Pun Salad

The media spent four long years suggesting that President Donald Trump was steeped in corruption, ensconced in partisanship, enmeshed in dangerous foreign policy fiascos. The media assured us that they would defend democracy from Trump’s brutalities, that they would spend every waking moment fighting to prevent anyone from accepting Trumpian standards as the “new normal.”

Instead, the media suggested we needed to return to the old “normal”—by which they meant a system in which the media and Democrats worked hand-in-glove together to lie to the American public about the content of policy (“If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor!” — former President Barack Obama); in which conventional wisdom was treated as gospel truth, no matter how wrong it was (“There will be no advanced and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process” — John Kerry on Israel); and in which cozy relationships between corporations and government were considered de rigueur.

As the streets of various U.S. cities descended into disorder set off by anger and anguish over police brutality, the domestic tranquility for which Americans theoretically surrender large chunks of their fortunes and freedom to the government seemed out of reach. Some protests devolved into generalized orgies of destruction and even arson—the most fiendishly destructive thing the average person can do in dense cities, and an act committed with careless glee dozens of times.

In the public debate between angry forces on the left and right wings, too many Americans insist on recapitulating the stark choices Germany seemed to offer its citizens between the world wars a century ago: a controlling, decadent left out to destroy private property, and a right embracing harsh, violent authoritarianism and viewing outsiders of all stripes with suspicion.

Each side seems so obviously, intolerably evil to the other that both sides agree the only moral or prudential choice is to come out swinging against the other side. The blood on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, where in August a right-wing 17-year-old shot three people during a protest is a small preview of where that path leads. Radicals on both left and right seem to agree that traditional American libertarianism either supports the evil side (wittingly or unwittingly) or, at best, provides a pusillanimous, pie-in-the-sky distraction from the necessary business of seizing state power to crush the enemy. But that old-school, nonrevolutionary, bourgeois libertarianism is, in fact, the only peaceful way out for our troubled country.

As director of the U.S. Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001, Kenneth Prewitt oversaw the first decennial count of the new century. When the enormous job of data collection was finally done, he arrived at a stark conclusion: The government should stop asking every American to report their race. “The race question is incoherent because race is incoherent,” said Prof. Prewitt, now a professor of public affairs at Columbia University. “We pay a price for not having a more subtle, nuanced set of numbers than what we currently have.”

Prof. Prewitt and many other demographers and sociologists say that the government’s centuries-old classifications no longer reflect realities on the ground, especially when it comes to generations of immigrants who have edged toward assimilation. Racial or ethnic labels are also falling behind the growing diversity within each racial and ethnic group and failing to capture mixed-race people. Americans of two or more races or ethnicities—including Vice President-elect Kamala Harris—are the country’s fastest-growing demographic, and they defy labels.

DiAngelo’s book does more than rehearse the familiar tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT)––racism is systemic and pervasive; race-blind standards are really white supremacist standards in disguise; lived experience confers special knowledge on victims of racism; and so on—it also uses simple and direct language to teach white people how to talk about race from a CRT perspective. Drawing on her academic work as well as her experience providing corporate diversity training, DiAngelo puts forth her theory of “white fragility”—a set of psychological defense mechanisms that white people use in order to avoid acknowledging their own racism. These defense mechanisms include “silence, defensiveness, argumentation, certitude, and other forms of pushback” in the face of racism accusations.

At first glance, it may be hard to understand why such a punishing message would appeal to a white audience. But on closer inspection, the appeal of DiAngelo’s message derives from her masterful exploitation of white guilt. As Shelby Steele has observed, white guilt is less a guilt than a terror—terror at the thought that one might be racist. If one has never felt this terror, then it may be hard to understand how intolerable it can be, and how welcome any alleviation is.

DiAngelo understands all this and exploits it masterfully. Like most antiracist literature, White Fragility spends considerable time telling white people that they’re racist, but with a crucial twist—it’s not their fault. “A racism-free upbringing is not possible,” she writes, “because racism is a social system embedded in the culture and its institutions. We are born into this system and have no say in whether we will be affected by it.” For DiAngelo, white supremacy is like the English language. If you’re born in America, you learn it without trying. Racism, in her view, transforms from a shameful sin to be avoided into a guiltless birthmark to be acknowledged and accepted.

Most free nations don’t have democratic majority votes for their ­executives. Parliamentary systems, for example, aren’t national polls. Between 1935 and 2017, the majority of British voters backed the party that formed a government on only two occasions. Voters don’t even cast a ballot directly for the prime minister. In 2019, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau “lost” the “popular vote.” By eliminating the Electoral College, we are far more likely to spark the creation of smaller parties that would keep presidents from gaining a majority. Of historical interest: Vladimir Putin was elected through a direct national poll.