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The fundamental geographic division in American politics has traditionally been a sectional conflict setting the North against the South. The idioms of "red states" and "blue states" caught on widely after the 2000 presidential election because they could be applied to a regional divide—blue North, red South—that was already presumed to reflect the main axis of political debate and competition. But the partisan difference between large-metro and rural residents has now become much larger than the gap between northerners and southerners.

I call this widening gap between the partisan loyalties of urban and rural America “the density divide.” Hopkins is clearly correct that urban vs. rural has eclipsed North vs. South as the geographic embodiment of our partisan divisions. As the old adage goes, a chart speaks a thousand white papers.

Many large metropolitan areas grew faster over the past decade than the Bureau had previously projected, with eight of the nation's ten largest cities showing an increased growth rate compared to the 2000 to 2010 period. At the same time, most of rural America shrank in absolute as well as relative terms. A majority—52 percent—of the nation's counties actually reported a smaller raw population in 2020 than they had in 2010.

One of the puzzles of the 2016 election, and the catastrophe of the Trump presidency, is how populist white nationalism finally prevailed at a time when Americans, taken altogether, were less racist than ever

My hunch is that rural white culture, which was once regionally varied and distinctive, became more uniform by becoming increasingly Southern. I call this the Southernification thesis.

In the Density Divide, I argued that the key to answering “Why did white ethnonationalism finally work to win the GOP nomination and then the White House when it didn’t even get close to working for Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul?” was that residential self-selection on ethnicity, personality, and education had made lower density parts of the country progressively more homogenously ethnocentric and socially conservative, which finally made it possible to unify and organize rural and exurban whites as a single constituency.

I think it’s an incomplete explanation without something like the Southernification thesis. Before it could be successfully organized politically, America’s increasingly ethnocentric non-urban white population needed to be consolidated first through the adoption of a relatively uniform ethnocentric white culture.

When I was a kid, the Atlanta Bravesþff somehow became “America’s Team.” Could it be that the media mogul who married Hanoi Jane took the critical first step in bringing non-urban white America together by beaming sanitized Southern culture into living rooms everywhere?

any department that regularly offers courses only on Western philosophy should rename itself “Department of European and American Philosophy.”

Non-European philosophical traditions offer distinctive solutions to problems discussed within European and American philosophy, raise or frame problems not addressed in the American and European tradition, or emphasize and discuss more deeply philosophical problems that are marginalized in Anglo-European philosophy.

The Republican coalition of 2016, in fact, will look increasingly like the Democratic Party of the 1930s.

A Trump versus Clinton contest will deepen the partisan divisions that for the past five decades have set those who support the social and cultural revolutions of the past five decades on race, immigration, women’s rights, gender equality and gay rights — as well as the broader right to sexual privacy — against those who remain in opposition.

Tesler’s findings are illustrated in the accompanying chart. There was a dose effect: the higher you scored on racial resentment, the more likely you were to support Trump; the more you resented immigrants or professed your white ethnocentrism, the likelier you were to plan to vote for Trump.

Tesler and Sides ranked white respondents by their level of “white racial identity” — determined by asking white respondents questions like “How Important is being white to your identity?”; “How important is it that whites work together to change laws that are unfair to whites?”; and “How likely is it that many whites are unable to find a job because employers are hiring minorities instead?”

In each case, Trump’s level of support in the survey rose in direct proportion to your level of agreement with each of these statements.

“The Second Demographic Transition: A concise overview of its development,” by Lesthaeghe, summarizes this concept:The SDT starts in the 1960s with a series of multifaceted revolutions. First, there was the contraceptive revolution, with the introduction of hormonal contraception and far more efficient IUDs; second, there was the sexual revolution, with declining ages at first sexual intercourse; and third, there was the gender revolution, questioning the sole breadwinner household model and the gendered division of labor that accompanied it.

These revolutions have reordered much of society. Lesthaeghe continues:These three "revolutions” fit within the framework of an overall rejection of authority, the assertion of individual freedom of choice (autonomy), and an overhaul of the normative structure. The overall outcome of these shifts with respect to fertility was the postponement of childbearing: mean ages at first parenthood rise again, opportunities for childbearing are lost due to higher divorce rates, the share of childless ever-partnered women increases, and higher parity births (four or more) become rare.

