Heather MacDonald writes as update on the struggle in schools to create an educational environment in the face of student misbehavior sanctioned by minority racial privileges. Her article at City Journal is Back to Discipline. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Disparate impact reflects disparate reality.

A federal commission on school safety has repudiated the use of disparate-impact analysis in evaluating whether school discipline is racially biased. The Trump administration should go further, and extirpate such analysis from the entirety of the federal code of regulations, as well as from informal government practice.

Disparate-impact analysis holds that if a facially-neutral policy negatively affects blacks and Hispanics at a higher rate than whites and Asians, it is discriminatory. Noticing the behavioral differences that lead to those disparate effects is forbidden. In the area of school discipline, disparate-impact analysis results in the conclusion that racially neutral rules must nevertheless contain bias, since black students nationally are suspended at nearly three times the rate of white students. In 2014, the Obama administration relied on this methodology to announce that schools that suspended or expelled black students at higher rates than white students were violating anti-discrimination laws.

To understand how counterfactual such an analysis is, consider Duval County, Florida, which has Florida’s highest juvenile homicide rate. Seventy-three children, some as young as 11, have been arrested for murder and manslaughter over the last decade, according to the Florida Times-Union. Black juveniles made up 87.6 percent of those arrests and whites 8 percent. The black population in Duval County—which includes Jacksonville—was 28.9 percent in 2010 and the white population 56.6 percent, making black youngsters 21.6 times more likely to be arrested for homicide than white youngsters. Nationally, black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined; if Hispanics were removed from the equation, the black-white disparity would be much greater.

Beneath those homicide numbers is a larger juvenile crime wave. “The reason so many kids commit murder in Jacksonville is not because they are murderers, but because they are everything else: drug dealers, robbers, thieves, rapists and a bunch of other types of criminals whose crimes of choice has a great likelihood of leading to a murder,” a teen murder convict, Aaron Wright, told the Florida Times-Union. Fifty-nine percent of juvenile murder convicts from Duval County who responded to the paper’s inmate survey reported that they were committing another crime such as robbery or burglary when they or their co-defendant killed their victim. Wright himself was robbing a woman when his fellow robber shot and killed her, making Wright guilty of felony murder.

The same family dysfunction and lack of socialization that create this juvenile crime wave inevitably affects classroom behavior. Duval County Public Schools also have the highest number of violent campus incidents of any Florida school district. Nationwide, schools with the highest minority populations report the highest number of disciplinary infractions. Schools that are 50 percent minority or more experience weekly gang activity at nearly ten times the rate of schools where minorities constituted 5 percent to 20 percent of the population, according to the 2018 “Indicators of School Crime and Safety” report produced by the U.S. Justice and Education Departments. Gang violence in schools with less than 5 percent minority populations was too low to be usable statistically. Widespread weekly disorder in classrooms was reported in schools with at least 50 percent minority populations at more than five times the rate as in schools with 5 percent to 20 percent minorities. More than four times as many high-minority schools reported weekly verbal abuse of teachers compared with schools with a minority student body less than 20 percent. Widespread disorder and teacher abuse at schools with less than 5 percent minority populations was again too low to be statistically reliable.

The “School Crime and Safety” reports produced during the Obama years contained identical disparities. And yet the Obama administration held that the only possible reason why blacks are disciplined in school more than whites is teacher and administrator bias. Never mind that teaching is the most “woke” profession in the country after social work, with education schools frantically indoctrinating their students in white privilege and critical race theory.

And so school districts, threatened with a loss of federal funding if they didn’t reduce racial disparities in discipline, left disruptive students in the classroom rather than removing them. The results were predictable: chaos and less learning than ever. In Des Moines, for example, students hit teachers and other students with little consequence, according to the Des Moines Register, leading to a teacher exodus. A nine-year-old boy was repeatedly struck by a fellow student, but the teacher felt powerless to do anything lest she be accused of discriminating against a minority student.

In 2018, a cell-phone video captured a classroom assault emblematic of the post-disciplinary era. A physics teacher in Texas had confiscated a student’s smart phone. “Give me my fucking phone. This is the last time asking your stupid ass,” the teen yelled, towering over the teacher sitting frozen behind his desk, grinning nervously, the very image of submission. The student aggressively swept the papers on the teacher’s desk to the floor, then violently shoved him in the face. Still impassive, the teacher pushed the phone across the desk back to the student, who grabbed it with a self-righteous shrug and strode away. The school principal explained that it “was just a bad day the student was having,” and commended the teacher’s response. The other students who observed this adult capitulation to thuggery learned a terrible lesson about their apparent immunity from any consequences for atrocious behavior.

A substitute teacher who worked in Los Angeles’s inner-city schools documents similar insubordination in his recent book, Sit Down and Shut Up: How Discipline Can Set Students Free. One student, recounts author Cinque Henderson, shoved a pregnant teacher in order to grab her laptop and watch a video. The dean then interrogated the teacher about why the student was not “jibing with her.” An instructor from Miami-Dade County told Henderson: “It is virtually impossible to discipline a student. I know we are losing a generation of kids of color as a result of allowing them to run wild.”

The Times-Union analysis identifies the biggest factor in juvenile violence: absent fathers. Eighty-four percent of the juvenile murderers who responded to the paper’s survey had what the paper discreetly calls “divorced or separated parents”—the reality more likely being that their parents never married in the first place. “I believe that my life may have took a different turn . . . had my father been a man and raised me,” a 61-year-old teen murderer and career criminal told the paper.

Excusing insubordination and aggression in the name of racial equity is not a civil rights accomplishment. The third-party victims of such behavior are themselves disproportionately minority—whether fellow classmates who cannot learn, or law-abiding residents of high-crime neighborhoods who have to worry about taking their children safely to school without being carjacked or caught in a drive-by shooting.

But the alleged beneficiary of a racial double standard in conduct is also a victim. Schools are usually the last chance to civilize children if their family has failed to do so. They accomplish that civilizing mission through the application of a color-blind behavioral code, neutrally enforced, that communicates to students that their behavioral choices have consequences. A student who perceives that his race is an excuse for bad conduct will be handicapped for life. Pace the race advocates, it is this disparate-impact-induced state of affairs—not the supposed implicit racism of teachers and principals—that constitutes an actual school-to-prison pipeline.

Not all of the administration’s social policies are as farsighted as the rescission of disparate-impact analysis in student discipline. This week, Trump signed an executive order creating “opportunity zones,” a concept trotted out by every administration over the last 40 years to revive low-income communities. But tax rates are not the main impediment to investment in poor communities; crime is. If the Trump administration wanted to continue breaking the mold of stale poverty initiatives, it would focus on family breakdown as the cause of urban crime and disorder. While policy is severely limited in its capacity to restore marriage norms, the administration should use every rhetorical outlet available to revalorize fathers and men.

Meantime, expect a battle over the future of disparate-impact analysis. The New York Times has accused the Trump administration of attacking “protections for minority students,” and the advocates are predictably outraged. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has promised to defend “vital student anti-discrimination protections.” The incoming head of the House Education Committee, Bobby Scott, will likely seek to enshrine disparate-impact methodology further in statutory law. Doing so would not only distort policymaking; it would also continue poisoning civil discourse and society with unjustified claims of racism. The only antidote to such a counterattack is a willingness to tell the truth about the behavioral disparities that create disparate impact in the first place.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.

