Is a demand for good grammar elitist and racist?

Three UK linguists wrote an article for Science News about a form of prejudice called linguicism.  It is discrimination against those who don’t speak the standard form of the English language.

Here is what they said:

Teacher and artist Sunn M’Cheaux has been posting on social media about “linguicism” after a reader asked him about the word “ax”, saying: “Why did we struggle saying ‘ask’? Like when I was little, I always said ‘ax’. Like I couldn’t say the word correctly.”

M’Cheaux’s response counters the common idea that “ax” (spelled also “aks”) is incorrect: “ax” isn’t a mispronunciation of “ask” but an alternative pronunciation. This is similar to how people might pronounce “economics” variously as “eck-onomics” or “eek-onomics”, for example. Neither of these pronunciations is wrong. They’re just different.

Linguicism is an idea invented by human-rights activist and linguist Tove Skutnabb-Kangas to describe discrimination based on language or dialect. The prejudice around “aks” is an example of linguicism.

Decades of research shows that the idea that any variation from standard English is incorrect (or, worse, unprofessional or uneducated) is a smokescreen for prejudice. Linguicism can have serious consequences by worsening existing socio-economic and racial inequalities.

[snip]

Schoolchildren who naturally say “aks” (or any other non-standard form of English) are tasked with the extra burden of distinguishing between how they speak and how they are expected to write. Conversely, no such barrier is faced by children who grow up speaking standard English at home, which can further entrench inequality. These children are already advantaged in other ways as they tend to come from high-status groups.

The way we speak has real implications in how we are perceived.  Research in south-east England found that young adults from working-class or from ethnic minority backgrounds tend to be judged as less intelligent than others – a prejudice based solely on the way they spoke.  The effect was worsened if the person was from Essex or London, or even if they were thought to have an accent from these places.

The example of “aks” neatly demonstrates the absurdity, the baselessness and, crucially, the pernicious impact of deeming any one form of English to be “correct.”  Accent prejudice and linguicism is a reframing of prejudice towards low-status groups who, simply, speak differently.

In answer, let me tell you of an experience of my old friend Steve.  He grew up in the same county in Maryland as I did, but relocated permanently to San Antonio a few years after I settled permanently in upstate New York.

He and his wife Martha checked into a Motel 6, and the clerk said something that sounded like, “Un gnat, rat?”  Steve, but not Martha, understood the clerk to be saying, “A room for one night, correct?”  He replied, “Rat!”

The clerk might have been as intelligent as anyone, but her inability to speak standard English not only marked her as a person of lower status, it limited her ability to communicate with people in the wider world.

Why so few Latin American mass shooters?

One explanation given for the high number of mass shootings in the USA, compared to other rich countries, is that the USA is an unusually violent country.

Compared to European countries, we have much higher rates of homicides and violent crime, combined with a much greater access to lethal weapons.  So it is not surprising we have more mass shootings.

But virtually no mass shooters in Latin America

But what about Latin America?  On average, Latin American countries have much more crime and more fatal shootings than the USA does.  Yet mass shootings are virtually unknown.

Paul Hirschfield, writing in Foreign Affairs, noted that in the Philippines, guns are sold openly in shopping malls and gun violence is endemic. The gun homicide rate in 2018 was 50 percent higher than in the USA.  Yet mass shootings are rare.

He pointed out that countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela have gun homicide rates far exceeding the USA’s.  But the Latin American region, which has 2.5 times as many people as the United States, has had only nine known lone-gunman style mass shootings since 1998.  Why?

One possible explanation, he wrote, is that the kind of suicidal loners who become mass shooters in the USA have different outlets in Latin America.  They may work out their rages by working as hit men or for police, military, terrorist or criminal organizations.

But he thinks the real answer is culture.  Extended family ties play a far greater role in Latin America than in Europe and North America.  Well-off Latin Americans on average live in larger households, have family nearby and usually live with their parents until marriage.  

This way of life promotes values such as loyalty, solidarity and interdependence that help counter-balance individualist values.  People who feel stigmatized or victimized are more likely to be defended by their kinfolk.

Of course not all Latin Americans enjoy the protection of extended families.  Hirschfield noted that Brazil’s infamous school shooter, who killed 12 children in a Rio de Janeiro school in 2011, had been adopted and lived alone.

But Latin Americans are notable for the ability of unrelated individuals to form voluntary associations and join together for mutual support.  This is called “relational mobility.”  Levels of relational mobility are above average among US Americans, but the level is twice as high in Mexico.

Hirschfield said that multiple studies have demonstrated that in a variety of situations, Latin Americans are more likely to display socially engaging emotions such as empathy, warmth, trust, and affection, and less likely to express socially disengaging emotions, such as pride and anger, than their counterparts in Europe and the United States.  So Latin Americans in crisis may have more moral support available than US Americans do.

My own take on this is that Latin Americans on average may be just as violent as we US Americans, or maybe more so, but they are much less suicidal.  Mass shootings are forms of homicide as well as suicide. 

Why so many US American mass shooters?

THE VIOLENCE PROJECT: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic by Jillian Peterson, PhD, and James Densley, Phd (2021)

Mass shootings are horrible, fascinating and distinctively American.  No nation has anywhere close to the number of mass shootings that occur in the USA.  They are so common it seems as if they are impossible to prevent.

A mass shooter is someone who, out of rage and frustration, opens fire on people in a public place.  Frequently mass shooting is a form of suicide; the shooter kills himself or is killed by police.

Fewer than 1 percent of U.S. firearm homicides are by mass shooters.  It is not a significant risk for US Americans generally, but the nature of the crime makes it fascinating and frightening. 

Two criminologists, Jillian Peterson and James Densley, took it upon themselves to create a data base of every mass shooting since 1966 who killed four or more people in a public place, and every shooting incident at schools, workplaces and houses of worship since 1999.

They compiled detailed life histories of 180 shooters, talking to their wives, parents, siblings, childhood friends, work colleagues and teachers.   They also talked to five convicted mass shooters serving life sentences in prison, and also found several people who planned a mass shooting but changed their minds.  The Violence Project is the result of their research.

According to The Violence Project, virtually all mass shooters have four things in common:

• Early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age
• An identifiable grievance or crisis point
• Study of the actions of past shooters and validation for their methods and motives
• The means to carry out an attack

There is a whole subculture of mass shooter fans on social media.   They regard mass shooters as heroes, because they’ve struck back at a world that marginalized them and made a name for themselves in a world that ignored them.

Roughly 70 percent of mass shooters are suicidal and 60 percent of mass shootings end with the death of the shooter.

