Modern "diversity" is the exact opposite of what once was done, in that America once strove to integrate, to assimilate. Today, the thing to which we would presumably be asking immigrants to assimilate into is itself targeted for extinction, namely, that nebulous beast the Woke call whiteness. Liberty, equality, the rule of law, AND democracy, when its outcomes aren't those demanded by the Woke, are each under attack. Could someone kindly point me in the direction of a multicultural and ethnically diverse democracy from which we can take hope, inspiration? In the last book he wrote, "Who Are We?" - if one could use italics here, that'd be swell - Huntington spoke often about the hazards of trying to merge America (part of a unique Western civilization that he discerned) with planet earth. He thought it would vitiate "our" nation and our civilization and engender chaos, probably violence, and potentially the destruction, gradual or rapid, of what made us, us.
Melnick is quite right that Huntington believed that the "American Creed" was derived from, and undergirded by the continuation of, Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethical and cultural norms. Before he died, Roger Scruton warned about the consequences of educating a generation of college kids in what he labeled "fake subjects" - being Women's Studies, Critical Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory, etc. Watching the way Gen-Z elites think, the ascendancy of said subjects is manifest.
In some ways one could say that the recent shift - should it prove long-lasting - of Latin immigrants toward the political Right, if it doesn't disprove, at least diminishes Huntington's central concern, in that much of the above-mentioned work frets over Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Wesley has talked about this before - the Woke elite have realized that this is an ongoing phenomenon (i.e., assimilation into whiteness), and it's led to something of a freak-out.
There are those who, espying liberalism's failures, have moved into the trad-con camp; this seems escapist, at best, in that such remedies as the trad-cons proffer are impracticable. But it's become evident to me that we should not ignore questions about value, purpose, and meaning. In one of my favorite novels, "The Magic Mountain," Thomas Mann has Naphta assert that "it is ultimately a cruel misunderstanding of youth to believe it will find its heart's desire in freedom. Its deepest desire is to obey." In Saul Bellow's "Mr. Sammler's Planet," Bellow talks about the unbounded desires stirring in the hearts of modern liberationists - their desire to experience everything, to be everything, to be constrained by nothing, not by the body nor even by the physical world. This, too, we can see.
The turn against tradition and custom and precedent in educated elite circles is putting a lot of long-settled questions back in play, meaning our values are in flux, which is making normies very anxious. Without any common culture or custom to which we can turn, almost everything is mere raw power. And the Woke are fine with this, as it verifies their claims about power to begin with. They've turned their beliefs into self-fulfilling prophecies in some ways; though beliefs, for all of us, can so easily do this. It is this fanatical desire to rid society of all its inheritances that makes the "Year Zero" term apt. Academia is obsessed with superficial diversity behind which intellectual conformity crouches. This diverse conformity, as it were, is a kind of psychosis re the ubiquitous iniquitousness of the West.
More than a few have, of late, taken to asseverating that Wokeness is on its last legs. I doubt this.
Modern "diversity" is the exact opposite of what once was done, in that America once strove to integrate, to assimilate. Today, the thing to which we would presumably be asking immigrants to assimilate into is itself targeted for extinction, namely, that nebulous beast the Woke call whiteness. Liberty, equality, the rule of law, AND democracy, when its outcomes aren't those demanded by the Woke, are each under attack. Could someone kindly point me in the direction of a multicultural and ethnically diverse democracy from which we can take hope, inspiration? In the last book he wrote, "Who Are We?" - if one could use italics here, that'd be swell - Huntington spoke often about the hazards of trying to merge America (part of a unique Western civilization that he discerned) with planet earth. He thought it would vitiate "our" nation and our civilization and engender chaos, probably violence, and potentially the destruction, gradual or rapid, of what made us, us.
Melnick is quite right that Huntington believed that the "American Creed" was derived from, and undergirded by the continuation of, Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethical and cultural norms. Before he died, Roger Scruton warned about the consequences of educating a generation of college kids in what he labeled "fake subjects" - being Women's Studies, Critical Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory, etc. Watching the way Gen-Z elites think, the ascendancy of said subjects is manifest.
In some ways one could say that the recent shift - should it prove long-lasting - of Latin immigrants toward the political Right, if it doesn't disprove, at least diminishes Huntington's central concern, in that much of the above-mentioned work frets over Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Wesley has talked about this before - the Woke elite have realized that this is an ongoing phenomenon (i.e., assimilation into whiteness), and it's led to something of a freak-out.
There are those who, espying liberalism's failures, have moved into the trad-con camp; this seems escapist, at best, in that such remedies as the trad-cons proffer are impracticable. But it's become evident to me that we should not ignore questions about value, purpose, and meaning. In one of my favorite novels, "The Magic Mountain," Thomas Mann has Naphta assert that "it is ultimately a cruel misunderstanding of youth to believe it will find its heart's desire in freedom. Its deepest desire is to obey." In Saul Bellow's "Mr. Sammler's Planet," Bellow talks about the unbounded desires stirring in the hearts of modern liberationists - their desire to experience everything, to be everything, to be constrained by nothing, not by the body nor even by the physical world. This, too, we can see.
The turn against tradition and custom and precedent in educated elite circles is putting a lot of long-settled questions back in play, meaning our values are in flux, which is making normies very anxious. Without any common culture or custom to which we can turn, almost everything is mere raw power. And the Woke are fine with this, as it verifies their claims about power to begin with. They've turned their beliefs into self-fulfilling prophecies in some ways; though beliefs, for all of us, can so easily do this. It is this fanatical desire to rid society of all its inheritances that makes the "Year Zero" term apt. Academia is obsessed with superficial diversity behind which intellectual conformity crouches. This diverse conformity, as it were, is a kind of psychosis re the ubiquitous iniquitousness of the West.
More than a few have, of late, taken to asseverating that Wokeness is on its last legs. I doubt this.