How Catholics Transformed America (What Colin Woodard's American Nations Gets Wrong about Yankees)

In this insightful video, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the profound influence of Catholic immigrants on American culture, particularly in reshaping the Yankee identity. Drawing from Colin Woodard's "American Nations" and contrasting it with David Hackett Fisher's "Albion's Seed," the Collins couple offers a nuanced perspective on how Catholic immigration waves transformed the cultural, political, and social landscape of America. This comprehensive analysis covers topics ranging from bureaucratic tendencies and voting patterns to the evolution of American arts and sports culture. Key points discussed: The misconception of Yankee culture's Puritan roots Catholic influence on American bureaucracy and politics The impact of Catholic immigration on urban centers The evolution of Catholic voting patterns Cultural differences between Catholic and Protestant traditions The role of Catholics in shaping American arts and education The future of Catholic influence in American politics

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. We were listening to the audio book for American nations by

Simone Collins: colin Woodard.

Malcolm Collins: . And we're likely going to do a series of episodes on them. This is a guy who divided America into 11 different populations with different histories. I'll put it on the screen here. I think he gets most things right. He wrote the book as a direct followup to another book that we mentioned all the time on the show called Albion's Seed that talks about the four founding cultures of America

Simone Collins: by historian David Hackett Fisher, which was written in either late eighties or early nineties.

So this answer is a much more modern take and quite interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Well, but it also does something quite different than Fisher's book. And I think it, it gets some things wrong. And one of the things that gets wrong, we're going to be talking about on this video, because I think he completely misunderstands the Yankee culture.

So first I'm going to talk a little bit about Albion Seed so you can get a little prep of this and, and why Albion Seed doesn't help us as much understand modern America as this [00:01:00] followup book does. Specifically, Albion Seed, they divide the original Americans into four Four distinct cultural groups, which is accurate.

The Puritans, the Quakers, the Backwoods people,

and the Cavaliers. Now what was interesting about these four groups is I remember I was talking to somebody about this, and they kept trying to guess. They were like, who are the Catholics? Which one is the Catholics?

And they go, like, I, I would go, so the first thing they go, oh, the next is the Catholic group. Or I mentioned the Cavaliers. And they go, oh, that must be the Catholic group. And I had to break to them something that is kind of, I think tough for a lot of Catholics today because they get this sort of retelling of American history that tries to include them in parts of American history that they just were not players in.

During the time of the American Revolution, only 1. 5 percent of America was Catholic. If you, and people are like, Maryland, Maryland was a Catholic colony, wasn't it? At the time of the revolution, less than 10 percent of the population in Maryland was Catholic. There was just no significant Catholic population in early America.

[00:02:00] However, that is not true of America today, even when we're talking about like significant declines in religiosity in America. You can look at something like Massachusetts, for example. And can you guess the percentage in 1990 of Americans , in Massachusetts, who identified as Catholics?

Simone Collins: 4%.

Malcolm Collins: 54%. Holy smokes. Do you, do you know what it was in 2010? 38? 45%.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Uh Oh. So we can go over some, some other, you know, new England states, you get 26% of New Hampshire, one of the least Catholic, of the New England states is incredibly Catholic. 22% of new Vermont, another low Catholic population of the New England states identifies as Catholic.

That is absolutely wild. [00:03:00] Yeah. Um, In terms of like how much of the population of New England Catholics makeup. So, the thing that the guy gets wrong in this book is he does get right. The Quakers, who ended up making up the Midlands population, were widely outcompeted by an alliance of the backwoods people and the German immigrants, who basically ended up erasing their cultural footprint until they came roaring back with a vengeance through the woke revolution, which we will do another episode on how that evolved out of Quakerism.

We talk about it heavily in the book, the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. However,

He incorrectly claims.

Malcolm Collins: the Yankees evolved out of the Puritans

When in reality.

Malcolm Collins: the Puritans. basically went extinct in the same way that the Quakers do. Oh, yes, they may got some small sliver of American population, but their ideals and their world vision was pretty much completely erased except for some small bubbles in places like New Hampshire, which I [00:04:00] think holds more to the Puritan political framing.

But largely speaking, they were erased by the many waves. of Catholic immigrants that mostly settled in the urban centers of New England. As to places why the, like Vermont and New Hampshire were not as affected, it's because their population doesn't live in urban centers. And most of the Catholic population went to settle in urban centers.

So, if you look here, , at his map and then contrast it with the concentration of Catholics in different parts of America. It is very clear that three of the regions. That he carved out are actually specifically Catholic cultural units. Here. We are talking about Yankee dim, the left coast and Eleanor.

Okay, This is the north Eastern United States. This is the far Western coast of the United States. And this is the Hispanic immigrant part of the United States. Every one of these has had an enormous impact on America's cultural [00:05:00] history.

And as such Catholicism has had an enormous impact on Americans, cultural history.

Malcolm Collins: Now, another thing that people get super wrong about Catholics modern, modern Catholics, and they go, Oh, Catholics, solid conservative voter place. Life begins at conception and all right. As of 2022, what percentage of Catholics identified was the Democratic Party versus the Republican party?

Simone Collins: That's a good question. I would say. Probably 68 percent of Catholics identify with the Democratic Party because it, it focuses more on this like, top down control and like charitable giving to the weak, right?

It's,

Malcolm Collins: it's 42 percent with the Democratic Party, 38 percent with the Republican Party. Oh, okay. So the rest aren't affiliated. Yeah. 20 percent are unaffiliated. There's still way more and they used to be even higher with the Democratic Party. So in the election cycle before that, in the 2020 election cycle it was 45 percent [00:06:00] identified with the Democratic Party.

And, and then if you look at exit polling, it's even worse. So you look at 2020 52 percent of Catholic voters voted for Joe Biden.