Measured by these criteria, the top-ranked counties were cosmopolitan centers, with a larger percentage of affluent, highly educated residents: New York City, the District of Columbia, Pitkin County, Colo. (where Aspen is), San Francisco and Marin County, Calif

The counties at the bottom tended to be small, white, rural, poor and less educated and they were located in the South and the mountain West:

the lower the S.D.T. ranking, the higher Trump’s votes compared to his statewide average; the higher the S.D.T. level, the lower Trump’s vote

The nomination of Donald Trump will sharpen and deepen the Republican Party’s core problems. Trump gains the party ground among declining segments of the population — less well educated, less well off whites — and loses ground with the growing constituencies: single women, well-educated men and women, minorities, the affluent and professionals.

Not only are more and more Americans adopting the practices and values described by Lesthaeghe and Neidert — self-expressiveness, gender equality, cohabitation, same-sex couples, postponed marriage and childbearing — but so too is much of the developed world.

This transition has effectively become the norm in much of Europe, and, as Lesthaeghe points out, it is gaining ground in regions as diverse as East Asia and Latin America.

For decades now, the Republican Party has been conducting a racial and cultural counterrevolution. It proved a successful strategy from 1966 to 1992.

Since then, as the percentage of Americans on the liberal side of the culture wars has grown steadily, the counterrevolutionary approach has become more and more divisive.

In this respect, Trump is not, as many charge, violating core Republican tenets. Instead, he represents the culmination of the rear-guard action that has characterized the party for decades

There is a chance that Trump will bring new blood into a revitalized Republican coalition. It’s also possible that he will accelerate the Republican Party’s downward spiral into irrelevance.

But since the mid 1990s research journals and books that are multi-regional or global in scope are common. Jared Diamond’s provocative Guns, Germs, and Steelis the best known. Accordingly, new textbooks have incorporated the major arguments from this research into their pages. So has the high school course that gives college credit - Advanced Placement World History.  

The creators of the proposed world history standards for Massachusetts have chosen to ignore these changes in the field of world history.

To put it in a US history context, this would be like teaching the history of the New England states to 1945, followed by the Mid-Atlantic states to 1945 so on and so forth and then having a majority of the course before and after 1945 focus on those two regions. This would not fly in a US history course. The regional approach could not work in an AP World History course. Yet, somehow in the Massachusetts standards it miraculously persists. 

The result of teaching a not so world history where “civilizations” don’t meet until 1800, where a student can take an entire course (World History I c. 500CE-1800CE) and not see any documents outside of the Western Civilization canon, and finally where the global era is much too focused on the West will lead to students who see the world from outdated, Eurocentric, and racist views. And the fault of this would be the standards makers and the teachers who teach them. We can do better. We need to do better. 

A significant share of Hong Kong’s population isn’t willing to exchange its civil rights for new railway lines, though, so Beijing has cracked down harder on dissent. Protests have become more violent, with some locals accusing the police of unwarranted brutality. In late July, a mob viciously assaulted peaceful protesters. We don’t know for sure whether Beijing coordinated the efforts, but such methods of terrorizing dissenters are standard Communist weapon

For example, more than a few Germans “without a migration background” find it impressive when binational children speak Spanish or English in addition to German, only to get up in arms when Turkish or Lebanese children switch to their native language in lieu of German.

But there’s also racism by minorities against mainstream society as well as against other minorities. It’s not uncommon that marriages or even friendships are forbidden not only between migrants and Germans, but also between Turks and Kurds, or Moroccans and African-Germans, or Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, or Muslims and atheists.

After the brutal murder of George Floyd, the racism debate reignited across the globe. This is a good thing. However, as a woman with a migration background, I find the current discussion surrounding “white privilege” both ethnocentric and misleading.

Within many of these communities, the lack of integration assistance reinforces a general dismissal of the culture of their host country

To fill the void, the well-trodden reactionary, patriarchal – read: religious – structures so widespread in many of their home countries take hold. The goal here has not been to foster integration, but rather to establish a parallel society defined by the norms of the cultures from which the newcomers came, cultures that are often diametrically opposed to the democratic societies of Germany and France.

As children often emulate their parents and others in their surroundings, it begs the question: Have some migrants become xenophobes themselves? Or are all people more or less racists?

