True story: I asked my 10 year old niece what she learned in school this year. “Our country was really mean to the Native Americans. We took their land and killed them.” Learn anything else about the US? “Yes, we still use mean stereotypes of the native Americans.” Anything else about America? “No that’s it.” Now, perhaps she was taught more, but that was her takeaway and it was 100% of what she retained about her country. She happens to go to a very nice private school in a major city.
This is what conservatives are against. These kids are being taught a purely oppressor-victim narrative of the country with zero context of the greater success of the American project. They don’t seem to learn that despite all its warts, this was truly a revolutionary project in terms of human freedom and equality and is essentially unparalleled in human history. That context is wiped away and we teach only the negative parts while forgetting that those very negative parts, while mostly an exception in America, were generally the norm for most people all over the globe for most of human history.
If we teach a generation of kids that our country has been a history of pure evil and oppression with no redeeming qualities, I guess progressives think the kids will remedy the oppression. Conservatives see a generation of radicals that will hold deeply anti-American sentiments with no sense of there being anything valuable worth preserving. This, of course, can only lead to the decay of the nation.
There just has to be a balance. We have many things worth preserving while still having things we need to improve upon. Reasonable people should be able to agree on this.
This is why I sympathize with conservatives on this issue even though I don’t agree with many of their specific claims. I think it’s good for Americans to have positive feelings toward their country and to identify with it. Not to the point where we won’t face up to darker episodes in our history or present day injustices, but enough that we feel some loyalty to the nation and thus a desire to improve it.
I worry that current trends in the social justice left, and its influence on history education and youth culture, will lead in Gen Z to apathy and an embrace of excessively rootless, global capitalism as much as it does to a drive for justice.
I’m in my late-20s and many of my 20-something friends have embraced a kind of cynical apathy toward politics that seems rooted in this kind of pessimistic social justice approach to history.
At the risk of sounding a bit cynical myself, I don't think it's at all a bad thing if political engagement cools off somewhat. The levels of political engagement we saw during the Trump years are really unhealthy for the broader civic health of the country, which needs way more people who don't watch the news.
I think that even now we have trouble reckoning with how existentially terrifying Trump’s election was to a certain flavor of liberal- he was so manifestly unfit to lead the country that a lot of people started second guessing everything that seemed real before about America and Americans. A lot of people really struggle to construct a coherent permission structure that explains how an allegedly intelligent, patriotic, ethical, religious (!) person could possibly fall behind such a transparent charlatan.
Regardless of its underlying truth or merits, racialism shares some unfortunate features of conspiracy theories for Liberals in the sense that it casts the “real” drivers of human action away from what people actually say or do, and into a shadow realm of innuendo and suggestion that we use to divine what lurks in the hearts of others. It can explain everything that doesn’t make sense.
Basically, I wonder the extent to which the current Vogue of racialized politics is basically linked to Liberals being blindsided by Trumpism and not knowing wtf is up with Conservative America. It’s tempting to speculate that as we start to understand what is happening in those communities better that the racial framing will organically recede as we start to understand the underlying issues better.
It's one thing to disengage because you feel like there are more important things in life or care a bit less about the ideological, but you still have vaguely patriotic feelings. That can be healthy for many people. But it's a whole other thing to disengage because you're so disgusted by your country that you don't think it's worth trying to improve.
Here’s the thing: many conservatives agree with your “normie liberal” take on this particular issue. But where normal liberals might intuitively trust teachers and left-leaning teachers unions, and so minimize or give the benefit of the doubt when they see CRT excess, they have the opposite reaction. It doesn’t help that normie liberals uniformly pretend those excesses don’t exist.
I studied history in college and read widely in it now. And I struggle to remember *anything* I learned about history in my K-12 years.
Oh wait; that's wrong. In fourth grade, my central Florida class made a school trip to St. Augustine (you know, Ponce de Leon, the Fountain of Youth, and all that). And we toured the Castillo de San Marcos, the great coquino-stone fort the Spanish built there. They had dungeons!! Totally cool!!!
I vividly remember asking my mom in maybe second grade if America had ever started any wars, since starting a war seemed to be an obvious no-no. My mom told me "only Vietnam... that was complicated." This was during the first Persian Gulf war.
Ha- she was born in the mid-50s and her worldview was heavily shaped by her hippie older brother who I’m sure was a war protester so I wouldn’t be surprised if she had some vaguely cynical associations at least
I agree that I remember very few specifics. But I do remember having a deep sense of patriotism and American exceptionalism-- especially compared the evil Soviets. I don't think the specifics are what you remember, but rather you form broader foundational assumptions of how the world is situated. Who the good guys and bad guys are to put it simplistically.
I see now that I was successfully propagandized. I also see how that was useful and totally uncontroversial coming out of 2 world wars and in the midst of an existential Cold War. We may simply find that relentless criticism of our society is useful so long as there are no serious external threats. Looking history, that sort situation never persists very long.
I think when you're in elementary school, getting a glossy version of American history is the right thing to do.
High school is the time for a more nuanced education, but good luck. You're either taking an AP class simply for the college selection rat race or (my case) you are bored out of your mind by your incompetent teacher and want to be anywhere else in the world.
I think there is a middle ground. I definitely recall learning about slavery in 5th grade US history. It didn't make me think that America was evil. We don't want it too glossy. 12 and 13 year olds should have at least a basic understanding of the history of racism and how it has shaped aspects of our country. But they should also learn how revolutionary the Declaration of Independence was.
I remember that, in 7th grade US history, I was taught that Reconstruction was a dark period where the constitution and the laws were overthrown and corruption reigned.
This makes a lot of sense, and my memory of my school years may be seriously impaired, but I just remember anything like this, or basically any study of history being prominently featured. Living in Florida in the 1960s, I had back then generally warm feelings toward the Southern side in the Civil War(*), but that came from imbibing from the general culture and ethos of society during those years, not from what teachers fed us.
I just have a feeling we're overthinking the role of education in shaping people's views, especially in the earlier years.
I remember learning about slavery, and also being absolutely traumatized when we got to 8th grade and learned about the Holocaust. A visit to the Museum Tolerance where we learned about a specific kid (mine died in Auschwitz) also really stuck with me. I do think history teaching can make a big impression! Especially if you have decent teachers who do interactive stuff so it’s not just the dry textbook
Agreed. Also, it's exactly one data point. I don't claim anything further. I'd simply frame it as useful real world example of a trend conservatives find unsettling.
No, the implication is that what she thinks was important about what she learned is only slightly correlated with what she actually learned. It's hard to extract the signal from that noise.
Both the things she learned are unambiguously true though. I'm very doubtful that's all she learned, but is it really a problem if our kids are being taught accurate history that maybe portrays America in a negative light? It's a history class, not a hagiography class.
The parts of CRT that concern me are less about teaching kids an accurate history of the nation they live in and more concepts like "white people are inherently racist" and "being punctual is a white trait"
It's not about true or false. It's about the range of facts, the focus, the context and the narrative.
It does seem to me a negative thing if the next generation of kids grow up with a baked-in notion that the country they live in is a bad or evil place. That's certainly what I would think if my understanding of American history was limited only it's 18th and 19th century interactions with Native Americans.
I don't think the US is bad, though, even in just a historical sense. That's partly because I understand the broader context of human history. Slavery, ethno-religious conflict and discrimination and wars of conquest were the norm worldwide when you look back a few hundred years. You'd be hard pressed to find a people or nation of that time that would live up to the standards of 2021. If anything, the US has been at the forefront of progress towards a more humane global standard.
I think that’s an argument for more world history—seeing the continuity of violence, conquest, and oppression in world history helps to put America’s dirty laundry in context. There are a bunch of progressives who don’t care about that context—American is the great Satan—and I can understand conservative and moderate parents worrying that a focus on the negative side of Us history will create more.
I agree with you, that's a much worse problem. However, I do think it's fruit from the same tree, just a matter of degree of how far you push one side of the narrative. If we teach very little of the good history and really emphasize the bad and don't give much context, we are effectively promoting the view that America should be primarily understood as an oppressive and racist place. From there, it's a not a far walk to infer that the same white people who made America such a bad place must also be evil and racist and of course, that implicates the underlying culture. It's pretty straightforward transitive logic.
I think we should especially be teaching the parts of history which portray America in a negative light, but you don't want that to be *all* you learn/take away, which I believe was the original poster's concern (and which I find reasonable). The US is the world's oldest democracy, as well as one of the world's oldest continuous governments, period. That's well worth celebrating, even as we talk about all the many, many issues.
I mean if she goes to private school one could only take it up with the school’s teachers and administration—it’s not a public policy matter. I also think a 10-year-old’s recollections of what they learned in history are unreliable. Kids are fascinated by stories of injustice; it’s not surprising those would stand out the most. None of which is to say the phenomenon you’re describing is baseless, but we would want to be careful in how we recognize and define it.
Agreed. I think her parents and most of the parents in the school are on board with it, so there likely won't be a big backlash. It's pretty self selecting. I toured the school and the head of lower school said in plain English that they don't like to teach history that was "written by white men." The thing is, I also toured most of the "elite" private schools in the area and it was similar stuff in all but one of them. Too progressive for me so I won't be sending my kids to any of those places, but plenty of people do and they are all considered top notch and the places to be if you want your kid to go to a high end college.
There is also another dynamic at play which is that I think even the people that do mainly disagree are quite hesitant to speak up. They don't want to the bad guy or God forbid the racist, and they want their kids to be viewed favorably so they can graduate from the fancy private school and go to a fancy Ivy League University. There's is just not enough reason to rock the boat, piss off a teacher or administrator, and potentially jeopardize your child's future.
During our recent summer of awakening, my niece wanted to talk to her 8-year-old daughter about racism, and in particular about the life of my Black 8-year-old goddaughter, with whom she played at least weekly from infancy to age 6, and whom she loves deeply. I guess she just told her that my goddaughter's life had been harder because whatever about racism. I wondered though, how does that affect great-niece's feelings/perceptions of goddaughter? Pity? Sense of fragility? Sense of unwanted/unnecessary responsibility for her feelings? They're both strong personalities, and each has generally held her own in the inevitable conflicts they've had. Niece move to Midwest and pandemic have separated them since Christmas 2019. Not sure what to expect in 2021; we'll see.
Look around your society. All told, it’s a pretty good society. It’s better than virtually every society that’s ever existed. Certainly, it’s far better than Bangladesh, where my dad grew up. Fundamentally, (American) conservatism posits that (1) we don’t really understand how our society got to be as successful as it is; and (2) that we should be extremely careful about changing it because we risk breaking it. It’s the applied version of Chesterton’s Fence.
What conservatives fear about a liberal retelling of history, that focuses only on the negatives and not on the positives, is that it will convince kids that the system as a whole needs upheaval and change. And conservatives think that’s bad not because it’s bad for conservatives, but because they think that upheaval would be bad for America.
Concrete example: I’m a conservative precisely because I’m an immigrant of color. When I look around America I see people with virtues lacking in the people back home, and system of government that’s produced remarkable stability and prosperity. In particular I see a system that has enabled many successive generations of immigrants to achieve parity with the original Anglo Saxon founders of the country, including non-white immigrants like Latinos and Asians: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353.
The success of America at being a multi-ethnic democracy is unparalleled. Even in Europe with its robust welfare states immigrants who look like me are stuck in generational poverty. But in America we’re richer than white people!
Interesting comment; thanks for sharing your views!
Speaking politically, I fear that things like the 1619 Project (and the whole CRT thing) is a dangerous trap for trying to build a Democratic coalition. If centering our ideology on the Black experience -- critical as that is and was -- is what will drive the Democrats in the future, then why should we expect Latinos, East Asians and, yes, Bangladeshi immigrants(*) to sign on? What's in it for them?
I strongly cosign that. I grew up in Virginia and Georgia and felt totally accepted, but I suspect that would not have been true had I been Black. It's none of my business how Black people choose to relate to America. I'm actually a bit of an SJW--I think we should have reparations, etc.
But projecting that sui generis experience onto my half-brown, half-white kid is wrong.
Buts it’s the conservatives who are actually writing laws in ORDER to break that- and historically, it’s ALWAYS been conservatives doing that thing. I understand your fear, but the loss of a shared narrative hasn’t happened yet, and the forging of one is a product of liberalism, in spite of conservative pushes against it. Meanwhile, conservatives are actively trying to maintain power by disenfranchising non-conservatives, while liberals... aren’t doing that to conservatives.
Liberals deserve credit for checking the natural conservative tendency toward xenophobia. But as I noted above, immigrants to liberal European countries with robust welfare states are languishing. The French welfare state hasn’t helped Muslim immigrants there escape multi-generational poverty, whereas many immigrants to America (e.g. Vietnamese and Cambodians) went from being poor refugees to parity with Americans in a single generation. Historically, conservatives were the ones that stood up for free market economies, patriotic education, etc., that made that possible. They demanded that Italian, Polish, etc., immigrants become culturally Anglo Saxon while liberals sought to preserve the distinct identities to get votes.
And today, liberals are definitely the biggest threat to continued prosperity for immigrants. Some racist Trump supporters in Kansas don’t scare me. What scares me is that well-meaning liberals will teach my kids that there is an invisible “white supremacy” that will hold them back in life. I was blessed to grow up in Virginia back when it was a red state. I never learned about “white supremacy” (except in terms of people with white hoods which we defeated). I never doubted I could succeed or blamed someone other than myself when I didn’t. I worry liberals will deprive my kids of that.
Like many immigrants, I favor things like universal healthcare, but oppose the social liberalism of white Democrats. As far as I can tell, social liberalism and the sexual revolution have heaped devastation across America. Elites in NYC and San Francisco seem to be okay, because they actually retain conservative family values as applied to their own lives. But the lower middle class towns where my in laws are from have been decimated. Every other kid is being raised in unstable homes, to parents who capriciously follow their sexual urges instead of doing their jobs as parents.
Ray, I don't know when your father immigrated, but it is very unlikely that somebody who looks Bangladeshi would have found life palatable in the US before blacks and white liberals came together to push Civil Rights reform.
It's also very unlikely that a given Bangladeshi person would have had an opportunity to immigrate. Before blacks and white liberals came together to pass the Immigration Act of 1965, less than 4% of immigrants in the US were Asian. Now that number is over 25%.
I'm a brown immigrant who grew up in Florida and learned about white supremacy. Learning about it didn't hold me back in life. I don't really see the rationale behind people who think it might have.
People like you and me owe a lot to the liberal black, brown, and white people who made our lives possible. Working in that same tradition is consistent with looking around at our society and wanting to preserve and expand the good in it.
I tried to explain to my parents once that we couldn’t have emigrated before the Civil Rights Act and they told me that actually we could have because Iranians are technically white according to the US Census. I’m not sure if that’s true (the Census part is but I don’t think immigration law worked that way - I think it was country based?). But that’s not the point. They were just sufficiently committed to the idea of themselves as white or white adjacent that any notion that they should make common cause with Black people was strange at best and scary at worst. It’s not that they’re virulent racists or anything, but I think that like a lot of upwardly mobile brown immigrants they’ve decided that the way to succeed in America is to assimilate as much as possible into whiteness by distancing yourself as far as possible from Blackness (and from less affluent brown immigrants like people from Latin America). That’s not actually crazy - it worked for the Polish and the Italians and lots of people who weren’t really considered white back in the day! But yes, we’d never have gotten the Asian and Middle Eastern, etc, immigrants we have in the US now without civil rights reforms.
"White liberals" caucused with southern segregationists to get FDR elected so they could get their vast welfare state. Republicans were the ones who pushed through every major civil rights reform until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and voted in greater percentages for both that law and the 1965 INA.
Decades after the fact, "white liberals" found religion and decided that what America needed was the same central planning that created systemic racism during the FDR era (https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten-history-of-how-our-government-segregated-america/) except this time the central planners wouldn't be racist (promise!) Now they attack the Republican idea of "color blindness" as "racist." Excuse me if I think that's one of those liberal dead ends, like eugenics, free love, etc.
Racism started with the New Deal and ended with Lyndon Johnson, but it was still somehow a conservative ending -- this is not a historical narrative that is easy to take seriously.
Free love + eugenics = antiracism is bad -- also very difficult to take seriously.
My point is that “liberals” taking credit for good things that arose in the past from race blindness, religious fundamentalism, and capitalism, while opposing all three of those things today, is disingenuous and self serving.
I’m not going in the opposite direction, just saying that liberals should own their own mistakes and dead ends. What liberals call “anti racism” today is one of those dead ends.
France is the poster country for radical race-blind republican enlightenment values. Canada is the poster country for multiculturalism. They both have a strong welfare state. France is the one with the racial values that conservatives say they want. Canada is the one with the racial values that progressives say they want.
You're mixing up two different things: religious pluralist versus homogenizing secularism, and color-blind versus color-sensitive. American Republicans believe in religious pluralism, while the French believe in homogenizing secularism. Democrats lean toward the French model, which is why Democratic exemplars for "Islam" (like Ilhan Omar) are completely unrepresentative of American Muslims.
Color-blind versus color-sensitive is a different distinction. Color blindness was the ideal in basically all developed countries until five minutes ago, including Canada.
Republicans say they believe in religious pluralism, but they actually mean that they want Christians to be able to legislate their religious views about, eg, abortion, and for Muslims to not exist and/or be heavily surveilled at the very least. They’re not sure what to do about Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists.
I think that religious Christians often want to do politics through the lens of their sectarian morals and interests, but they also understand that if they can do it, other sects can do it too. So the autonomy of religion and freedom of religious worship is maybe even more important. I'm reminded that religious Baptists were big supporters of Thomas Jefferson back in that day. They were against some of what Jefferson's party stood for, but that party wrote and supported the religious freedom idea that became part of the First Amendment, and that in the end turned out to be the most important to them.
It's a good example for the racial-value policies in question, but i think it just shows that the racial policies are not as important as one might think.
I think you're making way too much of human capital by region and not nearly enough of human capital by strata of society.
The largest countries in the world disproportionately send us the top 1% of their emigrants. Some of what I would call very poor (and you're calling "low-human capital") countries have extremely successful immigrants: India, the Philippines, Pakistan, Iran and Indonesian ethnicities are all in the top of USA income measured by ancestry. Nigeria and Ghanian ethnicities have higher income than White Americans.
If China sent us 1 million uneducated day laborers from the lowest socio-economic rung of their societies ladder their children would be unlikely to fill out the Ivy League enrollments of 20 years from now.
Yep, this is correct. I was born in Iran and my parents both had graduate degrees before we came here. Iranians are a little weird because we generally emigrated for political/religious/personal freedom rather than for economic reasons, but in general the countries you have to fly in from send richer immigrants than the countries you don’t. Also though, are poor immigrants from wherever really “low human capital”? My mom’s former cleaning lady had zero education but worked super hard. Was she not adding value to society? Also, she always used to bring her little son with her - he liked to read while she worked. He ended up getting a full scholarship to Berkeley and now works in Silicon Valley. I’d call that a pretty good ROI on immigration! I just don’t think we can gauge people’s potential based on their level of wealth or education when they come in.
I actually think we're glossing over the key point here.
Ray favors universal health care. In my eyes, Ray should be part of our coalition, and it's on the liberals/Democrats that he isn't voting with us. And if we could have people like Ray be part of our coalition we would win more, and enact more reforms we want.
Elites are following the same urges. They have resources and a support system that helps them deal with the consequences. Poor kids do not; their mistakes will ruin them, because the margin for error is almost nonexistent. This is part of why many non-elite parents are afraid of changing values. If change is a mistake, the children of the well-off will recover when the mistake is recognized. The poor kids will not.
If a child of the elite is caught with some drugs at age 16, by the time they're 19 (probably much sooner), it will be as if that never happened. Not so much for the poor and poorly connected.
Go to recovery at age 20, return to your life if you're from a good home. The kid who is already in the job market will lose things, and have to come up with a story for prospective employers about why they weren't working at all, for a time. And will be set back even further, right at the beginning. There are few things in life more dangerous for a poor kid than moving in a social circle with rich kids. Probably sounds like I'm exaggerating but I'm under-selling it, if anything.
