On our American Mind website, the Claremont Institute recently launched a campaign to engage citizens in debate about what it means to be an American. We are warning about the danger to the republic posed by multiculturalism, identity politics and politically correct speech restrictions. Google decided that our writings violated the company’s policy on “race and ethnicity in personalized advertising” and prevented us from advertising to our own readers about our 40th-anniversary gala dinner this Saturday.
His Claremont Institute recently held a forum in DC entitled “Multiculturalism vs. America.” I was in the audience, and like most other audience members (and several of the speakers), I disapproved of that framing.
During the Q&A, I pointed out that when Donald Trump pins a label on an opponent, that label is funny, instantly recognizable, and belittling. “Multiculturalism” is none of those. I suggested “crybullies,” a term which I have seen on the Instapundit web site. Apparently everyone thought I said “tribalism.”
The response of the Claremont folks to these complaints was that their framing was not chosen for political purposes or as a marketing slogan. My thoughts:
1. I cynically infer that launching a crusade against “multiculturalism” is an idea that resonated with some major donors.
2. I don’t have much sympathy with Williams’ whine about Google. Hence the title to this post.
3. I did have a positive reaction to many of the speakers at the session, especially Christopher DeMuth. He pointed out that in the 1960s, Martin Luther King and other dissidents were holding up American historical values and saying, in effect, “Live up to these.” In contrast, today’s left sees American historical values as nothing but a set of pathologies–racism, sexism, and rapaciousness.
4. Villanova’s Colleen Sheehan sees universities as at the heart of the problem. I am inclined to agree. Where do young activists in journalism and politics get their ideas?
Along these lines, Liel Leibovitz addresses a plea to Jewish philanthropists:
Please stop offering up lavish new buildings and campus centers and multimillion-dollar bequests in honor of your fathers and mothers, who would probably be rolling over in their graves if they could see and hear what goes on inside the buildings that bear their names. Any Jewish donor invested in any institution in which Jewish students regularly live in fear of retribution from classmates or teachers for asserting their own basic human dignity and attachment to the values of free inquiry and critical reasoning should demand her or his money back.
I am somewhat disillusioned with nonprofits in general. I have three daughters, and for a long time, I have been saying, “I wish just one of them would work for a profit.” I think that my advice to billionaires would be similar. I wish that they would invest for profits, and stay away from non-profits. With non-profits, you are subject to Conquest’s second law. Furthermore, you are raising demand for talent in the non-profit sector. Instead, what you want is for most talented people to obtain exposure to the for-profit sector, where they can better learn to appreciate what it takes to be successful as well as how many flaws and imperfections are going to be found in even the must effective organizations.
Also, non-profits don’t offer the feedback mechanisms that exist in the for-profit sector. Feedback helps to deter for-profit firms from framing major new initiatives in a self-defeating way.
An appeal to Americanism is a desire to kick can.
I have benefited greatly from Claremont seminars and publications, as well as Cato’s, FIRE, Institute for Justice and others, and have made donations to each in appreciation of the information and insights I have received. They are filling the market niche created by today’s academia and I am happy to “shop at their stores” rather than the latter’s. But, as with today’s colleges and universities, and nonprofits in general, to say nothing of government, they, too, have shown creeping tendencies to pursue “lavish new buildings” and the like, focusing on material well-being and display at the expense of the intangible virtues they extol but run the risk of displacing in their emphasis. Beauty on the outside should never take precedent over beauty on the inside. The profit motive is both an economic and moral term, “dirty” to its opponents but salutary to its adherents precisely for the reasons Dr. Kling has reminded us, and can’t remind us often enough.
If only Tyler Cowen had included your thinking on non-profits in his Big Business book. I think your two paragraphs on the topic are worth as much in terms of advancing an appreciaton for business than his whole book.
You may fault the universities, but the Manichean “non-profit”=good/for-profit business=bad bias is embedded in the tax code and that is where it should be ripped out.
Instead of taxing success, a VAT, applied across the board without exemptions, would eliminate the statutory embodiment of the doctrine that productive activity by tax-paying entities is unworthy.
It would have the added bonus of forcing businesses to pay taxes no matter how much they fritter away on frivolities in the manner of Google.
One wonders how Google is acting in the best interests of its shareholders by refusing to accept revenue? They, of course, are protected by the director primacy rule in making that decision. But objectively, I would find it hard to qualify such behavior as any where near a reasonable business judgement. Of course Google does not pay dividends, and likely never will, it being instead an entity more or less devoted to indulging the hubris of its directors.
And let’s consider Google’s behavior as political speech. When President Kamala Harris packs the Supreme Court and the Citizen’s United decision is overturned, will later administrations be able to enact regulations to prevent such behavior as an in-kind political donation?
Speech regulating entities like Google, Facebook, and Twitter who use their clout to meddle in the political process are a grave threat to democracy. After all, a hundred thousand dollars was all it took for the Russians to steal the 2016 election. Think what the insidious algorithms concocted by the evil plutocrats behind these multinational behemoths can accomplish. The Chinese social credit system appears benign in comparison.
Honestly, the worst thing I dislike about the Claremont lack of definition of multi-culturalism is there is a lot of good multiculturalism in American and especially business. And a lot of this multicultural complaints sound dangerously close to the ‘Replacement*’ ideas that Pat Buchanan and palo-conservative are stating. So I am wondering:
1) Is bad that our businesses have a global focus? To be successful at global business is you have to sell to global consumers. I over-emphasize Disney movies here, but is it bad Disney is making movies that sell to global buyers?
