The Fine Line Between Nationalism and Racism

Andrew Sullivan wonders, "Will there always be an England?"


Andrew Sullivan is getting some pushback for a New York Magazine essay titled “Will There Always Be an England?” The controversy stems from this bit in the setup:

The minute you start chatting with anyone about the state of the country, you can almost feel the toxicity and tension, and the tenacious tribalism rending the country apart. Westminster feels like Washington, the way it did when Reagan and Thatcher were ascendant in the 1980s, or when Clinton and Blair entrenched the legacy of their conservative predecessors in the 1990s. This time, they are defined not by a new common direction but by a shared unraveling.

And if you hang around, you can begin to realize why. If my hometown feels remarkably similar, London is close to unrecognizable from the city I knew as a teen. Its skyline has a touch of Dubai to it, the wealth is tangible, even obscene, the prices absurd, the energy young and incredibly diverse. “It’s not our capital any more, is it?” my brother asks, as if seeking confirmation from me. I can see what he means, by virtue of not being there continuously as change accumulated and transformed. In a little less than a week in London, I have yet to buy anything from someone English. Everywhere I hear foreign accents or one of the more than 300 languages London now incorporates. Thirty-seven percent of the capital’s population is foreign-born — the same as New York City — and that share is predicted to be 50 percent by 2031. But New York has always been a thriving immigrant city; newcomers have always defined the place, and it’s just one of several vast metropoles in America. But London is the overwhelmingly dominant city in the U.K., and has never previously been a city of immigrants in the English psyche. London, in fact, is synonymous with the essence of England, and has been a national center since the Roman era. The counties surrounding it are called the Home Counties, because London has always been home.

The best pushback against this are those noting that London has been a multi-ethnic city for a very long time. TNR’s Jeet Heer has the best of those takes:

The most amusing responses note that Sully is himself an immigrant, having become an American citizen. The Atlantic‘s Julia Ioffe is among them:

Duncan Black, better known by his nom de blog Atrios, is more caustic:

There are also many simply pushing back at the notion that diversity has significant downsides. Bloomberg View‘s Noah Smith is an exemplar:

Many, though, are calling Sullivan out for straight-out racism.

Splinter‘s Libby Watson is at least subtle about it:

Most harshly, technology journalist Kelsey Atherton:

This is, of course, a reference white supremacist David Lane’s 14 Words, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

While Sully brings some of this on himself, I don’t see this as a fair reading of his essay. It’s true that, as a young man running The New Republic, he published large excerpts from Charles Murray’s controversial book The Bell Curve and continues to defend that decision. Indeed, he continues to double down on the race-IQ link, seemingly reveling in the inevitable attacks that come from that. (As William Saletan notes in a recent Slate essay, there’s just no useful way to have that conversation: “Don’t imagine that if you posit an association between race and some trait, you can add enough caveats to erase the impression that people can be judged by their color. The association, not the caveats, is what people will remember.”)

Regardless, Sullivan’s argument here is far more subtle than “immigrants are ruining London.” Indeed, he clearly doesn’t think that at all.

I love the new London, but then I would, wouldn’t I? I’m an American now, and became one in part because I fell in love with its racial and cultural diversity.

No, it’s the rubes who don’t like like it:

But most people, not gifted with a great education and lucky breaks, are not able to hop and skip between capital cities, finding each metropolis increasingly and pleasantly like the other. They’re in suburbs and small towns, or in the rust-belt north, whence Orwell’s patriotic (emphatically not nationalist) socialism sprang. And they’re anxious — in a way that the young are not anxious. For the under-40s, economic insecurity, college debt, and inability to own a home drive the angst. For the over-40s, it’s a sense that the England they identified with, that gave their lives meaning and pride — the England that was nearly destroyed in the “finest hour” of 1940 — this “sceptered isle,” is disappearing.

