E pluribus unum
Many of us understand and agree that the way you lose to terrorism is to cop to its premises in the way that you react to it. If ISIS or Al Qaeda want to claim that there is a war of civilizations, a religious war between “Muslims” and “The West”, the worst thing we could do is to live up to the role into which the terrorists have cast us by indiscriminately harassing and attacking Muslims. Acts of ostentatious violence are calculated to goad us into reinforcing the enemy’s framing of the conflict. Unfortunately, the tactic frequently works, because “we” are not a monolith, and some domestic factions in fact share a commonality of interest with the terrorists. During the Republican primary season, at least as abhorrent as anything Donald Trump said was the emergence of recitations of “We are at war with radical Islamic terrorism” as a kind of litmus test of seriousness among the allegedly sensible candidates. Perhaps I am cynical, but the sprawling, shadowy, money-drenched national security state is still disproportionately a Republican constituency, and that strikes me as relevant to why these politicians would garb themselves so enthusiastically in a costume sewn by our enemies. (Of course, there is no evidence of any quid pro quo, and I’m sure the candidates are all perfectly sincere in their way. So let’s not call it corruption.)
Similarly, if Donald Trump wants to start a race war, I wonder whether the best approach is to step in and take the other side. You might win an election that way, but you might also take us from a country of people who, still, mostly, don’t think of themselves as partisans for their race to one in which organizing along racial lines becomes a matter of self-defense. Of course, it often has felt that way, and really has been that way, for African Americans. Although there might be a certain justice in extending that condition to the rest of the country, I’m not sure that it would ultimately work out well for any of us. Functional nation states generally try to reduce the salience of socioethnic difference in favor of a national identity. That one of America’s two political parties has sometimes sabotaged this objective for political reasons doesn’t mean it would be a good idea if they both did. It seems to me an overtly racialized United States would be a lot more, rather than less, comfortable place for Donald Trump or the 20th Century politicians to which he is often compared.
I think that the “war on terror” cannot be won by defeating ISIS or Al Qaeda or any other enemy, but will end when the people of the Middle East have hope of living decent lives in stable countries with legitimate governments. Most problems in the world must be solved, not defeated, however attractive the branding of yet another “war on” may be. In the United States, I don’t doubt that various forms of racial animus drive the support of Donald Trump, to some degree. But you can’t solve “Trumpism” by defeating racism. The so-called “white working class” has lots of reasons to be aggrieved besides race or resentment over changing racial hierarchies, including legitimate grievances that would be shared by the not-white working class. Racism itself is an outcome as much as it is a cause. If interpreters of political affairs make wild efforts to dismiss colorably legitimate explanations of grievance in favor of unsympathetic racial resentments, that might be politically useful in delegitimizing support of Donald Trump. It might, less usefully, actually be believed, both by the people whose concerns are being caricatured (and so who come to see themselves as racists) and by others (who take an ever harder line with a cartoon moral enemy).
Of course, socioethnic conflict can be useful. It is an old strategy of colonialists to create racial strife in order to divide and rule. In Europe, elites turned a crisis that emerged from venality among bankers and poor regulation by Brussels into an ethnonational morality play that has destroyed the legitimacy of the EU and continues to devastate several countries, precisely in order to deflect blame from themselves. An America as unequal as ours has become engenders lots of blame that may require deflecting. Carl Beijer writes, “[L]iberalism relentlessly co-opts identitarian politics as a way to channel civil unrest away from class struggle.” (ht Ryan Cooper)
To be clear, I don’t think the writers with whom I am taking issue are intentionally sowing discord. They are writers whom I often admire, who, I think, have given less thought to the implications of the lines they are taking than I wish they would.
Update: This piece is not a response to the awful events in Orlando, which I learned of just after hitting “post”. Stupid fucked-up world.
Update History:
- 12-Jun-2016, 7:30 a.m. PDT: Added bold update re terrible Orlando shooting.
“Functional nation states generally try to reduce the salience of socioethnic difference in favor of a national identity. That one of America’s two political parties has sometimes sabotaged this objective for political reasons doesn’t mean it would be a good idea if they both did. ” Surely, both sides of US politics have been playing this game in different ways for quite some time now. Indeed, hasn’t “privilege politics/white supremacy” been one long invitation for white people to think of themselves as white people, an invitation now being accepted?
Jihadis claim to speak for Islam in the way Nazis did for Aryans and Leninists did for the proletariat. Does not mean that all those on the “caliphate curve” are not sharing an underlying ideology and objective. And ideologies (particularly, violent ones) are not defeated by welfare programs. Especially when the jihadis often come from the best educated and most prosperous parts of the Middle East. Indeed, young men of Muslim heritage separated from kith and kin at university are prime targets for jihadi recruitment. While jihadis also arise from young men born and raised in European democratic welfare states.
