Whatever parallel you want to draw, the conclusion is the same: This is not liberalism, rightly understood.
Guinier’s views are actually relatively moderate compared to other champions of identity politics on the left. These days, there are whole academic departments dedicated to “Whiteness Studies.” But this discipline is not analogous to “Black Studies” or “Hispanic Studies” or “Women’s Studies.” Those schools of thought are dedicated to the project of building up an identity, celebrating its uniqueness, and cultivating, essentially, a sense of nationhood. Whiteness Studies are dedicated to cataloging the illegitimacy and even the evil of whiteness. The syllabus at one university describes Critical Whiteness Studies as a field “concerned with dismantling white supremacy in part by understanding how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced.”46
This sort of thinking has spilled out into the mainstream culture. Essentialism for Maistre was all about nationality. Now it is about ethnic or gender categories. As one black journalist recently put it on Twitter: “Yes, ALL white people are racist. Yes, ALL men are sexist. Yes, ALL cis people are transphobic. We have to unpack that. That’s the work!”47
Again, one need not be categorically opposed to ethnic groups or other minorities flexing their muscles in a diverse society. That’s a story as old as the country and is unavoidable in any society. The key distinction, once more, is that some within these groups are not merely fighting for their piece of the pie or for recognition of their legitimate interests. They are seeking to overthrow the ideals that made this country so successful in the first place. They are not merely arguing that the system needs to live up to its own ideals, which was the argument of the suffragettes and the civil rights movement. They are arguing that the ideals themselves are illegitimate.
The tragedy here is that liberalism—in the classic Enlightenment sense—is the only system ever created to help people break out of the oppression of identity politics. For thousands of years, nearly every society on earth divided people up into permanent categories of caste, class, peasant and noble, and, of course, male and female. The Lockean principle of treating every human as equal in the eyes of God and government, heedless of who their parents or ancestors were, broke the chains of tyranny more profoundly and lastingly than any other idea.
Does America fail to live up to that ideal? Of course. Every human and human institution fails to live up to its ideals. That is why we call them ideals. They are something to strive for. Every wife and husband who ever repeated a marriage vow has fallen short of their promise at one point or another. But that is not an argument for not trying to stay true to their oath. The devout Christian is the first to admit that he or she fails to live up to the injunction to be Christlike (1 Corinthians 11:1). But that entirely human failure is not an indictment of the Christian ideal. Even the greatest philanthropists will readily concede that they could be even more charitable. Does that discredit the good they do? Oskar Schindler, the man made famous by Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, was overwhelmed with remorse that he didn’t do more to save more Jewish lives during the Holocaust. But he did save more than a thousand of them, at great personal risk. Shall we declare him a villain in that chapter of humanity for doing good while falling short of perfection?
The original argument for diversity was a thoroughly liberal one, in the Lockean sense. Elite universities once discriminated against Jews, blacks, Asians, and women on the grounds that such institutions were a privilege reserved for white Anglo-Saxon Christians. The argument for diversifying universities was purely an appeal to classic American principles of inclusion and meritocracy. Today, many universities as a matter of core policy and conviction discriminate in admissions against Asians, Jews, and whites on the grounds that the principle of diversity trumps any considerations about merit. When the University of California system was forced, against strenuous objections, to abandon racial preferences, the number of Asians admitted skyrocketed. They now make up a plurality of students, roughly one-third, even though Asians constitute only 15 percent of the state’s population. Asian students made up 40 percent of the student population at UC Berkeley in 2012 and 43 percent of the student population at the California Institute of Technology.48 Meanwhile, in elite universities outside of California, Asians need 140 more points (out of 1600) on the SAT to be admitted (while blacks need 310 points fewer).49
In order to defend this institutional discrimination, the clerisy must embrace doctrines of racial essentialism and authenticity. Lee Bollinger, then the president of Columbia University, famously stated:
Diversity is not merely a desirable addition to a well-rounded education. It is as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare. For our students to better understand the diverse country and world they inhabit, they must be immersed in a campus culture that allows them to study with, argue with and become friends with students who may be different from them. It broadens the mind, and the intellect—essential goals of education.50
This is a fine sentiment. But it glosses over the fact that universities subscribe to a very narrow definition of diversity. Intellectual, ideological, and religious diversity take a backseat—sometimes a very distant backseat—to a very specific kind of bean counting. Beside the practical educational problems with racial quotas—promoting students above their ability, making it more likely they will drop out of college, for instance—there is the philosophical and moral problem. It makes racial essentialism into a permanent standard. The original justification for affirmative action policies was that they were a necessary bending of an ideal for special circumstances. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair,” Lyndon Johnson famously explained in his 1965 commencement address to Howard University.51 The argument for bending the ideal of individual merit in 1965 was defensible, given the special history and conditions of African-Americans at the time. The doctrine of “diversity” for its own sake goes past bending to breaking the old ideal.