I agree with this - I don’t much like Matt Taibbi but he once wrote a line that really stuck with me, about how being poor or even sometimes middle class in America is like walking on a highwire suspended above a canyon filled with razors. One false move and you’re dead. Our lives are that the precarious
I don't think they are following all the same urges. I would guess that Ivy Leaguers have a much lower amount of sexual activity as teens (and much higher rate of birth control usage) than equivalent people their age who work in retail and don't/won't go to college. These things relate to class.
I strongly suspect this is correlated with the marshmallow test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment. In a meritocracy like America, the elites are people who won the marshmallow test as kids--i.e. they have strong impulse control. They don't understand, and have no personal use for, strong (and sometimes oppressive I'll grant you) social norms that might exist to help normal people make good decisions.
In Bangladesh, we don't just have strong norms against divorce and single parenthood, we have active support infrastructure. When my cousin had a severe fight with her new husband, my dad flew out to another state to counsel them through it. Family and friends weren't telling them "don't put up with it, you deserve better!" Of course that has a lot of downsides too, but it's not clear to me the solution is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Well, societies with strong taboos against divorce and single parenthood are pretty much premised on the strict patriarchal control of *women’s* sexual behavior. While the men can sneak off to a brothel or whatever and it’s fine. Is freedom messier? Yes. But if you have to actively oppress the half of the population I happen to be in to get whatever your definition is of success, I’ll pass, thanks. I’ve seen Iranian society up close and what Christian fundies in the US espouse is way too close to that for my comfort. And yes, Iranian society has many wonderful values! Super close families, for instance. Respecting and taking good care of the elderly. Hospitality to strangers. But it’s sexual mores are misogynistic garbage.
Also, it’s not sexual urges that make people unsuccessful in life - that’s normal and human and shouldn’t be pathologized. If anything it’s having the information and wherewithal and support systems around you to mitigate the impact of your youthful impulses - to use birth control, or get help for your mental health issue so you don’t self medicate with drugs, or whatever. Poor people mostly just don’t have access to that stuff.
My final note on this is going to be a little unrelated, which is that - isn’t the marshmallow test basically bunk?
>>And today, liberals are definitely the biggest threat to continued prosperity for immigrants<<<
More than the people who would block their arrival in the first place? The leading lights of the GOP are objectively anti-immigration (the old saw about being "anti ILLEGAL immigration" is very 2004). Full stop. It's hard to imagine doing more to impinge upon the "prosperity" of a poor person from Honduras or China than not allowing them to immigrate in the first place.
In regard to Europe, Europe is FAMOUSLY bad at integrating immigrants, (hi I’m Jewish, we have a long history of being treated like trash in Europe). France in particular, is incredibly bigoted against Muslims- open bigotry makes integration harder. But America’s welfare state isn’t osetlcuslry robust, immigrants come here to become capitalists and members of the “petty bourgeoisie,” not to be workers living on the public dole, so I’m not sure how true it is that America’s welfare stste is super relevant here. But in regard to sexual
Promiscuity, are you concerned with the mere licentiousness, or the babies out of wedlock? If it’s the former, WHY do you care? And do you think government should actually use its power to affect said licentiousness, and if it should, then how? If it’s the second, then, widespread birth control and sex education largely deals with that problem.
Speaking only for myself it's the latter, because the latter is a huge deal. A baby born in a single parent home is in all likelihood starting way way way behind.
I think Ray's argument probably was beyond the powers of government, strictly speaking and into culture. Much of popular culture, media and academia has an unmistakeable leftward social tilt and is more positive towards babies out of wedlock than a culture could be. Places like Japan, Korea and Taiwan are good examples of democracies where the laws aren't so different, but society-at-large views single parenthood very differently.
Birth control and sex education are great but neither entirely solves the problem if people don't use them, or still choose to have children when they're not ready. So society should also acknowledge that single parent homes are an enormous contributor to poverty and hold up a more stable life as a role model for raising children.
Catching up after actually doing work and spending time with my wife...
"Much of popular culture, media and academia has an unmistakable leftward social tilt and is more positive towards babies out of wedlock than a culture could be."
That leftward social tilt has correlated to gillions of really good things, and among them is declines in teen pregnancy rates:
Off the top of my head, here are some more things that correlate to the era of more open discussion and less judgement about things having to do with sex:
-- We are a lot nicer to gay and trans people than we used to be.
-- Sexual harassment in the workplace is no longer broadly socially acceptable.
-- Fewer women are being made to feel guilty about natural human urges.
-- Abused women have more resources and power to escape their abusers.
-- Young girls have a greater diversity of academic interests they can realistically pursue.
I don't care about how specific individuals live their lives. But at a certain scale this becomes a social phenomenon. In the towns where my college-aged siblings in law live (middle class mostly white not in a major metro) every other kid has an unstable home life due to parents either not getting married, or getting divorced. The social norm in favor of married two-parent households has totally broken down. And those kids are your kids' friends at school, etc. Studies show that peers are stronger influences on kids than their parents: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2007-04-peer-pressure-stronger-parents.html. I'm not even talking about the stereotypical "welfare mom." I'm talking about reasonably functioning working to lower middle class white people who have been socialized into believing that their own personal fulfillment outweighs the disruption to their kids' lives resulting from divorce, serial monogamy, etc.
And the kids are suffering. Nobody is starving or homeless, but they are failing out of college because their parents got divorced their Freshman year, etc. Tidy home finances turn into financial struggles when parents separate, and luxuries like dance lessons or math tutoring get dropped. They hang around in the houses of friends with stable families because they don't like mom's new boyfriend, etc.
To me I think that there is a lot to agree with in what you say, but the core logical error is that social liberalism is responsible for the breakdown of families. This is a common assertion among conservatives- it posits a world where if everyone was too ashamed to speak up about their horrible partner or sexual preference or personal ambitions and just hunkered down in a two-parent family and went to church then all of these problems of modernity would disappear and everyone would be better off.
To me, this just plainly assumes a lot of facts that are not in evidence. Conservative towns are every bit as riven by broken families and personal corruption as liberal cities. My dad’s family was basically a conservative one like you describe in a conservative part of the world, and indeed two of my uncles were quite successful and created lives that worked really well within a traditional family structure that would make the ghost of Reagan proud. But two of the other siblings died early from drug issues and one basically never talks to anyone anymore for reasons that I assume are related to lifestyle preferences incompatible with rural Kansas.
Liberals aren’t changing the world. The world is changing, and Liberals are trying to respond to it instead of pretending that we can all just go live in the 50’s again if we only had the will to do so.
I agree with some of this but think a lot of these issues are economic in nature - being poor makes it a lot harder to get married and makes divorce devastating financially too. I also wonder whether a lot of these working class parents had kids too young and weren’t ready for the responsibility, or are trying to relive some youth they missed out on. I think a big reason affluent liberal types have more stable marriages is that we marry and have kids relatively late (because of grad school, careers). The other reason is that we have more money (even me, and I’m a lowly nonprofit worker - but I have enough). Money makes everything in life easier, including marriage.
I have these same questions. Also, something about the way you phrased your parenthetical about having a long history of being treated like trash in Europe made me LOL. So true tho!
>>>What conservatives fear about a liberal retelling of history, that focuses only on the negatives and not on the positives, is that it will convince kids that the system as a whole needs upheaval and change. And conservatives think that’s bad not because it’s bad for conservatives, but because they think that upheaval would be bad for America.<<<
C'mon, man. You can't possibly believe such tired, cliché-ridden pablum in the America of 2021. Much (probably "most" if the polling bears even a passing relationship to reality) of conservative America believes duly elected president Joe Biden was installed via fraud; and moreover very large numbers (probably a majority) of the lawmakers supported and elected by said conservatives are laying the groundwork for elections nullification. The evisceration of American democracy would be a far more radical "upheaval" than anything ginned up by this or that lefty professor.
In fact what American conservatives in 2021 fear most of all is democracy. In the main, they're perfectly comfortable jettisoning the democratic form of governance if that's what's necessary to achieve their policy objectives.
The only reason why we enjoy such a good society in America today is because of generation after generation of liberals who lobbied, fought, and died to ensure that this would be the case. From abolishing slavery to social security to women's suffrage to marriage equality, it's always liberals trying to make society better and conservatives standing athwart history yelling stop.
Yes, America today is a better society than Bangladesh and we should cherish that, but America today is also a better society than America 100 years ago. Liberals are the ones trying to ensure that the America 100 years from now is better than the one today.
That's a very expansive and self-serving definition of "liberal." For example, Republicans have always been a fusion of religious wingnuts and capitalists. Abolition was a fundamentalist Christian movement, and capitalism fueled the Northern economy that smashed the south. The South was the one that portrayed themselves as the forward-looking ones, embracing the "science" of racial differences and rejecting the religious "zealotry" of abolitionism: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech.
Women's suffrage likewise had a strong religious component. The 19th amendment passed with more Republican votes than Democratic votes.
You can draw a straight line from conservative religiosity to the fact that America is one of the few welcoming places for Muslim immigrants. Muslims are doubly alien in "liberal" French society--because they are not French, and because they are not secular humanists. That's why the even French center (Macron) is turning upon Muslims. By contrast, America is a country founded by religious wingnuts. Evangelicals might think that Islam is a false religion, but they at least understand the perspective of people who would put religion above secular society. Conservatives might say nasty things about Muslims, but liberals are the ones who want to directly attack their way of life by e.g. stripping religious institutions that don't accept same-sex marriage (which is virtually every Mosque in America)--of tax exemptions.
In the economic realm, conservatives are the ones who fought for things that make the lives of immigrants better. Unions and their focus on seniority, for example, hurts immigrants and people of color (who tend to be much younger and therefore at the bottom of the totem poll). Strong worker protections benefit bad native workers at the expensive of new immigrants willing to work harder. It's not really a coincidence that the more ossified economies of continental Europe do a worse job economically assimilating immigrants than the more dynamic Anglo economies of the U.S., Canada, and Australia.
Looking at America from 10,000 feet, it seems to me that religion and capitalism are the things that made it what it is today. Who are the ones opposing both?
It’s also facially silly. Aligning the confederacy with liberalism takes some seriously tortured logic; I was actually engaging with some of the stuff Ray was saying upthread but this is cloudcuckoo land.
When the confederacy called abolitionists “zealots” who held onto an “unscientific” idea of equality of the races, they weren’t wrong (given what was known at that time). Abolition was rooted in faith-the belief that God created us all in his image. It was faith that required overlooking the obvious chasm in advancement between European and non-European civilizations at that time.
What that means is that sometimes faith gets you the right answer and it’s better than the ideological tools liberals are working with at the time. (Just as it did with eugenics here in the US, the atrocities of communist regimes abroad, etc.)
Those same Confederates (when they were justifying secession) talked mostly about their own conservatism and the wisdom of their patriarchal system as suited to the natural unequal state of man, versus the radical Yankee idea of equality.
If it’s odd to confederacy “liberal” it’s equally odd to call the Republican Party of 1865, just like today a fusion of capitalists and religious fundamentalists, “liberal.”
That just means you can’t meaningfully project those terms as we use them today back to 1865, so as to assign modern “liberals” credit for ending slavery and defeating the confederacy.
Well, certainly the conservatives don't deserve credit for ending slavery. A conservative Democratic ticket came all too close to winning the presidency and negotiating an end to the war which would have left the slaves enslaved and the country divided. These were the Democrats, but they were not liberals. All the reform energy was on the Republican side.
> The Republican party used to be liberal and the Democrat party used to be conservative.
That’s just something Democrats say to protect their egos. The party of FDR, more than 30 years before Democrats flipped on civil rights, was obviously the more liberal party, not to mention recognizably the modern Democratic Party in most respects. It embraced technocratic administration by experts, handling economic issues at the federal level, redistribution, higher taxes, etc. It was also the party of Black people, because it was the more liberal party. Except they had ally with southern segregationists to get Social Security enacted.
In the 1930s, the south was (economically) liberal because it was poor and agrarian. Southerner segregationists hated capitalism, big corporations, etc., just like Democrats do today. They wanted government redistribution just like today. George Wallace was a pro-labor New Deal Democrat.
The parties didn’t “switch places” in 1965, as the Democratic conceit goes. The economy and the issues changed. Georgia went from being an agrarian state looking for welfare to being an industrialized state looking to poach jobs from New York and Illinois through lower taxes and less regulation. That obviously made it a much more fertile ground for Republicans.
The Civil Rights Act of 65 and Brown v. Board also changed the salience of different ideological issues. Color blind individualism and meritocracy aligned with the goals of the civil rights movement prior to 1965, when the right was against legalized discrimination. But once that was off the table, the debate shifted to stuff like affirmative action and equitable redistribution. And those causes naturally found more of a home in the Democratic Party, which had been the party of social engineering and government welfare even when it was also the party of Jim Crow.
"recognizably the modern Democratic Party" Not by me. The basis of the New Deal was actual working-class people, including socially conservative farmers who hated Wall Street, and a lot of urban Catholics. The Republicans were pretty much an upper-class plus Northeastern and Midwestern party. Today's Democratic party is largely composed of educated people (who were Republicans until the Sixties) yoked with certified racial minorities (who had practically no votes at all in the 1930's). The lens of "for or against government spending" is a distorting one. It is essentially a Republican political framing which has done a great job of helping to break up the New Deal coalition.
Republicans literally banned Muslims from the country. France is super Islamophobic (and also has had more terrorism, leading to more racist backlash) but I have no idea what that has to do with American liberalism. It’s a very different society.
I understand the idea that French laicite creates a hostile social environment for Muslim citizens of France and that there are substantial social and racial problems there. I can’t say I know: it’s not my country. And yet, I work for a global company with a lot of French employees, most of them in highly technical fields requiring serious education. Our global email catalog shows that among them, there is quite a high proportion of Muslim names. So I don’t know what to think.
Conservatives in the US are entirely dedicated to breaking it and tried to overthrow an election and still keep peddling the Big Lie that Trump won. They are radicals dedicated to upheaval.
I see threats to our democracy on BOTH the extreme left and the right. I have to say that I think the CRT movement has good and noble intentions but is extremely destructive nevertheless. Most of us would agree that there is, at least unconscious bias, if not systemic racism built into our culture. But CRT is being taught in schools not as theory, but as dogma. There is an almost religious fanaticism to the movement and an absolute intolerance of opposing ideas. And I think it’s extremely damaging to tell White children that they are inherently racist, or to tell Black children they are destined to be victims.
That being said, the continued propagation on the right that the election was stolen is also extremely destabilizing to our society. It remains to be seen which force causes the most damage to our society in the end. Or whether these end up being minor blips that then correct.
Is this what’s really being taught? I totally agree that that’s bad but as someone without a school-aged child I just have no clue whether this whole CRT thing is even real or just a conservative fever dream.
In the liberal private school where my kids went, it is a raging fire, complete with segregation in the early grades, mandatory "affinity groups" and breakout antiracism sessions in accordance with the now-declared primary values of the school. And also some alarming instances of anti-Semitism in a historically Jewish school. I wouldn't send them there today by choice.
" It’s the applied version of Chesterton’s Fence. "
... no, no it isn't. That's just the internal propaganda view of what conservatives stand for. The impulse of the conservative movement has nothing to do with preserving America and everything to do with exacerbating existing imbalances in group power dynamics. Whether the axis is gender, orientation, race, religion, citizenship, economic status, the impetus is to push to enhance the power of those already advantaged by the system. The Bush and Trump administrations should provide ample evidence of fences being pulled down by a movement that has no intention of merely nurturing the status quo.
You are clearly not Canadian yourself, or you would have apologized immediately for this blatant self-promotion.
Here's how you do it:
"Well what about being, I don't know, Canadian, eh? It's not so bad, is it? Probably not for everyone, though, really. It takes getting used to and all."
I quite like Canada, but I'd be curious to understand what Canada would be like as a great power instead of a relatively small (population wise) country that free rides tremendously on its southern neighbor.
America might be relatively good for immigrants, but so far it's been pretty bad for people who were enslaved or colonized (and their descendants). That inconvenient truth seems worth acknowledging and addressing.
The 1619 Project gets too much respect here. I think the idea of "provocation" or "great journalism" elides how such assertions are accepted as fact by people who want to be on the correct, moral side of contemporary issues. To take just one example, I can’t tell you how many times I have heard from highly educated people that the urban police in America originate from slave catchers. People actually believe this stuff, and it is important to push back and call out the propaganda where it is, perhaps especially for those of us who are liberals. The conservatives should not be the only ones out there fighting this fight (and messing it up while they're at it).
Yeah, I have no beef with the individual articles, but Hannah-Jones essentially created historical "fact" from whole cloth (without consulting historians!) to serve a narrative. In other industries, we might call that "lying"! It's unbecoming of a journalist and the fact that it was rewarded with a Pulitzer says quite a bit about the current state of the journalism industry (it's not good).
The 1776 project is obviously really dumb but I don't think it can be said enough that Hannah-Jones literally lied to support her argument-or, at best, was deeply ignorant of the historical facts and didn't want to learn-and was rewarded with one of journalism's highest awards for it.
I think this level of dishonesty is not actually unheard of in journalism, but as you say, to follow it up by awarding it journalism's highest honor is just galling.
As another poster noted, she consulted historians, than ignored them. I don't see any reason to dance around the issue, frankly. She was at best deliberately ignorant and incompetent, and at worst a fabulist, and she got a Pulitzer for it. I think she knew what she was doing perfectly well, and it paid off.
While it is factually accurate that the first policeman in American probably was not a slave catcher right before that, it is also factually accurate to say that Southern policing grew out of slave catching. It is also accurate that a big part of American policing for most of the country's history was dedicated to enforcing racism.
"I have heard from highly educated people that the urban police in America originate from slave catchers." -- This is a bit of a strawman. While some people may have the details mixed up, it is perfectly accurate to note that cops have historically been expected to do racist stuff on behalf of local governments.
You can choose to focus your frustrations on people who understand the basic gist but get some details wrong, or you can focus your frustrations on people who hide behind cops to defend their racism.
The "police evolved from slave catchers" line is a pretty silly talking point firstly because it isn't true and secondly because it's kind of meaningless.
It's not true in the sense that the modern conception of "police" evolved from the old "nightwatch" system in London around 1830, largely in response to evolving urbanization. This was then exported to American cities like New York and Boston around mid-century and spread from there leading up into the twentieth century and basically replaced whatever systems were there beforehand. Slavery didn't have much to do with it.
It's meaningless in the sense that it kind of does nothing to advance the discussion about what to do about police beyond trying to somehow cosmically ties their existence to some nebulous sense of American Original Sin in order to make some sort of quasi-religious appeal to the righteousness of whatever argument someone is making.
To anyone who actually cares about, like, facts and stuff it just makes whoever is saying it look uninformed and kind of weird. If the point they're trying to make is that police are often the enforcement mechanisms of bad laws... well, that largely puts the onus on the lawmakers rather than the police, so again, it's not really that helpful.
There was an interesting statement about Southern policing in Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside, to the effect that police did not even try to police black communities in the South, on the cynical premise that a murder there just meant “one fewer to worry about.” So those communities were lawless, and when their members immigrated to other places, they carried this lawlessness with them. The utter brutality of this is a far bigger indictment of our history than this silly “slave catchers” stuff. But to acknowledge it would mean to acknowledge that the issue is not only about the legitimacy of police, but also about their effectiveness: at root, the police have not been strong enough to succeed in imposing the rule of law and the state monopoly of violence in the troubled communities where most of the violence takes place.
Dude, Southern policing did in fact evolve from slave catching. That is a real thing. It's true that urban policing in the northeast did not come from slave catching. Both statements can are true.
What's more, there are a limitless number of incorrect sentiments out there. To be infuriated by this one more than others (say, "Obama was born in Kenya") is a choice that seems driven by general hostility to antiracism.
Well, am I right that you are more infuriated by "Obama was born in Kenya" than by "police evolved from slave-catchers"? It seems like a good policy is a blanket opposition to false statements and a commitment to correct them when we're made aware of them.
"opposition to false statements" is not the same as "go on the internet and use this false statement to justify x."
I don't go around intentionally repeating any false statement, and if in the appropriate social/professional context (I'm a teacher), I correct false statements.