Denmark will not accept and attempt to integrate unwelcome migrants, according to this report Denmark Plans to Isolate Unwanted Migrants on a Small Island Excerpts in italics with my  bolds.

COPENHAGEN — Denmark plans to house the country’s most unwelcome foreigners in a most unwelcoming place: a tiny, hard-to-reach island that now holds the laboratories, stables and crematory of a center for researching contagious animal diseases.

As if to make the message clearer, one of the two ferries that serve the island is called the Virus.  “They are unwanted in Denmark, and they will feel that,” the immigration minister, Inger Stojberg, wrote on Facebook.

On Friday, the center-right government and the right-wing Danish People’s Party announced an agreement to house as many as 100 people on Lindholm Island — foreigners who have been convicted of crimes and rejected asylum seekers who cannot be returned to their home countries.

The 17-acre island, in an inlet of the Baltic Sea, lies about two miles from the nearest shore, and ferry service is infrequent. Foreigners will be required to report at the island center daily, and face imprisonment if they do not.  “We’re going to minimize the number of ferry departures as much as at all possible,” Martin Henriksen, a spokesman for the Danish People’s Party on immigration, told TV 2. “We’re going to make it as cumbersome and expensive as possible.”

The deal allocates about $115 million over four years for immigrant facilities on the island, which are scheduled to open in 2021.  The finance minister, Kristian Jensen, who led the negotiations, said the island was not a prison, but added that anyone placed there would have to sleep there.

Louise Holck, deputy executive director of The Danish Institute for Human Rights, said her organization would watch the situation “very closely” for possible violations of Denmark’s international obligations.
The agreement was reached as part of the annual budget negotiations. Each year, the Danish People’s Party demands restrictions on immigrants or refugees in return for its votes on a budget.

In Denmark, as in much of Europe, the surge in migration from the Middle East and Africa in 2015 and 2016 prompted a populist, nativist backlash.

The government has vowed to push immigration law to the limits of international conventions on human rights.  Legal experts said it was too early to tell whether the Lindholm Island project would cross those boundaries, constituting illegal confinement. They said it resembled an Italian government project that was struck down in 1980 by the European Court of Human Rights.

The Lindholm Island plan furthers the government’s policy of motivating failed asylum seekers to leave the country by making their lives intolerable.  Asylum seekers with criminal records are not allowed to work in Denmark. Rejected asylum seekers who cannot be deported are given accommodations where they cannot prepare their own meals, food and an allowance of about $1.20 per day, which is withheld if they fail to cooperate with the authorities.

A former immigration minister, Birthe Ronn Hornbech, called the island project “a joke” and a blunder comparable to a soccer player scoring a goal for the opposing team.  “Nothing will become of this proposal,” she wrote in her newspaper column.

Many foreigners who have been denied asylum cannot be deported to their home countries for fear of abuse or persecution, or simply because those countries refuse to take them back. Hundreds lingering in two deportation centers refuse to leave — a challenge for a government that has promised to get rid of those who have no legal right to remain in Denmark.

Some have held out for more than a decade despite a steady deterioration in living conditions. An independent study by a former prison director now working for the rights group Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly found conditions in one of the deportation centers to be comparable to those in some prisons, or worse.

Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said last month that the government’s aim in receiving refugees would no longer be to integrate them, but to host them until they can return to their countries of origin.“It’s not easy to ask families to go home, if they’ve actually settled,” he told a meeting of his party. “But it is the morally right thing. We should not make refugees immigrants.”

This summer, a ban on face coverings was introduced and quickly nicknamed “the burqa ban” as it followed a debate on the Islamic garment seen by some as “un-Danish.” This month, Parliament is expected to pass legislation requiring immigrants who want to obtain citizenship to shake hands with officials as part of the naturalization ceremony — though some Muslims insist that they cannot shake hands with someone of the opposite sex.

The government contends that hand shakes are “a basic Danish value.”

Christopher Caldwell writes an article What is Populism? at Claremont Review of Books. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Le monde, the French newspaper of record, admitted last summer that readers had been complaining about the indiscriminate way its journalists flung around the word “populist.” It seemed to describe dozens of European and American political actors with nothing in common except the contempt in which Le Monde held them. The meaning of “populist” was nonetheless easy to decode. A dispatch in that same edition of Le Monde, about a new political alliance between populist governments in Italy, Austria, and Hungary, was titled: “Europe’s hard right lays down the law against migrants.” To call someone a populist is to insinuate that he is a fascist, but tentatively enough to spare the accuser the responsibility of supplying proof. If one sees things as Le Monde does, this is a good thing: populism is an extremism-in-embryo that needs to be named in order that it might better be fought. Others, though, will see populism as an invention of the very establishmentarians who claim to be fighting it, an empty word that allows them to shut down with taboos any political idea that they cannot defeat with arguments. In Europe, populism is becoming the great which-side-are-you-on question of our time.

Whatever populism is, it is prospering across Europe. By late September, in the wake of Chemnitz, support for the AfD had risen to 18% nationwide, placing the party level with the once-colossal Social Democrats as the country’s second largest, behind Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party has held roughly two thirds of the seats in the country’s national assembly since regaining control in 2010. Italy’s two populist parties—the Five Star Movement and the League—were mocked when they came together to form a coalition last May. After four months of pursuing a hard line on migration, their government has become one of the most popular in Italy since the Second World War. Between the two of them, the parties had the support of 64% of the public by early October.

Populist movements, however, even when strong, can be checked by social convention and threats of ostracism. Few call themselves populist. In Sweden, the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats took 18% of the vote at elections in September but at their own demonstrations their supporters are sometimes outnumbered, and always outshouted, by activists massing in the name of anti-racism or anti-fascism. That populists have a hard time seizing and holding public platforms is a problem for the movement. It may mean, though, that sympathy for populism runs deeper than it appears to. The decision of Britain’s voters to withdraw from the European Union in a 2016 referendum won only narrowly, with a 52-48 margin in favor of the Leave option. But when London’s Independent asked Britons days before the vote how the results would make them feel, 44% said they would be “delighted” with a Leave vote, while only 28% said that about Remain. There seems to be more support for populism in citizens’ inmost hearts than on the Letters to the Editor page.

Migration and Merkel

Europe has entered a period of demographic, institutional, and ideological convulsion. Mass migration is the focus of populist concern. After World War II, Europe’s countries, while not ethnically homogeneous, all had stable populations of European descent. The need to rebuild spurred many countries in wrecked northern Europe to import workers—primarily from southern Italy, Portugal, and what was then Yugoslavia. A boom ensued that intensified the short-term need for labor, and brought new workers from further afield. Turks and Moroccans came. Decolonization and war untethered vast populations from their Pakistani, Algerian, and Indonesian homelands. Soon storefronts were being converted into mosques. Europeans learned words like “couscous,” “Ramadan,” and “jihad.”

