Diversity and Its Limits

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Luke Ford

Charles Murray writes for Claremont Review of Books:

* The crisis of American democracy demands a clear-eyed understanding of the ways in which differences in ethnic groups and some sources of political polarization are never going to be resolved.

* In The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, political scientist Yascha Mounk asks the most far-reaching political question of our age: can democracies that are ethnically diverse survive?

* The first disparity between America and western Europe is that whites continue to be an overwhelming majority of the population everywhere in western Europe. Ten west European countries have populations that are over 90% white. The most diverse country in west Europe by this measure is the Netherlands, with “only” 84% whites. Compare that with the United States, where whites amount to only 60% of the population and are on their way to becoming a minority. The reason this is important has nothing to do with whiteness or European culture. Rather, Europe’s white population matters because a large ethnic majority can unilaterally set the terms of assimilation by minorities. This is as true of the Chinese majority in Singapore as of the white majority in Norway. The countries of western Europe still have the option to do what the United States did throughout its history until the 1960s: energetically socialize immigrants into the culture of their new country and require, as Theodore Roosevelt famously put it for the United States, that an immigrant’s naturalization be “predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American.” Whether any west European nation will do this is an open question, but it is an option for them. It is no longer an option for the United States.

The second disparity is the size of the individual ethnic minorities. No one ethnic minority in any west European nation is large enough to be a political force on its own except France’s North African population (estimated at 10%). Everywhere else, the largest discrete ethnicity is a few percent of the population. A few percent of the population cannot become a political force on its own, and different immigrant ethnicities seldom form alliances. In contrast, the United States has two large and politically powerful minorities: Latinos (19% of the population) and blacks (12%). Asians (6%) are emerging as another.

* The problem is that ethnic diversity in a community significantly erodes social trust, not only between different ethnic groups but also among people within the same ethnic group. This ominous relationship was first documented in 2007 by Robert Putnam in “E Pluribus Unum” (Scandinavian Political Studies). By 2020, a meta-analysis of the relationship (“Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust,” Annual Review of Political Science) could call upon 87 separate studies. All 87 found a statistically significant negative correlation between ethnic diversity and social trust…

* the third sin of omission, ignoring the literature on ethnic differences in social behavior, is definitely mortal. Social behavior refers to the constellation of ways in which people act with respect to social institutions (marriage, civic activities, religious activities) and places (workplaces, schools, sidewalks, public parks, or others’ homes). The question regarding Mounk’s topic is whether social behavior varies by ethnicity, and the answer is yes on a host of behaviors. If the differences were small, the implications for sustaining a diverse democracy would also be small. For America’s East Asians and South Asians, the differences with whites are, in fact, small. For Latinos, they usually vary from small to moderate. For blacks, they usually vary from moderate to large.

To illustrate, I use one of the most important social behaviors: marriage. The following numbers refer to the percentage of adults aged 20 and over who are in heterosexual marriages with the spouse present, using data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Surveys for 2013–2020. Asians had the highest marriage rate (61%), followed by whites (54%), Latinos (44%), and blacks (28%)—a huge difference from top to bottom. Since marriage rates are known to increase along with education, it may be asked if the ethnic differences persist for people with high school diplomas, associate’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, and professional degrees. In the case of whites and Asians, the differences ranged from zero to five percentage points across those educational levels—small. In the case of Latinos and whites, the differences ranged from nine to 13 percentage points—moderate. In the case of blacks and whites, the differences ranged from 18 to 24 percentage points—large.

