Luke Ford

Rod Dreher writes: A reader left this comment on the “What’s The Matter With Utah?” thread. I think it’s really thought-provoking and challenging, but he posted it under his real name, and I’m worried that if I approve it, it will set him up to be attacked. Reader, if you are sure that you want me to approve it, let me know and I will. But I want to throw the comment out there for discussion, because the issues the reader brings up are real, and difficult:

The patterns displayed by Trump’s performance are ‘confusing’ only because they challenge core beliefs on both sides of the political spectrum about race and diversity. Conservatives are straining to deny the obvious because Trumps’s success confirms a long-denied narrative about the racial roots of the Southern realignment, as has been reiterated in at least a half-dozen op-eds a week. Occam’s Razor would suggest that the story, if a bit simplified, is the cleanest way to explain why an identity-politics candidate is performing well in the Old Confederacy states. Trump is winning in part because these are the same people who are losers in the global wage-arbitration realignment, to places like China, but that’s just one more factor that reinforces their central racialist schema for understanding the world.

But the Left is also reluctant to acknowledge one important element of that narrative: The Putnam hypothesis that racial polarization increases with social contact. This denial is a deeply pernicious epistemological flaw, grounded in an incorrect understanding of human nature. A central dogma of post-religious society is that provincialism and xenophobia are a product of ignorance, and that when people come into contact with one another, they inevitably become more tolerant. But this conviction is a consequence of statistical anomalies, and is not at all representative of broader human nature.

Left-leaning members of the media believe that precisely because it works so well for them. When they encounter minorities in the fields of law, journalism, or politics, those minorities are almost always the handful of successful exceptions to the broader trend of poverty, lack of education, and social malaise. If the only blacks (Hispanics, etc) you encounter are the ones who are disproportionately successful, then it reinforces your conviction in the irrationality of racism, and the necessary existence of deeply perverse moral defects in anyone who doesn’t assent to the “obvious truth” of diversity as a source of social cohesion and institutional success.

Outside those enclaves, it’s easier to see the consequences of building policy around those outliers. Skimming off the handful of successful minorities and concentrating them (whether through affirmative action or by legitimate personal success) into a handful of wealthy multi-ethnic enclaves is itself a reason why many black communities are deprived of the social capital and networking needed to escape poverty. But worse, it tends to create a world where the points of contact between poor whites and poor blacks are entirely negative, and reinforce negative stereotypes in a way that falls far closer to the concept of “rational racism” (in the classic “taxi driver who avoids certain neighborhoods” sense) than the Leftist-orthodox rainbows-and-unicorns celebration of personal experiences as a remedy for bigotry. (This doctrine has only been reinforced by the outcome of the SSM debate, where the communities where homosexuals can comfortably be “out” are the ones where you’d expect to find lots of economically successful and charismatic public figures, in fields like sports and entertainment.)

I live in a poor part of town, about 50% black, 30% Hispanic, and 20% white. All my neighbors are black, and relatively poor. The house next to mine has three junker cars in the back yard, slowly rusting. At night (including last night!), I often hear gunshots and screaming fights between belligerent family members who use all manner of violent-sounding profanity to describe what they’d like to do to one another. God save the fatherless kids in the middle of those fights. Last month a repo-man came to our door asking about the working hours of our neighbor, in an attempt to intercept her; we told him that, so far as we can tell, she is unemployed and lives off benefits. Her children occasionally drop by with grandkids to avail themselves of free babysitting while they smoke pot. The kids seem nice enough, sometimes, but I won’t let my girls go over to play for fear of their parents’ drugs, booze, and guns. It’s hard to sleep, between the gunshots and the foundation-shaking ‘music’ that cars charitably broadcast to the neighborhood. Last fall one of the peach trees I’d been carefully tending was ripped up when a criminal fleeing the police was chased through my yard, eventually being tackled and cuffed on the back of my car after everyone in my house woke up to bullhorn-loud demands to “drop your weapon.”