“Being white” once again dominates the discourse as human rights violations are displaced from center stage. This is the approach of several no-doubt well-intentioned anti-racist activists. But their proponents should be aware that they are once again reducing individuals to the color of their skin.

The idea here is to target the unjust system, not the people it represents. The goal should be to combat the causes and instruments that prevent the equitable and respectful coexistence of fellow humans.

The economic and linguistic integration of migrants is indispensable. But in order to become responsible citizens within mainstream society, they must come to terms with the state’s liberal democratic system of norms and find their bearings in relation to the enlightenment and the advantages of a humanist secular democracy.

The French philosopher and author Henri Peña-Ruiz recently wrote: “To effectively fight racism, there are two invaluable maxims. The first is to remain vigilant as to the singularity of the human species

The second is to reject any abstract stratification of human groups, independent of whether this may derive from assertions related to nature or culture. An individual should never be drowned in a feeling of affiliation, nor should an ethnicity be judged through a global lens.”

This underscores that a relativistic approach to culture has the further disadvantage of discouraging migrants from questioning and debating their community’s norms that may violate certain human rights. This results in the deprivation of a migrant’s opportunity to develop into a responsible citizen, which in itself is a form of racism.

Naïla Chikhiborn in 1980 in Algiers, is a cultural scientist who works as an independent advisor and consultant in the fields of integration and women’s issues.

Introduction: Our Virtue

“There is one thing that a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative…. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.” p. 25

Democratic education…wants and needs to produce men and women [who are] supportive of a democratic regime.” p. 26

The historical assumption of the human sciences was (and remains) that an objective human nature exists and can be discovered—if not by reason itself, then at least by empirical science guided by reason. Science was a method to allow us to rise beyond the prejudices of our culture in order to discover the truths of human nature. It was a mechanism for opening our minds, an instrument of openness. p. 37-38

Liberalism has always tended towards increased freedom—i.e., decreased regulation. But “it was possible to expand the space exempt from legitimate social and political regulation only by contracting the claims to moral and political knowledge…. It begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all…[and] of course the result is that…the argument justifying freedom disappears, and…all beliefs begin to have an attenuated character.” p. 28

Modern education is concerned mainly with correcting ethnocentrism—showing students that their preferences are merely accidents of their culture and that no single culture is better than any other. The roots of this movement are found in the problems (racism, mistreatment) that arose due to the multicultural nature of American life. p. 29-30

The Founders envisioned a society where individuals were bound together by their belief in and adherence to the rights of the Constitution. Minority factions were seen as a bad thing, detracting from social cohesiveness. p. 31

However, the provision of equal rights did not guarantee equal treatment, and minority groups suffered. This caused them to retreat into their minority identities and oppose the majority—indeed, “much of the intellectual machinery of twentieth-century American political thought and social science was constructed for the purpose of making an assault on [the] majority…. The very idea of a majority—now understood to be selfish interest—is done away with in order to protect the minorities.” p. 32-35

However, its ideas about what this means have changed over time, starting with a faith in the human rights of the U.S. Constitution, but ultimately changing to (now) mean “openness,” i.e., relativism. p. 26-27

“Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is a democratic prejudice.” p. 40

Today, “the human sciences want to make us culture-beings with the instruments [science and reason] that were invented to liberate us from culture…: cultural relativism, historicism, the fact-value distinction—are the suicide of science. Culture, hence closedness, reigns supreme. Openness to closedness is what we teach.” p. 38-39

Yet the dogmatic modern assumption is that human nature does not exist, that our ways of being are culturally determined, that our minds are inherently constrained—“closed”—by cultural influences. p. 38

“There are two types of openness, the openness of indifference…and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude.” p. 41

The openness of indifference advocates the removal of all requirements in education—why should students learn languages or philosophy? But the reality is that, “to be open to knowing, there are certain types of things one must know which most people don’t want to bother to learn and which appear boring and irrelevant…true openness means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present.” p. 41

The Clean Slate

On the surface, Americans seems to lack a true culture or set of traditions. But most of them grew up with a shared knowledge of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, and “contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political [and intellectual] traditions of any nation in the world.” And this tradition is not confused or counterbalanced by a history of monarchy or aristocracy. p. 52-55

So we have a culture in which to root education, but we have begun to undermine it. The idealism of the American founding has been explained away as mythical, selfishly-motivated, and racist. And so our culture has been devalued. p. 55-56