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Teaching The Holocaust

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Luke Ford

From the Claremont Review of Books:

* I have observed substantial variations among schools in their approach to the Holocaust. Jewish schools are more likely to place the Holocaust in historical context by reviewing the long history of European anti-Semitism, including medieval Jewish ghettos, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, and the Russian pogroms of the 1800s and early 1900s—sometimes including a gratuitous showing of Fiddler on the Roof (1971), which students at Jewish schools have already seen too many times. The Jewish schools also are more likely to complete the unit with an exploration of the role played by Holocaust survivors in launching the state of Israel. Schools with a Protestant or Catholic affiliation typically portray the Holocaust as a manifestation of pure evil, putting Adolf Hitler alongside mass murderers and serial killers. Schools without a religious affiliation, both public and private, commonly present anti-Semitism as one kind of prejudice, and sometimes set the Holocaust alongside the genocide of Native Americans and the treatment of African-American slaves in the South before the Civil War. Twenty U.S. states now require the Holocaust to be taught in schools. In some schools, it’s painfully clear that the teachers are assigning Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) merely to fulfill this requirement; serious in-depth discussion of the origins of the Holocaust is absent.

But in almost every case, whether the schools are Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, or secular, public or private, the Holocaust is taught using books and media in which most of the German characters are cardboard caricatures of evil.

* Most of us have a desire to belong to something bigger than ourselves. Whether it’s cheering at a football game, singing in a choir, or line-dancing at a wedding reception, there is a domain of human experience that can be enjoyed only in the company of many of our fellow creatures. Watching a football game on TV with a buddy at home is fine, but it’s not the same as singing the team fight song in a stadium in unison with 90,000 other fans. Maschmann’s memoir shows how the Nazis understood and exploited this primal human longing. Nazi mass festivities—such as the yearly Harvest Festival at Bückeberg attended by 500,000 or more; the Mayday celebrations; and of course the days-long Nuremberg rallies—were skillfully crafted to elicit and sustain this transcendent ecstasy.

It is popular today among intellectuals to devalue tribal experiences. Instead of group ecstasy, we moderns focus on individual fulfillment, self-actualization rather than self-transcendence. But this emphasis on the individual impoverishes and flattens the human experience. To transcend oneself, to sacrifice oneself for others, to love all the world, can indeed be a pinnacle of moral experience. Millions, be you embraced! This kiss for all the world!

* In March 1940, six months into World War II and nine years before the publication of his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues.” The Nazis, Orwell realized, understood something that the democracies did not:

“Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades…. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people, “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”

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The lights are going off in South Africa

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Luke Ford

Helen Andrews writes:

* “We blacks saw businesses we thought had no challenges,” a failing farmer tells her. “But we were lying to ourselves.” There you have it in a nutshell. Black South Africans thought their white neighbors were rich because of the things they had. As it turned out, nice things didn’t stay nice for very long without the codes of behavior that kept them nice. Being a white South African looked very easy from the outside, but it turned out to depend on lots of little habits that, even with the best will in the world, would have been hard to explain in advance. (Why is getting up early to mow your lawn a better quality in a neighbor than staying up late at a party?)

Nowhere is this gulf more evident than in South Africa’s political leadership. Whatever you want to say about the old National Party, they were not personally corrupt. Prime Minister J.G. Strijdom used to refund to the government every month the stamps he had used in personal correspondence. The ANC, on the other hand, has presided over a frenzy of personal enrichment. The current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has a stated net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and this is likely an underestimate, considering that some lucky burglars who happened to strike his personal farm in 2020 made off with $4 million cash in foreign currency. Punishment for corruption is rare. Former president Jacob Zuma is unusual in having been prosecuted for, and convicted of, money laundering. During his trial, he protested that corruption is only a crime “in a Western paradigm.”

* Would better leaders have saved South Africa? This is a standard argument: Mandela was a great man, then Thabo Mbeki and his successors screwed it up. The assumption is that if we could find another leader as good as Mandela, everything would be fine. This is unlikely. Consider Eskom, the embattled utility unable to provide reliable power. What could a new Mandela do about rampant theft from the company’s warehouses, where valuable replacement parts are often found stripped of their copper and left useless? Or about the refusal of many customers (including the vast majority of Sowetans) to pay their bills? In 1984, when the apartheid government tried to make one neighborhood of delinquent customers pay higher electricity bills, the resulting riot led to three local officials being hacked to death and their bodies burned in the street.