Simone Collins: 52%. Yeah. Yeah. I would, I would think that the majority of Catholics are going Democrats.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Here I have contrasted to maps. For you. One map is the percent of Catholics in different counties of America. And the other map is how those counties voted. You can see there is almost a direct overlap to which counties went Democrat. And this is in the most recent election cycle. This is this election cycle, which counties are hotly contested, which ones are not. So, this is not.

just a historic thing.

Malcolm Collins: And I think a lot of people think that they're a Republican faction, Catholics at all voting was, Republicans is actually a fairly modern thing in the 1970s.

So again, I mentioned this on the show, but a lot of people don't know this. The Republican party ended up having to take a pro-life stance. It was majority the Republican party was the pro-choice life before, which [00:07:00] much more fit was Republican values because yeah. The, the Protestant tradition generally believes that life begins like 12 weeks after conception as Catholics did before about 200 years ago you know, like Thomas Aquinas and Augustus Hippo used to believe this, but they did this shift recently with Pope Pius IX, gone into that in another episode, don't need to go into it here but, but one, it was the, the, you know, Protestant religious thing to do, and it was the, Free choice thing to do, which is what Republicans were historically about.

And so they did this switch in the 1970s, specifically as a tactic to try to get some Catholics to vote Republican. And while it swung some Catholics their way, it has always been the minority of Catholics who this appealed to. And it was really just the single issue voters, because other than that issue, and we'll get into why the Catholic vote and the Catholic vote Cultural perception much more aligns with the democratic party.

And I also think people forget how recently Catholics were accepted as a mainstream block within American society. [00:08:00] You know, I'm just baffled where you'll get these like Catholic LARPers today. Like they don't, they're not actually culturally Catholic, like, Nick Fuentes, right, who like are aligning with like the KKK, the KKK.

hunted and lynched Catholics just as much as they did blacks. What? Yes, they hated Catholics. The three groups that the KKK was about getting rid of or removing from power were blacks, Jews, and Catholics. Oh, what?

Simone Collins: Okay how did I live my entire life not knowing this? Well, because there's

Malcolm Collins: been this like rewriting of history as like Catholics were this group that was always here and weren't this incredibly discriminated against group that was because, you know, you can't have like Irish as a discriminated group in modern progressive.

You can't have Italians, but there were lots of signs, you know, you look, you go back to these immigration ways and it was, you know, Irish need not apply here. Italian need not apply here. There was this [00:09:00] huge fear of the Catholic immigrant waves and that they would change our culture and they saw these people in the same way that many people today, I actually say much worse than most people look at Hispanic immigrants today.

They saw them as an intrinsically criminal people. Because most of the Catholic immigrant graves came with large organized crime, much larger than the current Hispanic wave. Like people They, they are nothing compared to like the mob or the mafia. The mob was the Irish wave and the mafia was the Italian wave which basically controlled huge portions of American urban centers.

Like people were terrified. So, so you've got to keep that in mind as well. Right. And when Kennedy, who was the first Catholic president that we had was running for office, it was a huge thing. Like it was the Obama. Yeah. They were like,

Simone Collins: is he going to be loyal to the Pope or to America?

Malcolm Collins: Can a Catholic be president?

This was a big thing that people saw beforehand. Like, like they were like, I do. It was a big belief before that the [00:10:00] Catholics couldn't be president. Like Mm-Hmm. because fundamentally they're loyal to their religion, and their religion is loyal to a foreign power. IE the Vatican. I. e. he can't be president, right?

And, and, and people are like, come on, Catholics aren't Democrats. Who was our last president? The Catholic Joe Biden. You know, keep this in mind, right? , so we've got to break through a number of things. One, Catholics were a discriminated group for a long time in American history.

It only recently came out of this discriminated status. This discriminated identity hugely shaped their cultural history, the way they impacted American politics, and the way they created, I think he is right about the boundary he drew around Yankeedom. I think he is wrong about what influenced their value set or how they came to exist as a cultural group.

We are going to do a different episode on why the Yankee Puritans went extinct and what ended up happening to America's Calvinists because they didn't go. purely extinct. They ended up merging with the backwoods [00:11:00] culture. You see a lot of this even in his book. And the backwoods people were already predominantly Calvinist.

These were the incredibly violent woodland people who ended up creating greater Appalachia, which is where my people are from. And I think people see this in my kids. It's like these sort of uncouth, violent like, like us as well. Like we prefer the lower arts. You know, we are not concerned with sort of signaling high class.

In fact, that would be considered like a very low class thing to do within the greater Appalachian cultural system. But we will get to a whole different episode talking about that. I want to focus now on how Catholics changed America. So when Catholics came into the United States, they behaved very differently than basically any cultural group that we had had in the United States before.

Typically and I've talked about this in other episodes, but it's worth noting during the recent sort of battle that we had as a country, you had, this was over the COVID vaccines. You had two different [00:12:00] ways of relating to truth. You had one group who said, well, true should be determined by people who spent their entire lives studying a subject and then who are certified by a central bureaucracy.

And then another group who said, in this case, the university system, the central bureaucracy is prone to corruption. Instead we should all determine truths for ourselves based on our own research. Wouldn't you know it, this actually broke out. If you look at the areas that were more pro really strict COVID restrictions and everything like that, you basically look at the percentage of Catholic descendants living in an area, and you will see a direct correlation to Did they go with the expert consensus or were they more about figuring this out on your own?

Now, I should note, I actually think that both of these systems for determining truth are important and a society is healthier when you have both of them. Otherwise, you go full QAnon where everyone is everything in the conspiracy. You can't trust anything. And I don't think QAnon is wrong about everything, but I think that, you know, there is, it's sort of a full conspiracy brain thing.

Or, you know, You go full, like, zero COVID, China, the experts can't have been [00:13:00] wrong the first time, so we have to keep doubling down. So I think that America benefits from having these two populations. But this, this flip is what we had during the Reformation, right? Like, that's why the Catholics took this mindset.

