Wherein we see Jonah Goldberg…
I once heard Jesse Jackson explain that racial integration of the NBA made it stronger and better. He was right. But would gender integration of the NBA have the same effect? Would diversifying professional basketball by height? Probably not.
Actually, more like absolutely not. As I wrote back in 2004 it’s not diversity that’s being celebrated in basketball it’s more of a monochromatic culture… And it’s one that’s as far as I’m concerned crippled the game forever.
But that’s just a diversion here. Let’s go on to the main course…
All of these analogies can take you only so far. Thomas Sowell once said, “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”
There’s a growing body of evidence that even if diversity— the kind that results from immigration — once made America stronger, it may not be doing so anymore. Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist at Harvard, found that increased diversity corrodes civil society by eroding shared values, customs and institutions. People tend to “hunker down” and retreat from civil society, at least in the short and medium term.
I think the real culprit here isn’t immigration or diversity in general, but the rising stigma against assimilation. Particularly on college campuses, but also in large swaths of mainstream journalism and in the louder corners of the fever swamp right, the idea that people of all backgrounds should embrace a single conception of “Americanism” is increasingly taboo.
Anyone of any race or national origin can be an American, but it requires effort and desire from both the individual and the larger society. There’s a shortage of both these days.
Absolutely correct. And I will say this again, 90% if not more of what gets passed off as racial issues these days are actually cultural issues…. Including that little slam I put into the first paragraph As regards basketball.
Particularly, note this paragraph again…
There’s a growing body of evidence that even if diversity— the kind that results from immigration — once made America stronger, it may not be doing so anymore. Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist at Harvard, found that increased diversity corrodes civil society by eroding shared values, customs and institutions. People tend to “hunker down” and retreat from civil society, at least in the short and medium term.
It is absolutely crucial that we understand this point. Moreover it is the same group of people, Democrats mostly, who have been fighting for unrestricted immigration who have also almost invariably been fighting against traditional American values and traditional American culture, and as Saul Alinsky prescribed, using the power of government to do it, using our own laws and our own government against us.
