Dennis Dale on Steve Sailer: the perils of success

Dennis Dale is a longtime, loyal Steve Sailer reader. He has, this past week, loaded up the catapult and blasted into the Internet an interesting Steve Sailer-related essay, timely and frank. His appraisal of Sailer, while not totally hostile, is certainly no hagiography. Any Sailer-reader of Sailer-interested person would do well to read it.

“I have come to bury Steve Sailer,” says Dennis Dale. “And to praise him.”

Here it is:

“Noticing and Nothingness,” Dennis Dale blog (also, mirrored on Substack), May 2024.

(DennisDale.com and Dennis Dale Substack).

Dennis Dale should be commended for producing such a valuable assessment of Steve Sailer’s work and public-profile, and Sailer’s place in our discourse as things stand in the mid-2020s. Only someone like Dale could get something like this right. I refer to someone of good character, keen perceptual skills, and courage, but who has so many years of following Sailer. Such a man, as Dale, can pick up the nuances of Sailer’s various changes across the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s. Most others cannot.

It’s clear to me, as another longtime Sailer reader and follower, that there is not just one Steve Sailer. We must speak of more than one Steve Sailer. That is one message implicit in the Dennis Dale essay. There are many Sailers. I agree. It’s probably true of all of us, admittedly. But most of us have not had public profiles as pundits and thinkers and nexuses of dissident thought spanning 25+ years. This is all of great interest with Sailer in part because of what it says about the overall picture of our times. Yes, “the life and times” of Steve Sailer. But, as already mentioned, Dennis Dale is no hagiographer.

The great man, Sailer, is now sixty-five. He has 1960s- and 1970s-nostalgia, a nostalgia for a basically-pre-Diversity America; certainly a pre-Wokeness America. People like to bring up the concept “cognitive dissonance,” and one wonders how much this concept explains the punditry-career Mr. Sailer has had, torn between loyalty to Classic America (mid-20th-century, pre-Third Worldization America) and the trends of the 1970s to present. One can get stuck easily.

It seems true enough that today’s Sailer is one that a surprisingly large share of his most-loyal fans and readers are unhappy with, to one degree or another. The big juncture was in 2020, when his own commentariat went into open revolt and only a handful of blowhards supported his position on the Corona-Panic. But the axes of disagreement by the Sailer-fans, or is it disillusionment, go far beyond one or another particular “missed call.”

Dennis Dale has launched this critical appraisal of Sailer’s work to us here in the spring of 2024 because it is shortly after a landmark-moment in Sailer’s career as a pundit and think: the publication of Sailer’s book, Noticing. But Dennis Dale’s Sailer essay has little directly to say on Sailer’s book itself. It is more about the changes in Sailer’s output and orientation.

As regards to the Sailer we have today, Dennis Dale is critical. He is also appreciative of the Sailer we once had, the Sailer of the 2000s and most or possibly all of the 2010s.

Dennis Dale says:

“Over the years Steve’s casually thrown off more useful concepts, insights and memorable phrases than one can keep track of. Over time these have percolated up through layers of suppression to influence—almost always without credit—polite conservatives.”

Yes, Steve Sailer has been extremely valuable, and much more influential than most people know. His core-readers know it, but the vast general political-consumer class who are unaware of him don’t know it, or frightened when they see the SPLC have him on their “enemies of the public” list and don’t even want to know. But they do know about the Trump/MAGA movement, whose electoral strategy was based on the “Sailer Strategy.”

The great man introduced the Sailer Strategy the world in the early 2000s, as Dennis Dale recalls and reminds us. As early as the year-2000 election cycle, Sailer proposed the strategy in identifiable form. He refined it and promoted it over the coming gew years. In 2015-16, Trump and co. put that exact strategy to use.

The Trump people won the unlikeliest election-victory in U.S. history in 2016, at least since the shock result of 1824 (which outraged the Andrew Jackson supporters, who’d have to wait to 1828), or the disputed 1876 election (in which both sides had used fraud in Southern states). The 1824 and 1876 elections outcomes were grand-bargains in which interest-groups balanced to put a compromise candidate into office. The 2016 election was winner-take-all, and the Regime then worked to crush Trump, a man who had wiggled his way into office thanks to Steve Sailer and related people’s efforts and proposals and intellectual foundations. And, yet, Steve Sailer began to withdraw from interest in politics during this period.

