* Not that I was aware of Ross Douthat back in 2002-03, but I recall reading later, around the time he was named as the NYTimes’ youngest columnist in history, that he was not only a strong supporter of the Iraq War but, in the style of the times, was actively criticizing anybody who was expressing opposition or reservations about the war. I don’t think he has ever admitted that his support of the Iraq War was wrong. I do remember when the Libyan War came up in 2011 that he wrote a column expressing reservations to the Libyan War based on “conclusions we learned from our involvement in Iraq,” or something to that effect. Not one word about how he supported the Iraq War and now thought it was a wrong decision.
In that way, Douthat is a lot like George Will, another prominent “conservative” columnist. Back in 2002-03, I was a regular viewer of ABC’s This Week, where George Will was a regular panelist at the time. I can remember him strongly supporting the Iraq War before it started and berating anybody who dared utter a word of opposition. A favorite target of his was Mohammed El Baredei of Egypt who was head of the international agency overseeing nuclear matters. Well, a few years later, around 2005, Will suddenly announced on This Week that the Iraq War violated every conservative principle in his body. As far as I know, Will never admitted that he had made a wrong decision about Iraq. I thought his admission that the Iraq War violated all his “conservative principles” was strange. I thought “principles” were deeply held beliefs that are arrived at through education and experience and were designed to guide your actions through life. I couldn’t understand what those “conservative principles” were that could be so easily discarded in the excitement of the moment.
* Much of the drive behind multiculturalism was the realization, I think, that the left (Jewish and otherwise) finally had at some specific point that biculturalism -that is blacks and whites- was never going to be a reality: that left to their own devices, blacks and whites would, either by state or voluntary action, separate themselves from one another and stay separate, blacks having their own media, entertainment, churches, doctors, barbers, funeral parlors, the whole gamut of things one could imagine.
I was witness to a recent discussion between some fortysomething white trendy college educated people about how “rap has gotten so shitty lately”. I am old enough now to know when to just stay silent and listen even though the ostensible premise of discussion is obvious horseshit, so as to hear the implicit assumptions. The discussion exactly echoed discussions I had had, in my blues guitar loving racially anticonscious days, about the black popular music that is now, itself, exactly the stuff these guys think is the benchmark of quality. We couldn’t understand why the young blacks had no use for or had never heard of the old blacks we thought were-as they say now-”the shit”. (I guess even that is passe’ now. Well, as they said fifteen years ago.) It is now understood that whites tend to approve of the black music of decades past while detesting that which is current, for two reasons. One is that blacks continually seek to differentiate their culture from white culture and so make it “more black”, and the other is this implicit feeling on our (the whites’) part that blacks at present must be specially decadent because they weren’t always this f***ed up.
Well, the answer is, most of them always were and always will be, short of a eugenic event of massive proportions. Multiculturalism-creating a continuum rather than a line of color-requires a number of different people to inhabit a space. So, they made it so.
The results are repellent to regular people, but someone must have seen the results in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica and other places and said, gee, that’s for us!
Who that someone is is obvious to all, and therefore the natural feelings this induces in everyone else have to be suppressed. But such suppression only works for so long. The Catholic Church suppressed the heresies that Protestantism represented for a while, but the invention of Gutenberg made it untenable in the end.
The liberal order is scared and vulnerable. Its opponents, though, are divided and often dysfunctional. We live in interesting times indeed.