The Reformation was also one group saying, truth should be determined by people who spent their entire life studying a subject, and then who have been certified by a central bureaucracy, i. e., the Catholic Church. The priest system. And then another group who said, no, no, no. True should be determined by individuals studying the Bible themselves.

And then you have the, the, the secondary thing with the Catholic group that made them very different. So in the first great awakening in America. We'll have another episode on this, how it was sort of like the first social media movement is the Catholics when they were choosing, you know, who would be appointed priests who would, you know, speak to people one, the people couldn't even understand what they were saying most of the time because they were saying it in one language and it was a language that people didn't speak and they were promoted through a bureaucracy.

In the early American colonies during this like fiery Protestant great awakening [00:14:00] period, people would go to the church. There'd be like four churches in a town and you would choose the one that spoke to you most. It was like using early social media channels, but it led to a very different way of relating to your family.

Faith. It was like a very fiery driven way, right? Like, well, it made

Simone Collins: you have sort of the difference between religion almost as a public utility. Like you go to the local public school, just like you'd go to the local Catholic church versus like a startup world that, that Protestant preachers were the original social media platforms.

And we're. We're recently on a road trip and I was looking at in an old New England town that we were driving through, like all the different, very old churches in that town and feeling like, wow, like each of these feels kind of like a different social media platform and we had these basically like local entrepreneurs running around.

Raising money from benefactors who are hoping to get an ROI on their investment in terms of social capital prestige, and maybe, you [00:15:00] know, like better odds of going to heaven or being among the elect, whatever it might be. To, you know, to invest in these, in these, in these projects. Preachers who then we're trying to get audiences and get the network effects.

And they're very much like early social media platforms. It is a chicken and egg problem of like, you know, well, can I get a great congregation, you know, but can I also get the best, you know, like preacher, it's, it's a really interesting question. And so, yeah, I see what you're saying. This is so interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Pretty much all of the other early American cultural groups had a, a, a massive distrust of authority and they had a massive distrust bureaucracies and everything like that. And the Catholics didn't have this, which allowed them to do something very unique in terms of how they were able to integrate themselves into American society. So there were two things that they did. One. We got to talk about organized crime because organized crime wasn't just organized crime.

It was an alternate government structure that this group was using to both provide social services to their own people, [00:16:00] which the organized crime organizations often did. They were providing you know, orphanages, they were providing help to the local Catholic community. They were providing with food and everything like that.

And this was a discriminated community, right? But they also provided rules for that community and order for that community that superseded the local government's order, but something very interesting happened because they were able to form these large counter bureaucracies to the existing bureaucracies of the regions that they were moving into.

But then they begin to quickly integrate with the local regions. Specifically, this is where the stereotype of the Irish cop comes from in American history. They. Quickly took over pretty much all of the government bureaucratic positions specifically the cops and other government bureaucracies in the large urban centers where they were, they were hugely disproportionately represented there.

We even see this today in American politics, where if you look at the Supreme Court, it has been hugely, hugely, hugely, overwhelmingly Catholic, and [00:17:00] I'll add in post, like, just how overwhelmingly Catholic, I think it's like 80 percent Catholic or something.

So as of the last Supreme court for Supreme court justices raised in Catholic families, you had. John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch. And justice, Sonia Sotomayor. That's a 78% Catholic majority in a Supreme court. Within a country that only had the Catholic population of 20%.

Malcolm Collins: Absolutely wild. And so they were sort of like bureaucratic specialists.

And it led to the culture that they were building in New England to have an incredible, this Yankee culture to have an incredible trust of bureaucracies and respect for bureaucratic traditions. So if you look at most of the other cultural groups, they would have looked down on, for example, lawyers especially wealthy lawyers.

So, and you see this in my family history. Remember I [00:18:00] read that story about my ancestor who was like really into getting educated and everything like that. Well, he always called himself, he said, well, I'm a a bacon and eggs lawyer. You know, he never wanted people to know that he wasn't a subsistence lawyer.

liver, that he lived on a subsistence lifestyle, but he was a lawyer. And we'll get into why the backwoods people wanted to be seen as living on a subsistence lifestyle and not accumulating capital. Because that was very important to their cultural tradition. But within the Catholic culture, no, this wasn't true.

You know, being a lawyer, being a judge, being a police officer, these were all very respected traditions.

This led to Catholics taking on a very unique role in the early. , economic hubs of America when the Catholic immigrant waves came in, because they were much more comfortable taking these sort of bureaucratic positions. Then the Protestants were, they were able to flood local institutions like the police, for example, and build a majority Catholic police force really, really quickly after their immigration waves came in.

And it was actually the rise [00:19:00] of the majority Catholic police force that led to the fall of the mob. , because there wasn't a need for an external, , bureaucratic., operation to protect the Catholics. When the Catholics controlled the police force, this is where you get that like stereotypical police officer's name of Murphy. You know,

But, but it wasn't just the police force.

It was also the legal system. It was also the governing bureaucracy. It was every bureaucratic layer became majority Catholic about a generation and a half after the first major Catholic immigration waves.

Malcolm Collins: And so it moved the Yankee culture into being a much more pro bureaucratic culture. But it also made it a culture that fundamentally, I think, didn't understand some of the things, like, the older parts of American culture.

So one of the things recently, like, if you talk about, like, the gay marriage stuff and like, oh, gays shouldn't be allowed to get married in the United States. And I've, I've noticed disproportionately it's the Catholic conservatives who push this. Which, from an [00:20:00] actual American perspective, is a very queer thing to be pushing because some religions within America do believe that gays can get married.

And if you are pushing that, then you are saying that the government should have the ability to choose how the Christian Bible should be interpreted. And this was actually one of the things that led to the revolution. So leading up to the revolution, one of the really like core evil things that the British government did is they, um, said that the Presbyterian.

the Calvinist ministers could not marry people. And they sent over Anglican ministers to marry people saying that we should have control over who marries and who doesn't marry and the traditions within which they marry. And this too, you know, the traditional American system was seen as horrifying.