Europeans assumed migration would end when their own need for migrant labor did. That was naïve. Middle Easterners and North Africans simply liked Europe better. What is more, at roughly this time European women stopped bearing babies, to the point where the population of native Italians was projected to fall by a quarter, from 60 million to 45, before the middle of the 21st century. This had society-transforming consequences. By the beginning of this century there were tens of millions of Muslims living in western European lands where there had never been any. Now minarets towered over the urban neighborhoods where those storefront mosques had been, cities (including London) came under the control of ethnic political machines, and Islam replaced Christianity as the main source of religious zeal, if not yet as the professed belief of the largest number of residents.

The change riled Europeans. In virtually every western European land, when pollsters ask members of the public to list their country’s most pressing problems, immigration ranks either first or second. But it seemed no one could do anything about it. The values that European elites proclaimed—a mix of post-Holocaust repentance and emulation of American civil-rights institutions—made it seem hypocritical and xenophobic to regulate the country’s frontiers in any way at all. Europe no longer had the conviction to say “no” to anyone making a reasonable case for political asylum, and no longer had the will to deport even those whose petitions were deemed unreasonable. One of these was Daniel Hillig’s alleged murderer Yousif Abdullah, who had accumulated a long criminal record in his three years in Europe. Abdullah’s own asylum application had been rejected, and then reopened on a technicality.

Episodes of terrorism and crime do shift thinking in a populist direction. If there was a moment when public sentiment about mass migration began to swing, as if on a hinge, it came in the days after New Years’ Eve 2015-16. Hundreds of women reported having been sexually assaulted by gangs of immigrants in the center of Cologne that night, but police took such pains to play down the attacks that news of the disorder did not reach newspapers for days. Notoriously, the city’s mayor advised women to avoid such unpleasantness in the future by keeping suspicious-looking men “at arm’s length.”

Still, the ultimate impetus for populism among native Europeans probably lies not in any individual incident but in the prospect, more vivid with every passing year, of demographic decline and even extinction. By this decade, several countries had lost control of their borders—above all, Sweden, where almost a third of babies are born to foreign mothers. The Pew Research Center recently projected that Sweden will be 30% Muslim by mid-century if refugee flows continue and 21% Muslim even if they stop altogether.

The wave of migration from the Arab and Muslim world may be as nothing compared to what awaits. Sub-Saharan Africa is now seeing the largest population explosion any region has undergone in the history of the planet. By 2050, Africa is expected to double its population to 2.5 billion. That increment of 1.25 billion young people is roughly twice the present population of Europe. At mid-century, Africa will still be the poorest place on earth, but it will be the richest in young men of military age. Until 2017 charitable rescue ships were transporting hundreds, sometimes thousands, of African migrants across the Mediterranean to Italy daily. These provide the merest foretaste of the population pressures that await.

Merkel’s invitation to Syrian migrants in 2015 was a detonator. Suddenly Germany had a million-odd Syrians, Pakistanis, Iraqis, and Afghanis on its soil—culturally alien, hard to employ, and making claims for the admission of millions more wives, children, and siblings. Germans were thus forced to choose between (a) welcoming an even larger second wave of dependent family members, and (b) damage control. This would mean stepping up expulsions, revoking longstanding rules on family reunification, and overturning various longstanding taboos against discussing Germany’s national interest and ethnic identity. Germans have opted for (b). They have shifted their votes from establishment parties (not just Merkel’s Christian Democrats but also the Social Democrats) to radical ones (not just the AfD but also the post-Communist Left party).

New Problems, New Solutions

In Italy, interior minister Matteo Salvini has become one of the most popular politicians in Europe by turning his party, the League, from a regional separatist group into a nationwide anti-immigration force. For years now, foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been chartering boats to mount extensive rescue operations of African migrants adrift in the Mediterranean. Salvini derided these efforts as taxi services to deliver migrants from the North African coast. Extraordinary maps published by the New York Times in June 2017, which showed rescue operations moving steadily closer to the port of Tripoli as humanitarian operations increased, provide considerable justification for Salvini’s view. But he went further. Salvini accused humanitarians of acting as go-betweens for two mafias: one that trafficked humans in Africa, and another that scammed Italy’s social-welfare system in Europe. He then closed Italy’s ports to such rescue vessels—first foreign-registered ones, then Italian ones. The result is that Salvini, called an “extremist” in many newspapers in the run-up to elections last March, now commands the support of 60% of Italians.

European leaders have assailed Salvini in the name of their values, none more volubly than French President Emmanuel Macron. In early June, when Salvini refused landing rights to 629 migrants aboard the German rescue ship Aquarius, Macron denounced him as irresponsible, cynical, and extremist. Salvini replied that, if Macron cared so much about European values, perhaps he could take some of the migrants himself. Macron did not. Indeed, when the same ship, the Aquarius, made for the French port of Marseille in late September with only 58 migrants aboard, Macron’s government denied it authorization to dock. In mid-October, newspapers across Europe reported that French authorities had apprehended African illegal migrants in the Hautes-Alpes region, driven them across the Italian border in a police van, and dropped them off in the woods.

The debate between Salvini and Macron revealed something formulaic and flawed in the latter’s way of thinking. Macron and his globalist allies sometimes acted as if the problems of human conflict had been solved by the Western “values,” and as if history were done presenting contingencies and surprises. That made it easy to “build a legacy” or win an honorable “place in history.” All one had to do was consult these values and order correctly from a menu of historical roles. With the rise of Salvini, the European Union’s economic commissioner Pierre Moscovici warned of “little Mussolinis” in the continent’s politics, and Luxembourg’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean Asselborn accused Salvini of using “fascist methods and tones”—which presumably made Moscovici and Asselborn the Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt of our times.

Populists, by contrast, argued that today’s events are not a replay of the 1930s—they are today’s events. “What people call ‘right-wing populism,’ ‘the new right,’ or ‘a return to nationalism,’” wrote Frank Böckelmann, editor of the contrarian German quarterly Tumult, “is only a reaction to specific new conditions.” That is the way Salvini saw it: he was just reacting pragmatically to problems as they came up. He wanted Italy to include in every trade deal it signs with a developing-world country a “repatriation clause” linking economic ties to a willingness to take back migrants. “I think I am paid by my citizens to help our youth to have the babies they used to have a few years ago,” Salvini said, “and not import the best of African youth to replace the Europeans who, for economic reasons, don’t have many children.”

Was this reasonable or was it racist? In matters of identity politics, the two adjectives can describe the same action. National identity is maintained by preferring one’s own people to others. This proposition sounds obvious and uncontroversial when you are saying, for example, that Italy’s destiny is a matter for Italians alone to decide—and not for Frenchmen to meddle in, even Frenchmen as powerful as Macron. It is perfectly innocent to prefer Italians to French people in that case. But is it okay to prefer Italians to Africans? Europeans are less comfortable answering “yes” to that question. When a boatload of migrants steams into a Sicilian harbor, and the law calls for them to be sent back to Libya, and thence to Chad or Niger, and they sue to stay, politicians who assert European values begin to hem and haw. But if one cannot argue against interlopers on behalf of fellow citizens, then the long history of Italy will soon come to an end. At least that is how the populists see it.