That’s the reason for Brexit. Period. In my view, it is an insane decision and it’s becoming ever-clearer what the nature of that madness is. The current debate is whether the U.K. will remain in a single market, a customs union, or a customs partnership. If you ask anyone the difference between the three, the brows furrow as the eyes glaze over. The Tories argue for Brexit, bizarrely, as a tool for freer trade, in true English fashion. But it is withdrawal from the biggest free-trade area in the world! Many of the regulations and standards imposed Europe-wide will have to be retained, but under British law, not European — because the economies are so intertwined. The more you investigate what Brexit actually, practically means, it turns out to be an attempt to keep everything the same but somehow change it completely. It’s a policy that makes no sense, is being negotiated by a prime minister who voted to remain in the E.U., is being debated by a Parliament overwhelmingly pro-staying, in deference to a referendum that was a blizzard of disinformation and ignorance. I truly don’t believe if you asked the average Brit what the E.U. is, they’d be able to give you a coherent answer.

He goes on to show some polling data in both the UK and US that demonstrates this unease and then pivots to this:

Ta-Nehisi Coates has called these people witting enablers of white supremacy because they voted for Trump, conjuring up images of men in white hoods lynching and murdering African-Americans. But many of them voted for Obama twice. Clinton called half of Trump voters “a basketful of deplorables.” But a majority of white women voted for Trump. The left intelligentsia regards them as bigots, racists, xenophobes, and even “privileged” — attitudes and statements that are re-broadcast every hour of every day to the white and culturally anxious viewers of Fox News. What few on the left seem to see is that cultural anxiety, given the ethnic and cultural transformation of the last few decades, is an entirely predictable and entirely understandable response. If people felt that someone in charge actually saw their point of view, sympathized with it, and attempted even minor changes to accommodate it, we would have a different politics. But all they had was Trump. And all they still have is Trump.

If that is true in immigrant-created, multiracial, multicultural America, a vast and churning continent, always restless, always changing, it is triply true in the little, overcrowded, once remarkably homogeneous island that is Britain. This country’s core identity is thousands of years old. Yes, it has long accepted immigrants, but until the 1950s, net immigration was a rounding error. Since then, it has exploded. In the last 20 years, it has reached American levels. For those whose self-understanding is wrapped up in bluebells and tea, in English accents divided solely by class and region, in a nearly all-white and all-English country for centuries, these times are culturally terrifying.

It wasn’t their economic insecurity that gave us Brexit. It was that no one in charge even sensed their unease. Elites — and I count myself among the guilty — gave them nothing by way of reassurance or even a sense that they were understood instead of reviled. So all they had was Brexit. It wasn’t a rational decision; it was their only way to have their voices heard. Their pride and self-identity are bound up in it now, just as a critical slice of America’s is bound up in Trump. Which is why, despite the mounting evidence that the Brexit gambit is a disaster, they will never let it go.

Home is indeed where one starts from. Change it too rapidly and it will disintegrate. We have been fools on mass immigration, we have been fools for preventing an honest debate about the benefits and drawbacks of diversity, and we have been contemptible in our contempt for so many of our fellow citizens. Both countries are now paying a terrible, terrible price.

Jeet Heer’s tweetstorm, linked above, correctly notes that these attitudes are minority viewpoints on both sides of the Pond. But that doesn’t mean they’re not a powerful political force. Rather clearly, ethnonationalism is on the rise in both the United States and Western Europe and we’re seeing impacts at the ballot box, most notably with the Brexit vote the election of Donald Trump—both of which represented minority viewpoints in the countries writ large but generated outsized enthusiasm.

Matt Yglesias, who appeared on the same masthead as Sullivan when they blogged at The Atlantic,  notes that Sullivan was once an advocate for a different position:

But I don’t see a change here. In 1999 as now, Sullivan’s perspective is classically conservative: a desire that change come incrementally rather than drastically. In 1999, he both lamented the loss of the quaintness of English village life, which he saw being homogenized into an American-style suburbia, and yet understood the desperate need for change:

This wasn’t quite the script I had imagined when I left in 1984. Every immigrant to America likes to think of his home country as a repository of the old and the quaint, of unchanging stability and backward thinking. It is the vanity of immigration, and in a deeper sense, the vanity of America itself. So it is somewhat of an adjustment to find the suburban England I had once seen as a rickety edifice of nostalgia, class and passivity become the kind of striving, anonymous exurb I once associated with America, and to feel the still-raw unease that such a transformation has clearly brought about.