So, the, the, during, during the revolution, I think a lot of people misunderstand the revolution's framing. So from the perspective of most of the revolutionaries, the way it's taught in school today, I think, to be more inclusive, is that they were mostly annoyed about just the [00:21:00] taxes that they were under, but that's not really the way most of the revolutionaries thought about it.

Most of the revolutionaries were like, Religious extremists, Calvinists, 70 percent of the white population in America. This is according to the heritage foundation, which is, you know, a core conservative organization were Calvinists during the American revolution and they solve the British Anglicans who were trying to impose their religious system on them as a Catholic light or a Catholic light group.

Trying to force them to live a more Catholic lifestyle. Still

Simone Collins: very much establishment because the whole thing is, you know, let me interpret for myself or let my community interpret for themselves without me.

Malcolm Collins: It wasn't just that it was the way that the Anglican, the Anglican church is very Catholic in a lot of its traditions.

And so they saw and, and even its belief system, because that's what, I mean, When Henry VIII, Henry VIII didn't really want to get rid of all of the great ceremony of the church, he liked all that stuff. He liked the hierarchy, he liked the ceremony, he just felt he had a duty [00:22:00] to his people to produce an error and he felt like due to church politics he wasn't able to do that.

He never really wanted to move away from the Catholic vibe, he wasn't ever really sold on the Puritan ideal of like, we need to reinvent the wheel. And because of that, the Church of England, the Anglican Church, always very much looked Catholic from the perspective of the, the Protestant immigrants. And so when they were fighting the revolution, to many of them, this was a holy religious war against a group that they saw as representing sort of the devil or the Antichrist.

And so, there was a huge anti, and this is where this anti Catholic sentiment came from. I'm not saying it was a good thing, but it's important to understand how strong it was in the early colonies. And so, so the Yankees then came and then, and this is also why many of the Catholics settled in the same areas and settled in this New England area, because that's where the ports were that they were dropping off the immigrants.

And when the immigrants came into those ports, If they moved too far from [00:23:00] these New England ports for the immigrants, the Ellis Island and stuff like that, where they were coming in, they would face an extreme amount of discrimination, possibly get killed. As I mentioned, you know, the KKK and the lynch mobs and stuff like that, there was a very strong motivation to not move from these ports of entry, which is why you have such a Catholic concentration in America.

And then here I'll put a, a map here on screen of where the Catholics actually live in America. . And and so I think that that is a fundamental thing he got wrong. , the Puritan ideology, which was mostly built around a hatred of authority, a hatred of bureaucracy a hatred of, yeah, they wanted to create utopian experiments, but it is very important that these utopian experiments were always meant to be small scale towns that would do things in different ways.

You can think of them very similar to the way we see things is, is that Puritan experiments, the different towns would run things in different ways. And those ways, like the way that the towns were different was very important. You would then go live in the town that, or follow the preacher that was most affiliated with your way of doing things.

Yes, it [00:24:00] was a city on a hill, but it was a city on the hill that was downstream of these influencer like early churches that led to the Great Awakening. It was not downstream of the government bureaucracy. They did not have trust in the government bureaucracy one iota, and you see this in the early days as well.

As you look at their writings and stuff like that. That trust did not descend from their utopian vision. It stemmed from the Catholic utopian visions. And another change that happened with the Yankee ideology that came with the Catholics is the Puritan ethical systems was always very consequential.

It was sort of like trying to find out why God laid the rules down that he laid and then follow those rules. The Catholic system was much more deontological. You know, help the poor don't have abortions and be a good people in this set of rules, which was also not the way many other early American cultures understood ethical systems and was brought by the Catholics and then became an important framing of reference [00:25:00] for the modern democratic party.

So, so that's important to note as well as this shift to this deontological ethical system, which was brought by the Catholics and a shift towards, I'd say, sort of government services, which they were much more comfortable with because the church had been offering them historically. Yeah, it sort of just

Simone Collins: switched from the church offering them to the government offering them.

But if the government's controlled by Catholics, who cares? It's still, yeah, the government's

Malcolm Collins: controlled by

Simone Collins: Catholics

Malcolm Collins: and get

Simone Collins: the taxpayers to tie it in addition to the Catholics, which is better, I guess.

Another huge difference between the Catholics and the other founding groups of America is that they were much, much less ideologically pluralistic. , whereas, you know, you're the, the Quakers and the Puritans Who both were pretty rigidly pluralistic, and then even the Backwoods people while they would fight with the native Americans. And we'll go into this a lot more in the next episode. They didn't really look down on them in the same way and that they would often marry them. They would often adopt their [00:26:00] customs. , the Catholic immigrant group was. Anti pluralistic in the extreme. If you look at the Catholic cultural centers in America, they were often the areas where we were most likely to have race riots in a historic basis. I mean, a couple of famous ones are the Boston burning crisis, , or the Boston draft riot. That occurred during the civil war.

Because there were many Southern sympathizers in Boston during the war. As to why the Catholic population with so much less pluralistic, culturally speaking than the other populations, there are two core reasons. One, if you are a discriminated group, you are always going to be more kind of racist than non discriminated groups. You even see this in our society where you have this moral license to act more racist.

If you are among a discriminated population.

Harrison, why haven't you called? You know how I worry. I'm giving it up, Maggie. I'm quitting the force. It seems like every time we frame a rich black guy, he's back out on the [00:27:00] streets in no time. Not another word of that kind of talk, Harrison Yates. I know you. Framing rich black men for crimes they didn't commit is in your blood.

Wiping that rich, smug smile off their faces is the only thing that puts a smile on yours. You're a good cop, Harrison Yates. You don't have to question that, and you're a good wife, Maggie. Where are you going? I think I've got a little more work to do.

 and as to why populations that are at the top of society are more likely to be pluralistic it's because they've already won in a pluralistic system. So they feel that well, if you don't put any more rules, all in will continue to win.