Class and Competition

The establishment view reflects a difference not just of ideology but also of class. Perhaps because he is yet a political novice, Macron has been vocal on the subject of human inequality. He is in favor of it. The president’s role in French life should be “Jupiterian,” he argued, while describing those who collected welfare as “illiterates” (illettrés) and “freeloaders” (fainéants). Like Matteo Renzi, the pro-business former prime minister whose center-left party was ousted by Italy’s populist coalition, Macron has behaved as if business were all: entrepreneurs and captains of industry are the only modern heroes. Cutting taxes, delaying retirements, and permitting Sunday shopping are the highest achievements to which a sensible politician could aspire. At the opening of Station F, a clearinghouse for high-tech start-ups, Macron found the name appropriate, because this would be the place that determined the entrepreneurs’ worth. “A station,” he said, meaning a railway station, “is a place where you run into people who succeed and people who are nothing.”

It was in this vein that historian Anne Applebaum, writing in the Atlantic, lamented the rise of two populist parties in Central Europe: Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, and Jaroslaw Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland. Applebaum, attentive and logical in all her books about Eastern Europe, showed little perspective or sense of context in writing about contemporary political clashes. She denounced the Polish and Hungarian upstarts as a threat to democracy, comparing them to Lenin’s Bolsheviks, Hitler’s Germany, and Apartheid South Africa.

Ceding Authority

All across the West, the intelligent, credentialed people who held the commanding heights of the economy were making the same mistake. They viewed the rise of populism as a misunderstanding or a glitch. Ashoka Mody, a gifted macroeconomist at the International Monetary Fund, cautioned against reading too much into the 2016 referendum on which Renzi had staked his political career: “Italians rejected the changes to the electoral system,” Mody wrote, “not because they had thought very deeply about the changes proposed but, rather, because the referendum gave them an opportunity to vent their economic and political frustrations.”

If such votes are only a “venting of frustrations,” then they don’t mean anything, and they certainly contain no specific instructions that deserve to be heeded. Last June, when Salvini began to change Italy’s immigration policies, Carlotta Sami, spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, voiced her objections: “Using migration in an instrumental way for a political objective is irresponsible,” she said in an interview, “because this reflects immediately not only on the lives of migrant and refugees, but also on the lives of the hosting communities of the Italians, pitting the one against the others.”

The verb “instrumentalize,” meaning “to make a political issue of,” is multinational shop talk. It is used to mark off an area of policy where public opinion has no legitimate role, and is therefore unwelcome. The duly elected constitutional government of Italy should step aside from making policy for Italy—Mrs. Sami will handle it! One might predict that no one would put up with such effrontery. In fact most people are willing to cede authority to judges and multinational bodies for as long as things are going well.

Where does this willingness to cede authority come from? Its sources run deep. Sociologist Norbert Elias, in his 1965 study The Established and the Outsiders, described the “monopoly on the means of orientation” that Brahmins in India held, just by virtue of being Brahmins. Most elitism is like this. To say that progressive elites control things is not a conspiracy theory, it is a tautology—they control the culture by definition.

Similarly, populists are wrong by definition. They usually internalize the idea of their inferiority and immorality. An establishment, as Elias sees it, always offers an alternative that the public can passively fall back on. Outsiders and populists do not. They will be subject to a “paralyzing apathy” unless a leader is there to light a fire under them. The challenge is keeping it lit. Hence the importance of Salvini’s social media videos and Donald Trump’s tweets. Constant motion is of the essence. One can see the difference between successful populist governments (such as Salvini’s) that act quickly, bringing rapid change; and unsuccessful ones (such as Trump’s over his first year-and-a-half) that do not, permitting all the playing pieces to roll back down the unlevel board into their pre-election positions.

A Democracy Movement

Margaret Canovan, one of the most sensitive academic analysts of populism, has described it as something that “haunts even the most firmly established democracies.” It would be more accurate to say that populism haunts especially the most firmly established democracies. It arises in democracies that are so built-out and specialized that a class of sophisticated political initiates is required to run them effectively. Any such class will be tempted to nudge the system to produce results more in line with what it sees as society’s needs. These “needs” may grow hard to distinguish from that class’s “values.”

Americans, living in the home of modern judicial review, will understand that judges are often guilty of trying to correct electoral results that don’t correspond to insider thinking. The civil rights laws of the 1960s, for example, have been interpreted to require transgender bathrooms, regardless of how democratic majorities might feel about them. Certain western European democracies work under analogous constraints. In Italy, both investigative magistrates (the equivalent of federal prosecutors) and adjudicative magistrates (the equivalent of federal judges) are members of the judiciary branch, and the bench, for the most part, operates as a self-perpetuating guild. Judges, not legislators or executives, appoint and approve judicial hires. Like Americans, Italians had plausible 20th-century reasons for enhancing the prerogatives of judges. Americans wanted to smash segregation. Italians wanted to ensure—in the wake of Mussolini, fascism, and defeat—that no prosecutor working on behalf of a strongman would use his office to throw political opponents in jail.

As it turned out, allowing the judiciary to be “independent” in this way was an even bigger risk. For, in Italy as in the United States, the judiciary is both a powerful regulatory body and a subset of what we now call the One Percent. Italian lawyers and judges, like our own, have a cultural affinity with intellectuals and progressive politicians. The result is that, when conservative governments come to power, the judiciary joins the opposition. Silvio Berlusconi, the madcap media billionaire who after 1994 became the longest-serving postwar Italian prime minister, was in and out of courtrooms for long-ago business irregularities for the whole two decades he was in or near power. He was convicted of tax fraud in 2013 and banned from politics for six years, until 2019.

Since the new League-Five Star coalition took power in mid-2018, Italy’s situation has paralleled that of the United States even more closely, with judges seeking ingenious ways to thwart a government they oppose on ideological grounds. A Genovese judge threatened to seize the League’s entire €49-million treasury, for an embezzlement case that antedates Salvini’s takeover of the party. After Salvini delayed the disembarkation of 177 Eritreans who had arrived aboard the Italian Coast Guard boat Diciotti, a prosecutor in Agrigento indicted him for kidnapping.

Where the United States is unloved among European populists, it is sometimes as the source of such judicial chicanery. American forces wrote or inspired a number of postwar constitutions, including the German Grundgesetz, which contains guarantees that many blame for the country’s impending “dissolution” by migration. “It is high time,” writes Frank Böckelmann, “for a constitution that is of the German people and for the German people.” For another thing, the United States tax code provides the model for various activist foundations that have left governments feeling surveilled and threatened in their sovereignty. That has been particularly so in Hungary, which in recent months has moved to close the Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros’s charities and to shutter a university he founded.

Orbán’s philosophy has been described in Western headlines as an attack on democracy. It is more accurately described as a passionate defense of his own vision of democracy. Orbán’s vision is different from the one that prevails in the West today. It is closer to the understanding of democracy that prevailed in the United States 60 years ago. For Orbán, democracy is when a sovereign people votes and chooses its destiny. Period. A democratic republic need not be liberal, or neutral as to values. It can favor Christianity or patriotism, if it so chooses, and it can even proudly call such choices “illiberal,” as Orbán did in a 2014 speech.

