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why is diversity good? Diversity isn't good in and of itself; it's good because it allows us to expand our horizons, to break out of the boxes – by they cultural, ethnic, or religious – in which we find ourselves. To think about other values, other beliefs, other lifestyles, to make judgements upon those values and beliefs and lifestyles. To enter, in other words, into a dialogue, a debate, through which a more universal language of citizenship can arise. It is precisely such dialogue and debate that multiculturalism as a political process undermines and erodes in the name of "respect" and "tolerance".

I think the very notion of multiculturalism is an irrational one. It assumes from the start that societies are composed of cultures that somehow relate to each other externally, as it were. Here is one culture, here's another, and there's another, and these cultures then interact with each other. In fact cultures aren't like that: cultures are living, organic entities that constantly change. There is no such thing as a multicultural society. There are societies with a variety of cultural forms, beliefs, lifestyles, values – in fact, virtually every society embodies such diversity – but to say that is to say something very different thing to the claim that a society is "multicultural".

Societies have always been conflictual, riven by class differences, generational differences, gender differences, ideological differences. But today we tend to see social clashes in a very narrow way, in terms of religion, faith and culture, because we have come to see identity in very narrow ways. The debate about multiculturalism is a debate in which certain differences – culture, ethnicity and faith – have come to be regarded as important and others – such as class, say, or generation – as less relevant.

There are two ways over the past half-century in which we've stopped treating people as citizens. One is through racism. The racist says "you're not a citizen, you don't have full rights in this society because you have a different skin colour, you are foreign", etc. The second is multiculturalism. The multiculturalist says: "we treat you not as an individual citizen, but as a Muslim or a Hindu or a Sikh or a black". The irony is that multiculturalism developed as an attempt to combat the problems created by racism. But it has recreated many of the problems by treating people not as citizens but as members of groups, and by formulating public policy in relation to those groups and not in relation to the needs of individual citizens.

we have to say that the multicultural policies were flawed from the very beginning: it wasn't as if this was a good set of policies that somehow eroded over time. The fact is that it was a lot easier to combat racism by saying to people "go on, follow your own values, cultures, lifestyles, beliefs, we will fund your festival, your dance troupe, your cultural centre"... we used to call it the "saree, samosa and steel band brigade".

What has happened is that the very notion of equality has transformed over the last twenty years. Equality used to mean that everybody was treated the same despite their differences. Now it's come to me that everybody is treated differently because of those differences.

There are two problems with granting people rights by virtue of their belonging to a group, as opposed to their being citizens with specific social, economic and other needs. First, the group becomes a focus not only for providing rights, but also for prejudice: you deal not with the problems of individual Roma, but the imputed problems of Roma as a whole. Second, you deny the same rights to other groups, to others who don't happen to be in that group, such as Muslims.

As for the relationship between multiculturalism and constraints on free speech, an argument has developed that runs something like this: we live in a society where there are lots of different peoples and cultures, each with deeply set, often irreconcilable, views and beliefs. In such a society we need to restrict what people say or do in order to minimize friction between cultures and to guarantee respect for people embedded in different cultures.

it is precisely because we live in a plural society that we need the most robust defence of free speech possible. It seems to me that in a plural society, the giving of offence is both inevitable and necessary. It is inevitable because we do have societies with deep-seated, conflicting views. But it's far better to have those conflicts out in the open than to suppress them in the name of respect and tolerance. But most importantly, the giving of offence is necessary because no kind of social change or social progress is possible without offending some group of other. When people say, "you are offending me", what they are really saying is, "you can't say that because I don't want my beliefs to be questioned or ridiculed or abused." That seems to me deeply problematic.

The real issue is not actually the threat of violence from Islamists. It is something much more internal to western societies, the sense that it is morally wrong to give offence to other groups and cultures. People are frightened of doing things because they fear the repercussions, but they are also frightened of doing things because they think it is morally wrong to offend other people and other cultures. And I think that is a much greater problem. We should say it is morally right to offend people. That is what a plural society is. If we want to live in a plural society, the price of a plural society – though I don't see it as a price, I think it is the value of the plural society – is that we confront each other. That is what is good about plural society.

We also need to make a distinction between colour blindness and racism blindness. The two have become confused, so that in France, for instance, arguments against multiculturalism have become an argument in defence of racism. Discriminatory policies, and not just against the Roma, but also against Muslims and others, have been defended on the basis that they are necessary for assimilation. The law outlawing the burqa, for instance. In one sense assimilation means treating individuals as citizens and not as members of a particular group. That seems to me to be a very good thing. But that is not what assimilation has come to mean in practice somewhere like France, where policies of assimilation have re

sulted in the authorities treating different groups of people differently by pointing up their differences, insisting that certain groups – Muslims or the Roma, for example – cannot belong to our culture, to our society, because their culture, their values, their ways of life are so different and inimical to ours. That is the way assimilation policies have developd and I think that is very dangerous.

Part of the problem of multiculturalism is that the distinction between the public and the private realms have become eroded. We need to defend the right of people to pursue their values, their lifestyles, their beliefs in private. By "private", I don't mean in the privacy of their homes, but in those areas of life distinct from the state and state institutions. But we also need to ensure that, in the public realm, the state does not treat people differently because of their particular values, beliefs or lifestyles. The ideal plural society is one where people have perfect freedom to pursue their beliefs, values and lifestyles in private but in public are treated as citizens, whatever those lifestyles, beliefs and values are. Multiculturalism has come to mean the very opposite: people are treated differently in the public realm because of their values, beliefs and lifestyles, but at the same time restrictions are placed upon the private realm, on what one can say or do, because of fear of giving offence.

Fighting racism doesn't mean I have to limit freedom of expression. I hate racist jokes, but I would protect the right of people to tell them. They are really ugly and stupid, but I wouldn't dream of regulating it by law. Actually, I do not believe in collective rights. I think everyone should be treated equally, but people also need to be free to live how they prefer. Fighting violent racism is something that should be done by law enforcement authorities. But it is also the responsibility of the cultural elites: to make racism something one should be ashamed of. It's a matter of education, I think. Not of laws limiting free speech.

The point about free speech is this: who is it that benefits from censorship? Is it those in power, or is it those without power? It seems to me that the only people to benefit from censorship are those with the power to enforce that censorship and the need to do so. Those who have no power are much better served by as little censorship as possible. Free speech is always the weapon in the hands of those who want to challenge power and censorship is always a weapon in those who want to preserve their power. That's why I think anyone who wants to challenge racism should support of the greatest extension of free speech possible.

I was reminded by a recent study on the effects of social-justice “multicultural” ideology compared with the “color-blind” liberal alternative. The study, which was published in the Journal of Social Psychology and Personality Science, found that exposure to multiculturalism can paradoxically deepen race essentialism, by which the authors mean the idea that “racial group differences are valid, biologically based, and immutable.” Money quote:

Study 1 (N = 165) shows that participants exposed to multiculturalism expressed greater race essentialist beliefs compared to those exposed to color blindness. Study 2 (N = 150) replicates this effect and also finds that exposure to multiculturalism, compared to color blindness, decreased participants’ belief that racial equality is a problem. These findings raise the ironic possibility that well-intentioned efforts to portray the value of differences may reinforce the belief that fixed, biological characteristics underpin them.

the mechanism the first study describes among students is a fascinating one. It’s simply that the more focus you put on race, the more conscious people are of it as a valid and meaningful distinction between people, and the more likely they are to reify it.

At today’s diversity-driven campus or corporation, often your first instinct when seeing someone is to quickly assess their identity — black, white, gay, Latino, male, trans, etc. You are required to do this all the time because you constantly need to check your privilege.

so college students — and those who hire and fire in business — are trained to judge a person instantly by where they fit into a racial and gender hierarchy, before they even engage them. Of course they’re going to end up judging people instantly by the color of their skin

Another study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found: [I]n three experiments, White American college students received a message advocating either a color-blind or a multicultural ideological approach to improving interethnic relations and then made judgments about various ethnic groups and individuals

Relative to a color-blind perspective, the multicultural perspective led to stronger stereotypes, greater accuracy in these stereotypes, and greater use of category information in judgments of individuals

[P]rimed with multiculturalism, participants liked racial minorities who displayed stereotypical preferences (i.e., liking basketball and hip-hop) more than racial minorities who displayed non-stereotypical preferences (i.e., surfing and country dancing).

In other words, teaching people to see other races as completely different from one’s own may encourage us to define others by stereotypes.

When the deep tribal forces in the human psyche are constantly on alert for racial difference, we run the risk of exacerbating racism

anti-racism could facilitate what it is attempting to destroy.

godless capitalism that Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center, described in “How Godless Capitalism Made America Multicultural” — a problem that Wilkinson correctly points out affects “all wealthy, liberal-democratic countries.”

