“It is going to blow”

Fred Reed has finally reached the same conclusion that I did more than two decades ago:

Here we come to the joys of diversity. Cultures can be too different to live together. Whites and blacks have almost no common ground, little common history. Whites trace their history back to well before the ancient Greeks, through Rome, the Renaissance, Europe. Blacks had no part in this and, it seems, have no interest in it. Aristotle? Thomas Jefferson? Einstein? Madame Butterfly? Galois? FORTRAN? These might all have come from some remote galactic civilization.

There is no agreement, anywhere, at any level, over anything. Hardcore conservatives insist that the coronavirus is no worse than the common flu as hospitals report overwhelmed ICUs and epidemiologists cry the alarm. Blue states favor lockdown while red states open up. Libertarians peddle cockamamie conspiracy theories. Mask laws are ignored or fought over. China, South Korea, Singapore shut down, control the virus, go back to work. Not America. Nobody is in charge.

Nothing holds the country together. There is no social glue, no dominant culture. We have no shared history, language, dialect, ethnicity, or religion. Diversity turns the country into rubble.

Diversity? It is the end of America. The country once was overwhelmingly white, European, Anglophone, and Christian. It worked, as approximate monocultures usually do. No longer. The North hates—the word is not too strong—the South and seeks to erase its culture and uniqueness. The Bible Belt is intensely Christian while the northern elites, heavily Jewish, seek to suppress Christianity. The coastal elites hold the central deplorables in contempt. Blacks hate whites. Feminists hate men.

Hispanics float in indeterminate limbo, not having jumped either way. Amerindians maintain a demanding apartness. Jews, neither Christian nor, in the minds of many, neither quite European or quite American, control the media and finance, generating perennial hostility. Bulk lot Somalis, having nothing in common with Minnesota, are in Minnesota. On and on.

It is going to blow.

The more one studies history, the more one understands that societies which violate certain basic principles do not put themselves at risk of collapse, they assure their own collapse. Neither “diversity” nor “equality” are new concepts, to the contrary, they are very old ones that are intrinsically tied to past societal failures.

The only thing that is new and different about the current situation in the United States is its scale. And that is a very sobering thought indeed. Because the only way out is through.