The detractors of Orbán-style democracy consider democracy a set of progressive outcomes that democracies tend to choose, and may even have chosen at some time in the past. If a progressive law or judicial ruling or executive order coincides with the “values” of experts, a kind of mystical ratification results, and the outcome is what the builders of the European Union call an acquis—something permanent, unassailable, and constitutional-seeming. If a democratic majority were to overturn, say, a country’s membership in the European Union, or a state’s laws establishing gay marriage, that outcome would be called “undemocratic.” Of course it would be no such thing. What would be threatened in this case would be somebody’s values, not everyone’s democracy.

That is our problem. Liberalism and democracy have come into conflict. “Populist” is what those loyal to the former call those loyal to the latter.

See Also Patriotism vs. Multiculturalism

Bradley Campbell writes insightfully at Quillette The Free Speech Crisis Is Worse than People Think  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

A new moral culture

If you were a time traveler from 10 years ago—maybe even five years ago—you’d probably have trouble following some of that. What’s a microaggression? What’s woke? And how could a New York Times op-ed lead to that kind of uproar on campus? But if you’ve been around, and if you’ve been following the happenings on American college campuses, you’re familiar by now with conflicts like this and the new moral terminology guiding the campus activists. In the last few years we’ve seen professors such as Nicholas Christakis at Yale and Brett Weinstein at Evergreen State College surrounded by angry, cursing students, with Christakis and his wife, Erika Christakis, soon leaving their positions as the masters of one of Yale’s residential colleges and Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heying, leaving Evergreen entirely. We’ve heard about microaggressions, said to be small slights that over time do great harm to disadvantaged groups; trigger warnings, which some students demand before they are exposed to course material that might be disturbing; and safe spaces, where people can go to be free of ideas that challenge leftist identity politics. We’ve heard claims that speech that offends campus activists is actually violence, and we’ve seen activists use actual violence to stop it —and to defend this as self-defense—when administrators fail to do so.

These are all signs of a new moral culture. In our book The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, Jason Manning and I discuss how a new culture of victimhood differs from cultures of honor and dignity, and we discuss how the new culture threatens the mission of the university.

In honor cultures men want to appear formidable. A reputation for bravery, for being willing and capable of handling conflicts through violence, is important. In a society like the pre-Civil War American South, for example, a gentleman who allowed himself or his family members to be injured or insulted might be thought a coward, someone with no honor, and lose his social standing. To avoid this, men sometimes fought duels. In honor cultures men are sensitive even to minor slights, but they handle such offenses themselves, possibly with violence.

In dignity cultures, though, people have worth regardless of their reputations. Because an insult doesn’t take away your worth, your dignity, you can ignore others’ insults. For serious injuries you can go to the police or use the courts. In dignity cultures, then, people aren’t as sensitive to slights—they’re encouraged to have thick skins—and they’re not as likely to handle offenses themselves, certainly not violently—they’re encouraged to appeal to the proper authorities.

But the new culture of victimhood combines sensitivity to slight with appeal to authority. Those who embrace it see themselves as fighting oppression, and even minor offenses can be worthy of attention and action. Slights, insults, and sometimes even arguments or evidence might further victimize an oppressed group, and authorities must deal with them. You could call this social justice culture since those who embrace it are pursuing a vision of social justice. But we call it victimhood culture because being recognized as a victim of oppression now confers a kind of moral status, in much the same way that being recognized for bravery did in honor cultures.

Like dignity culture, though, victimhood culture is a moral culture. Moral concerns and moral emotions inspire the campus activists. Their behaviors might appear immoral to those who don’t share their moral assumptions, but it would be a mistake to think the activists see it that way, or to think they’re in some way hypocritical or insincere. Recognizing their moral concerns helps us understand better what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt call vindictive protectiveness, whereby activists are simultaneously protective toward some people and vindictive toward others. This is not a contradiction, but rather a consequence of seeing the world through the lens of oppression. Just as in an honor culture people show respect for the honorable and disdain toward the cowardly, in a victimhood culture people have empathy for victims of oppression and wrath toward their oppressors.

The optimistic critics are right about a lot, but their optimism seems like wishful thinking. The “grievance studies” that Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian targeted are still entrenched in the universities, and those sympathetic to the fields simply dismissed the hoax as pointing to the vulnerabilities of peer review generally. Meanwhile, people come up with novel ways to undermine the norms of scholarship in the name of social justice.

And what about free speech and academic freedom? The recent attacks on Abrams at Sarah Lawrence College, and the initial failure of the college president to condemn them and support Abrams, are as egregious as any of the others, especially considering the actual content of his op-ed.

What about microaggressions? The term has continued to spread. Just in 2018 are some of the ways administrators have continued to fly off the rails a bit:

• The National Science Foundation gave a grant to researchers at Iowa State University to study microaggressions in engineering programs.
• The University of Utah placed posters of microaggression statements around campus to raise awareness.
• At the University of Buffalo, microaggressions were the theme of the bullying prevention center’s annual conference.
• At Harvard University’s School of Public Health, students are now asked on course evaluation forms about microaggressions. Last Spring, in 43 of the 138 courses evaluated, at least one student reported hearing “verbal or nonverbal slights/insults.” Administrators said they were investigating the seven professors whose courses received three or more such reports.

And even while activists and administrators concern themselves with possible minor slights against those they perceive as victims, they engage in or tolerate insults and hate speech directed toward those they perceive as oppressors. There was the professor who said that a white college student tortured and killed by the North Koreans for allegedly stealing a poster “got what he deserved,” and that he was just like the other “young, white, clueless, rich males” she teaches. Another professor from Rutgers wrote on Facebook, “I now hate white people.” And after a group of Stanford students put “no crackers” on their community’s residential bus, a staff member defended them, saying, “I hope we have no crackers here.”

What’s more, victimhood culture is already spreading beyond the universities, making the case for pessimism even stronger. Corporations and government agencies, even NASA, have begun doing their own microaggression training. In Multnomah County, Oregon, a recent contract between the county and the municipal workers union guaranteed that “the County and union won’t tolerate any form of ‘microaggression.’” And the Times recently hired Sarah Jeong to its editorial board despite her history of tweeting slurs against whites and men—things like “#CancelWhitePeople” and “White men are bullshit,” the kind of things that are common among campus activists but were not previously part of the mainstream. And while the Times did distance itself from the tweets, writers at Vox and other left-of-center outlets defended them. Ezra Klein, for example, said tweets like “#CancelWhitePeople” are simply calls for people to challenge the dominant power structure. And Zack Beauchamp says that “White men are bullshit” is a way of pointing out the existence of a power structure favoring white men.

Of course, the danger of pessimism is that it leads to despair, which isn’t really warranted either. For one thing, none of us have a crystal ball. The critical optimists could be right. Maybe things will turn around. Or maybe our efforts are ultimately doomed, but are helping preserve the academy for a little while longer. For all the problems with universities, they’re still doing a lot of good. The natural sciences continue on, not yet wholly captured by the identitarian Left, and as bad as the attacks on scholarship and free speech are in the social sciences and humanities, they aren’t all pervasive. The randomness of the attacks is part of the problem, making them difficult to avoid even if one tries to comply with the latest leftist orthodoxy. But the randomness also means that even the most maverick thinkers aren’t attacked as a matter of course. Part of what’s strange about the Abrams incident is that he’s been writing similar things for some time without incident. At universities all over the country, people are discussing and debating ideas — with more trepidation, perhaps, but it’s usually still possible to do so. If there’s any chance of preserving that, even temporarily, we should do so. We’re unlikely to be successful, but it makes sense to try.

