An American Tragedy

By David Harsanyi

Thursday, September 03, 2020

 

Here’s a patriotic yarn:

 

In my suburban Maryland neighborhood, there resides a dizzying array of ethnic, religious, and national identities. These Americans not only coexist peacefully, they send their kids to the same schools and overpriced universities; they not only shop at the same big-box stores and stream the same television shows, they often become friends and engage in communal projects without displaying a hint of ethnic, racial, or religious animus.

 

In my kid’s senior high-school yearbook, I can discern no fewer than 25 distinct nationalities — and there are likely many more. In the 1980s, schools were crammed with Michelles and Lisas and Johns and Davids. Today I regularly mispronounce the beautiful names of my children’s highly accomplished friends, despite my very best efforts.

 

The graduating class includes the descendants of both Chinese and their onetime Japanese oppressors, of Bangladeshis and their onetime Pakistani oppressors, of Nigerians and their onetime British colonizers, and of Jews and their onetime would-be German annihilators — and an array of other backgrounds and faiths that have long and complicated, oftentimes violent, histories with each other.

 

Most of these families are now solidly in the middle or upper middle class. This is unsurprising. Name any group of newcomers to the United States, and they will almost surely have higher living standards, higher educational attainment, and freer lives than those who live in the place they came from. That many of these parents still speak with accents only illustrates that one can quickly shed ancestral grievances and find success here.

 

This is not to say that my neighbors never harbor any residual grudges from the old country — all heritages come with the wounds of history — and some may still prefer the company of their own ethnic group. All of that typically changes within a generation. Whatever the case, today all of us sit in auditoriums (or in lockdowns, wishing we could) and celebrate the achievements of our children together.

 

The story above, told in endless iterations, has become something of a platitude in political rhetoric. Most times, though, we take away the wrong lessons. Our strength isn’t diversity — though it might be the flavor that enhances our cultural lives — but rather our ability to convince widely disparate people to adopt American norms and surrender many of their own. That’s one of the reasons assimilation is more successful here than anywhere else. Europeans might try to artificially replicate our arrangement by adopting all the vacuous and relativistic slogans about inclusion, but they miss the most vital part of the arrangement.

 

Yet today there is a simmering catastrophe underway. It is most obvious in our politics, protests, and media, but anecdotally I see it unfolding in the kids graduating from the local high school. Students are now often saddled with abhorrently misleading versions of American history that threaten social cohesion.

 

In his Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Donald Trump claimed that schools are teaching kids to “hate our country” with a “far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.” This statement might be imbued with the typical Trump hyperbole, but it is undeniable that many teenagers across the country are now steeped in an excessively self-critical, race-obsessed history of the United States that accentuates every sin but is devoid of vital context and any foundational civic understanding. This self-loathing corrodes truth. It also strips us of the idealism and aspirational notions that are necessary for the American project to survive.

 

Perhaps your school is better off. My county, situated near the capital of the nation, will begin to “infuse” the New York Times’ fabulist 1619 Project “into the mainstream English and Social Studies” resources for students from middle school to high school. It’s no surprise that the same school district that often dispenses with the great works of literature so that kids can read the personal grievances of Ta-Nehisi Coates or the historical revisionism of Howard Zinn will ratchet up the unseemly indoctrination of children. Why the parents of those who escaped the strictures of tyranny, caste, and genuine racism kowtow to the propagandists who run these schools is incomprehensible to me.

 

In the past, we might well have been guilty of exceedingly idealizing and romanticizing our history. That is certainly far preferable to what goes on in many schools today. Kids often function under the impression that they live in an irredeemably bigoted nation where minorities are subjected to systemic state-sanctioned violence and immigrants are unwelcome. An entire generation that’s enjoyed the unmatched benefits of the capitalistic meritocracy believes the very idea that made it possible is evil. Never has there been a generation as utterly disconnected from the reality of their own amazing lives.

 

I was reminded of this when the first nonwhite governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, declared at the Republican National Convention that America “is not a racist country,” pointing to her own experience of overcoming prejudice. She was immediately ridiculed by pundits and journalists. How could Haley claim America wasn’t racist when she admits that she “faced discrimination”?

 

It’s easy.

 

Of course prejudice exists in America. And of course not everyone succeeds. And of course there is injustice. There is no utopia — not in Mexico or Thailand or Mali or Germany or anywhere else. Humans are often terrible. The important question is, Where can they best rise above the ugliest views of the worst people?

 

The amount of cooperation and peace that exists in the United States is wholly unprecedented in the history of mankind. Whether this situation is powered by providence or human design, or both, many kids starting school this week live in a miracle. They just don’t know it anymore. That’s a tragedy.