Thomas D. Klingenstein writes,
Multiculturalism conceives of society as a collection of cultural identity groups, each with its own worldview, all oppressed by white males, collectively existing within permeable national boundaries. Multiculturalism replaces American citizens with so-called “global citizens.” It carves “tribes” out of a society whose most extraordinary success has been their assimilation into one people. It makes education a political exercise in the liberation of an increasing number of “others,” and makes American history a collection of stories of white oppression, thereby dismantling our unifying, self-affirming narrative—without which no nation can long survive.
. . .Trump is the only national political figure who does not care what multiculturalism thinks is wrong. He, and he alone, categorically and brazenly rejects the morality of multiculturalism. He is virtually the only one on our national political stage defending America’s understanding of right and wrong, and thus nearly alone in truly defending America. This why he is so valuable—so much depends on him.
In an interesting rhetorical move, he equates the fight against multiculturalism with the fight against slavery.
multiculturalism, as with abolition, has the potential to energize the conservative movement.
His essay is a counterpoint to an essay from two years ago by Yuval Levin. Levin contrasts conservatism with alienation.
Conservatives incline to be heavily invested in society and its institutions, even when deeply concerned about their condition and their fate. When these institutions are threatened from the left, conservatives tend to be defensive of them. Even when they are dominated by the left, as so many of our institutions are, conservatives by instinct and reflection tend to argue for reclamation and recovery—for building spaces within these institutions more than for rejection and contempt of them. If our traditional ways of doing things speak to yearnings that arise anew in every generation, then there is always reason to hope for a resurgence of orthodoxy and to work for it.
Alienation denies or rejects the possibility of such resurgence and therefore the importance of working to keep that possibility open. The work of keeping it open is the work that conservatives can often be found doing, particularly outside politics, as in the service of religious missions or of liberal education, among other causes.
Think of academia, the chief bastion of multiculturalism. A conservative would seek to reform it, by pursuing efforts such as Jonathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy. The more alienated opponent of academia would place little hope in such attempts.
In that regard, I am probably closer to the alienated frame of mind. I doubt that Haidt has enough support among professors born after 1975.
“Multiculturalism conceives of society as a collection of cultural identity groups, each with its own worldview, all oppressed by white males, collectively existing within permeable national boundaries.”
The multi-culturalists vote badly and always revert to the white guy who balances budgets. This Dem election is seeing that, the rise of old white men. In California it is a tradition, we all agree, having a multi-cultural nut in the governorship would be a disaster.
Multi-culturalism is a retrograde move, tends to happen when government becomes jammed up, becomes inefficient. The Great White Father has to steer the ship.
Richard III, where King Richard is expressing his feelings of discontent regarding living in the world that hates him. He begins his soliloquy by stating, “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York…”
That is a Wiki quote, but it sums the problem up. Richard gets the burden of making the accounts add up. This is the heart of the multi-culturalists, they cannot integrate sustainable legislature. They cannot make the tough decisions.
It’s wealthy white people who tend to be the most “woke.” They each see themselves as the “white savior,” as Atticus Finch. But as someone once said, if you’re going to be St. George, you first need a dragon. To be Atticus Finch, you need a racist society that routinely lynches blacks. So, America must become that society to fit in with their heroic self-narrative.
Atticus Finch also needs a Tom Robinson – noble, oppressed, and helpless in the face of an evil society. So, in the woke progressive’s self-narrative, minorities must be without agency, requiring white saviors to act on their behalf. In the end, white progressives exploit minorities for their own ego trips.
“and makes American history a collection of stories of white oppression, thereby dismantling our unifying, self-affirming narrative—without which no nation can long survive.”
This guy don’t know much history, does he?
Slavery; jim crow; wallace showing the gop how to win elections; reagan’s “young bucks buying t-bone steaks with food stamps”; trumps “build that wall”.
Almost like his eyes are covered.
Yes, there’s all of that in American history, but there are a few bright spots as well. As Benjamin Franklin pointed out, half the truth is often a great lie.
Ah, the Claremont Institute strategy to convince imbeciles that they, and they alone, know what the founding fathers really wanted for the US a couple of centuries down the road.
Only a group like them could compare trump with lincoln.
The only question I have about this author, and that group, is are they really that stupid, or really that corrupt.
I read him as saying that history isn’t not simply good people vs. bad people; only the Avengers live in a world like that. Actually-existing America includes both slavery and its legacy, but also the Marshall plan; the Tuskegee experiment but also the inventions of the light bulb, airplane, penicillin, and the Internet. American history is neither wholly virtuous nor wholly villainous; every element of human character is found within it. Our task is to preserve and improve the good parts while fixing the bad parts.
A general life tip: wantonly accusing others of stupidity does not serve as evidence of your intellectual superiority, and most people won’t take it as such.
Not the purpose.
They are what they are. Either stupid, or corrupt.
Slavery is a system that existed in most places and times throughout history. Only the industrial revolution really ended it, primarily by reducing the relative value of low skill unfree labor below the costs of maintaining slavery.
As soon as the very bleeding edge of the industrial revolution started to make the abolition of slavery possible, white people ended slavery throughout the world, usually at their own expense in both treasure and blood.
Though in fairness I’m not giving enough credit to those white people that had largely eradicated at least chattel slavery from much Europe (especially the north) centuries earlier, even long before the industrial revolution. It’s telling that when it started back up it was from a country on the periphery of Europe (the Iberians) that had only recently liberated itself from Muslims. And even then it started with a bunch of cowboy adventures halfway around the world who bought already enslaved people from another part of the world. Couldn’t pull that off in the heart of the Metropol.
White people paid whatever debt they had for slavery (and I would largely argue that most outside the planter class had little) at Shiloh and Gettysburg. Or did you miss the part were we died to free them, they didn’t free themselves.
Jim Crow is a necessary way of keeping order. Have you seen what black run places are like? I’ve just had to watch another black mayor of black run Baltimore get their home raided by the FBI. I never used to understand segregation, but once you live in a majority black area (as many parts of the south were) you completely understand it. The second Jim Crow was overturned blacks decided to literally burn down out inner cities and go on a decades long killing spree. I’ll listen to an argument as to why getting rid of Jim Crow might be a good idea, but I’m sure as hell not going to be told that ignorance or hate were the sole reasons for it. There is a laundry list of good reasons for it born from actual empirical experience. After its repeal segregation was largely how people decided sort themselves voluntarily.
