"French Lessons: The nation neocons most despise has followed their immigration prescriptions" by Steve Sailer

in the December 19, 2005 issue of The American Conservative. Here's an excerpt:

Numerous American pundits have been crowing about how much better America is at handling minorities and immigrants than is France, which got what it had coming to it during the weeks of car-burning riots.

As in France, where the political class seemed more interested in the riots' impact on the 2007 Presidential election than in stopping the destruction, few talking heads here appear inclined to blame the rioting on the rioters. After all, the columnists feel, the North and West Africans setting cars on fire are just a bunch of lowbrow punks, hardly worthy of our disdain, while it's so much more fun to score points off our old ideological rivals.

Of course, when it comes to urban unrest, it's always dangerous to boast, "It can't happen here," since it could happen here at any moment. "Instant karma's gonna get you," as John Lennon warned.

In this case, however, sneering at the French is particularly foolhardy because it already has happened here, repeatedly.

Amusingly, the American commentariat, while full of scorn for French policies, offer diametrically opposed explanations of what they are doing wrong. Liberal gloating has at least been more attached to reality than that of the neoconservatives, since the liberals recognize that the French state shares with their neoconservative antagonists an ideological opposition to affirmative action and identity politics. The French government doesn't even compile statistics by race or ethnicity, for example...

The embarrassing truth is that the country the neocons hate the most, France, is also, paradoxically but perhaps not surprisingly, the one most similar to them in personality and philosophy. The French are quarrelsome, vengeful, ideological, and verbally facile … a nation of Podhoretzes.

The December 19th issue also includes my rather ambitious review of "Rent," which offers a suggestion for why creativity in the arts appears to be in decline.

This issue of The American Conservative also includes articles by Roger D. McGrath on black vs. Hispanic violence in LA, Bill Kauffman on the secession movement in Vermont, W. James Antle III on lessons from the recent GOP electoral losses, Pat Buchanan on "The Death of Economic Patriotism," Taki on lessons for Bush from The Prince, Deep Background on what the big money boys in Syria are doing, John Zmirak on Wal-Mart's war on Christmas, Leon Hadar on Karen Hughes's comedy tour of the Middle East, William Pfaff on Tony Blair's embarrassment, Scott McConnell on The Assassins' Gate by George Packer, Howard Sutherland on Stanley A. Renshon's The 50% American: Immigration and National Identity in the Age of Terror by Stanley A. Renshon, and Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, on Victor Davis Hanson's A War Like No Other.

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My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer