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Another way to frame this is from the Black perspective, as I understand it:
Blacks agreed to largely stop calling people racist, and whites agreed to end the legacy of racism. That is, Black Culture never understood the deal to be that the underclass was incorrigible and would be written off, but rather than education and social policy would dissolve the underclass and uplift all blacks together. They were willing to tolerate a considerable amount of write-off in the short term, but the public agreement (and it was a very public agreement in the late 90s - early 2000s) was that this uplift was happening and would continue until the problem went away.
From my own perspective, the fact that this agreement was based on a lie does not strike me as the fault of Black Culture; they mostly weren't the ones who built the ideological foundations of the Church of the Blank Slate. It's not their fault either for noticing that decade after decade, the results they were promised never materialize. They aren't the ones who bet the full faith and credit of our entire society on "social science" that turned out to be ideologically-motivated fictions. They are at fault, it seems to me, for many of their own pathologies; even accepting their framing that America as constituted was, is and likely will continue to be innately hostile to their culture, there's much better ways to handle such a reality than the strategies they've collectively defaulted to. But this doesn't change the fundamental nature of the situation: the problem isn't the blacks demanding impossible solutions, it's the whites who spent decades promising those impossible solutions, and are now desperate to skip out on the checks they've written and cannot cash. I remain baffled by the people, some of them commenters here, who seem to believe that if we could just sufficiently marginalize blacks, Red Tribe and Blue Tribe could lay their other differences aside and get down to productive cooperation.
I share your skepticism that any of this can be meaningfully rolled back to some more congenial prior state. We burned unbelievably vast and irreplaceable resources on a scam perpetrated by a specific band of ideologues, leaving us in a strictly-worse position.
To be clear, my experience with ordinary, working-class-in-the-sense-of-actually-works and middle class blacks has been that they know there's an issue with their culture, are often frustrated with African American Community Leaders and democrats for not addressing or acknowledging it, and don't really like or want their kids around 'niggers'. Black women wish their pastors would do something about poor male behavior being endemic in their communities, everyone wants something done about (hard)drugs, black men wish working hard and staying married was more incentivized by their cultural taste-makers, and even the outright black supremacists are usually surprisingly chill with whites(not Jews though) in practice. Yes, many of them believe racism gets in the way, many of them think shitty schools can be fixed by shoveling money at the problem so more black kids can go to college, lots of them think jail isn't the right way to deal with drug problems, lots of them think rap music is fine instead of the root of half the cultural issues they complain about, etc, etc. Yes, they're often offended by white conservatives who answer 'well why do our schools have to suck?' with 'because your culture does', but you would be too- Vivek Ramaswamy may not have been right that American kids should be shoved into a South Korea type grind but a lot of the objections to it were based on offense rather than discussion of the data(for the record, I think the South Korean rat race is just pure pointless suffering and if I was dictator of South Korea I would legally limit school and study hours).
A data point: 71% of black Americans think hip hop has a negative influence on the culture.
Thought hip-hop has a negative influence. 2008 is basically an eternity ago for the purpose of those discussions.
That's true. I thought Pew were meant to conduct surveys repeatedly.
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I've had similar direct experiences. Unfortunately, I've also had direct experiences where individual blacks I knew bought the progressive racism/white-supremacy message hook line and sinker. There's a large section of the community that knows that at least a considerable portion of the problems are in-house. Aaron McGruder made a career out of shouting that message through a megaphone. But when push comes to shove, my observation is that the race-baiters win. Blue Tribe tells blacks that their problems are the fault of Red Tribe. Blue Tribe gets political power, Blacks get cheap hope and the avoidance of some really deeply unpleasant conversations. Until Red Tribe figures out how to make a better offer, it seems unlikely that this will change. And again, why should it? Red Tribe signed off on the promises too. Red Tribe politicians made all the same speeches about how education would fix everything. Red Tribe really does largely support and run the systems that coordinate meanness against individual blacks, at least if you're speaking in general terms. And crucially, Reds fundamentally do not have a better offer, at least from the black perspective, and at least in the short term. "we don't know how to solve this, and much of it is your own fault" is never going to beat "it's all their fault, help us beat them and we'll make you whole."
Adding to this, reds don't even have a better offer to the write-offs within white America than "At least we don't blame you for minorities' problems.". The present Trump administration is flailing at a solution for high school educated male wages being stagnant at best for the last 50 years (This fucks over black men harder, BTW, given their lower level of college education.) and probably isn't going to find one.