Yes, blacks receive a bunch of welfare and then blow it on bullshit. I only have to walk down to Lexingont market to watch black dudes in Nikes drinking 40s in the middle of the street during the day. Do you question this? This is a very easily provable empirical question. Why do you think this description resonated with so many people? Blind hate? Maybe it accurately described what they could see with their own two eyes.
Yes, if we had never had any immigration from south of the border America would be a better country.
Dude, get real on this. Blacks problems are due to their genetics, not us. If we weren’t around it would be like it is in Africa (a lot worse). In those parts of the country where they manage to gain a majority and control (Detroit) it’s almost like Africa.
We owe them NOTHING. They owe us EVERYTHING. The planters are dead and I’m not going to pay for their sins. I’m not going to be intimidated by your bullshit anymore. Racial guilt is a shakedown pursued for the most unjust reasons, and it’s time to just say no.
“Blacks problems are due to their genetics, not us.”
Read Theodore Dalrymple’s book, “Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass.” Dalrymple is a English physician who worked for years among the poor in Great Britain. These (white, Anglo-Saxon) people live very dysfunctional lives thanks to a worldview crafted by years as wards of the British welfare system. Their problems exactly mirror those of Americans (both black and white) who were brought up in America’s welfare system.
Moreover, many of the most brilliant and productive people who ever lived were products of “black genetics,” including: Thomas Sowell, America’s greatest living economist, historian, and philosopher; Frederick Douglass, abolitionist and one of America’s greatest orators; Booker T. Washington, educator, orator, author, and presidential advisor; George Washington Carver, scientist and inventor; Walter E. Williams, economist, educator, and author; Clarence Thomas, lawyer, judge, and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court; and Charles Richard Drew, physician, surgeon, and medical researcher.
If we fixed everything wrong with the welfare system, we would still have a lot of black dysfunction, and it would be statistically larger than white dysfunction relative to population size.
I’m not against such fixes, but they won’t change the disparity, and they are beside the point because we can’t implement such fixes so long as blame whitey is the dominant narrative.
Bell curves have right tails even when the average is pretty low. All of those names don’t change the problems people face with blacks.
The bottom line is that blacks are a mess, and who is to blame. What we hear nonstop, constantly, daily, is that whites are to blame. That our whole society is tainted and needs to be torn down because of it. And because we are to blame, we have to pay up.
There are quite a few government policies that help create and sustain poverty among people of all races, including:
• Minimum wage laws
• Job licensing regulations
• Onerous regulations for starting new businesses
• Regressive sin taxes
• Marriage penalties in tax law
• Marriage penalties in welfare programs
• Programs that encourage poor people to buy houses they can’t afford
• Rent controls
• Zoning restrictions
• Urban renewal projects that destroy functioning neighborhoods
• Restrictions on school choice
• Special privilege grants to companies, groups, and individuals
Let’s end these policies and see what happens before we throw up our hands and chalk everything up to genetics.
Discussions of IQ quickly get into nature vs nurture debates. We know, for instance, that nutrition – both the mother’s during pregnancy and the child’s – has a huge impact on IQ. Eldest children tend to have higher IQs than do their younger siblings, while only children tend to have higher IQs than do eldest children. Presumably, this has something to do with the amount of attention children receive from their parents. Culture also seems have an impact. During WWI soldiers IQs were tested, and it was noticed that northern blacks had, on average, higher IQs than both southern whites and blacks.
• Minimum wage laws
If you aren’t productive enough to earn the minimum wage, you aren’t productive enough to be a net resource for a first world country.
• Job licensing regulations
I think marginal revolution once published a study on this and it really wasn’t a huge impact on wages or employment.
• Onerous regulations for starting new businesses
In countries that score sky high on business freedom indexes the low IQ groups still don’t succeed.
• Regressive sin taxes
Yes, alcohol taxes are really holding blacks back.
• Marriage penalties in tax law
I pay the marriage penalty and it really isn’t that big a penalty. Certainly not enough to make people walk out on the relationship.
• Marriage penalties in welfare programs
It’s not good, but it’s not like people who don’t get married for legal reasons are acting like they are married anyway.
• Programs that encourage poor people to buy houses they can’t afford
Nobody forces them too.
• Rent controls
Blacks generally seem to be the recipients of housing assistance
• Zoning restrictions
Are fundamental to property rights. Until you promise middle class people that an end to zoning won’t mean the destruction of their neighborhoods and property values, you have no right to complain about zoning.
• Urban renewal projects that destroy functioning neighborhoods
Urban renewal projects mostly seem to target dysfunctional neighborhoods
• Restrictions on school choice
Blacks vote for the party that wants to restrict school choice.
• Special privilege grants to companies, groups, and individuals
This is specifically why blacks underperform?
The biggest problem with your list of course is that blacks vote for the party that imposes most of these, so we can hardly say blacks are the victims of these policies.
‘If you aren’t productive enough to earn the minimum wage, you aren’t productive enough to be a net resource for a first world country.”
Being unproductive does not have to be permanent. Two-thirds of people in minimum wage, entry level jobs get a raise within the first year. Once they’ve established a track record for being reliable, being able to learn, willing to work, and working well with others, they become more valuable to the business.
On the other hand, we can prevent them from getting that all-important first job by pricing them out of the market. Then when – locked out of the legal market – they begin working in illegal markets or go on welfare, people on the left can point to them as proof of an unfair society and people in the alt-right as products of “black genetics.”
“Blacks generally seem to be the recipients of housing assistance”
Three quarters of the blacks in this country are middle class or above. They are not “generally” the recipients of housing assistance.
” Zoning restrictions … Are fundamental to property rights.”
Hardly. Zoning restrictions prevent people from using their own property as they choose.
Richard,
You’re specifically talking about the minimum wage being what causes black dysfunction. That is bunk. If the minimum wage were eliminated tomorrow, it wouldn’t change the basic position of blacks one iota. People who can’t get a job at McDs because of the minimum wage are not on the path to being net tax contributors.
If we look at recipients of housing assistance, blacks would receive assistance in excess of their % of the population.
Zoning restrictions allow people to enter into a covenant with other property owners to preserve the nature and value of their property. When you decide to build low income housing next to someone it causes crime to increase, schools to go downhill, and property values to tank. This is a violation of the property rights of your neighbors, and so we have zoning regulations to stop people from destroying the property values of their neighbors to try and make a quick buck at their expense.