2) If you are part of a global business, it turns out you have interact multicultural co-workers. And this is good for business.
3) Honestly 90% office employees really don’t care what your politics and backgrounds. (And colleges should recognize this.) I have been such conversation in which I nodded and transition to meeting topic.
4) And finally, we over-estimated how great things were in the past (Before all this multiculturalism) Is it so wrong that Compton, CA, the gang capital of the nation in 1990, was ‘Latino Genetrified?’ Long term the results are less crime and more investment.
(The replacement ideas are coastal elite liberals are inviting Hispanic Immigrants into the United States to replace the White Working Class with lower wages and socialist ideology. There is a does seem a weird contradiction in there especially since small business are the ones that over-whelming benefit from Immigration.))
O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
This is from the article “O’Sullivan’s First Law” published in the October 27, 1989 issue of National Review:
My copy of the current Mother Jones (well, it’s my job to read that sort of thing — I take no pleasure in it) contains an advertisement for Amnesty International. Now, AI used to be a perfectly serviceable single-issue pressure group which drew the world’s attention to the plight of political prisoners around the globe. Many people owe their lives and liberty to it. But that good work depended greatly on AI’s being a single-issue organization that helped victims of both left- and right-wing regimes and was careful to remain politically neutral in other respects. Its advertisement in Mother Jones, however, abandons this tradition by calling for an end to the death penalty.
The ad itself, needless to say, is the usual liberal rhubarb. ‘In American courtrooms,’ it intones, ‘some have a better chance of being sentenced to death.’ That is true: the people in question are called murderers. But Al naturally means something different and more sinister — namely that poor, black, and retarded people are more likely to face the electric chair than other murderers.
Let us suppose this to be the case. What follows? A mentally retarded person incapable of understanding the significance of his actions cannot be guilty of murder or of any other crime. A law that punishes him (as opposed to one that confines him for his own and society’s safety) is unjust and should be changed — whether or not he faces the death penalty. On the other hand, someone who is guilty of murder may be executed with perfect justice. His race or economic circumstances do not affect the matter at all. The fact that other murderers may obtain lesser sentences does not in any way detract from the justice of his own punishment. After all, some murderers have always escaped scot-free. Would Amnesty have us release the rest on the grounds of equality of treatment? Finally, Amnesty’s argument from discrimination could be met just as well by executing more rich, white murderers (which would be fine with me) as by executing no murderers at all. Significantly, Amnesty’s list of death-penalty victims does not include political prisoners. America does not have political prisoners, let alone execute them. Why, then, Amnesty’s campaign on the issue?
That is explained by O’Sullivan’s First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don’t like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over — and the rest follows.
Is there any law which enables us to predict the behavior of right-wing organizations? As it happens, there is: Conquest’s Second Law (formulated by the Sovietologist Robert Conquest):
The behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies. Examples: virtually any conservative party anywhere, the Ronald Lauder for Mayor campaign, and the British secret service. That last example is, however, flawed, since the British secret service actually was controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies in the form of Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, et al. In which case, Conquest’s Law should have operated to make M1-6 a crack anti-Soviet intelligence service of James Bond proportions.
And this is from the memoirs of Kingsley Amis, published in 1991:
In deliberately inverse order I now set down something about Bob’s real or proper concern, a sufficiently serious one as a writer on politics and authority on the Eastern bloc, particularly the USSR and its internal history. His political position has come to be on the libertarian Right, and he has always been implacably anti-Soviet, an unfashionable stance for an intellectual and poet in those early 1950s days. In those same days I was some sort of man of the Left, and this brought us into mild conflict. Some time later he was to point out that, while very ‘progressive’ on the subject of colonialism and other matters I was ignorant of, I was a sound reactionary about education, of which I had some understanding and experience. From my own and others’ example he formulated his famous First Law, which runs, ‘Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.’ (The Second Law, more recent, says, ‘Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.’)
On 1 & 2 multiculturalism:
I don’t have much sympathy with Williams’ whine about Google. Hence the title to this post.
Today, “multiculturalism” means being anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-“middle class” values of hard work and individual responsibility. It favors tribal identity, and tribal politics pitting tribes against other tribes. So I’m against this kind of multiculturalism.
I do like “crybullies” — and it is the bullying that needs to especially be stopped, even by force, if necessary.
Google, Facebook, & Twitter are becoming anti-Rep. They should be subject to the same liability as other publishers — they are NOT neutral.
4-universities are a key anti-profit aspect of the general anti-business feeling so many college students have. Their tax advantages should be ended. Fed research funds should be denied those colleges which stop free speech.
Colleges need to be sued, and lose, for discriminating against the hiring of Republicans, the dirty “open secret” discrimination they’ve been doing for decades.
Non-profits devolve into being lousy. There should be a “not for profit” surtax on the salaries of those working in the NGO based on the amount of income greater than the American median (“med” now about $61k): 10% on the amount over the med; 20% on the amount over 2*med; 30% on the amount over 3*med; 40% on the amount over 4*med; 50% on the amount over 5*med.
Those who want “more money” should be working for wealth creating orgs, those “making money”.
There should also be more stringent reporting requirements of funds collected and spent by NGOs, including the NRA — itself now under investigation for it’s leaders hugely mis-spending money.
The principal agent problem can become even worse in NGOs than in profit orgs, since there is so much less internal audit review and monitoring.
In Tulsa, the wealthy give only to nonprofits while graduated must go out of state to find jobs. We are overrun with nonprofits.