As we try, though, we need to recognize what we’re up against. Misunderstanding victimhood culture has led critics of its various manifestations to underestimate its strength.  One reason victimhood culture is strong is that those who embrace it are sincere and zealous. Simply condemning them, or worse, calling them names or trying to trigger them, won’t help anything. Neither will simply ignoring them until things get out of hand, as at Sarah Lawrence University. If you want to save the academy, you’ll need to start by offering an alternative moral vision.

Bradley Campbell is an associate professor of sociology at California State University, Los Angeles.

In the video, Two incompatible sacred values in American universities” by Jon Haidt, Hayek Lecture Series, he addresses the sacredness of victimhood directly starting about 25 minutes into the talk.

Thomas D. Klingenstein writes a perceptive essay at American Thinker. He sees a deeper meaning in the now familiar war between Trump and the leftist establishment in the United States. I have changed the title to broaden the issue he raises, since the struggle against multiculturalism is not limited to the American nation-state. Other elections like the recent one in Brazil, and previously Brexit are examples of the same dynamic playing out in other jurisdictions around the world. Even in Canada, one province after another is voting against typical Canadian liberal multiculturalism. This despite (or maybe because of) politically correct and photogenic PM Justin Trudeau waving every diversity and gender awareness flag, tearfully apologizing to natives, the LGBTQIA “community” and passing legislation targeting Islamophobia.

Our House Divided: Multiculturalism vs. America is by Thomas D. Klingenstein. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Following Trump’s lead—and Lincoln’s.

Many conservatives did not see that Trump had framed the 2016 election as a choice between two mutually exclusive regimes: multiculturalism and America. What I call “multiculturalism” includes “identity politics” and “political correctness.” If multiculturalism continues to worm its way into the public mind, it will ultimately destroy America. Consequently, the election should have been seen as a contest between a woman who, perhaps without quite intending it, was leading a movement to destroy America and a man who wanted to save America. The same contest is being played out in the upcoming midterm elections.

I realize the term “multiculturalism” is somewhat dated, but I mean to freshen it up by using it in its most comprehensive sense: a political philosophy. Multiculturalism conceives of society as a collection of cultural identity groups, each with its own worldview, all oppressed by white males, collectively existing within permeable national boundaries. Multiculturalism replaces American citizens with so-called “global citizens.” It carves “tribes” out of a society whose most extraordinary success has been their assimilation into one people. It makes education a political exercise in the liberation of an increasing number of “others,” and makes American history a collection of stories of white oppression, thereby dismantling a unifying, self-affirming narrative without which no nation can long survive.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump exposed multiculturalism as the revolutionary movement it is. He showed us that multiculturalism, like slavery in the 1850’s, is an existential threat. Trump exposed this threat by standing up to it and its enforcement arm, political correctness. Indeed, he made it his business to kick political correctness in the groin on a regular basis. In countless variations of crassness, he said over and over exactly what political correctness prohibits one from saying: “America does not want cultural diversity; we have our culture, it’s exceptional, and we want to keep it that way.” He also said, implicitly but distinctly: the plight of various “oppressed groups” is not the fault of white males. This too violates a sacred tenet of multiculturalism. Trump said these things at a time when they were the most needful things to say, and he said them as only he could, with enough New York “attitude” to jolt the entire country. Then, to add spicy mustard to the pretzel, he identified the media as not just anti-truth, but anti-American.

Trump is a walking, talking rejection of multiculturalism and the post-modern ideas that support it. Trump believes there are such things as truth and history and his belief in these things is much more important than whether he always tells the truth himself or knows his history—which admittedly is sometimes doubtful.

His pungent assertion that there are “shithole” countries was an example of Trump asserting that there is truth. He was saying that some countries are better than others and America is one of the better ones, perhaps even the best. Multiculturalism says it is wrong to say this (as it was “wrong” for Reagan to call the Soviet Union “evil”). Trump is the only national political figure who does not care what multiculturalism thinks is wrong. He, and he alone, categorically and brazenly rejects the morality of multiculturalism. He is virtually the only one on our national political stage defending America’s understanding of right and wrong, and thus nearly alone in truly defending America. This why he is so valuable—so much depends on him.

His shortcomings are many and some matter, but under present circumstances what matters more is that Trump understands we are at war and he is willing to fight. In conventional times, Trump might have been one of the worst presidents we ever had; but in these most unconventional times, he may be the best president we could have had.

2016 and the Meaning of America 

Most conservatives did not see Trump in 2016 as a man defending America. This was in large part because they did not see that America was in need of defending. What conservatives did see was Trump’s policies (which didn’t line up with conservative ones) and his character (which didn’t line up, period), and they concluded the country was nowhere near in bad enough shape, and Hillary Clinton not enough of a danger, to justify enthusiasm for a man so manifestly unfit for the role.

In what might be a case of everybody’s-out-of-step-but-me, many conservatives have concluded that if the electorate voted into office a man so obviously unfit to be president, there must be something wrong with the electorate.

I think the explanation for Trump’s victory is actually quite straightforward and literal: Americans, plenty of whom still have common sense and are patriotic, voted for Trump for the very reason he said they should vote for him, to put America first or, as his campaign slogan had it, “to make America great again”—where “America” was not, as many conservatives imagine, code for “white people.” In other words, the impulse for electing Trump was patriotic, the defense of one’s own culture, rather than racist.

Levin and like-minded conservatives have matters backwards. Multiculturalism, not Trumpism, is the revolution. Trump’s campaign, and its defense by his intellectual supporters, was not a call for a revolution but a call to stop a revolution. Trump’s intellectual supporters did not say things could not get worse; they said without a sharp change in course there was a good chance we shall never get back home again.

Trump’s entire campaign was a defense of America. The election was fought not so much over policies, character, email servers, or James Comey, as it was over the meaning of America. Trump’s wall was not so much about keeping foreigners out as it was a commitment to a distinctive country; immigration, free trade, and foreign policy were about protecting our own. In all these policies, Trump was raising the question, “Who are we as a nation?” He answered by being Trump, a man made in America, unmistakably and unapologetically American, and like most of his fellow citizens, one who does not give a hoot what Europeans or intellectuals think.

Clinton, in the other corner, was the great disdainer, a citizen not of America but of the world: a postmodern, entitled elitist who was just more of Obama, the man who contemptuously dismissed America’s claim to being exceptional. What she called the “deplorables” were the “anti-multiculturalists.” She was saying, in effect, that she did not recognize the “deplorables” as fellow citizens, and they were, as far as she was concerned, not part of the regime she proposed to lead.

