec problem.
Pierre Trudeau repeatedly said, Quebec's separatism is dead.
I wrote a book arguing the contrary.
I said, far from being dead, Quebec will actually secede at some point.
Well, Quebec did continue to convulse Canadian politics, contrary to the Convention of Wisdom in 1970.
But they haven't seceded yet.
I think they will, but it hasn't happened yet.
Similarly, you know, the immigration, when I wrote my immigration stuff in the early...
I assumed everything would move a lot faster.
Now, I still think that I'm right with my analysis, and I think I'm more right than the Wall Street Journal was, which wrote after the National Review was purged of immigration patriots, the immigration debate is now over.
There's no further debate about immigration.
Anyway, it was all the work of English immigrants, a reference to me and to John O'Sullivan at that time.
Because if you don't want to be told what to do about immigrants, maybe you shouldn't bring them into the country.
But they didn't worry about that.
The political system, so it didn't happen.
And similarly, we have to remember, and again it goes back to the Cold War, the political system did solve the great crisis of the 1970s.
It did solve inflation, and it did solve the Cold War.
It wasn't a clean solution.
Inflation still bubbles along at relatively historically high levels.
Historically, of course, deflation was more of the norm.
And the collapse of the Soviet Union took a long time.
It was very messy, but it did solve it, in spite of the odds which appeared overwhelming after the Vietnam War in 1975.
I will say also...
You know, the race is not to the swift.
There was a marvelous article on V-Dev by a fellow called Generation, who calls himself Generation 5, about secession in the South.
And he basically traced the two different personality types that had to work together to make secession work.
The rhetorical radicals were early and soon to see that secession was necessary in their own terms.
But they weren't the ones who benefited.
The ones who actually benefited was the fifth category, which he called opportunists, which included, by the way, Jefferson Davis.
Alexander Stevens, who came to it very late.
So I don't think this is a very good lookout for me, in terms of actually benefiting from my radical insights.
But it's great for Jared, because he'll be in Congress and cutting deals.
And now we will have a five-minute exposition for the negative side.
The question before us is, can the race problem be solved through the political system?
And at the risk of sounding pedantic, I would say that theoretically, most anything could be created through the political system.
Theoretically, we could end democracy and install a Catholic monarchy or a pure libertarian society or we could socialize ice cream.
Lots of other things like that, theoretically.
But this really is a question of possibility and probability.
And in that sense, it's really a question of priorities.
Where are we going to put our limited means and resources?
Are we going to continue to do what most American conservatives have been doing for the past 25 years?
That is, thinking that we can solve problems by pushing buttons or pulling levers, about nipping around the edges, or voting for a hardcore candidate who's unelectable, or things like that.
Or are we going to really invest in something for the next century?
Invest in our great-great-grandchildren.
Even if we are...
Aristocrats ourselves, can we in a way act like them?
Act in the best spirit of having that long time horizon, of thinking in terms of decades and centuries and not in terms of days or minutes, which seems to be the attention span of American politicians and the American public.
In the summer of 2011, the The majority of births in the United States were to non-whites.
That should have been a clarion call for us to change our strategy and change our goals.
Because when you think about it, in our elementary schools, the future is now.
And really, the future is now for us.
This doesn't mean that an issue like immigration is totally irrelevant.
But it really does fundamentally mean that immigration reform is not a decisive issue for the future of the white race on the North American continent.
It's just not.
It can't be.
The demographic Our demographic fate is really baked in if all we're thinking about is the terms of immigration reform, of numbers, of slowing inflows,
and so on and so forth.
The future is now.
We are already at a point where we need to start thinking about totally new creative solutions for the future, and we need to start investing in them.
We don't need to find a white Harry Reid, or that's a kind of funny way to put it, I guess, or a white advocate Harry Reid, or a white advocated Joe Biden.
We need to think about finding a white advocate Martin Luther King, or a white advocate Gandhi.
We need to start finding these people who are able to Start from a position of weakness and capture people's imagination.
Because I completely agree with John Derbyshire that that is how politics are ultimately made.
Politics is a lagging indicator.
Politics comes late.
Politics comes after.
Whenever we have these debates, there's this straw man argument that has always bothered me, and that is the defeatist versus the pragmatist.
Apparently I'm on the defeatist side or something like this.
Well, we've been pursuing ruthless pragmatism.
That is, conservative Americans have been pursuing ruthless pragmatism for some time.
Whenever there's some action by the left, we've emotionally reacted against it, and we've circled the wagon and gathered the troops and gone off to fight against this new innovation of the left.
This hasn't really worked out for us.
The left has been able to change the world and we've been there screaming, angrily, walking away, shaking our fist.
We need to start to be active.
We need a movement that is about the next hundred years and is not about reacting to the latest actions of our enemies.
Thanks. We now have three minutes of refutation from the negative side.
What a world it would be if the range of political debate was a debate between John Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow on one side and the two of us on the other.
What a wonderful world that would be.
