defending liberalism (but not EHC)

let's not complicate things.

If you're reading this, that's because you clicked on my homepage and found it. I did not send it out as an email, because I didn't edit it. But I hate editing, and my editing backlog is now 110 essays / 220,000 words / 440 pages, and I don't have time to keep editing things. So this is just getting put out there as a little bonus article. I was going to write it as a comment, but the comment got too long, and I wanted to include citations and images, so it became a bonus article. Enjoy!

A lot of people hate the term “elite human capital.” Including me. And I’m an edgy neo-liberal, who the term should appeal to.

Hanania is considering dropping the term, which I think is a good idea. If your ideas are good, and your brand is hurting you, re-brand.

I’m not going to spend too much time re-litigating why the term is uncomfortable. Rather, I want to defend the substance of liberalism on its own terms, not a label. But a brief blurb should suffice:

yeah, EHC isn’t my thing.

The criticism of EHC is that “sometimes smart people are wrong.” Of course! Humanity has changed its opinion too many times for smart people to always be right.

When Christianity began, it was probably an amalgamation of Greco-Hebrew religious fanatics (like Timothy), Roman soldiers, unorthodox Rabbis, and working-class masses. By the 6th century, if you were a Christian priest evangelizing to the unwashed masses, you had to make big picture books to describe the Bible because no one in Northern Europe could read.

These were medieval propaganda posters, not meant just for scholarly consumption, but also for visual display to illiterates who couldn’t understand Latin. (Codex Gigas)

In the 1st century, Christianity wasn’t really “elite.” By the 6th century, it was definitely elite, and Christian conversions came from the top down, with Germanic kings converting first, and then the population following them.

Whether or not Christianity had attained elite status has nothing at all to do with whether or not Jesus was God. You can’t determine truth by association. That’s just an appeal to authority. It’s a better heuristic than the authority of a single person or institution, but it is still appealing to the authority of a class called “smart people,” who have been continually wrong about stuff throughout history.

Today, liberalism is a signal of high status. It is “elite.” Does that mean liberal ideas are necessarily correct? No! They need to be defended on their own terms. Instead of hiding behind status as a justification for ideas, let’s just defend the ideas.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that smart people are liberals. I am glad that liberalism has elite status. I also like poking fun and trolling conservatives, so I am happy to remind them that they are as dumb as a bag of rocks. Genetically dumb. But that’s just a fun little jab (you aren’t triggered, are you?) and is not in itself an argument for liberal policies.

It would suck if we lived in 1270, and I was getting persecuted by the church for trying to read Aristotle. Thank God for the high status of liberalism! But the victory of liberalism over America is not a proof of the goodness of liberalism. I certainly wouldn’t argue that the Islamic conquests are evidence that Islam is a perfect system (although I would argue that it was better than the paganism which preceded it).

With that out of the way, let’s get into the substance of liberalism, according to Mr. East Hunter:

feminism:

- feminism (which drives down birth rates and makes women unhappy),

Feminism is awesome.

The idea that we need high birth rates at this moment in history is ridiculous.

Population growth increases pollution, the risk of nuclear war, and violent crime. Population growth is not necessary for innovation. We could have a much smaller population (1 billion people) and still have AI, robotics, automation, plenty of food and water, cheap housing, and Netflix. We don’t need 100 trillion Americans. The idea of building more favelas and suburbs to house more Last Men is repulsive and immoral.

China had the right idea with the One Child Policy — it was just a bit too overzealous in its implementation. It will experience some short term pain, but in the long term, China was more correct to restrict fertility than to boost it. In 2000, the Chinese GDP per capita was $959. That’s lower than Rwanda today ($990). 25 years ago, China was literally worse than Africa. Also in the year 2000, China was adding 10 million people to its population. It was only restricting fertility that China was able to add more per capita resources into education, investment, infrastructure, and development. This pulled China out of poverty.

Obviously, we are not China. We do not just declare force abortions on women for having more than one child. What we have instead is called feminism.

Feminism is a shit test. It increases conflict between men and women. And yes, it does make women unhappy. This is because people prefer slavery over freedom. But we will force them to be free, whether they like it or not!

