It’s increasingly unfashionable to celebrate those who made this republic and established its core values. On college campuses, the media and, increasingly, in corporate circles, the embrace of “diversity” extends to demeaning the founding designers who arose from a white population that was 80 percent British. ...
But what ties most Americans to the founders is not race, but our embrace of a political and legal culture based on distinctly Anglo-Saxon ideas about due process, representative government, property rights and free speech. These proved infinitely superior to the divine right of czars, kaisers, emperors and other hereditary autocrats for generations of non-Anglo-Americans.
This system, always capable of amendment, has allowed waves of traditional outsider groups — African Americans, Latinos, women, Mormons, Jews and Muslims — to join the economic, political and cultural mainstream. In some cases, as in the case of President Obama, they have also secured the highest reaches in the national firmament.
America is a nation of ideas and not of blood and soil. So anybody can--and many have over the centuries--become Americans by adopting our ideas of freedom, rule of law, and individual rights.
But when we celebrate "diversity" to the point of promoting Balkanization instead of assimilation where people treasure their heritage while adopting American ideas of citizenship, we destroy the very qualities that allowed us to bring new Americans into our country.
Right now the party of factions--the Democrats, who call their factions "interest groups"--welcomes new Americans to join their factions. But if the Democrats succeed in fully Balkanizing America, their factions will split, too, as some factions perceive the imported factions as hostile to their interests.
And if that trend explodes, Republicans too will start to behave as factions. Not as many as Democrats, and not all, but factions will start to form. When you are attacked repeatedly, eventually you react and close ranks.
It is insanity to try this sort of hard "diversity" that recreates the Old World blood and soil "diversity" that led to so many wars over there. And it won't end well here.
If we want to reduce the factionalism, we really need--as I've droned on about a lot--to restore federalism where only a few things are a federal issue. While that may seem like Balkanization, too, it is not. Balkanization is by blood tribe. Federalism is by artificial borders and includes anyone of any race, gender, or religion living within those borders.
Sure, factionalism can infect a state, but at least that stops at the state border.
I don't care if California wants to waste its money on policies I consider lunacy. People should be free to be stupid and waste money. What angers me is when people from elsewhere want to enforce their lunacy on me under the guise of making do things for my own good.
God help us all, but there are too many people that enjoy bossing other people around on even the smallest (dare I say "micro?") issue.
And who knows? Perhaps what I think is lunacy is actually pretty smart. I like to think I can learn.
And if I can't? Well, I'm free to live in a state where I can be free to be stupid and waste money.
That's what that whole "states are the laboratories of democracy" saying came from. That isn't possible when the federal government mandates every damn thing.
NOTE: I wrote this before the election but delayed scheduled posting to make room for events within my attempts to keep my posts to under 100 per month (no need to seem too obsessed with blogging, eh?), although at least one link might be post-election to illustrate what I wrote earlier.
Perhaps the thought of a Trump presidency with power centralized in his hands will persuade Democrats that federalism is a good thing after all.
UPDATE: Yes, minority identity politics rely on the majority not acting the same way:
The intellectual historian Mark Lilla has a must-read essay in today’s New York Times explaining how the academic and media fixation on identity politics doomed the center-Left this election cycle. One of his key points: The Democratic Party’s decision build its coalition around race and gender differences, and emphasize those differences in order to mobilize its base, predictably produced a parallel response from the identity groups that were not included[.]
Tip to Instapundit.
I'm not so sure that this white identify politics point was true this election given that Trump seems to have gotten more minority support than Romney and about the same support of white votes.
But I warned of exactly this problem back in July:
[If] we abandon a policy of promoting assimilation in favor of multiculturalism that rejects assimilation, our country will Balkanize and tribalize--including at least parts of the existing white population that will revert to tribal politics in reaction.
And this in August:
So it is with great concern to see how successfully Democrats have revived tribalism and corruption in our democracy. Oh, it is called interest group politics, but it is tribalism.
Through it all, this strategy to mobilize tribal loyalties relied on the majority to maintain a democracy based on rule of law to enable newly awakened tribes to gain ground.
If the majority as a tribe, too, the majority tribe could corruptly slap down the minority tribes, eh? [emphasis added]
If this is what Trump represents despite the lack of evidence that voters voted that way (and I did worry about this prematurely in the August post), our liberal brethren share a lot of the blame for his rise by writing the rules he could use.
It will come true in time if we don't stop. Don't go there.