But the specific false statements I choose to go on the internet and complain about tend to be the ones I regard as being consequential: climate change isn't real, voter fraud swings elections, racism was fixed in the 60s. My choices in this regard tell you something about my values.
When somebody says that people who confuse the origins of urban policing with the origins of Southern policing are not making an honest mistake but just hate police, that also tells me something about that person's values.
So what I'm hearing is "accuracy doesn't really matter if the story generally expresses what I fervently believe." I can't go with you there. To me, history matters, and accuracy matters, because without it there is no true understanding. In this case we have a pure political play: by associating (inaccurately) today's policing with slavery it is hoped to delegitimize policing and law enforcement for the entire community. My response is: if that's your goal, say it, and argue for it, don't hide behind phony historical statements.
As I noted above, the history of policing in the South is different from the one of the Northeast. You are the one who is insisting on inaccuracy by pretending that this isn't true. Here is the relevant passage from The American Bar Association:
"The more commonly known history—the one most college students will hear about in an Introduction to Criminal Justice course—is that American policing can trace its roots back to English policing. It’s true that centralized municipal police departments in America began to form in the early nineteenth century (Potter, 2013), beginning in Boston and subsequently established in New York City; Albany, New York; Chicago; Philadelphia; Newark, New Jersey; and Baltimore. As written by Professor Gary Potter (2013) of Eastern Kentucky University, by the late nineteenth century, all major American cities had a police force. This is the history that doesn’t make us feel bad.
While this narrative is correct, it only tells part of the story (Turner et al., 2006). Policing in southern slave-holding states followed a different trajectory—one that has roots in slave patrols of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and police enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. As per Professor Michael Robinson (2017) of the University of Georgia, the first deaths in America of Black men at the hands of law enforcement “can be traced back as early as 1619 when the first slave ship, a Dutch Man-of-War vessel landed in Point Comfort, Virginia.”
To your greater point about policing in a modern context, it is relevant that police have historically been asked to do things that today we see as racist. To stop doing this requires them to reassess what they have traditionally considered best practices.
There is a direct connection between racism and better policing. It is an entirely reasonable and appropriate point to make.
What we seem to have is a misunderstanding around the definition of policing. In the 19th century, rural America (north and south) was unpoliced. Whatever law enforcement needed to be done, had to be done by the citizens themselves, under minimum supervision by the sheriff or the justice of the peace. In the prewar South, these private citizens organized slave patrols whose job it was to make sure that the blacks were not circulating around in a way that they felt could be dangerous. After the Civil War, similar groups of armed self-deputized citizens did essentially the same thing, this time wearing sheets. None of this has anything to do with actual police. It is in fact what happens in the absence of police.
Southern cities (New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville, Richmond, Atlanta) established police departments on the same model as northern cities. The officers were often on the Very Bad racist side of things, but not always: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Liberty_Place. Their racism derived from the society in which they existed, not from any fanciful descent from slave patrols, which are just irrelevant to actual policing.
The true descendant of the slave patrols is the Klan, not the police. Does it matter, when we all know what we think right and wrong is? I think it does matter, because I think it’s important to think clearly about these matters, and not fill our heads with rubbish and nonsense. Equally, not to spread falsehoods that damage the credibility of what we’re trying to do now, in the 21st century, in defining what effective police reform could be
Except that most of those Southern police departments, as they exist now, had basically nothing to do with slavery. For example, the Atlanta Police Department wasn't formed until 1873, over a decade after slavery ceased to exist. Did another law enforcement apparatus (like a sheriff's department or a Nightwatch) exist before then which did enforce laws related to the institution of slavery as was legal before the Civil War? Yeah, obviously, those laws were clearly going to be enforced by somebody. But that frankly says less about the nature of policing than it does about the simple fact that Georgia had slaves once. Make bad laws and police will have to enforce bad laws.
The APD also spent a century enforcing Jim Crow. Many of the cops who were promoted for being really good at doing their job before Civil Rights went on to carry out the war on drugs and train future (now recent) generations of cops.
In light of this, it makes total sense that the APD has a lot of institutional knowledge about nabbing bad guys but comparatively less institutional knowledge about making sure your not accidentally being racist.
Even if you disagree with my logic, can you at least see that I'm not motivated by blanket hatred of cops?
There's a pretty big leap from "a police force somewhere in the country enforced jim crow laws" (something no one was denying or is surprised by) to "America's police grew out of slave catchers" which is the canard that's being casually thrown around by activists as if it's true and is some sort of deep and meaningful argument.
There are plenty of things about modern police departments to criticize without playing "six degrees of slavery" with their histories and IMO activists would be much better served by focusing on those things that we can actually do something about rather than making up "facts" that frankly make them sound like they don't know what they're talking about.
I don't know where you find this stuff. Jim Crow was the consensus of the white population. Violence was rarely needed. People understood the situation and what was expected of them. And for those who didn't, it was the Klan, not the police, who were there to enforce it.
The poster making the original point was talking about urban policing, though, which is something many repliers here appear to have missed. He's specifically saying that people he knows are saying this stuff about *urban police*, not rural Southern police, or the broader concept of police in the US.
“Policing in southern slave-holding states followed a different trajectory—one that has roots in slave patrols of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and police enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.”
That’s all fine because you note that it all ended in the mid-Twentieth Century.
Policing in southern states ended in the mid-Twentieth Century?! That's news to me. Maybe we should let them teach us Californians about how to defund the police.
Less sarcastically, what do you think happened in the mid-twentieth century? The existing police departments were replaced root-and-branch? If not, why do you assume that institutional or personnel continuity would not suffice to maintain cultures and practices adapted to a racist milieu?
“…why do you assume that institutional or personnel continuity would not suffice to maintain cultures and practices adapted to a racist milieu?”
I have not assumed that. I say prove it. As far as I can tell no one who has claimed that police departments’ roots are in slave patrols has not even attempted to offer that proof.
This kind of feels like a "why worry about our people who are wrong when theirs are so much worse" argument to me, which frankly I've never found very compelling. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Does American policing have a long history of enforcing state discrimination on the basis of race? Absolutely. Does that mean it's OK to make up fake history? No.
It is not fake history to note that policing in the US has a racist history to reckon with. To pick on one confused detail (urban vs Southern) as a justification for dismissing anybody who wants police reform is not an exercise in fidelity to historical evidence. It's an exercise in straw-manning.
But "it has a racist history" doesn't justify *specific* claims about what that racist history is, especially since some people take those claims as relevant to the question of whether policing in the US is even redeemable.
The original poster was talking about people thinking that urban police departments stemmed directly from slave patrols. The only strawman here is your attempt to somehow connect this to a commentary on the entire US police system when the OP was specifically talking about urban police. They weren't talking about people reckoning with the racist history of policing, or in any way implying that policing doesn't have many race-related issues. They were very specifically talking about people thinking that urban PDs come from slave patrols, which is something you continue to refuse to acknowledge in your attempt to defend blatant fabulations in the 1619 Project. It's not defensible when the other guys make stuff up and it shouldn't be defensible for people left of center either.
"In this case we have a pure political play: by associating (inaccurately) today's policing with slavery it is hoped to delegitimize policing and law enforcement for the entire community. My response is: if that's your goal, say it, and argue for it, don't hide behind phony historical statements."
This is straw-manning because 1) the roots of Southern policing are different than those of Northeastern policing, and 2) I am not trying to delegitimize all policing.
I am suggesting that confusing urban with Southern does not legitimate the accusation that people who talk about antiracism just hate cops.
"It’s a stupid argument that tells you nothing about anything" — no, it tells you how trustworthy that source of information is.
* "Geneticists are bad because they used to believe in eugenics" — so maybe we should be _very, very_ suspicious about genetics' social conclusions.
* "the military should be abolished because it used to massacre the Indians" — so maybe we should only use casus belli from military-independent sources.
* "Cops did racist stuff because the laws and social norms for most of American history were explicitly racist, and cops enforce laws and social norms." — so maybe we should make sure we don't use police behavior to _set_ our social norms and laws as well.
There are often many virtues in something that also produces false beliefs in some people. The germ theory of disease, and the way it was promoted in the early 20th century, led to some good efforts on hand-washing, and some really bad ideas of ignoring the role of aerosols and ventilation that came back to bite us this year. We should expect stronger versions of this mixture of good and bad from theories of humans (whether our health or our society) than from theories of, say, gravity, but even there, good theories often lead to many bad beliefs.
The series of articles was called the 1619 Project for a reason, which Hannah-Jones explained in characterizing 1619 as the true founding of the United States and 1776, a/k/a the American Revolution, as motivated to preserve slavery against the possibility of British-compelled emancipation. Everything else in every other article might be correct, and still pointing to them to defend the project would be a deflection.
The World Socialist Website, https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619, interviewed several leading historians, who had no apparent connection to the Trotskyist organization behind the website or to a hard-left, class-based politics. Again, focusing on the organization's politics perhaps may help explain why it acted as it did, but it's another deflection from the merits of the controversy.
You’re overreaching here. I am sure that slave catching patrols had little to do with the origins of any random north eastern police force, let alone far western, but surely they have some sort of role in shaping the way southern police forces go about their business. The thing to do is show that this isn’t true by looking at the records and making a cogent argument.
Douthat's view is correct, and to imply he is nut-picking is wrong. There is a large and growing strain of leftist activists who are anti-American, who want to divide, who do not agree with classic liberalism - freedom of conscience, religion, speech - and believe all this can be solved with a turn toward socialism. The use of a racial wedge is merely a tool and not the goal.
As evidence, I submit the Democratic primary where the leftists were out-of-step with actual Black people's in supporting and enforcing a more radical set of policies, whether under the Bernie or Warren (rather than Biden) candidacy. And again in the NYC mayoral election, where the true left mobilized to oppose the Black candidate. The use of race is a tool for a rising left that is fighting classic liberalism, a market economy, and, yes, the origins of the US.
You might not realize this, but America is a large country. The fact that a minority of supporters of LOSING primary candidates have dumb beliefs is not the indictment of "the left" you think it is. I don't think your opinions are representative of all of Florida. You're just some guy on the internet. When this "rising left" you invoke in fear actually, like, rises, beyond the primordial of Twitter and ignored protest slogans you might have a point.
I agree that America is a large country, but I also see a dynamic that you might be missing. At this moment in history, the black political caucus holds the balance of power position within the Democratic Party - they can’t win by themselves, but the Democrats cannot win without them. The caucus contains moderates and leftists, but the latter have strong influence because they want specific things, more intensely. So what the caucus ends up delivering, policy-wise, is heavily influenced by the left. This is how trustworthy Old Joe’s moderate administration is officially signed up for racial preferences, outcome-based criteria, and so on in some key areas (e.g. housing). It is because the people who have been given the power to write the executive orders want that. So, small minority or not, they are far from inconsequential.
I guess I agree with your assessment, then, that those pushing the Kendi and DiAngelo views of racial issues and those who reject the principles of free expression, market economies and diversity of thought represent the "nut" side of the progressive movement.
I disagree, though, that those views are small or insignificant. The fact we are reading MattY on Substack rather than Vox is pertinent. He signed onto an anodyne statement supporting free expression and was hounded for weeks.
Do these standards of free expression apply to the conservative movement as well?
Off the top of my head:
-- CPAC booed off the stage a lifelong conservative's presentation on the economic benefits of immigration.
-- Conservatives have attacked dozens of Republicans who upheld the rule of law with respect to the 2020 election. All kinds of people have been formally censured and lost positions.
-- Conservatives boycotted the Dixie Chicks for expressing their opposition to the Iraq war.
-- Liz Cheney.
Its worth noting that nobody boycotted MY. He received some emails, so he took his ball and went home. I'm not crying for him.
Your examples, Biden winning the Democratic primary and the NYC mayor’s race are examples of, not just the mainstream left being dominant over the fringe left, but of the mainstream left being, well, mainstream.
MattY and Ezra Klein haven't talked too much publicly about their departure from the media company they founded at around the same time (and that continues to show their influence, particularly in its discussion of housing and transportation policy). It seems likely to me that it's more complex than a simple connection of this sort, given that Yglesias did and Klein didn't sign that letter.
I think if you re-read the article, you'll see that Matt's claim is that Douthat is nutpicking *arguments from the 1619 Project*. Yes there are some bad leftist activists out there, but the primary arguments in the 1619 Project are reasonable. That is why conservatives focus on criticizing a small minority of the 1619 Project's arguments.
Just like right-wing American politics contains many strains which have to reside together under one roof for pragmatic purposes, so does left-wing American politics. The simple fact that lots of people on the left don't agree with African American moderates about some issues doesn't mean that they are 'anti-American', and the 'evidence' submitted here doesn't add up to the assertion.
I don't see why Matt's take is incompatible with Ross's. Most conservatives genuinely have moved toward the center in their understanding of American history and are concerned about an "over-correction" that actually leaves kids (who aren't really wired to add nuance to a one-sided story by themselves) with the impression that America is a pretty fucked up place. Also conservatives don't like the idea of progressives taking over the curriculum and painting history as a war of good guys vs bad guys, where the bad guys are always the conservatives. Imagine that!
Just to re-up my Haidt stan cred, progressives also don't seem to recognize that the conservative enthusiasm for the American myth is a deeply-held moral perspective for them. Being American is a core part of their identity for many of them much like being a member of a minority racial group is for other people, one of their biggest sources of personal and collective pride. Toppling a statue of George Washington in protest would stir up the same feelings of disgust and offense in many of them as toppling a statue of MLK in protest. It's personal. They take pride in standing up for the foundational values of America in the face of an army of an army of progressive-socialist-communist-anarchists who would burn it all to the ground. When they watch Star Wars, we're the Empire. When they read history, we're the "Democrats" who fought to protect slavery (I know, it's dumb). We're the Maoists holding struggle sessions. We're the angry protesters opposed to judging people on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin. We're their bad guys. Simple as that. You can point out all the ways they're wrong (there are plent) but if you can't accurately see us through their eyes, you'll never understand what's actually behind the outrage.
"Being American is a core part of their identity for many of them much like being a member of a minority racial group is for other people, one of their biggest sources of personal and collective pride."
Being a white American is a core part of their identity.
Seriously, think for a moment why toppling a statue of Washington would outrage "Americans" but toppling a statue of MLK would offend "racial minority groups." MLK is an American hero. To make him the exclusive concern of some racial minority group is so common and so illustrative. The reason there's such outrage against things like CRT is that it shines a light on these unexamined impulses and talks about them.
Did I say only minorities would care if a statue of MLK was toppled? No, I did not. In fact I was trying to say most conservatives would be equally mad about both. I used to see things the way you describe…. It was a very weird realization/identity crisis to realize most conservatives in 2021 genuinely don’t care about being white until someone gives them trouble about it. Are there some people who care about their whiteness? Yes, and they usually suck, but they’re not as common as you might think.
What you call "giving them trouble about it" I think is more accurately described as "any mention of it whatsoever." This makes sense: In a society in which institutional racism plays such a powerful role, and operates largely on auto-pilot, the mechanisms can only function if we pretend they don't exist. *That's* the reason folks on the right react with rage when you point out the obvious.
I suspect I won’t change your mind on this. I do want to ask this sincerely…. Have you ever stopped to fully consider the possibility that you could be wrong about what’s in other people’s hearts and minds?
Absolutely. I'd ask you though, do you believe that implicit bias exists. Do you think people absorb assumptions about, for example, gendered differences from the culture they inhabit? If so, how do you think the way sexism is so fundamentally different from racism?
Oh man, yes, implicit bias absolutely exists! Biases are super hardwired into us humans. I spent, I dunno, 20 years operating under the conviction that the vast majority of white people were biased in favor of other white people (I still think this part) and that this was the primary root cause of racial disparities, and that to end disparities, white people had to acknowledge their biases and work to eliminate them. What I didn't realize that was biases between the tribal political parties VASTLY outweigh the psychological weight of race-based biases in most people. https://www.vox.com/2015/12/7/9790764/partisan-discrimination I realized my implict bias about conservatives led me to glom on to any story or study that confirmed my intuition that they were awful, terrible people. I realized that all of my navel-gazing about my biases about black people was actually making those associations stronger (ironic processing theory). I gave myself permission to think critically about the ideas of leaders in the antiracist movement who were POC for the first time because *that's what you do for people who you consider to be your equals*. When I gave myself permission to not care about race, I took the IAT again and lo and behold- I got neutral scores for the first time ever. I realized I'd been making my biases so much worse by obsessing over them. And I realized a lot (not all) of the conservatives who say they don't care about race and they really do want to treat everyone equally aren't lying... they don't understand why our side is so obsessed and find it offensive/racist. Are they biased? Sure as hell they are. But they're 1000x more biased against Democrats (based on actual policy ideas and moral perspectives) than they are against minorities. They would hang out with a minority conservative over a white liberal any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Has it always been this way? Absolutely not. But I think liberals have 1965 frozen in their mind and assume conservatives are the same people who picketed bussing when that was 2 generations of people ago. Anyway at this point I'm rambling, this is why I started a Substack :D Hope some of that makes sense!
Matt seems to have missed the main objection I've heard from conservatives about critical race theory.
The driving force of the right's outrage is the goal of the CRT project and its advocates. Their stated goal is to upend the centuries old enlightenment values that underpin our modern society. At its core, it's a stunningly illiberal project that's counter to centuries of American values.
Specifically, CRT seeks to eliminate our tradition of elevating certain individual rights above those of the collective. It assesses everyone it encounters based on their immutable characteristics, rather than based on their individual characteristics. It seeks to categorize and divide people by their immutable characteristics. It attacks our sense-making apparatus at its core by all classifying all truth relative and by disrupting the processes we use to establish what's true.
>Their stated goal is to upend the centuries old enlightenment values that underpin our modern society.
This is a stunning comment. Can you document it? I thought that the idea of any critical theoretical process, whether in legal studies or literature, is to provide "critique" and textual analysis. You are suggesting that the theory itself wants to eliminate other interpretative traditions, which doesn't sound correct at all. A few citations, authors, or quotes would help to clarify.
From literally a textbook on CRT that Matt tweeted: “Unlike traditional civil rights, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”
But the key idea is "questions" which is what any worthwhile critical apparatus does. The problem here is that we act like conservative readings - whether of history or of literature or the law or politics - are not interpretative theories and are thus not ideological, but are rather, "raceless". Please point me to something that is not a tertiary reading or generalization of the purpose of this theory, which is supposedly to "eliminate our traditions." Theorists would find that objectionable.
"But the key idea is "questions" which is what any worthwhile critical apparatus does."
Yeah, there's a curious insecurity in a lot of conservative attitudes towards conservative values: "don't question them! if you question them, you will undermine them!"
Really? Are you that unpersuaded of their intellectual integrity, that you think they will dissolve on close inspection? Why don't you think that questioning is just as likely to result in vindicating them and producing a deeper understanding of their merit?
I suspect it's because the conservative model for their own values is blind religious faith, which does in fact have a tendency to wither under scrutiny. But when my students question the Enlightenment, they come away even more committed to its values, exactly because they questioned it.
Off topic, but I do not see how anyone can say in June 2021 that conservatives are politically committed to liberal democracy when they are doing their best to institute minority party rule.
I share your concerns about the youngsters' commitment to liberal democracy. But the question is, how do we increase their commitment to those values? By shouting at them, "you may not question our sacred values?" Or by looking at the entire picture, warts and all, and seeing why this country remains the last best hope on earth?
I think the second is more likely to succeed, and the first appeals only to those with an authoritarian mindset -- which itself is directly opposed to liberal democracy.
Okay, so are you okay with teaching kids why cultures and religions across the world reject same-sex marriage? So they can interrogate their liberal western assumption that non-discriminatory treatment is more important than, e.g., prioritizing reproduction and child rearing?
Actually, some cross-cultural context would be helpful. Students should know the how human liberty and self-determination varies across both time *and* space. This might soften some of the negativity focus on the darker aspects of American history could cause. Human liberation is morally right, but it ain't easy.
I would be absolutely in favor of that, both so the they can interrogate their western assumptions, and so that they are not narrowly parochial and myopic in their outlook, and don't make an ass of themselves when they venture outside of the US border. It's good to know about what other cultures think!
But any kid who attends conservative/fundie Sunday school class is already being taught that. Which may explain why critical perspectives are seen as providing a valuable balance. It's a good intention, anyway
Ah, yes, those insecure conservatives. In contrast to the intellectually rigorous liberals who declare that anything less than totally and uncritically accepting someone's self-declared gender is "denying their existence."
Critical theory of all sorts has a central strand that sees the "Enlightenment" concept as deeply problematic. See this bit from Wikipedia on "Dialectic of Enlightenment" by Adorno and Horkheimer:
"Horkheimer and Adorno believe that in the process of "enlightenment," modern philosophy had become over-rationalized and an instrument of technocracy. They characterize the peak of this process as positivism, referring to both the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and broader trends that they saw in continuity with this movement."
CRT isn't being taught in high schools anyway. CRT is a specific aspect of law school curriculum. Centering the idea that white supremacy was a foundational idea in America is not the same as CRT. In fact, looking at Edmund Morgan's work, I think you can successfully argue that white supremacy and ideas about "democracy" were positively linked. America produced broad-based democracy for white men, because race substituted for European ideas of class. But the internal contradiction was there for everyone to see who wanted to look for it. If there was one piece of common ground between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln prior to 1863, it was that that contradiction should spell the end of slavery.
Uh, he does though. Right here: “the project as a whole ties together in popularized form a lot of strands of newer history that, broadly speaking, cast racial conflict as the central through-line of American history and does so in a way that’s devastating to conservatism.” He denies that the main focus is on “delegitimizing,” patriotism, but is instead focused on looking at our history through a race conscious lens, and that lens, (much like a purely economic lens) is incredibly unflattering to Conservatism. CR isn’t about America’s irredeemable racism, it’s about America’s REDEEMABLE racism.
I don't agree. This quote is about looking back and fighting about our history. IMO, that's a side show. The primary threat of CRT is its implications on today's society moving forward. CRT upends long-established norms for how we establish facts and truth and how we do science.
The core fight is not about the finer details of America's history or about attempts to reshape the American historical narrative.
>CRT upends long-established norms for how we establish facts and truth and how we do science.
Not sure what any of this has to do with science, but the same could be said about Marxist theory in the 20th century. What you are suggesting is that CRT is a dangerous and subversive ideology that masquerades as legitimate academic analysis. But I suspect that it is the "race" part that triggers the reaction for conservatives. It's a useful cultural panic that rallies the bases, no one will give a shit about in a few years, just like postmodern theory, an intellectual footnote
First, I don't believe there's any masquerading going on here and I consider CRT legitimate academic field of study. I just disagree with it. Framing CRT in a similar manner to Marxist theory seems about right to me. I'm not really that concerned about the academic work itself, just as I'm not that concerned about academic work on Marxism. The concern is that very tenuously supported theories are being operationalized and widely deployed in a manner that's unending many institutions across our country.
Second, just because an argument is being utilized by "bad people" doesn't mean the argument itself is wrong or bad. This seems to me to be a case of a very real and legitimate concern is being highjacked for perhaps cynical political purposes. (btw - So far, I'm staunchly against every one of the anti-crt bills I've reviewed including the one in NH. These all seem very reactive
Are conservatives interested in winning the history wars or the midterm elections? My money is on the latter and all the CRT boomer moral panic is just getting the base riled up to put republicans into the house and senate.
To be honest I think one of the best parts of CRT is that it dulls this “real racists!” Strategy. The “real racists!” was always either some ridiculous statement about democrats from the old south and they control the party now a la Hydra from Marvel… or it’s rather defensive counterpart, vilifying people who are tbh losers who are resentful of themselves and do engage in vulgar, racist words. Though this behavior is bad it adds insult to injury to cast them as society’s ultimate villains. And it gives a defense to all conservative, institutional racism.
Most US pop historiography falls victim to a major analytical error and this is no exception. Americans have a tendency to center the US in the global historical narrative and to treat other countries as peripheral to our development. This is always evident in the crappy history books that conservative journalists write (see Brian Kilmeade, Bill O'Reilly) and as much as I am more inclined to support 1619, it is no different.
For instance, the Desmond article is interesting so long as you steadfastly refuse to recall that global capitalism was driven by the British and that the US replicated its conditions until they begin to diverge post WW1. Quite simply, racial discrimination can not adequately describe a system that developed with the US, at best, as an interesting sideshow. His point about the 'financialization' of Slavery via bank bonds implies an interesting historical materialist argument about the subsuming of human cruelty to a capitalist system, but that is basically the exact opposite of the point he tries to make (that the cruelty created capitalism).
More broadly, these writers (with the exception of Kruse, whose work is appropriately narrowly focused) are not historians or even journalists who normally write about history. That's why all these articles read like term papers from someone taking an elective class.
The 1619 project is actually a really interesting set of articles, but it is not conservatives' fault that the creators decided to try and turn it into a curriculum and a 'reimagining of US history.' It deserves to be criticized the same as "Killing Lincoln."
I think Matt's comments on the 1619 Project are generally spot on -- some of the essays are truly wonderful, and I loved NHJ's paean to her father's patriotism. But what I object to (and what Matt calls merely "sloppy") is the focus on slavery and race relations as the monocausal explanation of American history. Slavery was *the* cause of the American Revolution. America's national wealth was basically built on cotton and slavery. These are not sloppy statements; they're deeply wrong. Were they really really important? Sure! But history is a complex phenomenon, and making such wild claims paints you as a fanatic, not an educator.
It's the fanaticism in this debate (on both sides, but most definitely on the woke side) that I find most disturbing. We need a much more richly detailed history taught than heretofore has been done, but we have to understand that every thread we pursue is just one more -- some more important than others -- in the American tapestry.
The 1619 Project is Trumpian in its bombast and sweep. The NYT asserted that “out of slavery” and “anti-Black racism” “rose everything that made America truly exceptional.”
Who *isn’t* offended by that? Certainly, as an immigrant, I’m pretty offended to see that entire aspect of American exceptionalism just waved away.
100%. I took the oath of allegiance in a court in Brooklyn, it was a day I waited for my whole life, and it was packed with people from all around the world who became American with me. My personal reaction to the 1619 Project was really pretty visceral, the idea that I took the oath to a country that, as you correctly note, the NYT said everything was out of slavery and anti-Black racism, made me want to punch something. And then they're teaching it to kids!? Makes me spit.
(And I also think Matt is engaging in some sanewashing here, the NYT very much promoted those couple of lines in NHJ's essay about the Revolution being for slavery as the core thesis until those historians called them on it and they got embarrassed enough to make some stealth edits).
"the U.S. Constitution, which not only endorses slavery..."
Let us look at the objects for which the Constitution was framed and adopted, and see if slavery is one of them. Here are its own objects as set forth by itself: — “We, the people of these United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.” The objects here set forth are six in number: union, defence, welfare, tranquility, justice, and liberty. These are all good objects, and slavery, so far from being among them, is a foe of them all. But it has been said that Negroes are not included within the benefits sought under this declaration. This is said by the slaveholders in America — it is said by the City Hall orator — but it is not said by the Constitution itself. Its language is “we the people;” not we the white people, not even we the citizens, not we the privileged class, not we the high, not we the low, but we the people; not we the horses, sheep, and swine, and wheel-barrows, but we the people, we the human inhabitants; and, if Negroes are people, they are included in the benefits for which the Constitution of America was ordained and established. But how dare any man who pretends to be a friend to the Negro thus gratuitously concede away what the Negro has a right to claim under the Constitution? Why should such friends invent new arguments to increase the hopelessness of his bondage? This, I undertake to say, as the conclusion of the whole matter, that the constitutionality of slavery can be made out only by disregarding the plain and common-sense reading of the Constitution itself; by discrediting and casting away as worthless the most beneficent rules of legal interpretation; by ruling the Negro outside of these beneficent rules; by claiming that the Constitution does not mean what it says, and that it says what it does not mean; by disregarding the written Constitution, and interpreting it in the light of a secret understanding. It is in this mean, contemptible, and underhand method that the American Constitution is pressed into the service of slavery. They go everywhere else for proof that the Constitution declares that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; it secures to every man the right of trial by jury, the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus — the great writ that put an end to slavery and slave-hunting in England — and it secures to every State a republican form of government. Anyone of these provisions in the hands of abolition statesmen, and backed up by a right moral sentiment, would put an end to slavery in America.
It was, in the same way that a 5/5ths version would be a pro-slave measure- csuse the south for to have representatives for people who couldn’t vote, and were treated as property.
It's more anti-slave than 5/5ths, less anti-slave than 0/5ths, even slightly less anti-slave than 1/2. You gotta wonder who had the demographic statistics they were plugging into their abacuses to figure out which fraction was the appropriate compromise.
Conservatives are the bad guys of American history.
This is the most productive argument we could be making IMO. Well-crafted arguments in other directions just keep bringing us back to a place where people who identify as conservative hate the rest of us for not being American enough.
My view here is that when you label an entire group of people "bad" you put yourself in a worse state. It's a cognitive distortion that leads to other cognitive distortions. It will lead to you being more upset about things than is warranted by reality.
"It's a mental shortcut designed to shut off further thought."
Wigan, we've had extensive discussions here. Do you really feel that I have shut off thought? Even if I have consistently failed to persuade you, haven't I at least demonstrated that I have in fact spent massive amounts of time learning and thinking about this?
This is really the crux of the whole thing. If we define a conservative as someone who accepts society as it is now but doesn't want it to liberalize further, then their account of history has to be "everyone who broadly took my position throughout history has been wrong, until now."
You're only looking at changes that were attempted, signed into law, successful, and stuck with us. For every great change pushed through congress and signed into law, there are many that fail and consequently are little remembered. Maybe the conservatives of the day were correct in shuttering lots of them?
Possibly, but being specific about what those were are INCREDIBLY important. We’d have had civil rights legislation in the 1800’s if conservatives didn’t actually have their way.
Sure, I hear you on those issues. It's likely true that conservative have been mostly wrong about most racial issues for most of US history.
I don't know that that says much about the future, though? A significant amount of progressives, for example, recently supported abolish the police / abolish ICE for racial reasons.
The fact that conservatives were wrong on civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights is a perfectly rational and compelling reason to see them as not credible on rights issues.
The conservatives (and everyone else) in U.S. history are all long dead, and they don't care whether you think they were mostly wrong about most racial issues. Nor do today's conservatives. Maybe it's better politics to make our best possible arguments in the here and now.
I think that's right, and gels with the Burkean idea that conservatism isn't about absolutely opposing change, but about making sure that any change is deliberate and steady enough that we can course correct if something turns out wrong. This is the vision of history that upholds someone like Henry Clay. I think the problem this runs into is that (1) the further into the past he recedes, the worse someone like Clay looks, since his compromise position looks more morally abhorrent, and (2) modern conservatism is more about standing athwart history yelling stop, which puts you naturally on the other side of any progress story.
Yes, and this is the problem too--our society is fundamentally pretty conservative, and so anyone whose worldview is that it's too liberal is already starting from a crank position.
Or could it be that conservatism forces liberals to improve their ideas so that only better ones survive over time. In which case both groups play an important role in the progress of society.
I think we all stand athwart history somewhat - and perhaps we will all be judged harshly by the future for it. We have no way of knowing, and we should not change ourselves for the lauds of future generations. Perhaps in the future abortion will be seen as barbarism and the murder of innocents. We don’t have to care and shouldn’t.
This feels like another way of saying conservatives are bad because they are not progressive enough. To which conservatives reply that progressives are bad because they are not conservative enough. While it may make us feel better to say the "other" is bad, does it actually accomplish anything?
What are you expecting to accomplish by going around and saying "Conservatives are the bad guys of American history?" If you're very successful, then maybe people stop calling themselves conservative and start calling themselves something else. Most likely you're not successful and it just makes all the people who are conservative or share some conservatives values dislike you and your agenda.
Excellent post. The 1619 Project was terrific journalistic history. And it did initially overreach in its point about the revolution being motivated by the protection of slavery. But that point was in part retracted, and it made people consider slavery as a contributing factor.
Jill Lepore's "These Truths" is excellent history as history and does a terrific job of looking at American history through the lens of marginalized groups. It does so in a way that is nuanced and in the end hopeful. Highly recommend as a great book to read, especially now as these history battles rage on.
I am very skeptical of the argument that "conservatives" are uniquely the inheritors of everything bad in this country. I think this is a self serving view and one that does not take seriously the fact that conservative/liberal takes on little coherence and meaning the further back we go in time. The coalitions were *really* different back then and our conceptions of what is conservative, liberal, or progressive do not really map well when we delve into eighteenth century history.
I think Douthat's column really did articulate well the underlying political/emotional stakes of the 1619 project. Matt's interpretation strikes me as a little bit of a jump, though an interesting one to consider.
However, I am willing to bet money that if Matt showed this column to any prominent Black writer, Nicole Hannah-Jones included, they would retort "NO, Matt. Everyone's hands are dirty when it comes to the brutalization of Black people. Not just conservatives." Hence why I think Matt's formulation is a little off the mark.
Yes... why is it that so many of us in modern day are drawn to read history as a fantasy football game where we get to retroactively draft the "good guys" onto our team and assign the bad guys to the other side? Why do we invest in a sense of hyper-collectivism where we take pride in the actions of other people we had no influence over and feel guilt (or assign guilt) in modern day based on the actions we also had nothing to do with? And especially to do it on the basis of skin color? It's super weird, when you think about it. No one in history was 100% good or bad. People of all colors, background, and ideologies participated in things that they thought were good at the time that turn out to look pretty bad in retrospect. Shouldn't the lesson for all of us be "the things you think are good could turn out to be bad, so if someone else is telling you you're doing something bad, maybe reflect on if they're on to something for at least a few minutes"?
I'll grant there are figures whose possible good attributes are now considered irrelevant due to the magnitude of their bad-ness. But I'd argue even those people generally thought of their actions as being for the "greater good" or fighting the "good fight" or some-such. It's a trap to think that the worst figures of history thought of themselves as the bad guys or knew what they were doing were obviously bad and did it anyway--leaves us thinking it could never be us.
You are likely correct. I would think of that more as people being bad and just not caring, but I don't think people think that way. They always convince themselves that they are justified.
Yes! And I like to remind myself that everyone we are talking about is dead for a long time, so there should be no personal stake in whether we think they are bad or good. There is only understanding.
"Yes... why is it that so many of us in modern day are drawn to read history as a fantasy football game where we get to retroactively draft the "good guys" onto our team and assign the bad guys to the other side?"
I really don't know what entertains me more. The threads that are in response to posts that are related to urbanism, housing, and transportation, where comments seem to be unaware of just the basics of MY's world view and some of the foundations of it--congestion isn't solved by more highway miles, NIMBYs are bad, etc., or the threads in response to the American politics where there's a mass of conservative comments arguing in a parallel universe where their concerns about the ongoing effort of the left to destroy America and all that it holds dear, and apparently things like Trump and January 6th never happened.
I would have a lot to say about January 6th if I were in a space where anyone thought it was acceptable, but I'm not.
I would guess that many of the 'conservative' comments you're referring to are being made by people like me who live in liberal areas and have beliefs that would be coded generally liberal in most places in the country, but not among the white, urban, secular, college-educated liberals who have been going in a particular direction on politics and specifically on race. Those are the people I'm not sure I want selecting a history curriculum for my kids. I don't want their conservative counterparts on the other side doing it, either, but there's no danger of that happening.
I think you should share your Jan 6 thoughts! I sincerely don’t think you’ll get flamed—this has been a pretty tolerant space in my experience (granted my opinions are usually in line with the majority’s here).
What the President did was destructive to our country and evil. The cowardice shown by many conservatives and Republicans who knew better and instead chose to protect their careers instead of speaking out and saying that the election was fair and he was lying was not much better. Republicans are supposed to be the ones who understand the fragility of institutions, including our democracy, and many of them failed.
Not really worried about getting flamed for this, but I don't think I'm really adding anything to the discussion, either.
Oh, I get it—by "thought it was acceptable" you mean, thought January 6 was acceptable! I thought you meant that people here wouldn't find your views acceptable.
I think there is fatigue on the right about having their values and stories not only constantly challenged but mocked. I used to love watching John Stewart tease the more absurd examples of right-wing anything on the "The Daily Show" but now I see this is what got Trump elected - conservatives were tired of being made fun of and wanted to "own the libs" more than anything. The media and entertainment complex has far more influence on the daily lives of Americans than wonky policy details, which is what Trump deeply understood.
Of course, this is the nature of the liberal versus conservative dynamic - the liberal pushes change faster than the conservative wants to allow it. That tension actually works well when it's balanced (go slow to avoid unintended consequences), but media and social media have labeled this dynamic a "catastrophe" rather than the way of the world that it has been for much of the progress of history. Why? Ratings and clicks, sadly.
“The sheer volume of criticism that’s heaped just on a couple of lines from Hannah-Jones’ essay shows the extent to which conservatives are mad about the project (because they rightly perceive it as bad for the right) but don’t really have the goods to debunk it.”
There are whole books written in response to the project: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083ZJM14R/. Obviously shorter critiques would focus on the easiest-to-explain falsehoods — not to mention the most inflammatory — like those in NHJ’s introductory essay. And whether or not conservative criticism is good or right, the project has been panned by scholars across the political spectrum.
True story: I asked my 10 year old niece what she learned in school this year. “Our country was really mean to the Native Americans. We took their land and killed them.” Learn anything else about the US? “Yes, we still use mean stereotypes of the native Americans.” Anything else about America? “No that’s it.” Now, perhaps she was taught more, but that was her takeaway and it was 100% of what she retained about her country. She happens to go to a very nice private school in a major city.
This is what conservatives are against. These kids are being taught a purely oppressor-victim narrative of the country with zero context of the greater success of the American project. They don’t seem to learn that despite all its warts, this was truly a revolutionary project in terms of human freedom and equality and is essentially unparalleled in human history. That context is wiped away and we teach only the negative parts while forgetting that those very negative parts, while mostly an exception in America, were generally the norm for most people all over the globe for most of human history.
If we teach a generation of kids that our country has been a history of pure evil and oppression with no redeeming qualities, I guess progressives think the kids will remedy the oppression. Conservatives see a generation of radicals that will hold deeply anti-American sentiments with no sense of there being anything valuable worth preserving. This, of course, can only lead to the decay of the nation.
There just has to be a balance. We have many things worth preserving while still having things we need to improve upon. Reasonable people should be able to agree on this.
This is why I sympathize with conservatives on this issue even though I don’t agree with many of their specific claims. I think it’s good for Americans to have positive feelings toward their country and to identify with it. Not to the point where we won’t face up to darker episodes in our history or present day injustices, but enough that we feel some loyalty to the nation and thus a desire to improve it.
I worry that current trends in the social justice left, and its influence on history education and youth culture, will lead in Gen Z to apathy and an embrace of excessively rootless, global capitalism as much as it does to a drive for justice.
I’m in my late-20s and many of my 20-something friends have embraced a kind of cynical apathy toward politics that seems rooted in this kind of pessimistic social justice approach to history.
At the risk of sounding a bit cynical myself, I don't think it's at all a bad thing if political engagement cools off somewhat. The levels of political engagement we saw during the Trump years are really unhealthy for the broader civic health of the country, which needs way more people who don't watch the news.
I think that even now we have trouble reckoning with how existentially terrifying Trump’s election was to a certain flavor of liberal- he was so manifestly unfit to lead the country that a lot of people started second guessing everything that seemed real before about America and Americans. A lot of people really struggle to construct a coherent permission structure that explains how an allegedly intelligent, patriotic, ethical, religious (!) person could possibly fall behind such a transparent charlatan.
Regardless of its underlying truth or merits, racialism shares some unfortunate features of conspiracy theories for Liberals in the sense that it casts the “real” drivers of human action away from what people actually say or do, and into a shadow realm of innuendo and suggestion that we use to divine what lurks in the hearts of others. It can explain everything that doesn’t make sense.
Basically, I wonder the extent to which the current Vogue of racialized politics is basically linked to Liberals being blindsided by Trumpism and not knowing wtf is up with Conservative America. It’s tempting to speculate that as we start to understand what is happening in those communities better that the racial framing will organically recede as we start to understand the underlying issues better.
