J.D. Vance

Source: Public Domain

This week’s dramatic events—Trump surviving being wounded by a would-be assassin quickly followed by his selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate—will focus attention on the newer generation of higher-brow rightist thinkers because it’s now thinkable that Vance, whose first endnote in his bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy is to a genetics blog post about his Scots-Irish people by my friend Razib Khan, might someday be President.

Vance is an interesting personality. He grew up in a Rust Belt town, enlisted in the Marines, graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State, made the law review at Yale Law School, was elected to the U.S. Senate, and was nominated for Vice President at age 39, a biography not too dissimilar to that of that bête noire of the mainstream media, Richard Nixon.

Whether Vance can convert his obvious intelligence into broad appeal to the Republican electorate, which has been trending downscale in this century, remains to be seen. His eyes tend to be slightly alarming, as if Fall Out Boy was about to shoot laser beams from them.

But it’s hardly improbable that Vance’s new generation/post–Paul Ryan intellectual interests will drive the press into a tizzy over the next week.

Personally, I don’t know that much about Vance. To the best of my knowledge, I have never had a back-and-forth communication with him, in person, on the phone, or digitally.

Nonetheless, this seems like a good point in history for me to post online my concluding chapter—“What if I’m Right?”—from my anthology Noticing (available domestically from Passage Press, while overseas readers might consider Amazon for Kindle or paperback: Jeff Bezos is really good at logistics).

“What if I’m Right?” is a synthesis of two Taki’s Magazine articles from 2021 and 2022. I’ve since shortened it for delivering as a speech at the VDARE Castle (you can watch the video here) and at the rather different Sovereign House basement in downtown Manhattan.

Because the VP nominee is likely to be attacked for an unproven familiarity with my ideas, I thought I’d post my explanation of why some of the smartest people think that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, I’m the most reasonable pundit in America:

What If I’m Right?

WHAT if I’m more or less right about how the world works?

What if my way of thinking is, in general, more realistic, insightful, and reasonable than the conventional wisdom?

What would that imply?

Note that I dislike thinking of my system of noticing as an ideology that demands certain policies. I don’t propound “Sailerism.” I lack the ambition and the ego. I am by nature a staff guy rather than a line boss. I’ve never especially wanted to be a George W. Bush-like “decider.”

Instead, I like being a noticer. I’d rather explain to you the trade-offs. Indeed, I most of all want to show you how you can make use of my techniques for figuring out things for yourself.

My basic insight is that noticing isn’t all that hard to do if only you let yourself: The world actually is pretty much what it looks like, loath though we may be to admit it.

My main trick for coming up with enough insights to make a living as an unfashionable pundit for two dozen years has been to assume that private life facts—what we see with our lying eyes—and public life facts—what the scientific data tell us—are essentially one and the same. There is only one reality out there. We don’t live in a gnostic universe in which there is a false reality of mundane cause and effect and a horrifying true reality in which unnoticeable racism and sexism determine all fates.

In contrast, most commentators assume that issues of daily life, such as deciding where to live, are of a lesser, more sublunary realm than the high public issues, such as the sanctity of the demands of Black Lives Matter. So, the unfortunate facts that they prudently observe when making real estate choices for their families about “safe neighborhoods” and “good schools” couldn’t possibly have any relevance to the great topics of the day they discuss in the media; only vulgar lowbrows would confuse these two vastly different domains of being.

Progressives assume there is an unfortunate “crime” problem that they try to sidestep with their own money and a galvanizing “Social Justice” problem that they try to solve with other people’s money by imposing upon the rest of America the opposite of what they do in their own lives.

In truth, you don’t need unfalsifiable dogmas like “systemic racism” to explain why, say, blacks on average are relatively better at playing cornerback than center in the NFL. Biological and cultural differences explain these and countless other patterns. Indeed, trying to figure out how nature and nurture intertwine in modern America is one of the great challenges of the examined life.

Public intellectuals should try it. It’s fun.