Whereas people who are at the bottom of an existing system are like, well, if you added some more rules in our group might end up doing better. So let's do that. Let's rig things in our favor. , the plugin. Elysium is always the path favored by any group that thinks that they can naturally out-compete other groups. But in addition to that, you also just had, you know, the, the syllabus of errors, for [00:28:00] example, from Pope Pius. With the Knights, , which that essentially Catholics should try to take control of whatever country they're living in and make it a Catholic. , state. Theocratic state. , it is in the Catholic tradition to attempt to use the faith, to control a government, and then use the government to legislate morality. Where that was never really true of the Protestant traditions.

They believe that you could set up individual. , towns that might legislate morality, but the moral ideas of one town are going to be very different than the moral idea of another town. So you wouldn't want the town next door legislating your morality because you have this decentralized nature of the religion. Whereas the Catholic tradition was historically very, very centralized.

So it made sense to centralize the way the government with legislating morality. Of these reasons. One thing you will note that it is only this last one. That applies to all Catholics rather than just the discriminated American Catholic groups. And this is why in other countries, [00:29:00] Catholic populations are much more pluralistic than the early Catholic American immigrants.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And this is another thing. And again, I, I should know, like, I have nothing against the Catholics just culturally.

It's sort of, because we are just in for the puritan culture. It's like oil and water for us. And one thing I was thinking about is how much of an easier time, like a huge portion of our friend group is Latin American immigrants. Which I think is another thing that people really is how similar the current Latin American immigrants are dispositionally.

To the Irish when they first immigrated or to the Italians when they first immigrated, very, very similar cultural systems. And it, it can be hidden when we talk about Latin American immigrants. They are one step removed Spanish immigrants. Okay. They are from Southern Europe, you know, just like the Italian immigrant waves were.

Yes. There's some native American DNA in them, but in, in, I think in the majority of cases, it's a minority. Yeah. Mostly Spanish, Portuguese immigrant group.

When I Google this, I get answers between 60% and 80%. So it is the [00:30:00] majority. And I point this out, not because like European DNA hits. Better or something like that, but just culturally speaking, , these individuals are really not that different from the Italian immigration wave, which was just another wave of Southern European immigrants who were majority Catholic coming into the United States. The thing that is different is not the nature of this immigrant wave, but the nature of America now, E all the social services that we offer as a country, you cannot offer social services. To immigrants and have porous borders. That's just stupid.

Because that's going to disproportionately select for the least productive immigrants.

Malcolm Collins: And so, a lot of people can one forget that. But two they, they can forget how similar they were to these early waves. And it's like, why do I, why do I have so many more friends in this group?

And I think it's because. When I talk with them, they know that their value systems aren't American. And they're like, okay with that. They're like, Oh, well, you know, maybe we can adopt to a more American system or learn about the American system and learn about how to make our value systems sort of [00:31:00] align with the American value system.

Whereas these older, because there's been so much sort of, you know, cultural brainwashing to, to try to integrate the Catholic population, which I appreciate, you know, like Columbus Day and stuff like that, that was created to integrate this discriminated population to make an Italian one of the like founding American forefathers, because there, there weren't really any important American forefathers.

There were a few like random ones, but not really. So they had to go, Oh, Columbus, that's the American Catholic you know, forefather. But they now like, I'll talk to them. I'll be like, well, these are American conservative values. I'll be like, those are not American conservative values. Those are Catholic values that you brought over in one of the immigrant waves.

And, and some parts of the conservative party have gotten confused about value sets and they'll start spouting value sets. And I'm like, no, that's a Catholic thing. And this is, this is where you've gotten sort of two groups of Catholics in American politics now which is the, the core group, which moved to sort of the Democrat faction.

And then the more extreme religious group which is sort of very deontologically ethical. And has moved into [00:32:00] the, uh, conservative bureaucracy, and that's where they played a huge role in shaping America as well. The, while Catholics make up the minority of the conservative party, right, and the minority of Catholics are conservatives they were the only faction within the conservative party that could really stand out.

Stomach staffing bureaucratic positions the only other group that really could, and is a vast minority of Americans, and I'll add the statistic here, is Mormons.

Mormons makeup only 1.2% of the American population, which is why they alone cannot staff the conservative bureaucracy.

Malcolm Collins: Basically of the conservative political alliance, the only true groups that could really suck up and stomach listening to an incompetent bureaucratic authority were the Catholics and the Mormons, because they were used to that within their church structures.

I mean, so they make up a huge amount of the conservative, like, intellectual factor. And the conservative bureaucratic machinery which shapes in the way that, that sort of policies filter through that machinery, a lot of conservative [00:33:00] policy. Um, so that's also really important in terms of how they, they, they shaped American history through the way that they affected that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. You've, you've been pretty organized with this. So I'm trying to think, and you surprised me with some interesting facts too. I would just, I guess, like your thoughts on like the implications of what this means for the future of both the Republican and Democrat party and where do you think Catholics are going to go?

Also, do you think that their influence is on the rise or do you think it's going to decline given current Catholic birth rates?

Malcolm Collins: So Catholic's influence is definitely both on the rise and in the decline, right? I feel

Simone Collins: like there's an argument for both.

Malcolm Collins: No, there's two different Catholic factions or there's a number of different Catholic factions.

And we'll talk about the ones that are going to rise and the ones that are going to fall apart. First, the one that is the, Just been absolutely murdered recently. It used to be that the bureaucratic apparatus of both the conservatives and the Democrats was mostly Catholic run. But the super virus that we talk about, the urban monoculture, this sort of mimetic [00:34:00] virus has specialized at spreading within bureaucracies and.