It is our goal to make the case for a principled center-right in American politics today that is distinctly different from either movement conservatism or its degenerate, populist offshoot.

Assimilation is an issue not because it isn’t happening, but because it is. The issue is that the post-1968 immigrants and their progeny are here at all. And their successful assimilation means that American culture, and American national identity, has already been updated and transformed.

Swift and dramatic cultural changes can leave us with the baffled feeling that the soil in which we laid down roots has somehow become foreign. Older people who have largely lost the capacity to easily assimilate to a new culture can feel that the rug has been pulled out from under them.

The result, according to Wilkinson, to whom I will give the last word, is thatrapid cultural change can make a truly common national identity hard to come by, if not impossible. It’s not clear to me how important it is to have one. But it does seem that a badly bifurcated cultural self-understanding can have very dramatic and potentially dangerous political consequences

The project of American democracy — to live beyond such tribal identities, to construct a society based on the individual, to see ourselves as citizens of a people’s republic, to place religion off-limits, and even in recent years to embrace a multiracial and post-religious society — was always an extremely precarious endeavor. It rested, from the beginning, on an 18th-century hope that deep divides can be bridged by a culture of compromise, and that emotion can be defeated by reason.

Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience. It comes more naturally to us than any other way of life. For the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet, the tribe was the only form of human society. We lived for tens of thousands of years in compact, largely egalitarian groups of around 50 people or more, connected to each other by genetics and language, usually unwritten.

Tribal cohesion was essential to survival, and our first religions emerged for precisely this purpose.

Religion therefore fused with communal identity and purpose, it was integral to keeping the enterprise afloat, and the idea of people within a tribe believing in different gods was incomprehensible. Such heretics would be killed.

we became a deeply cooperative species — but primarily with our own kind. The notion of living alongside people who do not look like us and treating them as our fellows was meaningless for most of human history.

Successful modern democracies do not abolish this feeling; they co-opt it. Healthy tribalism endures in civil society in benign and overlapping ways.

in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts

most critically, there is the Über-tribe that constitutes the nation-state, a megatribe that unites a country around shared national rituals, symbols, music, history, mythology, and events, that forms the core unit of belonging that makes a national democracy possible.

Tribalism only destabilizes a democracy when it calcifies into something bigger and more intense than our smaller, multiple loyalties; when it rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole; and when it turns rival tribes into enemies. And the most significant fact about American tribalism today is that all three of these characteristics now apply to our political parties, corrupting and even threatening our system of government.

If I were to identify one profound flaw in the founding of America, it would be its avoidance of our tribal nature

The founders were suspicious of political parties altogether — but parties defined by race and religion and class and geography? I doubt they’d believe a republic could survive that, and they couldn’t and didn’t foresee it. In fact, as they conceived of a new society that would protect the individual rights of all humanity, they explicitly excluded a second tribe among them: African-American slaves

But it did happen here, on a fault line that closely resembles today’s tribal boundary.

in the first half of the 20th century, with immigration sharply curtailed after 1924, the world wars acted as great unifiers and integrators. Our political parties became less polarized by race, as the FDR Democrats managed to attract more black voters as well as ethnic and southern whites. By 1956, nearly 40 percent of black voters still backed the GOP.

The re-racialization of our parties began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, when the GOP lost almost all of the black vote. It accelerated under Nixon’s “southern strategy” in the wake of the civil-rights revolution. By Reagan’s reelection, the two parties began to cohere again into the Civil War pattern, and had simply swapped places.

The greatest threat to a politician today therefore is less a candidate from the opposing party than a more ideologically extreme primary opponent. The incentives for cross-tribal compromise have been eviscerated, and those for tribal extremism reinforced.

When it actually came to undoing the reform earlier this year, the GOP had precious little intellectual capital to fall back on, no alternative way to keep millions insured, no history of explaining to voters outside their own tribe what principles they were even trying to apply.

Add to this the great intellectual sorting of America, in which, for generations, mass college education sifted countless gifted young people from the heartland and deposited them in increasingly left-liberal universities and thereafter the major cities, from which they never returned, and then the shifting of our economy to favor the college-educated, which only deepened the urban-rural divide.

The myths that helped us unite as a nation began to fray. We once had a widely accepted narrative of our origins, shared icons that defined us, and a common pseudo-ethnicity — “whiteness” — into which new immigrants were encouraged to assimilate.

we should be clear-eyed about the consequence. We can no longer think of the Puritans without acknowledging the genocide that followed them; we cannot celebrate our Founding Fathers without seeing that slavery undergirded the society they constructed; we must tear down our Confederate statues and relitigate our oldest rifts. Even the national anthem now divides those who stand from those who kneel. We dismantled many of our myths, but have not yet formed new ones to replace them.

The result of all this is that a lopsided 69 percent of white Christians now vote Republican, while the Democrats get only 31. In the last decade, the gap in Christian identification between Democrats and Republicans has increased by 50 percent. In 2004, 44 percent of Latinos voted Republican for president; in 2016, 29 percent did. Forty-three percent of Asian-Americans voted Republican in 2004; in 2016, 29 percent did. Since 2004, the most populous urban counties have also swung decisively toward the Democrats, in both blue and red states, while rural counties have shifted sharply to the GOP

When three core components of a tribal identity — race, religion, and geography — define your political parties, you’re in serious trouble.

Some countries where tribal cleavages spawned by ethnic and linguistic differences have long existed understand this and have constructed systems of government designed to ameliorate the consequences

There is no neutral presidency here, and so when a rank tribalist wins the office and governs almost entirely in the interests of the hardest core of his base, half the country understandably feels as if it were under siege. Our two-party, winner-take-all system only works when both parties are trying to appeal to the same constituencies on a variety of issues.

Our undemocratic electoral structure exacerbates things. Donald Trump won 46 percent of the vote, attracting 3 million fewer voters than his opponent, but secured 56 percent of the Electoral College. Republicans won 44 percent of the vote in the Senate seats up for reelection last year, but 65 percent of the seats. To have one tribe dominate another is one thing; to have the tribe that gained fewer votes govern the rest — and be the head of state — is testing political stability.

Slowly our political culture becomes one in which the two parties see themselves not as participating in a process of moving the country forward, sometimes by tilting to the right and sometimes to the left, as circumstances permit, alternating in power, compromising when in opposition, moderating when in government — but one where the goal is always the obliteration of the other party by securing a permanent majority, in an unending process of construction and demolition.

And so by 2017, 41 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of Democrats said they disagreed not just with their opponents’ political views but with their values and goals beyond politics as well.

61 percent of Trump supporters say there’s nothing he could do to make them change their minds about him; 57 percent of his opponents say the same thing. Nothing he could do.

When criticized by a member of a rival tribe, a tribalist will not reflect on his own actions or assumptions but instantly point to the same flaw in his enemy.

By the 2000 election, we were introduced to the red-blue map, though by then we could already recognize the two tribes it identified as they fought to a national draw. Choosing a president under those circumstances caused a constitutional crisis, one the Supreme Court resolved at the expense of losing much of its nonpartisan, nontribal authority.

In America, the intellectual elites, far from being a key rational bloc resisting this, have succumbed. The intellectual right and the academic left have long since dispensed with the idea of a mutual exchange of ideas.

Conservatism thrived in America when it was dedicated to criticizing liberalism’s failures, engaging with it empirically, and offering practical alternatives to the same problems. It has since withered into an intellectual movement that does little but talk to itself and guard its ideological boundaries.

among tribal conservatives, the Iraq War remained a taboo topic when it wasn’t still regarded as a smashing success, tax cuts were still the solution to every economic woe, free trade was all benefit and no cost, and so on. Health care was perhaps the most obvious example of this intellectual closure. Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act was immediate and total. Even though the essential contours of the policy had been honed at the Heritage Foundation, even though a Republican governor had pioneered it in Massachusetts, and even though that governor became the Republican nominee in 2012, the anathematization of it defined the GOP for seven years.

the now near-ubiquitous trend of “whataboutism,” as any glance at a comments section or a cable slugfest will reveal. The Soviets perfected this in the Cold War, deflecting from their horrific Gulags by pointing, for example, to racial strife in the U.S. It tells you a lot about our time that a tactic once honed in a global power struggle between two nations now occurs within one.