Religion, too, has been explained away, but this has left us without a standpoint from which to understand our experience as humans. Parents “have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world.” p. 56-57

“As it now stands, students have powerful images of what the perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.” p. 67

Books

“I have begun to wonder whether the experience of the greatest texts from early childhood is not a prerequisite for a concern throughout life for them and for lesser but important literature. The soul’s longing…may well require encouragement at the outset.” p. 62

Literature is critical because it presents to young people the range of possibilities of human types—both good and bad. p. 62-64

But students are less and less exposed to literature, and as a result, “they have only pop psychology to tell them what people are like, and the range of their motives…. [Therefore,] people become more alike, for want of knowing they can be otherwise. What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rainbows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the observer nothing about what is inside.” p. 64

Without exposure to literature, students usually resort to the movies. But movies do not provide the “distance from the contemporary” that students need, and so this only reinforces the belief that the here and now is all there is. p. 64

The loss of literature has also meant the loss of heroes. In a “perversion of the democratic principle,” this lack is almost admired, since being oneself is the supposed goal. But whether or not it is seen as desirable, students invariably seek role models. And without literature, they only have those around them (and in the media) to emulate. p. 66-67

“Nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth…. Tradition has become superfluous.” p. 58

We are left with a culture filled with “the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art…. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy. This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such.” p. 74-75

Relationships

“In short, after the war, while America was sending out its blue jeans to unite the young of all nations, a concrete form of democratic universalism that has had liberalizing effects on many enslaved nations, it was importing a clothing of German fabrication for its souls, which clashed with all that and cast doubt on the Americanization of the world on which we had embarked, thinking it was good and in conformity with the rights of man

“This indeterminate or open-ended future and the lack of a binding past mean that the souls of young people are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature—spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone…. Why are we surprised that such unfurnished persons should be preoccupied principally with themselves?” p. 87-88

“The one eccentric element in this portrait, the one failure…is the relation between blacks and whites.” Although black students are present on campuses, they “have, by and large, proved indigestible.” p. 91

the Black Power movement arrived and the universities conceded to identity politics, which took the form of Black-themed courses, quotas, and an unwillingness to fail black students. p. 94-95

“The black student who wants to be just a student and to avoid allegiance to the black group has to pay a terrific price, because he is judged negatively by his black peers and because his behavior is atypical in the eyes of whites. White students have silently and unconsciously adjusted to a group presence of blacks, and they must readjust for a black who does not define himself by the group.” Affirmative action cements this dynamic. p. 95-96

The restructuring of the family requires that men subdue their masculine character. “And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them ‘care’ is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail…. The old moral order, however imperfect it may have been, at least moved towards the virtues by way of the passions. If men were self-concerned, that order tried to expand the scope of self-concern to include others [i.e., his wife and children], rather than commanding men to cease being concerned with themselves.” p. 129

“I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should go back to them. I am only insisting that we not cloud our vision to such an extent that we believe that there are viable substitutes for them just because we want or need them.” p. 130

“All of our reforms have helped strip the teeth of our gears, which can therefore no longer mesh. They spin idly, side by side, unable to set the social machine in motion.” p. 131

Modern students are lacking the longing that is critical for a full enjoyment of life. They are complacent. And the universities do not see themselves as providing for such a longing. p. 134-136

The German Connection

Value relativism is the modern replacement for traditional morality, and “constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism.” p. 141

Value relativism has sunk so far into the American consciousness that its vocabulary has become colloquial: we talk about ‘charisma,’ ‘life-style,’ ‘commitment,’ ‘identity,’ etc. “Although they, and the things to which they refer, would have been incomprehensible to our fathers, not to speak of our Founding Fathers.” p. 147

Students today are largely apathetic about any concerns outside of themselves. There isn’t any malice in this self-centeredness; but it has become so entrenched in American culture that it isn’t even recognized as unusual. p. 82-86

“We chose [to import] a system of thought that, like some wines, does not travel; we chose a way of looking at things that could never be ours and had its starting point dislike of us and our goals.” p. 153

The question isn’t even asked whether the German doctrine of value-creation is contrary to democratic and egalitarian ideals; but it certainly seems to leave room for their opposites and perhaps promote them—i.e., value relativism seems to allow for fascism. p. 154

The Self

Although a precise definition remains elusive, “the self is the modern substitute for the soul.” p. 173

