"Get woke, go broke" applies to countries and civilizations too
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To conquer, divide. We have been transformed into a population of former Americans, once united, now comprising hundreds of different classes of victims, each viewing the others as oppressors. The “melting pot” conception the U.S., always more aspirational than totally real, has been thoroughly debunked and replaced with the “knowledge” that America was and remains an evil empire, founded and maintained on oppression. There is no longer a core of a country to adhere to, and the people who did that are ready to bring in something else instead; many of us won’t like it, most will probably welcome it, because they’ve been taught to.
When we obsess in neo-Confederate style on race, ethnicity, or religion as the defining element of who we are, and we do this to leverage political advantage, then we set off a chain-reaction of Yugoslavian- or Lebanese-style tribalism. Like nuclear proliferation, once one group goes tribal, then all others will strain to find their own deterrent tribal identity.
… Yet the tribal problem is not just an epidemic of false identities and fraudulent victims. Entire areas of social and political reality are now set off and exempt from rational discussion. We are currently witnessing an upsurge in black-male crime, often descending into disproportionate hate crimes perpetrated against Asians and Jews. Yet any discussion of this violence is taboo, lest one is deemed racist or illiberal.
… Against Meritocracy
The old 1970s cynical canard that racial quotas would not extend to pilot training or neurosurgery is no longer true. Some of the major airlines have announced mandatory non-white acceptance quotas for pilot training, and not predicated on competitive résumés or standardized test scores. Many universities and professional schools are considering adopting pass/fail grading on the theory that affirmative action admissions must become synonymous with guaranteed graduation.
Yet what is the alternative once one travels this pathway? Suppose the idea of quota-based admissions is declared valid and salutary. In that case, grading must likewise be recalibrated along this long chain of anti-meritocracy to continue ensuring equality of results.
Licensing boards are next. If one is admitted to universities on diversity, equity, and inclusion concerns rather than demonstrable achievement as quantifiably determined by competitive grades and test scores and other definable exceptional achievements, and one is further graduated on the assurance that grades either will not be issued or will be inflated, then the logical next step is that licensing exam standards in law or medicine must likewise be relaxed so as not to interrupt the ever-lengthening wokeist chain.
In other words, soon where one went to medical school, or what one did in medical school, or where one did his residency, or his certification by a medical board of examiners will become rather irrelevant. The point is not to recruit applicants with the most competitive records and to ensure that they all are subject to the same standard of rigorous instruction and assessment to ensure the public can have confidence in the medical profession, but to make sure that profession measures up to some artificial notions about diversity, equity, and inclusion. The relationship between these metrics and health is beside the point.
We forget that what once separated the Western world from the rest was not race, climate, or natural bounty, but its gradual creation of meritocracies replacing the pre-civilizational rule of the clan, the tribe, or the race. The old inherited and stubborn obstacles remained: aristocratic privilege, class chauvinism, and plutocratic clout that warred with qualifications. They were the ancient impediments to merit whose power in the West slowly was also dethroned.
How ironic in their places, the reactionary Western world has simply created new exemptions and privileges, calibrated on premodern criteria such as race and sex that will set off chain tribal reactions as we degenerate into Hobbesian factionalism.
Anytime perceived merit, or something close to merit, was not the standard, a society either imploded or became impoverished and calcified. The racial, one-drop categories of the Old South or the Third Reich, or the colorized spectrum of the old apartheid South Africa, or the racial chauvinism of the new tribal South Africa, or the commissar system of the Soviet Union, or the religious intolerance of fundamentalist Islam, or the familial gangs and clannish tyranny of prewar Sicily ensured that all were dysfunctional societies, and often much worse than that. Opportunity was instead guaranteed, and excellence defined, by something other than demonstrable talent and achievement.
There will be no exceptions granted to the United States from these rules of history. There are many talented black women in the corporate world, private sector, and elsewhere who would have made excellent vice presidents given their race was incidental and an afterthought to their achievement and talent.
The Best We’ve Got?
But Kamala Harris is not among them. She was selected by Biden’s braggadocio not because of any past stellar record as a Bay Area prosecutor, an accomplished senator, an effective orator, or a superb presidential candidate, but because a frightened Joe Biden amid the George Floyd riots announced in advance that he would preselect his running mate exclusively on the basis of race and sex, sort of in the fashion of the white male-dominated world of the past.
Ditto Pete Buttigieg, who, in his dismal record as a rather inconsequential small city mayor and failed presidential candidate, had never evidenced aptitude for transportation issues—other than occasionally and ostentatiously riding a bike. He was never expected to seriously address problems like spiraling auto fuel prices, the bottlenecks at our harbors, the wild-west train robbing at the port of Los Angeles, the Southwest Airlines implosion, or our clogged freeways. Instead, he was appointed Transportation Secretary because of the diversity of his sexual orientation and his woke rhetoric that almost immediately surfaced in wildly out-of-pocket lectures about “racist” freeways.