It is like the ancient Greek story of Herostratus, who destroyed the world’s most beautiful temple in order that his name would be remembered.  And in fact, Herostratus is remembered, but the name of the builder of the temple is not.

News accounts spotlight today’s Herostratuses and provide scripts on how to act out their fantasies.    A mass shooting took place last May in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket, about 70 miles west pf where I live.  This was the top news story in my local Rochester, N.Y., newspaper for about a week.  Our many local homicides (76 last year) are usually reported on an inside page.

Most murders overall are by people known to the victims, most others are the byproduct of other crimes, but these kinds of crimes are more understandable than mass shootings.  The nature of mass shootings generates curiosity, which generates news coverage.

Peterson and Densley speculate that the reason for a decline in the number of serial killers is that mass shooters got more publicity.  They suggest that the names of accused mass killers be suppressed and that newspapers concentrate on reporting about the innocent victims and heroic resisters. 

Some questions about North American suburbs

I found this video and comment on Reddit through a link on MARGINAL Revolution.

I just watched this video from Not Just Bikes on YouTube, I have few questions.

Disclaimer: I’m from Slovakia, Eastern Europe, so bear in mind, I’m confusion.

He keeps on talking about how cities and suburbs have to meet certain types of regulations. For example the parking lot size, the road width, etc.

Then he says there can be only one family houses. There can’t be any businesses inside these residential suburbs and also no schools.

My questions are:

1. What do you actually do? Are you always stuck inside? What did you do when you were a child and couldn’t drive?

2. Why do you have these sorts of strange regulations? Are your officials so incompetent? Is this due to lobbying from car or oil companies? I don’t get it.

3. Why is there no public transport? It seems like the only thing is the yellow school bus. …

4. He says there can be only one family houses. Why? Why can’t you have … … [an apartment] block in the middle of such a suburb?  Or row houses or whatever.

5. Why are there no businesses inside these? I mean, he says it’s illegal, just why? If I lived in such a place, I’d just buy a house next to mine and turn it into a tavern or a convenience store or whatever. Is that simply not possible and illegal?

6. These places have front and backyards. But they’re mostly empty.  Some backyards have a pool maybe, but it’s mostly just green grass.  Why don’t you grow plants in your yards? Like potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes or whatever.  Why do you own this land, if you never use it?

Whenever I watched an American movie and saw those suburbs, I always thought these streets were located somewhere in a small village or something. Turns out these are located within cities up to 30 km away from Downtown…

Why is it so hard to pay attention?

STOLEN FOCUS: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari (2022)

I find it much harder to concentrate on a task than I used to.  

Once I could dash off a book review like this in a couple of hours.  Now what took me a couple of hours takes me a couple of afternoons.  

It’s partly that the task itself takes me longer.  But it is also that I can’t resist the temptation break off the work and check my e-mail or browse my favorite blogs.

I’ve attributed this to a combination of old age and weakness of character.  

But although my age and laziness are real, a science writer named Johann Hari has convinced me that there’s more to it.  He says our whole civilization and lifestyle are conspiring to distract me from focusing on what I need to do.

Hari is the author of Chasing the Scream, a best-seller about addiction, which I haven’t read, and Lost Connections, a best-seller about depression, which I have read and liked a lot.  In both books, he showed how a dysfunctional society makes personal problems worse, and the same is true of Stolen Focus.

In his new book, Stolen Focus, tells of his search for knowledge from neurologists, psychologists and his personal back-and-forth struggle to regain his own fading sense of focus.

He shows that distraction and the inability to concentrate are on the increase, not just for individuals but for society as a whole.

A study of office workers in the U.S. showed that most of them never get an hour of uninterrupted work in a typical day.  Another study shows that if you get interrupted, it will take, on average, 23 minutes to regain your focus.  Studies of top topics on Google and Twitter shows that the life of a hot topic on these media is growing shorter and shorter.

Increasingly, studies show, Americans and Britons are more stressed, more tired and more distracted.  We don’t get the sleep we need.  We read less and are less able to concentrate on what we read.  More and more of us juggle multiple jobs, or are on call 24/7 in the jobs we have. 

 It’s no wonder we find it hard to concentrate on things at hand. 

But if we can’t focus of this, we can’t deal with with the big challenges ahead we face individually and as a society.

Lots of things contribute to this—the faster pace of society, lack of sleep, our artificial manner of life and, of course, social media.

Hari offers tips on how to cope:

• If you can, find a pursuit or sport that gets you into a state of “Flow”—a state where you are totally engrossed in something worthwhile that challenges you.
• Get a good night’s sleep in a completely darkened, completely silent room.
• Take long walks in the fresh air and sunshine without a phone.
• Read long novels or watch long TV mini-series.  Fiction is more immersive than non-fiction and also makes you more empathetic.
• Avoid or cut down on stimulants and sedatives.
• Use all the Aps on your devices that enable you to set limits on notifications and interruptions.

∞∞∞

But trying to change individual behavior isn’t enough, he wrote.  The problem is deeper.

Robots, sex, addiction and the human future

Robots have been used for physical labor for a long time. Some time ago they started being used for intellectual labor.

More recently they started being used for emotional labor—robot pets that provide companionship to children and lonely old people, for example.

And now we have sex robots.

If you accept that sexual pleasure need not be associated with marriage, human reproduction or even affection, and if you are okay with pornography and sex toys, it is hard to make a principled objection to sex robots.

The. problem with sex robots is that they will be able fulfill specific sex fantasies more precisely than actual human beings can.  And that means some people, maybe many people, possibly even most people, will be unable to move from the fantasy aspect of sex to the love, marriage and childbearing aspect.

Pornography addiction is a problem.  Internet addiction is a problem.  Some people can’t bear to be separated from their cell phones.  Would sex robots become just as addictive?

Suppose you could buy a sex robot that would allow you to act out a sexual fantasy of rape and torture, or of sex with a small child?  Would that be acceptable, since no sentient being was actually harmed?  Or would this intensify the forbidden desires? 

If you’re exclusively eat extremely spicy food, you may lose your appetite for bland food.  And what if you become habituated to eating things that don’t nourish you at all?  I hope you see the problem.

I note in passing that all the prototype sex robots seem to have the female form.  We men might react differently if there were a lot of large handsome, muscular male prototype sex robots.

The SF writer Charles Stross wrote two novels, Saturn’s Children and Neptune’s Brood, in which the characters were sentient androids.  Human beings had died out, presumably from apathy and lack of a sense of purpose, because anything biological humans could do, androids could do better.