This highlights the power of words and how the new class intellectuals use them to change or undermine institutions. New class bureaucrats have not only expanded the definition of diversity to include other racial groups that had never been slaves or subjected to Jim Crow but have also arrogated to themselves the arbitrary power to decide what counts as “good” diversity, just as they assert authority over what constitutes acceptable language. When agents of the state and other officials have unilateral authority to change the ideal based upon their own political, aesthetic, or cultural preferences, they are substituting objective standards for their own arbitrary power, their own priestcraft.
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All political parties are coalitional to one extent or another, but the Democratic Party has always been more coalitional than the modern Republican Party, which, since the rise of Goldwater-style conservatism, has been more ideological. To the outside observer, it might seem odd that the FDR coalition contained Klansmen, blacks, and socialist Jews. Even in recent years, it was not intuitively obvious why the party of same-sex marriage should also be the default party of the Teamsters.
Psychologically and ideologically, these alliances are often rationalized by progressive elites on the grounds that they are defending the defenseless victims of social prejudice. This makes some sense if you start from the romantic premise that traditional civilization is retrograde and oppressive and therefore those who want no part of it are oppressed. This kind of argument is routinely voiced in Europe by human rights activists, who have no problem attacking traditional customs and institutions but insist that non-Western religious or cultural minorities must be given the widest possible latitude: “Who are we to judge?” for the practitioners of Sharia, but judgment
alism as far as the eye can see for traditional Christians.
As a broad generalization, the practitioners of identity politics and their coalitional allies have leached off the inherent decency of this country and the constitutional order to press their advantages. To the extent that they have respected the rules while trying to undermine them at the same time, they have done so while living off borrowed capital. You can get away with a lot of illiberal theatrics and demands in a liberal society, and one of the great, eternal challenges for democratic governments is to figure out how much one can tolerate before the forces of illiberalism corrode the liberal order.
But tolerance is a two-way street. In a decent society, the majority owes respect to the minority. And the minority owes the majority respect as well. That bargain has fallen apart, most acutely in Europe, but America is not far behind, as the champions of identity have grown in power. The story has been embellished to the point where the majority are not cast as tolerant and decent citizens trying to figure out how we should live with one another; the majority are now simply villains.
In August of 2017, two law professors, University of Pennsylvania’s Amy Wax and University of San Diego’s Larry Alexander, penned an op-ed arguing that the breakdown in bourgeois values has led to much of the social discord and dysfunction of contemporary society. The bourgeois culture of the 1940s to 1960s laid out “the script we all were supposed to follow”:
Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.
Wax and Alexander acknowledged the downsides of that era, but they also noted that bourgeois norms help the disadvantaged more than they help the wealthy, because the wealthy can afford their deviations. But, they note correctly, “all cultures are not equal” and bourgeois culture has benefits others do not.52 A coalition of students and alumni responded to the essay in predictable fashion. Wax and Alexander were peddling the “malignant logic of hetero-patriarchal, class-based, white supremacy that plagues our country today. These cultural values and logics are steeped in anti-blackness and white hetero-patriarchal respectability…”53 It goes on in that vein for a while.
It’s all such nonsense. One has to wonder: If the Judeo-Christian and bourgeois norms of the 1940s and 1960s were so malignantly racist and sexist, how is it that the civil rights movement and feminism ever succeeded in the first place? America was far whiter, the government and leading institutions far more dominated by white men, and the society as a whole was far more religious in the 1960s than it is today. And yet the Civil Rights Acts passed (almost exclusively thanks to the votes of white males in Congress—a majority of them Republicans), universities became coed, and society became more tolerant and welcoming. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t demonize whites or the Founding; he appealed to the very ideals that are now declared illegitimate. He didn’t vilify bourgeois values; he modeled them in public. He didn’t denounce the Judeo-Christian tradition; the Reverend extolled them from his heart. And, by the way, why did the struggle for gay marriage succeed? Because it appealed not to radicalism but to bourgeois values about family formation.
It must be pointed out that this is not simply about rhetoric. The rhetoric yields reality. Anywhere these religious or bourgeois values come into conflict with the agenda of the new class, they must give way. The architects of Obamacare insisted that nuns—nuns!—must pay for birth control and abortion coverage. In Massachusetts, Boston’s Catholic Charities closed down its adoption services because the state told it that if it wanted to find homes for orphans, it needed to place them with same-sex couples.54 I’ll spare the reader all of the controversies over transgender bathrooms, bakers being forced to make cakes for same-sex weddings, forcing the Marines to accept women, and the like.