Perhaps Trump’s most effective answer to Clinton’s and the Democrats’ multiculturalism was his attacks on political correctness, both before and after the election. Trump scolded Jeb Bush for speaking Spanish on the campaign trail. He pointed out that on 9/11 some Muslims cheered the collapse of the twin towers. He said Mexico was sending us its dregs, suggested a boycott of Starbucks after employees were told to stop saying “Merry Xmas,” told NFL owners they should fire players who did not respect the flag, expressed the view that people from what he called “shitholes” (Haiti and African countries being his examples) should not be allowed to immigrate, exposed the danger of selecting judges based on ethnicity, and said Black Lives Matter should stop blaming others.

The core idea of each of these anti-P.C. blasts, when taken in aggregate, represent a commitment to America’s bourgeois culture, which is culturally “Judeo-Christian,” insists on having but one language and one set of laws, and values: among other things, loyalty, practical experience, self-reliance, and hard work. Trump was affirming the goodness of our culture. Odd as it may sound, he was telling us how to live a worthy life. Trump is hardly the ideal preacher, but in a society where people are thirsting for public confirmation of the values they hold dear, they do not require pure spring water. Even Trump’s crass statements objectifying women did not seem to rattle Trump women voters, perhaps because it did not come as news to them that men objectify women. In other words, Trump was being a man, albeit not the model man, but what mattered was that he was not the multicultural sexless man. A similar rejection of androgyny may have been at work in the Kavanaugh hearings.

It was only a generation or so ago that our elite, liberals as well as conservatives, were willing to defend America’s bourgeois culture, American exceptionalism, and full assimilation for immigrants. Arthur Schlesinger expressed his view of assimilation this way: the “American Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition … provides the standard to which other immigrant nationalities are expected to conform, the matrix into which they are to be assimilated.” That meant giving up one’s home culture, not necessarily every feature and not right away, but ultimately giving up its essential features in favor of American culture. In other words, there are no hyphenated Americans.

Trump understands that “diversity is our greatest strength,” which is multiculturalism boiled down to an aphorism, is exactly backwards. America’s greatest strength is having transcended race, and the one major exception was very nearly our undoing. In light of this history, the history of the world (one “tribal” war after another), and the multicultural car wreck that is Europe today, to manufacture cultural diversity is nothing less than self-immolating idiocy. Trump might not put it in these words, but he gets it. The average American gets it too, because it is not very difficult to get: it is common sense.

The Kavanaugh Hearings: Multiculturalism at Work

In exposing the dangers of multiculturalism, Trump exposed its source: radical liberal intellectuals, most of whom hang about the humanities departments (and their modern day equivalents) at our best colleges and universities, where they teach the multicultural arts and set multicultural rules. And from the academy these ideas and rules are drained into the mostly liberal, mostly unthinking opinion-forming elite who then push for open borders, diversity requirements, racism (which somehow they get us to call its opposite), and other aspects of multiculturalism.

Multicultural rules were in full force in the Kavanaugh hearings. Armed with the chapter of the multicultural creed that covers “male oppression of women,” Democrats could attack Kavanaugh with accusations conjured out of nothing. At the same time, multicultural rules required Republicans to fight with one hand behind their backs: they were forced to allow a case with no basis to go forward, could not attack the accuser, and had to use a woman to question her. Republicans reflexively accepted their assigned role as misogynists (and would have been accepting the role of racists had the accuser been black). True, Republicans had no choice; still when one is being played one needs to notice.

Had Trump tweeted, “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the sex or color of the questioner,” I suspect the majority of Americans would have applauded. After all, that is the American view of the matter. It’s not the average American who requires a woman questioner or a black one. We know that because Trumpsters have told us. It’s not typically the parents in our inner-city schools who demand teachers and administrators with skin color that matches that of their children. It’s not ordinary Mexican immigrants who are agitating to preserve their native culture. It’s the multiculturalists.

Multicultural rules flow from multiculturalism’s understanding of justice, which is based not on the equality of individuals (the American understanding) but on the equality of identity groups oppressed by white males. In the Kavanaugh hearings, the multiculturalists did not see a contest between two individuals but rather between all women who are all oppressed and all white men who are all oppressors. Americans claimed the multiculturalists violated due process and conventional rules of evidence, but from the multiculturalists’ perspective what Americans saw as violations were actually multiculturalism’s understanding of due process and rules of evidence. Americans were seeing a revolution in action.

We now find ourselves in a situation not unlike that which existed before the Civil War, where one side had an understanding of justice that rested on the principle of human equality, while the other side rested on the principle that all men are equal except black men. One side implied a contraction and ultimate extinction of slavery; the other, its expansion. It was a case of a ship being asked to go in two directions at once. Or to use Lincoln’s Biblical metaphor, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln did not mean that the country could not stand part free and part slave. It could, as long as there was agreement that slavery was bad and on the road to extinction. But once half the country thought slavery a good thing and the other thought it a bad thing the country could no longer stand. It was the different understandings of justice that were decisive because when there are two understandings of justice, as in the Civil War and now, law-abidingness breaks down. In the Civil War, this resulted in secession. Today, this results in sanctuary cities and the “resistance.” To get a sense of how close we are to a complete breakdown, imagine that the 2016 election, like the Bush-Gore election, had been decided by the Supreme Court. One shudders to think.

“What to do, and How to do it.”

The lesson is this: get right with Lincoln. He made slavery the non-negotiable center of the Republican party, and he was prepared to compromise on all else. Conservatives should do likewise with multiculturalism. We should make our opposition to it the center of our movement. Multiculturalism should guide our rhetorical strategy, provide a conceptual frame for interpreting events, and tie together the domestic dangers we face. We must understand all these dangers as part of one overarching thing.
This approach, however, will not work unless conservatives begin to think about politics like Lincoln did. That they do not may explain why so many of them missed the meaning of the 2016 election. This topic is complex but I think it comes down to this: As compared to Lincoln’s thinking about politics, conservative thinking tends to be too narrow (i.e., excludes too much) and too rigid.

What for Lincoln was the single most important political thing—the public’s understanding of justice—many of today’s conservatives think not important at all. It should not then be surprising why they missed, or underappreciated, the political dangers of multiculturalism with its assault on the American understanding of justice. Having missed or underappreciated multiculturalism, conservatives could not see that those attributes of Trump that in conventional times would have been disqualifying were in these times just the ones needed to take on multiculturalism. Trump was not a conventional conservative, yet his entire campaign was about saving America. This is where conservatism begins.

Education is another area that conservatives believe is less politically important than Lincoln did. Conservatives must relearn what Lincoln knew, and what, until the mid-twentieth century, our universities and colleges also knew: the purpose of higher education, in particular elite higher education, is to train future citizens on behalf of the common good. If the elite universities are promoting multiculturalism, and if multiculturalism is undermining America, then the universities are violating their obligation to the common good no less than were they giving comfort to the enemy in time of war. In such a case, the government, the federal government if need be, can rightfully impose any remedy as long as it is commensurate with the risk posed to the country and is the least intrusive option available.