I don’t believe sentient androids are possible.  I could be wrong, though, because I don’t really understand what sentience is.  

If sentient robot slaves, including sentient robot sex slaves, are possible, that opens up a whole new category of evil, and also a whole new danger to the human race, when the androids begin to understand the difference between slavery and freedom.

The younger generation and the decline of sex

Back in 2020, the conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher wrote a blog post deploring the growing lack of interest by young American women in marriage, children and heterosexual sex.

A blogger who called himself the Flaming Eyeball then wrote a blog post saying Dreher didn’t tell the half of it.  He linked to a series of article depicting a younger generation ravaged by poor physical and mental health, declining testosterone in young men, and loss of interest in dating, marriage, having children and in sex itself.  

A short time late he suspended his blog, but another blogger had taken the trouble to copy it.  

None of the trends he mentioned are new to me, and he didn’t even get into the topics of Internet addiction, pornography addiction and addiction to prescription drugs.  But getting all this information at one time in one post made me stop and think.

I’m hard-put to think of a single factor that would explain all of this.  It would have to explain not only rejection of old-time moral standards, but the general apathy and listlessness.

Has the decline of religion and traditional values left the new generations with a lack of purpose?  Do some people find a complete freedom of choice too much to deal with?  How much is due to addictions?

Or is there a general sense of hopelessness in the face of new existential threats to humanity—the new four horsemen of the apocalypse, famine, pestilence, nuclear war and global warming?

Or is there some insidious biochemical change in the environment, akin to lead poisoning?

I am re-posting the Flaming Eyeball links and summarizing their contents.  My goal is to create a second archive of this information, and to invite comments.  

Please let me know whether you think this is real, what you think the reason might be and what, if anything, might be a solution.

No Families, No Children, No Future by Rod Dreher for The American Conservative (2020)

There are more unmarried women in the United States than married women.  Fertility rates are at a 35-year low.  Thirty percent of American women under age 25 identify as LGBT.

The Kids Are Not Alright by the Flaming Eyeball (hat tip to Nikolai Vladivostock), saved by Eddie Willers on Anodyne Mendacity (2021). 

Flaming Eyeball said he’s a Zoomer university student, fairly successful and not an incel (involuntary celibate).  But he said a disturbingly large fraction of the guys he met in high school and college seldom or never went on dates, experienced sex or had girlfriends.  He thinks something must be going on.  So he did some research, the results of which follow.

Therapy as a substitute for religion

THE TRIUMPH OF THE THERAPEUTIC: Uses of Faith After Freud by Philip Rieff (1966)

The world’s great civilizations, and all cultures that I know anything about, have been based on religions or philosophies that taught people to regard themselves as part of something greater than themselves.

The greater thing can be conceived as a supernatural order, as natural law or as a web of existence of which we are all a part.  Or it can be service to God or some transcendent force.  Or it can be a continuation of ancient ways of the ancestors.

The atheist sociologist Philip Rieff, like many before him, noticed how such ideas were fading in rich Western countries.  In these countries, people were, and are, increasingly focused on individual self-fulfillment.  For many, religion was and is either ignored or regarded as a stepping-stone to self-fulfillment.

Psychotherapy’s purpose is to make self-fulfillment possible.  In this book, Rieff looked at the potential for psychotherapy to become a substitute for religion, by examining the thought of Sigmund Freud and three of his critics, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich and D.H. Lawrence.

I have some basic knowledge about these four thinkers, but I am not a deep student of their thought.  What follows is my understanding of Rieff’s account.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was an atheist who was committed to scientific rationality.  He discovered that people were much more subject to irrational subconscious forces than they had thought.  

He classified the human mind into the “ego,” the conscious rational mind, and the subconscious “id” and “superego.”  The id consists of all the feelings and desires the ego is unwilling to admit, and the “super-ego,” consists of all the rules and taboos imposed by parents that are subconsciously taken for granted.

Freud believe that, in order to live in society, especially modern industrial society, it is impossible to act out all your emotions and fulfill your desires.  Some control is necessary.  Complete happiness is impossible.

But people make themselves more miserable than necessary because they are unconscious of both their desires and the internal taboos that prevent them from attaining their desires.  Freud thought unconscious sexual taboos and desires were especially harmful.

He was not a libertine.  His goal was to make his patients more aware of their unconscious feelings and desires so that they would not be controlled by them.

Freud believed in moral neutrality.  If a patient behaved in a warm and compassionate way because of unconscious guilt feelings, and, freed of guilt feelings, became selfish and ruthless, that was no concern of the therapist.

Although Freud despised the USA and U.S. American culture, his ideas fit well with a certain kind of American individualism.

China and the conflict of civilizations

A blogger named N.S. Lyons has a Substack blog called The Upheaval on which he discusses the civilizational conflict between the USA and China. It’s not just an economic rivalry or a geopolitical struggle. It is a conflict of philosophies.

The USA is the heir to a liberal tradition, going back to Ancient Greece and Rome, that values freedom of the individual.  China is an ancient and successful civilization founded on quite different values.

All this is complicated by the USA’s embrace of what I call woke-ism and Lyons calls the New Faith.  

He has written two parts of a three-part series on China, to which I was waiting to link until he completed the third.  But now he has put his blog behind a paywall, and the third part evidently will be for subscribers only. I don’t like to link to articles that are behind paywalls, so here are links to the first two.

China Empire: What is China to us anyway?  Part One

The China Dream, Lyons wrote, is the dream of Empire.  At different periods of its history, China was a superpower.  Xi Jinping wants to make China great and powerful again.  In this respect, he is no different from Chinese rulers of the past.

The Chinese government commissioned a study of the rise of the great powers of the past few centuries—Great Britain, Imperial Germany and the USA—and concluded that their rise was due to (1) state-assisted economic development, fueled by foreign trade, and (2) a global infrastructure to protect it, including ocean-going British and U.S. navies.

China’s global infrastructure is its Belt and Roads Initiative—roads, pipelines, ports, power lines and fiber optic cables integrating not only the interior of Eurasia, but also connecting China with the whole world, including Africa, the Western Hemisphere and the Arctic.  China is building up its naval force as well.  

The history of European imperialism indicates that military power follows trade, in order to protect trade.  Lyons says that China already regards Eastern Asia as its sphere of influence, much like the USA’s Monroe Doctrine for Latin America.

The Inscrutable Ideology of the New China: Incoherence or totalitarian brilliance? Part Two.

China is officially a Marxist-Leninist country.  The ruling Communist Party enforces ideological conformity on all levels of society.

