Why we must unite across class lines.
“If there
is hope,” wrote Winston, “it lies in the proles.”
Those are the first
eleven words of the seventh chapter of George Orwell’s 1984, in
which the protagonist, Winston Smith, wonders who could mount a revolution
against Big Brother. The elites, Smith concludes, lack the will, because they
are too invested in the ruling system, but the proles have a common sense that
might enable them—or so Smith hoped—to fight back.
Those
eleven words have stuck with me ever since I first read them almost 20 years ago.
I have been thinking of them even more since the election of Donald Trump. But
it was not until last month, on a family excursion to buy a Christmas tree,
that I fully appreciated the role of the “proles” in our predicament. On that
trip, I saw up close Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, the
book that explains how class divisions in America have created a tangle of
problems for working- and middle- class whites. Not only could I see Dr.
Murray’s thesis more clearly, but I could see more clearly what the book was
missing: race.
In early
December, my family and I went to buy our Christmas tree, but instead of buying
it in our typical SWPL neighborhood, we ventured outside of the
city to make a day of it on a family farm in a working-class suburb. We had an
idyllic vision of escaping the problems of city life. We imagined drinking hot
chocolate and laughing with similar-looking families, our children playing with
their similar-looking children.
There was
some of that, but the scene was far from wholesome. A surprisingly significant
number of children at the farm had frizzy blonde-tinged afros, the tell-tale
sign of black-white miscegenation (I say “sign” because many of these
frizzy-haired kids had only one parent with them—almost always a heavily
tattooed and obese white mother with creative piercings and hair coloring).
Almost all of the adults were white, but many of them mumbled in a barely
comprehensible black-imbued vernacular and dressed in sloppy hip-hop attire.
This was not the scene we had expected.
That
night, we came back to the city and ate dinner at an upscale restaurant. Every
single patron was white—mostly young hipsters. The decor was agrarian and the
background music, to my surprise, was country (mostly Chris Stapleton). This was
the idyllic traditional America that we had hoped to find earlier in the day.
Over
dinner, my wife and I discussed what we had seen. Based on the voting patterns
in both areas, we could safely bet that the vast majority of the people at the
farm voted for Donald Trump. And we were almost certainly the only Trump voters
at the upscale city restaurant.
The irony
is that much of the diversity at the farm is a direct result of the last 50
years of housing and education policies—the very programs white liberals favor
in their politics but flee in their personal lives. This feature of white
liberalism has been noted before, perhaps most cleverly by Joe Sobran: “In their
mating and migratory habits, liberals are indistinguishable from members of the
Ku Klux Klan.”
But white
elites do not just flee the consequences of their diversity
politics; once freed from the burden of diversity, they create replicas of
the aesthetic and culture that their liberalism is destroying. Indeed, at the
upscale urban restaurant there were no signs of diversity degeneracy—no hip-hop
attire; no frizzy-haired children; no black-imbued vernacular. In fact, it was
just the opposite—lumberjack shirts, two-parent families, cohesive and pleasant
interaction—a simulacrum of the traditional America these very elites are
destroying through their politics.
Our
liberal rulers pollute public white culture but then produce an artificial
version of it in their private lives to satisfy their longing for community and
identity. This would not be such a problem if their poorer white brethren could
also maintain this public-private dichotomy. But because the working and middle
classes lack the money and mobility to escape the diversity degeneracy that
seeps deeper and deeper into white America, they are stuck with the cultural
pollution that the elites create.
This
recalls another Sobran gem: “The
purpose of a college education is to give you the correct attitude towards
minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.” But the
prescient Sobran did not go far enough. Our elites seek not only the
means to live far away from diversity, but the power to
impose diversity on others—all in the name of cultural enrichment.
This
underscores two features of our predicament that I have been thinking about
ever since our day at the farm: (1) how diversity has polluted white suburbia,
and (2) how diversity is a new form of cultural warfare.
Liberalism,
diversity, and suburbia
Over the
past 50 years, the contrast between enforcing diversity for Middle Americans
while maintaining homogeneity for upper-class whites has come to define
American law and politics. One of the most famous examples is from the 1970s,
when Judge Wendell Arthur Garrity
Jr.—the very federal judge who compelled desegregation busing in
Boston—sent his own children to private schools so as to be immune
from his own social engineering. He reportedly justified this by saying that “when I’m on the bench, I’m a judge,
and when I’m at home, I’m a father.” A valid distinction, to be
sure, but his ruling prevented many middle- and lower-income Bostonians from
being fathers—that is, from being able to protect their children.
Strangely,
despite all of the research and commentary on the effects of desegregation,
almost all of the critical focus has been on how it created “white flight” and how that has hurt blacks.
Almost entirely ignored is how desegregation has destroyed white suburban
culture. Consider how the Boston desegregation ruling most directly
affected Irish and Italian working-class areas, leading
them to flee the city for Boston suburbs. Although this part of the “white
flight” story has been widely covered, few scholars have considered how
desegregation chased after these middle-income whites, while leaving their
wealthier white counterparts in different suburbs unaffected.