To me, the existence of a Trump who loses Utah makes perfect sense. It’s hard to sustain anti-racism in the face of a world of social pathology that makes so many parts of the racist narrative feel so deeply rational and appealing. As a lower-elementary kid, I don’t remember ever comprehending the idea of racial prejudice when I attended a private school where there were three black kids, all of them from the families of wealthy politicians. They were so talented, and friendly, and, aside from skin color, so much like us! But when I transferred into the public school system in middle school, and I had to listen to sexually violent “suck my dick, bitch!” rap lyrics on the school bus every day, suddenly I didn’t like black kids nearly as much as I did before. I still said all the right things in public about racial tolerance, but they felt more than a little fake. The black kids were mean. They swore. They fought. They made fun of me. They talked about hurting other people with guns and knives, and it was scary. Despite what my parents said, I felt that the value of being in a “more integrated” public school was all a sham — and having a Trump-esque figure in my circle of friends willing to admit that sham in public would have felt liberating. It was making me vastly less tolerant and open-minded than the unnaturally white private school I had attended before.

Two years later, I started listening to a lot of Rush Limbaugh, and the guy really made sense to me.

I’m aware that tendency cuts both ways. I’m sure there are things that my black neighbors dislike about my house and family — My dog barks too much! I have messy-looking vegetable gardens in the front yard! I’m a dorky-looking nebbish on a bicycle! — and I’m sure they have to work to avoid letting that personal frustration evolve into some broader critique of “white people” in general. All the same socio-economic self-sortings that make working-class white racism feel justified against blacks (or Hispanics) are increasingly likely to cut the other way, as white working-class communities dissolve into meth addiction and out-of-wedlock births and are perceived as dysfunctional by “minorities” that are (in the case of Hispanics particularly) passing them by. Most of the best maintained houses in my neighborhood are owned by Mexicans with a talent for working in construction, and I’m sure they hate living next to poor white trash families in homes with rotting frames without the resources to escape to the exurbs, and who are trapped here pulling down their property values.

But what liberal wants to go up on live TV and admit the obvious truth, that segregation and demographic homogeneity are a powerful force for racial harmony, the best antidote for Trumpian racial resentment, and the easiest way to create the kind of social cohesion that allows us to have a generous Scandinavian welfare state? What conservative wants to tell successful blacks in the position of a Ben Carson or a Clarence Thomas that they should have maintained their identity in poor black neighborhoods, full of selfish (or even well-meaning) friends and relatives who will try to drag them back down into poverty? Which StopTrump secularist organization wants to publicly advocate the sort of strong religiously-motivated homogeneity of Mormon choirs, as an alternative to the “celebrating our diversity” whitewashing of cultural suicide by an African-American artistic community that went from Jazz at Carnegie Hall to the bitches-and-hos hip-hop that blares from every window-rattling car that drives past my front yard?

If Trump is defeated by normal mechanisms, then states like Utah will deserve much of the credit — and that means that the voluntary racial segregation that arose through Mormon migration and discrimination (until recently, by explicit doctrine!) will deserve part of that credit. But no one will dare to say that out loud.

The “Putnam hypothesis” the reader refers to is the research that Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam undertook that … well, read the 2007 Boston Globe piece about it. Excerpt:

It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

“The extent of the effect is shocking,” says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.

The study comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues. The study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation’s social fabric. But with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, the real question may yet lie ahead: how to handle the unsettling social changes that Putnam’s research predicts.

“We can’t ignore the findings,” says Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. “The big question we have to ask ourselves is, what do we do about it; what are the next steps?”

The study is part of a fascinating new portrait of diversity emerging from recent scholarship. Diversity, it shows, makes us uncomfortable — but discomfort, it turns out, isn’t always a bad thing. Unease with differences helps explain why teams of engineers from different cultures may be ideally suited to solve a vexing problem. Culture clashes can produce a dynamic give-and-take, generating a solution that may have eluded a group of people with more similar backgrounds and approaches. At the same time, though, Putnam’s work adds to a growing body of research indicating that more diverse populations seem to extend themselves less on behalf of collective needs and goals.