By transformation, I don’t mean merely the shift that has occurred everywhere the global economy has been allowed to do its work unchecked. And I don’t mean the changes that happen with every hometown between remembered adolescence and adulthood. I mean something a little deeper, something alien to the American experience, which is why perhaps it has gone largely unnoticed in this country. I mean the loss of national identity itself, the unraveling of a sense of nationhood and settled way of life that was once almost definitional of the stolid British. For in a way perhaps invisible to outsiders and too gradual for insiders to fully acknowledge, the combined forces of globalization, political reform and the end of the cold war have swept through Britain in the last two decades with a force unequaled in any other country in the Western world.

As the century ends, it is possible, I think, to talk about the abolition of Britain without the risk of hyperbole. The United Kingdom’s cultural and social identity has been altered beyond any recent prediction. Its very geographical boundaries are being redrawn. Its basic Constitution is being gutted and reconceived. Its monarchy has been reinvented. Half its Parliament is under the ax. Its voting system is about to be altered. Its currency may well soon be abandoned. And its role in the world at large is in radical flux. The implications for Britain’s closest ally, the United States, are far from trifling.

Some of this change was organic and inevitable. But much of it is also the legacy of three remarkable Prime Ministers, who have successively managed in very different ways and with very different styles to revolutionize Britain’s economy, society and Constitution — in a way that promises to free the people of the island from the past that long threatened to strangle them.

That Andrew Sullivan was at the tail end of his youth, lamenting that so much of it had been lost. Its title, “Farewell Britannia; There Will Always Be an England,” very much parallels that of the piece he wrote as a man well into middle age. Looking back on one’s childhood 30 years hence, a lot will have changed. Almost two decades later, the homeland of one’s youth will be almost unrecognizable. That’s even more the case when one remembers the past through rose-colored glasses.

Sullivan is a member of the elite; indeed, the elite of the elite. He’s extremely talented and went to all the right schools. He was editing one of the premier opinion magazines in his 20s and has been a global figure for decades. He’s spent most of his life in those circles and in global cities, which are fine places indeed to live—especially if you’re rich and famous.

But the forces of globalization that Sullivan understands work to his benefit, even as he looks back wistfully at what has been lost, scare the living hell out of people our age who have been less fortunate. They mostly see the downsides of manufacturing jobs moving overseas, immigrants from diverse cultures changing the face of their community, and just change in general. One can understand the Eff You impulse behind Brexit and Trump, even while shaking one’s head at the destructiveness that results.

Still, the line between those fears and racism is not always obvious. Where does pride in national identity and a desire to preserve one’s culture end and prejudice begin?

It’s not unreasonable to think of “England” or “America” in terms of their dominant cultures, which have been white, Christian, and English-speaking even while recognizing that both have long been immigration-friendly and benefitting from the resulting diversity. If the question “Will there always be an England?” means something other than “Will the island of Great Britain continue to exist?” it’s because “England” has a social meaning, tied to language, ethnic heritage, traditions, and the like. Would an England that’s not predominantly English-speaking still be “England”? One that’s not predominately Anglo-Saxon? Probably not—at least, not if it happened overnight.

We’ve long defined “America” mostly in political terms. So, the fact that,  presuming I make it to median life expectancy, I’ll see a United States where whites are no longer a majority won’t mean an end “America.” Even if we officially recognize Spanish as a second language, we’d still be “America.” Partly, though, it’s because of the pace of these changes. While they may seem fast to middle-aged white men looking back wistfully at our youth, they’ve been gradual.

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James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Where does pride in national identity and a desire to preserve one’s culture end and prejudice begin?

    At the point where preserving the former is done via the latter, starting with the idea that one’s culture should in fact be dominant.

    As for this:

    Ta-Nehisi Coates has called these people witting enablers of white supremacy because they voted for Trump, conjuring up images of men in white hoods lynching and murdering African-Americans.

    Bullsh!t Andrew, no such images were conjured in my head, just trump’s words and actions and those of his most ardent supporters. In case you haven’t noticed Andrew, white supremacists no longer need to wear hoods or give each other Nazi salutes, now they wear khaki pants and white polo shirts, carry tiki torches and chanting “Blood and Soil…”

    Are trump’s voters bigots, racists, xenophobes, and even “privileged”? Some, for certain are. As for the rest, they voted for putting an obviously bigoted, racist, xenophobic, over privileged, ignorant, narcissist in the White House and that sin is on them.

