New York magazine has written a remarkably fair profile of Steve Sailer, The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right:
After Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss to Barack Obama, the Republican establishment undertook a rigorous postmortem and, looking at demographic trends in the United States, determined that appealing to Hispanics was now a nuclear-level priority. And yet their successful candidate in the next election won by doing precisely the opposite. The Trump strategy looked an awful lot like the Sailer Strategy: the divisive but influential idea that the GOP could run up the electoral score by winning over working-class whites on issues like immigration, first proposed by the conservative writer Steve Sailer in 2000, and summarily rejected by establishment Republicans at the time. Now, 17 years and four presidential cycles later, Sailer, once made a pariah by mainstream conservatives, has quietly become one of the most influential thinkers on the American right.
Sailer himself says that he’s really not much of an inventor:
I’m more of an analyst. My contribution perhaps is to explain the inevitability of identity politics and to recommend prudent policies for moderating their impact.
He also notes that the article doesn’t link to anything it cites, so he provides his own references.
After decades of intense identity politics on the left and continual white bashing, it was inevitable that whites would come round to their own identitarian politics. Eventually, whites will be expelled from the Democrat Party. The current geriatric leadership of the Party is mostly white, but the next generation of leaders is mostly black and brown. Considering the antipathy between blacks and browns, it will interesting to see if the Democrat Party continues to exist as a unified entity or whether it dissolves into a loose coalition, each part going its own way on various issues. The Republican Party will become a white party (it largely is today) by default, in as much as whites have no where else to go.
Went on that site to comment at length.
Mysteriously, I already had a nymag account. Can’t fathom why.