Instead, the demographic transformation of America has given us a Democratic Party more attuned to racial injustice or committed to ethnic patronage (depending on your point of view) than ever, and a Republican Party that has exploited white racism or ridden a white backlash against ethnic patronage (again, depending on your perspective) on its way to control of the House, the Senate and the White House.
.. At the other end you have the fears of those white Trump voters who feel like the new liberalism offers affirmative action for everyone but them, allowing immigrants and minorities to “cut the line” (to borrow an image from Arlie Russell Hochschild’s recent study of working-class Republicans) and claim an American dream that they themselves can no longer reach.
.. Abolish racial preferences in college admissions, phase out preferences in government hiring and contracting, eliminate the disparate-impact standard in the private sector, and allow state-sanctioned discrimination only on the basis of socioeconomic status, if at all. Then at the same time, create a reparations program — the Frederick Douglass Fund, let’s call it — that pays out exclusively, directly and one time only to the proven descendants of American slaves.
A Time for Immodest Proposals
But often the newest attempt at a new right offers a rhetoric of nationalism that cashes out in policies not obviously bolder than what reform conservatism offered.
.. So as an experiment, I thought I’d write a few columns (an intermittent series, as events permit) floating genuinely radical visions of how policy makers might respond to our order’s slippage toward something worse than stagnation. These will not be ideas that I find entirely convincing, they will not be fully fleshed-out, and I will disavow responsibility if they’re ever put into disastrous practice.
.. So an emergency response would set a more ambitious goal: a swift boost in work force participation and family formation, using a few sticks and a lot of very expensive carrots.
.. The sticks would include cuts to disability and unemployment benefits and tighter Medicaid eligibility rules for the able-bodied — not as “pay fors,” but simply to make sustained worklessness less pleasant.
.. The scale of spending means this proposal gores more conservative oxen than liberal ones. But that’s only because I’m saving a related proposal to ban pornography and video games for a later installment in this series — which I promise will only grow more outlandish as it grows.
Who Are We?
In this narrative, which has surged to the fore in response to Trump’s refugee and visa policies, we are a propositional nation bound together by ideas rather than any specific cultural traditions — a nation of immigrants drawn to Ellis Island, a nation of minorities claiming rights too long denied, a universal nation destined to welcome foreigners and defend liberty abroad.
.. saying that’s not who we are is a way of saying that all more particularist understandings of Americanism, all non-universalist forms of patriotic memory, need to be transcended.
.. But the real American past was particularist as well as universalist. Our founders built their a new order atop specifically European intellectual traditions. Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.
.. Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.
Can We Expect an Early Night?
she actually has a campaign, complete with number-crunchers and a turnout machine, whereas her opponent has a bunch of guys playing around with the maps on 270towin.com.
.. There will be no riots, the call will come early, and Trump’s concession speech will be a schizophrenic mess — half a conciliatory attempt to save his kids’ brand equity, half a ranting advertisement for Trump TV.