George Orwell famously defined this mind-set as identifying yourself with a movement, “placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” It’s typified, he noted, by self-contradiction and indifference to reality

As for indifference to reality, today’s Republicans cannot accept that human-produced carbon is destroying the planet, and today’s Democrats must believe that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism. Even now, Democrats cannot say the words illegal immigrants or concede that affirmative action means discriminating against people because of their race. Republicans cannot own the fact that big tax cuts have not trickled down, or that President Bush authorized the brutal torture of prisoners, thereby unequivocally committing war crimes.

Orwell again: “There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case … still one cannot feel that it is wrong.” That is as good a summary of tribalism as you can get, that it substitutes a feeling — a really satisfying one — for an argument.

When a party leader in a liberal democracy proposes a shift in direction, there is usually an internal debate. It can go on for years. When a tribal leader does so, the tribe immediately jumps on command. And so the Republicans went from free trade to protectionism, and from internationalism to nationalism, almost overnight

And then there is the stance of white Evangelicals, a pillar of the red tribe. Among their persistent concerns has long been the decline of traditional marriage, the coarsening of public discourse, and the centrality of personal virtue to the conduct of public office.

In the 1990s, they assailed Bill Clinton as the font of decadence; then they lionized George W. Bush, who promised to return what they often called “dignity” to the Oval Office. And yet when a black Democrat with exemplary personal morality, impeccable public civility, a man devoted to his wife and children and a model for African-American fathers, entered the White House, they treated him as a threat to civilization

And when they encountered a foulmouthed pagan who bragged of grabbing women by the pussy, used the tabloids to humiliate his wife, married three times, boasted about the hotness of his own daughter, touted the size of his own dick in a presidential debate, and spoke of avoiding STDs as his personal Vietnam, they gave him more monolithic support than any candidate since Reagan, including born-again Bush and squeaky-clean Romney.

In 2011, a poll found that only 30 percent of white Evangelicals believed that private immorality was irrelevant for public life. This month, the same poll found that the number had skyrocketed to 72 percent.

Total immersion within one’s tribe also leads to increasingly extreme ideas. The word “hate,” for example, has now become a one-stop replacement for a whole spectrum of varying, milder emotions involved with bias toward others:

Or take the current promiscuous use of the term “white supremacist.” We used to know what that meant. It meant advocates and practitioners of slavery, believers in the right of white people to rule over all others, subscribers to a theory of a master race, Jim Crow supporters, George Wallace voters.

But it is now routinely used on the left to mean, simply, racism in a multicultural America, in which European-Americans are a fast-evaporating ethnic majority.

Liberals should be able to understand this by reading any conservative online journalism and encountering the term “the left.” It represents a large, amorphous blob of malevolent human beings, with no variation among them, no reasonable ideas, nothing identifiably human at all

It’s not easy to be optimistic with Trump as president. And given his malignant narcissism, despotic instincts, absence of empathy, and constant incitement of racial and xenophobic hatred, it’s extremely hard not to be tribal in return. There is no divide he doesn’t want to deepen, no conflict he doesn’t want to start or intensify. How on earth can we not “resist”?

In 2015, did any of us anticipate that neo-Nazis would be openly parading with torches on a college campus or that antifa activists would be proudly extolling violence as the only serious response to the Trump era?

In fact, the person best positioned to get us out of this tribal trap would be … well … bear with me … Trump. The model would be Bill Clinton, the first president to meet our newly configured divide. Clinton leveraged the loyalty of Democrats thrilled to regain the White House in order to triangulate toward centrist compromises with the GOP. You can argue about the merits of the results, but he was able to govern, to move legislation forward, to reform welfare, reduce crime, turn the deficit into a surplus, survive impeachment, and end his term a popular president.

The Democrats are now, surprisingly, confronting a choice many thought they would only face in a best-case-scenario midterm election, and their political calculus is suddenly much more complicated than pure resistance. Might the best interest of the country be served by working with Trump? And if they do win the House in 2018, should they seek to destroy Trump’s presidency, much like GOP leaders in Congress chose to do with Obama? Should they try to end it through impeachment, as the GOP attempted with Bill Clinton? Or could they try to moderate the tribal divide?

if the Democrats try to impeach a president who has no interest in the stability or integrity of our liberal democracy, and if his base sees it, as they will, as an Establishment attempt at nullifying their vote, are we really prepared to handle the civil unrest and constitutional crisis that would almost certainly follow?

Tribalism is not a static force. It feeds on itself. It appeals on a gut level and evokes emotions that are not easily controlled and usually spiral toward real conflict. And there is no sign that the deeper forces that have accelerated this — globalization, social atomization, secularization, media polarization, ever more multiculturalism — will weaken

But we should not delude ourselves that this is all a Trump problem.

As utopian as it sounds, I truly believe all of us have to at least try to change the culture from the ground up. There are two ideas that might be of help, it seems to me. The first is individuality.

I mean valuing the unique human being — distinct from any group identity, quirky, full of character and contradictions, skeptical, rebellious, immune to being labeled or bludgeoned into a broader tribal grouping. This cultural antidote to tribalism, left and right, is still here in America and ready to be rediscovered

I may be an extreme case, but we all are nonconformist to some degree. Nurturing your difference or dissent from your own group is difficult; appreciating the individuality of those in other tribes is even harder. It takes effort and imagination, openness to dissent, even an occasional embrace of blasphemy.

we also need mutual forgiveness. It doesn’t matter if you believe, as I do, that the right bears the bulk of the historical blame. No tribal conflict has ever been unwound without magnanimity. Yitzhak Rabin had it, but it was not enough. Nelson Mandela had it, and it was

But this requires, of course, first recognizing our own tribal thinking. So much of our debates are now an easy either/or rather than a complicated both/and. In our tribal certainties, we often distort what we actually believe in the quiet of our hearts, and fail to see what aspects of truth the other tribe may grasp.

Not all resistance to mass immigration or multiculturalism is mere racism or bigotry; and not every complaint about racism and sexism is baseless. Many older white Americans are not so much full of hate as full of fear.

The actual solutions to our problems are to be found in the current no-man’s-land that lies between the two tribes. Reentering it with empiricism and moderation to find different compromises for different issues is the only way out of our increasingly dangerous impasse.

All of this runs deeply against the grain. It’s counterintuitive. It’s emotionally unpleasant. It fights against our very DNA. Compared with bathing in the affirming balm of a tribe, it’s deeply unsatisfying. But no one ever claimed that living in a republic was going to be easy — if we really want to keep it.

George J. Borjas, a professor of economics at Harvard, argues thatillegal immigration reduces the wage of native workers by an estimated $99 to $118 billion a year, and generates a gain for businesses and other users of immigrants of $107 billion to $128 billion.

The left, Lind said,cannot cope with reality of how low-wage unskilled immigration has been driving down wages at the bottom of the labor market since the 1960s. Whenever multiculturalism collides with the interests of labor, multiculturalism wins.

The dynamic interaction of three current trends — voter anger over immigration, over offshoring and robotization, and over damage wrought by the economic meltdown of 2008 — has been crucial to Trump’s success.

: “In 1979, the four middle-skill occupations (sales; office and administrative workers; production workers; and operatives) accounted for 60 percent of employment,” according to David Autor, an economist at M.I.T. By 2012, “it was 46 percent.”

the aftereffects of the financial collapse: “The cost of the crisis, assuming output eventually returns to its precrisis trend path, is an output loss of $6 trillion to $14 trillion. This amounts to $50,000 to $120,000 for every U.S. household,”

While the recession was an economic phenomenon, its impact went beyond a sizable drop in output or consumption. The adverse psychological consequences are enormous

The “stark legacy of the recession and the lackluster labor market” are apparent in “reduced opportunity and deterioration,” according to the Dallas Federal Reserve. The number of men and women “not in the labor force” continues to grow, from 92.5 million in November 2014 to 94.4 million last month.

The question for the rest of us, it seems to me, is whether Israel under this hard-right government should be viewed in the future as an ally for democratic forces, like Britain or France — or as something a little more complicated, like Hungary or Poland?

Here’s how a spokesperson for an Arab-Israeli lobby described it: “This law guarantees the ethnic-religious character of Israel as exclusively Jewish and entrenches the privileges enjoyed by Jewish citizens, while simultaneously anchoring discrimination against Palestinian citizens and legitimizing exclusion, racism and systemic inequality.” When you consider this move alongside the continuing settlement of the West Bank, where Palestinians have no rights to speak of, and are increasingly being sequestered into isolated Bantustans, it’s not a good look.

Trump is simultaneously vandalizing the West, while slowly building a strongman alliance that rejects every single Western value. And Russia — authoritarian, ethnically homogeneous, internally brutal, internationally rogue — is at its center. That’s the real story of the last week, and at this point, it isn’t even faintly news.

if I were an Estonian or a Montenegrin I’d be nervous, wouldn’t you? If I were a German, I’d be unnerved. If I were still British, I’d be very leery of door handles. There’s no Uncle Sam to look to for help anymore. The Americans are on the other side.