June 12th, 2016 at 5:36 pm PDT
link
Steve, you seem to be projecting rather strongly. For the past sixty years, the faction at the forefront of exacerbating socioethnic cleavages is, well, yours, a development bemoaned by a few aging liberals like Arthur Schlesinger (in The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society) and Eugene McCarthy (in A Colony of the World: The United States Today). Remind me, which faction was it that surrendered the universities to the Third Worldist gangsters? Which faction is it that teaches their racial, irredentist, nationalist ideologies, under the rubric of “social justice”, as part of an increasingly mandatory university education? Which faction is it whose friends include the likes of something called La Raza? Oh, and it is rather difficult to maintain a coherent national identity when your faction insists on importing an unprecedented multitude of foreigners (among them Omar Mateen), often illegally, and then forcing everyone to worship their “diversity” as a matter of societal advancement.
Did you happen to notice a certain Google Doodle recently? Have you opened The New York Times or The Washington Post in the past six or so years, and noticed the weekly deluge of articles condemning anything and everything as being “too white“? I’m neither white nor American, but I find it endlessly fascinating. For instance, you will see, without even the slightest sense of irony, a journalist with a Jewish name criticizing Hollywood for being dominated by crackers.
So while seemingly every designated minority is celebrated for making blatantly particularist demands against society, whites alone are judged by a supposedly “universal” standard that no other culture in history has ever lived up to or even recognized. If alien anthropologists were to visit our planet, I have little doubt that they would be fascinated by the universalist inclinations of whites who are seemingly oblivious to their exceptionality. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that liberalism has gone much farther in creating the New Man than the Soviet Union ever did.
Donald Trump is not a race warrior. That is absurd. And while some of his supporters are no doubt driven by racial animus, even that is remarkably restrained. If I were them, I’d be a lot more apoplectic. Whites are well on their way to becoming a minority in the United States, and the history of high-achieving minorities is, as Amy Chua described, a bloody one. That the exact same tropes once deployed against Jews are now being harnessed against whites is not exactly a sign of racial harmony to come.
As for what should be done in regards to Muslims, there’s a very simple, flawless proposal that requires neither bovine docility nor jingoistic imperialism. Steve Sailer:
Unfortunately, liberals seem to believe that creating Lebanon 2.0 is some kind of moral imperative, probably because all the problems it creates provides more jobs.
June 13th, 2016 at 7:46 am PDT
link
What is the empirical evidence that class struggle is fundamental?
What is the empirical evidence that problems like the Middle East get solved?
On the second question: the rising tide of Democracy in Latin America just happened to coincide with our foreign policy and military establishment stopped paying attention. Thus, our best empirical guide suggests that the Middle East will settle down at precisely the moment we don’t need their oil.
On the first question: is it an accident that the overwhelmingly white male world of economics imagines that economic concerns are fundamental to human identity? Couldn’t the failure of economics be described as what happens when white male math savants imagine that the rest of humanity thinks like them and therefore considers reflection to count as empirical evidence?
June 13th, 2016 at 11:28 am PDT
link
“….I think that the “war on terror” cannot be won by defeating ISIS or Al Qaeda or any other enemy, but will end when the people of the Middle East have hope of living decent lives in stable countries with legitimate governments.”
The former CIA officer in this short video sums up her “lessons learned” in a similar fashion :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WEd34oW9BI
The world is indeed FUBAR , too often with timing to match. This 2016 campaign is about the only one left that I could get enthusiastic about ( now that Bernie Is – apparently – Bust ) :
http://www.thegreenhead.com/imgs/giant-meteor-2016-bumper-sticker-2.jpg
June 14th, 2016 at 12:43 am PDT
link
Mr Waldman,
You do an excellent job of shaping and articulating my point of view. Thank you!
The analogy of the Krugman / Drum culture arguments to the War on Terror arguments makes sense to me. Krugman and Drum seem to be saying that the best way to fight Trumpism is to call it out as cultural conflict, and not to be fooled into economic discussions which distract from this core truth.
I, on the other hand, believe that this approach is a mistake both morally and tactically. Generalization about the other side’s motives and circumstances is likely to be wildly inaccurate in many instances (as most liberals would agree with regard to the “War on Terror”). My personal opinion is that the evolution of the “ownership society” over the last 36 years has left many of us with less economic security. It’s something that’s obvious to younger people who work in companies with 2 tier benefit plans — with older employees having more generous pension benefits, for example. Many more jobs are contractual these days, as opposed to the greater job security that full time employees used to enjoy.
So perhaps there are legitimate explanations of economic anxiety mixed with cultural differences. To say, as Drum does, that it’s ALL cultural with NO legitimate economic component is delusional nonsense.
June 14th, 2016 at 2:57 pm PDT
link
Yakima @2 – A few thoughts:
1. Omar Mateen wasn’t a foreigner.
2. Why do you consider it a bad thing for some “factions” to frame things from a perspective that’s different from the perspective historically taught in American history? Why not open things up beyond the white landowner class, which you appear to be convinced is the only legitimate frame of reference for viewing things?
3. I don’t understand your concern about maintaining a “coherent national identity,” and why you think that it’s harder now than in the past. The 1800s, after all, saw a pretty brutal Civil War. The 1800s and early 1900s saw a lot of immigration from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe, leading to importation of radical ideologies (resulting in terrorism and a Red Scare) and a backlash that resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act and other restrictions on immigration. The 1950s and 1960s, of course, saw a lot of upheaval as Blacks struggled to gain equal rights.
