Social Matter

Nursing, as I have, a lifelong dislike for the Beatles, I’ve never put much stock in the proposition that however many “million fans of _________ can’t be wrong.” That’s nonsense. Of course they can be wrong. They frequently are, especially if that millions-strong cohort of fans is comprised mostly of shrieking teenage girls.

I do, however, put stock in a somewhat related proposition, which is that no one is wrong about everything, no matter how grotesque in general are their tastes and habits and opinions. Not even Beatles fans are wrong about everything. In the end, there’s probably something to be said for those doe-eyed limey manchildren (even though there’s a famous photo of their resident “creative genius” hanging naked like some giant mutant fetus off the side of the plain-faced, talentless, poseur, Oriental banshee with whom he evidently fell madly in love and for whom he eventually broke up the band). Chances are that something emerged from that brain besides uninterrupted torrents of sackless pacifism and stratagems for the careful avoidance of adult masculinity. In other words, you’d be taking a gamble to write off everything John Lennon ever thought, wrote, said, or supported simply because the man himself was such an asshat.

This is true of not just individual social justice warriors like Lennon but of the entire social justice movement as well. Yes, it is wall-to-wall impressionable morons and a couple clever malcontents producing a talking point every now and again. True. But sometimes those malcontents show a gleam of real insight and the morons who dutifully reblog it on all their social media accounts are, for that one rare moment, not spreading pure misinformation and cancer—but misinformation and cancer with a little bit of good sense mixed in.

One legitimate observation that emerged, God knows where exactly, from the social justice left is the idea of “institutional racism.” Keeping in mind all my typical caveats about the mercenary nature of the “racism” critique, it’s an interesting idea. And one that I think common sense bears out if you give it a fair hearing. The gist of it is that American institutions—its educational system, its laws and courts, even its business culture and practices—were the creations of white people, and therefore those institutions favor those people, in the sense of being a favorable environment at least. They are tailored to white sensibilities and proclivities, suited to white lifestyles, etc. etc.

Where the social justice warriors trip up, of course, is in the origins of institutional racism. There the fevered leftist mind dreams up exotic conspiracies against the nonwhites. They see the institutions of America (and the European motherland) as somehow intentionally hostile to outsiders, somehow actively exclusionary, actively hegemonic. As if the creators of these institutions had some axe to grind with the entire nonwhite universe, crafting their traditions and beliefs in long anticipation of the days they would be a rock of offense to the hated darkies, Jews, mestizos, Asians.

In fact, though, there was no such antipathy, at least not on a systematic scale. “Institutional racism” in America favors whites because whites designed the institutions of America. These whites weren’t evil per se, at least not beyond that which is common to man. They were simply attempting to do the dirty work of creating schools, political processes, legal protocols, standards of professionalism, whatever happened to be the problem at hand. And they created systems congenial to their constitutions, their ways of thinking, which vary of course from group of people to group of people at any scale of analysis from the nuclear family on up to the major races of humankind. It’s no wonder, then, that people whose ancestors lived millennia on entirely different continents, evolving independently, creating institutions of their own, find American ones to be less than a custom fit. No wonder at all.

See. Once you de-weaponize the concept of institutional racism, once you quit trying to leverage it as yet another cudgel to club bad old whitey with, you get a pretty good description of a whole subset of American racial tensions. You get the notion that we absolutely should expect there to be friction in an increasingly multiethnic country that operates on a set of norms generated largely by the ethnicity that founded the country. And we should expect friction in exact, inverse proportion to the ability or willingness of the non-founder ethnicities to assimilate to those norms.

(Here’s another penny on which the social justice mind derails. The thought of assimilation is horrible to them. They would instead propose, I don’t know, some sort of “open” and “inclusive” “dialogue” about what norms should obtain in our beautiful rainbow nation. And then everyone would talk it out calmly: “Thank you, Patel. Let’s hear from Jose next.” And then everyone’s aesthetics and politics and racial proclivities could be artfully blended together into a mosaic of multicultural harmony, prosperity and fellow-feeling. In celebration, we would pump Imagine through loudspeakers nationwide. Utopia!)

Recognizing that the cultural and political traditions of our nation are the product of a specific people, that they cater, naturally, to those people, and that other peoples at home or abroad have less (and many times no) such affinity for them or desire to see them perpetuated opens up all sorts of dizzying vistas of crimethink. But the one that I would like to leave you with is the purest reversal, near as I can tell, of the kernel of insight originally proffered by our friends and colleagues on the progressive left.

The social justice warriors will tell you that to defend the traditions and institutions of America is to defend the traditions and institutions of white Christians of European descent. And you shouldn’t defend white Christians because they’re icky and hateful. The warriors are perceptive and right on the first point, hysterical and wrong on the second. Yes, the great preponderance of what we on the right want to recover and preserve is white. No, it is not therefore disqualified from being worth recovery and preservation. Beyond all the race-baiting and pundit theatre and caterwauling about “historical injustices” in America, there lies those simple truths. So much air and ink and energy is wasted on the right creating Byzantine circumlocutions around those truths, so that no one has to mention such blatantly offensive facts on television or in print. But we’ve got precious little to show for our efforts.

That’s the bit of crimethink these Lennon fans have inspired in me tonight. That we need to man up on the race question and quickly. We on the right need to have our “honest conversation” about it, even if it’s one that ultimately scandalizes Eric Holder. America throughout its history as a country has been predominately white. And American conservatism must fight for the interests of its predominately white base, or else go the way of all flesh.