The post-1945 attempt to organize the world around collective security, free trade, open societies, non-zero-sum diplomacy, and multicultural democracies is therefore close to unintelligible to him. Why on earth, in his mind, would a victorious power after a world war be … generous to its defeated foes? When you win, you don’t hold out a hand in enlightened self-interest. You gloat and stomp. In Trump’s zero-sum brain — “we should have kept the oil!” — it makes no sense. It has to be a con. And so today’s international order strikes Trump, and always has, as a massive, historic error on the part of the United States

There’s nothing in it for him to like. It has empowered global elites over national leaders; it has eroded national sovereignty in favor commerce and peace; it has empowered our rivals; it has spread liberal values contrary to the gut instincts of many ordinary people (including himself); it has led the U.S. to spend trillions on collective security, when we could have used that wealth for our own population or to impose our will by force on others; it has created a legion of free riders; it has enriched the global poor at the expense, as he sees it, of the American middle class; and it has unleashed unprecedented migration of peoples and the creation of the first truly multicultural, heterogeneous national cultures.

He wants to end all that. He always hated it, and he never understood it. That kind of complex, interdependent world requires virtues he doesn’t have and skills he doesn’t possess

He wants a world he intuitively understands: of individual nations, in which the most powerful are free to bully the others. He wants an end to transnational migration, especially from south to north. It unnerves him. He believes that warfare should be engaged not to defend the collective peace as a last resort but to plunder and occupy and threaten. He sees no moral difference between free and authoritarian societies, just a difference of “strength,” in which free societies, in his mind, are the weaker ones. He sees nations as ethno-states, exercising hard power, rather than liberal societies, governed by international codes of conduct. He believes in diplomacy as the meeting of strongmen in secret, doing deals, in alpha displays of strength — not endless bullshit sessions at multilateral summits

today’s generation gap is not based just on temporary intellectual postures. It is based on concrete, lived experience that is never going to go away.

Unlike the Silent Generation and the boomers, millennials and Gen Z voters live with difference every single day. Only 16 percent of the Silent Generation is minority, but 44 percent of the millennial generation is

Young voters approve of these trends. Seventy-nine percent of millennials think immigration is good for America. Sixty-one percent think racial diversity is good for America.

The generation gap is even more powerful when it comes to Republicans. To put it bluntly, young adults hate them.

They are much less likely to say the U.S. is the best country in the world.

Matthew Continetti recently identified the key blocs on the new right in an essay in The Washington Free Beacon. These included the Jacksonians (pugilistic populists), the Paleos (Tucker Carlson-style economic nationalists), the Post-Liberals (people who oppose pluralism and seek a return to pre-Enlightenment orthodoxy). To most young adults, these tendencies will look like cloud cuckooland.

There is a conservative way to embrace pluralism and diversity. It’s to point out that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down

A better multiculturalism would be optimistic: We can communicate across difference; the American creed is the right recipe for a thick and respectful pluralism; American structures are basically sound and can be realistically reformed

My mentor William F. Buckley vowed to stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” Today’s Republicans don’t even seem to see the train that is running them over.

one core divide on the right: between those who see the social, cultural, and demographic changes of the last few decades as requiring an assault and reversal, and those who seek to reform its excesses, manage its unintended consequences, but otherwise live with it. Anton is a reactionary; I’m a conservative

there is a place where conservatives and reactionaries find common cause — and that is when the change occurring is drastic, ideological, imposed by an elite, and without any limiting principle.

On immigration, for example, has the demographic transformation of the U.S. been too swift, too revolutionary, and too indifferent to human nature and history?

Or is it simply a new, if challenging, turn in a long, American story of waves of immigrants creating a country that’s an ever-changing kaleidoscope?

If you answer “yes” to the first, you’re a reactionary. If “yes” to the second, you’re a liberal. If you say yes to both, you’re a conservative.

If you say it’s outrageous and racist even to consider these questions, you’re a card-carrying member of the left.

In a new essay, Anton explains his view of the world: “What happens when transformative efforts bump up against permanent and natural limits? Nature tends to bump back

But what are “permanent and natural limits” to transformation? Here are a couple: humanity’s deep-seated tribalism and the natural differences between men and women

— but you will never eradicate these deeper realities.

The left is correct that Americans are racist and sexist; but so are all humans

I’d say that by any reasonable standards in history or the contemporary world, America is a miracle of multiracial and multicultural harmony. There’s more to do and accomplish, but the standard should be what’s doable within the framework of human nature, not perfection

More to the point, the attempt to eradicate rather than ameliorate these things requires extraordinary intervention in people’s lives, empowers government way beyond its optimal boundaries, and generates intense backlash.

if you decide to change the ethnic composition of an entire country in just a few decades, you will get a backlash from the previous majority ethnicity; and if you insist that there are no differences between men and women, you are going to generate male and female resistance.

That kind of left-radicalism will generate an equal and opposite kind of right-reactionism. And that’s especially true if you define the resisters as bigots and deplorables, and refuse to ever see that they might have a smidgen of a point.

This is not to say that some of the resisters are not bigots, just that no human society has been without bigotry, and that many others who are resistant to drastic change are just uncomfortable, or nostalgic, or afraid, or lost

I’m a multicultural conservative. But when assaulted by the slur of “white supremacist” because I don’t buy Marcuse, my reactionism perks up. The smugness, self-righteousness, and dogmatism of the current left is a Miracle-Gro of reactionism.

Subject young white boys to critical race and gender theory, tell them that women can have penises, that genetics are irrelevant in understanding human behavior, that borders are racist, or that men are inherently toxic, and you will get a bunch of Jordan Peterson fans by their 20s. Actually, scratch that future tense — they’re here and growing in number.

Many leftists somehow believe that sustained indoctrination will work in abolishing human nature, and when it doesn’t, because it can’t, they demonize those who have failed the various tests of PC purity as inherently wicked.

n the end, the alienated and despised see no reason not to gravitate to ever-more extreme positions. They support people and ideas simply because they piss off their indoctrinators. And, in the end, they reelect Trump.

None of this is necessary. You can be in favor of women’s equality without buying into the toxicity of men; you can support legal immigration if the government gets serious about stopping illegal immigration; you can be inclusive of trans people without abolishing the bimodality of human sex and gender; you can support criminal-justice reform without believing — as the New York Times now apparently does — that America is an inherently racist invention,

Leftists have to decide at some point: Do they want to push more conservatives into Michael Anton’s reactionary camp or more reactionaries into the conservative one? And begin to ponder their own role in bringing this extreme reactionism into the mainstream.

Anton’s critique was that I was half-right and half-wrong. I was right to see democracy degenerating into tyranny but wrong to see any way to avoid it. What he calls “Caesarism” is already here, as Obama’s abuse of executive power proved. Therefore: “If we must have Caesar, who do you want him to be? One of theirs? Or one of yours (ours)?”

he writes a reactionary blog, Unqualified Reservations, under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug and has earned a cult following among the alt-right. His magnum opus — “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” — is an alternately chilling and entertaining assault on almost everything educated Westerners hold to be self-evidently true.

Yarvin believes that the Western mind became corrupted during the Enlightenment itself. The very idea of democracy, allied with reason and constitutionalism, is bunk: “Washington has failed. The Constitution has failed. Democracy has failed.” His golden era: the age of monarchs. (“It is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.”) His solution: “It is time for restoration, for national salvation, for a full reboot. We need a new government, a clean slate, a fresh hand which is smart, strong and fair.”

The assumption that all of history has led inexorably to today’s glorious and democratic present is, he argues, a smug and self-serving delusion. It’s what used to be called Whig History, the idea that all of human history led up to the democratic institutions and civilizational achievements of liberal Britain, the model for the entire world.

Why do so many of us assume that progress is inevitable, if never complete? Yarvin, like the Claremonters and American Greatness brigade, blames an elite that he calls by the inspired name “the Cathedral,” an amalgam of established universities and the mainstream press. It works like this: “The universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent.

for Yarvin, the consent is manufactured not by capitalism, advertising, and corporations but by liberal academics, pundits, and journalists. They simply assume that left liberalism is the only rational response to the world. Democracy, he contends, “no longer means that the public’s elected representatives control the government. It means that the government implements scientific public policy in the public interest.”