For better or worse, IMO Trump's rise was fueled by a creeping sense within white America that the "writeoff" portion was being expanded from "high school dropouts" (who barely exist) to "high school educated". Nobody cares about this guy, but people get mad when their nice but unexceptional kid with an IT degree struggles to find well-compensated employment.
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I think there are good aspects to Asian schools that we could bring in, though perhaps not to the extreme that those schools go to.
I think first of all, as a culture, we must start taking academic achievement much more seriously. America doesn’t take education seriously, and instead tends to be rather casual about tge project. And the result is that almost half of all American adults cannot read on an eighth grade level. Mathematics and science fair no better. Because of this, we’re generally stuck when it comes to innovative ideas and deep thinking in philosophy or the arts. If we took school and education as seriously as we take sports, with high achievement being celebrated and rewarded.
But the other thing that makes it work is the tracking. Not every kid who graduates goes to tge same “university to office job” track. If you haven’t earned the grades and done the work, you will go to lower colleges, trade schools, or vocational programs. This not only reduces the competition for entry level positions for college graduates, but ensures that every group ends up with a skil they can use to support themselves.
Most of the actual problems come from taking the system to extremes. Over competing in sports leads to 13 year old kids needing Tommy John’s surgery. To much competition in academics makes people miserable. Neither is an indictment of those activities or those who take them seriously. If rules are put in place to keep the competition sane, competition is generally good for people and drives them to do better. The alternative is underachieving with all the problems that come from that.
‘Half of Americans can’t read on an eighth grade level’ is one of those statistics which sounds bad, but using the same definition how does it compare to other countries with ‘deep’ orthographies such as Australia, France, etc.
English is legitimately harder to read than Finnish, Spanish, and in fact most of the rest of the world’s languages. Add to that that the American education system just absolutely loves terrible teaching methods. An oriental grindset probably isn’t the solution compared to phonics and maybe spelling reform.
‘But the US has lower reading scores than Italy’ is just not a fair comparison. I would guess that, keeping the standard constant, the USA teaches reading about as well as Australia and France and only slightly worse than China and Japan. I could be wrong. But ‘making everyone so miserable that we have a .7 TFR’ isn’t the solution.
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The US is anything but stuck when it comes to innovative ideas. And no, they're not ALL from immigrants (and some of the immigrants were educated here). As for deep thinking in philosophy, if that means we have neither Foucault nor Derrida.... uh, good? The arts (assuming you mean non-commercial) everywhere in the First World seem to have disappeared into either pure self-referential naval-gazing or been eaten by lefty activism.
We definitely don't need more Asian-style schooling. We don't need to break intelligent kids and turn mediocre kids into grinds.
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Most of this doesn't sound right.
I'm not completely sure what this is supposed to mean. PMC Americans and aspirants take it very seriously. Others take it pretty seriously, but from what I've heard there are a lot more PhD graduates or MA graduates than positions that really need that level of education. The government takes it seriously and pours enormous amounts of money into the project. Teachers generally take it pretty seriously, roughly proportional to how much they can get their students to do. Perhaps lower class blacks and hispanics and trailer type whites don't take it seriously enough. America and the various states keeps trying to push at these groups, inspire them, prod them into loving books and whatnot, but it mostly doesn't take. There have been a lot of educational reform movements. It is perhaps not very effective in terms of value for money.
What would greater seriousness look like? Perhaps more removal of disruptive children from classrooms? That is, of course, very political.
It is. People are very happy when their kids do well in school. They get awards, congratulations, eventually scholarships. Lots of kids are not involved in sports.
That is a description of current reality.
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Presumably I am one of the individuals you have in mind. I can understand why you find it baffling: your hatred of “the Blue Tribe” — a fictitious construct which, I maintain, exists more in your head than it does in the real world — verges at times on the atavistic. I don’t expect that a fully-committed partisan such as yourself will be able to put aside your grudges and live in comity with true-Blue progressives.
My perception is that the vast majority of Americans, though, are nowhere near as committed to hatred of those who vote for a different party, nor would they be so thoroughly filled with hatred and distrust of the other side in the event that the extremely live-wire issue of pervasive black criminality were removed from the everyday lifestyle calculations of so many people. In no way do I believe that issues related to crime and racial grievance are the sole motivating reason for political polarization in America; I simply believe that these issues have a far stronger valence than most others — at least for urban (and, increasingly, suburban) voters — given their intractability, the web of obfuscation and lies characterizing discourse about them, and the way that these issues reveal some vexing contradictions at the heart of the American individualist/liberal framework.