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  2. KM says:

    It’s not unreasonable to think of “England” or “America” in terms of their dominant cultures, which have been white, Christian, and English-speaking

    Technically that’s not true. America wasn’t always mostly English-speaking – there was a fairly good chance that German would be our official language. Quite of few of the original colonies had major populations of non-English speakers. French was the cultural language of the court for most of England’s formative years, what with the Normans and all. Hell, “England” as a concept hasn’t really existed for a while now since they’ve been the UK since the 1700 and Welsh and Scots are languages and people in their own rights.

    It’s a socialization myth: we’ve *always* been this way because the group in power says so. “White” is the same thing – go back a few decades and people who think they are “white” today would be shocked at what their ancestors were considered. Racism is a constant game of moving goalposts – who the “Other” is can change on a whim but it’s never *you*. That’s the driving fear behind a lot of this after all since they see it as flipping the script. They consider themselves – true or not – as the norm and anything else is a violation of that.

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  3. drj says:

    As always, Sullivan is a complete tool. From his piece:

    What few on the left seem to see is that cultural anxiety, given the ethnic and cultural transformation of the last few decades, is an entirely predictable and entirely understandable response. If people felt that someone in charge actually saw their point of view, sympathized with it, and attempted even minor changes to accommodate it, we would have a different politics. But all they had was Trump. And all they still have is Trump.

    There is a border patrol catching and turning back illegal immigrants, no? That has been the case for many, many decades, no?

    So how on earth can Sullivan maintain that no one in charge sympathizes with those who want to restrict immigration? It’s patently absurd. Everyone in charge wants to restrict immigration.

    And I’ll bet it’s no coincidence that he omits to specify which “minor changes” he would like to see introduced, because these will either be not minor at all, racist as fuck, or something that conservatives (as opposed to lefties) don’t want to see, such as much harsher penalties for companies employing illegal immigrants.

    Even more importantly, another thing that Sullivan very, very conveniently overlooks is that a whole lot of “cultural anxiety” has absolutely nothing to do with immigration (anthem kneeling, Black Lives Matter, “strapping young bucks,” “welfare queens,” bell curves, sagging pants, etc., etc.).

    And that’s only the surface of all the unfounded insinuations and absolute howlers Sullivan managed to put together. He is just an incredibly sloppy thinker – albeit with a gift for words.

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  4. Kylopod says:

    @KM:

    there was a fairly good chance that German would be our official language.

    That’s an urban legend.

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-german-vote/

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  5. Dave Schuler says:

    The situations are different for the U. S. and England. As Chesterton observed a century ago, America is a country built on a creed. As long as the creed is honored, even when more in the breach than in the observance, there will be an America. There is some question about that. For example, a recent Gallup poll found that although there was strong support among Millennials for the First Amendment there was even greater support for diversity and inclusion even if freedom of speech would be curtailed.

    But England and the countries of the Continent have a decision before them. They can be ethnic states or not. The evidence strongly suggests that they cannot be both. Glossed over in the romantic recollections of Good Old Blighty is that Englishness was built through actively suppressing other groups just as Frenchness has been.

    It’s not my decision to make so I can’t advise them but I think it will prove more difficult than many seem to think.

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  6. Eric Florack says:

    All of this goes to a point I made over 20 years ago. 90% of what gets passed off as racism is in fact culture.

    Unless for chance you’d like to explain the success of dr. Walter Williams, dr. Thomas Sowell, etc.

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  7. Modulo Myself says:

    Neither England nor America are vanishing. It’s people who cling to their pasts who are disappearing, because they are part of time and are walking on stilts that grow higher and higher.

    The other thing is that Brexit and Trump represent a longing for pre-global provincial culture but the prosperity of a dominant Empire. It’s a ridiculous dream, and one that will never be restored.

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  8. grumpy realist says:

    @Modulo Myself: I think it was an American who said at the end of WWII that the British had lost an empire but not yet found an identity.

    And now they’ve got Brexit, which will supposedly bring them back to Utopia. Might work better if they actually had a plan. At present it’s nothing more than wishful thinking and handwaving whenever someone points out the problems of transition.