When it comes to human behavior, there mostly aren’t systematic differences between what your lying eyes tell you and what The Science says. Instead, there’s a continuum between anecdote, anecdata, and data. For instance, if you can recall several examples suggesting a pattern, you might well be able to find large-scale data against which to test your supposition.

Conversely, if there’s a strong statistical pattern in the numbers, you should be able to come up with vivid real-life examples of it. If you can’t think of any, maybe there is something wrong with the statistically esoteric analysis.

That I assume all truths are connected to all other truths helps explain why my columns often seem to end somewhat abruptly and arbitrarily: I don’t act as if I’ve reached the conclusive end of a topic because, from my perspective, there is no conclusion, just an endless network of cause and effect. So instead, I merely tend to knock off around dawn when it’s long past time to go to bed.

I like to tell myself I should just keep coming up with more ideas that are (in declining order of importance to me) true, interesting, new, and funny. Eventually, people will notice how much better my approach to reality has been than that of the famous folks winning MacArthur genius grants and try to figure out for themselves how I do it so that they can too.

Or at least that’s what I hope.

On the other hand, when I wrote this in 2023, public discourse had just gotten stupider and more socially self-destructive over the course of my career.

Maybe that’s partly my fault?

What if I had just kept my mouth shut and, instead of challenging popular pundits to be honest and intelligent, I’d let them work it out for themselves? After all, while people who know me tend to find I’m an okay guy, people who don’t know me tend to hate me.

Thus, when I point out the facts, I’m often greeted with incoherent anger centering on the allegation that I must be a bad person for being so well-informed.

When I started writing in the 1990s, my views were edgy but not unknown. Intellectually, I’m basically an heir to the debates in the early 1970s among data-driven social scientists, with me being closer to the domestic neoconservatives like James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein. But I also admired liberals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as well as socialists like Christopher Jencks. What’s changed since the 1970s?

Basically, all that has happened is that the data have piled up against the establishment view. I find it’s an exaggeration to say that the left totally dominates the social sciences today. I have been a human sciences aficionado for the past half century, and I haven’t seen much decline in findings supporting my general worldview, in part because I constantly adapt to new evidence, but also because advances have typically validated the best old research. For example, the genetic revolution of the 21st century has mostly vindicated the best scientists of the second half of the 20th century.

Granted, journalists tend to not grasp that current dogmas like “Race does not exist” are obfuscations to keep geneticists from getting persecuted by know-nothings. But if you read the scientific journals carefully, you will see what’s what.

Yet, instead of changing minds, the passing of the years has only made the dominant discourse ever more antiquarian. For example, the failure of property values to boom in black neighborhoods in the 56 years since redlining was abolished has not made it more acceptable to point out that if blacks want higher home values (which it’s not clear they do), they should work harder on being better neighbors. Instead, we hear ever more often about FDR’s redlining as if that’s what is really driving the real estate market today.

My approach in explaining human society has been to follow the general line of Occam’s Razor that the simplest plausible explanation is less likely to be contrived for political purposes than a more complicated Occam’s Butterknife rationalization. For example, home values today tend to be determined by current crime rates and school test scores, not by what FDR did 86 years ago.

And as more data continue to accumulate over the decades, my depiction of the way the world works seems to have a better track record than more fashionable theories. Now, it’s not that I’m infallible. Still, (a) I like to argue, and (b) I don’t like to lose. So, I look hard for the strongest evidence so that I can make winning arguments. And when I lose, rather than double down, I usually change my mind.

I would encourage intellectuals to try to subscribe to a form of vulgar Hegelianism in their thinking that I’ve found very useful: If you hold a thesis for what seem like good reasons, and somebody counters with a well-argued antithesis, you have three options:

(1) Reject the criticism (the most common).

(2) Convert (the most dramatic).

(3) Look for a synthesis that makes sense of both approaches (usually, the hardest but most productive).

For example, if I say:

A racial group is a taxonomical subspecies.

But you say:

A racial group is a biologically nonexistent social construct!