His solution is not just a tyrannical president who hates all that the Cathedral stands for but something even more radical: “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power to a mysterious figure known only as the Receiver, who in the process of converting Washington into a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation will abolish the press, smash the universities, sell the public schools, and transfer ‘decivilized populations’ to ‘secure relocation facilities’ where they will be assigned to ‘mandatory apprenticeships.’ ”

This is 21st-century fascism, except that Yarvin’s Receiver would allow complete freedom of speech and association and would exercise no control over economic life. Foreign policy? Yarvin calls for “a total shutdown of international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.” All social policy also disappears: “I believe that government should take no notice whatsoever of race — no racial policy. I believe it should separate itself completely from the question of what its citizens should or should not think — separation of education and state.”

I never doubted the cogency of many reactionary insights — and I still admire minds that have not succumbed to the comfortable assumption that the future is always brighter. I read the Christian traditionalist Rod Dreher with affection. His evocation of Christian life and thought over the centuries and his panic at its disappearance from our world are poignant. We are losing a vast civilization that honed answers to the deepest questions that human beings can ask, replacing it with vapid pseudo-religions, pills, therapy, and reality TV

Because in some key respects, reactionaries are right. Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back. The Reformation did initiate brutal sectarian warfare. The French Revolution did degenerate into barbarous tyranny. Communist utopias — allegedly the wave of an Elysian future — turned into murderous nightmares. Modern neoliberalism has, for its part, created a global capitalist machine that is seemingly beyond anyone’s control, fast destroying the planet’s climate, wiping out vast tracts of life on Earth while consigning millions of Americans to economic stagnation and cultural despair.

And at an even deeper level, the more we discover about human evolution, the more illusory certain ideas of progress become. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari points out that hunter-gatherers were actually up to six inches taller than their more “civilized” successors; their diets were much healthier; infectious disease was much rarer; they worked less and goofed off more than we do.

Harari notes another paradox: Over hundreds of millennia, we have overcome starvation … but now are more likely to die of obesity than hunger. Happiness? Globally, suicide rates keep rising.

We are tribal creatures in our very DNA; we have an instinctive preference for our own over others, for “in-groups” over “out-groups”; for hunter-gatherers, recognizing strangers as threats was a matter of life and death

We also invent myths and stories to give meaning to our common lives. Among those myths is the nation — stretching from the past into the future, providing meaning to our common lives in a way nothing else can. Strip those narratives away, or transform them too quickly, and humans will become disoriented. Most of us respond to radical changes in our lives, especially changes we haven’t chosen, with more fear than hope

If we ignore these deeper facts about ourselves, we run the risk of fatal errors. It’s vital to remember that multicultural, multiracial, post-national societies are extremely new for the human species, and keeping them viable and stable is a massive challenge.

Globally, social trust is highest in the homogeneous Nordic countries, and in America, Pew has found it higher in rural areas than cities. The political scientist Robert Putnam has found that “people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle.” Not very encouraging about human nature — but something we can’t wish away, either

In fact, the American elite’s dismissal of these truths, its reduction of all resistance to cultural and demographic change as crude “racism” or “xenophobia,” only deepens the sense of siege many other Americans feel.

When this velocity of cultural change combines with a deepening — and accurate — sense of economic anxiety, is it shocking that human beings want to retreat into a past, to resuscitate the nation-state, and to reach backward for a more primeval and instinctual group identity? Or that they doubt the promise of “progress” and seek scapegoats in the governing classes that have encouraged all of this to happen?

The tragedy of our time, of course, is that President Obama tried to follow Lincoln’s advice. He reached out to those who voted against him as often as he could. His policies, like Obamacare, were aimed at helping the very working poor who gave Trump the White House. He pledged to transcend the red-blue divide. He acknowledged both the necessity of law enforcement and the legitimate African-American fear of hostile cops

A black man brought up by white people, he gave speech after speech attempting to provide a new narrative for America: one of slowly integrating moral progress, where racial and class divides could be overcome. He criticized the reductive divisiveness of identity politics. And yet he failed

he couldn’t stem the reactionary tide that now washes ever closer ashore. If a man that talented, with that biography, found himself spitting into the wind, a powerful storm is indeed upon us.

how can you seriously regard our political system and culture as worse than ever before in history? How self-centered do you have to be to dismiss the unprecedented freedom for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals? Or the increased security for the elderly and unemployed, and the greater access to health care by the poor and now the working poor? Compare the air we breathe today with that of the 1950s. Contrast the religious tolerance we take for granted today with the enmities of the past.

Over the very long haul, too, scholars such as Steven Pinker have found convincing evidence that violence among humans is at the lowest levels since the species first emerged.

It is also one thing to be vigilant about the power of the administrative state and to attempt to reform and modernize it; it is quite another to favor its abolition. The more complex modern society has become, the more expertise is needed to govern it — and where else is that expertise going to come from if not a professional elite?

the liberal media has nothing like the monopoly it once enjoyed. There are two “Cathedrals” in the 21st century — and only one has helped produce a conservative Supreme Court, a Republican Congress, a Republican president, and near-record Republican majorities in statehouses around the country

Beyond all that, neo-reactionaries have a glaring problem, which is that their proposed solutions are so radical they have no chance whatsoever of coming into existence — and would be deeply reckless to attempt.

There is, perhaps, a way to use reactionary insights and still construct a feasible center-right agenda. Such a program would junk Reaganite economics as outdated but keep revenue-neutral tax reform, it could even favor redistribution to counter the deep risk to democracy that soaring inequality fosters, and it could fix Obamacare’s technical problems. You could add to this mix stronger border control, a reduction in legal immigration, a pause in free-trade expansion, a technological overhaul of the government bureaucracy, and a reassertion of Americanism over multiculturalism.

The left, for its part, must, it seems to me, escape its own bubble and confront the accelerating extremism of its identity politics and its disdain for millions of “deplorable” white Americans. You will not arrest the reactionary momentum by ignoring it or dismissing it entirely as a function of bigotry or stupidity. You’ll only defuse it by appreciating its insights and co-opting its appeal.

I’d been talking with DiAngelo for a year when Floyd was killed, and with other antiracism teachers for almost as long. Demand has recently spiked throughout the field, though the clamor had already been building, particularly since the election of Donald Trump

As their teaching becomes more and more widespread, antiracism educators are shaping the language that gets spoken — and the lessons being learned — about race in America.

“I will not coddle your comfort,” she went on. She gestured crisply with her hands. “I’m going to name and admit to things white people rarely name and admit.” Scattered Black listeners called out encouragement. Then she specified the predominant demographic in the packed house: white progressives. “I know you. Oh, white progressives are my specialty. Because I am a white progressive.” She paced tightly on the stage. “And I have a racist worldview.”

“White supremacy — yes, it includes extremists or neo-Nazis, but it is also a highly descriptive sociological term for the society we live in, a society in which white people are elevated as the ideal for humanity, and everyone else is a deficient version.” And Black people, she said, are cast as the most deficient. “There is something profoundly anti-Black in this culture.”

White fragility, in DiAngelo’s formulation, is far from weakness. It is “weaponized.” Its evasions are actually a liberal white arsenal, a means of protecting a frail moral ego, defending a righteous self-image and, ultimately, perpetuating racial hierarchies, because what goes unexamined will never be upended

At some point after our answers, DiAngelo poked fun at the myriad ways that white people “credential” themselves as not-racist. I winced. I hadn’t meant to imply that I was anywhere close to free of racism, yet was I “credentialing”?

the pattern she first termed “white fragility” in an academic article in 2011: the propensity of white people to fend off suggestions of racism, whether by absurd denials (“I don’t see color”) or by overly emotional displays of defensiveness or solidarity (DiAngelo’s book has a chapter titled “White Women’s Tears” and subtitled “But you are my sister, and I share your pain!”) or by varieties of the personal history I’d provided.

But was I being fragile? Was I being defensive or just trying to share something more personal, intimate and complex than DiAngelo’s all-encompassing sociological perspective? She taught, throughout the afternoon, that the impulse to individualize is in itself a white trait, a way to play down the societal racism all white people have thoroughly absorbed.

One “unnamed logic of Whiteness,” she wrote with her frequent co-author, the education professor Ozlem Sensoy, in a 2017 paper published in The Harvard Educational Review, “is the presumed neutrality of White European Enlightenment epistemology.”

she returned to white supremacy and how she had been imbued with it since birth. “When my mother was pregnant with me, who delivered me in the hospital — who owned the hospital? And who came in that night and mopped the floor?” She paused so we could picture the complexions of those people. Systemic racism, she announced, is “embedded in our cultural definitions of what is normal, what is correct, what is professionalism, what is intelligence, what is beautiful, what is valuable.”

“I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious,” one of the discipline’s influential thinkers, Peggy McIntosh, a researcher at the Wellesley Centers for Women, has written. “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear and blank checks.”

