A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution

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A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution<br>How to win the elites and create a better world

Nathan Cofnas<br>Feb 05, 2024

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Nipping at the wheels of the woke juggernaut is not going to derail it. Talking about Thomas Sowell, calling liberals “the real racists,” or National Review publishing its (as of now) 3,131st article about how Chuck Schumer is a hypocrite are not effective weapons. If we want to joust with the juggernaut and win, we need a sharper lance.<br>Rufo’s siege of the institutions and Hanania’s proposed legal reforms are necessary for success. But by themselves they won’t change the trajectory of the culture.<br>Nathan Cofnas’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Any realistic path to victory over wokism requires widespread acceptance of hereditarianism among the elites. As I explained in “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem,” wokism is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of Christian morality. If all races and sexes have the same innate distributions of psychological traits, disparities in socioeconomic status must be due to environmental factors. In practice, that means differences in outcome favoring whites or men will be attributed to past or present white racism or sexism. This triggers an all-consuming crusade against the hidden forces of discrimination. That’s what wokism is. Smart people are disproportionately attracted to the woke left because the mainstream right accepts the equality thesis but fails to recognize its implications. Woke law and woke institutions are primarily effects rather than causes of elites being woke. Undermining the equality thesis destroys the intellectual basis of wokism and gives the elites a reason to join the right.

The prospect of a hereditarian revolution strikes some people as inconceivable and/or even more terrifying than wokism itself. Here I argue that, without hereditarianism, the fight against wokism is futile, and that a hereditarian revolution is both feasible and desirable. “Race realism” is the best term to describe the scientifically correct position. When the elites accept race realism, we can construct a better world.<br>Only Hereditarianism Stops the Cycle of Wokism

The empirical and moral premises that motivate wokism had become the orthodoxy among elites by the 1950s. It took a couple generations for the intellectual class to impose its ideology on the rest of society through the law and education system.<br>Rufo argues that “critical theorists” conquered the culture via a “long march through the institutions.” But, in fact, academia, government agencies, and the education establishment latched onto critical theory because the elites who controlled these institutions were already woke. Herbert Marcuse said this openly: “What I did is formulate and articulate some ideas and some goals that were in the air at that time. That is about it.”<br>Hanania argues that (much of) wokism was created by civil rights law, and the solution is to fix the law. But the law cannot be the cause of wokism if wokism came first. The original civil rights laws unambiguously prohibited discrimination against whites and men. But when it became clear that legal equality would not lead to equality of outcome, lawyers and bureaucrats decided that the law says that everyone has to be woke, and they looked to philosophies like critical race theory to justify their decisions. As long as the elites who are responsible for interpreting and implementing the law remain environmentalists with respect to race and sex differences, there is nothing to stop this from happening again. The intellectual class will interpret race and sex disparities as a moral wrong that needs to be corrected. They will read their ideology into the law, and we’ll be back to where we started.<br>Until we defeat the taboo on hereditarianism, our victories will always be temporary. Every time we cut off a tentacle of the DEI monster, it will grow back. Harvard President Claudine Gay will be replaced by someone worse. We’ll ban “diversity statements” for university job applications, but zero Republicans will be hired. Our legal reforms will be purposefully misinterpreted. The leviathan will live on.<br>Hanania argues that getting the elites to accept hereditarianism would require a “cultural revolution,” which is “bound to have unforeseen consequences.” In his view, we might be able to bring wokism down to a tolerable level without attempting such radical and dangerous measures. If we change the law to demand colorblindness, he says, we can live with “permanent cognitive dissonance” regarding the fact that blacks and other groups will be massively underrepresented in certain positions.<br>What’s to stop the elites from doing the same thing they did before,...