Disuniting

Interesting to hear this on Federalist Radio Hour pod of Spencer Klavan and Emily Jashinsky:

SK: “We conservatives think if we can argue ‘this doesn’t make any sense’ it will be effective...[But] nonsense is the point. Saying ‘2 + 2 = 5’ is a tactic to put [conservatives] on the back foot...I think there’s a point at which you say, ‘I’m not going to be able to argue you out of this crazy nonsense..the better thing to do is to offer people something truer and better and to offer it in a way that will play in the media landscape. That’s a really hard thing, to feed truth into Twitter, into social media.” 

EJ: “It is true that logic is not the way to win this battle, which is part of a larger culture war, about something so much deeper and bigger than one election...If we can’t rely on saying, ‘There are obviously two distinct biological sexes’, what is the pathway forward?” 

They speak my language. There’s certainly no reason to reason with political opponents anymore. It’s a hopeless cause wrapped in a despairing void. 

And from latest National Review, a review of Arthur Schlesinger’s 1991 book “Disuniting”: 

Schlesinger opens by observing that the Cold War is over and new wars have begun: not over ideology but over those old standbys: race, ethnicity, and tribe. As he proceeds, he quotes Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist who lived from 1930 to 2013. (It was he who wrote Things Fall Apart, whose title is borrowed from Yeats.) The greatest weakness of the Nigerians, Achebe said, is “their inability to face grave threats as one people instead of as competing religious and ethnic interests.”

For his part, and discussing America, Schlesinger warns that “the contemporary sanctification of the group threatens the old idea of a coherent society” — a society never based on race, ethnicity, or religion, but on “a common adherence to ideals of democracy and human rights.”

What Schlesinger wants to know is, “Will the center hold? Or will the melting pot give way to the Tower of Babel?” 

I had to smile — or did I more like grimace? — when reading Schlesinger on higher education: “The situation in our universities, I am confident, will soon right itself once the great silent majority of professors cry ‘enough’ and challenge what they know to be voguish blather.” I think Professor Schlesinger, 30 years later, would find himself still waiting...   

He also gives us this killer — and ungainsayable — sentence: “It is ironic that what the multiculturalists began as a joyous celebration of diversity ends as a grim crusade for conformity.”