Absolutely annihilated the progressive leaning Catholic church. It is torn through it, you know, led to huge amounts of deconversions led to huge amounts of like culturally moving away from what was a traditionally Catholic value system, traditional Catholic beliefs. And so they're basically Catholics in name only at this point.

The ones who stayed within the bureaucratic apparatus of the democratic party. And. And they've also become incredibly low fertility even lower fertility. As we've mentioned, the average Catholic in America that was born in America, not that immigrated is lower fertility than the average American.

So they just got hit really hard by the urban monoculture much harder than other groups because they were bureaucratic specialists. And then another group comes in. Pac Manning the the bureaucracy and unfortunately it ate them. Then you have the deontological Catholics that had historically been really, like, like, like, super strongly deontological Catholics, like, this is what's [00:35:00] true.

Uh, And the deontologists of all groups, we've talked about this in another episode, of the Mormons, the Catholics, all of them. ended up losing their positions of power because they have been unov to motivate intergenerational faith. They are much more likely to deconvert than the consequentialist of the various religious systems.

Mm-Hmm. , who are actually like actively having a theological conversation instead of like, this is how I aesthetically be a Catholic. This is how, and we saw this within the Mormon community as well, which had a large deontological faction was like a, you know, I think the classic version of this is girl defined, which is now, you know.

In the process of deconversion her husband's in the process of Deconversion and Minnie Science Point to, you know, one of them being in the process of Deconversion, which I think shows, you know, it's, it's very bad at intergenerationally keeping people involved in this age of the internet. And it also is unable to motivate a high fertility rate as we've just seen in the data.

And, and, and as we've anecdotally seen interviewing fans and stuff like that, it seems that the Mormons that are actually staying in their religion are staying firing their [00:36:00] religion and are still high fertility and. With the Catholics are moving to this more consequentialist understanding of their religion which leads to a more active and living discussion of the religious text that doesn't just say, well, this is the way we do it because this is the way we've always done it.

It's more like, well, what did God intend by this? What did God intend by this? How can we do this better? Because when you have that, you're able to update much faster and you're able to have better explanations to your kids for why you do things. That the urban monoculture disagrees with. So I actually think that this new faction of Catholics that we've seen sort of bubbling up and becoming very lively within the conservative space which is the new wave, conservative, intellectual Catholics.

I think that's the faction that's going to do really well. And you've seen them like create these all Catholic towns and everything like that. And there are a group of Catholics that I fully align with. Like when I talk with them, I have no trouble understanding them. I have no trouble talking to them.

When I talk with the deontological Catholic faction. They're the way that they logically structure their arguments is so foreign to me. [00:37:00] Even if I like them as people and everything like that, I genuinely, there, there isn't a lot of inter interpretability between the way I logically structure my ideas and the way they logically structure their ideas.

Don't you know about like the doctrine of the body and, and that shows why b*******s are bad. And that shows why IVF is bad. And I'm like what, what, who, who wrote this? Like it's somebody in the 1700s. And I'm like,

Simone Collins: It's so unmoored from the way that you relate to religion.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah there's much more respect for antiquity as being a, a, a sign of truth, like if something has long been, and it's interesting, this, this respect for antiquity within the Catholic, like, intellectuals I talk to, and this is another interesting thing the Catholics brought, is the Protestants generally, the early ways of the Protestants really had no respect for the non Christian intellectuals, historically speaking.

Whereas the Catholics have had a deep respect for people like Aristotle, people like Plato. Yeah. Like they really [00:38:00] cared about the classic intellectuals. And so they Well, and they also did

Simone Collins: so much to integrate other traditions and, and Partially an effort to integrate them into the Catholic fold to say, Hey, we'll just bring in your holidays.

We'll figure out a way to make this Catholic and to accommodate, whereas more Protestant religions, especially more Calvinistic religions with limited atonement, or like, I'm not going to like you, I'm not going to try to bring you in like, no. Not a good thing. Much more isolationist.

Malcolm Collins: The argument that a lot of our holidays are descended from pagan holidays is mostly fallacious.

And we'll likely do episodes on the various holidays about why it's fallacious that these are not actually mostly Christian holidays. They may have taken some elements from earlier holidays, but Catholics did genuinely adopt a lot of I mean, Pagan, I think is a loaded word. But a lot of ideas that came [00:39:00] from non Christian thinkers and allowed those ideas, I think, to the benefit of our society to percolate into the educated life of our society, because the way that the Catholic group related to education was very different than the way the Protestant group related to education.

Both groups valued education. Like that was part of the social status that you would have within various, no, not all Protestant groups valued education. When we talk more about the other early American groups, not all of them valued education. But some of them did like the Puritans heavily valued education.

What did that mean to a Puritan? You know, that meant a consequentialist form of education, education that allowed you to do things in the world. What did education mean in terms of the Catholic value hierarchy? It was, you've got to know all the rules. This is why they were so good at like. Law and stuff like that, and why they ended up dominating the profession.

You had to know all of the ancient thinkers, you needed to know all of the ancient writers, you needed to know all of the famous paintings, you needed to know it is sort of like a [00:40:00] study of the classics, really, right, where we're like, really, what the Catholics meant by education and Engineering and bible memorization.

And what are the latest like biblical theories and metaphysical theories is what the Puritans meant by education. And these are two completely different understandings of education. And I think that the country has been better for both of them existing. Like I'm not the type of guy who would come in and say, like, we need to cancel the humanities, right?

Like, I think that there is some utility in some people specializing in them. Right? Like, so this is me talking about a group that is very culturally different in what it values for me. But it brought a lot of that in and it brought a lot of that into New England.

That's another thing that the, the Yankee culture has that many other American cultures don't, which is a value of the high arts. It's IE you know, orchestra and art museums and you know, the classical paintings and sculptures and artists, you know, all this pagan stuff. [00:41:00] And I think that a lot of, if, if the large Catholic immigrant ways hadn't come to America, I think that generally as Americans, we'd see that stuff was the same disdain that many of our Puritan ancestors did.