4. I would agree that sometimes people over-reach in their arguments, and it’s at least mildly annoying that some writers feel it’s okay to make anti-white jokes or comments but verboten to do the same with respect to other ethnicities. But really, that’s all it is – mildly annoying – because those people don’t really hold any power in society.
5. Bottom line, I think that your arguments are similar to those that have been made repeatedly throughout history, against Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese, etc. America has been strong enough to survive those waves of immigration, and will be fine with the latest waves of Latino and Muslim immigration. That’s not to say that there won’t be bumps in the road, which will translate into real tragedy for perhaps many human beings. But my sense is that at some point in the future people will feel ashamed at having supported someone like Donald Trump, and will wish they hadn’t.
June 16th, 2016 at 10:17 am PDT
link
Jonny Scrum-half,
1. Sorry, his family, I meant.
Do I really need to explain to a liberal why the inflammation of racial irredentist nationalism might be a bad thing, when the role of Satan in your political religion is occupied by a certain Austrian politician who spouted exactly that? What, exactly, is the difference between *Das Volk* and *La Raza*? As the recent history of the Third World demonstrates amply, non-white nationalisms are just as pregnant as white nationalisms with epic genocidal potential, so why are you violently allergic to the latter, but not the former?
You also seem to be under the impression that this “different” perspective is struggling against some titanic jingoist orthodoxy maintained by the ruling slavocracy. The reality is precisely the opposite. The hegemonic perspective in the Western university system is that which was imposed by the likes of the Third World Liberation Front. I’m sure you’ve seen enough “political correctness gone mad” stories to know that its adherents are fanatically intolerant of anything that fails to share their enthusiasm for an unbridled egalitarianism. I attended a few semesters at a Canadian university as a computer science major, and even there the stench of American leftism was omnipresent.
As Waldman said, “Functional nation states generally try to reduce the salience of socioethnic difference in favor of a national identity.” The history of the United States, as you remind us, is replete with episodes in which the exacerbation of cleavages resulted in fantastic levels of violence. Given this bloody history, how is it not the height of insanity to create new cleavages, exacerbate existing ones, and use them as the basis for political conflict?
The years in which the United States came closest to being a harmonious nation state were, as even honest progressives will admit, the years following the immigration restriction act of 1924.
This entirely reasonable policy was abandoned in 1965 not because it was thought to be in the interests of Americans, but for reasons of Cold War geopolitics, and the new arrivals are now transparently being recruited as a Janissary caste to consolidate the rule of the ruling progressives, and smash their indigenous conservative opponents. That alone is reason enough to ask what an immigration policy crafted in the interests of Americans should have actually looked like.
My own intuition is that a sane immigration policy would fluctuate between periods of openness and restriction to force the new arrivals to assimilate and the nation to absorb them. Would you have any objection to such a policy?
Do we live on the same planet? When I look at the United States, I see a society whose defining creed is increasingly with opposition to racism, where antiracists enjoy the highest levels of authority, influence, and celebrity, where the White House can consider a communist, terrorist-supporting, Third Worldist lunatic a national hero solely because of her antiracism, and where racists, real or imagined, are hunted and ostracized from polite society with paranoid fervor that far outstrips “McCarthyism” by several orders of magnitude.
You notice that there exists a double standard. What is power, if not the ability to impose on society a standard from which you alone are exempt?
In a democracy, those who hold power dictate public opinion. To find them, look at the people who run your opinion-making institutions. That means The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, etc., and of course, the universities. (And please do not pretend that Fox News is of symmetrical importance.) These are the institutions that created and perpetuated that double standard. These institutions have succeeded in turning the United States into the most neurotic, race-obsessed society in history, second only to Nazi Germany.
Good lord, just look at the language you invoke. “strong enough to survive”. It’s quite instructive that even you make immigration sound like a trial by poison.
I don’t doubt that America can ingest the poison; I just doubt that the poison has any nutritional value. Survive to what ends? What is the point of this ordeal? Your country does not strike me as having some kind of Muslim shortage that urgently needs to be filled.
June 17th, 2016 at 12:02 am PDT
link
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Yakimi. Regarding a fluctuating immigration policy, I don’t know that it’s a bad idea, although of course the particulars matter. However, regarding everything else you wrote, I think that we’ll just have to acknowledge disagreement on a fundamental level. I simply don’t view the world the way you do, and I don’t agree that the things you describe are real threats.
June 17th, 2016 at 6:27 am PDT
link
It’s very funny that this post immediately follows one where you extend sympathy to those practicing identity politics, for both ethnic groups and economic classes, domestically.
So exactly the same “socio-ethnic conflict” you are decrying on a world scale, you are welcoming as long as it is practiced within the US, by people who on average tend to share your views.
If you read those two posts together, and are honest with yourself, you will see the driving distinction: that you believe domestic political opponents deserve more vigorous opposition than far-away savages. Which is fine, if you are willing to oppose immigration policies that will preserve the “far-away” part.
June 22nd, 2016 at 12:03 pm PDT
link