White people are already thoroughly indoctrinated with feminism, and the white TFR is fairly steady. Hispanic TFR has been boosted by continued immigration, but Mexican TFR has been falling for some time. Globally speaking, feminism is the best tool to reduce overpopulation. The fertility declines among whites are diminishing and flatlining. If you want to close the white-nonwhite fertility gap, you should support feminism, because it affects non-whites more than it affects whites at this point. Outlawing feminism would disproportionately benefit non-whites, whose fertility strategy relies much more on sexism.

In short, white people have been exposed to feminism over a longer period of time and have developed some inoculation against it, including religiousness (think Orthodox Jews and Amish) and conservatism. Non-whites have not developed this inoculation, and they are being devastated by feminism. Feminism is sort of like a smallpox blanket. If you want to reverse white demographic decline, the last thing you should be doing is attacking feminism.

immigration:

- the support for mass immigration (which adds people to Western countries who are a net drain on the state through lower education/income, higher use of social transfers and increased criminality),

Mass immigration is a drain on per capita income, because the welfare state is massive. The problem isn’t open borders, it’s open pockets. But immigrants to America don’t generally increase the risk of violent crime. The study that Mr. Hunter links to is on Denmark, whose immigrants are Muslims and Slavs.

By contrast, the three big immigrant groups to America are Hindus, Asians, and Mexicans. These three groups have much lower rates of violent crime than Slavs and Muslims.

From a globalist perspective, bringing 3rd worlders into the west is a net good, because it lowers their fertility. Probably because of the aforementioned feminism, but also education and lower mortality rates.

Let’s say that Somalians have an IQ of 67.8. Somalians in Somalia have a TFR of 6.2. But if you import Somalians to Finland, their TFR drops to 2.39. Problem, conservatives?

You could argue that when you remove Somalians from Somalia, that leaves more “empty spaces” in Somalia to be filled by Somalians. More specifically, you could argue that remittances from Somalian immigrants give Somalians back home more cash to spend on having babies. But you could also argue that remittances increase development and reduce mortality, and reducing mortality is the best way to reduce fertility. Mexico gets tons of remittances, and that hasn’t stopped its TFR from dropping from 6.8 (1964) to 1.8 (2022).

The “filling the spots” hypothesis has no evidence behind it. Plenty of countries are losing people to emigration, but this isn’t boosting TFR. Sudanese TFR has fallen from 7.1 (1971) to 4.4 (2022) while losing 3% of its population per year. This is true for every country with net emigration: they all have falling fertility rates.

I’m not suggesting that open borders decreases the TFR of natives within native countries. I’m simply arguing that the TFR of immigrants decreases when they go abroad, and the TFR of the natives is unaffected either way. The net result is less non-white people living in this world, globally. Problem?

You could argue that these fertility rates would fall even faster if we closed the borders, but there’s no evidence for this. It’s just an assertion. In reality, what lowers fertility is feminism, urbanism, and economic development. If you want Somalian fertility to drop, we need to bring those three things to Somalia. That means more foreign aid, more gay sex, and more liberalism. Based!

This isn’t a new experiment — the west has been doing this for decades. We used to call it colonialism; now we call it liberal internationalism. Non-whites go to the west; they get educated; some of them return home; the returners help develop their countries. Did you know that Ho Chi Minh was educated in Paris? I’m not the biggest fan of communism, but Vietnam is much more developed today than it was in the 1960s. Thank you, mass immigration! Thank you, communism! Thank you, liberalism!

Again, you can claim that you don’t care about 3rd worlders, but that’s a value judgement on your part, not an example of you “proving the liberals wrong.” On the empirical question of global economic growth, liberalism is superior. If you’re racist and hate the sight of Vietnamese people, and you think their genes are polluting the purity of the Aryan race, just say that and don’t lie about how racism is a superior economic system, or how Vietnamese immigrants are making you unsafe.

I do think that Islam presents an ideological threat to liberalism and that Muslim immigration should be restricted for that reason. But that’s an argument for why liberals shouldn’t tolerate intolerance; it’s an argument against one particular strain of liberalism, not liberalism in the broadest sense. I agree that open borders with Africa is a bad idea, but you can still remove that plank from the platform and be a liberal on feminism, geopolitics, sexuality, and environmentalism.