Borrowing from feminist scholarship and critical race theory, whiteness studies challenges the very nature of knowledge, asking whether what we define as scientific research and scholarly rigor, and what we venerate as objectivity, can be ways of excluding alternate perspectives and preserving white dominance

the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s casting of white actors as Asians in a production of “The Mikado.” “That changed my life,” she said. The phrase “white fragility” went viral, and requests to speak started to soar; she expanded the article into a book and during the year preceding Covid-19 gave eight to 10 presentations a month, sometimes pro bono but mostly at up to $15,000 per event.

For almost everyone, she assumes, there is a mingling of motives, a wish for easy affirmation (“they can say they heard Robin DiAngelo speak”) and a measure of moral hunger.

Moore drew all eyes back to him and pronounced, “The cause of racial disparities is racism. If I show you data that’s about race, we need to be talking about racism. Don’t get caught up in detours.” He wasn’t referring to racism’s legacy. He meant that current systemic racism is the explanation for devastating differences in learning, that the prevailing white culture will not permit Black kids to succeed in school.

The theme of what white culture does not allow, of white society’s not only supreme but also almost-absolute power, is common to today’s antiracism teaching and runs throughout Singleton’s and DiAngelo’s programs

unning slightly beneath or openly on the surface of DiAngelo’s and Singleton’s teaching is a set of related ideas about the essence and elements of white culture

For DiAngelo, the elements include the “ideology of individualism,” which insists that meritocracy is mostly real, that hard work and talent will be justly rewarded. White culture, for her, is all about habits of oppressive thought that are taken for granted and rarely perceived, let alone questioned

if we were white and happened to be sitting beside someone of color, we were forbidden to ask the person of color to speak first. It might be good policy, mostly, for white people to do more listening than talking, but, she said with knowing humor, it could also be a subtle way to avoid blunders, maintain a mask of sensitivity and stay comfortable. She wanted the white audience members to feel as uncomfortable as possible.

The modern university, it says, “with its ‘experts’ and its privileging of particular forms of knowledge over others (e.g., written over oral, history over memory, rationalism over wisdom)” has “validated and elevated positivistic, White Eurocentric knowledge over non-White, Indigenous and non-European knowledges.”

the idea of a society rigged at its intellectual core underpins her lessons.

There is the myth of meritocracy. And valuing “written communication over other forms,” he told me, is “a hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. Another “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.” He said, “There’s this whole group of people who are named the scientists. That’s where you get into this whole idea that if it’s not codified in scientific thought that it can’t be valid.”

“This is a good way of dismissing people. And this,” he continued, shifting forward thousands of years, “is one of the challenges in the diversity-equity-inclusion space; folks keep asking for data. How do you quantify, in a way that is scientific — numbers and that kind of thing — what people feel when they’re feeling marginalized?”

Moore directed us to a page in our training booklets: a list of white values. Along with “ ‘The King’s English’ rules,” “objective, rational, linear thinking” and “quantitative emphasis,” there was “work before play,” “plan for future” and “adherence to rigid time schedules.”

Moore expounded that white culture is obsessed with “mechanical time” — clock time — and punishes students for lateness. This, he said, is but one example of how whiteness undercuts Black kids. “The problems come when we say this way of being is the way to be.” In school and on into the working world, he lectured, tremendous harm is done by the pervasive rule that Black children and adults must “bend to whiteness, in substance, style and format.”

Dobbin’s research shows that the numbers of women or people of color in management do not increase with most anti-bias education. “There just isn’t much evidence that you can do anything to change either explicit or implicit bias in a half-day session,” Dobbin warns. “Stereotypes are too ingrained.”

he noted that new research that he’s revising for publication suggests that anti-bias training can backfire, with adverse effects especially on Black people, perhaps, he speculated, because training, whether consciously or subconsciously, “activates stereotypes.”

When we spoke again in June, he emphasized an additional finding from his data: the likelihood of backlash “if people feel that they’re being forced to go to diversity training to conform with social norms or laws.”

Donald Green, a professor of political science at Columbia, and Betsy Levy Paluck, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, have analyzed almost 1,000 studies of programs to lessen prejudice, from racism to homophobia, in situations from workplaces to laboratory settings. “We currently do not know whether a wide range of programs and policies tend to work on average,

She replied that if a criterion “consistently and measurably leads to certain people” being excluded, then we have to “challenge” the criterion. “It’s the outcome,” she emphasized; the result indicated the racism.

Another critique has been aimed at DiAngelo, as her book sales have skyrocketed. From both sides of the political divide, she has been accused of peddling racial reductionism by branding all white people as supremacist

Chislett filed suit in October against Carranza and the department. At least five other high-level, white D.O.E. executives have filed similar suits or won settlements from the city over the past 14 months. The trainings lie at the heart of their claims.

Chislett eventually wound up demoted from the leadership of A.P. for All, and her suit argues that the trainings created a workplace filled with antiwhite distrust and discrimination

whatever the merits of Chislett’s lawsuit and the counteraccusations against her, she is also concerned about something larger. “It’s absurd,” she said about much of the training she’s been through. “The city has tens of millions invested in A.P. for All, so my team can give kids access to A.P. classes and help them prepare for A.P. exams that will help them get college degrees, and we’re all supposed to think that writing and data are white values? How do all these people not see how inconsistent this is?”

I talked with DiAngelo, Singleton, Amante-Jackson and Kendi about the possible problem. If the aim is to dismantle white supremacy, to redistribute power and influence, I asked them in various forms, do the messages of today’s antiracism training risk undermining the goal by depicting an overwhelmingly rigged society in which white people control nearly all the outcomes, by inculcating the idea that the traditional skills needed to succeed in school and in the upper levels of the workplace are somehow inherently white, by spreading the notion that teachers shouldn’t expect traditional skills as much from their Black students, by unwittingly teaching white people that Black people require allowances, warrant extraordinary empathy and can’t really shape their own destinies?

With DiAngelo, my worries led us to discuss her Harvard Educational Review paper, which cited “rationalism” as a white criterion for hiring, a white qualification that should be reconsidered

Shouldn’t we be hiring faculty, I asked her, who fully possess, prize and can impart strong reasoning skills to students, because students will need these abilities as a requirement for high-paying, high-status jobs?

I pulled us away from the metaphorical, giving the example of corporate law as a lucrative profession in which being hired depends on acute reasoning.

They’ve just refined their analysis, with the help of two Princeton researchers, Chelsey Clark and Roni Porat. “As the study quality goes up,” Paluck told me, “the effect size dwindles.”

he said abruptly, “Capitalism is so bound up with racism. I avoid critiquing capitalism — I don’t need to give people reasons to dismiss me. But capitalism is dependent on inequality, on an underclass. If the model is profit over everything else, you’re not going to look at your policies to see what is most racially equitable.”

I was asking about whether her thinking is conducive to helping Black people displace white people on high rungs and achieve something much closer to equality in our badly flawed worl

it seemed that she, even as she gave workshops on the brutal hierarchies of here and now, was entertaining an alternate and even revolutionary reality. She talked about top law firms hiring for “resiliency and compassion.”

Singleton spoke along similar lines. I asked whether guiding administrators and teachers to put less value, in the classroom, on capacities like written communication and linear thinking might result in leaving Black kids less ready for college and competition in the labor market. “If you hold that white people are always going to be in charge of everything,” he said, “then that makes sense.”

He invoked, instead, a journey toward “a new world, a world, first and foremost, where we have elevated the consciousness, where we pay attention to the human being.” The new world, he continued, would be a place where we aren’t “armed to distrust, to be isolated, to hate,” a place where we “actually love.”

I reread “How to Be an Antiracist.” “Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” he writes. “They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes.”

“I think Americans need to decide whether this is a multicultural nation or not,” he said. “If Americans decide that it is, what that means is we’re going to have multiple cultural standards and multiple perspectives. It creates a scenario in which we would have to have multiple understandings of what achievement is and what qualifications are. That is part of the problem. We haven’t decided, as a country, even among progressives and liberals, whether we desire a multicultural nation or a unicultural nation.”

Ron Ferguson, a Black economist, faculty member at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative, is a political liberal who gets impatient with such thinking about conventional standards and qualifications

“The cost,” he told me in January, “is underemphasizing excellence and performance and the need to develop competitive prowess.” With a soft, rueful laugh, he said I wouldn’t find many economists sincerely taking part in the kind of workshops I was writing about

“When the same group of people keeps winning over and over again,” he added, summarizing the logic of the trainers, “it’s like the game must be rigged.” He didn’t reject a degree of rigging, but said, “I tend to go more quickly to the question of how can we get prepared better to just play the game.”