With respect to the effects that the minimum wage had to black unemployment, economist, Thomas Sowell, wrote in his book, “Basic Economics”:
The unemployment rates of young black males during the late 1940s – the years prior to the repeated escalations of the minimum wage that began in 1950 – contrast sharply with their unemployment rates in later years. As of 1948, for example, the unemployment rates for blacks aged 16-17 years was 9.4 percent, while that of whites the same ages was 10.2 percent. For blacks 18-19 years of age, the unemployment rate that year was 10.5 percent, while that of whites the same ages was 9.4 percent. In short, teenage unemployment rates were a fraction of what they were to become in later years, and black and white teenage unemployment rates were very similar….
The black teenage unemployment rate during the recession of 1949 was lower than it was to be at any time during even the boom years of the 1960s and later decades. Black 16 and 17 year-olds had an unemployment rate of 15.8 percent in the 1949 recession year, but that was less than half of what it would be in every year from 1971 through 1997, and less than one-third of what it would be in 2009. Repeated increases in the minimum wage marked these later years of much higher unemployment rates among black teenagers.
Economist, Michael Mandel, wrote:
“[I use] the metaphor of ‘throwing pebbles in a stream’ to describe the effect of regulation on innovation. No single regulation or regulatory activity is going to deter innovation by itself, just like no single pebble is going to affect a stream. But if you throw in enough small pebbles, you can dam up the stream. Similarly, add enough rules, regulations, and requirements, and suddenly innovation begins to look a lot less attractive.”
Regulations have the same cumulative effect on things other than innovation; things like job and wealth creation. So, any one of the items I listed (minimum wages, rent control, zoning, etc.) may not be *the* reason for high unemployment, but cumulatively, they add up.
As humans, we tend to favor single-cause explanations for complex problems. Often, however, complex problems have many causes.
Richard,
The minimum wage is significantly below
Moreover, it doesn’t address the main problems.
1) You can earn twice the minimum wage and still not be a net tax contributor.
2) Blacks vote for minimum wage increases, so you can hardly blame whites for foisting it on blacks.
3) The minimum wage has decreased in real terms for decades since, and it hasn’t changed the situation with blacks all that much.
We all know why blacks deteriorated since the 1950s.
1) Their families, like most families below the middle class, got torn to shreds by social liberalism starting in the 60s.
2) Low skill factory work disappeared, much of it for factors beyond regulation and merely changes in economics.
3) Returns to IQ went up and anyone below a certain threshold basically became an excess mouth.
4) Blacks got access to welfare, which they overwhelmingly voted for, as well as race based sinecures, that they again overwhelmingly voted for.
But we are getting in the weeds here. Why haven’t all these terrible things prevented high IQ groups from succeeding where blacks failed? Why when blacks find themselves in situations where these aren’t big factors do they still fail?
And why are we blaming whites for laws that most of them voted against, while not blaming blacks for laws they did vote for?
Why do you care about these people? They don’t care about you. They don’t care about their ideas or values. Wherever and whenever they gain power they act unjustly and give no mind to your welfare or ideals. Why are you twisting yourself into knots over them? Why do you care more about them than your own people and those that can actually add value to your life, treat you well, and share a far greater % of your ideals?
I don’t start from the proposition that I owe anything to blacks and that it’s my duty to solve their fuckups for them.
Have African-Americans better today than 25 -30 years? Hell yea.
1) Look up crime rates and not see the drop since 1990. (FYI the rates started dropping 1981 although the totals were slightly rising in the 1980s) But the crime rates after 1990 dramatically dropped and the biggest in the African-Americans. The weird reality is:
1) NOBODY predicted back then and really by 1994/1995 did people believed to be true.
2) I have not seen a good defining reason why this happened but it did.
2) We are seeing the decline of single motherhood and other measures that accelerated in 2008. (I suspect The Great Recession had the main impact.)
3) In our SoCal neck of the woods genetrification is true but really the big wave of new residents to Inglewood or Compton was Hispanic-Americans.
4) The weird part of 2019 economy is white communities getting hit harder by economics, emigration and drug trade. So how is the Bell Curve working here?
5) In terms of working at McDonalds for minimum or low wages is that a thriving capitalist economy needs cheap labor. And that is the problem with modern economies is how do both have cheap labor without the issues of poor personal choices.
“Have African-Americans better today than 25 -30 years? Hell yea.”
Some have, at our expense.
1) Crime declined after 1990 because the crack epidemic burned out. Crack, PCP, etc cause people to go crazy and commit violent crimes. This has a funny way of getting them killed/imprisoned.
There were other factors in the decline in crime, but that was a huge part of the 1990 spike that happened in the inner cities. You just don’t hear much about crack or PCP anymore. Drugs today mostly mellow people or cause them to commit suicide alone.
2) We are seeing a decline in relationships and fertility in general. Sterility is not an improvement.
3) Hispanics pushed blacks out ala the Steve Sailer. An unspoken part of the resurgence of some 1st tier cities was driving out the blacks by using Hispanics.
4) Black median income is below white median income by a lot. Bell curve seems to be working exactly as the math says.
5) No, they don’t need cheap labor. No cheap labor in Asia and it works fine.
Remember that people working at McDonalds are a burden to the state, who will spend more on them then they ever make for the economy.
The world isn’t static. Once a McDonald’s employee doesn’t mean always a McDonald’s employee. In fact, McDonald’s hires about one million employees in the United States every year, and 15% of American workers have worked at McDonald’s at some time.
Decreases in the crime rate were a result of get-tough policies enacted when the murder rate shot up in the 1960s. The policies were driven by public demand – including demand from black communities, which were disproportionately impacted by the crime wave. See, for example, Peter Enns’s book, “Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World.”
“Have African-Americans [done] better today than 25-30 years [ago]? Hell yea[h]. Some have, at our expense.”
From Thomas Sowell’s book, “Economic Facts and Fallacies”:
“The percentage of black families with incomes below the poverty line fell most sharply between 1940 and 1960, going from 87 percent to 47 percent over that span, before either the Civil Rights act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and well before the 1970s, when ‘affirmative action’ evolved into numerical ‘goals’ or ‘quotas.'”
So, poverty among black families dropped 40% when discrimination was still required by law in many parts of the nation. It wasn’t until government started “helping” blacks that the rate of decline slowed substantially. According to Sowell,
“The poverty rate declined from 47% to 30 percent during the decade of the 1960s and then only from 30 percent to 29 percent between 1970 and 1980.” Today, the poverty rate among blacks is at about 21%.