His findings on the downsides of diversity have also posed a challenge for Putnam, a liberal academic whose own values put him squarely in the pro-diversity camp. Suddenly finding himself the bearer of bad news, Putnam has struggled with how to present his work. He gathered the initial raw data in 2000 and issued a press release the following year outlining the results. He then spent several years testing other possible explanations.

When he finally published a detailed scholarly analysis in June in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies, he faced criticism for straying from data into advocacy. His paper argues strongly that the negative effects of diversity can be remedied, and says history suggests that ethnic diversity may eventually fade as a sharp line of social demarcation.

“Having aligned himself with the central planners intent on sustaining such social engineering, Putnam concludes the facts with a stern pep talk,” wrote conservative commentator Ilana Mercer, in a recent Orange County Register op-ed titled “Greater diversity equals more misery.”

Whole thing here.

COMMENTS:

* I’m not sure what to make of the writer’s laments. I live in a middle to upper middle class community that is ethnically & cultural diverse; my next door neighbor is Russian/Ukrainian, the family across the street is Latino, down the block there is an African American/Filipino family, a gay couple, a couple of Indian families and so on. There are plenty of churches in town including a couple of mega Evangelical churches that are massive, a large Mormon temple and Sikh temple to name a few. So not a strictly secular, MTD crowd. As of 2012 the political breakdown was roughly 55% GOP & 45% Dem. We also have a Sun City with lots of well to do seniors and other senior communities that aren’t quite as affluent. So we really are quite diverse excepting income. And I think educational attainment & income are the determining factors to a civil and functioning community. Generally people who are well educated/technically skilled and make a comfortable living are more likely to be accepting of diversity. Lack of education and poor/non existent career opportunities are the problem, not race, religion,etc. The writer speaks of ” white trash” with dilapidated homes which reinforces my point – economic insecurity is the root of the issue. That is what needs urgent addressing.

* It is worth noting that the “Nation of Immigrants” was a Nation of segregated neighborhoods and clubs in the height of its “Immigrantiness” in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

There were severe immigration restrictions put in place in the mid-1920’s which ultimately led to significant assimilation with respect to White ethnics anyway. Forty years later, we passed comprehensive civil rights legislation and opened the borders, and we are now in a new era of “immigrantiness”, for better or worse.

As far as segregation, it is very fine to get on the high horse, but America remains as segregated as it ever was in the 1950’s. We just segregate by Zip Code instead of neighborhood like we did in the old days. You can look to the Burger Court if you want to know why. It makes no sense to claim that we are “integrated” today in contrast to some mythic past when we were “segregated”.

Jim Crow in the South, with respect to public accommodations, voting rights, vigilante violence, went well beyond segregation. However, there was plenty of segregation in terms of neighborhoods and private clubs outside of the South, which relatively speaking, may have been more benign. Further, those patterns have mostly continued, with some territorial adjustments.

There is a change in the elite, we have a multi-racial, multi-ethnic elite that is selected primarily on the basis of IQ, and homogenized by a process of common liberal education/indoctrination, and these elites share degrees from fancy colleges. But this is in fact a dream world, take the cream from everyone and homogenize them and they can get along to some extent. It is precisely those elements that are not the “cream” that create the lion share of social and political problems.

* Diversity may provide intellectual cross-pollination when it occurs among the educated and tolerant but it doesn’t work among people who don’t operate at the intellectual level and have little in common socially. The economic and cultural elites have prescribed “diversity” for the common man perhaps thinking that since it works for engineers, doctors and lawyers, it will work just as well for hip-hoppers and their bitch/ho culture, or Hispanic gang-bangers, or poor ignorant whites. But it obviously doesn’t work well; of course, the elites miss this fact because they do not put themselves or their families in a “diverse” environment of ignorant, impoverished, perhaps violent people.