If you need to differentiate between open borders liberalism and normal borders liberalism, we can come up with another term like “neo-liberalism” or “deep leftism.” Whatever floats your boat. My argument isn’t that every superficial permutation of leftism invented by tumblr Millennials in the last 10 years is beyond reproach or critique. My argument is that broad liberalism (or deep liberalism) is basically right and true, and we shouldn’t throw out the entire ideology just because it’s gone too far in a few places.

ukraine:

- support for the Ukrainian war (which destroys both Ukraine and the EU economy to avert a Russian threat which never really existed anyway),

Imagine if NATO disbanded tomorrow. Russia would steamroll Ukraine, absorbing 30 million new workers into its population, along with a significant amount of natural resources, including farmland, minerals, and natural gas. Russia plus Ukraine is absolutely a threat to Europe.

Furthermore, Russia today is a Chinese proxy, which means that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war between America and China. If America gives up, China wins. China plus Russia could easily invade Europe.

Instead of all that happening, America has defended Ukraine. That the Europeans or Ukrainians suffer in the short term is not in dispute. The question is whether or not it is good to defend your country against invasion by the Eurasian cartel, in the long term. I would argue that a Europe dominated by Russia and China would be worse in the long term, and it is entirely moral for the United States to assert itself in providing aid to Ukraine.

If you only consider the damage caused by the war, and not the cost of being conquered by Eurasian autocrats, then you’re missing half of the equation.

Take East Germany, for example. East Germany was the richest state in the communist bloc. Why? It was run by Germans, and Germans are good at running economies. That Germany was richer than Poland and Russia had nothing to do with “communist ideology,” but the demographics of Germany. If Russia and China gain military supremacy over Europe, they will run Europe in a worse way than America would.

You could argue that Russia-China would just let Europe “do its own thing.” Maybe, maybe not! Even if Europe would be entirely unaffected by a transition to Eurasian domination, there’s also the issue of unipolarity.

Unipolarity is good for global stability. A multipolar world is a more violent world. Imagine a world where Iran is going to war with Israel; China is fighting in Taiwan; North Korea just bombed Seoul; Pakistan is launching raids on India.

All of these are “frozen conflicts” due to the intervention of America. If America withdraws from the global stage, as neo-isolationists suggest, all these “frozen conflicts” will heat up very quickly. Regional powers in a multi-polar world would have no big dog restraining their local actions. Iran could very easily invade Iraq (which is run by Iran-sympathizers), and gain control over 25% of the world’s oil by smashing the flash-but-fake Saudi military. If America withdrew, Iran is six months away from conquering the entire Middle East — or trying. In that scenario, Israeli nukes come into play. Not good!

If America stops playing global policeman, the risk of nuclear war increases exponentially. At the same time, if America intervenes too hard — starting a pre-emptive war with Iran, for example — that is also destabilizing. Liberals have the right balance: defend small nations when they are threatened by regional hegemons, but don’t launch pre-emptive wars against great powers that play by the rules.

Russia broke the rules. You can argue that NATO expansion was a mistake, and should have never been on the table, but that’s in the past. We can’t go back and change that. The future is one in which Russia is going to seek to conquer Ukraine, and that should be prevented by maintaining a Kiev government. If aid is withdrawn, Ukraine collapses, and instability increases.

America’s job is to maintain the status quo. That was the function of the Roman Empire, and when empires bring stability to large areas of the globe, they increase economic productivity. Multi-polarity is a recipe for the eruption of conflict and piracy, which is bad for the global economy.

race:

- racial egalitarianism (which only works if handouts are given on a racial basis because there is a likely biological discrepancy in the abilities and motivations of ancestry groups)

The argument here is that liberals are responsible for racial egalitarianism, and that racial egalitarianism is a tax on white people. Three problems with this:

1. Without racial egalitarianism, you increase the potential for an increase in race-based ethnic conflict, including genocide.

2. Racial egalitarianism can be thought of as an “insurance policy” against genocide, which costs 10% of GDP, but prevents the outbreak of catastrophic pogroms.¹

3. Racial egalitarianism is a “canary in the coal mine” which projects intelligent minorities like Asians and Jews against chuds.