Reorienting the conservative movement is a formidable undertaking, but we have a few big things in our favor: for starters, most of the country, including many who are not Trumpsters, appear to object to multiculturalism and its accompanying speech codes. In addition, multiculturalism, as with abolition, has the potential to energize the conservative movement. Conservatives, who are in the business of conserving things, come to life when there is something important to conserve because this allows them to stake out a very distinctive and morally powerful position with enough room to accommodate a broad coalition. In this case, that really important “something” is our country.

Thomas D. Klingenstein is a principal in the investment firm of Cohen, Klingenstein, LLC and the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Claremont Institute.

It took 15 years, but Brazilians finally woke up to the failure of socialist theory and voted them out of power. It wasn’t so much their belief in the new guy, but the fact he was stabbed during the campaign revealed how much the left will do to stay in power. To understand why the election went as it did, see this short video by a Brazilian journalist.

The socialist mantra has been “From each according to his ability, To each according to his need.” That ideology claims to organize outcomes to match individual needs by government collecting all the production and distributing it equally. That sort of government has failed every time, whether in Romania, Cuba, East Germany, or elsewhere. Not only because of corruption by the elite, but also because it defies human and social reality. In this respect, it is analogous to the failure of abstract global warming theory to explain particular local and regional anomalies.

A good insight into the fundamental problem with socialist theory is an article Income Inequality Is a Natural and Desirable Feature of Labor Markets by Joseph Michael Newhard. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Redistribution makes a mockery of the concept of equality, merely facilitating a leisure class that lives at the expense of laborers.

With the next presidential election already looming, it’s as certain as death and taxes that another round of hysterical demagoguery is upon us. Among the regurgitated bromides will be complaints about that tired socialist bogeyman of income inequality. Yet, when envy gives way to economic analysis, we find these grievances to be without merit. Income inequality is a desirable feature of labor markets, arising naturally wherever workers are free to choose from among the seemingly endless number of career paths and lifestyles afforded by a modern economy.

Income Inequality Is a Choice

One source of income inequality is differences in how much free time we want. Everyone values both income and leisure, but increasing one necessarily reduces the other—this is the labor-leisure tradeoff. People who highly value free time choose to work less than their peers. Income inequality results even between workers who are identical in every other way.

However, it is an error to interpret this inequality as evidence of inequity. These workers are choosing to earn lower incomes in exchange for more leisure time and consider themselves better off for having the option. Political charlatans may propose redistribution but will succeed only in decreasing the number of workers by artificially rendering indolence relatively more attractive.

Effort is another source of income inequality, especially in certain occupations. If two salesmen are the same in every way except one is driven by his work ethic to make more sales calls, income inequality can result. Greater opportunities for career advancement will also tend to fall to such workers. Each worker is optimizing, with one preferring a more laidback work experience in exchange for a lower income and the other judging that more income is worth the additional effort. It is misguided to conclude that the resulting income gap is an injustice.

Equalizing differences, or compensating wage differentials, is another source of income inequality. The many jobs available to us are of dissimilar unpleasantness, dirtiness, difficulty, security, or riskiness of injury or death. Jobs that are relatively unattractive in such ways must offer a wage premium to attract workers who will otherwise seek more favorable employment. If coal miners earn a higher wage than schoolteachers in Appalachia, then far from constituting inequality, this premium is, in fact, necessary to make both types of workers equally well-off at the margin (that is, “equalizing”).

Last are the investments we make in our own human capital. Americans with more education tend to earn higher incomes. Yet, educational attainment requires years of sacrifice. Wages and leisure time are forfeited. Studying and tests displace parties and video games. Many desirable purchases are delayed. One loses touch with friends and family. Marriage and children may be postponed or avoided altogether. This is a lot to give up, and it is not for everyone, but it is not evidence of inequity when those who sacrificed so much in youth earn higher incomes later in life as a result.

Maximizing Utility, Not Income

If Tyler makes $20 an hour and Jack makes $40 an hour, who is better off? When one understands the numerous factors that drive income inequality, it is clear that we have no idea who is better off based on income alone. If Jack makes more because he has a dangerous job that Tyler wouldn’t do even for $50 an hour, there is no basis for asserting that Jack is better off just because he earns more money.

People don’t maximize income; they maximize utility. If college students only cared about maximizing income, they would all major in petroleum engineering. Yet most students major in lower-paying fields. For many students, a mathematically-intensive field like engineering would mean a miserable, mentally draining lifestyle for which the additional income would less than fully compensate for not working in a more appealing occupation. Whether pursuing self-actualization through a career in accountancy, nursing, or acting, we consider not only income but also the costs of training, the appeal of the work itself, and the leisure time the career affords.

The Benefits of Income Inequality

Income is shaped by preferences like demand for leisure, time preference, and level of risk aversion. Ultimately, it is chosen by each worker as a result of one of the few freedoms we still have: the right to choose one’s own profession. Those who choose video games over long work hours, or partying over college, see a real benefit they deem greater than the value of forfeited earnings. Those who instead pursue higher incomes forfeit these enjoyable activities. We should celebrate that we are free to build a career that offers us an optimal bundle of desirable attributes, with income only one of many considerations. Income inequality is a natural result of this freedom.

Income inequality also fulfills an important social function. Higher wages attract workers to fields where their services are highly valued, such as in medicine. If the wage premiums of such professions are eliminated, the incentive to take on important but arduous work disappears. Workers will seek out only the easiest, safest, and most pleasant job opportunities, shunning fields that require years of training or significant physical or mental exertion.

Any Excuse to Seize Power

Unfortunately, none of this will stop power-mad politicians from courting the votes of those who enjoy the benefits of lower incomes but still demand tributes from their more financially prosperous peers in the name of “fairness.” Offering strawman visions of robber barons and banksters hoarding their ill-gotten gains, oligarchs will ignore the true causes of income inequality, attributing it instead to nefarious forces that only the state can confront.

Is it “equality” if Tyler steadfastly refuses every opportunity to apply himself, Jack earns $1000 for the week, and the state gives Tyler half of Jack’s income? They each see the same $500, but Tyler is also able to relax and enjoy his free time while Jack works; they are hardly equally well-off. Redistribution makes a mockery of the concept of equality, merely facilitating a leisure class that lives at the expense of laborers.

Living in a world of scarcity means that to get something you want, you must give up something else that you also want. Less stress, more vacation time, or a reduced risk of workplace injury or death are real benefits that people are willing to pay for through a reduced income. Yet, in the end, these nonpecuniary benefits cannot be stolen by the state and given to people who didn’t earn them in exchange for votes; only income can be. Thus, those who enjoy the many advantages forfeited by high-income earners also get to share in the monetary rewards earned by the blood and sweat of their more ambitious neighbors.

Joseph Michael Newhard is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics and Finance at East Tennessee State University.

Footnote: 

Personal economics was already appreciated in Biblical times.  St. Paul quoted Deuteronomy and adds the lesson in writing: “For the Scriptures say, It is not right to keep the ox from taking the grain when he is crushing it. And, The worker has a right to his reward.” 1 Timothy 5:18 (BBE).  Jordan Peterson adds his description what socialism doesn’t get about human inequalities.

Postscript:

A Russian once spoke nostalgically about the Soviet era:  “The system was simple and reliable. We pretended to work, and they pretended to pay.”

See Also:  Socialist Snow Job