At the same time China is a highly competitive capitalist country.  Ambitious young Chinese endure what they call a “996” lifestyle—working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week.  Wealth inequality is even greater in China than in the USA.

But China is not a free-market country.  State-owned enterprises own 40 percent of national assets and produce 40 percent of national output.  Businesses are expected to serve national goals.

In the West, N.S. Lyons noted, the fusion of an authoritarian government with corporate business is commonly called fascism.  Another characteristic of fascism is intense blood-and-soil ethnic nationalism, which President Xi also is promoting.  Meanwhile many young Chinese embrace an idea “lying flat,” which is doing the bare minimum required to get by.

So what China may be heading for, Lyons wrote, is a new synthesis embracing “the consumptive power of globalized neo-liberal capitalism, the state-directed economic and military might of fascism, the social control of communism, the moralistic welfare-statism of progressivism and absolutely none of the messy liberalism of ye old republican democracy.”

In other words, China is full is contradictions, just like the USA and the West as a whole.

###

Both articles are well worth reading in full.  If and when Lyons publishes his Part Three, I will summarize it and, if it is not behind his paywall, link to it.

Military recruiting videos around the world

Anti-woke folks have been posting three military recruiting videos on the Internet—one each from China, Russia and the USA.

The Chinese video shows a Chinese husband and father, leaving his family to live a life of hardship and danger in order to protect his family and nation from enemies.

The Russian video shows a tough, muscular Russian trooper, ready to face and deal with whatever comes.

The US American video shows a nice young woman, who has been raised by two lesbian women, who has found the U.S. armed forces accept her for what she is.

The anti-wokesters say the videos show the difference in the martial spirit of the leaders of the three countries.

Someone like the young US American woman probably would not be a match for someone like the Chinese or Russian man on the field of battle.  And the nature of the video does say something about the feminization of US American society.  

Then again, actual warriors make up a small percentage of US American armed forces.  Most of them are technicians and support staff whose war is waged at a distance.

I spent all afternoon reviewing military recruitment videos from different countries.  I don’t think that, in isolation, any particular military recruiting video proves anything about the character of the nation that issued it.  Even so, the different kinds of reasons they offer for joining the military are interesting, at least to me.

Does the USA need a new founding myth?

The U.S Constitutional Convention, 1789

A myth is not necessarily false.  It is a story that people tell about themselves.

The founding myth of the USA is the idea that we are a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

The American dilemma, as Gunnar Myrdal wrote in his classic 1944 book on race and racism in the USA, is the incompatibility of what he called the American creed with American reality.  The great sin of us contemporary white Americans as a group is the refusal to face up to this contradiction.

Most of us Americans like to think of the USA as the land of the free and the home of the brave, and don’t like to look at evidence that this isn’t so.  That’s why, for example, so many white Southerners insist that the Civil War was fought over state’s rights, not slavery.

As a boy, I was taught by my parents and teachers, including my Sunday school teachers, that everyone deserved equal rights regardless of race, creed or color, and that everyone, regardless of social standing, should be treated with courtesy and respect. I believed that being a good person and a good American were one and the same thing.

My core beliefs are still the same.  My opinions have changed radically over the course of my life, and especially within the past 10 or 20 years.  Like Albert Camus, I want to love justice and still love my country, and struggle to reconcile these loves.

But the USA as a nation is turning its back on the historic American creed even as an aspirational goal.

MAGA Republicans normalize voter suppression.  Woke Democrats normalize censorship.

We have normalized military aggression, torture, assassinations, bombing of civilians, corporate crime and imprisonment of dissidents and whistleblowers.

Although the American founding myth is fading, a new myth cannot be conjured up just by calling for one.  The power of a myth depends on believers thinking of it, not as a myth, but as just the way things are.

If you recognize a myth as a myth, it has no power over you, although the afterglow of your previous belief may persist for a time.

The most likely candidate for a new unifying myth is a patriotism based on American exceptionalism rather than historic American ideals.  During the past 20 years, we Americans have been called upon to take pride in the USA not because of our freedom and democracy, but our might and power.

Patriotism is defined as unconditional support for war and domination.  The military is our most respected institution.

U.S. census shows a blurring of racial lines

At a time of increasing talk about race and racial distinctions, the U.S. Census reports the lines dividing traces are becoming more blurred.

It noted that almost all the U.S. population increase from 2010 to 2020 consisted of Americans with two or more racial identities.

Whites remained in the majority. 

In 2020, there were 204.3 million Americans who called themselves white, down 8.6 percent from the previous census.  The non-Hispanic “white alone” U.S. population was 60.1 percent of the total in 2020, down from 63.7 percent in 2010.  But there were an additional 23.3 million who considered themselves white plus something else—boosting the white population to 235.4 million.

Hispanics can be of any race.  There were 62.1 million of them in the U.S. in 2020.  They comprised 18.5 percent of the U.S. population in 2020, up from 16 percent in 2010.

Americans of “some other race” were the second largest racial category, after whites.

Double click to enlarge

Some 49.9 million Americans called themselves “some other race,” meaning something other than white, black, Asian, native American or some other recognized racial category.

“Some other race” can include national identities, including Mexican, Cuban or the like, so growth in this category probably included a lot of Hispanics. 

The 48.9 million African-Americans were the third largest category.  The “black alone” U.S. population was 12.4 percent in 2020, virtually unchanged from 13 percent in 2010.

Some 33.8 million Americans called themselves multi-racial in 2020, up from 9 million in 2010.

One report indicates that 10 percent of all American married couples, and 17 percent of new marriages, are of individuals of different races or ethnicities.

I’m old enough to remember when this would have been considered shocking.  Back in the 1960s, when I attended the wedding of my friend Jim Yeatts, who was white, to Georgianna Bell, who was black, the Chief of Police of my home town reported this fact to my employer.  Now it would be taken in stride.

Double click to enlarge

There are two ways to interpret current population changes.  One is that American society is becoming more inclusive.  The other is that it is the dominant group that is becoming more inclusive.

Originally the dominant group consisted of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or WASPs, the descendants of the original English settlers.  My German immigrant ancestors were excluded. 

Later the top group expanded to include all white Protestants, then all white people of “Judeo-Christian” heritage and now all non-Hispanic whites.

I predicted years ago that the dominant group would expand itself to include white Hispanics and persons of mixed race who consider themselves white.  If you count the Hispanic whites, whites were 76.3 percent of the 2020 population.

The bad thing about this is that African-Americans would still be a minority and still excluded from the dominant group.