In other words, government help might have been at “our expense,” but blacks paid far more for that “help” in terms of dependency and ruined lives. But the welfare state doesn’t have this effect on blacks alone. Again, read Theodore Dalrymple’s, “Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass,” to read in painful detail how the British dole had the same impact on white, Anglo-Saxons.
Richard,
What is the black poverty rate relative to the white poverty rate? Much higher.
What is the size of the black underclass as a % of the black population relative to the white underclass as a % of the white population? Exactly what was laid out in The Bell Curve.
Society got a lot richer in the last century and the poverty rate went down in general. We’ve reached the limits of what this will do though.
I’m as much a fan of tough on crime as anyone, but it seems obvious to me that the 1990s spike was related to crack/pcp. There was a more general crime wave that started in the 1960s with liberal soft on crime policies, but the actual 1990s local peak has a lot to do with specific drug epidemics.
The bottom line is that in the “bad old days” of Make America Great Again 1960 crime was a lot lower than 2019. Which is why I don’t much care about how 1990 was worse than 2019.
The same blacks that championed the 1990s crime bill now unperson the people that passed it and are rioting in the streets to dismantle tough on crime, with the obvious effect of causing crime to go up.
People who work at McDonald’s, and I’m not talking your part time gig in high school, aren’t going anywhere in life. What are they going to get promoted to. Making $8/hour? Is that going to pay for all the services they receive over their lifetime? Not even close.
The bottom line is that blacks will always be doing worse then whites, and they will always blame whites, and they will always take what they can when they can from whites if they can get away with it. It’s a proven pattern of behavior, and its in line with their incentives. When your low IQ, the scraps of your betters table are worth more then anything you could ever produce on your own.
There is a lot true that the Af-Am gang wars and crack epidemic burned itself out in the early 1990s.
1) Still the fall is incredible and the epidemic burned out decades ago and yet crime still drops.
2) Actually Steve Sailer and I agree that some of the realities is Compton and Inglewood had Latino genetrification. So what is wrong with that? Sounds like multiculturalism worked here! (And it is weird that older AF-Am have weekend gatherings to react the gang wars. )
3) Tell me Japan economy is not stuck in weird labor supply issue. For all I remember in 1990 Japan Inc. was going to take over the world and I had a visiting Indian econ professor state they will have a labor supply issue and the economy will stuck soon. He said this 1993 and nobody in upperclass Econ students believed him.
4) Ask a McDonald owner in California what their biggest problem is today…They have trouble hiring workers.
5) The economy needs high flyers but not everybody can be Michael Jordan either.
When Latinos push blacks out, they don’t disappear. They go somewhere and become someone else problem. When blacks got pushed out of parts of Baltimore by gentrification they moved to Baltimore County and ruined many suburban neighborhoods there.
Importing negative assets isn’t going to fix the low Japanese fertility rate. Brown people don’t make a society money, they cost a society money.
He could raise wages if he needs workers. If he can’t operate profitably at a wage rate that doesn’t require government assistance, maybe this isn’t an industry we need to be importing more workers to support.
A question.
How do you get the smell off your clothes from carrying a torch all night long?
Bleach?
Try some on your soul.
You seem to have missed the contradiction in saying that there are good reasons for segregation and saying that black run places are are awful as Africa. If it’s that bad in majority black places, then wouldn’t it be better to be MORE integrated, not less? I.e. if black people are dispersed throughout white society instead of being concentrated into black enclaves, then they won’t control their local governments and won’t be able to run them into the ground.
It’s better for the blacks to be able to parasitically leach of white success, but it’s not better for the whites to be leeched. That’s a zero sum game. White people don’t exist to be black peoples slaves and owe them nothing.
Moreover, you are using immigration to try and create a majority brown country in which all places are poorly run. There will be nowhere left to run.
Ah, the myth of the southern strategy lives on. Welfare reform is slavery 2.0. I guess when you don’t have a case, you may as well resort to hysterical hyperbole.
Myth?
Wallace showed the way, and it runs through the GOP for half a century. Amazing anyone missed it.
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Lee Atwater
The poverty rate in the United States in general – and among blacks in particular – was dropping steadily right up until the Great Society programs started kicking in. After that, the poverty rate has stagnated at around 15%, give or take a few percentage points.
Why do all the liberals in my state live in a different school district then the blacks, do everything they can to avoid sharing a school district with blacks (zoning, etc), and if they fail to do so sent their kids to private school?
Are they pursuing a Southern Strategy?
Maybe blacks are just miserable to be around and everyone regardless of political persuasion knows it deep down and acts on it when their own neck is on the line.
I think part of the reason that white people find blacks “miserable to be around” is not because of anything objectively wrong with black people, but because white people and black people feel uncomfortable around each other, because of the unhealed wounds of slavery and segregation. Whites and blacks don’t trust each other and it’s stressful living among people you don’t trust.
There is something objectively wrong with black people, it can be measured with statistics.
I don’t see white people stressed about having black orthodontists around. In fact they seem to go out of their way to attract and be proud of such diversity. It’s low class black thugs they are afraid of. For what its worth they are also afraid of white trash, but that isn’t as big a problem.
@Richard Fulmer –
Yes, there are bright spots. The country does have a path. It was usually rough business for those who took it, but it forms some lessons for moving forward.
So when are you, or anyone else going to stop telling us how full of it the left is, and start spending a little more time on how we are going to fortify “our unifying, self-affirming narrative”?
I threw up a little in my mouth reading the argument that Trump is defending America’s understanding of right and wrong. It just isn’t enough to be against multiculturalism. You have to be for something that the country can rally around.
The argument is there to be won, but conservatives need to show some good faith to Democratic constituencies that they actually want provide a better path for them too. There has to be more to the message than just “shut up and get with the program”.
I’m a small “L” libertarian who shares your opinion of Trump. I doubt he’s motivated by anything other than his ego and his gonads. The idea that he’s defending “truth, justice, and the American way” strikes me as ludicrous.
The only things libertarians can offer Americans are freedom with responsibility and mutual respect and cooperation. What we don’t propose is to bribe you with your own, or other people’s, money.
Well then, start with that.
Figure out a way to move some government entity somewhere in the US an inch or two of towards freedom with responsibility and mutual respect and cooperation. I hear a lot of complaining, but I don’t hear a lot from Libertarians about how to make anything actually work better
Libertarians need to go get some work done, then come back and maybe someone will listen to them.