It's one thing to disengage because you feel like there are more important things in life or care a bit less about the ideological, but you still have vaguely patriotic feelings. That can be healthy for many people. But it's a whole other thing to disengage because you're so disgusted by your country that you don't think it's worth trying to improve.
Here’s the thing: many conservatives agree with your “normie liberal” take on this particular issue. But where normal liberals might intuitively trust teachers and left-leaning teachers unions, and so minimize or give the benefit of the doubt when they see CRT excess, they have the opposite reaction. It doesn’t help that normie liberals uniformly pretend those excesses don’t exist.
10 yr old nieces are famous for providing accurate, exhaustive, and detailed summaries of their school year to their uncles.
I studied history in college and read widely in it now. And I struggle to remember *anything* I learned about history in my K-12 years.
Oh wait; that's wrong. In fourth grade, my central Florida class made a school trip to St. Augustine (you know, Ponce de Leon, the Fountain of Youth, and all that). And we toured the Castillo de San Marcos, the great coquino-stone fort the Spanish built there. They had dungeons!! Totally cool!!!
But other than that through 12th grade, nada.
I vividly remember asking my mom in maybe second grade if America had ever started any wars, since starting a war seemed to be an obvious no-no. My mom told me "only Vietnam... that was complicated." This was during the first Persian Gulf war.
That's funny because believing that we started the war in Vietnam requires a cynical (though probably correct) view of the Tonkin Gulf incident!
Ha- she was born in the mid-50s and her worldview was heavily shaped by her hippie older brother who I’m sure was a war protester so I wouldn’t be surprised if she had some vaguely cynical associations at least
Not sure what you mean by cynical here. But I had a friend who was part of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Only it never happened.
Weren’t we sincerely defending Kuwait in that war?
I agree that I remember very few specifics. But I do remember having a deep sense of patriotism and American exceptionalism-- especially compared the evil Soviets. I don't think the specifics are what you remember, but rather you form broader foundational assumptions of how the world is situated. Who the good guys and bad guys are to put it simplistically.
I see now that I was successfully propagandized. I also see how that was useful and totally uncontroversial coming out of 2 world wars and in the midst of an existential Cold War. We may simply find that relentless criticism of our society is useful so long as there are no serious external threats. Looking history, that sort situation never persists very long.
I think when you're in elementary school, getting a glossy version of American history is the right thing to do.
High school is the time for a more nuanced education, but good luck. You're either taking an AP class simply for the college selection rat race or (my case) you are bored out of your mind by your incompetent teacher and want to be anywhere else in the world.
I think there is a middle ground. I definitely recall learning about slavery in 5th grade US history. It didn't make me think that America was evil. We don't want it too glossy. 12 and 13 year olds should have at least a basic understanding of the history of racism and how it has shaped aspects of our country. But they should also learn how revolutionary the Declaration of Independence was.
That’s basically where I come down too
I remember that, in 7th grade US history, I was taught that Reconstruction was a dark period where the constitution and the laws were overthrown and corruption reigned.
I mean, the constitution and the laws _were_ definitely overthrown…two out of three's not bad!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Cruikshank
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk%E2%80%93Holden_war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Liberty_Place
I mean, corruption also did reign:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_administration_scandals
Yes, evil carpetbaggers, etc.
that was in 1989
Dungeons!?! Teach the context!
This makes a lot of sense, and my memory of my school years may be seriously impaired, but I just remember anything like this, or basically any study of history being prominently featured. Living in Florida in the 1960s, I had back then generally warm feelings toward the Southern side in the Civil War(*), but that came from imbibing from the general culture and ethos of society during those years, not from what teachers fed us.
I just have a feeling we're overthinking the role of education in shaping people's views, especially in the earlier years.
(*) No longer, it should go without saying.
I remember learning about slavery, and also being absolutely traumatized when we got to 8th grade and learned about the Holocaust. A visit to the Museum Tolerance where we learned about a specific kid (mine died in Auschwitz) also really stuck with me. I do think history teaching can make a big impression! Especially if you have decent teachers who do interactive stuff so it’s not just the dry textbook
Agreed. Also, it's exactly one data point. I don't claim anything further. I'd simply frame it as useful real world example of a trend conservatives find unsettling.
No, the implication is that what she thinks was important about what she learned is only slightly correlated with what she actually learned. It's hard to extract the signal from that noise.
Both the things she learned are unambiguously true though. I'm very doubtful that's all she learned, but is it really a problem if our kids are being taught accurate history that maybe portrays America in a negative light? It's a history class, not a hagiography class.
The parts of CRT that concern me are less about teaching kids an accurate history of the nation they live in and more concepts like "white people are inherently racist" and "being punctual is a white trait"
It's not about true or false. It's about the range of facts, the focus, the context and the narrative.
It does seem to me a negative thing if the next generation of kids grow up with a baked-in notion that the country they live in is a bad or evil place. That's certainly what I would think if my understanding of American history was limited only it's 18th and 19th century interactions with Native Americans.
I don't think the US is bad, though, even in just a historical sense. That's partly because I understand the broader context of human history. Slavery, ethno-religious conflict and discrimination and wars of conquest were the norm worldwide when you look back a few hundred years. You'd be hard pressed to find a people or nation of that time that would live up to the standards of 2021. If anything, the US has been at the forefront of progress towards a more humane global standard.
But a 10 year old doesn't have that context
I think that’s an argument for more world history—seeing the continuity of violence, conquest, and oppression in world history helps to put America’s dirty laundry in context. There are a bunch of progressives who don’t care about that context—American is the great Satan—and I can understand conservative and moderate parents worrying that a focus on the negative side of Us history will create more.
I agree with you, that's a much worse problem. However, I do think it's fruit from the same tree, just a matter of degree of how far you push one side of the narrative. If we teach very little of the good history and really emphasize the bad and don't give much context, we are effectively promoting the view that America should be primarily understood as an oppressive and racist place. From there, it's a not a far walk to infer that the same white people who made America such a bad place must also be evil and racist and of course, that implicates the underlying culture. It's pretty straightforward transitive logic.
I think we should especially be teaching the parts of history which portray America in a negative light, but you don't want that to be *all* you learn/take away, which I believe was the original poster's concern (and which I find reasonable). The US is the world's oldest democracy, as well as one of the world's oldest continuous governments, period. That's well worth celebrating, even as we talk about all the many, many issues.
As a chronically late person with ADHD, I wholeheartedly endorse the idea that punctuality is somehow racist. :)
I mean if she goes to private school one could only take it up with the school’s teachers and administration—it’s not a public policy matter. I also think a 10-year-old’s recollections of what they learned in history are unreliable. Kids are fascinated by stories of injustice; it’s not surprising those would stand out the most. None of which is to say the phenomenon you’re describing is baseless, but we would want to be careful in how we recognize and define it.
Agreed. I think her parents and most of the parents in the school are on board with it, so there likely won't be a big backlash. It's pretty self selecting. I toured the school and the head of lower school said in plain English that they don't like to teach history that was "written by white men." The thing is, I also toured most of the "elite" private schools in the area and it was similar stuff in all but one of them. Too progressive for me so I won't be sending my kids to any of those places, but plenty of people do and they are all considered top notch and the places to be if you want your kid to go to a high end college.
There is also another dynamic at play which is that I think even the people that do mainly disagree are quite hesitant to speak up. They don't want to the bad guy or God forbid the racist, and they want their kids to be viewed favorably so they can graduate from the fancy private school and go to a fancy Ivy League University. There's is just not enough reason to rock the boat, piss off a teacher or administrator, and potentially jeopardize your child's future.
^ this this this
During our recent summer of awakening, my niece wanted to talk to her 8-year-old daughter about racism, and in particular about the life of my Black 8-year-old goddaughter, with whom she played at least weekly from infancy to age 6, and whom she loves deeply. I guess she just told her that my goddaughter's life had been harder because whatever about racism. I wondered though, how does that affect great-niece's feelings/perceptions of goddaughter? Pity? Sense of fragility? Sense of unwanted/unnecessary responsibility for her feelings? They're both strong personalities, and each has generally held her own in the inevitable conflicts they've had. Niece move to Midwest and pandemic have separated them since Christmas 2019. Not sure what to expect in 2021; we'll see.
Obviously, empathy and better understanding are also possible included outcomes!
How old is your child, if I may ask?
My niece is 10. My own children are 2 and 4.
"True story: I asked my 10 year old niece what she learned in school this year."
Sure, sure -- he told us how old his *niece* is. But Michael wants to know how old his *child* is. Different question altogether.
But Clement never mentioned having a child - so why would Michael ask that if other than being simply mistaken?
Sorry, David -- I was making a joke. I will refrain from doing that again.
Sorry - clearly missed that!
Sorry, I Misread the post.
Look around your society. All told, it’s a pretty good society. It’s better than virtually every society that’s ever existed. Certainly, it’s far better than Bangladesh, where my dad grew up. Fundamentally, (American) conservatism posits that (1) we don’t really understand how our society got to be as successful as it is; and (2) that we should be extremely careful about changing it because we risk breaking it. It’s the applied version of Chesterton’s Fence.
What conservatives fear about a liberal retelling of history, that focuses only on the negatives and not on the positives, is that it will convince kids that the system as a whole needs upheaval and change. And conservatives think that’s bad not because it’s bad for conservatives, but because they think that upheaval would be bad for America.
Concrete example: I’m a conservative precisely because I’m an immigrant of color. When I look around America I see people with virtues lacking in the people back home, and system of government that’s produced remarkable stability and prosperity. In particular I see a system that has enabled many successive generations of immigrants to achieve parity with the original Anglo Saxon founders of the country, including non-white immigrants like Latinos and Asians: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353.
The success of America at being a multi-ethnic democracy is unparalleled. Even in Europe with its robust welfare states immigrants who look like me are stuck in generational poverty. But in America we’re richer than white people!
I’m afraid of you liberals breaking that.
Interesting comment; thanks for sharing your views!
Speaking politically, I fear that things like the 1619 Project (and the whole CRT thing) is a dangerous trap for trying to build a Democratic coalition. If centering our ideology on the Black experience -- critical as that is and was -- is what will drive the Democrats in the future, then why should we expect Latinos, East Asians and, yes, Bangladeshi immigrants(*) to sign on? What's in it for them?
(*) And Black immigrants for that matter.
I strongly cosign that. I grew up in Virginia and Georgia and felt totally accepted, but I suspect that would not have been true had I been Black. It's none of my business how Black people choose to relate to America. I'm actually a bit of an SJW--I think we should have reparations, etc.
But projecting that sui generis experience onto my half-brown, half-white kid is wrong.
Buts it’s the conservatives who are actually writing laws in ORDER to break that- and historically, it’s ALWAYS been conservatives doing that thing. I understand your fear, but the loss of a shared narrative hasn’t happened yet, and the forging of one is a product of liberalism, in spite of conservative pushes against it. Meanwhile, conservatives are actively trying to maintain power by disenfranchising non-conservatives, while liberals... aren’t doing that to conservatives.
Liberals deserve credit for checking the natural conservative tendency toward xenophobia. But as I noted above, immigrants to liberal European countries with robust welfare states are languishing. The French welfare state hasn’t helped Muslim immigrants there escape multi-generational poverty, whereas many immigrants to America (e.g. Vietnamese and Cambodians) went from being poor refugees to parity with Americans in a single generation. Historically, conservatives were the ones that stood up for free market economies, patriotic education, etc., that made that possible. They demanded that Italian, Polish, etc., immigrants become culturally Anglo Saxon while liberals sought to preserve the distinct identities to get votes.
And today, liberals are definitely the biggest threat to continued prosperity for immigrants. Some racist Trump supporters in Kansas don’t scare me. What scares me is that well-meaning liberals will teach my kids that there is an invisible “white supremacy” that will hold them back in life. I was blessed to grow up in Virginia back when it was a red state. I never learned about “white supremacy” (except in terms of people with white hoods which we defeated). I never doubted I could succeed or blamed someone other than myself when I didn’t. I worry liberals will deprive my kids of that.
Like many immigrants, I favor things like universal healthcare, but oppose the social liberalism of white Democrats. As far as I can tell, social liberalism and the sexual revolution have heaped devastation across America. Elites in NYC and San Francisco seem to be okay, because they actually retain conservative family values as applied to their own lives. But the lower middle class towns where my in laws are from have been decimated. Every other kid is being raised in unstable homes, to parents who capriciously follow their sexual urges instead of doing their jobs as parents.
Ray, I don't know when your father immigrated, but it is very unlikely that somebody who looks Bangladeshi would have found life palatable in the US before blacks and white liberals came together to push Civil Rights reform.
It's also very unlikely that a given Bangladeshi person would have had an opportunity to immigrate. Before blacks and white liberals came together to pass the Immigration Act of 1965, less than 4% of immigrants in the US were Asian. Now that number is over 25%.
I'm a brown immigrant who grew up in Florida and learned about white supremacy. Learning about it didn't hold me back in life. I don't really see the rationale behind people who think it might have.
People like you and me owe a lot to the liberal black, brown, and white people who made our lives possible. Working in that same tradition is consistent with looking around at our society and wanting to preserve and expand the good in it.
I tried to explain to my parents once that we couldn’t have emigrated before the Civil Rights Act and they told me that actually we could have because Iranians are technically white according to the US Census. I’m not sure if that’s true (the Census part is but I don’t think immigration law worked that way - I think it was country based?). But that’s not the point. They were just sufficiently committed to the idea of themselves as white or white adjacent that any notion that they should make common cause with Black people was strange at best and scary at worst. It’s not that they’re virulent racists or anything, but I think that like a lot of upwardly mobile brown immigrants they’ve decided that the way to succeed in America is to assimilate as much as possible into whiteness by distancing yourself as far as possible from Blackness (and from less affluent brown immigrants like people from Latin America). That’s not actually crazy - it worked for the Polish and the Italians and lots of people who weren’t really considered white back in the day! But yes, we’d never have gotten the Asian and Middle Eastern, etc, immigrants we have in the US now without civil rights reforms.
"White liberals" caucused with southern segregationists to get FDR elected so they could get their vast welfare state. Republicans were the ones who pushed through every major civil rights reform until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and voted in greater percentages for both that law and the 1965 INA.
Decades after the fact, "white liberals" found religion and decided that what America needed was the same central planning that created systemic racism during the FDR era (https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten-history-of-how-our-government-segregated-america/) except this time the central planners wouldn't be racist (promise!) Now they attack the Republican idea of "color blindness" as "racist." Excuse me if I think that's one of those liberal dead ends, like eugenics, free love, etc.
Racism started with the New Deal and ended with Lyndon Johnson, but it was still somehow a conservative ending -- this is not a historical narrative that is easy to take seriously.
Free love + eugenics = antiracism is bad -- also very difficult to take seriously.
My point is that “liberals” taking credit for good things that arose in the past from race blindness, religious fundamentalism, and capitalism, while opposing all three of those things today, is disingenuous and self serving.
I’m not going in the opposite direction, just saying that liberals should own their own mistakes and dead ends. What liberals call “anti racism” today is one of those dead ends.
France is the poster country for radical race-blind republican enlightenment values. Canada is the poster country for multiculturalism. They both have a strong welfare state. France is the one with the racial values that conservatives say they want. Canada is the one with the racial values that progressives say they want.
You're mixing up two different things: religious pluralist versus homogenizing secularism, and color-blind versus color-sensitive. American Republicans believe in religious pluralism, while the French believe in homogenizing secularism. Democrats lean toward the French model, which is why Democratic exemplars for "Islam" (like Ilhan Omar) are completely unrepresentative of American Muslims.
Color-blind versus color-sensitive is a different distinction. Color blindness was the ideal in basically all developed countries until five minutes ago, including Canada.
Republicans say they believe in religious pluralism, but they actually mean that they want Christians to be able to legislate their religious views about, eg, abortion, and for Muslims to not exist and/or be heavily surveilled at the very least. They’re not sure what to do about Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists.
I think that religious Christians often want to do politics through the lens of their sectarian morals and interests, but they also understand that if they can do it, other sects can do it too. So the autonomy of religion and freedom of religious worship is maybe even more important. I'm reminded that religious Baptists were big supporters of Thomas Jefferson back in that day. They were against some of what Jefferson's party stood for, but that party wrote and supported the religious freedom idea that became part of the First Amendment, and that in the end turned out to be the most important to them.
He was talking about the religion side of things, not the racial side. France is color-blind and explicitly secular.
It's a good example for the racial-value policies in question, but i think it just shows that the racial policies are not as important as one might think.
There are massive differences in the immigration systems of the two countries and the kinds of things discussed in this: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/a-response-to-scott-alexander-on
are probably better explanations for the differences.
I think you're making way too much of human capital by region and not nearly enough of human capital by strata of society.
The largest countries in the world disproportionately send us the top 1% of their emigrants. Some of what I would call very poor (and you're calling "low-human capital") countries have extremely successful immigrants: India, the Philippines, Pakistan, Iran and Indonesian ethnicities are all in the top of USA income measured by ancestry. Nigeria and Ghanian ethnicities have higher income than White Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
If China sent us 1 million uneducated day laborers from the lowest socio-economic rung of their societies ladder their children would be unlikely to fill out the Ivy League enrollments of 20 years from now.
Yep, this is correct. I was born in Iran and my parents both had graduate degrees before we came here. Iranians are a little weird because we generally emigrated for political/religious/personal freedom rather than for economic reasons, but in general the countries you have to fly in from send richer immigrants than the countries you don’t. Also though, are poor immigrants from wherever really “low human capital”? My mom’s former cleaning lady had zero education but worked super hard. Was she not adding value to society? Also, she always used to bring her little son with her - he liked to read while she worked. He ended up getting a full scholarship to Berkeley and now works in Silicon Valley. I’d call that a pretty good ROI on immigration! I just don’t think we can gauge people’s potential based on their level of wealth or education when they come in.
I actually think we're glossing over the key point here.
Ray favors universal health care. In my eyes, Ray should be part of our coalition, and it's on the liberals/Democrats that he isn't voting with us. And if we could have people like Ray be part of our coalition we would win more, and enact more reforms we want.
I was a Democrat for most of my adult life. Now I'm a registered independent. (Like 40%+ of Asians.)
I’m curious why? What changed for you? Asking in good faith
Elites are following the same urges. They have resources and a support system that helps them deal with the consequences. Poor kids do not; their mistakes will ruin them, because the margin for error is almost nonexistent. This is part of why many non-elite parents are afraid of changing values. If change is a mistake, the children of the well-off will recover when the mistake is recognized. The poor kids will not.
If a child of the elite is caught with some drugs at age 16, by the time they're 19 (probably much sooner), it will be as if that never happened. Not so much for the poor and poorly connected.
Go to recovery at age 20, return to your life if you're from a good home. The kid who is already in the job market will lose things, and have to come up with a story for prospective employers about why they weren't working at all, for a time. And will be set back even further, right at the beginning. There are few things in life more dangerous for a poor kid than moving in a social circle with rich kids. Probably sounds like I'm exaggerating but I'm under-selling it, if anything.
I agree with this - I don’t much like Matt Taibbi but he once wrote a line that really stuck with me, about how being poor or even sometimes middle class in America is like walking on a highwire suspended above a canyon filled with razors. One false move and you’re dead. Our lives are that the precarious
*that precarious
I don't think they are following all the same urges. I would guess that Ivy Leaguers have a much lower amount of sexual activity as teens (and much higher rate of birth control usage) than equivalent people their age who work in retail and don't/won't go to college. These things relate to class.
I strongly suspect this is correlated with the marshmallow test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment. In a meritocracy like America, the elites are people who won the marshmallow test as kids--i.e. they have strong impulse control. They don't understand, and have no personal use for, strong (and sometimes oppressive I'll grant you) social norms that might exist to help normal people make good decisions.
In Bangladesh, we don't just have strong norms against divorce and single parenthood, we have active support infrastructure. When my cousin had a severe fight with her new husband, my dad flew out to another state to counsel them through it. Family and friends weren't telling them "don't put up with it, you deserve better!" Of course that has a lot of downsides too, but it's not clear to me the solution is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Well, societies with strong taboos against divorce and single parenthood are pretty much premised on the strict patriarchal control of *women’s* sexual behavior. While the men can sneak off to a brothel or whatever and it’s fine. Is freedom messier? Yes. But if you have to actively oppress the half of the population I happen to be in to get whatever your definition is of success, I’ll pass, thanks. I’ve seen Iranian society up close and what Christian fundies in the US espouse is way too close to that for my comfort. And yes, Iranian society has many wonderful values! Super close families, for instance. Respecting and taking good care of the elderly. Hospitality to strangers. But it’s sexual mores are misogynistic garbage.