I hope the blurring of racial distinctions in the U.S. continues.  This is the only hope for the survival and flourishing of the United States as a nation. 

LINKS

U.S. Census Bureau Quick Facts.

Local Population Changes and Nation’s Racial and Ethnic Diversity by the U.S. Census Bureau.

2020 U.S. Population More Racially and Ethnically Diverse Than Measured in 2010 by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Number of interracial marriages increasing in the United States by Brian Lowe for the Global Times.

How culture wars have replaced class conflict

Note: I made several last-minute revisions and additions to this post the evening and following morning after I put it up.

Source: Mother Jones

American politics nowadays is extremely bitter.  Many Democrats and Republicans literally hate the opposing party.  In some circles, there’s talk of a new civil war.

Yet the leaders of the two parties differ but little on fundamental political and economic issues.  None of them questions the goal of global military supremacy.  Neither is facing up to the pandemic or the impending climate-related disasters.  Neither questions the existing structure of wealth and power.

But our politics is not about economic and political change.  It is about cultural change.

One party is pushing the ongoing revolution in how we think about race, religion, the family and sexual morality; the other is resisting it.  These issues are important, but they don’t have political answers.  But here we are.  They are on the political agenda, whether I like it or not.

Some friends of mine pointed me to an important article by David Brooks in The Atlantic about the background to all this.  He said that we are in the unusual position of having an elite of income and wealth who think of themselves as progressive, and push for change they think is progressive, while remaining blind to their own privilege.

The late Saul Alinsky said politics is a conflict between the haves, the have-nots and the have-a-littles.  As Brooks points out, this is not politics in today’s USA.  He describes a blue hierarchy and a red hierarchy, and points out that political antagonism is mostly between groups at the same levels in the opposing hierarchies (Koch brothers vs. Bill Gates, social workers vs. cops).

Brooks’ blue hierarchy consists of:

• The bohemian bourgeoisie: Technology and media corporate CEOs, university and foundation presidents, high-level bankers, highly-successful physicians and CEOs.  Many are graduates of elite universities.  They think they owe their success to their superior intelligence and understanding.
• The creative class: Tenured professors, successful journalists, employees of non-profit and cultural institutions.
• Children of the elite: Younger people with elite educations, but without elite incomes, working in the lower rungs of education, the mass media, technology and the non-profit sector.
• The caring class: Health care workers, and also restaurant servers, store clerks and hotel employees.  They tend to be racially diverse, and poor.

His red hierarchy consists of:

• The philistine one-percenters:  Corporate executives, entrepreneurs, top-level professionals.  Few are graduates of top universities.  They think they owe their success to their superior common sense and grit.
• The regional gentry: Families in small cities and towns who’ve owned businesses and properties for generations, and identify with their communities.
• The proletarian aristocracy (aka the petit bourgeoisie): Small-business owners, independent craft workers (electricians, plumbers), salaried middle managers.
• The rural working class.  Wage-earners with highly-supervised jobs in manufacturing, construction and transportation.  They tend to be poor, and racially homogeneous, living among family and friends they’ve known all their lives.

I would mention another key group in the red coalition.

• The guardian class.  State and local police, private security and the career military.  They are important not only because of their numbers, but because of the respect the enjoy and because of the key role they would play in any breakdown in social order.  Counteracting this is the new wokeness at the top levels of the Pentagon and FBI.

What unites the blue and red hierarchies?  Not material interests.  Values.  What are they fighting over?  Validation of their values.  Validation of their ways of living and ways of thinking, and repudiation of those of their enemies.  Also higher status, but mainly validation.

What Brooks doesn’t get into is the large number of Americans who don’t feel represented by either the blue or the red hierarchy  They either see no material benefit in voting or they reluctantly vote for what they see as a lesser evil.

Not everybody is enlisting to fight in the culture wars.  Some care more secure jobs, or secure retirements, or an end to useless, unwinnable wars, or protection from pandemic disease, or something else that’s tangible and real and not a matter of attitude.

LINKS

How the bohemian bourgeoisie broke America by David Brooks for The Atlantic.  “The creative class was supposed to foster progressive values and economic growth.  Instead we got resentment, alienation and endless political dysfunction.”  Yep!

The enduring strength of Chinese culture

The Han Chinese are one of the oldest, largest and most unified of the world’s ethnic groups.  Their current success is not only due to their government’s policies, but the enduring strength of their culture.

For many centuries, the Chinese had a claim to be the world’s most advanced culture.  Marco Polo, who visited China in the late 13th century, was astonished at the wealth and wonders of China, including transformative inventions such as gunpowder, the magnetic compass, the printing press and paper money.

The purpose of the voyages of Christopher Columbus were to establish a sea route so Europeans could buy Chinese tea, porcelain (valuable dishware is still called “china”), silk and other manufactured products without going through intermediaries.

But then as now, there was a trade deficit.  As the Emperor Qianlong told the British McCartney mission in 1792-1794, the Europeans didn’t manufacture anything that the Chinese needed.  The British response was the Opium Wars.

Chinese culture was shaped by Confucius (Kung Tze), who taught the importance of duty, loyalty and responsibility—not individual self-expression.

Confucianism is based on five filial relationships—father to son, teacher to student, older brother to younger brother, older friend to younger friend and ruler to subject.

Society is seen as an extended patriarchal family.  Sons, students and subjects owe loyalty to their fathers, teachers and rulers.  Fathers, teachers and rulers have a responsibility to mentor and provide for their sons, students and subjects.

These are not equal relationships, but they are reciprocal relationships.  There is a historic Chinese belief that subjects have a right to rebel against rulers who have lost the “mandate of Heaven.”    

Government service throughout Chinese history was based on passage of examinations, a process that in theory and frequently in practice eliminated old-boy networks and provided opportunity for the poor but talented.

The Chinese have a history of absorbing not only their subjugated peoples, but their conquerors, such as the Mongols and Manchus, through intermarriage and cultural assimilation.  We can see this process going on now, with the Tibetans and Uighurs.

We Americans see diversity as our strength.  We attract people from all over the world, with different talents and ideas, and they all supposedly contribute to the common good.

But this only works if there is a unity underlying the diversity.  Bringing diverse people together in one place accomplishes nothing unless they have a common purpose.  Otherwise it is better to be unified and homogeneous, like the Chinese.

Belief in filial virtues means Chinese typically have strong family ties.

In some cultures, excessive loyalty to family can be a weakness.  Enterprising family members are held back by their duty to provide for their non-enterprising members.