One place to start is to work to roll back the regulatory state. I think that there are two bases on which classical liberals can bring lawsuits aimed at reigning in regulatory agencies:
(1) The takings clause: By dictating what we can do with our property, regulations reduce the value of that property – usually with no compensation.
(2) Separation of duties: Regulatory agencies typically fill the legislative, executive, and judicial roles. This is contrary to the Constitution and the rule of law.
Lawsuits that publicize egregious examples of these usurpations of power may not initially win in court, but they will eventually build public support for change (recall, for example, the backlash against the Kelo decision).
Our personal political journeys need not end in alienation. Radicalism is the path forward. A radical response to corrupt and irredeemably dysfunctional institutions, like the US bureuacracy, the US congress, the US presidency, the US courts, the US criminal justice system, the US legal system generally, the US educational indoctrination system, the US mass opinion shaping campaigns by tech giants and their “journalist” flunkies, and all the other buffoonery that charactarizes the US, is complete and total constitutional reform via an Article V constitutional reform convention.
Of course many will call this tilting at windmills, but, hey, tilting at windmills meant Don Quixote got out of his library.
It also would do the founders of the US honor. Remember, the original US constitution, the Articles of Confederation, were ratified in 1781 and then replaced by the current constitution on March 4, 1789. The founders, who were willing to go back no doubt would have extreme contempt for the pusillanimous refusal of the US to undertake serious constitutional reform all these years later.
Much of why the US is so awful today is a direct result of the Connecticut compromise made at the Philadelphia convention. The original Virginia Plan consisted of 15 resolutions put before the convention by Edmund Randolph would have provided for proportional representation by populaton of states in the House, election of senators by the representatives, and that the National Executive would be chosen by the legislature. Basically, a parliamentary system, and we now have the experience of dozens and dozens of parliamentary systems to guide us in drafting an improved model, preferrably a party-list proportional representation system administered by the federal government using paper ballots rather than the corrupt, rampant with fraud, electoral system the US is currently cursed with.
Equally important if not more were resolutions 8 & 9 which would have established an authentic rule of law instead of the politicized beyond all belief court systems and legal guild rapine that is the current US legal system:
8. Resd that the Executive and a convenient number of the National Judiciary, ought to compose a Council of revision with authority to examine every act of the National Legislature before it shall operate, & every act of a particular Legislature before a Negative thereon shall be final; and that the dissent of the said Council shall amount to a rejection, unless the Act of the National Legislature be again passed, or that of a particular Legislature be again negatived by of the members of each branch.
9. Resd that a National Judiciary be established to consist of one or more supreme tribunals, and of inferior tribunals to be chosen by the National Legislature, to hold their offices during good behaviour; and to receive punctually at stated times fixed compensation for their services, in which no increase or diminution shall be made so as to affect the persons actually in office at the time of such increase or diminution. that the jurisdiction of the inferior tribunals shall be to hear & determine in the first instance, and of the supreme tribunal to hear and determine in the dernier resort, all piracies & felonies on the high seas, captures from an enemy; cases in which foreigners or citizens of other States applying to such jurisdictions may be interested, or which respect the collection of the National revenue; impeachments of any National officers, and questions which may involve the national peace and harmony.
Essentially the one or more supreme tribunals clause opens the doors to establishing a Danish-style legal system in which the supreme court consists of two chambers which both hear all types of cases. A case is heard by at least five judges. In all, the court consists of normally 15 judges and a President. A Judicial Appointments Council nominates individuals to become judges. Thereby avoiding the cult of personality that is the US supreme court. The US could improve on this by banning members of the legal guild from judgeships and thus prevent the promotion of litigaton for billable hours sake.
The World Justice Project consistently ranks Denmark as number one its Rule of Law Index.
By allowing antifa to run amok burning cars and violently terrorizing people seeking to attend the presidential inauguration on the mall with impunity, the Democrats are doing a fantastic job of convincing many Americans that radical change is indeed necessary. What is happening in the courts, schools, and mass opinion shaping mills, is at best a tad bit less destructive of civil society. We can sit back and take it or take reform action now.
I find these arguments about multiculturalism to very cranky and he is as much an out-of-touch Ivory Tower Professor as any leftist university professor.
1) Why do large corporations pursue mulitcultural goals?
BECAUSE THEY ARE GLOBAL COMPANIES THAT MAKE MONEY WITH CONSUMERS FROM ALL CULTURES!!!!!
So who is the most multicultural propaganda company in the globe? Probably Disney and say the movie Zootopia is the biggest movie multicultural propaganda ever made. And it grossed over $1B of which $670M was overseas sales. And isn’t the Marvel Comic Universe movies sort of a globalist view of US soft Multiculural power? (Really Captain America is fighting with Black Panther!) And MCU Endgame is likely to gross $2B.
Otherwise companies are multicultural because:
1) There is some litigation risk with racism or sexism. (This is what had Jame Damore fired.)
2) They have workers from all across the globe and they have manage their needs are well.
3) Employees have to interact with both global customers and employees. I am not high up and have worked with people from 10 countries.
And yes I do believe universities are too obsessed with multicultural goals (although how many foreign students attend?) and wish they would simplify to the reality that 90% are looking to get education, gain some communication skills and get the sheepskin effect.
Collin,
I think you’re (perhaps unintentionally) conflating two possible meanings of the word “multicultural.” You imply that the word refers to understanding and appreciation of actual foreign cultures, but in practice “multicultural” refers to a fairly narrow range of views held by American liberals. “Multiculturalists” in practice do not tolerate other countries having moral or social views that differ in any material respect; when Joe Biden told an international gathering that when it came to gay rights “I don’t care what your culture is,” he was expressing the actual “multicultural” position. I think very few of the “woke capital” issues are driven by pressure on U.S. companies from foreign markets, as opposed to very vocal pressures from activists here.
You are correct that litigation risk drives some of this (Damore, for example), but that circles back to the question as to whether employment law–specifically hostile environment law–has become broad enough to constitute another form of censorship. We can agree (I hope) that if the government had decreed criminal penalties on any business that allowed the expression on its premises of certain views, there would be a serious free speech violation. That the penalties are civil instead might not be as big a difference as we think.
I think you’re (perhaps unintentionally) conflating two possible meanings of the word “multicultural.”