* Imagine if one day the international community decided that Latin Americans should be able to vote in U.S. elections, since our economy depends on their labor and their fates are affected by U.S. policies. The counterargument would have nothing to do with whether Latin Americans are good people or possess human rights. It would be that they outnumber us more than two to one and would, by sheer numbers, render native voters null overnight. That was Verwoerd’s case for apartheid: strictly mathematical. As long as blacks were 80% of the population and voting as a solid racial bloc, it would be folly to put the two communities into one democracy.

The argument that borders are the moral equivalent of apartheid is not just theoretical; it is being made today. The quality of life we enjoy in America is the result of exclusion. Otherwise, entire favelas would pack up and move here. On what moral basis do we keep them out? Do the people of Latin America not deserve nice things? One might ask why they can’t have nice things in their own country, but the answer would probably be that it is somehow our fault. Certainly it is not anything the Latin Americans are doing. That would imply that they are incapable of sustaining nice things, and that would be racist. Eventually the only reply to these liberal gotchas is to say that foreigners can’t have our country because it’s ours. That is precisely the kind of basic moral claim that the current Left would like to deprive Americans of the authority to make.

* When people say America is becoming more like South Africa, they usually mean that California can’t keep the lights on and private security is a booming business for middle-class neighborhoods in Baltimore and Portland. That is all part of it, but the most South African thing about our politics is the current effort to push white Americans into that same position as permanently powerless scapegoats.

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California’s Political Dysfunction

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Luke Ford

From the Claremont Review of Books:

* “California is experiencing—coincidentally—both a drought emergency and a flood emergency,” said the Department of Water Resources director. Only in CA.

When a state is afflicted by too little water and too much water, simultaneously, one might suppose that the whole point of having a Department of Water Resources is to turn this coincidence into a happy one.

* The State Water Project system remains unfinished. Since the 1970s there has been more litigating and planning than building, despite the fact that California’s population doubled between 1970 and 2020. Two recent books—Winning the Water Wars (2020) by journalist Steven Greenhut and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022) by Edward Ring of the California Policy Center—argue that the cycle of droughts and floods owes less to capricious nature than to failed governance. The “core problem,” writes Greenhut, is that California policy has come to emphasize “boosting fish populations” over meeting residents’ and farmers’ needs. Indeed, it has come to favor water scarcity as “a means to limit growth and force changes in the way we live.” He believes that the key component of a successful policy is expanding water storage throughout the state, both above and below the earth’s surface, so that rainfall and snowmelt is preserved for future use, rather than draining into the Pacific Ocean or overflowing riverbanks.

* California presently has twelve desalination plants in operation but, despite constant warnings that the latest drought is the worst in state—if not human—history, has been notably ambivalent about adding more. In May 2022 the California Coastal Commission voted 11-0 to reject a new plant in Orange County that would have provided 50 million gallons of water a day, enough to provide for 460,000 residents’ needs. As Edward Ring noted in National Review, the Poseidon Water company had, over a 24-year period, spent $100 million on the application for the plant. Much of that time and money, he notes, produced “seemingly endless studies and redesigns as the Coastal Commission and other agencies continued to change the requirements.” Despite these efforts, and the fact that Poseidon had been operating a similar desalination plant in neighboring San Diego County since 2015, the commission’s board followed its staff’s recommendation: to reject the project for economic and environmental reasons.

* Californians, directed to make conservation a way of life, may fairly ask why responsiveness and competency cannot be made a way of government.

* A state that once amazed the world with its freeways and bridges has now wasted 15 years and $10 billion building a high-speed rail system that, according to its original directors, may never carry a single passenger. The more money the state, counties, and cities spend to prevent homeless people from sleeping on sidewalks and in parks, the worse the problem gets. There appears to be no public responsibility so basic, down to thwarting shoplifters and reckless drivers, that California government hasn’t lost the ability or will to discharge it.