Whatever one thinks about the merits of these individual policies, the larger point still stands. Under the progressive view of the state, tolerance only has one meaning: bending to a single vision of the culture. When activists say, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” they are saying there are no safe harbors in the culture, no rights of exit from the agenda of “social justice.” The Nazis borrowed the term Gleichschaltung from engineering to describe a doctrine whereby every institution, every Burkean “little platoon,” must coordinate with the state or be crushed. My point here is not to single out the role of the state but to emphasize the larger climate of power politics.
As Alexis de Tocqueville most famously argued, our liberal order depends upon mediating institutions, or what he called “associations,” that create and enrich the space between the individual and the state. These institutions—families, churches, businesses, schools, sports teams, charities, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, etc.—are the microcosms that provide meaning for individuals in the larger macrocosm of the nation. By their nature, they must be culturally distinct in some meaningful way if they are to be “sticky.” It is the cultural distinctiveness—the quirks of theology, custom, and mission—that appeal to some people and leave other people cold that provide members a sense of community, belonging, and meaning.
African-Americans understand this implicitly and often express it with great eloquence when it comes to their own historic institutions, both physical and cultural. Historically-black colleges have a rich and laudatory history in America. The black church has been a heroic spiritual, cultural, and political bulwark and safe haven. Jews, likewise, have an incredibly rich collective consciousness of not just the role their religion plays but the myriad customs that give their lives meaning and that have kept them culturally and religiously intact over millennia. The same goes for virtually every ethnic minority and identity group, from gays to the Amish to the deaf. Within broad parameters, there is nothing wrong with any of this, and very much that is right. The key to a thriving civil society is a multiplicity of institutions where diverse groups of people can find a home.
The one hitch is that you must have the “right to exit.” Individuals must have the ability to leave communities and other institutions that do not serve their interests. The miserable, abused wife must be allowed to leave the marriage. The non-believer must be able to walk out of his church, mosque, or temple. The worker must be allowed to leave her job. The right to exit is not absolute. The soldier cannot desert his unit without paying a price. Divorce laws can be written in a way that allows for “cooling-off periods.” Children cannot wander off in a huff. Employees can be held to account for contracts they voluntarily signed. But individuals must have the ultimate authority to say “this is not for me,” and institutions must be allowed to have some cultural “stickiness” if they are going to be able to do their job. And that stickiness can only come from a certain degree of cultural distinctiveness that runs somewhat counter to the mainstream culture. What is true of the hippie commune and gay chorus is also true of the Catholic nunnery and the Boy Scout troop.
There was a time when the right to exit wasn’t the problem, but the right to enter was. Jim Crow laws and sex and religious discrimination policies were immorally exclusive. The country had a series of big, democratic arguments about these barriers, and those arguments were consistent with the Western tradition, not in defiance of it.
Unfortunately, progressives could not take yes for an answer. The failure of ubiquitous and total equality to materialize overnight was seen as proof that classically liberal, color-blind policies were not enough, particularly among a whole class of activists who made a career of exaggerating the nature of the problems so as to justify their own status and power. Psychologically, the romantic desire to fight oppression, to be a person of radical commitment, was unfazed by success after success. Social justice has
become an industry unto itself. Progressivism now lacks a limiting principle for governmental and social action. There’s always more work to be done, more injustice to be identified—or imagined—and then rectified. As Democratic senator Chris Murphy said in a moment of jubilation when the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed: “There is no anxiety or sadness or fear you feel right now that cannot be cured by political action.”55 This is a description not of politics but of religion.
Social justice warriors do not seek to simply destroy existing traditional Western culture (or what’s left of it); they seek to create a new culture, or what Hillary Clinton called a “new politics of meaning.” On its best terms, this can be a defensible vision of social democracy, multiculturalism, and secularism. But that vision is almost entirely theoretical. Quite literally, it has simply never been tried on anything like the scope its proponents are attempting, save in places like the Soviet Union. And as that catastrophic experiment demonstrated, whenever you try to replace well-established cultural norms and traditions with an abstract new system, you do not open the door to a new utopia; you open the door to human nature’s darker impulses.
Among the greatest benefits of old institutions is that they are old. Old trees can weather a storm that uproots saplings. Any institution that has been around for a long time has, through a kind of evolutionary adaptation, learned how to cope with crises. The Catholic Church has endured for more than 2,000 years, and in that time it has learned a few things. Judaism has been around for roughly twice as long, which at minimum speaks to the resources Jews have developed to survive.
The Japanese monarchy, the oldest continuous monarchy, dates back to 660 B.C. There is a reason the current Japanese constitution describes the emperor as “the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people.”56 In the literal ashes of World War II, the Japanese could still look to the emperor as a reassuring symbol of communal meaning.
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy Page 27