If, if, if you come from one of those Puritan groups and so, they began to elevate those arts. And I also think that that is why you see those arts being more practiced and more culturally lauded. In the areas where you had more Catholic immigrant ways and specifically was in Yankee culture, which really values the high arts much more than other American cultures.

I think it also explains as we're having this new political realignment in America where the greater Appalachian cultural group is like a key player in this new political alignment in America is it has moved to become represented

Simone Collins: by JD Vance. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, it was also where I grew up in Texas, you know, I'm in rural Texas and JD Vance represents it and everything like that has a, but JD Vance, remember, converted to Catholicism which I think is because, you know, so we can talk [00:42:00] about why in a different episode but the The, the greater Appalachian cultural group always had a great, even more than the Puritans did, disdain for the high arts.

And they specifically were known for people who interacted with them as having an unusual amount of celebration with like the low arts. Like they would party and everything like that a lot. Like they, they, they liked enjoying their lives, but they knew that that enjoyment was a sin. The enjoyment that came from drinking and jigging and all of the Fiddling and everything like that.

They were like, yeah, unlike the Puritans, they were like, yeah, this is a sin, but like, it's fun and we're humans. So whatever. Right. We, we just recognize it as a sin. Whereas and so it led to them because they didn't distinguish between different types of arts. Whereas I think within the deontological ethical system that the Catholics had that sort of entertainment is much more sinful than the that you get from.

going to an orchestra or the entertainment that you get from going to an art museum. Whereas they would actually see those forms of [00:43:00] entertainment as being even more sinful because you're combining sin and pride, like regular sin. And then in addition to that pride and so, they always look to like low culture forms of entertainment.

And I think that this is why, and I think that this is very odd to people is how much of Trump's base is really into what I would call low culture, like from Warhammer, like God, emperor Trump. Like all of the anime memes for Trump, all of the 4chan for Trump and stuff like that. This like rebellious, intentionally low culture group.

Why are they moving to Trump? It is because they are coming from this greater Appalachian cultural group that always elevated low culture. And that you're seeing this clash with the historically Catholic ideas around like what is sin and what is not sin, right? Which is, which is really interesting to me.

This 11 cultures or nations within America concept, I think also much better helps understand the current political realignment in America. Here. I have put a map on the [00:44:00] screen that shows each of them at colored by how they voted in the last election cycle. How far red or blue they are? And what you will notice is Trump's core, core, core base.

It's not the deep south.

It's not the far west. It's greater Appalachian. Greater appellation is, and this is, you know, my people, , the furthest pro-Trump group. These are the descendants. , of the, , uncouth violent,

Backwoods people who are very different than like the deep south that used to be the GOP inks core base. , another really interesting thing to people is Yankee them is actually one of the least far democratic factions with the core democratic factions actually being the left coast.

And as well as the Tidewater basin, , with the recent Hispanic immigrant. Regions of the United States being far, far, far more blue than the far [00:45:00] Northeast of the United States.

I think what also might surprise people is that the left coast is more blue than the new Netherlands area or the New York area.

So the far. , Western coast of the United States is even more blue than the more blue. , New York area by, by a pretty significant margin.

Malcolm Collins: Did you have any final thoughts on this Simone?

Simone Collins: Only that I loved getting your take on this. When I. Was going through the book with you in our long car ride. I was not having these thoughts. And I just love that you add a whole new layer to the things that even I'm consuming. So thanks.

Malcolm Collins: He, I found it so interesting in the book that he was like, Oh yes, you have a cultural continuity from the Puritans until today.

And I was like, you are underestimating the size. If you look at the immigrant way, it's like, remember I was talking like, how do you get like 50 percent Catholic population in these regions? Well, you just have to look at the immigrant waves. At certain times in cities like Boston, 37 percent of the population was a first generation Catholic immigrant.

Like huge chunks. Imagine if one of [00:46:00] our major cities in the U S right now with that percentage, first generation immigrant people would like, like these were immigrant waves that in terms of their effects on the local areas, absolutely dwarfed what we are dealing with today from Latin America, which by the way, I would note.

is a very normal Catholic immigrant wave. Um, And, and people can be like, well, they're Democrats. It's like the Catholic um, and they're like, but, but, but they um, they have different values than us. The Catholic immigrant waves always had different, they bring organized crime. The Catholic immigrant waves always bring organized crime.

And, and it is interesting to me that you have these like performative individuals like Nick Fuentes, who was like, I hate the immigrant waves. And I'm like, how can you do that? These are like trad casts. Like, what, what are you talking about? And they're going to end up, I think, sorting out. Now this is an interesting thing.

I think that, so here's another question people can ask. They say, will the living versions of the Catholic tradition end up siding more with the progressive faction or more with the conservative [00:47:00] faction? As the urban monoculture begins to clean out the people who it was able to infect through mimetic sterilization.

I think after it cleans out, I think that they are again going to make up the core of the progressive faction. Totally agree. That has always been the idea that the government should enforce a value system. That's always been the progressive ideology. The idea that the government should provide services to the poor and the needy.

That's always been Catholic and progressive ideology. The idea that bureaucracies are the best way to solve things and that authority should be decided by people who spent their entire life studying a subject. Like it aligns very closely. The only reason why conservatives were ever able to peel off any Catholic faction was because of the anti abortion thing.

That was it. That was the only thing that we ever had to get in the Catholics. They culturally, there is just no alignment there. And I don't have a problem with that. You know, I think the country is better for having a two party system. Do I think our country would be better if we lived under a Republican dictatorship?

Absolutely not. So [00:48:00] long as the parties can both play fair, which unfortunately we might be moving out of that system. And that really scares me. But I, I think that people should be like, yes, I have, Criticisms of a cultural group because they are different from, right? Like when I criticize Catholics, I'm criticizing them because they are different from me, not because they are worse for me.