If affirmative action is totally dismantled, it won’t affect white people that much. This is because most of the jobs taken by blacks and Hispanics would be filled by Asians, not whites. Secondly, most of the wealth transfer from whites to non-whites occurs on a non-racial basis, in the case of welfare, for example.

Blacks and Hispanics are poorer, so they get more welfare. If you want to stop blacks and Hispanics from getting welfare, you would need to actively discriminate against them on the basis of race, or eliminate welfare entirely. There’s no way to stop racial transfers of wealth otherwise.

Race realism is, in fact, dangerous. Blithely asserting that we could eliminate welfare or start deporting black people to Africa without any negative consequences is naive. Whenever right-wingers protest against racial egalitarianism, they are never honest about their alternative. The alternative looks like 200 years of race war between Native Americans and whites. If you think that’s a moral position, go for it, but your views are fringe and LARPy.

You might as well argue that “we should abolish Christianity and build giant statues to Nietzsche and bring back dueling in the public square.” Exciting! Fun! Sexy! But this is not realistic policy. Propose something, rather than endlessly critiquing liberals for defending the status quo.

Yes, liberals are annoying. They say things like “Latinx,” which hurts them in elections. But being annoying is a self-inflicted wound against Democratic popularity, and not the “civilization crisis” that conservatives make it out to be. No, using she/they pronouns is not going to collapse civilization. Stop being a hysterical neurotic conservative in response to hysterical neurotic liberals. Counter substantive policy with substantive policy.

climate change:

- drastic measures to stop climate change (which never include things like nuclear energy which actually work, have poor cost-benefit ratio, won’t work unless implemented globally which is not happening, and even then only stops an event which is predicted to be the second-to-least likely world-ending scenario, with most predicting humanity will be fine)

The problem with nuclear is that it is a huge cybersecurity risk. If you hack an oil rig, you can temporarily inconvenience a nation. If you hack a nuclear power plant, you can explode it. Now I’m sure there are many smart people who work very hard to make it “virtually impossible” to blow up a nuclear power plant, but as we’ve found out many times before, “virtually impossible” is not the same thing as “actually literally impossible.”

I actually agree that humanity will be fine, and we should focus on pollution rather than CO2. This is still an area where liberals are better than conservatives.

trans:

- transgender ideology (which causes iatrogenic harm to a significant percentage of impressionable teenagers)

Wow, iatrogenic! You are truly smart! I bow before your Elite Human Capital!

Trans issues are the dumbest part of the conservative package. Why are you against sterilizing mentally defective people?

Right-wingers will go from “let the Africans die!” to “we must save trans kids from their BPD mothers!” Which one is it? Are traits heritable, or are they not?

conclusion.

Conservatives are liberals from 20 years ago. They have no new ideas; they simply complain. Sometimes complaining is warranted, but in many cases, it is just an expression of frustration.

I understand that people are frustrated about the collapse of religion, family, and social trust. People are more lonely and atomized. They want to be slaves — most people are natural born slaves — and they want big daddy to tell them what to do. That big daddy could be the church, or it could be Hitler. But they do not like freedom. Freedom is uncomfortable, and makes us sad.

I do not care.

If you do not enjoy freedom, your opinion is not valid. Only free people deserve power. If slaves find freedom uncomfortable, tough luck! I hope you stop breeding. We do not need more slaves. We have AI and robots and technology to replace you. Bye bye!

You are completely free to join a fundamentalist cult, like the Orthodox, Amish, or Fundamentalist Mormons. There are many to choose from. I respect people’s right to be crazy and have kids and indoctrinate them in flat Earth nonsense. If you win the breeding war against the liberals, congratulations! But while I respect your right to drop out of society and become a breeding machine, I do not respect you.

The purpose of humanity is to learn, grow, and advance. If you are not contributing to that, we are not on the same team. Liberalism is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Authoritarianism, monarchism, and theocracy are all outmoded. Liberalism remains the most attractive and meritocratic option.

1. I cover the history of pogroms against black people here in my 2026 midterms analysis.