Perhaps I am the pot calling the kettle black, and that in fact it is I who am wildly overestimating the salience and centrality of my pet issue. No doubt I am, to some extent. But I truly do believe that most non-black Americans can return, with not insurmountable difficult, to the relative comity of the 90’s, if and only if there is a significant marginalization of blacks as a cultural and political entity.
As a non-American familiar with American history, I am inclined to agree with this take.
Even if you don't think that the Civil War was caused by slavery, it is very obvious from soldiers' accounts that the necessary hatred for Americans to cheerfully put themselves through four years of danger and material deprivation for the primary purpose of shooting other Americans had a lot to do with slavery. And of course most of the pre-Civil War political violence was explicitly about slavery.
And then post Civil War you still see ongoing white-on-white political violence driven by the Negro Question (the Lincoln assassination, Reconstruction and the 1st Klan, Redemption and the Red Shirts etc.) There is a lull after the anti-racist side gives up and cuts a deal to tolerate Jim Crow, but the Civil Rights Movement sees more than a little actual white-on-white political violence, and a lot of credible threats which end up getting walked back when it becomes clear that the Feds are not backing down. The fact that the Kennedy assassination turned out to have nothing to do with race surprised Americans so much that you seem to have had a collective head explosion.
In our generation, the George Floyd et al riots seem to involve a lot of white-on-white political violence nominally driven by concern for blacks. Rittenhouse vs the idiots is just the specific case that got put under a microscope.
I'm not aware of any other issue where white Americans are willing to kill each other and think they are serving the common good by doing so.
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My tribe- 'the church crowd' in vernacular parlance- does not want European style mass conformity, though. We'd rather the good, the bad, and the ugly with blacks than deal with that, at least as long as social progressives get to set the terms of it. You're way overestimating the solidarity across different social groups of whites in the USA.
I want to make sure I actually understand what you’re claiming here.
Is the claim something like: blacks, by being an unassimilable block and a thorn in the side of any project aiming toward American political/cultural reconciliation, are actually performing a positive service. They’re what’s preventing non-black Americans from coming together to form some sort of cultural consensus, and this is a good thing, because the rise of such a consensus — at least, if it were to arise under current ideological conditions — would be shaped largely by progressives. Therefore, blacks should be encouraged to continue to be a pain in the ass (or at least no active steps should be taken to force them not to be) because if they were marginalized or mollified, white people might start forming a “mass conformist” culture like the ones in Europe.
Am I getting this right? I don’t want to misinterpret or misrepresent your view.
Yes. I would rather the commons be shit up than used as a weapon against me and mine. I know you’re not a social conservative but surely you can see why I would hold this view.
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Communism was pretty clearly a thing, and there's a reason it remains so disproportionately popular, even in America, given its history. That reason has pretty much nothing to do with Black people or America's racial history. More generally, I'm curious what you would consider an existence-proof of Blue Tribe as you perceive me to understand it. We've been in the middle of a steadily-escalating tribal war for several years now. This war routinely results in very public political violence, frequently of a highly organized nature, and this violence observably receives broad-based institutional and public support in large volumes. It's obvious that large percentages of the population actively sort their social context along the lines of the Red/Blue tribal split. The number of norms and institutions that have collapsed under the tectonic force of the Red/Blue faultline is quite long and rapidly growing, and most of the rest are visibly shaking.
You've got me on the atavistic hatred, though.
The vast majority of Americans have no significant commitments, to hatred or to any other ideological construct. They simply follow the crowd, as humans always have and always will. Most Russians in 1920 were not "committed" in any meaningful sense to the Communist project, nor most Germans to the Nazi project in 1938. Most Democrat-voting Americans didn't support rioting and defunding of police in 2016, and probably weren't all that comfortable with it even when it was happening post-Floyd.
The model you seem to be applying is that there's a problem, and conflict over how to fix the problem is driving the split, and so if the problem were removed the split would heal. You don't seem to recognize a values-level split between Reds and Blues, which is presumably why you think the categories the split demarcates are in my head.
The model I'm applying is that tribes exist to coordinate and control power, as is necessary and proper for all large-scale populations of humans. Power exists to solve problems, and if one specific object-level problem goes away, another will take its place. Unfortunately, values-incompatibility is a meta-level problem, and past some level of divergence, solutions are not compatible with cooperation across the divide. Object-level problems, which is what our society previously perceived race to be, do not directly create values-level conflict, but rather are drawn into them as the tribes grope for leverage against each other. It seems entirely possible for race to rise to a values-level problem itself; maybe it already is one for our society, and certainly it is one for many individuals. Maybe that's the way we'll go. The fact remains that from my perspective, Blacks and their dysfunction is far less of a problem for me and mine than their white Blue-Tribe patrons. Blacks do not rule me, and I see no plausible path by which they could rule me in the foreseeable future, so the threat of their hatred is manageable. Blues can and have ruled me, and intend to do so again; their hatred is a much more serious problem, and it's hard for me to see how that would change regardless of the disposition of the race question.