Similarly, upon appointment as press secretary, we were immediately told Karine Jean-Pierre was the nation’s first black, gay press secretary rather than being asked to recognize any prior achievement that earned her such a coveted spot. Few said her appointment reflected a successful record as chief of staff for Kamala Harris’ not-one-delegate presidential campaign, or national megaphone for an ossified Moveon.org, or her stellar work as an MSNBC pundit.
What will a university like Stanford do when it admits much of its 2026 class largely on the basis of tribal considerations? It does not release who of the admitted opted not to take the now-optional SAT. It seems proud, in fact, that it has rejected in the past 70 percent of those applicants with perfect SAT scores. So why would one believe that Stanford truly deplores its past Jewish exclusionary quotas, when it easily trumps them in the present—and uses the same argument of diversity to excuse prejudice and disqualifying those who, by its own former standards, had earned admission?
Diversity is neither a strength nor a weakness. Diversity of thought can be helpful, or become chaotic as orthodoxy. Hitler’s 3.7 million soldiers who charged into Russia were especially diverse, but that fact did not make the invaders less murderous.
A multi-religious India is certainly diverse, but is not always calm or humane. Yugoslavia was diverse, and so is current-day Lebanon. Was either country a kinder, gentler, or more successful society than decidedly nondiverse Japan or Poland?
Just as uniformity can result in both stability and stagnation, so too can diversity sometimes ensure either dynamism or bedlam. In all these cases, the emphasis on tribalism is the critical determinative. If a 95 percent Asian or white country defines itself in blood-and-soil terms as did Japan of the 1930s and early 1940s and Germany between 1933 and 1945, then it becomes toxic, unlike a more natural assumption that race is incidental, not essential, even in a racially uniform society.
The same is true of diversity. Accentuate it; sharpen differences; treat individuals as part of tribal collectives—and a descent into violence and anarchy is assured. But consider tribal differences superficial, and human commonality more important than racial difference, then diversity can be enriching through voluntary contributions to the whole in terms of varieties of food, music, art, fashion, and literature. But again, envision diversity as iron-clad calibrations of identity in which the individual cedes to the collective tribe, then a tribally regressive America will be no different from the world elsewhere and our fate is assured.
So, we are headed, dangerously so, into an historically ugly, hateful, and volatile place—all the more so because we lie that it is utopian when it is pre-civilizational and reactionary.
I was a very impressionable preteen when I first saw Emanuel Leutze’s iconic painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851). Like so many American kids, I came across it in a history book, as a reproduction illustrating George Washington’s famous 1776 Revolutionary War journey across the Delaware River, and I assumed it represented fact.
Since its unveiling in 1851, Leutze’s painting has been expansively circulated in textbooks, prints, postcards, and blockbuster museum shows. Perhaps more than any other image, it’s become visual shorthand for American independence, glory, and the archetypal “American hero.” It’s also done a lot of work to bolster Washington’s reputation as the brave, unassailable father figure of the United States.
But like so much popular visual culture, Washington Crossing the Delaware tells only a small fraction of the real story and leaves many communities completely out of the narrative. That distortion hasn’t been lost on contemporary artists, a number of whom have reinterpreted the piece to tell a more inclusive account of American history. In some cases, they’ve also used it to mount scathing takedowns of the traditional—i.e., white male—notion of American heroism.
“It’s an iconic image whose afterlife has been even more powerful than its period reception, conveying to many audiences an illustration of American strength and perseverance against tremendous odds, and locating that significance in a heroic, inspirational leader,” explained Sylvia Yount, curator in charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Of course, it’s also been used to critique that notion, especially in terms of who’s included—and not—in that boat.”
Leutze’s masterpiece entered the Met’s collection in 1897, and it currently hangs prominently in the museum’s American Wing, where hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of visitors lay eyes on it every year. This past December, the museum also became home to a contemporary send-up of the Leutze painting: Kent Monkman’s Resurgence of the People (2019). Significantly, the Met’s curators placed the new version even more prominently than the original—in the museum’s lofty entryway, the Great Hall.
Monkman’s sprawling painting, which spans 11 by 22 feet, riffs powerfully—corrosively, even—on Washington Crossing the Delaware. It is one of a pair of works on view by Monkman, a Canadian artist of mixed Cree and Irish heritage, that reinterprets the Euro-American tradition of history painting by inserting indigenous people and refugees in the place of conventional white male heroes. In doing so, Monkman questions “history painting as an authoritative language, which people tend to consume uncritically,” explained Randall Griffey, a curator in the Met’s modern and contemporary department who helped organize the commission. “And he sees opportunities there to intervene and insert other narratives.”
Monkman’s composition revolves delightfully around an indigenous, gender-fluid mythological hero of his own creation: Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. In Resurgence of the People, she takes Washington’s place as the fearless leader of a diverse group of refugees heading for American shores. “Looking at the Emmanuel Leutze painting…[Washington] is the hero of that painting, and I wanted Miss Chief to be the hero of my two paintings,” Monkman explained in a video produced by the Met, in which he confronts Leutze’s original painting in person—and in full, fabulous drag as Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. “I wanted to make a monumental painting that really reflected on indigenous perspective to give it that same importance,” he continued.