I have to say I disagree with Peter Brimelow in his interpretations of what happened in the 1970s.
I don't think that the problem of inflation was solved by voters putting pieces of paper in ballot boxes.
It was solved by the most undemocratic institution in our society, the Federal Reserve System, which choked inflation by raising interest rates to 20% and were able to take actions that no politician could ever have taken and survived.
Likewise, with the Cold War, It flatters Americans to think that we overthrew communism.
We did not overthrow communism.
Communism was created in America and exported to Russia.
As my Russian tutor said, it was not a Russian civil war.
It was a war of alien conquest.
And the United States had a policy of sustaining communism, which was disguised throughout the Cold War.
But the U.S. was never a threat to communism.
Communism was overthrown by the Russian people from within.
It was the Russian people who gathered 500,000 of them around the mayor's office in St. Petersburg and 500,000 around the Duma in Moscow and faced tanks with bare hands, even as National Public Radio was sneering that there are only 500,000,
if you get 50 Americans to do something like that.
I don't think that either of these can be cited as an example of an achievement by universal suffrage democracy.
The Cold War I have come to see as a huge hoax and deception perpetrated upon the American people to justify the oppressive system state.
The idea that we were threatened by a nation with a gross national product less than that of the Netherlands.
Which we were never allowed to know until after the Soviet Union imploded.
That notion is silly.
Only, finally, I will say again that a democratic system is not capable of long-term systematic change.
It is not capable of placing demands upon people that they accept a lower standard of living and suffering.
Only rarely, as in World War II, in a moment of national crisis with civil liberties suspended, can someone like Churchill offer people a program of blood, sweat, toil, and tears and get them to sign up for it.
And in fact, had people been allowed to express their opinions, it's very likely the people of Britain would have said they wanted a peace settlement in 1940 and would have gotten rid of Churchill.
But only a monarchy or an aristocracy is capable...
Of a humane program of systematic, sustained change.
Or a dictatorship, which I don't want.
So I would say that the record of democracy in my lifetime has been one of consistent failure.
And it is a snare and a delusion and a distraction to think that we can accomplish change through the democratic system.
This does not mean that I propose going out and picking up...
Guns and fighting and civil war.
I just propose other solutions, and I think once again that if the American people, the American white people, the founding stock of America and its related cousins, simply unplugged, that would be the end of it.
We have a final three minutes on the affirmative side.
You know, it would be nice.
I'd like to hear more of Richard's plans, which actually do, for his organization, actually do comport with what I was saying in the second half of my own speech, that we have to think anew here.
And maybe internal succession is the answer.
But as it stands right now, I don't see what they are.
As I say, my position is not that I think...
The situation will solve it, but I know from experience, and it's a long experience, you know, that these problems do go away sometimes.
I don't agree with him that the demography is baked in.
There are lots of things a determined government could do.
You ought to go and look at what Quebec did to drive out the Anglophones, the English speakers, in the 60s and 70s.
They broke the back of the English community and made it a French-speaking state.
It can be done if the government's determined enough.
I forgot to switch this on, Henry.
How we doing?
Okay. I don't agree with Sam that the Federal Reserve just spontaneously decided to stop inflation.
It could have done that at any point in that previous 15 years.
It did it because the Reagan administration was willing to take the political cost.
So I do think Reagan has to be credited for that.
Similarly, I don't think it's true that the Soviet Union was never a threat to the free world.
The Red Army beat the Wehrmacht.
That was a fantastic achievement.
And nobody who remembered that and that generation was very aware of it.
Could do anything other than take the Soviet Union very seriously, in regards to the size of its GDP.
Sam says he can't think of an example of democracy curing itself.
But the fact is that, you know, it was a fairly democratic US that ended Reconstruction and reached the era of what was called Grand Reconciliation at the early 1900s when the South and the North were very friendly with each other.
They just changed course.
Democracies can change course.
And dictatorships often, or even authoritarian states, have very serious problems.
There are serious problems during the war in Germany.
And we see in the Soviet Union that because there's no corrective mechanisms that there are in democracies.
Some of you will be aware of the famous story of the...
Of the man who was annoyed the Caliph of Baghdad in the Middle Ages and was condemned to death, but persuaded the Caliph to spare him for a year on condition that in that year he would teach the Caliph's horse to fly.
And his friend said, what have you done?
What have you agreed to?
And the man said, well, in a year's time, the Caliph may die, or I may die, or the horse may learn to fly.
All I'm here to tell you is that the horse might learn to fly.
Very good.
Well, now...
And now we will conclude with five minutes of free debate and conversation among the panelists, and I expect you all to behave like white men and not hog the microphone.
But, well, I don't want to do that.
You can speak one at a time.
There'll be only one microphone, and you can go for it now.
If you have anything, any conclusory remarks?
This is Jared's idea.
I wanted to conclude the whole thing with a kickboxing match between the two sides, but Jared vetoed that for reasons I don't understand.