* In 2018 69% of Los Angeles County voters approved Measure W, a ballot proposition to raise property taxes for the purpose of improving facilities that capture and treat water. With nearly 10 million residents, a population more than one fourth of California’s, and exceeding that of all but the ten most populous states, L.A. County does not have the luxury of failing in slight and inconsequential ways. Yet the Los Angeles Times found that, as of March 2022, the county had collected $556 million as a result of the ballot proposition but disbursed only $95.5 million of the new revenues. And, given that “actual construction had lagged well behind the money disbursed…it could take half a century to complete the work.” One former county official told the paper, “Part of the problem is that we don’t have a plan and we are saying to voters give us the money and we will figure it out later.”

The payoff from the increased taxes will not only arrive in a more distant future than the voters were led to expect but will take a very different form. In particular, the Times reported, “Storm capture projects appear to be a low priority.” Discerning newspaper readers will infer that Measure W had the key elements of a bait-and-switch scam. Votes were secured on the promise of addressing the public’s greatest concern: drought relief through enhanced rainfall and snowmelt capture. But the wording revealed, to the handful of voters who worked through it, that W’s revenues would be available for a range of water-related purposes, and that the priorities would ultimately reflect officials’ preferences rather than the public’s. “[W]hatever voters thought,” the Times concludes, “new water resources are not the main focus of the Measure W process.”

* In 1910 the philosopher William James lamented that, throughout history, “war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community.” He looked forward, though, to a time when the “moral equivalent of war” will “inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.” All that is needed to attain “that higher social plane…of service and cooperation” is “skillful propagandism” and “opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.”

* It also gets harder to win elections when the activist state acquires a public image that is less like Santa Claus and more like Nurse Ratched: patiently, insistently, incessantly telling you to fasten your seatbelt, drive 55, remove your shoes before going through airport security, don’t use plastic straws, step out of the bar and stand on the sidewalk if you insist on smoking, wear your mask, get vaccines and boosters, lower your thermostat, replace your gas stoves, and water your lawn no more than once a week and for no more than ten minutes at a time. These interventions left many Americans feeling that liberalism’s supply of discipline and direction greatly exceeded the demand for it. As journalist Josh Barro warned liberals in 2017 in Business Insider, “All this scolding—this messaging that you should feel guilty about aspects of your life that you didn’t think were anyone else’s business—leads to a weird outcome when you go to vote in November.”

* One year ago The Atlantic’s Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on COVID, told another journalist, Sam Adler-Bell, that he covered the pandemic from the start as “an opportunity to take stock of societal problems that have been allowed to go unaddressed for too long.” Writing in New York magazine, Adler-Bell elaborated the point, calling COVID “an X-ray of the dysfunction and rot in our social order.” It had made clear the need for “the child tax credit, universal health care, investments in schools and hospitals, and alleviating poverty.” Accordingly, he said, the debates about COVID—when to end lockdowns, resume in-person public schooling, modify or drop mask requirements—“are as much about how we should regard all this suffering as they are about how we may prevent it.”

Replying in his online newsletter, Josh Barro called this approach to keeping the pandemic crisis from going to waste a flagrant case of “stolen-base politics.” Though people acquiesced in temporary departures from normal life during COVID, “[a]t no point, anywhere along the line, was there significant buy-in for the idea that we were going to permanently change the social contract.” The base-stealing involved skipping the step where the public was supposed to be persuaded that a Green New Deal was exactly the remedy needed to fix and redeem our rotten, dysfunctional social order. Persuasion is hard and humbling, requiring you to meet voters where they are in order to move them closer to where you think they should be. Far easier to declare that, because a crisis has rendered politics a luxury we can’t afford, we have no choice but to “trust the experts.”

* Greenhut’s Winning the Water Wars points out that in the late 1800s conservationist John Muir urged California to construct reservoirs “so that all the bounty of the mountains may be put to use.” By 1992, the Sierra Club felt it necessary to reproach its founder for such a “strong anthropocentric component” in his writing, different from, and inferior to, the “ecocentric thinking” animating the modern environmentalist movement.