Okay. But of course. When I'm judging the morality of an action or like, should you approach things this way or should you approach it this way, I'm going to approach it using the measuring stack of my own cultural perspective, which is going to be very different than their cultural perspective.

Simone Collins: Exactly.

Malcolm Collins: That's totally fine. I, I should be able to have these types of ideas and say, well, they do things in this way and my culture doesn't, you know, shames doing things this way for X historical reason. Right. You know, which we'll get into in another episode as to why, The backwoods culture ended up merging with the Puritan culture and why it became so, well, it didn't really end up merging.

They basically formed a caste system where you had a Puritan upper class and most of their population, because they really didn't like running for elected positions [00:49:00] as much as other groups. So they typically use like the educated Puritan group to run things. And the two groups basically completely merged into each other over, over time.

American history. Because they were both Calvinists anyway. And so to understand why did they hate high culture so much, I think is really interesting. Why do they value the things they value is really interesting. And why did they survive while the traditional Puritan groups didn't survive?

That's also really interesting. As to why the, the Catholic survived this is also an interesting question. I think it was because while they had this strict deontological ethical system, they also understood that they would break it. And they had a system for dealing was when they broke it confession, which I think is like one of the most genius pieces of social technology.

Anyone is

Simone Collins: like, it creates a market failure and the solution. all in its own little system that sort of just generates its own flywheel of energy as it moves forward. What do you

Malcolm Collins: mean

Simone Collins: by that? I don't understand the market. Sending in confession. But what's the market failure it's creating? It's creating a bunch of deontological [00:50:00] rules that you're going to break.

Oh yeah, so it

Malcolm Collins: creates all these rules, but then you break them because you go out drinking, I mean.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it makes, it makes the impossible to follow standards, and then it creates a solution for when you break those standards, and it just, it, like I'm saying, it creates this flywheel, it creates this economy, that propels the church forward.

Instead of just being like

Malcolm Collins: the backwoods people, which were like well, we have these impossible standards, which are even stricter, but like, we also know that humanity is wretched and we must learn to accept our wretchedness. Where the Puritans were like, humanity is wretched and we should strive to be as perfect as we can.

Whereas in the Catholic, it was like, you should strive to be kind of perfect, like generally good, but like also you're going to sin. So go to confession. Which is maybe, maybe an interesting sort of in between these two, these two other perspectives on morality. And I think people see us in, in our perspective on morality really heavily colored by this backwoods cultures, moral systems.

When they see us be like, Oh, you have all these super strict moral values, but we're also like, yeah, but you know, you're [00:51:00] going to send, so let's party. As long as it doesn't distract from your ability to be a good person in terms of your, your efficacy as a human.

Okay, well the final thing I'd note here, that something that became part of the Yankee cultural system, That people might be underestimating is I actually think that downstream of this Catholic cultural group became the Yankee love of sports and baseball and, and sports more broadly, which is to say, if you look at Catholic majority countries and you look at the places that are, you know, have the, the craziest soccer fans and stuff like that I think it has to do with the way that they relate to entertainment.

Whereas the Puritan cultural groups mostly saw sports as as sinful as like gay sex, for instance. The, the Catholics didn't. They sort of had these carve outs of this isn't unethical. And so those are the things they do. Anyway, love you to Desimone. I'm going to go find out who's ringing our doorbell and get the kids.

Simone Collins: I love

Malcolm Collins: you too, Mom. Do you want me to go get them immediately?

Simone Collins: Give me a chance to do some diaper change cleanup. All right. Love you. Bye. Love you, too What should I make for [00:52:00] dinner?

Malcolm Collins: No, no yesterdays.

Simone Collins: Ah with white rice. Do you want fried rice or plain white rice? Oh fried rice if you don't mind making it plain without added vegetables, but with shallots, right?

I'll wing it

Malcolm Collins: Octavian, you farted. .

Octavian: Yes. That was that. So silly.

Malcolm Collins: I dunno. It's silly. That is gross. . So, so I got a, I got a question for you, Octavian. Do you, what do you think of Catholics?

Octavian: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Catholics are Yes. For you?

Octavian: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Are they the best people?

Octavian: Yes

Malcolm Collins: they are.

Octavian: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Are you gonna become a Catholic when you grow up?

Wait, you gotta give it what? Octavian. Here's, here's a question I have for you. What do you think that sports are evil?

Octavian: No. [00:53:00]

Malcolm Collins: Okay. What's evil?

Octavian: This and my bad guys are evil boy.

Malcolm Collins: Bad guys are evil. What are some of the things that bad guys do?

Octavian: They do bad stuff.

Malcolm Collins: Like what do they do that's bad?

Octavian: They take over the city.

Malcolm Collins: They take over the city?

Octavian: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Do you want to take over the city one day?

Octavian: No.

Malcolm Collins: You don't want to take over the city? Do you want to take over the world?

You're not going to take over the world? Can you promise them you won't take over the world?

Octavian: I promise I will not take over the world.

Malcolm Collins: What did you bring to the house today? What's in the package?

Octavian: So, What's in the package is a stinky teddy bear, so I need daddy to clean it.

Dad. So I just got my sinky teddy bear in the box, but I did, I made daddy to clean it.

Malcolm Collins: Is he your friend?

Octavian: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Is the teddy bear a catholic?[00:54:00]

Octavian: Well, he's dirty, so yes.

Malcolm Collins: Wait, what?

Octavian: Well, if he's dirty, then no. If he's clean, then yes. If my teddy's clean, then yes. Or if my teddy's dirty, then no.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so he stops being a Catholic when he's dirty?

Octavian: There's dirty,

Malcolm Collins: but when he when he when you get the dirt off then he's a Catholic because Catholics are clean, right?

Octavian: Yes And kind of

Malcolm Collins: much better.

Octavian: Hey, can you clean this for me?

Malcolm Collins: That was about to get very problematic, Octavian.

Octavian: Oh,