Christopher Caldwell (1) (1962–)

amazing read, scholarly, understanding how individual events explain what is going on in our lives.
pg 232 :" -- the civil rights approach to politics meant using lawsuits, shamming, and street power to overrule democratic politics. It encouraged-- no, it required--groups of similarly situated people to organize against the wider society to defend their interests."
this statement seems to me to sum up civil rights, its has nothing to do about rights & wrongs, & methods to correct, except by force, intimidation & threats… (meer)

A penetrating, erudite, and well-written look at the present-day situation in Europe as it relates to Islamic immigration from North Africa and the Middle East. Europe's civilizational exhaustion and confusion, characterized by its secularization and low birthrates, is in stark contrast to the hearty religious identity of its new arrivals, who are forming a distinct, often segregated, culture within its borders. And one that is antithetical to many traditional European values.

Caldwell delves into this situation by examining the historical background, and many of the more recent incidents that expose it for what it is, such as the Danish cartoon fiasco. What is most interesting in the account is Europe's own cognitive dissonance -- if not schizophrenia -- in how it responds to and understands mass Muslim immigration.

What Europe -- particularly its elite -- cloaks as broadness, openness, and tolerance is often a festering fear that they are losing their distinctive cultures and ways of life. Which non-elites worry about more openly, but whose fears and opposition never really manifest as policy, despite often representing majorities of their democratic populations. Diversity is touted, and 'integration' (rather than assimilation) is the program, and despite the glosses used to prop them up, they are manifest failures which undermine European national identities and traditions.

Post-colonial guilt gives way to anti-colonial, culturally suicidal tendencies. Caldwell, while not putting it in those terms exactly, perceptively grasps this.


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(44) I thought this was a very interesting book - an actual exploration of the recent history and politics of the US from something other than the typical leftist academic viewpoint. Not vitriol filled alt right crap, but not yet another offering to the altar of multiculturalism, diversity, and civil rights. Caldwell's thesis if I understand it correctly is that we got more than we bargained for when Civil Rights legislation was enacted. Instead of just a way to dismantle the Jim Crow South which was much needed -- Civil Rights Law became almost a constitution in and of itself. Whole bureaucracy's were set up to support it - Office of Civil Rights, HUD, EEOC, Department of Education, with carefully selected landmark cases that would come before the Supreme Court and activist judges. Expanded entitlements, government-sponsored lending of mortgages to people who were traditionally considered unqualified, coupled with the rise of globalization has left the country with a huge debt and lack of meaningful employment for the working class. Those who have benefited - the college educated elite, the tech sector, and historically marginalized groups - gays, people of color, women. And those who are losers - white men - named, shamed, and blamed. The last line of the book is purposefully unwritten but understood - enter Trump. This book makes crystal clear how someone like him could have come to power.

You might think this book is just white fragility backlash but I don't think entirely so - (though I admit to eye-rolling when polls of white Americans were taken as evidence of whether a problem was real or not.) Caldwell does not present himself as someone who would actually support Trump. What he says is when shame is a political strategy it works only on people capable of feeling it - so all the high-minded individuals have abandoned ship re: daring to disagree and instead the resistance (righteous and understandable resistance) is left to the crass and hurtful...

Anyway, I digress. I am taking a class right now called 'Teaching for Equity,' which takes as its assumptions we all agree with critical race theory, which assumes that for every example of inequality between people of color and the raceless white monolith - discrimination is the reason. That there is no other reason than racism and white oppression for the actual facts - unlike other marginalized communities which seem to come to parity after a generation or two; African American are on the bottom. The bottom of everything - income, incarceration, health, home-ownership, upward mobility - despite decades of enforcement of civil rights, anti-discrimination, and affirmative action. I don't know. I just don't know. But I do know that it is important to explore both sides of an issue unabashedly. The writing was a bit plodding and plebeian, but the subject matter was important to me and the intellectual crossroads I find myself at now.… (meer)