Consider:

Synthesis: A racial group is a partly inbred extended family.

And thus, just as with extended families, it’s hard to be certain of the boundaries of races.

So, what if I’m right? How would the world look different?

Well, it wouldn’t. I’ve taken pains to make my worldview correspond with how the world actually is.

What policies are implied by my realistic view of humanity?

To my mind, nothing terribly new: In general, we need rule of law, equal protection of the laws, and other old-time principles. For instance, the fact that African Americans tend to have a high crime rate, for whatever combinations of reasons of nature and nurture, suggests that they need law and order even more, not less, than do the rest of us. As you may recall, we tried in 2020 reducing the rule of law during the “racial reckoning.”

The result of less policing was that in 2021 44 percent more African Americans died by homicide than in 2019, and 39 percent more died in traffic fatalities.

That’s really bad.

The usual responses I’m given by my critics are either:

(1) My findings are rejected by all experts as completely untrue, or:

(2) Everybody already knows that what you are saying is true, Sailer, they just don’t want to talk about it.

Among those who assert the latter, I am told that we shouldn’t mention the truth because either:

(1) The facts have no possible policy implications, or:

(2) The facts have overwhelmingly horrible policy implications, such as the logical necessity of reimposing slavery or instituting genocide.

The former strikes me as obtuse and the latter as insane and/or evil.

When I try to think through the policy implications that would flow from honest public discussion of American realities, it strikes me that it could be useful if more people knew more about what they were talking about.

Knowing the facts doesn’t prove one set of values is better than another—that’s what politics is for deciding—but it can help you avoid making things worse than they have to be, as the Establishment flagrantly did in its 2020 meltdown.

But what if noticing became widespread?

To explore this question, let’s focus in on one controversy in which, to my surprise, I wound up largely winning the debate and changing highbrow opinion: the gender gap in Olympic track. In my 1997 article “Track and Battlefield,” I pointed out that the then-celebrated convergence of times between men and women runners had already ended when stricter steroid testing was instituted after Ben Johnson was caught while setting a world record in the 1988 Olympics 100-meter dash and the East German women’s team collapsed along with the Berlin Wall. Why?

Because women got a bigger bang for the buck from these synthetic variants of masculine hormones, so they’d been improving more than men had. But then the convergence stopped when better testing was started. For a number of years after that I would see articles repeating the 1990s nostrum that science had shown that male and female athletic performance would soon equalize. I’d send them my article and occasionally I’d even get a response that, yeah, I was probably right.

Over time, I stopped seeing prognostications of convergence among all but the most ill-informed in the media.

So, what were the dire side effects of people learning the truth?

Did high school girls stop running in despair? Were women’s sports banned?

No.

The main effect, so far as I can tell, has been a beneficial one for women’s sports: When the transgender push in the press started around 2013 and ex-men like MMA fighter Fallon Fox, whom The New York Times championed to be allowed to beat up women for money, and Penn swimmer “Lia” Thomas began intruding themselves into women’s sports, the autogynephilia fetishists found themselves disarmed of the old feminist talking point that women would soon equal men on the playing fields. Only the silliest social constructionists still believed that. Therefore, the trans dudes couldn’t persuasively argue that it was only a matter of time before women were as good as men, so what did it matter if female impersonators jumped the gun a little?

Fortunately, defenders of women’s sports were able to persuasively argue that letting biological men crush women would be a permanent disaster for women’s sports. And, as of 2024, they’ve won most of these debates and appear to be making steady progress, at least outside of the Biden administration, on banning fetishists from making a farce out of women’s athletics.

That strikes me as the most likely model for what would be the result of more of my ideas coming to be accepted as sensible: neither utopia nor apocalypse, but some improvement in the rules and discourse. And, perhaps most valuably, various even worse new ideas that we haven’t yet imagined would be headed off at the pass.

That may not have been the most decisive way to conclude my book. Perhaps I was merely knocking off around dawn because it was time for bed.

Yet, ultimately, I believe that the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking.

In any case, it’s a lot more interesting.