Yes, I am conflating the meanings here because understanding other people and cultures can help in business. And the left can over-extend the meaning here but the right complaining about multiculturalism is missing the primary benefits of it as well. (So it is being PC in which 80% of being PC is simply being polite in society.)
At internal Sales Meeting, I have heard the CEO of the division say diversity and multicultural words as values companies have. (Not a tech company.) And like buzzwords it can mean of variety of things to different audiences but I bet 80% of multiculturalism is just good business sense at working well with a variety of employees and customers. (We don’t complain about this as it is good stuff.) Also global business also crosses over in which other cultures had to learn US ways. It was an urban legend of when India would start taking over call centers, they made their workers watch the show Friends.
1) The first reality for a business is if they choose to sell in another nation, they have understand the customers and their needs.
2) And the business is going to have hire and work with foreign employees.
At the heart of this is simply just good business but it does take a degree of understanding other cultures and work well within them.
I’m confused.
Chinese movie audiences would like to hear a speech from Black Panther about how Stuyvesant needs to be less Asian and there needs to be an Asian quota at Harvard because “diversity is our strength”.
Or maybe Zootopia should have had a scene where Bunny Hops says that “All Lives Matter” is hate speech and gets someone fired from their job.
These are movies for children. They don’t address any of the issues that people have beefs with. They are designed to be fantasy worlds where there are no real problems or hard tradeoffs to deal with. Zootopia essentially says “there is no bell curve, people getting shot with a weird plant causes all black crime and we just solved it so that’s over forever!”
Isn’t effective Propaganda film one that does not an obvious to the audience? So in the long run Casablanca really was an effective Propaganda while Nazi or most Soviet movies in most forgotten. (Listen to the Act 1 of Casablanca and it was obvious debating of Rick’s interest in long run helping the Allies with lots of buzzwords that fit 1941 US politics.)
Yes, Zootopia does not deal with all the urban issues of the modern world as it is kid’s movie to entertain which makes it more effective in IMO. Here are some of the issues:
1) The main point of the movie is how animals deal with their instinct in animal city. Think Instinct v. Stereotype or Bell Curve. The obvious female bunny can make it in a male carnivore dominated police. The Fox learns he can move away from crime to solving crimes.
2) The city is wonderful and a little scary as they are a variety of neighborhood/Animal Habitats and the characters have to navigate these habitats to solve the crime.
In general, the movie main theme is you can be anything you want to be but a successful character must navigate various groups in the city. (FYI the main villain is sort of an evil HRC or Warren type government worker so it is not completely left PC.)
I never like Levin’s use of the term ‘alienation’ in this context. It doesn’t really seem description of the present conservative attitude towards certain of our most important social institutions, which has gone beyond resentment that they have been captured by ideological opponents, and more towards existential pessimism about salvage-ability: a perspective of irredeemability in terms of capacity to fulfill intended or traditional ends and purposes.
Imagine two trees between which one has hung a hammock. After many years of enjoyment, one of the eye-screws pops out and, upon inspection one discovers that some parasites have been sucking the life out of both trees.
If it’s still early, maybe one could try to cut off diseased sections, and apply certain preventative chemicals, and fertilize and put up support stakes, with the hope of one day having normally healthy trees again which can stand on their own and support hammocks without any maintenance or intervention. Maybe there is some argument at the time about what must be done to the trees right away, or else the disease will spread beyond hope of recovery.
The parasites, naturally, argue for doing nothing at all. They have their own plans for the trees, which have nothing to do with netted, full-body slings. Maybe at this stage on is “alienated” from the trees, which, while still alive, are only feeding the parasites, but not able to provide any comfortable outdoor slumber.
But at some point one looks at the trees and discovers that things have indeed gone too far, past the point of no return, that there is nothing else to be done, and no ability to even try intervening anyway, and that the only way one is going to have a hammock again is to burn it all to the ground and start over fresh, and with an active parasite-detection-and-prevention system to boot, this time around.
Think about it this we. We say things like the value of institutions is in large part the value as going concerns, that they are all about organization capital these days, often embedded more in the people’s brains than in any way that can be formalized, written down, and copied effectively via instruction manual. That the real norms, standards, processes, and tacit understandings that go on in any organization are absorbed via social osmosis and transmitted from person to person in a slow and subtle process, regardless of what official, formal ‘training’ systems there may be. We say that personnel is policy, and that applies to the attitudes of the personnel who will decide to carry things on the way they have been, or whether to pursue some other objectives. We notice that the heights of many academic fields seems to be run on a who-knows-whom, mutual back-scratching cliques and cabals.
Put it all together and we can see that after a few generations of Gramscian Marching and personnel selection mechanisms which emphasize commitment to objectives intrinsically at odds with the stated purposes of the institutions, there ceases at some point to be genuine continuity with the past, and the very capacity to perform those one valued functions is irretrievably lost.
Universities are made of people. A news organization is made of people. A church is made of people. When enough of the people who run them want them to be something other than the institutions conservatives value for long enough, then they are no longer those same institutions at all. They are merely wearing the skin-suit of a formerly valued institution as a facade, hiding nothing but disease below the surface. There is no sense being naive about redemption or salvage in that context. Don’t be fooled into supporting these things with one more dime for one more minute. Burn it down to the ground and start afresh; that’s all there is to do.
Your comment reminded me of how David Burge describes the process, in pithy twitter fashion:
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
#lefties
Right. And what do you call a ‘conservative’ who keeps paying that respect? A fool.
You aren’t a conservative. Those aren’t conservative ideas.
There’s much truth in that. If leftism is by definition the radically excluded and universally despised, then the far right is the new left.
@Dain
Conservatism is a philosophy that there is institutional and social wisdom that has been accumulated over generations and wants to preserve and build around that. If you believe that society no longer has any core and that we need to burn it down and start over, you are by definition not conservative.
Both the far left and the far right of the moment reject conservatism, although only one admits it. Both are angry at institutions, and both want rapid change.
merde
Trump is lincoln.
Feel comfortable with that thought.
It is the nicest thing most of you think.
Poor Abe.
“[Trump] is virtually the only one on our national political stage defending America’s understanding of right and wrong.”
Well, viewing Trump primarily as a moral leader is certainly a unique perspective…
Indeed.
Right or wrong definitions.