I would just like to support my colleague Peter Brimelow here on the affirmative side.
In refuting what Sam said about...
Peter already refuted what he said about the Fed acting as if the Fed could act without any regard to politics or popular opinion.
The Fed, people say this about the Supreme Court too, that it lives in an airy realm far above politics.
That's nonsense, as I said.
Culture drives politics, and politics drives institutions like the Supreme Court and like the Federal Reserve.
It's not a politics-free zone, and politics is not a culture-free zone.
And the same with the Cold War.
Do we really think that the Soviet Union just imploded on its own and would have done so just the same at about the same time if...
The American public, and let's please remember we're talking mostly about the pre-1965 American public, the American public we all like, before the 1965 Immigration Act.
Would the Soviet Union have imploded if the American public had not been so resolute in defending our side in the Cold War?
Well, perhaps it would have.
I don't think it would have.
Popular anti-communism in 1950s, early 1960s America, and even through into the 1970s, before Vietnam disillusioned everybody, was a contributing cause to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union,
I do think.
Anybody else?
I think one thing that has to be kept in mind is that demographics dooms a democratic solution.
We see the studies over and over about, well, the Republicans can win by getting 60% of the white vote, and in the next election they can win by getting 65% of the white vote.
The fact is that half the children under age 6 are non-whites.
And that doesn't include the immigration.
It doesn't include the effect of an amnesty, which I think will eventually come, which will add 60 million people to our country when you include family reunification for the 11 million illegals the government says who are here.
The votes just aren't going to be there.
It is not going to be practically possible to pursue a democratic solution.
I'll actually be very gentlemanly and I'll ask my opponents a question.
What exactly do you expect to happen through the political system and the foreseeable future?
What do you see as a possible outcome that would fundamentally alter the fate of the white race in the North American continent?
Well, exactly what happened in 1980, you'd have a president elected who broke radically with the consensus and you would, among all things, cut back on immigration and it would have more profound effects than anybody realises.
So the answer is a second Reagan.
I don't know whether that's going to happen, but it could happen.
And, you know, there are a lot of people at the time when Reagan came into power who didn't take him seriously.
But in fact, I think his effect was tremendous.
By the way, Sam, I meant to say here, but I missed it, that, you know, if you taught the Soviets in...
The early 90s, what they would tell you is that what broke their back was Star Wars, the fact that Reagan opted for the missile defense program, and they just knew they couldn't compete with that.
I'm just oh, I'm sorry.
How is Reagan's immigration and race policy?
Could you remind me about those?
Is immigration and race policy consisting of winning the Cold War and stopping inflation?
Immigration was not an issue then, but it is now.
That was then, this is now.
It's a difference.
So you have somebody who will focus on these new problems.
Well, immigration was kind of an issue in 1986 when Reagan signed ERCA, which was later scotched by the power of the cheap labor lobbies, but that wasn't Reagan's fault and he didn't like it.
I would just...
I would say that in response to the question that Richard posed, go back to what Jared said at the very beginning.
The first word in the title of this debate is"can".
Can the American political system solve the race problem?
I didn't sit here to argue that it will.
I offered you some points of light to suggest that it can.
And I'm just going to repeat my points of light.
Number one, politics follows culture.
If we can change people's minds, we can change the system.
Two, nothing grows to the sky.
We can't go on moving leftwards forever.
Number three, the old world may redress the balance of the new.
Number four, the Jews who have disproportionate influence in our culture through the media, through high culture.
And to some degree in politics, may wake up and move over to our side.
As you might say, Israeli Jews already have.
Israel is one of the most nationalist countries in the world.
How much longer can non-Israeli Jews maintain the cognitive dissonance?
Number five, genomic technology.
And number six, the two-party system may break up.
These are points of light.
These are things that can...
And can is the first word in our title.
I'm afraid that the affirmative side got a bit of an unfair advantage on the time allocation there.
But now has come the crucial moment.
I asked you all to decide before we got into this debate what you thought about the question.
Can, in fact, the political system be used to solve the race problem?
Now, I'd like to have all of you raise your hands who thought that it could be used to solve the race problem, but now are convinced that it cannot be used to solve the race problem.
Not well.
All right.
We have one, two, three.
All right.
Very good.
Now, how many among you were convinced that the political system could not be used?
Is that the question I asked before?
No, could not be used, but now can, the political system can be used to solve the race problem.
Ah, well, I see.
The immigrants have done well.
Very good.
But I do note that most of your minds were not changed up at all.
We have a very hard-headed group.
In other words, please raise your hands if your mind was not changed either way.
Ah, dear me.
Well, then finally, finally, the final question is, how many of you thought from the beginning and still think that the political system cannot be used to change the system?
And how many among you believe and continue to believe that the political system can be used to change the system?
Well, a fairly even split, but I think the negative side has it from the beginning.
So maybe this debate didn't have much meaning from that point of view, but I think it was a very stimulating exchange of ideas.