Structural Racism, Identity Politics, and Re-tribalization

For those interested in the flourishing of the United States in a historically recognizable form, despite adverse criticisms under the headings of “structural racism” and “identity politics”; and despite an implied imperative for a “re-tribalization of society”; a single page from the Opinions section of a recent day’s print edition of the Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, September 7, 2021) is of considerable interest. 

William McGurn remarks in his article, The Real Structural Racism, that if ever there were a structure impairing the success of African-American students, then it would be the public schools in major cities of the U.S.  In the most recent results (2019) of the National Assessment of Educational Progress for 27 U.S. urban school districts - - from Boston to Los Angeles - - none of these school districts can say that a majority of its black eighth graders are proficient in either math or reading.  Detroit’s results are worst of all, showing a 4% proficiency in math and a 5% proficiency in reading.  The highest proficiency in math (24%) was achieved in Charlotte, while the highest proficiency in reading (20%) was achieved in Boston.  Meanwhile, the most richly supported public schools spent from $16,543 per student (Seattle) to $28,004 per student (New York City).

There is no mention of cinematography in McGurn’s article, but we note in passing that a recent popular film, Hidden Figures, chronicled a very talented trio of high-achieving black female workers in the highly technical NASA programs (“Space Race”) of the 1960’s.  (The filmmaker took some liberties with historical facts, but those liberties seem not to invalidate the focus of the film.)  This trio of technical workers was doubly blessed, being not only talented but also coming from solid family backgrounds.  Seeing the universal in the particular, as we are wont to do whenever appropriate, there is no good reason not to expect high scores in math and reading among contemporary black eighth graders who live in solid family backgrounds conducive to the completion of homework.

McGurn notes that some progressives, embarrassed by the meager educational results for black eighth graders, have shifted their focus to getting rid of the achievement tests that expose this failure.  Once free of irksome tests for eighth and twelfth graders, it is proposed that future reliance on race-based college admissions can disguise academic deficiencies.  As various courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, consider suits stemming from race-based college admissions, McGurn suggests that the key question to consider is: Do school failures at the eighth (and subsequent) grade levels justify rigging college admissions to exclude some high-achieving students in favor of other applicants whose acceptance, due to “social-promotion,” will devalue college degrees?

By “identity politics,” the current reviewer understands any process that privileges or penalizes certain individuals in society on some basis other than objective merit, including the property rights that express the wills of meritorious individuals.  Non-meritocratic factors include ethnicity, race, culture, religion, and language.  Any full-scale program of identity politics includes the destruction of the notion of objective merit, leaving one to wonder whether an identity-politics enthusiast would really prefer that the pilot of his next flight be chosen from an ethnic lottery rather than from a pool of competent and tested individuals.

Discussions of identity politics often employ, confusingly, the problematic terms “tribe” and “tribalism.”  A tribe in the ancient Roman Republic (509 to 27 B.C.) was one of the 35 geographically-determined voting blocs of the Roman plebeians in their Council of the Plebs.  However, the plebs defined themselves in opposition to the patricians.  If “identity politics” is to be read into the ancient Roman world, then this reading would seem to be based upon the struggle between plebs and patricians; and not upon any difficulties between tribes, all of whom were plebeian.  Nevertheless, we will take “tribe” to refer to be any grouping of people according to ethnicity, race, culture, language, or religion.

The entire project of reading “identity politics” back into ancient Roman history is problematic: When the armies of Rome first confronted Germanic tribes in the Cimbrian War (113-101 B.C.), the Romans certainly disdained what they saw as the Germans’ inferior culture, religion, and language.  But the (relatively brown) Romans did not disdain the (relatively white) Germans based on skin color; because, as the classical philologist V. D. Hanson has written in his article, Classical patricide, “Whiteness itself was a concept completely unknown to the Greeks and Romans. No such word exists in the classical vocabularies of the ancient world, the supposed font of endemic Western racism.”

In his article, Identity Politics Goes Global, Walter Russell Mead surveys some political trends of the past century or so that reveal identity politics to be destructive in the sense of reducing a nation’s domestic prosperity and stability, as well as its international influence and security.  

Mead notes that many modern African nations inherited geographical boundaries from colonial times, irrespective of historical tribal boundaries.  The post-World War II presupposition among professional diplomats was that tribalism was primitive, atavistic, and ethically tacky.  Modern diplomacy then assumed that any tribe member assigned to a certain, modern-day nation would automatically be pleased to vote alongside the members of all other tribes within that nation.  Hence, there was a wide-spread expectation that tribalism would wane even while allegiance to the rulers within newly defined national boundaries would flourish.  

In defiance of the expectation for the straightforward development of African nations, some of those new nations broke up due to cultural, religious, and language factors.  The citizens of some failed states saw no good reason to be co-governed by members of cultural, religious, and language groupings other than their own.  In Nigeria, the central government has not been able to suppress Christian-Muslim conflict that has led to tens of thousands of deaths.  In South Africa, Zulus have staged a recent insurrection (or at least a quasi-insurrection) in support of a former national leader.  Similar conflicts have arisen in the regions near Ethiopia and Sudan.  Sudan spun off South Sudan in 2011; South Sudan may further split.  English-speakers and French-speakers are battling each other in Cameroon.  Economic development has not overcome tribal differences in these cases.

Mead sees other historical examples of identity politics as well: In Eastern and Central Europe before World War I, increasing education and self-awareness led to nationalistic aspirations among groups within the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires. The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist precipitated World War I.  Today, fierce fighting exists within such countries as Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon; and this fighting can be viewed as the result of identity politics.

Mead likewise observes that “many Americans wonder whether a common U.S. identity is strong enough to contain the forces that threaten to splinter the country permanently into hostile racial, religious, and ideological camps.”

The current reviewer observes that “civic religion” and economic development in the U.S. helped to create a melting pot of people who agreed to pursue economic interests; to promote abstract notions of international justice; and to ignore traditionally contentious issues in the realms of culture, religion, and language.  Thus, the U.S. is the unique, centuries-long experiment of creating and maintaining a non-tribal society based on merit.  The current effect of identity politics is to reverse the melting-pot process, to drive wedges between ethnic groups, to override evaluations based on merit, to instill doubt about the results of one’s next airplane trip or surgical procedure, and to re-tribalize society under new bureaucratic leadership.

Rescuing American History: Essay Reviews (1)

On the occasion of Labor Day, 2021 and of the recent start of a new school year - - to the extent that a school year is possible in the pandemic era - - this blog post will review the first three essays in a recent book (2021) about American-history education in the U.S.  The book under examination is titled “Red, White, and Black” and subtitled “Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.”  The editor of this volume is Robert L. Woodson, Jr.; the publisher is Emancipation Books (An Imprint of Post Hill Press); and the ISBN number is 978-1-63758-261-9.  

The Woodson book’s Dedication page recognizes that there are countless millions of patriots seeking to live in peace “at a time when many are trying to pull us apart by stoking grievances and sowing discord.”  The essayists in this volume believe that the overwhelming majority of Americans remain devoted to our founding principles - - or at least would be so devoted if the educational system did its job without recourse to the latest recycled theories of class struggle.  Rising to the current historic occasion, the essayists have done their duty in opposing these theories.  The essayists have elaborated upon Woodson’s “1776 Unites” project.  “1776 Unites” was launched in order to counteract a diametrically opposed project - - as advertised by a certain notorious, de facto Marxist newspaper - - in which the dating of U.S. history is based on the year that the first slaves arrived in North America, in preference to other, notably favorable years, such as the years in which the slaves were emancipated or in which voting rights were established.

The forward to the Woodson book states that “these essays in Red, White, and Black brim with the agency, initiative, and aspiration of ordinary black Americans, telling stories that inspire precisely because they illustrate the success within any American’s reach, if only he or she believes.”

The introduction to the Woodson book mentions a contemporary American historian who maintains that “what America is confronting today, with the dominance of race grievance and identity politics, has had, since its inception, an even more sinister purpose: to maintain the power of the landlord merchant class.”  Here, we might take issue with this historian’s opinion that the class involved with “race grievance and identity politics” is that of “landlords and merchants” - - it is just these classes, after all, that lack political power and that have done poorly in the time of pandemic-induced free rent and cratering businesses.  Instead, the present writer would say that the maintenance of power has occurred in the class of the wealthy, who are accustomed to running government, issuing decrees, and escaping ill-effects of said decrees while ensconced in gated communities.

Essay (1), appearing on pages 3 – 10, is titled “A Positive Vision: The Agenda of ‘1776’.”  The author, Wilfred Reilly, subscribes to the view that a country does not need to be utopian in order to be good: “The U.S. is a flawed but very good country, where it is not terribly hard to succeed, given hard work and personal responsibility.”  Reilly’s theses are that the claim that the contemporary U.S. is “systemically racist” is false; that many primary social problems are completely disconnected from historical racial conflict; that some individuals are not responsible for the sins of others in some group that includes both; and that basic skills training in schools would do more for minorities and working-poor whites than any amount of training in the recitation of grievance theory.  

In support of the first of Reilly’s theses, the present writer would mention that Jackie Robinson faced obvious racism; that such racism is now absent to the extent possible in a non-utopia; and that relabeling absent racism as “systemic racism” is a rhetorical flourish that one would expect in a Marxist diatribe.  There is no doubt that the contemporary U.S. is not “systemically racist.”

In support of the second of Reilly’s theses, that many primary social ills are disconnected from historical racial conflict, one need only cite the problems ensuing from the breakdown of families (i.e., the problems stemming from the increase in illegitimacy) across all racial groups in the contemporary U.S.  In 2010, illegitimacy stood at 28.6% for non-Hispanic whites, 52.5% for Hispanics, and 72.3% for blacks.  (These are Reilly’s cited statistics.)

In support of the third of Reilly’s theses, that some individuals are not responsible for the sins of others in the same group, Reilly offers the observation that “a Caucasian individual whose ancestors were serfs in Sicily or Russia in 1864 [has] nothing to do with the peculiar institution [slavery].”  The notion that someone is condemned today because his or her great-great-grandparents did not fight hard enough against slavery centuries ago is itself morally repugnant.  Reilly notes that poor whites, the so-called deplorables so denigrated during the 2016 Presidential campaign, are the most downtrodden segment of society, because affirmative-action programs are not available to them.

In support of the fourth of Reilly’s theses, that basic skills training in schools would do more for the working poor than any amount of rhetorical training in grievance theory, one need only mention that “calling [for] ‘bourgeois norms,’ as charter schools often do, will do far more to move working-poor Americans toward success than will teaching them … the Swahili word for ‘racism’.”

Essay (2), appearing on pages 11 – 15, is titled “The Moral Meaning of America: Two Parallel Narratives.”  The author, Jason D. Hill, states that Americans are the first non-tribal people in the world.  (The two parallel narratives in the essay title seem to refer to people who are either tribal [non-U.S.] or non-tribal [U.S.].)  “By making foreigners and strangers into Americans, the republic has made them citizens of the world by undermining and de-ratifying the spirit of seriousness grafted onto lineage and blood identity.”  Furthermore, “America encourages human beings not to search for their origins, but, rather, their destiny.”  One notes in passing that the existence of the website, genealogy.com, seems to belie this assertion.  One also wonders why a certain ambiguity in the concept of America is not more widely noted: Does the land of non-tribalism itself require borders and immigration rules for its very existence?

Essay (3), appearing on pages 17 – 22, is titled “Acknowledging Slavery’s Limits in Defining America.”  The author, John Wood, Jr., reminds us that then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama said that “words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage … [or to grant them] their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States.”  But to overemphasize the effects of slavery and historical racism is to overlook the success that black Americans have achieved in their culture.  “The relative deterioration [of that success] in the aftermath of the Great Society is arguably the most salient threat facing black America.”  Moreover, overemphasizing the lingering effects of slavery in the U.S. fails to account for the fact that ethnically similar people have succeeded at wildly different rates in the U.S.  (Wood cites a study by Coleman Hughes of the educational and economic outcomes for immigrants from the West Indies and for native-born black Americans.)  Wood concludes that what we choose to emphasize in our history will determine how we relate to our country.

Equity, Equality, and the U.S. Declaration of Independence

Section 1 of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason and adopted by the Fifth Virginia Convention on June 12, 1776, states “that all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

The Preamble to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson and adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, states that "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Jefferson never claimed originality for his Declaration, maintaining instead that it was merely a faithful rendition of the Colonial Zeitgeist and its interpretation of other sources such as Mason and Locke.  

Both Mason and Jefferson referred to all men as being either “by nature equally free and independent” or “created equal … [and] endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”  However, Mason’s five-fold reference to life, liberty, property, happiness, and safety was boiled down by Jefferson into a three-fold reference to life, liberty, and happiness; consistent with property being subsumed under liberty, and safety under happiness.  After all, Jefferson was an author who took scissors to the Bible in order to pare it down to what he considered its most essential features; and in his Declaration he made up for a truncation of the number of ideas with an enhanced capitalization of words.