The question of what are Steve Sailer’s goals comes up in any assessment of this kind. The audiences that have read him, and followed his work over the years, do care about political change, and do want to win. They don’t want to compare Black traffic-statistics on bar-graphs. They want to turn the tide against the Wokeness regime. They want to assure the security and viability of of White-Christians in North America.

Here is Dennis Dale again:

“Another memorable phrase of Steve’s, the “point and sputter”, describ[es] the unfortunately effective but intellectually dishonest practice of pointing out and defaming as “racist” or otherwise verboten statements or ideas without any attendant substantive refutation of their veracity. […] [But Sailer himself now] indulge[s] in what I call the “point and titter”, the practice of pointing out conventional absurdities for a laugh but to no meaningful effect—and beyond this point it isn’t clear their effect isn’t in fact deleterious, acting as an energy sink and diversion.”

The perceptive Dieter Kief has written, recently, that Steve Sailer is consistent in being “no activist.” Steve Sailer is, instead, “an analyst,” says Mr. Kief. “He is not in the business of changing things actively – in other words: He is not directly involved in politics.”

This accurately describes the Steve Sailer of the mid-2020s, and for some years, it is largely accurate. Although he did became involved in the politics of the Corona-Panic and urged obedience to the Panic’s mandates, instead of attacking the absurdity of the Panic-regimes, as a younger Sailer might have done.

Yes, it is a readily available criticism of Sailer is that he uses his cultivated image as a neutral-observer analyst as cover for other goals. The branding of doing something called “noticing” has the effect of making oneself look like what the Spanish call a “pobre inocente,” someone who just stumbles into things with zero agenda of any kind. A naive but well-meaning person.

Mr. Kief’s characterization of Sailer is less accurate for the 2000s and 2010s than it is for the 2020s. Dennis Dale’s view on Sailer is stronger for the entire arc of a quarter-century (and more) of Sailer commentary.

Dennis Dale also has the courage to bring up a subject many of Sailer’s readers have brought up: his conspicuous decision to avoid the subject of one particular ethnic-group, a group he formerly wrote about often but no longer does. Dennis Dale doesn’t say it directly, but there are hints of a belief that Sailer has allowed himself to be, as they say, “co-opted.” How, and why, this is supposed to have happened deserves a full analysis and debate. The unfortunate genres of the social-media one-liner or the fifteen-second TikTok rant won’t provide any meaningful answers. (Incidentally, Dale’s perceptive analyses decline to mention Steve Sailer’s own heavy use of Twitter since about 2018, and how that may have affected his perceptions of the right-and-noble, or his place in the world.)

I’d direct those interested in Steve Sailer to read Dennis Dale’s full essay, “Noticing and Nothingness.” It is worth a few minutes of your time.

The Sailer story is far from over, for, as far as we know, the man is in excellent health and will continue to be on the scene for years to come. Charles Murray, some sixteen years older than Sailer (and vulnerable to many of the similar criticisms the disillusioned Sailer fans have been making of Sailer), is still active and shows no signs of slowing down. Murray even has a positive long-form review out, in the Claremont Review of Books, of the Sailer Noticing book.

Here is how the Claremont Review of Books‘ editorial-cartoonist, Mr. Elliot Banfield, has chosen to depict Steve Sailer:

This is probably an over-idealized vision of Sailer’s role. But that is the stock-and-trade of cartoonists like the skilled Mr. Banfield (see also: “America’s Ruling Class, early 2020s,” Hail To You, Dec. 2021 — a response to a Banfield cartoon).

Banfield’s Sailer is also different Sailer than the one we get from Dennis Dale’s pen. The great man’s place in our thought, and our times, won’t soon be wrapped up in any single narrative, try as people might. But Dennis Dale’s contribution is much more valuable than most.

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