E Pluribus Unum Revisited

“Charlottesville” was one year ago.  That is, this time last August the “Unite the Right” march took place there (featuring Nazis and other white-power advocates), along with counterprotests, and finally a death when one of the counterprotestors was deliberately hit by a car.   The anniversary has been much in the news, and so I happened to re-read what I sent to Center for Equal Opportunity supporters a year ago, and thought it has stood up pretty well.  So I’m sending it around again.  Note that the Harvard subplot remains in the news, and that CEO is very much involved in it.  And, alas, Google’s political correctness is still with us, too. 

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If recent headlines over the last few weeks can tell us anything, it is that America needs to get serious, and quickly, about E pluribus unum.

America has always been a multiracial and multiethnic country, and it is becoming dramatically more so. For a society like ours to work, our laws and institutions cannot treat Americans differently according to skin color and what country people’s ancestors came from. We cannot view ourselves and each other as something other than Americans first and foremost.

Of course, America has had a sad history of ignoring this principle, and whenever it has, it has been disastrous. Slavery and Jim Crow were great evils, we all now recognize.

And, more recently, identity politics and political correctness are disasters, too. The Left’s racial nostrums are divisive and unfair, and embrace false stereotypes and discrimination, just as the politically incorrect racism did.

The arguments then and now for such discrimination are no good, and even if there were something to them, the costs of the discrimination and its sheer unworkability in a country like ours — where not only the demographics but individual Americans are more and more multiethnic and multiracial — overwhelm any possible justifications for treating one another differently on the basis of color and national origin.

So let’s turn to those recent headlines.

The Justice Department says it is going to investigate admissions discrimination against Asian Americans at Harvard, and the Left becomes hysterical. That is, the Left is upset because the Justice Department is investigating racial discrimination against a racial minority group.

The Trump administration hurried to set the record straight that this is only one investigation; well, nothing wrong with correcting fake news, but here’s hoping that this doesn’t mean that the administration would have second thoughts about investigating other cases involving politically correct discrimination, even if — horrors! — the victims were indeed white. Will those Rust Belt voters be happy if those returning jobs, and their children’s college opportunities, are divvyed up by skin color?

We are all Americans, are we not? The text and intent and ideal of the civil-rights laws are to protect all Americans from racial discrimination.

Next, a Google employee is fired for suggesting that his company’s efforts to meet gender quotas are bad law and bad policy. Well, if Google were to discriminate against women, that would be a bad thing (and illegal), but likewise if there are anti-male quotas that is also a bad thing (and illegal).

And what about the argument whether women and men might, in the aggregate, have different interests and talents when it comes to certain jobs? That’s an interesting topic for discussion, but of an intricacy disproportionate to its interest if a company follows the law and treats people as individuals. Such nondiscriminatory, merit-based decision-making might result in more men than women being hired, but the failure to achieve proportionate representation is not the same thing as discrimination — unless, of course, you have embraced identity politics and put equal results over equal opportunity. (President Trump, by the way, included a bad nod to such numbers-driven political correctness in [a speech at that time].

And now there is Charlottesville. Lots of chickens coming home to roost here. It was big mistake for the Trump campaign and its hangers-on to play footsie with the alt-right. It was a big mistake for the Left to think it could advance minority-identity-politics without there eventually being a reaction advancing white-identity-politics.

Race and racial appeals should have no place in our politics.

An immediate problem is that the extremes of Left and Right are only too happy to have one, two, many Charlottesvilles. It does not serve their interests to have a unified society. They want racial violence, and it is of only mild interest to the extremists whether the dead bodies are on their side or the others’. It is tempting to leave them to a cage fight, but that would advance their agendas, not the country’s.

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I should add, finally, that defending the principle of E pluribus unum is the mission of the Center for Equal Opportunity.

I happen to like and admire Robert E. Lee, by the way, but it is not crazy to think that official commemoration of him is divisive, and I’m happy to remove his statue in return for, say, race-neutral admissions at the University of Virginia.

Which brings me back to where I started. I have no doubt that the overwhelming majority of Americans want E pluribus unum. They want nondiscrimination, and they want more emphasis on what unites us and less celebration of our differences. They want patriotic assimilation, for immigrants and also for non-immigrants.

But our elites and our non-elite pols need to get serious about this, and quick.

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[And, a week later, I offered some additional thoughts on Charlottesville]:

First, liberals should condemn lawless and violent behavior by those on the Left, and conservatives should condemn lawless and violent behavior by those on the Right. There is a temptation when this is done on both sides to temper that criticism by adding a “But . . . ” — that is, to say, “Of course, it is wrong to kill the police, but we must recognize that black lives do matter,” etc., or “Of course, it is wrong to ram a car into a protestor, but many protestors on the Left are violent types, too,” etc.

The trouble is that, if you do this in reaction to something that is indefensible — like a murder or a riot — then the other side will understandably feel that you are not only tempering your criticism but excusing it or at least signaling that it’s understandable and therefore forgivable. And so the other side will get really upset. Again, this is true on both sides: Conservatives didn’t like it when liberals added a “but” sentence in their response to riots and police murders, and that’s why liberals (and others) are upset with President Trump’s equivocations here.

It’s okay, of course, to make these broader and more nuanced points in some other context, but not when the action being discussed and in our face is one where nuance is unacceptable and clarity is essential.

Second, and for what it’s worth, here’s a piece that I wrote for NRO sixteen years ago on a hot issue at that time, namely whether the Confederate battle flag should be removed from the Mississippi state flag. That’s a different issue from what to do with statues and the like, but some of the points I made then have some relevance now.

Finally, bear in mind that the media love drama and have a vested interest in convincing the public that the end of the world is at hand and so it really needs to keep watching the television, buying the newspaper, visiting this website, etc.  Extra, extra, read all about it!  That’s not to say that what happened in Charlottesville was not newsworthy, and I do feel a little bit like Frank Drebin in this clip when I urge people not to obsess about marching and murderous neo-Nazis; what’s more, a president’s pronouncements can on their own raise issues bigger than what he is pronouncing on. Nonetheless, a few extremist kooks and one bad weekend with one murder in one town do not a Weimar Republic make.