* It is likely, even in heavily Democratic California, that the anthropocentric, all-of-the-above agenda of water abundance is more popular than the ecocentric ideal of perpetuating scarcity as a way to gradually supplant modern civilization with austerity. But, to rework a maxim ascribed to Stalin, how the people vote is less important than how their votes are interpreted, implemented, and litigated.

Californians’ desire for more water is clear…and hasn’t made much difference. California has not increased its reservoir capacity since 1980.

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India’s Uprising

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Luke Ford

Christopher Caldwell writes for Claremont Review of Books:

* Under Modi’s leadership the BJP, founded in 1980 and focused on the aspirations of the 80% of Indians who are Hindu, has become the world’s largest political party.

* India’s tiny sliver of Western-connected English-language opinion-makers tend to find Modi appalling. Their minoritarian take has hardened into Western conventional wisdom about India: Modi is understood as a subcontinental Viktor Orbán or Donald Trump. He is a demagogue, a populist, a reactionary. Some accuse Modi of religious fundamentalism, or of bigotry against India’s Muslims. He cares little for the rights of women and gays, say others. For certain opponents his sin is nationalism, for others it is cozying up to India’s billionaire tech moguls and venture capitalists. As the marching thousands of the Congress party poured into a village called Ghatiya in rural Madhya Pradesh, one English-speaking intellectual said he was marching against Modi to prevent the “onslaught of fascism.”

This is not how India’s modestly situated monoglots see Modi. Nor does it make sense. Western populist leaders are all, in one way or another, trying to stem the decadence of their once-great countries. Modi’s India has plenty of problems, but decadence isn’t one of them.

* The political advisory group Morning Consult keeps track of two dozen world leaders’ popularity, and Modi is generally in a class by himself. In February he stood at 78% approval and 19% disapproval—extraordinary for a leader nine years into the job. Only Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, at 63%, is even in the ballpark. Joe Biden is at 40. Emmanuel Macron is at 27. Modi wins and wins big because Indians see him as the embodiment of a different idea of India, a majoritarian one that, necessarily or not, was suppressed in the 20th century.

* Gandhi had two heirs apparent among the Congress movement’s freedom fighters. They vied jealously with one another. One was his fellow Gujarati lawyer Vallabhbhai “Sardar” Patel, a politician of almost preternatural practical abilities and an intense loyalty to Gandhi. The other was Nehru, privileged, educated at Harrow and Cambridge (where his friends called him “Joe”), charming, shaped by modern progressive doctrines and curious about the Soviet Union. The historian Sunil Khilnani gives an elegant summary in The Idea of India (1997) of the choice that faced Gandhi: “One [Patel] wanted the state simply to express and tend the existing pattern of India’s society, with all its hierarchy, particularity and religious tastes; the other [Nehru] hoped to use the state actively to reconstitute India’s society, to reform it and to bring it in line with what he took to be the movement of universal history.”

* The Indian Constitution, one of the world’s longest, was ratified in 1949. It managed the relationship between faiths much as the British raj had, giving each of India’s major religions the leeway to run its own affairs. So an Indian Muslim, even today, has the liberty to practice polygamy, while an Indian Hindu does not. What was most innovative about the constitution was that it invented the modern practice of affirmative action. Its great conceptualizer and drafter was B.R. Ambedkar, a social-science polymath, a lecturer at Columbia University, a radical political reformer, and a dalit, or “untouchable,” from the lowest reaches of India’s complex caste system, against which he held an understandable grudge. One of the things that made the constitution so long is that it laid out a “schedule” of 1,109 castes and 775 aboriginal tribes who would be eligible for “reservations,” or quotas, securing them a quarter of the seats in India’s parliament and granting them a quarter of government jobs. But only government jobs—in this respect, India’s affirmative-action system, however much it may have been belittled for its complexity, was actually less intrusive than the American one, with its litigation-fueled undermining of meritocracy in the private sector.

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