But it can be a strength if the family is united in an ambition to be a dynasty.  The fictional Kee family in James Michener’s Hawaii, with its hard-driving matriarch, Char Nyuk Tsin (“Auntie Chow’s Mother), is an example of this.

Amy Chua’s “tiger mother” is almost a caricature of this.

When publicity trumps everything else

Major auto companies’ production in 2020 vs. total value of their stock

—

One of the ancient Greek historians—I forget whether it was Thucydides or somebody else—wrote that the Athenians in the early days of their city chose leaders they thought were the wisest and most virtuous, but as they grew prosperous, powerful and complacent, they chose leaders that were the most entertaining.

My friend Bill Elwell sent me a link to a post about how, in American life today, your ability to get the public’s attention matters more than what you actually accomplish.  Click on Red Bull, Elon Musk and Matt Gaetz to read it.

Patriarchy was a positive ideal, now fading

Patriarchy is a way of thinking about things that was accepted in every major civilization, until now.

The basic idea of patriarchy is that society is, and should be, organized on the model of the extended patriarchal family, guided by a powerful and wise father.

The patriarch had a responsibility to guide and protect the family.  In return, his children and dependents were obligated to obey him.

This was the rationale for the authority of Emperors, Kings, Popes and Caliphs, who supposedly stood in relation to their peoples as loving fathers to their children.

It was the moral basis of royal dynasties, feudal lords, family businesses and humble peasant households.

Not only society, but the whole universe was supposedly organized on a patriarchal basis. 

Jews, Christians and Muslims worship a Heavenly Father, a powerful, wise and good parent who loves us and watches over us, and expects our love and obedience in return.

The senior gods of the Greco-Roman and Hindu pantheons were patriarchal fathers who headed extended families.

There were places for women in many of these religions—the Virgin Mary and various saints in Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, goddesses in the pagan pantheons, but always in a subordinate place to a father figure..

The five filial relationships of Confucianism—son to father, student to teacher, younger brother to older brother, younger friend to older friend, and subject to ruler—are patriarchal relationships. Notice they are all male-to-male relationships.

All the relationships are parallel to the father-son relationship.  The father (teacher, elder, ruler) protects and guides the son (student, youth, subject) who gives loyalty and obedience in return.

Many different societies believed in a version of the Great Chain of Being—a hierarchical ladder stretching down from God through kings and aristocrats to humble peasants, who, however, exercised patriarchal authority over their wives and children.

The patriarchal hierarchy could be a system of amoral naked power.  Thomas Piketty, in Capital and Ideology, mentioned a medieval French aristocrat who punished rebels by cutting off their hands and feet and returning them to their families.

Even when the patriarchs lived up to their moral code, the system was still oppressive in many ways.  I wouldn’t want to go back to the old ways. 

But there was something valuable there, a relationship of responsibility and loyalty, that has been lost.

Our problem today is that our institutions are still organized as patriarchal hierarchies.  But the people in charge of them no longer have confidence in patriarchal authority or exercise patriarchal responsibility—neither paternal responsibility for those in their charge nor loyalty to any authority above them.

True believers in the USA of 2021

I recently finished Eric Hoffer’s THE TRUE BELIEVER, a 1951 book about fanatical mass movements.  I think most Americans see that the USA of 2021 is ripe for such movements.

Fanatics invaded municipal buildings and burned police stations in some U.S. cities during the Black Lives Matter protests last summer.  Fanatics invaded the Capitol a couple of weeks ago.

Some self-described conservatives see Donald Trump as a messianic figure sent by guide.  Some self-described progressives embrace an “anti-racism” ideology that considers “all lives matter” a racist statement.  People can become pariahs or lose their for a thoughtless comment on social media.

If you are an American, you probably think some of the things I mentioned are serious problems while others are blown out of proportion.  Whatever the case, something is going on.  What is it?

Source: Benjamin Studebaker

Eric Hoffer said fanatical mass movements arise when there are large numbers of people who are frustrated and lonely.

People don’t become fanatics when they are embedded in family, community and religion that give them security and meaning.  Neither do they become fanatics when they enjoy the satisfactions of creativity and achievement.

But in times when fewer and fewer are able to enjoy the security of a stable family, community and religious life, while the opportunities for individual achievement and self-determination narrow—that’s when you have to watch out.

That’s how things are in the USA today.  We live in a very unforgiving society, compared to the one I grew up in.

Economic inequality is increasing, but I think that what really worries people is the growth of economic insecurity. 

More and more workers are being pushed out of full-time work and into the gig economy, where they don’t know from week-to-week how many hours they’ll work or what they’ll earn.  Millions lack the resources to meet even a small emergency.

All this is in the name of a philosophy I and others call neoliberalism, which exalts economic efficiency above all else.  Neoliberals run the economy without any slack in the system, with all the risk off-loaded onto wage-earners, sub-contractors and the public. 

It’s not just wage workers who suffer.  Small-business owners with six-figure incomes worry about being able to compete with giant mega-corporation.  A number of billionaires are planning ahead for economic collapse, so they can retreat to secret strongholds in New Zealand or other remote place.

Unfortunately the USA is exporting instability through its economic and war policies, and through its cultural influence as well.

President Donald Trump made things worse.  He had a genius for keeping affairs in a constant state of turmoil.  Just having Trump in the news day after day was a strain.  I think some people voted for Joe Biden just because they were sick of seeing Trump on TV.

The partisan news companies keep Americans on edge.  Fox News was a pioneer in making money out of peddling fear to elderly white people.  Now, as Matt Taibbi has shown, the self-described progressives have adopted the same model.

Then there are Facebook and the other social media companies.  They have algorithms designed to feed people links to material designed to hold attention by appealing to fear and indignation. 

COVID-related lockdowns have destabilized society.  It is not just the economic impact on workers’ wages and small-business profits.  It is that people have been cut off from religious services and family gatherings, two of the main sources of consolation in times of uncertainty.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus is real and deadly, and doesn’t care about anybody’s spiritual or psychological needs.  I’m an introvert who lives alone, and can afford to have groceries delivered, so I can tolerate the lockdowns better than most. 

But I can see how someone might be devastated by separation from loved ones and normal life and be willing to risk their lives rather than endure the separation.  A good many of the protests, including the invasion of the Michigan state capitol, were in opposition to the lockdown.

Trumpism and the revolt of rural America

My city neighborhood is full of Black Lives Matter signs.  But if I were to drive 20 or 30 miles beyond the city, I would soon see I was in Trump country.

A blogger named Crispin Sartwell sees Trumpism as a rural identity politics movement, like black nationalism and gay pride.