For the Founders, being by nature equally free and independent - - or being created equal with inalienable rights - - included being free of arbitrary legislative procedures like taxation without representation or bills of attainder.  Being Englishmen, they insisted on equal status before the law, which is to say, an equality of procedure or opportunity to receive a fair hearing in a stable legal environment. 

In contrast, the legal notion of equity has had a long and checkered career as the antithesis to equality and as a parasite on lawful procedures.  Beginning with the English Court of Chancery in the Middle Ages, there occurred the idea that the King’s Law (or “Conscience”) could trump local courts of law.  This might have been acceptable if it had been limited to technical issues such as in the following cases: Creditors appeal to a bankruptcy court as a court of equity.  A second example pertains to an equal-stock company in which one member did most of the work, incurred an unusual debt, and requested a larger-than-equal pay-out from the enterprise.  

The idea of equity as the King’s Conscience always had the potential to degenerate into an enforcement of “whatever the judge says,” while ignoring the actual law.  Nevertheless, there evolved a dual track system consisting of courts of law, which adjudicated legislative statutes; and of courts of equity, which adjudicated “fairness” - - or whatever the judge thought was fair.  (Later, the judgment might become whatever John Rawls thought was fair.)  Hence, the notion of a court of equity, dating back many centuries, entailed creating a parallel court system, generating complexity and obfuscation, circumventing law (especially property rights), and distributing economic goods in accordance with the preferences of powerful elites.

One notes in passing that the term, equity, has a different meaning in business contexts, viz., the ownership of assets that have labilities attached to them (the securities traded in the stock market).  One is owed some fluctuating amount of cash by virtue of owning such securities, provided that someone wants to make a market in those securities.  Hence, equity markets are somewhat reminiscent of equity courts in awarding some value that is due: Equity values in the stock market are objective in the sense of being the highest bids, whereas equity values determined by a court of equity are essentially subjective.

The meaning of equity most in vogue today is the distribution of economic goods in accordance with the racial preferences of intellectual elites.  Christopher Caldwell, writing in the May 17, 2021 National Review, mentions three female mayors who were recently recognized for administrative acumen by the MIT business school.  These mayors were praised as purveyors of equity, despite presiding over cities with appalling homicide rates and other social pathologies.  Caldwell finds that the perceived paramount importance of equity derives from an assumed absolute (categorical) imperative to eliminate all collective racial inequalities, to abandon equality of opportunity, and to adopt equality of result.  Although Caldwell does not so conclude, it would seem that enforcing collective racial equality over time would require all racial groups to experience alternating eras of subjection and preference that would “average out” in the long run.

In today’s conception of equity as delineated by Caldwell, first, all inequality across identifiable groups is proof of white racism.  Second, equity is race-conscious rather than race-blind.  Third, civil-rights law overrides the U.S. Constitution.  Caldwell does not state the seemingly obvious rejoinder that “the new anti-racism is the old racism.”  Indeed, some white Wisconsin farmers recently won a court case in which they objected to agricultural debt relief being parceled out on a racial basis.  The judge in that case made two points: The obvious solution to old racism is to disallow any new racism, not to embrace even more racism.  Furthermore, “the Biden administration is radically undermining bedrock principles of equality under the law.”  In other words, equity, as construed by the Biden administration in this case, violates equality.

Caldwell maintains that the Biden administration is now radically redefining the American idea of fairness.  Equity and fairness are said to derive from so-called critical race theory, but as we have noted above, this is not true.  Courts of equity have been around since King Henry III in England; but critical race theory has only been around since 1989, when Marxists - - thwarted by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of international socialism - - substituted “race struggle” for “class struggle” and continued their long march through the institutions.  From another perspective, Caldwell notes that contemporary critical race theorists, having found that equity as “race-blindness” is not achieving their desired results, now propose that equity as “race-consciousness” is the sine qua non for the formation of social policy.

Many people may assume, Caldwell writes, that the Civil Rights Act still functions in order to fight discrimination; whereas what passes for civil rights today has moved on to equity ideology, especially among large corporations.  There is much money to be made in giving corporate seminars like “A Ten-Step Plan to Embed Race Equity in Your Organization.”  Any employee dissenters from equity theory are likely to be treated as deviants from a Maoist self-criticism session.  

“The most troubling innovation of equity is its tendency to move in a direction that will, in time, reintroduce segregationist thinking,” as when Illinois U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth announced that she will vote to block the confirmation of all white nominees brought before the Senate.  Caldwell concludes that “perhaps equity is best thought of as diversity or affirmative action taken to its logical conclusion.”