Also, it’s not sexual urges that make people unsuccessful in life - that’s normal and human and shouldn’t be pathologized. If anything it’s having the information and wherewithal and support systems around you to mitigate the impact of your youthful impulses - to use birth control, or get help for your mental health issue so you don’t self medicate with drugs, or whatever. Poor people mostly just don’t have access to that stuff.
My final note on this is going to be a little unrelated, which is that - isn’t the marshmallow test basically bunk?
Great perspective. Remarkably similar to the current school board curriculum debate in Evanston, IL.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/black-lives-matter-curriculum-has-unintended-lesson/618501/
>>And today, liberals are definitely the biggest threat to continued prosperity for immigrants<<<
More than the people who would block their arrival in the first place? The leading lights of the GOP are objectively anti-immigration (the old saw about being "anti ILLEGAL immigration" is very 2004). Full stop. It's hard to imagine doing more to impinge upon the "prosperity" of a poor person from Honduras or China than not allowing them to immigrate in the first place.
In regard to Europe, Europe is FAMOUSLY bad at integrating immigrants, (hi I’m Jewish, we have a long history of being treated like trash in Europe). France in particular, is incredibly bigoted against Muslims- open bigotry makes integration harder. But America’s welfare state isn’t osetlcuslry robust, immigrants come here to become capitalists and members of the “petty bourgeoisie,” not to be workers living on the public dole, so I’m not sure how true it is that America’s welfare stste is super relevant here. But in regard to sexual
Promiscuity, are you concerned with the mere licentiousness, or the babies out of wedlock? If it’s the former, WHY do you care? And do you think government should actually use its power to affect said licentiousness, and if it should, then how? If it’s the second, then, widespread birth control and sex education largely deals with that problem.
Speaking only for myself it's the latter, because the latter is a huge deal. A baby born in a single parent home is in all likelihood starting way way way behind.
I think Ray's argument probably was beyond the powers of government, strictly speaking and into culture. Much of popular culture, media and academia has an unmistakeable leftward social tilt and is more positive towards babies out of wedlock than a culture could be. Places like Japan, Korea and Taiwan are good examples of democracies where the laws aren't so different, but society-at-large views single parenthood very differently.
Birth control and sex education are great but neither entirely solves the problem if people don't use them, or still choose to have children when they're not ready. So society should also acknowledge that single parent homes are an enormous contributor to poverty and hold up a more stable life as a role model for raising children.
Catching up after actually doing work and spending time with my wife...
"Much of popular culture, media and academia has an unmistakable leftward social tilt and is more positive towards babies out of wedlock than a culture could be."
That leftward social tilt has correlated to gillions of really good things, and among them is declines in teen pregnancy rates:
https://www.cdc.gov/teenpregnancy/about/index.htm
Off the top of my head, here are some more things that correlate to the era of more open discussion and less judgement about things having to do with sex:
-- We are a lot nicer to gay and trans people than we used to be.
-- Sexual harassment in the workplace is no longer broadly socially acceptable.
-- Fewer women are being made to feel guilty about natural human urges.
-- Abused women have more resources and power to escape their abusers.
-- Young girls have a greater diversity of academic interests they can realistically pursue.
I agree the government can't fix it.
I don't care about how specific individuals live their lives. But at a certain scale this becomes a social phenomenon. In the towns where my college-aged siblings in law live (middle class mostly white not in a major metro) every other kid has an unstable home life due to parents either not getting married, or getting divorced. The social norm in favor of married two-parent households has totally broken down. And those kids are your kids' friends at school, etc. Studies show that peers are stronger influences on kids than their parents: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2007-04-peer-pressure-stronger-parents.html. I'm not even talking about the stereotypical "welfare mom." I'm talking about reasonably functioning working to lower middle class white people who have been socialized into believing that their own personal fulfillment outweighs the disruption to their kids' lives resulting from divorce, serial monogamy, etc.
And the kids are suffering. Nobody is starving or homeless, but they are failing out of college because their parents got divorced their Freshman year, etc. Tidy home finances turn into financial struggles when parents separate, and luxuries like dance lessons or math tutoring get dropped. They hang around in the houses of friends with stable families because they don't like mom's new boyfriend, etc.
To me I think that there is a lot to agree with in what you say, but the core logical error is that social liberalism is responsible for the breakdown of families. This is a common assertion among conservatives- it posits a world where if everyone was too ashamed to speak up about their horrible partner or sexual preference or personal ambitions and just hunkered down in a two-parent family and went to church then all of these problems of modernity would disappear and everyone would be better off.
To me, this just plainly assumes a lot of facts that are not in evidence. Conservative towns are every bit as riven by broken families and personal corruption as liberal cities. My dad’s family was basically a conservative one like you describe in a conservative part of the world, and indeed two of my uncles were quite successful and created lives that worked really well within a traditional family structure that would make the ghost of Reagan proud. But two of the other siblings died early from drug issues and one basically never talks to anyone anymore for reasons that I assume are related to lifestyle preferences incompatible with rural Kansas.
Liberals aren’t changing the world. The world is changing, and Liberals are trying to respond to it instead of pretending that we can all just go live in the 50’s again if we only had the will to do so.
I agree with some of this but think a lot of these issues are economic in nature - being poor makes it a lot harder to get married and makes divorce devastating financially too. I also wonder whether a lot of these working class parents had kids too young and weren’t ready for the responsibility, or are trying to relive some youth they missed out on. I think a big reason affluent liberal types have more stable marriages is that we marry and have kids relatively late (because of grad school, careers). The other reason is that we have more money (even me, and I’m a lowly nonprofit worker - but I have enough). Money makes everything in life easier, including marriage.
I have these same questions. Also, something about the way you phrased your parenthetical about having a long history of being treated like trash in Europe made me LOL. So true tho!
"(hi I’m Jewish, we have a long history of being treated like trash in Europe)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5dQnJldgzA
>>>What conservatives fear about a liberal retelling of history, that focuses only on the negatives and not on the positives, is that it will convince kids that the system as a whole needs upheaval and change. And conservatives think that’s bad not because it’s bad for conservatives, but because they think that upheaval would be bad for America.<<<
C'mon, man. You can't possibly believe such tired, cliché-ridden pablum in the America of 2021. Much (probably "most" if the polling bears even a passing relationship to reality) of conservative America believes duly elected president Joe Biden was installed via fraud; and moreover very large numbers (probably a majority) of the lawmakers supported and elected by said conservatives are laying the groundwork for elections nullification. The evisceration of American democracy would be a far more radical "upheaval" than anything ginned up by this or that lefty professor.
In fact what American conservatives in 2021 fear most of all is democracy. In the main, they're perfectly comfortable jettisoning the democratic form of governance if that's what's necessary to achieve their policy objectives.
The only reason why we enjoy such a good society in America today is because of generation after generation of liberals who lobbied, fought, and died to ensure that this would be the case. From abolishing slavery to social security to women's suffrage to marriage equality, it's always liberals trying to make society better and conservatives standing athwart history yelling stop.
Yes, America today is a better society than Bangladesh and we should cherish that, but America today is also a better society than America 100 years ago. Liberals are the ones trying to ensure that the America 100 years from now is better than the one today.
That's a very expansive and self-serving definition of "liberal." For example, Republicans have always been a fusion of religious wingnuts and capitalists. Abolition was a fundamentalist Christian movement, and capitalism fueled the Northern economy that smashed the south. The South was the one that portrayed themselves as the forward-looking ones, embracing the "science" of racial differences and rejecting the religious "zealotry" of abolitionism: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech.
Women's suffrage likewise had a strong religious component. The 19th amendment passed with more Republican votes than Democratic votes.
You can draw a straight line from conservative religiosity to the fact that America is one of the few welcoming places for Muslim immigrants. Muslims are doubly alien in "liberal" French society--because they are not French, and because they are not secular humanists. That's why the even French center (Macron) is turning upon Muslims. By contrast, America is a country founded by religious wingnuts. Evangelicals might think that Islam is a false religion, but they at least understand the perspective of people who would put religion above secular society. Conservatives might say nasty things about Muslims, but liberals are the ones who want to directly attack their way of life by e.g. stripping religious institutions that don't accept same-sex marriage (which is virtually every Mosque in America)--of tax exemptions.
In the economic realm, conservatives are the ones who fought for things that make the lives of immigrants better. Unions and their focus on seniority, for example, hurts immigrants and people of color (who tend to be much younger and therefore at the bottom of the totem poll). Strong worker protections benefit bad native workers at the expensive of new immigrants willing to work harder. It's not really a coincidence that the more ossified economies of continental Europe do a worse job economically assimilating immigrants than the more dynamic Anglo economies of the U.S., Canada, and Australia.
And then there are just the bad things liberals did that they want to forget about. FDR's efforts at central planning baked in anti-Black prejudices across the economy: https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten-history-of-how-our-government-segregated-america/. Religion defeated the evil of eugenics. Etc.
Looking at America from 10,000 feet, it seems to me that religion and capitalism are the things that made it what it is today. Who are the ones opposing both?
"The 19th amendment passed with more Republican votes than Democratic votes. "
I just wanted to point out that this kind of thing means nothing.
The post talked about liberal/conservative and you've made the unearned leap to Democrat/Republican. They aren't the same thing.
The Republican party used to be liberal and the Democrat party used to be conservative.
It’s also facially silly. Aligning the confederacy with liberalism takes some seriously tortured logic; I was actually engaging with some of the stuff Ray was saying upthread but this is cloudcuckoo land.
When the confederacy called abolitionists “zealots” who held onto an “unscientific” idea of equality of the races, they weren’t wrong (given what was known at that time). Abolition was rooted in faith-the belief that God created us all in his image. It was faith that required overlooking the obvious chasm in advancement between European and non-European civilizations at that time.
What that means is that sometimes faith gets you the right answer and it’s better than the ideological tools liberals are working with at the time. (Just as it did with eugenics here in the US, the atrocities of communist regimes abroad, etc.)
Those same Confederates (when they were justifying secession) talked mostly about their own conservatism and the wisdom of their patriarchal system as suited to the natural unequal state of man, versus the radical Yankee idea of equality.
If it’s odd to confederacy “liberal” it’s equally odd to call the Republican Party of 1865, just like today a fusion of capitalists and religious fundamentalists, “liberal.”
That just means you can’t meaningfully project those terms as we use them today back to 1865, so as to assign modern “liberals” credit for ending slavery and defeating the confederacy.
Well, certainly the conservatives don't deserve credit for ending slavery. A conservative Democratic ticket came all too close to winning the presidency and negotiating an end to the war which would have left the slaves enslaved and the country divided. These were the Democrats, but they were not liberals. All the reform energy was on the Republican side.
> The Republican party used to be liberal and the Democrat party used to be conservative.
That’s just something Democrats say to protect their egos. The party of FDR, more than 30 years before Democrats flipped on civil rights, was obviously the more liberal party, not to mention recognizably the modern Democratic Party in most respects. It embraced technocratic administration by experts, handling economic issues at the federal level, redistribution, higher taxes, etc. It was also the party of Black people, because it was the more liberal party. Except they had ally with southern segregationists to get Social Security enacted.
In the 1930s, the south was (economically) liberal because it was poor and agrarian. Southerner segregationists hated capitalism, big corporations, etc., just like Democrats do today. They wanted government redistribution just like today. George Wallace was a pro-labor New Deal Democrat.
The parties didn’t “switch places” in 1965, as the Democratic conceit goes. The economy and the issues changed. Georgia went from being an agrarian state looking for welfare to being an industrialized state looking to poach jobs from New York and Illinois through lower taxes and less regulation. That obviously made it a much more fertile ground for Republicans.
The Civil Rights Act of 65 and Brown v. Board also changed the salience of different ideological issues. Color blind individualism and meritocracy aligned with the goals of the civil rights movement prior to 1965, when the right was against legalized discrimination. But once that was off the table, the debate shifted to stuff like affirmative action and equitable redistribution. And those causes naturally found more of a home in the Democratic Party, which had been the party of social engineering and government welfare even when it was also the party of Jim Crow.
"recognizably the modern Democratic Party" Not by me. The basis of the New Deal was actual working-class people, including socially conservative farmers who hated Wall Street, and a lot of urban Catholics. The Republicans were pretty much an upper-class plus Northeastern and Midwestern party. Today's Democratic party is largely composed of educated people (who were Republicans until the Sixties) yoked with certified racial minorities (who had practically no votes at all in the 1930's). The lens of "for or against government spending" is a distorting one. It is essentially a Republican political framing which has done a great job of helping to break up the New Deal coalition.
Both parties had "liberal" and "conservative" wings who fought it out at the party conventions. The Reagan and Gingrich era finished that.
Republicans literally banned Muslims from the country. France is super Islamophobic (and also has had more terrorism, leading to more racist backlash) but I have no idea what that has to do with American liberalism. It’s a very different society.
I understand the idea that French laicite creates a hostile social environment for Muslim citizens of France and that there are substantial social and racial problems there. I can’t say I know: it’s not my country. And yet, I work for a global company with a lot of French employees, most of them in highly technical fields requiring serious education. Our global email catalog shows that among them, there is quite a high proportion of Muslim names. So I don’t know what to think.
Conservatives in the US are entirely dedicated to breaking it and tried to overthrow an election and still keep peddling the Big Lie that Trump won. They are radicals dedicated to upheaval.
I see threats to our democracy on BOTH the extreme left and the right. I have to say that I think the CRT movement has good and noble intentions but is extremely destructive nevertheless. Most of us would agree that there is, at least unconscious bias, if not systemic racism built into our culture. But CRT is being taught in schools not as theory, but as dogma. There is an almost religious fanaticism to the movement and an absolute intolerance of opposing ideas. And I think it’s extremely damaging to tell White children that they are inherently racist, or to tell Black children they are destined to be victims.
That being said, the continued propagation on the right that the election was stolen is also extremely destabilizing to our society. It remains to be seen which force causes the most damage to our society in the end. Or whether these end up being minor blips that then correct.
Is this what’s really being taught? I totally agree that that’s bad but as someone without a school-aged child I just have no clue whether this whole CRT thing is even real or just a conservative fever dream.
In the liberal private school where my kids went, it is a raging fire, complete with segregation in the early grades, mandatory "affinity groups" and breakout antiracism sessions in accordance with the now-declared primary values of the school. And also some alarming instances of anti-Semitism in a historically Jewish school. I wouldn't send them there today by choice.
" It’s the applied version of Chesterton’s Fence. "
... no, no it isn't. That's just the internal propaganda view of what conservatives stand for. The impulse of the conservative movement has nothing to do with preserving America and everything to do with exacerbating existing imbalances in group power dynamics. Whether the axis is gender, orientation, race, religion, citizenship, economic status, the impetus is to push to enhance the power of those already advantaged by the system. The Bush and Trump administrations should provide ample evidence of fences being pulled down by a movement that has no intention of merely nurturing the status quo.
Yes, America is great. But isnt Canada better? Wouldn’t a nation with America’s power and prosperity and Canada’s decency be best of all?
You are clearly not Canadian yourself, or you would have apologized immediately for this blatant self-promotion.
Here's how you do it:
"Well what about being, I don't know, Canadian, eh? It's not so bad, is it? Probably not for everyone, though, really. It takes getting used to and all."
I quite like Canada, but I'd be curious to understand what Canada would be like as a great power instead of a relatively small (population wise) country that free rides tremendously on its southern neighbor.
Is such a nation even possible?
America might be relatively good for immigrants, but so far it's been pretty bad for people who were enslaved or colonized (and their descendants). That inconvenient truth seems worth acknowledging and addressing.
The 1619 Project gets too much respect here. I think the idea of "provocation" or "great journalism" elides how such assertions are accepted as fact by people who want to be on the correct, moral side of contemporary issues. To take just one example, I can’t tell you how many times I have heard from highly educated people that the urban police in America originate from slave catchers. People actually believe this stuff, and it is important to push back and call out the propaganda where it is, perhaps especially for those of us who are liberals. The conservatives should not be the only ones out there fighting this fight (and messing it up while they're at it).
Yeah, I have no beef with the individual articles, but Hannah-Jones essentially created historical "fact" from whole cloth (without consulting historians!) to serve a narrative. In other industries, we might call that "lying"! It's unbecoming of a journalist and the fact that it was rewarded with a Pulitzer says quite a bit about the current state of the journalism industry (it's not good).
The 1776 project is obviously really dumb but I don't think it can be said enough that Hannah-Jones literally lied to support her argument-or, at best, was deeply ignorant of the historical facts and didn't want to learn-and was rewarded with one of journalism's highest awards for it.
Well the really damning part is that they did consult historians and them proceeded to just ignore them in favor of their preferred falsehoods: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248
I think this level of dishonesty is not actually unheard of in journalism, but as you say, to follow it up by awarding it journalism's highest honor is just galling.
And in the Paper of Record too.
It seems to me more precise to say she’s “flat out wrong” for xyz reasons than to accuse her of telling a deliberate untruth.
As another poster noted, she consulted historians, than ignored them. I don't see any reason to dance around the issue, frankly. She was at best deliberately ignorant and incompetent, and at worst a fabulist, and she got a Pulitzer for it. I think she knew what she was doing perfectly well, and it paid off.
While it is factually accurate that the first policeman in American probably was not a slave catcher right before that, it is also factually accurate to say that Southern policing grew out of slave catching. It is also accurate that a big part of American policing for most of the country's history was dedicated to enforcing racism.
"I have heard from highly educated people that the urban police in America originate from slave catchers." -- This is a bit of a strawman. While some people may have the details mixed up, it is perfectly accurate to note that cops have historically been expected to do racist stuff on behalf of local governments.
You can choose to focus your frustrations on people who understand the basic gist but get some details wrong, or you can focus your frustrations on people who hide behind cops to defend their racism.
The "police evolved from slave catchers" line is a pretty silly talking point firstly because it isn't true and secondly because it's kind of meaningless.
It's not true in the sense that the modern conception of "police" evolved from the old "nightwatch" system in London around 1830, largely in response to evolving urbanization. This was then exported to American cities like New York and Boston around mid-century and spread from there leading up into the twentieth century and basically replaced whatever systems were there beforehand. Slavery didn't have much to do with it.
It's meaningless in the sense that it kind of does nothing to advance the discussion about what to do about police beyond trying to somehow cosmically ties their existence to some nebulous sense of American Original Sin in order to make some sort of quasi-religious appeal to the righteousness of whatever argument someone is making.
To anyone who actually cares about, like, facts and stuff it just makes whoever is saying it look uninformed and kind of weird. If the point they're trying to make is that police are often the enforcement mechanisms of bad laws... well, that largely puts the onus on the lawmakers rather than the police, so again, it's not really that helpful.
There was an interesting statement about Southern policing in Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside, to the effect that police did not even try to police black communities in the South, on the cynical premise that a murder there just meant “one fewer to worry about.” So those communities were lawless, and when their members immigrated to other places, they carried this lawlessness with them. The utter brutality of this is a far bigger indictment of our history than this silly “slave catchers” stuff. But to acknowledge it would mean to acknowledge that the issue is not only about the legitimacy of police, but also about their effectiveness: at root, the police have not been strong enough to succeed in imposing the rule of law and the state monopoly of violence in the troubled communities where most of the violence takes place.
Dude, Southern policing did in fact evolve from slave catching. That is a real thing. It's true that urban policing in the northeast did not come from slave catching. Both statements can are true.
What's more, there are a limitless number of incorrect sentiments out there. To be infuriated by this one more than others (say, "Obama was born in Kenya") is a choice that seems driven by general hostility to antiracism.
We'll just have to disagree, then. I think we have a problem of definition. I don't think what you say is well supported.
Well, am I right that you are more infuriated by "Obama was born in Kenya" than by "police evolved from slave-catchers"? It seems like a good policy is a blanket opposition to false statements and a commitment to correct them when we're made aware of them.