I have 2/3rds of a reply to your comment on religion sitting in the hopper, btw. Always a pleasure.
I think the idea is more that the conflict over that problem creates far more day-to-day strife and personal animus than value differences do, in line with Scott's memorable post about people's shocking ability to get along even when they have, on paper, deep and irreconcilable value differences.
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On the one hand, after they can agree that rules are rules, and it doesn't matter what "disproportionate" amount of blacks end up in jail, what is there left to argue about? The central plank of blue tribe ideology seems to be rooted in the inherent evil of western white civilization, and exhibit A is blacks as a permanent underclass globally.
On the one hand, yeah, old habits die hard. It is hard to imagine the average blue triber going "Ok, yeah, I admit it, more blacks are in jail because they commit more crime" but then being ok with gun ownership, recklessness towards the climate, or free speech. But I also, simply, have a very difficult time imagining the blue tribe mind without that aforementioned central plank of their ideology.
I guess the difference is that I'm skeptical that black victimhood really is a central plank to Blue ideology. My perception is that the central plank in Blue ideology is the belief that they are capable of an arbitrary level of control over material reality, that they have the power to make the world as they wish it to be. "We know how to solve all our problems; if a problem isn't solved, it's the fault of someone with a name and an address."
It seems to me that the American Blue Tribe has existed since the founding, and they coexisted with explicit, legally-codified racism for a very long time without much of an issue. It likewise seems to me that many of their foreign analogues coexisted with deep cultural racism for even longer, and in some cases continue to do so right down to the present day. Blue Tribe's commitment to the racial justice narrative seems just as contingent to me as their commitment to Christianity or Bodily Autonomy. Blue ideology is explicitly built around facilitating rapid, fundamental social change; appeals to history and tradition seem to me to be rather badly missing the point.
What justifies the violations of freedom that allow that material control?
America has a liberal counter-narrative to totalitarian optimism, in theory. It's supposed to have much stronger protections than even many other liberal nations. One wedge that allows the defeat of defense mechanisms like freedom of association or federalism and hell, just even entry level noticing about transgender athletes is the condition of African Americans, to an actively uncomfortable degree ("black women would suffer more from attempting to police femininity" is a take that would be considered Stormfront-tier by SJWs if it wasn't SJWs saying it).
The Civil Rights movement is still considered an important enough pillar to base all of these arguments on (or the laws extending these protections to more and more people) and any modern attack on freedom is justified on the grounds that those values were already attacked during the CRM, and this is universally considered to be the right thing.
And the more that gets stacked on it, the harder to default.
It's the wedge they have, and it's been very effective.
They've observably gotten a lot of mileage out of material inequality and various flavors of materialist apocalypse.
The question isn't whether race is their biggest, best wedge in the American context. It certainly is. The question is whether the giant hammering that wedge ceases if the wedge were to be taken away. I'm pretty confident it does not. They will find their next-best alternative, and continue swinging.
The question is actually whether the wedge itself helped the giant grow.
American socialists continually lament the lack of class consciousness even on the left. The identity politics-obsessed left that has power has based their entire movement on America's second founding. Maybe the next weapon is just significantly worse.
Their power comes from the fact that there is - was - a bipartisan consensus on some things. Many things that expanded their power were justified explicitly by special pleading on race and either allowed or ignored by mainstream Republicans for fear of being on the wrong side again. Would they be equally sanguine for other things?
It took till Trump to even fight on the AA issue. Things like the trans activist craze are building off laws and ideas that started with race. In a different time it would be inconceivable how fast it's spread and even been mandated. But you can't actually deny the left the tools that do this, because they can always point out where they come from.
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Based on the actual history of the progressive movement, in its many forms, I'd actually say that the central plank of progressivism is fertility control, not utopianism.
how does that match with the Enlightenment, French Revolution, and Communist revolutions? Some of those were pretty pro-natal at some points. I guess China's a pretty stand-out example for fertility control, though...
The French Revolution actually saw a large fertility decline. Communism generally saw the same thing, albeit with totalitarian back and forth.
The enlightenment was an intellectual movement that didn’t filter to the masses for so long it’s impossible to separate from confounders.
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