When their cherished objective of diversity fails, the intellectuals and economic elites must find an explanation. It cannot be that enforced diversity is a bad idea. It cannot be that the socially and economically powerless resent being forced to live among those they dislike or fear. It cannot be that, rather than judging people by the color of their skin, people are judging others by the content of their character. No, it can only be that those who resist diversity are “racists” who have not yet been sufficiently exposed to diversity to appreciate its wonders.

But there is another explanation that is simpler, and truer: it is called “human nature”; humans don’t particularly like other humans, and all the kings horses and all the kings men will not make them like or accept people they don’t like or want to accept. People tend to prefer to live among those they consider their own kind. They do not welcome interactions with people who have values or exhibit behaviors of which they disapprove. In every heterogeneous society in the world, people self-segregate—unless prevented from doing so by government fiat. Thus we have the unremarkable phenomenon that successful blacks don’t move back to the “hood” to pull their fellow blacks out of ignorance and poverty; they just don’t want to be around people of that caliber.

* It’s interesting that Chesterton recognized that living in a homogeneous community separated from other races and cultures tends to increase tolerance and goodwill toward them. Consider what he wrote in the introduction to What I Saw in America: “I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like.”

When I first read that as a teenager, I found it somewhat shocking, but the more I observe the world, the more I realize that in this, as in much else, Chesterton knew what he was talking about. Putnam didn’t uncover anything people didn’t recognize a century ago; but even having a vast body of pitiless data to demonstrate the fact won’t crack the ideological convictions of the “diversity is our strength!” crowd.

So it is only natural that Utah finds Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric unappealing precisely because it is among the least racially and religiously-diverse parts of the country – it is easy to love immigrants when almost none of them live near you. Sweden is a perfect example of this. They were one of the most harmonious and ethnically-homogeneous nations in the world, and so had no hesitation to share their success by throwing open their doors to vast numbers of refugees and economic migrants from the Balkans, Africa and Asia. And now, after a few years of this, the Sweden Democrats, a hard Right ethno-nationalist party is leading the polls there. The introduction of large numbers of foreigners of different races and religions has turned a large portion of what was famously the most open and tolerant society in the world into anti-immigrant nationalists in an astonishingly short amount of time. Those who have eyes, ought to see.

The social engineers must be stopped before they wreck the very foundations of functional, pluralistic democracy pursuing their flawed ideals. They must come to understand, whatever they would like to be true, that in many cases diversity narrows the mind.

* It is hard to imagine how anybody can seriously believe that Balkanization (which is what “Diversity” should properly be called) is anything other than an invitation to disaster.

Only highly educated ivory-tower intellectuals can be dumb enough to believe that in the first place.

Human beings are naturally tribal, and most people do best and are happiest & most productive when they are in the company of others who are similar (but not necessarily identical) to themselves.

When you try to force dissimilar peoples into close contact, the best you can hope for is simmering resentment. And, sooner or later, (per Enoch Powell) you are likely to have “rivers of blood in the streets.”

And those who call themselves “Libertarians” should keep firmly in mind that it is absolutely impossible for a country to be both a “diverse, multicultural utopia” and a limited-government constitutional republic. (Obviously, the advocates & beneficiaries of Big Government regard that as a feature rather than a bug.)

Once you get Balkanized, the only thing that can keep the lid on is an iron-fisted central government. And if you don’t believe that, just look at what happened between the Turks & the Armenians when the Ottoman Empire collapsed; look at what happened in India & Pakistan when the British Empire collapsed; or look at what happened in Yugoslavia when the Soviet Empire collapsed.

“Diversity” is a curse. (And it really has nothing to do with whether some of the peoples are “good” and others are “bad.” Just the fact that they are different is enough.)

* The uncomfortable truth is that the Greek polis was a very ethnically homogeneous creation, and was able to govern itself, even with direct democracy, because of a broadly shared agreement on the good.