“Trump went on to falsely characterize what he said an “extreme late abortion” would entail in horrifically graphic—and not to mention misleading—language. “Your Democrat governor here in Wisconsin, shockingly, stated that he will veto legislation that protects Wisconsin babies born alive. Born alive,” Trump said in a disapproving tone. “The baby is born, the mother meets with the doctor, they take care of the baby, they wrap the baby beautifully, and then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.” Trump then put on an incredulous tone. “You hear late term, but this is where the baby is born, it’s there, it’s wrapped, that’s it,” Trump said as he made a guillotine motion with his hand, as if he were implying that the baby’s head would be sliced off.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/04/trump-abortion-baby-wrapped-blanket-execute-baby.html
Ten thousand people attended. Beyond frightening. But whatever you do, do not call these deplorables deplorable.
We need a stronger word.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/04/trump-abortion-baby-wrapped-blanket-execute-baby.html
You’ve committed a dozen Holocausts in this country alone simply because you found these babies lives inconvenient, and then you claim to be the party of human rights.
Nobody can take a single thing you say about human rights seriously while you’re actively conducting genocide because you find it personally convenient.
I am a male.
I have not done anything remotely close to what you say.
Not my choice.
Shouldn’t be that hard to understand.
Most people didn’t put Jews into gas chambers. But a lot of people voted for the guy that did.
You legalized multiple Holocausts and watched it happen.
This kind of defense didn’t work for Pontious Pilate and it ain’t working here.
You channel trump. Shows clearly what you are.
Let me ask you a question. There are at least as many miscarriages as abortions.
Do you see all those miscarriages as another holocaust? Does anyone in the pro-life camp make any attempt at figuring out how to lessen this massive tragic loss of life? Is there any interest in this at all?
Truth be told, it doesn’t seem there is. Planned Parenthood is viewed as a terrorist organization, even as they save many more fetal lives than they take.
Please stop with the hysterical rhetoric. You really don’t care about people that much. You’ve made too many posts that claim otherwise.
Miscarriages happen, fairly predictably in spite of whatever resources you throw at the problem. When a person miscarries, they aren’t purposely killing their baby. It would be like saying someone that gets cancer has committed suicide.
Like people starving in third world countries, I see religious people doing a lot to try and save them. However, the world is not full of infinite resources, and at some point you start to make tradeoffs. Murder is an act, not a lack of an act.
I doubt Planned Parenthood has saved more lives than its taken. Most miscarriages happen early in the pregnancy and are a probabilistic biological reality that can’t be changed by any means available to us.
Multiculturalism has a positive bent too, i.e. the melting pot trope. “We all add our old world sensibilities and idiosyncratic views to the rich fabric of a meritocratic America in which we map out our own individual life plans.” Something like the Nathan Glazer view.
Unfortunately it seems that both the pro-immigrant meritocratic individualist perspective AND the far right race-based conflict view have been lumped together by a sub-national fractious and gloomy left who control the cultural organs.
“He is virtually the only one on our national political stage defending America’s understanding of right and wrong, and thus nearly alone in truly defending America. This why he is so valuable—so much depends on him.”
The author(sic) of this drek.
“There was another reminder of the sheer scale of the problem on Monday thanks to the Washington Post, which found Donald Trump, American president, has made 10,000 false claims in public since taking office. Well, it’s up to 10,111 claims now, a feat our dear leader accomplished in just 828 days. That’s thanks to a period over the last seven months in which the president has truly upped his game. Over the first 100 days, Trump averaged five false claims a day in public. This was remarkable if you consider what days might be like if you lied to people five times a day in your own life. But recently, Trump has jacked it up to 23 (twenty-three!) a day.
The Post highlights some events that, from the standpoint of complete and utter truthlessness, really defy belief:
‘In recent days, the president demonstrated why he so quickly has piled up the claims. There was a 45-minute telephone interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News on April 25: 45 claims. There was an eight-minute gaggle with reporters the morning of April 26: eight claims. There was a speech to the National Rifle Association: 24 claims. There was 19-minute interview with radio host Mark Levin: 17 claims. And, finally, there was the campaign rally on April 27: 61 claims.’
Once he really gets going, there are times he’s saying something that’s clearly false once every minute. And then there’s the Presidential Twitter Feed. The president has upped his output on the face of things—he threw up more than 50 tweets in one 24-hour period last week—and, along with that, the output of things that are not fing true…
Aaron Rupar
✔
@atrupar
Trump falsely claims Democrats support murdering babies.
“The baby is born, the mother meets w/the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully. Then the doctor and mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”
This is not real. It is the latest batshit twisting of what Virginia Governor Ralph Northam said a few months back—before it emerged he’d once worn blackface. But it will become real in the minds of far too many people now that the president said it from the rally podium. And we know, from recent history, that people will kill in defense of an ideology they call “pro-life.” It is not just dangerous for the president to speak this way. It is incitement.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27305546/trump-10000-false-claims-23-a-day-media-coverage/
“understanding of right and wrong”
That is what impeachment will show him.
It is past time for House Dems to go after these people. When you follow in the footsteps of John fen Mitchell, you need to held responsible.
“On March 22, 1973, President Richard Nixon had his attorney general, John Mitchell, over to the White House for a wee chat. Nixon was concerned that, in various courtrooms and law offices around the District, the ratlines off his administration were getting crowded. He proposed that Mitchell might want to do something about that. This is what he said.
‘ I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else, if it’ll save it—save the plan. That’s the whole point.’
46 years later, Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his report into the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election, and into the attempts of the current administration* to obstruct the investigations into such matters, to Attorney General William Barr. Two days later, Barr released his now-infamous four-page summary that let the president off a number of hooks and that set a narrative—albeit a cheesy and half-true—for a crucial few days. Now, thanks to the Washington Post, we learn that Barr’s little memo got crossways with the special counsel.
‘ Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote the previously undisclosed private letter to the Justice Department, laying out his concerns in stark terms that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.’
“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”’
One of the more egregious episodes of malfeasance in Barr’s most recent stint as AG came on April 10, when Barr was appearing before another Senate committee and was asked by Senator Chris Van Hollen whether Mueller supported Barr’s conclusion in his memo regarding Mueller’s opinion on whether the president* obstructed justice. Barr said he didn’t know. Now we know that Mueller had written to Barr more than a week earlier and informed him that he didn’t support Barr’s conclusion at all………
And on Wednesday, Barr is supposed to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, with its Republican majority. He’s supposed to appear before House Judiciary, with its Democratic majority, the next day, but he’s balking because, he says, he doesn’t want to be questioned by anyone except the committee members, which makes Barr much more of a coward than either Mitchell or, for that matter, Christine Blasey Ford, for whose examination before the SJC the Republicans flew in a separate lawyer.