“Equality Acts” from Easter to Pentecost and Beyond

Reflections on the occasion of Pentecost: A bill named “The Equality Act” has been debated in the U.S. Congress in recent years and recommended for passage by President Biden in a recent speech to a joint session of Congress.  Whether one believes that the main result of this “Equality Act” would be exciting athletic competition between biological women and transgender women; or, on the other hand, the exclusion from competition of whole groups of would-be athletes with lesser average muscle mass; one might at least agree that the term “Equality” in this bill’s name has been minted only very recently.  In contrast, if one were to seek the counsel of millennia of experience, one would find, for example, that men and women played equally dignified roles in the Biblical accounts of Easter and Pentecost: Women went to Jesus’ tomb to anoint his body on Easter morning; joined the apostles for prayer in the upper room; were among the group of believers who were filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost; and heard Peter’s first sermon quoting the prophet Joel, saying “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.”  

Some commentators raise the question, however, whether the Biblical accounts are mythical.  In response to this question, Robert Barron has recently cited C. S. Lewis in saying that “those who think that the New Testament is a myth just haven’t read many myths.”  Barron notes that myths are “once upon a time” stories with their own takes on eternal truths, but without any specific location in historical eras.  No one ever supposed that Heracles performed his labors during a specific historical time period.  In contrast, Barron notes, Biblical accounts in the New Testament are very specific in their historical references. 

The Biblical “everyone who calls” refers not only to birth gender, but also to race.  (Perhaps one should say “birth race,” for who would be so foolish as to doubt that a lucrative pigmentation technology could arise for altering skin color?)  Martin Luther King, Jr. famously looked forward to the day when everyone would be judged by the content of his character, not by the color of his skin.

In the opinion of Jason L. Riley, the day foreseen by Dr. King has already arrived: Race relations in America are better than ever.  Dr. King’s concept of equality is being achieved.  This improvement has occurred despite various well-publicized ideological agendas promoting theories of “systemic racism” and “unconscious bias” that swamp out good news.  For example, the approval of interracial marriage rose from 4% in 1958 to 84% in 2013.  Riley writes that “the political left has a stake in overstating both the existence and effects of racism so that it can advocate for more and bigger programs to combat it.”  

One such leftist group is named “Black Lives Matter” (BLM).  According to the New York Post article “Inside BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ million-dollar real estate buying binge” (April 10, 2021), a NYC version of BLM has called for a financial probe into the operations of the global version of BLM.  Cullors is a self-described Marxist whose standard of living seems greatly to surpass those of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao; and flagrantly to violate the spirit of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”  Presumably, this Marxist slogan has also undergone some recent linguistic engineering, but it is difficult to see just how the enjoyment of luxury housing in Topanga Canyon or the Bahamas can be construed as an “act of equality.”

Elitism, Nihilism, and Vorotyntsev-ism in Politics

This year, more so than most, the elections for high office in the United States highlight Benjamin Franklin’s post-constitutional-convention remark that you, the citizens of the erstwhile colonies, now have “a Republic, if you can keep it.”  Among the types of radicalism that would fundamentally alter the United States Constitution is one that found historical expression in the intelligentsia of late 19th and early 20th century Russia, where intelligentsia is a term of social and political art discussed below.  Right now, three weeks before Election Day 2020, voters may wish to incorporate the following analysis into their electoral deliberations.

      The Northwestern professor, Gary Saul Morson, has vividly portrayed pre-revolutionary Russia while reviewing the background of the word intelligentsia, which was coined about the year 1860 in order to refer to an elite class based on three criteria.  First, each member of the intelligentsia, referred to as an intelligent, agreed to identify himself with this progressive class in preference to any traditionally defined social, professional, ethnic, or religious class.  Second, each intelligent devoted himself or herself to a rigorous personal regimen of “puritanical dissoluteness” or “nihilistic moralism,” ignoring its implied irony and inventing a meaning of life independent of tradition.  Third, each intelligent accepted a set of destructive beliefs - - be they populist, Marxist, or anarchist - - that were taken to be scientifically underwritten, absolutely certain, and completely obligatory; thereby “checking the boxes” for some fashionable modern ideas while remaining oblivious to their many implied contradictions of history or logic: An intelligent accepted atheism on faith, became spiritually devoted to materialism, and chose to embrace determinism.  An intelligent committed himself or herself to “science,” construed as a metaphysical system in which the world worked by purposeless forces that nevertheless aimed at utopia; and detected a profound syllogism in the statement “Man is descended from apes; therefore, love one another.”