But, he suggested, “in this moment we’re at risk of giving short shrift to dealing with qualifications. You can try to be competitive by equipping yourself to run the race that’s already scheduled, or you can try to change the race. There may be some things about the race I’d like to change, but my priority is to get people prepared to run the race that’s already scheduled.”

DiAngelo hopes that her consciousness raising is at least having a ripple effect, contributing to a societal shift in norms. “You’re watching network TV, and they’re saying ‘systemic racism’ — that it’s in the lexicon is kind of incredible,” she said. So was the fact that “young people understand and use language like ‘white supremacy.’”

We need a culture where a person who resists speaking up against racism is uncomfortable, and right this moment it looks like we’re in that culture.”

Of course Ivy League schools double as dating services. Of course members of elites — yes, gender egalitarians, the males as well as the females — have strong incentives to marry one another, or at the very least find a spouse from within the wider meritocratic circle. What better way to double down on our pre-existing advantages?

That this “assortative mating,” in which the best-educated Americans increasingly marry one another, also ends up perpetuating existing inequalities seems blindingly obvious, which is no doubt why it’s considered embarrassing and reactionary to talk about it too overtly.

it would be like telling elite collegians that they should all move to similar cities and neighborhoods, surround themselves with their kinds of people and gradually price everybody else out of the places where social capital is built, influence exerted and great careers made. No need — that’s what we’re already doing!

Or it would be like telling admissions offices at elite schools that they should seek a form of student-body “diversity” that’s mostly cosmetic, designed to flatter multicultural sensibilities without threatening existing hierarchies all that much. They don’t need to be told — that’s how the system already works!

The result is an upper class that looks superficially like America, but mostly reproduces the previous generation’s elite.

But don’t come out and say it! Next people will start wondering why the names in the U.S. News rankings change so little from decade to decade. Or why the American population gets bigger and bigger, but our richest universities admit the same size classes every year, Or why in a country of 300 million people and countless universities, we can’t seem to elect a president or nominate a Supreme Court justice who doesn’t have a Harvard or Yale degree.

That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one’s kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.

Armed groups of men have always been a major force in world history, whether sanctioned by the state or not. The idea that the moral power of grieving parents could overcome the identity gifts -- the sense of security -- that arms give to the men who cherish them is not just ahistoric; it misunderstands the fundamental dynamics of how power works in human society, and the politics of masculine identity in America. Even in a democracy, the only thing that can overcome force is force.

There are other ways of creating change. Public shaming also has a power.

The gun conversation can be changed by the one type of force more powerful than an organized group of people with arms -- the power to make people feel ashamed of themselves and ostracized by the group they care most about.

America has undertaken more vigorous shaming campaigns for far less harmful social behaviors than keeping a sloppy hold on guns, such as getting pregnant as a teen, or smoking, or letting babies ride in cars outside of car-seats. And it would mean asking gun owners to rethink how they store, share, and sell their legally purchased weapons.

legal gun owners are the second-largest source of guns flowing to criminals, with 37 percent of them coming from family or friends of the individuals locked up in state prisons.

I don't believe that a small group of grieving mothers -- even with strong political backing -- has the power to transform a conversation that's at core about how millions of men define themselves. Only the men of the relevant communities can do that

But the system works. In the dorms, classrooms, summer internships and early jobs they learn how to behave the way successful people do in the highly educated hubs. There’s no economic reason to return home, and maybe it’s not even socially possible anymore.

The highly educated cluster around a few small nodes. Decade after decade, smart and educated people flock away from Merced, Calif., Yuma, Ariz., Flint, Mich., and Vineland, N.J. In those places, less than 15 percent of the residents have college degrees. They flock to Washington, Boston, San Jose, Raleigh-Durham and San Francisco. In those places, nearly 50 percent of the residents have college degrees.

the magnet places have positive ecologies that multiply innovation, creativity and wealth. The abandoned places have negative ecologies and fall further behind.

This sorting is self-reinforcing, and it seems to grow more unforgiving every year.

half of the jobs in university political science programs went to graduates of the top 11 schools. That is to say, if you have a Ph.D. from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and so on, your odds of getting a job are very good. If you earned your degree from one of the other 100 degree-granting universities, your odds are not.

The first problem with the effort is that it’s like shooting a water gun into a waterfall

The second problem is the focus on income redistribution

The final problem is that, in an effort to reduce the economic concentration of power, the administration is concentrating political power in Washington

the liberal agenda is not very good at addressing the inequality problem it seeks to solve. The meritocracy is overwhelming the liberal project.

If it just means that Americans have believed their country is special, then (as a British skeptic writes) there is “nothing exceptional about this exceptionalism. All great nations cherish national myths.”[1] If it means that the U.S.A. was exceptionally virtuous given its precocious dedication to civil and religious liberty, equality, justice, prosperity, social mobility, and peace and harmony with all nations, then ipso facto the U.S.A. is exceptionally vicious for falling so short of those ideals. If the term means rather that Americans are somehow exempted from the laws of entropy governing other nations—that (as Bismarck reportedly quipped) “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America”—then such exceptionalism can only be proven sub specie aeternitatis. Indeed, the very illusion that a nation is under divine dispensation may perversely inspire the pride that goeth before a fall (“thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”) or the many bad ends to which reckless adolescents are prone. Finally, if American Exceptionalism means that its power, values, and “indispensable” status render the United States exempt from the rules of behavior it makes and enforces on other nations, then enemies, neutrals, and allies alike are sure to push back.

he concluded that “these distortions should not blind us to the valid elements in the theory of exceptionalism.... America represents, as I have stressed above, the naked embodiment of the most dynamic elements of modern Western history

it was probably just a matter of time before somebody turned the Stalinist term of derision into a patriotic badge of honor and ait stamped it over all of American history. As it happened, that somebody was Max Lerner, a former editor of The Nation turned Cold War liberal and author of the one-thousand page America as a Civilization (1957).

Exceptionalism dovetailed perfectly with a new orthodoxy among political scientists that extolled what Harvard professor Louis Hartz called America’s Liberal Tradition.

the idea of an America set apart by Providence and endowed with a special mission to reform (not to say redeem) the whole human race dovetailed perfectly with the political rhetoric needed to rally Americans to lead the Free World in what amounted to a “holy war” against “godless Communism.”

Those were the years when the “Judaeo-Christian tradition” became a civilizational motto

how come computerized word-searches show that references to American Exceptionalism exploded—literally from hundreds to tens of thousands—only after the Cold War was over?

Those were the years when presidential rhetoric became steeped in what sociologist Robert Bellah called “God-Talk,”

the Cold War was over, globalization and multiculturalism were the new trends, and American identity got contested as never before. What made exceptionalist rhetoric ubiquitous was the fact it was now contested

the myth of American Exceptionalism, ironically inspired by Roman Catholics and Marxists, entered our lexicon as historical gloss for the campaign to persuade a skeptical, war-weary people that global commitments such as the UN, Truman Doctrine, and NATO were not really a break with tradition, but a fulfillment of the nation’s hoariest, holiest calling.

As early as 1630, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop implored his people ‘to Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us.’”[12] I took for granted that my teachers and textbooks were right when they traced our national identity back to the Puritans beginning with Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity. Composed on board the ship Arbella bound for the New World, it seemed the elegant spiritual companion to the Pilgrims’ Mayflower Compact.

he borrowed a New Testament image when he imagined New England as a city on a hill called to inspire the whole human race by its example.

the dogged literary excavations of historian Richard Gamble have now exposed it as myth. It turns out that Winthrop’s manuscript, far from serving as keynote address of the American pageant, was either unknown or forgotten until it turned up in the family archives in 1809. Donated to the New York Historical Society, it slept for another three decades before publication in a Massachusetts collection of colonial documents in 1838

The famous “City on a Hill” passage appears in the Sermon on the Mount as one in a list of metaphors Jesus uses to describe his disciples. He speaks of them as the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a city on a hill, and a lamp not hidden under a bushel. The passage served as text for many a sermon preached by colonial divines, not least Jonathan Edwards. But those pastors were quoting the Bible to make theological points to Christian audiences; none was quoting Winthrop to make political points to American audiences. What has been lost “in the fierce crossfire of the battle to define the American identity,” Gamble writes, is “the story not of how the metaphor helped make America what it is today but the story of how America helped make the metaphor what it never was.”

not even the Puritans were “impelled by a unique or exceptional American impulse. On the contrary, they were products of European education, European culture, European piety, and they were engaged in a great European quarrel.

