Victor Davis Hanson
The United States until recently was the world’s only multiracial, well-functioning, large democracy/constitutional republic. India and Brazil are plagued by poverty, violence, and political discord. Other nations do not attempt multiracial/multireligious/multiethnic paradigms lest the project turns out like the Balkans, Rwanda, or Iraq.
Instead, nations usually encompass blood-and-soil commonalities of religion, race, tribe, and ethnicity. Japan does not welcome a large African immigrant population; China does not grant citizenship or even residence to Peruvian or Columbian migrants. Anyone can work in the Gulf and from anywhere, but the Saudis do not grant Indians and other “guests” full citizenship. Nor does India grant Nigerians easy entry and citizenship. Gaza and the West Bank would either turn away, harass, or kill would-be gay, trans, or Mormon immigrants. Chad does not treat equally its rare citizens of Chinese or European ancestry. A Swedish-American could never fully be considered Mexican should he apply for Mexican citizenship.
Only in North America do constitutional states not define their citizenry or their immigrants by race, religion, or tribe—or so we thought. The logical fruition of the “all Men are created equal” clause of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 was that a nation founded by Enlightenment thinkers of almost exclusively British white ancestry was the current multiracial society of America.
But—and this is an important qualifier—the Founders envisioned a racially blind not tribal society. They wanted race to be incidental not essential to who we are. Yet we now live in an aberrant age where the 60-year-long Civil Rights movement has transmogrified from emphasizing the content of our character to the color of our skin, or, as Professor Kendi puts it, the “good” “anti-racist racism.” To stop supposed white prejudice you must be prejudiced against whites, in Hatfield-McCoy endless tit-for-tat fashion.
Woke/DEI/political correctness/affirmative action—whatever the term one employs—has descended into a virulent notion that the nation is divided by a 70 percent oppressor/victimizer/white majority and a noble 30 percent oppressed/victimized/and non-white minority.
One bizarre result of this Marxist construct, completely unmentioned by the DEI apparat, is that the so-called majority in its seventh decade of the Civil Rights movement does not seem to be all that privileged. Whites in absolute numbers make up the largest group of poor. In terms of annual income adjudicated by race or ethnicity, they fall well behind most Asian-American ethnic groups. They are suffering from reduced life expectancy and higher rates of suicide. Why?
Note that the wealthy, globalist white elites use DEI to the equal opportunity aspirations of the white middle and working class on the theory they are deplorables/irredeemables/chumps/clingers/crazies and thus can be excluded in hiring and promotions on the basis of their race. (Stanford University this year allowed 9 percent of its entering class to be white males, a demographic that nationally may well be 30-35 percent of the population. And crede mihi that 9 percent was accounted mostly for by legacies, kids of mega-donors, administrators, and athletes.)
The real privileged white coastals have the means, influence, and desire to circumvent the very racist categories of exclusion they construct. The result is that DEI/woke does little to nothing to benefit poor whites, Asians, blacks, and Hispanics, but a great deal to privileged upper-middle-class minorities and the upper-upper mostly leftwing media/corporate/entertainment/political/academic white ruling class.
The result? The nation is segmenting and not just by red/blue state dichotomies, but by tribe, as self-segregation increases and all the cargo of historical animosities that comes along with it.
To be continued…
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