"opposition to false statements" is not the same as "go on the internet and use this false statement to justify x."
I don't go around intentionally repeating any false statement, and if in the appropriate social/professional context (I'm a teacher), I correct false statements.
But the specific false statements I choose to go on the internet and complain about tend to be the ones I regard as being consequential: climate change isn't real, voter fraud swings elections, racism was fixed in the 60s. My choices in this regard tell you something about my values.
When somebody says that people who confuse the origins of urban policing with the origins of Southern policing are not making an honest mistake but just hate police, that also tells me something about that person's values.
“…Southern policing did in fact evolve from slave catching.”
Is that what they teach at police academies in the south? If not, then you’re wrong.
I am pretty sure they go well out of their way to avoid teaching ANY kind of evolution and most southern teaching institutions. :P
So what I'm hearing is "accuracy doesn't really matter if the story generally expresses what I fervently believe." I can't go with you there. To me, history matters, and accuracy matters, because without it there is no true understanding. In this case we have a pure political play: by associating (inaccurately) today's policing with slavery it is hoped to delegitimize policing and law enforcement for the entire community. My response is: if that's your goal, say it, and argue for it, don't hide behind phony historical statements.
As I noted above, the history of policing in the South is different from the one of the Northeast. You are the one who is insisting on inaccuracy by pretending that this isn't true. Here is the relevant passage from The American Bar Association:
"The more commonly known history—the one most college students will hear about in an Introduction to Criminal Justice course—is that American policing can trace its roots back to English policing. It’s true that centralized municipal police departments in America began to form in the early nineteenth century (Potter, 2013), beginning in Boston and subsequently established in New York City; Albany, New York; Chicago; Philadelphia; Newark, New Jersey; and Baltimore. As written by Professor Gary Potter (2013) of Eastern Kentucky University, by the late nineteenth century, all major American cities had a police force. This is the history that doesn’t make us feel bad.
While this narrative is correct, it only tells part of the story (Turner et al., 2006). Policing in southern slave-holding states followed a different trajectory—one that has roots in slave patrols of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and police enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. As per Professor Michael Robinson (2017) of the University of Georgia, the first deaths in America of Black men at the hands of law enforcement “can be traced back as early as 1619 when the first slave ship, a Dutch Man-of-War vessel landed in Point Comfort, Virginia.”
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/how-you-start-is-how-you-finish/
[End quoted text]
To your greater point about policing in a modern context, it is relevant that police have historically been asked to do things that today we see as racist. To stop doing this requires them to reassess what they have traditionally considered best practices.
There is a direct connection between racism and better policing. It is an entirely reasonable and appropriate point to make.
What we seem to have is a misunderstanding around the definition of policing. In the 19th century, rural America (north and south) was unpoliced. Whatever law enforcement needed to be done, had to be done by the citizens themselves, under minimum supervision by the sheriff or the justice of the peace. In the prewar South, these private citizens organized slave patrols whose job it was to make sure that the blacks were not circulating around in a way that they felt could be dangerous. After the Civil War, similar groups of armed self-deputized citizens did essentially the same thing, this time wearing sheets. None of this has anything to do with actual police. It is in fact what happens in the absence of police.
Southern cities (New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville, Richmond, Atlanta) established police departments on the same model as northern cities. The officers were often on the Very Bad racist side of things, but not always: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Liberty_Place. Their racism derived from the society in which they existed, not from any fanciful descent from slave patrols, which are just irrelevant to actual policing.
The true descendant of the slave patrols is the Klan, not the police. Does it matter, when we all know what we think right and wrong is? I think it does matter, because I think it’s important to think clearly about these matters, and not fill our heads with rubbish and nonsense. Equally, not to spread falsehoods that damage the credibility of what we’re trying to do now, in the 21st century, in defining what effective police reform could be
Except that most of those Southern police departments, as they exist now, had basically nothing to do with slavery. For example, the Atlanta Police Department wasn't formed until 1873, over a decade after slavery ceased to exist. Did another law enforcement apparatus (like a sheriff's department or a Nightwatch) exist before then which did enforce laws related to the institution of slavery as was legal before the Civil War? Yeah, obviously, those laws were clearly going to be enforced by somebody. But that frankly says less about the nature of policing than it does about the simple fact that Georgia had slaves once. Make bad laws and police will have to enforce bad laws.
The APD also spent a century enforcing Jim Crow. Many of the cops who were promoted for being really good at doing their job before Civil Rights went on to carry out the war on drugs and train future (now recent) generations of cops.
In light of this, it makes total sense that the APD has a lot of institutional knowledge about nabbing bad guys but comparatively less institutional knowledge about making sure your not accidentally being racist.
Even if you disagree with my logic, can you at least see that I'm not motivated by blanket hatred of cops?
There's a pretty big leap from "a police force somewhere in the country enforced jim crow laws" (something no one was denying or is surprised by) to "America's police grew out of slave catchers" which is the canard that's being casually thrown around by activists as if it's true and is some sort of deep and meaningful argument.
There are plenty of things about modern police departments to criticize without playing "six degrees of slavery" with their histories and IMO activists would be much better served by focusing on those things that we can actually do something about rather than making up "facts" that frankly make them sound like they don't know what they're talking about.
I don't know where you find this stuff. Jim Crow was the consensus of the white population. Violence was rarely needed. People understood the situation and what was expected of them. And for those who didn't, it was the Klan, not the police, who were there to enforce it.
The poster making the original point was talking about urban policing, though, which is something many repliers here appear to have missed. He's specifically saying that people he knows are saying this stuff about *urban police*, not rural Southern police, or the broader concept of police in the US.
“Policing in southern slave-holding states followed a different trajectory—one that has roots in slave patrols of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and police enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.”
That’s all fine because you note that it all ended in the mid-Twentieth Century.
Policing in southern states ended in the mid-Twentieth Century?! That's news to me. Maybe we should let them teach us Californians about how to defund the police.
Less sarcastically, what do you think happened in the mid-twentieth century? The existing police departments were replaced root-and-branch? If not, why do you assume that institutional or personnel continuity would not suffice to maintain cultures and practices adapted to a racist milieu?
“…why do you assume that institutional or personnel continuity would not suffice to maintain cultures and practices adapted to a racist milieu?”
I have not assumed that. I say prove it. As far as I can tell no one who has claimed that police departments’ roots are in slave patrols has not even attempted to offer that proof.
This kind of feels like a "why worry about our people who are wrong when theirs are so much worse" argument to me, which frankly I've never found very compelling. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Does American policing have a long history of enforcing state discrimination on the basis of race? Absolutely. Does that mean it's OK to make up fake history? No.
It is not fake history to note that policing in the US has a racist history to reckon with. To pick on one confused detail (urban vs Southern) as a justification for dismissing anybody who wants police reform is not an exercise in fidelity to historical evidence. It's an exercise in straw-manning.
But "it has a racist history" doesn't justify *specific* claims about what that racist history is, especially since some people take those claims as relevant to the question of whether policing in the US is even redeemable.
That’s a good point, actually
The original poster was talking about people thinking that urban police departments stemmed directly from slave patrols. The only strawman here is your attempt to somehow connect this to a commentary on the entire US police system when the OP was specifically talking about urban police. They weren't talking about people reckoning with the racist history of policing, or in any way implying that policing doesn't have many race-related issues. They were very specifically talking about people thinking that urban PDs come from slave patrols, which is something you continue to refuse to acknowledge in your attempt to defend blatant fabulations in the 1619 Project. It's not defensible when the other guys make stuff up and it shouldn't be defensible for people left of center either.
The original poster also said this:
"In this case we have a pure political play: by associating (inaccurately) today's policing with slavery it is hoped to delegitimize policing and law enforcement for the entire community. My response is: if that's your goal, say it, and argue for it, don't hide behind phony historical statements."
This is straw-manning because 1) the roots of Southern policing are different than those of Northeastern policing, and 2) I am not trying to delegitimize all policing.
I am suggesting that confusing urban with Southern does not legitimate the accusation that people who talk about antiracism just hate cops.
"It’s a stupid argument that tells you nothing about anything" — no, it tells you how trustworthy that source of information is.
* "Geneticists are bad because they used to believe in eugenics" — so maybe we should be _very, very_ suspicious about genetics' social conclusions.
* "the military should be abolished because it used to massacre the Indians" — so maybe we should only use casus belli from military-independent sources.
* "Cops did racist stuff because the laws and social norms for most of American history were explicitly racist, and cops enforce laws and social norms." — so maybe we should make sure we don't use police behavior to _set_ our social norms and laws as well.
One could add that Indian policy grew out of violent conflict between Indians and Europeans, in which the former often came out on top.
There are often many virtues in something that also produces false beliefs in some people. The germ theory of disease, and the way it was promoted in the early 20th century, led to some good efforts on hand-washing, and some really bad ideas of ignoring the role of aerosols and ventilation that came back to bite us this year. We should expect stronger versions of this mixture of good and bad from theories of humans (whether our health or our society) than from theories of, say, gravity, but even there, good theories often lead to many bad beliefs.
The series of articles was called the 1619 Project for a reason, which Hannah-Jones explained in characterizing 1619 as the true founding of the United States and 1776, a/k/a the American Revolution, as motivated to preserve slavery against the possibility of British-compelled emancipation. Everything else in every other article might be correct, and still pointing to them to defend the project would be a deflection.
The World Socialist Website, https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619, interviewed several leading historians, who had no apparent connection to the Trotskyist organization behind the website or to a hard-left, class-based politics. Again, focusing on the organization's politics perhaps may help explain why it acted as it did, but it's another deflection from the merits of the controversy.
You’re overreaching here. I am sure that slave catching patrols had little to do with the origins of any random north eastern police force, let alone far western, but surely they have some sort of role in shaping the way southern police forces go about their business. The thing to do is show that this isn’t true by looking at the records and making a cogent argument.
I believe the poster you responded to specified *urban* police.
I stand corrected!
Douthat's view is correct, and to imply he is nut-picking is wrong. There is a large and growing strain of leftist activists who are anti-American, who want to divide, who do not agree with classic liberalism - freedom of conscience, religion, speech - and believe all this can be solved with a turn toward socialism. The use of a racial wedge is merely a tool and not the goal.
As evidence, I submit the Democratic primary where the leftists were out-of-step with actual Black people's in supporting and enforcing a more radical set of policies, whether under the Bernie or Warren (rather than Biden) candidacy. And again in the NYC mayoral election, where the true left mobilized to oppose the Black candidate. The use of race is a tool for a rising left that is fighting classic liberalism, a market economy, and, yes, the origins of the US.
You might not realize this, but America is a large country. The fact that a minority of supporters of LOSING primary candidates have dumb beliefs is not the indictment of "the left" you think it is. I don't think your opinions are representative of all of Florida. You're just some guy on the internet. When this "rising left" you invoke in fear actually, like, rises, beyond the primordial of Twitter and ignored protest slogans you might have a point.
My opinions are held by all True Floridians. :)
What’s your gun/bullet of choice?
Fair enough lol
I agree that America is a large country, but I also see a dynamic that you might be missing. At this moment in history, the black political caucus holds the balance of power position within the Democratic Party - they can’t win by themselves, but the Democrats cannot win without them. The caucus contains moderates and leftists, but the latter have strong influence because they want specific things, more intensely. So what the caucus ends up delivering, policy-wise, is heavily influenced by the left. This is how trustworthy Old Joe’s moderate administration is officially signed up for racial preferences, outcome-based criteria, and so on in some key areas (e.g. housing). It is because the people who have been given the power to write the executive orders want that. So, small minority or not, they are far from inconsequential.
*Rejects “nut picking”*
**Spews two paragraphs of nut picking**
I guess I agree with your assessment, then, that those pushing the Kendi and DiAngelo views of racial issues and those who reject the principles of free expression, market economies and diversity of thought represent the "nut" side of the progressive movement.
I disagree, though, that those views are small or insignificant. The fact we are reading MattY on Substack rather than Vox is pertinent. He signed onto an anodyne statement supporting free expression and was hounded for weeks.
Do these standards of free expression apply to the conservative movement as well?
Off the top of my head:
-- CPAC booed off the stage a lifelong conservative's presentation on the economic benefits of immigration.
-- Conservatives have attacked dozens of Republicans who upheld the rule of law with respect to the 2020 election. All kinds of people have been formally censured and lost positions.
-- Conservatives boycotted the Dixie Chicks for expressing their opposition to the Iraq war.
-- Liz Cheney.
Its worth noting that nobody boycotted MY. He received some emails, so he took his ball and went home. I'm not crying for him.
Your examples, Biden winning the Democratic primary and the NYC mayor’s race are examples of, not just the mainstream left being dominant over the fringe left, but of the mainstream left being, well, mainstream.
MattY and Ezra Klein haven't talked too much publicly about their departure from the media company they founded at around the same time (and that continues to show their influence, particularly in its discussion of housing and transportation policy). It seems likely to me that it's more complex than a simple connection of this sort, given that Yglesias did and Klein didn't sign that letter.
Matt didn’t even leave. He still hosts The Weeds.
I think if you re-read the article, you'll see that Matt's claim is that Douthat is nutpicking *arguments from the 1619 Project*. Yes there are some bad leftist activists out there, but the primary arguments in the 1619 Project are reasonable. That is why conservatives focus on criticizing a small minority of the 1619 Project's arguments.
Just like right-wing American politics contains many strains which have to reside together under one roof for pragmatic purposes, so does left-wing American politics. The simple fact that lots of people on the left don't agree with African American moderates about some issues doesn't mean that they are 'anti-American', and the 'evidence' submitted here doesn't add up to the assertion.
I don't see why Matt's take is incompatible with Ross's. Most conservatives genuinely have moved toward the center in their understanding of American history and are concerned about an "over-correction" that actually leaves kids (who aren't really wired to add nuance to a one-sided story by themselves) with the impression that America is a pretty fucked up place. Also conservatives don't like the idea of progressives taking over the curriculum and painting history as a war of good guys vs bad guys, where the bad guys are always the conservatives. Imagine that!
Just to re-up my Haidt stan cred, progressives also don't seem to recognize that the conservative enthusiasm for the American myth is a deeply-held moral perspective for them. Being American is a core part of their identity for many of them much like being a member of a minority racial group is for other people, one of their biggest sources of personal and collective pride. Toppling a statue of George Washington in protest would stir up the same feelings of disgust and offense in many of them as toppling a statue of MLK in protest. It's personal. They take pride in standing up for the foundational values of America in the face of an army of an army of progressive-socialist-communist-anarchists who would burn it all to the ground. When they watch Star Wars, we're the Empire. When they read history, we're the "Democrats" who fought to protect slavery (I know, it's dumb). We're the Maoists holding struggle sessions. We're the angry protesters opposed to judging people on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin. We're their bad guys. Simple as that. You can point out all the ways they're wrong (there are plent) but if you can't accurately see us through their eyes, you'll never understand what's actually behind the outrage.
"Being American is a core part of their identity for many of them much like being a member of a minority racial group is for other people, one of their biggest sources of personal and collective pride."
Being a white American is a core part of their identity.
Seriously, think for a moment why toppling a statue of Washington would outrage "Americans" but toppling a statue of MLK would offend "racial minority groups." MLK is an American hero. To make him the exclusive concern of some racial minority group is so common and so illustrative. The reason there's such outrage against things like CRT is that it shines a light on these unexamined impulses and talks about them.
Did I say only minorities would care if a statue of MLK was toppled? No, I did not. In fact I was trying to say most conservatives would be equally mad about both. I used to see things the way you describe…. It was a very weird realization/identity crisis to realize most conservatives in 2021 genuinely don’t care about being white until someone gives them trouble about it. Are there some people who care about their whiteness? Yes, and they usually suck, but they’re not as common as you might think.
What you call "giving them trouble about it" I think is more accurately described as "any mention of it whatsoever." This makes sense: In a society in which institutional racism plays such a powerful role, and operates largely on auto-pilot, the mechanisms can only function if we pretend they don't exist. *That's* the reason folks on the right react with rage when you point out the obvious.
I suspect I won’t change your mind on this. I do want to ask this sincerely…. Have you ever stopped to fully consider the possibility that you could be wrong about what’s in other people’s hearts and minds?
Absolutely. I'd ask you though, do you believe that implicit bias exists. Do you think people absorb assumptions about, for example, gendered differences from the culture they inhabit? If so, how do you think the way sexism is so fundamentally different from racism?
Oh man, yes, implicit bias absolutely exists! Biases are super hardwired into us humans. I spent, I dunno, 20 years operating under the conviction that the vast majority of white people were biased in favor of other white people (I still think this part) and that this was the primary root cause of racial disparities, and that to end disparities, white people had to acknowledge their biases and work to eliminate them. What I didn't realize that was biases between the tribal political parties VASTLY outweigh the psychological weight of race-based biases in most people. https://www.vox.com/2015/12/7/9790764/partisan-discrimination I realized my implict bias about conservatives led me to glom on to any story or study that confirmed my intuition that they were awful, terrible people. I realized that all of my navel-gazing about my biases about black people was actually making those associations stronger (ironic processing theory). I gave myself permission to think critically about the ideas of leaders in the antiracist movement who were POC for the first time because *that's what you do for people who you consider to be your equals*. When I gave myself permission to not care about race, I took the IAT again and lo and behold- I got neutral scores for the first time ever. I realized I'd been making my biases so much worse by obsessing over them. And I realized a lot (not all) of the conservatives who say they don't care about race and they really do want to treat everyone equally aren't lying... they don't understand why our side is so obsessed and find it offensive/racist. Are they biased? Sure as hell they are. But they're 1000x more biased against Democrats (based on actual policy ideas and moral perspectives) than they are against minorities. They would hang out with a minority conservative over a white liberal any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Has it always been this way? Absolutely not. But I think liberals have 1965 frozen in their mind and assume conservatives are the same people who picketed bussing when that was 2 generations of people ago. Anyway at this point I'm rambling, this is why I started a Substack :D Hope some of that makes sense!
You described my views more articulately than I could do so.
Nice... do I win some kind of ideological Turing test prize? :D
Matt seems to have missed the main objection I've heard from conservatives about critical race theory.
The driving force of the right's outrage is the goal of the CRT project and its advocates. Their stated goal is to upend the centuries old enlightenment values that underpin our modern society. At its core, it's a stunningly illiberal project that's counter to centuries of American values.
Specifically, CRT seeks to eliminate our tradition of elevating certain individual rights above those of the collective. It assesses everyone it encounters based on their immutable characteristics, rather than based on their individual characteristics. It seeks to categorize and divide people by their immutable characteristics. It attacks our sense-making apparatus at its core by all classifying all truth relative and by disrupting the processes we use to establish what's true.
>Their stated goal is to upend the centuries old enlightenment values that underpin our modern society.
This is a stunning comment. Can you document it? I thought that the idea of any critical theoretical process, whether in legal studies or literature, is to provide "critique" and textual analysis. You are suggesting that the theory itself wants to eliminate other interpretative traditions, which doesn't sound correct at all. A few citations, authors, or quotes would help to clarify.
From literally a textbook on CRT that Matt tweeted: “Unlike traditional civil rights, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”
But the key idea is "questions" which is what any worthwhile critical apparatus does. The problem here is that we act like conservative readings - whether of history or of literature or the law or politics - are not interpretative theories and are thus not ideological, but are rather, "raceless". Please point me to something that is not a tertiary reading or generalization of the purpose of this theory, which is supposedly to "eliminate our traditions." Theorists would find that objectionable.
"But the key idea is "questions" which is what any worthwhile critical apparatus does."
Yeah, there's a curious insecurity in a lot of conservative attitudes towards conservative values: "don't question them! if you question them, you will undermine them!"
Really? Are you that unpersuaded of their intellectual integrity, that you think they will dissolve on close inspection? Why don't you think that questioning is just as likely to result in vindicating them and producing a deeper understanding of their merit?
I suspect it's because the conservative model for their own values is blind religious faith, which does in fact have a tendency to wither under scrutiny. But when my students question the Enlightenment, they come away even more committed to its values, exactly because they questioned it.