Americans have always been tempted to think that because they live in God’s Country they must be God’s Elect. Such faith has its uses, for instance to motivate a free and disparate people to rally and sacrifice in times of crisis. But it verges on idolatry from the standpoint of Biblical religion and—if exploited for partisan purposes—verges on heresy from the standpoint of civil religion.

One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end

If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.

the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life

our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good

In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country

When young people arrive at college they are encouraged to keep this focus on themselves by student groups, faculty members and also administrators whose full-time job is to deal with — and heighten the significance of — “diversity issues.”

How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose the designated gender pronouns to be used when addressing them?

Fascination with the identity drama has even affected foreign reporting, which is in distressingly short supply. However interesting it may be to read, say, about the fate of transgender people in Egypt, it contributes nothing to educating Americans about the powerful political and religious currents that will determine Egypt’s future, and indirectly, our own.

it is at the level of electoral politics that identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in healthy periods is not about “difference,” it is about commonality. And it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny

Ronald Reagan did that very skillfully, whatever one may think of his vision. So did Bill Clinton

A convenient liberal interpretation of the recent presidential election would have it that Mr. Trump won in large part because he managed to transform economic disadvantage into racial rage — the “whitelash” thesis

This is convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals to ignore what those voters said were their overriding concerns

It also encourages the fantasy that the Republican right is doomed to demographic extinction in the long run — which means liberals have only to wait for the country to fall into their laps. The surprisingly high percentage of the Latino vote that went to Mr. Trump should remind us that the longer ethnic groups are here in this country, the more politically diverse they become.

Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored.

they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by “political correctness.”

the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.

We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them

As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)

Teachers committed to such a liberalism would refocus attention on their main political responsibility in a democracy: to form committed citizens aware of their system of government and the major forces and events in our history.

A post-identity liberalism would also emphasize that democracy is not only about rights; it also confers duties on its citizens, such as the duties to keep informed and vote

A post-identity liberal press would begin educating itself about parts of the country that have been ignored, and about what matters there, especially religion

it would take seriously its responsibility to educate Americans about the major forces shaping world politics, especially their historical dimension.

At the same time, Mr. Obama declined to really spend time and capital explaining his initiatives in an effective way. He believed that positive changes on the ground, especially from economic policies and the Affordable Care Act, would succeed, vindicating his judgment and marginalizing his opponents.

When President Obama began focusing on those “left behind” by the recovery, he called for building “ladders of opportunity.” That communicated that the president believed the country’s main challenges were unrealized opportunity for a newly ascendant, multicultural America, rather than the continuing economic struggle experienced by a majority of Americans.

Mr. Obama also offered only tepid support to the most important political actor in progressive and Democratic politics: the labor movement.

In fact, he spent the last couple of years of his presidency pursuing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, a free trade law vociferously opposed by the labor movement. Under President Obama, union membership has declined to 11.1 percent from 12.3 percent.

Models, it appears, do not substitute for the hard work of organizing and engaging voters in nonpresidential years; models that apparently drove nearly every decision made by the Clinton campaign are no substitute for listening to voters.

On the eve of the 2016 election, the president used the refrain: “We’ve seen America turn recession into recovery” and 15.5 million new jobs. Pointedly, he said, “Incomes are rising. Poverty is falling.”

The public’s reaction was stark from the beginning. People did not believe his view on the economy, and his approval ratings fell in Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin in 2010 and in Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2014 — the states that led the working-class move away from the Democrats.

Just as important, however, was the discontent brewing with the Democrats’ own base. Combined, the approximately 40 percent of minority, unmarried female and millennial voters disapproved of how President Obama was handling his job in 2010 and 2014, and many stayed home during the off-year elections. Mitt Romney carried white millennials by 7 percentage points in 2012.

The president will leave office with a rising approval rating near the same league of Ronald Reagan, an economy nearing full employment and real wages tipping up. Yet a majority of voters in the last election said the economy was the top issue in their vote.

We think voters were sending a clear message: They want more than a recovery. They want an economy and government that works for them, and that task is unfinished.

Why is his opposition to immigrants and Mexicans in particular so resonant when immigration liberalization ostensibly has majority support in most polls?

Support for immigration “may be greatly overestimated.”

polls conducted by large survey organizations never ask about immigration in geographic contex

This kind of abstract framing tends to push respondents toward giving more “politically correct” answers to standard poll questions about immigration.

The quest by American liberals and progressives for support, or at least tolerance, of diversity, inclusiveness and multiculturalism is likely to prevail — particularly if the compulsory dimension of compliance is curtailed.

one way to better understand the intensity of Trump’s appeal is by looking at something called “psychological reactance.” Haidt describes reactance asthe feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination.

He has won a unique admixture of support, based in part on what might be called an anti-rational or irrational loyalty but also in part on his recognition of legitimate grievances among his adherents that many other politicians belittle or deny.

In both the workplace and academia, Haidt argues,the accusatory and vindictive approach of many social justice activists and diversity trainers may actually have increased the desire and willingness of some white men to say and do un-PC things.

Trump comes along and punches political correctness in the face. Anyone feeling some degree of anti-PC reactance is going to feel a thrill in their heart, and will want to stand up and applaud. And because feelings drive reasoning, these feelings of gratitude will make it hard for anyone to present arguments to them about the downsides of a Trump presidency.

Trump responded on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on May 2. What Clinton said “was a very derogatory statement to men,” Trump declared. “It was almost as though she’s going to tell us what to do, tell men what to do.” He continued, “It was a real put-down.”

many Trump followers respond to Clinton in a fashion similar to that of8th grade boys reacting to their homeroom teacher. But I think this has more to do with her gender than with any particular behaviors on her part — in other words, there are some who would respond to any woman running for president as an 8th grader in homeroom who resents the teacher.

since reactance is driven by perceptions rather than by facts, this works well in Trump’s favor, considering his often cavalier relationship with the truth.

research that shows that some people will reject a policy or action that is to their advantage when they feel pushed or forced into making the “correct” decision.

In other words, reactance can foster a totalizing loyalty that does not respond to reasoned fault finding. This might help explain Trump’s seeming immunity to criticism from his adversaries. His followers feel that they have experienced a “diminution of freedom” and believe that Trump can “restore their autonomy.”

I would say that decades of political correctness, with its focus on “straight white men” as the villains and oppressors — now extended to “straight white cis-gendered men” — has caused some degree of reactance in many and perhaps most white men.

Clinton remains the favorite, but she faces five months of treading water in a shark tank. She has yet to discover a compelling rebuttal to Trump on political correctness, and it will be difficult for her to placate opponents of immigration while holding her advantage with her bas

But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and act as members of a tribe.

They have their own distinctive worldview (basically liberal Christianity without Christ), their own common educational experience, their own shared values and assumptions (social psychologists call these WEIRD — for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic)

and of course their own outgroups (evangelicals, Little Englanders) to fear, pity and despise.

it’s a problem that our tribe of self-styled cosmopolitans doesn’t see itself clearly as a tribe: because that means our leaders can’t see themselves the way the Brexiteers and Trumpistas and Marine Le Pen voters see them.

They can’t see that what feels diverse on the inside can still seem like an aristocracy to the excluded, who look at cities like London and see, as Peter Mandler wrote for Dissent after the Brexit vote, “a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations.”

They can’t see that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders Londoners who love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or American liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of majority-minority schools.

They can’t see that their vision of history’s arc bending inexorably away from tribe and creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like something familiar from eras past: A powerful caste’s self-serving explanation for why it alone deserves to rule the world.

after the Sept. 11 attacks, and later after the Madrid and London bombings, we told ourselves that Islam and Islamism had nothing to do with each other. But sadly, they do. The peaceful religion can sometimes serve as a slope into a militant anti-Western ideology, especially when this ideology offers a strong sense of belonging amid the mental discomfort of our postmodern societies.

Belgium’s predicament mirrors Europe’s. Official Europe has worked hard to move past nationalism, so that there is no German or French Dream. But there’s no European Dream, either, not yet. So new migrants have no spirit to tap into, as they do in the United States. Instead, some Muslims find it more attractive to give their loyalty to Allah, their fellow believers or the Islamic State.

A result of this mutual apathy is too many Islamists, and too few police and intelligence officers — particularly in Belgium, but not just there. We may have a common European currency, but we still do not have a common European terrorism database. Islamists in Western Europe seem better coordinated than the European authorities hunting them. 19 Comments

There are serious grounds for the alienation between the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and her European partners. There are many practical things she can do in response, but also some big-picture steps. She should speak honestly about Europe’s illusions, past and present. She should lead Europe past its outmoded data-protection concerns and push for coordination among security services. And she should make integration and opportunity a common value for everyone in Europe — a European dream that is more appealing to immigrants than any afterlife kingdom could possibly be.