In these decades I’ve seen rural America sag severely: small manufacturers disappearing; farms foreclosed or folded into much bigger operations; small-town downtowns shuttered; kids living the song and leaving as soon as they can; schools and churches becoming abandoned buildings; waves of meth and opiates.

For decades, there seemed to be an effortless but bizarre assumption, even in the sociological research into rural pathologies, that everyone wanted to live in a city and eventually would, more or less, as the economy somehow transformed from making concrete things to providing abstract services.

Rural Americans were living in a way that was over, and the question was how to assimilate them into the globalized information economy of the 21st century, or whatever Al Gore was on about.

But what are y’all going to do, abandon 93 percent of the country and eat information?  Country people are often derided for ignorance, but they often deride you for living in a realm of delusion.

There are some problems with Barack-Obama-style technocracy I’d like to point out.  Rural people have been approached, at best, pretty much the way Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Bill Clinton approached black people: How can we address your pathologies? Maybe if y’all went to college…

Trumpism appears out here as a rural pride movement.  Such a movement strikes me as justified, necessary in some form: a culture, a way or ways of life, and the connection of people with the physical landscape of America have been endangered, devalued, sneered at, and devastated.

Country and small-town America has similar reasons as black America or trans America to unite and resist. I’m surprised that it didn’t happen before.

But I wish it hadn’t been Trump. I wish the sense of rural pride that has arisen wasn’t tainted with white pride, that there could be a rural nationalism that wasn’t connected in any way to white nationalism, that people out here weren’t falling for lies.

Rural America needed an avatar, but that New York developer with his rattletrap demagoguery and his relentless narcissism was both an unlikely and extremely unfortunate selection.  But personae as compelling and mercurial and bold as Trump’s, and as willing to smash the stultifying rhetorical conventions of American technocracy, are rare.

One wonders whether the sense of rural identity could’ve arisen at all without a big dose of these dark sides, and one bad thing about the ironic embodiment of rural identity in Trump is that it tends to confirm everything that Harvard profs and Atlantic staff writers think about us: that we’re ignorant, easily manipulated, evil, and stupid.

On the other hand, everyone is sort of paying attention now; everyone is sort of realizing that country people have them surrounded, that driving in any direction from any big city in America gets you to Trump country really quick.

They’re talking again about fixing rural people, or beaming more diabolically effective propaganda into our homes to relieve us of our ignorance, or educating children out of their parents’ values, all of which is just going to piss people off and exacerbate the divide.

But what I dream of seeing is a rural politics and a representation of rural people in the corridors of power that proceeds by some sort of expansion rather than various forms of exclusion, that demands recognition and concrete steps to help rural communities but does not configure around racial identities.

Some progressives complain that they can’t enact their agenda because of the over-representation of Trump voters in the Electoral College and the Senate.  This is baked into the Constitution and virtually impossible to change anytime soon.

With the depopulation of rural areas and the concentration of wealth in certain big cities, this disparity can only grown.  So maybe progressives should try instead to seriously address the problems of rural America, which in many ways are like the problems of urban America.

LINK

Trumpism as a Rural Identity Movement by Crispin Sartwell for Splice Today. (Hat tip to Gene Zitver)

There’s no such thing as ‘the Hispanic vote’

LatinX-plaining the election by Antonio Garcia-Martinez for The Pull Request.

“Lambert Strether” on U.S. politics, 2016-2020

“Lambert Strether” is a contributor to the Naked Capitalism web log. Here’s his idea of how U.S. politics has changed in the past four years.  I think he’s right, and my bet is that politics will change even more in the next four years.

• The Professional Managerial Class (PMC) attained class consciousness.
• The PMC was and is embubbled by a domestic psyop.
• The press replaced reporting with advocacy.
• Election legitimacy is determined by extra-Constitutional actors.
• “Fascism” became an empty signifier, not an analytical tool.

Read his full post to see what he means. The comment thread is good, too.

LINK

“What It Took”: The Price of Democrat Victory in 2020 by “Lambert Strether” for Naked Capitalism.  A brilliant analysis and an interesting comment thread.

From Obama to Trump

I came across this interview with Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and campaign strategist, on the Naked Capitalism web log today. 

It was done back in January.  I happened to turn it on and kept watching until the end.  It’s an hour long, another video that’s a little long to watch on a computer screen, but you can listen to it while doing something else, such as making and eating breakfast.

I don’t agree with everything Luntz had to say, he’s more inclined to give some people the benefit of the doubt than I am, but he is someone who gets around and who actually listens to people, and he had interesting things to say. 

I’m not sure the whole PBS Frontline series is worth watching,  but here are the links if you’re interested.

America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump, Part One.

America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump, Part Two.

A Canadian on the end of the American era

Ford’s WIllow Run plant during World War Two

When people are faced with external threats, they need to pull together.   A Canadian anthropologist named Wade Davis pointed out that this once was true of the United States.

In 1940, with Europe already ablaze, the United States had a smaller army than either Portugal or Bulgaria.

Within four years, 18 million men and women would serve in uniform, with millions more working double shifts in mines and factories that made America, as President Roosevelt promised, the arsenal of democracy.

When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90 percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, invented from scratch a synthetic-rubber industry that allowed Allied armies to roll over the Nazis.

At its peak, Henry Ford’s Willow Run Plant produced a B-24 Liberator every two hours, around the clock.

Shipyards in Long Beach and Sausalito spat out Liberty ships at a rate of two a day for four years; the record was a ship built in four days, 15 hours and 29 minutes.

A single American factory, Chrysler’s Detroit Arsenal, built more tanks than the whole of the Third Reich.

That was then.  This is now.

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken.

As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease.

The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand.

As a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind.

With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths.

The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average. Achieving the world’s highest rate of morbidity and mortality provoked not shame, but only further lies, scapegoating, and boasts of miracle cures as dubious as the claims of a carnival barker, a grifter on the make.

Some of these statements need asterisks.  Latin America has overtaken North America as the center of the coronavirus infection, and several advanced countries have higher coronavirus-related deaths per million people than the USA does, at least so far.

Davis, like many Canadian critics of the USA, is somewhat blind to the problems of his own country.  An American who has lived in Davis’s Vancouver pointed out that it is far from being the semi-utopia he claims it is.

But none of this disproves Davis’s general point.  U.S. industrial and governmental capacity has been unraveling for a long time.  This process won’t reverse by itself.  The first steps in change are for us Americans to understand our situation, pull together and stop accepting excuses for failure from our supposed leaders.