In contrast, the Imperial Nation, be it Byzantium or Macedonian or Russia (for example), is generally autocratic and there is some form of universalist religion (like Christianity or Islam) that is imposed on the majority, and religious minorities are at best entitled to second class status, if not persecutions. The Imperial Nation comes to exist by both pushing out certain other ethnic groups, as well as assimilating other ethnics.

For example, America pushed out the Native populations, but brought in European immigrants from beyond the British Islands to people the “virgin” continent. The Romans ethnically cleansed the Gauls to the North, but mixed with other tribes in the South of Italy. People love the “universalist” side of ethnogenesis, but it always comes with a dark side for those who are deemed incapable of assimilation (like the Cherokee People in the American Southeast or the Pied Noir in Algeria).

The problem is from the national standpoint, Nation States always want to expand their hegemony, meaning empire. At the same time, if you look domestically, people are much too humane to have a stomach for empire, and the birth rates are too low to have a surplus population that people are willing to send off in search of foreign conquest. America’s elites wants an Empire, but the American population is incapable of it.

Second, we are doing this global thing, and there are these global transfers of populations, but there isn’t anything like real ethnogenesis going on in America or Europe, and if it was, it would be viewed as a problem, not a solution. [I am trying to use non-judgmental language here.] So you have this weak, decaying sense of traditional identity being replaced by shopping and internet porn, and you are bringing in these people with totally different world views, customs and values, and you expect them to abandon their way of life and become shallow airheads. Good luck, empire on the cheap is pretty dicey.

There could be a populist push for a more Republican government, but it would be informed by anti-globalism and anti-immigration, an attempt to revive some portion of America’s historic traditions and an attempt to homogenize the existing population here in terms of a shared national culture. But good luck, the elites want war, the military industrial complex wants weapons, the multinationals want “access to markets” (e.g. gunboat diplomacy), Hollywood wants to market consumer identities and lifestyles to your children, and at the end of the day, who calls the shots in this country? Not Pat Buchanan.

* Diversity simply makes us care less for those around us, and focus more on the micro-level of ourselves and our immediate family and friends. It does this across racial lines, really. There are racists out there, for certain, but for most people the impact of diversity is a very watered down sense of community and communal interest, and a reinvigorated sense of self/personal-family over all else. This really is quintessential to our current culture. When you add in the exceptional emphasis on autonomous individualism, it just amplifies the effect, as both aspects increase the overall impact to create a breathtakingly anonymous, autonomous culture.

* Traits of human nature are inherently amoral, and can be employed in moral or immoral ends (depending on the given moral framework).

Take sex. We want to do it as part of our human nature. Without it, we wouldn’t be here. Sex can manifest itself positively — loving relations between faithful spouses who share in the joys and burdens of child-rearing — or negatively — rape and so forth.

Tribalism — which is basically a broader version of affinity for one’s close kinfolk; race, as Steve Sailer says, is just a partially inbred large extended family — is itself morally neutral, and evolutionarily adaptive. You hear tribalism and basically your mind Godwins, and that is certainly a possibility with tribalism, but tribalism is also why people have community, civilization, in the first place.

* The liberal policy of forced busing destroyed basically every city in the Northern US from the 1960’s to the 1980’s. It put white kids in situations where the family would have to move to get out of the schools where they would be beaten up all the time. I was there to see the end of it. But, this massive devastation has never been acknowledged, except to occasionally blame it on that racist Emmanual Goldstein.

Lenders lowered standards for mortgages before 2008 and this was justified on anti-racism grounds: since racism prevented lending in the past, morally we have to get rid of all standards, which are potentially racist. Every other aspect of the 2008 collapse can be looked at except the use of anti-racism to justify lowering lending standards.

Diversity/anti-racism is the foundation of our new unacknowledged official state religion. As such it can not be questioned no matter what the consequences.