Twenty or ten or even a few years ago, I thought white racism was a radically diminished factor in American life. Obviously it is not now. Was I wrong all along? Or did it decline and come back? I would argue for the latter, given that the new racism is so different from the old. But that’s not a hill I’d die on, either. I could be persuaded that I was simply insensitive to what was there below the surface.

Perhaps it doesn’t really matter. The present is never identical with the past but always grows out of it in some way.

These thoughts are prompted by Kevin Williamson’s outstanding defense today of his outstanding article on why many white working class communities are dying and can’t be saved by any possible means. He says today:

Conservatives thought so highly of Cosby for saying these things that when he was accused of rape, the New York Post protested that he was being “crucified for being conservative.” When the allegations first started coming out, Rush claimed that they were getting media play only because Cosby had enraged liberals by insisting that black men “start accepting responsibility.” Jerome Corsi, Trumpkin extraordinaire, fell over himself with praise for Cosby, whose speech had gone “against the grain of politically correct rhetoric that defines white racism as the cause and black inequality as the result.” (Conservatives of this stripe are big on being “politically incorrect” — about blacks.) Sean Hannity joined in.

Black man tells black underclass to get its act together, he’s a hero to white conservatives. White man tells white underclass to get its act together, different story. If you wanted to know whether white identity politics inspired by Donald Trump is going to be as foolish and morally reprehensible as black identity politics inspired by Al Sharpton, there’s your answer.

Houston, we have a white racism problem.

I think it really does come down to a choice between modern, liberal constitutional democracy or the abyss.

I keep coming back to Allan Bloom on this. The big question he was really posing was simply: Must liberal democracy destroy itself? And the context he sought to provide for the question was twofold. 1) If it does, we do not seem to be capable any longer of generating any other kind of humane social order; if liberal democracy does destroy itself, the only alternative seems to be totalitarianism. You can say (as I do) that this is because the great tradition culminated in modern, liberal democracy and cannot now be found outside it, or you can say (as Bloom did) that the great tradition died because we became aware that we could choose between many traditions and thus none of the traditions can now function for us as a tradition. In the end perhaps they’re two ways of saying the same thing. 2) Our minds have been shaped for a century by a radical European thought tradition that takes for granted liberal democracy must destroy itself, and we are now so deep in this thought tradition that we are not aware of the alternatives. Thus the American mind has become “closed” to even the possibility of the American experiment, and we cannot think freely again until we recover some awareness of why people found that experiment plausible in the first place, so we can evaluate for ourselves whether they were right.

Interesting times to live in. It will be fascinating, though not necessarily fun, to see what the Lord has for us next.