My guess? He will stonewall the Senate and continue to duck the House, which should end with his being impeached and removed from office. But the most critical aspect of Tuesday night’s events is that the White House and its various henchpeople are on their way to leaving the Congress no remedy except impeachment to get to the truth of this administration’s corruption. What I am sure of is that no congressional Republican is going to take that leap. It’s a eunuch choir over there, and everybody’s still on key. But events are driving themselves now, and the tension within the institutions of government is destabilizing the whole damn thing.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a27330899/william-barr-mueller-report-letter-impeach/
Combine Barr’s acts with trump taking Congress to court, and impeachment should have started yesterday.
I’m a bit surprised that more Republicans on the Hill aren’t open to impeachment. Just from a political point of view, I’d think they’d much rather go into the 2020 election with Pence at the top of the ticket than with Trump.
While that may be true, any GOP members that voted for impeachment would be in a world of trouble come the next election. Not to mention that Pence would get trounced as the GOP base ignores the voting booth out of the loss of their favorite son.
People seem to think trump created some base of fans. Not true, his base has always been the GOP base. Basically racist white working class people and evangelicals. He did not invent them, they were always there.
What excited them so much is that trump took the GOP’s obviously racist policies out of the closet and put them on his chest. He replaced the dog whistles with a microphone and those people rejoiced. Finally they had a candidate that called a spade a spade, for the first time since george wallace showed the gop how to win elections.
The problem with the conservative view of “multiculturalism” is that their view of what legitimately constitutes “America” and “American culture” is too exclusively white-centered to include all of the legitimately multi-cultural nature of American history.
Whether conservatives like it or not, there are and have been for a long time, significant ethnic minorities which have never felt included in the “one culture” that conservatives claim to champion. And they don’t want to expand “Americanness” to include those other ethnic groups. They want those other ethnic groups to conform to white culture. I can name black to start with, who have their own culture born of slavery, as well as Chinese Americans who crossed in the 19th century, and Hispanics who have been US citizens since the Treaty of Guadalupe.
The reason these groups have become ethnic “identity groups” is because American society at large has not and has never been “one culture” that unites us all. it’s always been a white-dominated culture from which these other groups have been excluded outgroups. So it is no wonder that they formed their own identity groups.
If conservatives genuinely desire to unit all Americans into “one culture”, as opposed to what (in their view) constitutes “multiculturalism”, then then need to include blacks and hispanics and Asians in the definition of “American”. Of course, contrary to conservative fever dreams, that’s actually the goal of “multiculturalism” – to try to become more inclusive of the actual ethnic diversity in America – stop trying to exclude people so that we CAN become “one people”.
What’s really going on here, is not so much opposition to ethnic fragmenation, but defense of white dominance of what constitutes “American culture”. You can’t claim to be fighting for “one culture” and simultaneously reject the inclusion of non-white cultures in that “one culture”, unless your goal is actually “one white culture”.
Hazel Meade,
I guess I have the same point here I did with Collins earlier: “multiculturalism” is not, in practice, about genuine appreciation for other cultures, either foreign or ‘ethnic’ within the United States. Rather, “multiculturalism” is one side of a cultural debate within the American middle and upper class, in which ethnic identities are used as auxiliaries or debating points. An example would be the American girl who wore a traditional Chinese dress to prom and was savaged on social media for “cultural appropriation,” except that when someone in the press sounded out people in China on the matter they didn’t care (or were mildly complimentary). “Multiculturalists,” in practice, do not respect ethnic cultural values when those values conflict with “multicultural” preferences–as another example, the LGBT movement did not arise from black or Hispanic values, and the black churches (particularly) have only reluctantly accepted that movement. And of course it is ridiculous to say that real ethnic cultural differences have had anything to do with the various campus disturbances and deplatformings. Far from being genuinely accepting of other cultures, “multiculturalism” is in practice a fairly narrow worldview that condemns many present cultures–and virtually all past ones–as wicked (i.e, one or more of patriarchal, racist, homophobic, etc.)
Maybe you should ask someone who claims to support “multiculturalism” what they think “multiculturalism” represents, instead of relying on the perceptions of “multiculturalism” held by people who oppose it. Multiculturalism is after all just a word, and it may mean different things to different people.
I’m sure there are many things to criticize about the behavior of the proponents of multiculturalism and how true to what they claim to believe in they are actually being. However, it’s probably unwise to impute covert malicious motives to them. Every movement has people involved in it with varying emotional pathologies, who can be overzealous and get fixated on particular issues. The fact that there are zealots does not mean that it’s a coordinated plot to destroy western civilization.
There is nothing covert about getting people fired from their jobs. Its overt as all get out.
Moderates have a responsibility to rein in their radical elements. At least in terms of not letting them run roughshod over society. A moderate university president, for instance, has a duty not to give into campus radicals demands. If he fails to do so, it matters little whether he himself is radical, as he’s abandoned the responsibilities of his office. We know the left is capable of fighting back against its zealots because every time someone mentions AIPAC the equivalent of a nuclear bomb goes off to rein them in. It’s simply a matter of their not giving a damn as long as the target of the radicalism is whites.
I agree that university president should have the cojones to ignore campus activists, but I think you overestimate the ability of moderates to rein in radicals. Nobody has any legal authority to stop them or even much ability to exert any private control. A lot of radicals are unemployed or low-wage workers who don’t have jobs to get fired from, or don’t care.
However, I have gotten into exactly this argument over “deplatforming” speakers with Facebook friends (and even have been unfriended as a result). I spend more time arguing with other libertarians because that’s where I feel I can influence people to be more moderate. Leftists don’t listen to me much.
Also, there is an enormous amount of opposition to Israel on the left. There’s a whole divestment movement even. There’s not much logic in saying that people on the left are somehow capable of silencing opposition to pro-Israel lobbying organizations.
It’s not that people should be held responsible to silence the left. It’s that they shouldn’t:
1) Accept their questionable assertions out of fear
2) Implement policies based on those assertions
It isn’t within their authority or ability to control peoples opinion, but it is within their authority to reprimand and ignore them.
When you need a special session of Congress and a hundred op-eds about anit-semitism because some hijab from Michigan questions AIPAC, you know that there is backbone there. It’s not that the Democratic Party needs to silence every single person who questions Isreal, they just need to make it clear that anyone that does is on the blacklist and it going to have problems because of it.