  9. Chris Renner says:

    So, the fact that, presuming I make it to median life expectancy, I’ll see a United States where whites are no longer a majority won’t mean an end “America.”

    I’m a few years younger than you, and I don’t expect to see this for one simple reason: native-born Hispanics overwhelmingly identify as white. Unless they’re forced into putting their Hispanic identity first, they’ll gradually stop being counted as nonwhite.

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  10. george says:

    Preserving your culture is a good thing. You only need to be from a culture that’s almost been eradicated (Native American for instance) to realize this. The more cultures in the world the better; partly because it makes the world a far more interesting place, partly because diversity is as strengthening wrt to humanity as it is with diversity of species in a biosphere.

    How to do so without resorting to prejudice is the problematic part.

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  11. KM says:

    @Kylopod :
    I didn’t know there was a supposed vote on it (the things you learn!) – I was referencing the fact that a lot of settlers in the colonies weren’t native English speakers. Places like Pennsylvania and New York had significant Dutch and German populations. The mythos is the Pilgrims, proper Englishmen and the like but the 13 colonies were founded by disparate groups from multiple countries. Wandering the countryside speaking only English might have left a traveler scratching their head.

    I’m DAR and my ancestors have only been speaking English for about 3-4 generations. It’s definitely false that rural living = English even from the start.

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  12. Kylopod says:

    @KM:

    I was referencing the fact that a lot of settlers in the colonies weren’t native English speakers.

    I understood your main point; however, you did say that there was a good chance of German becoming the country’s official language, and that simply is not true.

  13. michael reynolds says:

    I had about a 30 year gap between early UK visits and more recent ones and the change is dramatic. London is a very diverse city, far more than it was back in the 70’s when I was there. So, whatever the history of suppression etc…, Brits saw themselves as primarily English. The reality in this case is less important than the perception. And it’s that perception that is a large part of the problem.

    I don’t buy wholly into the idea of separate and unique cultures. What everyone, from modern day Native-Americans to Brexit-loving Brits misses is that the culture they have is not the culture they had, and the culture they think they had is a construct of dubious history, self-flattering nostalgia and TV shows. What these various groups think they’re preserving is a narrative that is largely false and in any event un-recoverable. Persisting in these fantasies quickly curdles into racism.

    Take our friend @Florack above. In his mind he imagines himself as a more important person at some point in the past. You’ll notice no one ever has a ‘past life’ where they were anything less than a knight or a princess. No one ever thinks, Yep, in the past I’d probably be working as a brick-maker for a bowl of gruel and a flea-infested mat in the corner of a smoky hut. Conservatives – who are by nature imagination-deprived – imagine themselves as a kindly white master on the steps of some plantation. They don’t picture themselves as impoverished small farmers desperately trying to compete with the big slave-powered plantations. They see themselves as one of Bobby Lee’s cavalry commanders, not as a starved recruit fighting for rich men’s ‘property.’

    A fantasized past will always seem better than a real present if you lack the wit to really understand the contrasts. One word: dentistry. The fact is the past sucked hard compared to the present. But to people who cannot compete in the present, the lure of a made-up past is strong.

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  14. Modulo Myself says:

    @george:

    Sure, but culture is being preserved. When Sullivan writes this:

    For the over-40s, it’s a sense that the England they identified with, that gave their lives meaning and pride — the England that was nearly destroyed in the “finest hour” of 1940 — this “sceptered isle,” is disappearing.

    –he’s an idiot. Somebody who is 60 would have been born in 1958. They would have been 19 when the Sex Pistols went on BBC. There’s actual culture being preserved by this mythical 60 year old which has nothing to do with WW2. Entire generations have been raised on the mythology of the punk and post-punk scene, or the origins of rave culture. Even David Cameron supposedly loved The Smiths, which in retrospect probably makes sense.

    Sullivan’s England is empty and awful regardless of how racist it is. Exactly like Trump’s America.

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  15. Dave Schuler says:

    @michael reynolds:

    No one ever thinks, Yep, in the past I’d probably be working as a brick-maker for a bowl of gruel and a flea-infested mat in the corner of a smoky hut.

    That pretty much describes my family on my mom’s side and it’s the prism through which I view any number of things.