Compare
Dedham and Newton, two Boston suburbs. Their high schools, despite being only
six miles away from one another, are vastly different. Dedham, which has a
large, Irish working-class population, has a high school that is 24 percent black and Hispanic (and
only four percent Asian). Newton, which has a large Jewish upper-class
population, has a high school that is only 10 percent black and Hispanic (and
20 percent Asian). It is easy to imagine which is the better school.
Suburban
Detroit is another example. As I mentioned in a previous essay, Eminem’s hometown of
Warren, Michigan, was fiercely resistant to integration, and as a result,
Warren remained 99.5 percent white in 1970, 98.2 percent white in 1980, and
97.3 white in 1990. Eminem attended high school in the 1980s and his class
reportedly had only one black student,
while the Detroit high school a few miles away had no white students.
Over the
last 25 years, however, that once-resistant working-class suburb has been
forced to capitulate, so that the same Warren high school is now hardly
recognizable, having become 59 percent black and
only 28 percent white. But just 15 miles away, in heavily upper-class Troy,
Michigan, the high school is about one tenth as black, with only a six percent black student
population.
You can
find this pattern throughout the United States. Pick a city and compare its
wealthy to its middle-income suburbs. You will find that in many cases the
wealthy suburbs are quite liberal but have very few blacks, and the nearby
middle-income suburbs are much more conservative and have far more diversity.
This is a
pattern that extends beyond geography. Compare the magazines at the check-out
at an upper-class grocery store, such as Whole Foods, to those at a more
middle-income establishment. You will find that the magazines at the
upper-class store are tasteful, restrained, and culturally white—whereas the
magazines at the middle-class store bombard the shopper with diversity
propaganda, like this and this. The check-out
counter has become a diversity warzone.
Even Whole
Foods’ magazine is unmistakably white.
Of course,
part of this discrepancy is due to the market. Poorer whites do not have the
money and mobility to opt out of diversity, and perhaps these less-educated
whites have tastes that make them more susceptible to the vulgarity of black culture.
But the market is only part of the explanation. A more significant force is
that our legal, political, and entertainment institutions are imposing this
culture on them.
Why are
our elites doing this to Middle Americans?
Diversity
warfare
The elite
assault on middle-class America is illustrated in the way Westchester County,
New York—a generally wealthy and liberal suburb of New York City—focused all of
its federally mandated diversity housing on largely Italian and Irish middle-class areas,
while litigating strenuously to
keep it out of wealthier, often more Jewish areas.
The result
is that Westchester suburban schools several miles from one another can vary in
diversity by an order of magnitude. For example, the Ossining High School
is only eight miles away from the one in Hillary Clinton’s Chappaqua, but whereas
the Ossining High School is 64 percent black and Hispanic, the figure for
Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua is only 6 percent. This
is not an urban issue—both towns are about 30 miles from New York City, and are
populated largely by families that long ago fled the city’s defective public
schools. But integration battles follow white people wherever they go, and
wealthier, more politically powerful whites jimmy the system to dump diversity
on poorer areas.
And again,
the free market is only part of this story. This transformation of
middle-income communities did not happen until American law hit them with the
one-two punch of mandating integration and eliminating the freedom of
association.
Thus, it
is not simply that diversity means conflict,
but that all the rhetoric and sloganeering about our national diversity
obsession has become a form of cultural and demographic warfare. Our
elites destroy the middle-classes through political slogans promoting our “greatest strength,” and
coercive programs that cite the nation’s “great moral victory”
over “racism.” When you hear elites extol the virtues of diversity, you
are being attacked.
So does
our hope lie with the proles? The big difference between Orwell’s 1984 and
2018 is that Orwell’s elites did not bother to indoctrinate the masses, on the
ground that the proles’ fidelity to Big Brother was considered irrelevant. By
contrast, in our diversity dystopia the masses are at the core of the Left’s
indoctrination project. Our “proles” are the ones forced to suffer a bad
education in integrated schools. They are the ones subjected to violence,
harassment, and intimidation. And they are the ones told, again and again, that
any resistance to this makes them betrayers of who we are as Americans,
deplorable traitors in need of ever-more reformation.
Leadership
may not come from the proles, but good sense and votes will. Those who bear the
burdens of diversity see its damage most clearly. It is no accident that Donald
Trump swept the white working-class vote.
Whatever
our own particular economic station, we all have a role to play in restoring
working- and middle-class white America. We should be hiring our own people,
tutoring our own people, supporting scholarships for our own people, and doing
our best to build schools and cultural institutions that can be healthy
environments for our own people.
Dr. Murray may have been right
that white America’s “coming apart” defined the last part of the 20th century
due to white flight from the cities. But “coming together” may define the first
half of the 21st century—because now there is nowhere to run.