Man used to strive for fulfillment by taming his bodily desires in order to live virtuously. But this changed after Machiavelli (and Hobbes after him) suggested that instead we ignore virtue and follow our desires, which find their root in the state of nature. p. 174-175

Following their advice, “our desire becomes a kind of oracle we consult; it is the last word, while in the past it was the questionable and dangerous part of us.” p. 175

Locke then replaced the virtuous man with the rationally selfish one. “Beneath his selfishness, of course, lies an expectation that it conduces more to the good of others than does moralism.” p. 175-176

“All higher purposiveness in nature, which might have been consulted by men’s reason and used to limit human passion, has disappeared.” p. 176

That reason “is unable to rule in culture or in soul…constitutes a crisis of the West…[whose] regimes are founded on reason.” Previous regimes relied on religion, but Enlightenment undermined religion. p. 196

Psychology came to us “in order to treat the parts of man which had been so long neglected by liberal society…. Modern psychology has this in common with what was always a popular opinion, fathered by Machiavelli—that selfishness is somehow good. Man is self, and the self must be selfish. What is new is that we are told to look more deeply into the self, that we assumed too easily that we know it and have access to it.” p. 178

Prior to this, it was only God who was dignified—not man. And God was dignified in his freedom, his ability to create. If man was to be elevated, he, too, must be free; he, too, must be able to create. p. 180

And so, following Rousseau and our dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment, we have elevated creativity above reason as the ultimate virtue, and the artist replaced the philosopher and scientist at the admired human type. p. 181-182

Yet those who praise creativity don’t realize why. They admire it without seeing that it is the result of Romantic thought absorbed into democratic public opinion. And it has influenced the whole political spectrum, from Left to Right. p. 181-182

The Germans (Nietzsche and Weber) recognized as early as 1919 that the scientific spirit was dead, that reason cannot establish values. But Americans (naïvely, and largely unknowingly) still held onto the rationalist dream, written as they were into our political foundations. p. 194-195

When those ideas came to the U.S. (via Weber), “a very dark view of the future was superimposed on our incorrigible optimism. We are children playing with adult toys.” p. 195

“The psychology of the self has succeeded so well that it is now the instinct of most of us to turn for a cure for our ills back within ourselves rather than to the nature of things.” p. 179

Rousseau and others recognized this. “The very idea of culture was a way of preserving something like religion without talking about it.” But Nietzsche saw this was impossible. p. 196-197

We are left with no religion, but we still have religious impulses. p. 197

“The disenchantment of God and nature necessitated a new description of good and evil. To adapt a formula of Plato about the gods, we do not love a thing because it is good, it is good because we love it. It [became] our decision to esteem that makes something estimable.” p. 197

“Since values are not rational…they must be imposed.” Will, or commitment, is the primary virtue; it is the equivalent of (what used to be) faith. “Nietzsche was not a fascist; but this project inspired fascist rhetoric, which looked to the revitalization of old cultures or the foundation of new ones, as opposed to the rational, rootless cosmopolitanism of the revolutions of the Left.” p. 201-202

Nietzsche was a cultural relativist. This meant he anticipated war, because wars are inevitable when values are imposed and unrooted in truth or anything objective. p. 202

“Just over the horizon, when Weber wrote, lay Hitler…. He was the mad, horrible parody of the charismatic leader—the demagogue—hoped for by Weber.” Weber was not looking for something so extreme, but “when one ventures out into the vast spaces opened up by Nietzsche, it is hard to set limits.” p. 213-214

“Hitler did not cause a rethinking of the politics here or in Europe. All to the contrary—it was while we were fighting him that the thought that had preceded him in Europe conquered here.” And it remains dominant. p. 214

The language of values implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social, and personal. It has been facilitated by a softening and blurring of the idea of religion and “the sacred,” which are no longer seen as dangerous.

“As an image of our current intellectual condition, I keep being reminded of the newsreel pictures of Frenchmen splashing happily in the water at the seashore, enjoying the paid annual vacations legislated by Leon Blum’s Popular Front government. It was 1936, the same year Hitler was permitted to occupy the Rhineland. All our big causes amount to that kind of vacation.” p. 239

This is our educational crisis and opportunity. Western rationalism has culminated in a rejection of reason. Is this result necessary?” p. 240