LINKS

How Covid-19 Signals the End of the American Era by Wade Davis for Rolling Stone.

The Unraveling of “The Unraveling of America” by Deanna Kreisel for Medium.

‘Cancel’ culture and American politics

The following is the the results of a YouGov poll commissioned by the Cato Institute

The Cato Institute is a strongly libertarian organization, but the poll was conducted by YouGov, which is a reputable organization, so I don’t think these results are biased.

Now the poll did not reveal the specific political views that Americans are afraid to express, but if highly-educated Americans are more fearful of expressing their opinions than the rest of us, I don’t think these fears are restricted to neo-Nazis or Klansmen.

I think a lot of the USA’s problem are due to misgovernment by an entrenched elite, and I hope for the kind populist revival that Thomas Frank describes in his new book.

But the Cato poll indicates just how hard it will be to make that happen.  We are too divided among ourselves.

It used to be that most self-described liberals thought of ourselves as defenders of free speech for all.  No longer, apparently.

Donald Trump and the Republican leaders are not friends of free speech.  But the divisions indicated in these polls work to their advantage.

The way we think now

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity  [William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming“]

Statue of George Washington in Portland, Oregon

During my lifetime, I’ve seen the crumbling of elite institutions that once exercised moral authority.

Mainstream churches no longer preach the Christian creed.  Elite universities no longer commit to disinterested scholarship.  Elite newspapers no longer try to present the facts accurately and objectively.

They are being taken over by cultural radicals.  Despite or maybe because of their compromises, mainstream churches and newspapers are rapidly losing public support, and elite universities survive mainly because they are gatekeepers for the top professional and managerial jobs.

The cultural radicals have created their own set of taboos about race and gender, which, in certain sectors of society, you defy at your peril.   You can lose your job for expressing approval of ideas and values that have existed for centuries or maybe millennia.  It is widely considered unacceptable to say that “all lives matter” or that there is a biological difference between men and women.

I’m not surprised or shocked that there are who think this way, which they have every right to do.  I am surprised and shocked that there has been so little pushback against them from the nation’s supposed intellectual and moral leaders.

While there is a revolution in cultural and moral values, the structure of wealth and power stands unchanged.  The CIA, NSA and FBI, the Pentagon and the armaments industry, the Wall Street speculators, Silicon Valley monopolists—all these entities are more powerful than ever.

The power that rests on moral authority has been eclipsed.  The power that rests on money and brute force shines as brightly as ever.

The nation’s elite – the ruling class, the Establishment, call them what you will –  lack moral conviction and moral confidence.  What happened?

∞

Lost Certainties

Someone said that 19th century America was held together by belief in three things – Protestantism, patriotism and progress.

I think this is so.  The old-time USA was much more violent than the USA today, prone to riots, strikes, insurrections and vigilante justice, even apart from the Civil War.  But there was a consensus that lay beneath all this.

Protestants believed that God ruled the world, that salvation came through Jesus, and that God’s justice.  Patriots believed that the USA was the embodiment of democracy and freedom.  Progressives believed that each generation would be better off, materially, than the ones who came before.

I myself, born in 1936, was taught to believe in all three.

This consensus was not necessarily a commitment to the status quo.  People who shared these beliefs brought about the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women and the regulation of monopoly capitalism.

The problem was that these ideas did not stand up to close intellectual scrutiny.  Once people started to question them, they could not go back to believing in the old way..

Biblical scholarship made it hard to believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.  Once you studied the topic, your choices were to reject scholarship, reject Christianity or believe in the Christian story in a vague way as an allegory or myth.

Historical scholarship made it hard to believe that the USA is the embodiment of freedom and democracy.  Once you studied the topic, your choices were to reject scholarship, reject patriotism or believe in American ideals as seldom-realized aspirational goals.

There are lots of reasons why it has become hard to believe in progress, which was possibly more foundational than the other two.

Life has been getting worse for the majority of Americans. This is largely because of bad economic policy, but even if this changes, life will still be hard because of climate-related catastrophes, exhaustion of natural resources and new pandemics in the coming bad years.  So progress, too, has become an aspirational goal, not a reality.

Adolph Reed Jr. on identity politics

This Bill Moyers interview with Adolph Reed Jr. was aired in 2014.

Adolph Reed Jr. is a retired professor of political science and a Marxist.  He thinks that what is called identity politics is a way of maintaining structure of inequality.  The purpose of this post is to call attention to his critique of identity politics and provide links to some of this work.

Identity politics is based on an analysis of how dominant groups oppress marginal groups.  Some examples:

• Whites > Blacks  [racism]
• Men > Women  [male chauvinism, mysogyny]
• Native-Born > Immigrants [xenophobia]
• Anglos > Hispanics [xenophobia]
• Straights > Gays [homophobia]
• Cisgendered > Transgendered [transphobia]

These are not made-up problems.  It is a fact that white job applicants or loan applicants get preference over equally-qualified or better-qualified black applicants.  It is a fact that shocking numbers of women are sexually harassed on the job.  No-one should be denied basic rights by reason of race, gender, national origin or LGBTQ identity.

The problem is when disparities between groups are used to distract from the structure of wealth and power in society as a whole.  According to economist Gabriel Zucman, one percent of Americans own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, up from 28 percent in the 1990s.

Reed says that, within the multicultural framework, this would be okay if the upper one percent were 50 percent women, 15 percent black and the appropriate percentages Hispanic, GLBTQ and so on.

Ideas of equity can be used to promote inequality.  Ideas about oppression of minorities can be used to divert attention from exploitation of the majority by the minority.  The ideology of multiculturalism can be used as a technique to divide and rule.

Honoring diversity doesn’t bring about full employment, living wages, debt relief or an end to America’s forever wars

Honoring multiculturalism can leave members of all the different groups divided among themselves and equally exploited, along with straight white cisgender males, by employers, bankers, landlords and corrupt politicians..

LINKS

Public Thinker: Adolph Reed Jr. on Organizing, Race and Bernie Sanders, an interview for Public Books.

An interview with political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. on the New York Times’ 1619 Project on the World Socialist Web Site.

Nothing Left: the long, slow surrender of American liberals by Adolph Reed Jr. for Harper’s Magazine (2014)

Adolph Reed: Identity Politics Exposing Class Division in Democrats, from an interview on the Benjamin Dixon Show (2016)

The Trouble With Uplift by Adolph Reed Jr. for The Baffler (2018)

What Materialist Black Political History Actually Looks Like by Adolph Reed Jr. for nonsite.org.