Conservatives - and the rest of us who have concerns about the depth of commitment to liberal democracy coming from various places on the political spectrum - are not making these kinds of results up. These generational differences concern me. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millennials-ok-with-limiting-speech-offensive-to-minorities/
Off topic, but I do not see how anyone can say in June 2021 that conservatives are politically committed to liberal democracy when they are doing their best to institute minority party rule.
I share your concerns about the youngsters' commitment to liberal democracy. But the question is, how do we increase their commitment to those values? By shouting at them, "you may not question our sacred values?" Or by looking at the entire picture, warts and all, and seeing why this country remains the last best hope on earth?
I think the second is more likely to succeed, and the first appeals only to those with an authoritarian mindset -- which itself is directly opposed to liberal democracy.
Okay, so are you okay with teaching kids why cultures and religions across the world reject same-sex marriage? So they can interrogate their liberal western assumption that non-discriminatory treatment is more important than, e.g., prioritizing reproduction and child rearing?
Actually, some cross-cultural context would be helpful. Students should know the how human liberty and self-determination varies across both time *and* space. This might soften some of the negativity focus on the darker aspects of American history could cause. Human liberation is morally right, but it ain't easy.
I would be absolutely in favor of that, both so the they can interrogate their western assumptions, and so that they are not narrowly parochial and myopic in their outlook, and don't make an ass of themselves when they venture outside of the US border. It's good to know about what other cultures think!
But any kid who attends conservative/fundie Sunday school class is already being taught that. Which may explain why critical perspectives are seen as providing a valuable balance. It's a good intention, anyway
Ah, yes, those insecure conservatives. In contrast to the intellectually rigorous liberals who declare that anything less than totally and uncritically accepting someone's self-declared gender is "denying their existence."
Critical theory of all sorts has a central strand that sees the "Enlightenment" concept as deeply problematic. See this bit from Wikipedia on "Dialectic of Enlightenment" by Adorno and Horkheimer:
"Horkheimer and Adorno believe that in the process of "enlightenment," modern philosophy had become over-rationalized and an instrument of technocracy. They characterize the peak of this process as positivism, referring to both the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and broader trends that they saw in continuity with this movement."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment
CRT isn't being taught in high schools anyway. CRT is a specific aspect of law school curriculum. Centering the idea that white supremacy was a foundational idea in America is not the same as CRT. In fact, looking at Edmund Morgan's work, I think you can successfully argue that white supremacy and ideas about "democracy" were positively linked. America produced broad-based democracy for white men, because race substituted for European ideas of class. But the internal contradiction was there for everyone to see who wanted to look for it. If there was one piece of common ground between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln prior to 1863, it was that that contradiction should spell the end of slavery.
Uh, he does though. Right here: “the project as a whole ties together in popularized form a lot of strands of newer history that, broadly speaking, cast racial conflict as the central through-line of American history and does so in a way that’s devastating to conservatism.” He denies that the main focus is on “delegitimizing,” patriotism, but is instead focused on looking at our history through a race conscious lens, and that lens, (much like a purely economic lens) is incredibly unflattering to Conservatism. CR isn’t about America’s irredeemable racism, it’s about America’s REDEEMABLE racism.
I don't agree. This quote is about looking back and fighting about our history. IMO, that's a side show. The primary threat of CRT is its implications on today's society moving forward. CRT upends long-established norms for how we establish facts and truth and how we do science.
The core fight is not about the finer details of America's history or about attempts to reshape the American historical narrative.
>CRT upends long-established norms for how we establish facts and truth and how we do science.
Not sure what any of this has to do with science, but the same could be said about Marxist theory in the 20th century. What you are suggesting is that CRT is a dangerous and subversive ideology that masquerades as legitimate academic analysis. But I suspect that it is the "race" part that triggers the reaction for conservatives. It's a useful cultural panic that rallies the bases, no one will give a shit about in a few years, just like postmodern theory, an intellectual footnote
First, I don't believe there's any masquerading going on here and I consider CRT legitimate academic field of study. I just disagree with it. Framing CRT in a similar manner to Marxist theory seems about right to me. I'm not really that concerned about the academic work itself, just as I'm not that concerned about academic work on Marxism. The concern is that very tenuously supported theories are being operationalized and widely deployed in a manner that's unending many institutions across our country.
Second, just because an argument is being utilized by "bad people" doesn't mean the argument itself is wrong or bad. This seems to me to be a case of a very real and legitimate concern is being highjacked for perhaps cynical political purposes. (btw - So far, I'm staunchly against every one of the anti-crt bills I've reviewed including the one in NH. These all seem very reactive
Yes, and the historical narrative of CRT boils down to “conservatism is historically bad.” Which is, understandably, offensive to Conservatives.
Are conservatives interested in winning the history wars or the midterm elections? My money is on the latter and all the CRT boomer moral panic is just getting the base riled up to put republicans into the house and senate.
The real reason conservatives talk about Critical Race Theory (or whatever they claim it is) is that the dogwhistle is built in.
I don't think it counts as a dogwhistle when it has "race" in the name. This is just old school explicit conservative racism.
It's all part of the typical "the REAL racists are..." stratagem. Which they keep going to because it works so well.
To be honest I think one of the best parts of CRT is that it dulls this “real racists!” Strategy. The “real racists!” was always either some ridiculous statement about democrats from the old south and they control the party now a la Hydra from Marvel… or it’s rather defensive counterpart, vilifying people who are tbh losers who are resentful of themselves and do engage in vulgar, racist words. Though this behavior is bad it adds insult to injury to cast them as society’s ultimate villains. And it gives a defense to all conservative, institutional racism.
Well, it's certainly more dogwistle-y than "Black people shouldn't be allowed to vote."
That's setting the standard for "code" extremely high. I mean, it's a theory about anti-racism.
Most US pop historiography falls victim to a major analytical error and this is no exception. Americans have a tendency to center the US in the global historical narrative and to treat other countries as peripheral to our development. This is always evident in the crappy history books that conservative journalists write (see Brian Kilmeade, Bill O'Reilly) and as much as I am more inclined to support 1619, it is no different.
For instance, the Desmond article is interesting so long as you steadfastly refuse to recall that global capitalism was driven by the British and that the US replicated its conditions until they begin to diverge post WW1. Quite simply, racial discrimination can not adequately describe a system that developed with the US, at best, as an interesting sideshow. His point about the 'financialization' of Slavery via bank bonds implies an interesting historical materialist argument about the subsuming of human cruelty to a capitalist system, but that is basically the exact opposite of the point he tries to make (that the cruelty created capitalism).
More broadly, these writers (with the exception of Kruse, whose work is appropriately narrowly focused) are not historians or even journalists who normally write about history. That's why all these articles read like term papers from someone taking an elective class.
The 1619 project is actually a really interesting set of articles, but it is not conservatives' fault that the creators decided to try and turn it into a curriculum and a 'reimagining of US history.' It deserves to be criticized the same as "Killing Lincoln."
Excellent post.
I think Matt's comments on the 1619 Project are generally spot on -- some of the essays are truly wonderful, and I loved NHJ's paean to her father's patriotism. But what I object to (and what Matt calls merely "sloppy") is the focus on slavery and race relations as the monocausal explanation of American history. Slavery was *the* cause of the American Revolution. America's national wealth was basically built on cotton and slavery. These are not sloppy statements; they're deeply wrong. Were they really really important? Sure! But history is a complex phenomenon, and making such wild claims paints you as a fanatic, not an educator.
It's the fanaticism in this debate (on both sides, but most definitely on the woke side) that I find most disturbing. We need a much more richly detailed history taught than heretofore has been done, but we have to understand that every thread we pursue is just one more -- some more important than others -- in the American tapestry.
The 1619 Project is Trumpian in its bombast and sweep. The NYT asserted that “out of slavery” and “anti-Black racism” “rose everything that made America truly exceptional.”
Who *isn’t* offended by that? Certainly, as an immigrant, I’m pretty offended to see that entire aspect of American exceptionalism just waved away.
100%. I took the oath of allegiance in a court in Brooklyn, it was a day I waited for my whole life, and it was packed with people from all around the world who became American with me. My personal reaction to the 1619 Project was really pretty visceral, the idea that I took the oath to a country that, as you correctly note, the NYT said everything was out of slavery and anti-Black racism, made me want to punch something. And then they're teaching it to kids!? Makes me spit.
(And I also think Matt is engaging in some sanewashing here, the NYT very much promoted those couple of lines in NHJ's essay about the Revolution being for slavery as the core thesis until those historians called them on it and they got embarrassed enough to make some stealth edits).
"the U.S. Constitution, which not only endorses slavery..."
Let us look at the objects for which the Constitution was framed and adopted, and see if slavery is one of them. Here are its own objects as set forth by itself: — “We, the people of these United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.” The objects here set forth are six in number: union, defence, welfare, tranquility, justice, and liberty. These are all good objects, and slavery, so far from being among them, is a foe of them all. But it has been said that Negroes are not included within the benefits sought under this declaration. This is said by the slaveholders in America — it is said by the City Hall orator — but it is not said by the Constitution itself. Its language is “we the people;” not we the white people, not even we the citizens, not we the privileged class, not we the high, not we the low, but we the people; not we the horses, sheep, and swine, and wheel-barrows, but we the people, we the human inhabitants; and, if Negroes are people, they are included in the benefits for which the Constitution of America was ordained and established. But how dare any man who pretends to be a friend to the Negro thus gratuitously concede away what the Negro has a right to claim under the Constitution? Why should such friends invent new arguments to increase the hopelessness of his bondage? This, I undertake to say, as the conclusion of the whole matter, that the constitutionality of slavery can be made out only by disregarding the plain and common-sense reading of the Constitution itself; by discrediting and casting away as worthless the most beneficent rules of legal interpretation; by ruling the Negro outside of these beneficent rules; by claiming that the Constitution does not mean what it says, and that it says what it does not mean; by disregarding the written Constitution, and interpreting it in the light of a secret understanding. It is in this mean, contemptible, and underhand method that the American Constitution is pressed into the service of slavery. They go everywhere else for proof that the Constitution declares that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; it secures to every man the right of trial by jury, the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus — the great writ that put an end to slavery and slave-hunting in England — and it secures to every State a republican form of government. Anyone of these provisions in the hands of abolition statesmen, and backed up by a right moral sentiment, would put an end to slavery in America.
Frederick Douglass is brilliant and a great orator, but the three-fifths compromise is also in the constitution.
He explains in that speech that the three-fifths compromise was an anti-slavery measure.
It was, in the same way that a 5/5ths version would be a pro-slave measure- csuse the south for to have representatives for people who couldn’t vote, and were treated as property.
It's more anti-slave than 5/5ths, less anti-slave than 0/5ths, even slightly less anti-slave than 1/2. You gotta wonder who had the demographic statistics they were plugging into their abacuses to figure out which fraction was the appropriate compromise.
Conservatives are the bad guys of American history.
This is the most productive argument we could be making IMO. Well-crafted arguments in other directions just keep bringing us back to a place where people who identify as conservative hate the rest of us for not being American enough.
My view here is that when you label an entire group of people "bad" you put yourself in a worse state. It's a cognitive distortion that leads to other cognitive distortions. It will lead to you being more upset about things than is warranted by reality.
"It's a mental shortcut designed to shut off further thought."
Wigan, we've had extensive discussions here. Do you really feel that I have shut off thought? Even if I have consistently failed to persuade you, haven't I at least demonstrated that I have in fact spent massive amounts of time learning and thinking about this?
No. I don't think you've shut off thought. I do think there's some intellectual danger in assigning good and bad labels to groups of people.
But following the thread I understand why you're reading it that way and I should have either:
1)Made my point in a less dismissive / assholish sounding way that doesn't sound like I think people are brainless. That's a bad look for me. Sorry.
2)Responded to Max in a way that can't be read as if I'm obliquely responding to your earlier thread. Which I maybe was a small bit, although
when I was typing I think I had Max's comment more focused in my mind.
Again, sorry for saying it in that way, I'll delete my earlier comment.
tbf conservatives define themselves as standing athwart history.
This is really the crux of the whole thing. If we define a conservative as someone who accepts society as it is now but doesn't want it to liberalize further, then their account of history has to be "everyone who broadly took my position throughout history has been wrong, until now."
You're only looking at changes that were attempted, signed into law, successful, and stuck with us. For every great change pushed through congress and signed into law, there are many that fail and consequently are little remembered. Maybe the conservatives of the day were correct in shuttering lots of them?
Possibly, but being specific about what those were are INCREDIBLY important. We’d have had civil rights legislation in the 1800’s if conservatives didn’t actually have their way.
Sure, I hear you on those issues. It's likely true that conservative have been mostly wrong about most racial issues for most of US history.
I don't know that that says much about the future, though? A significant amount of progressives, for example, recently supported abolish the police / abolish ICE for racial reasons.
The fact that conservatives were wrong on civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights is a perfectly rational and compelling reason to see them as not credible on rights issues.
The conservatives (and everyone else) in U.S. history are all long dead, and they don't care whether you think they were mostly wrong about most racial issues. Nor do today's conservatives. Maybe it's better politics to make our best possible arguments in the here and now.
I think that's right, and gels with the Burkean idea that conservatism isn't about absolutely opposing change, but about making sure that any change is deliberate and steady enough that we can course correct if something turns out wrong. This is the vision of history that upholds someone like Henry Clay. I think the problem this runs into is that (1) the further into the past he recedes, the worse someone like Clay looks, since his compromise position looks more morally abhorrent, and (2) modern conservatism is more about standing athwart history yelling stop, which puts you naturally on the other side of any progress story.
Yes, and this is the problem too--our society is fundamentally pretty conservative, and so anyone whose worldview is that it's too liberal is already starting from a crank position.
Or could it be that conservatism forces liberals to improve their ideas so that only better ones survive over time. In which case both groups play an important role in the progress of society.
I think we all stand athwart history somewhat - and perhaps we will all be judged harshly by the future for it. We have no way of knowing, and we should not change ourselves for the lauds of future generations. Perhaps in the future abortion will be seen as barbarism and the murder of innocents. We don’t have to care and shouldn’t.
I imagine that what you mean by liberalize is rather different than what a conservative would mean.
This feels like another way of saying conservatives are bad because they are not progressive enough. To which conservatives reply that progressives are bad because they are not conservative enough. While it may make us feel better to say the "other" is bad, does it actually accomplish anything?
What are you expecting to accomplish by going around and saying "Conservatives are the bad guys of American history?" If you're very successful, then maybe people stop calling themselves conservative and start calling themselves something else. Most likely you're not successful and it just makes all the people who are conservative or share some conservatives values dislike you and your agenda.
Excellent post. The 1619 Project was terrific journalistic history. And it did initially overreach in its point about the revolution being motivated by the protection of slavery. But that point was in part retracted, and it made people consider slavery as a contributing factor.
Jill Lepore's "These Truths" is excellent history as history and does a terrific job of looking at American history through the lens of marginalized groups. It does so in a way that is nuanced and in the end hopeful. Highly recommend as a great book to read, especially now as these history battles rage on.
I am very skeptical of the argument that "conservatives" are uniquely the inheritors of everything bad in this country. I think this is a self serving view and one that does not take seriously the fact that conservative/liberal takes on little coherence and meaning the further back we go in time. The coalitions were *really* different back then and our conceptions of what is conservative, liberal, or progressive do not really map well when we delve into eighteenth century history.
I think Douthat's column really did articulate well the underlying political/emotional stakes of the 1619 project. Matt's interpretation strikes me as a little bit of a jump, though an interesting one to consider.
However, I am willing to bet money that if Matt showed this column to any prominent Black writer, Nicole Hannah-Jones included, they would retort "NO, Matt. Everyone's hands are dirty when it comes to the brutalization of Black people. Not just conservatives." Hence why I think Matt's formulation is a little off the mark.
Yes... why is it that so many of us in modern day are drawn to read history as a fantasy football game where we get to retroactively draft the "good guys" onto our team and assign the bad guys to the other side? Why do we invest in a sense of hyper-collectivism where we take pride in the actions of other people we had no influence over and feel guilt (or assign guilt) in modern day based on the actions we also had nothing to do with? And especially to do it on the basis of skin color? It's super weird, when you think about it. No one in history was 100% good or bad. People of all colors, background, and ideologies participated in things that they thought were good at the time that turn out to look pretty bad in retrospect. Shouldn't the lesson for all of us be "the things you think are good could turn out to be bad, so if someone else is telling you you're doing something bad, maybe reflect on if they're on to something for at least a few minutes"?
I agree with you wholeheartedly except for "No one in history was 100% good or bad."
Strong evidence there were members of the 100% bad group.
I'll grant there are figures whose possible good attributes are now considered irrelevant due to the magnitude of their bad-ness. But I'd argue even those people generally thought of their actions as being for the "greater good" or fighting the "good fight" or some-such. It's a trap to think that the worst figures of history thought of themselves as the bad guys or knew what they were doing were obviously bad and did it anyway--leaves us thinking it could never be us.
You are likely correct. I would think of that more as people being bad and just not caring, but I don't think people think that way. They always convince themselves that they are justified.
Yes! And I like to remind myself that everyone we are talking about is dead for a long time, so there should be no personal stake in whether we think they are bad or good. There is only understanding.
"Yes... why is it that so many of us in modern day are drawn to read history as a fantasy football game where we get to retroactively draft the "good guys" onto our team and assign the bad guys to the other side?"
Keep talking...
I really don't know what entertains me more. The threads that are in response to posts that are related to urbanism, housing, and transportation, where comments seem to be unaware of just the basics of MY's world view and some of the foundations of it--congestion isn't solved by more highway miles, NIMBYs are bad, etc., or the threads in response to the American politics where there's a mass of conservative comments arguing in a parallel universe where their concerns about the ongoing effort of the left to destroy America and all that it holds dear, and apparently things like Trump and January 6th never happened.
I would have a lot to say about January 6th if I were in a space where anyone thought it was acceptable, but I'm not.
I would guess that many of the 'conservative' comments you're referring to are being made by people like me who live in liberal areas and have beliefs that would be coded generally liberal in most places in the country, but not among the white, urban, secular, college-educated liberals who have been going in a particular direction on politics and specifically on race. Those are the people I'm not sure I want selecting a history curriculum for my kids. I don't want their conservative counterparts on the other side doing it, either, but there's no danger of that happening.
I think you should share your Jan 6 thoughts! I sincerely don’t think you’ll get flamed—this has been a pretty tolerant space in my experience (granted my opinions are usually in line with the majority’s here).
What the President did was destructive to our country and evil. The cowardice shown by many conservatives and Republicans who knew better and instead chose to protect their careers instead of speaking out and saying that the election was fair and he was lying was not much better. Republicans are supposed to be the ones who understand the fragility of institutions, including our democracy, and many of them failed.
Not really worried about getting flamed for this, but I don't think I'm really adding anything to the discussion, either.
Oh, I get it—by "thought it was acceptable" you mean, thought January 6 was acceptable! I thought you meant that people here wouldn't find your views acceptable.
I think there is fatigue on the right about having their values and stories not only constantly challenged but mocked. I used to love watching John Stewart tease the more absurd examples of right-wing anything on the "The Daily Show" but now I see this is what got Trump elected - conservatives were tired of being made fun of and wanted to "own the libs" more than anything. The media and entertainment complex has far more influence on the daily lives of Americans than wonky policy details, which is what Trump deeply understood.
Of course, this is the nature of the liberal versus conservative dynamic - the liberal pushes change faster than the conservative wants to allow it. That tension actually works well when it's balanced (go slow to avoid unintended consequences), but media and social media have labeled this dynamic a "catastrophe" rather than the way of the world that it has been for much of the progress of history. Why? Ratings and clicks, sadly.
“The sheer volume of criticism that’s heaped just on a couple of lines from Hannah-Jones’ essay shows the extent to which conservatives are mad about the project (because they rightly perceive it as bad for the right) but don’t really have the goods to debunk it.”
There are whole books written in response to the project: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083ZJM14R/. Obviously shorter critiques would focus on the easiest-to-explain falsehoods — not to mention the most inflammatory — like those in NHJ’s introductory essay. And whether or not conservative criticism is good or right, the project has been panned by scholars across the political spectrum.
The Trots are also against it https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619