      With regard to nihilism, one must be aware of possible equivocation: Philosophical nihilism is an extreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence and that “All is unreality or illusion.”  On the other hand, historical nihilism can refer to the extreme Russian political viewpoint, dating from the late 19th century, that disapproved of the entire established social order and sought to overthrow it.  Destruction of existing society was regarded as the first step towards the utopia that would quickly arise were it not for the baleful effect of current social arrangements.

      Morson reports that between 1900 and 1917 in late-Tsarist, pre-revolutionary Russia there were tens of thousands of acts of terrorism, arson, robbery, and murder.  How did educated liberal Russian society, in thrall as it was to the intelligentsia, respond to this scourge?  A Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadet Party) was set up in the Duma (legislature formed in 1905), but official Kadet publications never condemned political assassination or terrorism.  In the words of one liberal, “Condemn terror?  That would be the moral death of the party!”  Solzhenitsyn’s novel November 1916 portrays a gathering of Kadet liberals and the visiting Colonel Georgi Vorotyntsev.  When Vorotyntsev ventured the slightest deviation from the Kadet party line, the room fell eerily silent.  As if hypnotized, Vorotyntsev said no more, “not because he felt he was wrong, but out of fear of saying something reactionary.”  As a professor later explained to him, “In educated Russian society … by no means every view may be expressed … [and] the more ‘liberated’ the company, the more heavily this tacit prohibition weighs on it.”  Such ingrained self-censorship, or Vorotyntsev effect, severely limited public speech on important issues.

      Morson reveals the moral cowardice of pre-Revolutionary Russian liberals, who signed petitions they did not agree with; supported anarchists’ demands to abolish the police despite foreseeable, looming disaster; agreed that socialism would cure all societal ills with alacrity; and obeyed the maxim “Better to side with people a mile to one’s left than be associated with anyone one inch to one’s right.”

      Morson notes that the terror of the French Revolution was eventually stopped by the fall of Robespierre and the rise of Napoleon.  But in Russia, Stalin proclaimed an intensification of class struggle even after the Russian Revolution had ended, leading to innumerable executions and exiles to the Gulag, not to mention purges, show trials, and induced famine.  Giving in to illiberal forces ensures their longevity.

      Recently, more than a century after liberal opinion in late-Tsarist Russia fell over itself to support various socialist, Marxist, and anarchist initiatives, the Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield has well described the latest emanation of the Vorotyntsev effect in the United States: “We live in a society where racism is not, and cannot be, openly professed … [yet] ‘systemic racism’ supposedly persists … [in a] paradox of a racist society without racists.”  If a modern Vorotyntsev would venture, during polite conversation, the slightest deviation from the progressive view of “systemic racism,” then the ensuing, eerie silence would quickly bid him to say no more, lest he say something reactionary.  Adapting the Russian professor’s advice, “In educated American society … by no means every view may be expressed … [and] the more ‘progressive’ the company, the more heavily this tacit prohibition weighs on it.”

      Mansfield observes that systemic racism is taken to be unconscious, but that “it is strange to describe an unconscious effect as racism, for an ism is an opinion, a doctrine, not a mere condition.”  Systemic racism is said to be the bad result of behavior heretofore regarded as good, but now revealed to be illicit privilege rather than just reward.  On the other hand, why should anyone feel guilty about an accusation of “privilege” if a system beyond anyone’s intentions creates that privilege?  It seems that charges of “systemic racism” are meant as a way to avoid arguments over the nature and application of justice.  “More affirmative action and more subsidies - - what can they do that will now help instead of hurt?  Call them ‘reparations’ - - will that do any good?”  Mansfield concludes that “‘Systematic racism’ is a bogus description that issues in an accusation made in doubtful faith [and] that contradicts itself.”  Nevertheless, Mansfield finds that theories of “systematic racism” are so widely held as to require polite disputation.

      Combining the insights presented by Morson and Mansfield, one concludes that it is high time to uphold the original intentions of Colonel Georgi Vorotyntsev!

(Postscript #1: Exactly one week after the original Mansfield article, the WSJ published seven replies (“Replying to Mansfield on Systemic Racism”) expressing a spectrum of opinions that generally, but not always, agreed with Mansfield’s analysis.)

(Postscript #2: The next blog posting in this series is currently expected to appear on January 1 or February 1, 2021.)