    I’ve visited the UK in the 1970s, the 1990s, and just a few years ago. By the 1990s London was very much foreign-born. You’d need to go out of your way to find an Englishman. But when you went outside London it was a different story. When you went into a pub you drew attention because of your accent.

    Judging by my recent experience most large towns in England are now pretty cosmopolitan.

    2
  16. gVOR08 says:

    @Kylopod: @KM: I was surprised some time ago by this map and list of ethnic ancestry in the U. S. I had assumed my native ND would be predominantly Scandinavian, but no, it’s German. As is much of the rest of the country. They list German as the largest ethnic group, with Black next. English is 5th, Irish 3rd. However I believe a large portion of the Germans came over in the 1840s. Early enough to have a significant and fortuitous effect on the Civil War, but long after English was settled as the dominant language.

    2
  17. gVOR08 says:

    A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it. – William Buckley

    Much as “conservative” seems an undefined concept, this does seem to be an underlying constant. Liberals try to adapt to the inevitable, Conservatives try to stop it, at least rhetorically.

    1
  18. MarkedMan says:

    @michael reynolds:

    No one ever thinks, Yep, in the past I’d probably be working as a brick-maker for a bowl of gruel and a flea-infested mat in the corner of a smoky hut.

    I do. And I always have. I’ve always been aware that I f I was born, say, in the US 1No one ever thinks, Yep, in the past I’d probably be working as a brick-maker for a bowl of gruel and a flea-infested mat in the corner of a smoky hut 150 years ago there is a 50% chance I would be a woman. And a not insignificant chance I would be a slave or American Indian. If we broaden the scope to the whole world the odds that my life would be nasty, brutish and short are overwhelming. Ive always been aware of the razors edge of chance that has me sitting in a coffee shop with a smart phone.

    2
  19. DrDaveT says:

    Sullivan:

    Clinton called half of Trump voters “a basketful of deplorables.” But a majority of white women voted for Trump.

    Why is that allegedly intelligent people seem to think there’s some kind of contradiction there?

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  20. Jc says:

    The UK is 82.7% White and are losing their minds. US is like 60% White and elected Trump. How long before the UK elects a nut job “Englishman”? Demographics have been changing for years, accept it and get on with your life, folks.

  21. Kylopod says:

    @Jc: Boris Johnson has sometimes been described as a British Trump (they even look kind of similar, weirdly enough).

  22. James Pearce says:

    A few months ago in Denver’s historically black neighborhood Five Points, a coffee shop put up a sign that said “Happily gentrifying the neighborhood since 2014.” People were pissed!

    London isn’t the only place where people feel like the unique character of their neighborhood is being changed by unwelcome “others.” That poison infects us all.

  23. wr says:

    @Eric Florack: “Unless for chance you’d like to explain the success of dr. Walter Williams, dr. Thomas Sowell, etc.”

    It’s basically minstrelsy. In any culture there’s always room for one or two members of the underclass to make a good living telling the ruling class that people like them deserve to be kept down by their betters.

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  24. grumpy realist says:

    @michael reynolds: as someone who was born a premie and who had only a 50% chance of survival (even with the incubator) I have absolutely no doubt what my previous life would have been like: very, very short.

    I seem to remember Terry Pratchett at one point had Cohen the Barbarian list the three best parts of modern life: dentistry, hot water, and soft toilet paper.

    3
  25. Andy says:

    Well, we are clearly at the point where any semblance of opposition or criticism of multiculturalism is flat out racism. In this, Sullivan commits the sin of heresy for suggesting that those who do not unconditionally support the spread of multiculturalism may have a valid view that doesn’t stem from racism.

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  26. al-Ameda says:

    @Eric Florack:
    A

    ll of this goes to a point I made over 20 years ago. 90% of what gets passed off as racism is in fact culture.

    Well, that explains why many Republicans and conservatives have come to believe that so-called ‘reverse racism’ is now a bigger problem than historical racism.

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  27. DrDaveT says:

    @Andy:

    Well, we are clearly at the point where any semblance of opposition or criticism of multiculturalism is flat out racism.

    That’s certainly the default position, yeah. I suppose I can intellectually imagine an argument in opposition to multiculturalism that isn’t based on racism (or its religious analog), but I’m having trouble coming up with actual real-world examples. Did you have one in mind?