Author: Curt Doolittle

TODD ON FAMILIES AND PARTICULARLY LIBERTY:

—“communitarian countries … against foreign occupiers chose to be communist. The communist vote in India (including recurring communist governments of certain states) appears to largely correlate with the communitarian family.

As with liberal-egalitarian countries, these countries embraced a pseudo-universalist ideology that explicitly rejected racism of the Nazi type.

Whereas all the other family types tend to favor one or other aspect of modernity, Todd finds that the communitarian family appears to correlate with stability (or “backwardness”), remaining peasant nations even as other modernize around them, until the tensions become such that they are (often brutally) jolted out of their conservatism. The overwhelming majority of humanity (i.e. Eurasia) is communitarian. ***Todd speculates that as this family type develops it then slows down historical development***, leaving only peripheral non-communitarian areas to be dynamic (i.e. Western Europe, Japan).

***Liberty alone characterizes absolute nuclear countries.*** The child leaves the family household as soon as he reaches adulthood and parents are free to dispose of their property as they wish. He sees a connection with the Lockean vision of liberal, non-egalitarian and contractual nature of government (which also characterizes America, with the added propensity for westward emigration and “fleeing” problems).

Todd argues that the perception of autonomous and different individuals within the family translates into ***Anglo-liberal politics, a preference for isolationism and a high tolerance for ethnic “ghettos” (that is, as “normal,” not necessarily considered a problem (as the French do)). Anglo-segregation and Dutch Apartheid are the norm whenever these peoples come into contact with non-whites.*** (Ed: My position as well – curt.)

Todd argues: “The English conception of the nation is particularly tolerable because it is tolerant. Unlike the French and German visions, which deny the right of peoples to an autonomous cultural existence.”

Otherwise the main characteristics of pure liberal nations appears to be a certain atomization of individuals, a certain political stability and respect for liberal oligarchic regimes (most monarchies in Europe are in pure liberal nations and have been rarely if ever toppled). There is little hard ideology. British Labourism is for Todd a “zero-socialism,” an organized labor movement which in practice very early accepted an unequal and individualist society as tolerable. “—