AMERICA DOESN’T NEED A NEW REVOLUTION
Can the country confront its current problems with its traditional can-do
spirit? We have barely four months to figure out how.
By AYAAN HIRSI ALI
_The Wall Street Journal [1]_
Outrage is the natural response to the brutal killing of George Floyd. Yet
outrage and clear, critical thinking seldom go hand in hand. An act of
police brutality became the catalyst for a revolutionary mood. Protests
spilled over into violence and looting. Stores were destroyed; policemen
and civilians injured and killed. The truism "black lives matter" was
joined by a senseless slogan: "Defund the police."
Democratic politicians--and some Republicans--hastened to appease the
protesters. The mayors of Los Angeles and New York pledged to cut their
cities' police budgets. The Minneapolis City Council said it intended to
disband the police department. The speaker of the House and other
congressional Democrats donned scarves made of Ghanaian Kente cloth and
kneeled in the Capitol. Sen. Mitt Romney joined a march.
Corporate executives scrambled to identify their brands with the protests.
By the middle of June, according to polls, American public opinion had been
transformed from skepticism about the Black Lives Matter movement to
widespread support. Politicians, journalists and other public figures who
had denounced protests against the pandemic lockdown suddenly lost their
concern about infection. One Johns Hopkins epidemiologist tweeted [2] on
June 2: "In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand
an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus."
Although I am a black African--an immigrant who came to the U.S. freely--I
am keenly aware of the hardships and miseries African-Americans have
endured for centuries. Slavery, Reconstruction, segregation: I know the
history. I know that there is still racial prejudice in America, and that
it manifests itself in the aggressive way some police officers handle
African-Americans. I know that by measures of wealth, health, and
education, African-Americans remain on average closer to the bottom of
society than to the top. I know, too, that African-American communities
have been disproportionately hurt by both Covid-19 and the economic
disruption of lockdowns.
Yet when I hear it said that the U.S. is defined above all by racism, when
I see books such as Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility" top the bestseller
list, when I read of educators and journalists being fired for daring to
question the orthodoxies of Black Lives Matter--then I feel obliged to
speak up.
"What the media also do not tell you," I tweeted on June 9, "is that
America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or
what have you. We have our problems and we need to address those. But our
society and our systems are far from racist."
America looks different if you grew up, as I did, in Africa and the Middle
East. There I had firsthand experience of three things. First, bloody
internecine wars between Africans--with all the combatants dark-skinned,
and no white people present. Second, the anarchy that comes when there is
no police, no law, and order. Third, the severe racism (as well as sexism)
of a society such as Saudi Arabia, where de facto slavery still exists.
I came to the U.S. in 2006, having lived in the Netherlands since 1992.
Like most immigrants, I came with a confidence that in America I would be
judged on my merits rather than on the basis of racial or sexual prejudice.
There's a reason the U.S. remains, as it has long been, the destination of
choice for would-be migrants. We know that there is almost no difference in
the unemployment rate for foreign-born and native-born workers--unlike in
the European Union [3].
We immigrants see the downsides of American society: the expensive yet
inefficient health-care system, the shambolic public schools in poor
communities, the poverty that no welfare program can alleviate. But we also
see, as Charles Murray and J.D. Vance have shown, that these problems
aren't unique to black America. White America is also, in Mr. Murray's
phrase, "coming apart" socially. Broken marriages and alienated young men
are problems in Appalachia as much as in the inner cities.
If America is a chronically racist society, then why are the "deaths of
despair" studied by Anne Case and Angus Deaton so heavily concentrated
among middle-aged white Americans? Did the Covid-19 pandemic make us forget
the opioid epidemic, which has disproportionately afflicted the white
population?
This country is only 244 years old, but it may be showing signs of age.
Time was, Americans were renowned for their can-do, problem-solving
attitude. Europeans, as Alexis de Tocqueville complained, were inclined to
leave problems to central authorities in Paris or Berlin. Americans
traditionally solved problems locally, sitting together in town halls and
voluntary associations. Some of that spirit still exists, even if we now
have to meet on Zoom. But the old question--"How can we figure this
out?"--is threatened with replacement by "Why can't the government figure
this out for us?"
The problem is that there are people among us who don't want to figure it
out and who have an interest in avoiding workable solutions. They have an
obvious political incentive not to solve social problems, because social
problems are the basis of their power. That is why, whenever a scholar like
Roland Fryer brings new data to the table--showing [4] it's simply not true
that the police disproportionately shoot black people dead--the response is
not to read the paper but to try to discredit its author.
I have no objection to the statement "black lives matter." But the movement
that uses that name has a sinister hostility to serious, fact-driven
discussion of the problem it purports to care about. Even more sinister is
the haste with which academic, media and business leaders abase themselves
before it. There will be no resolution of America's many social problems if
free thought and free speech are no longer upheld in our public sphere.
Without them, honest deliberation, mutual learning and the American
problem-solving ethic are dead.
America's elites have blundered into this mess. There were eight years of
hedonistic hubris under Bill Clinton. Then came 9/11 and for eight years
the U.S. suffered nemesis in Afghanistan, Iraq and in the financial crash.
After that we had eight years of a liberal president, and the hubris
returned. Sanctimonious politics coincided with deeply unequal economics.
Through all this, many Americans felt completely left out--of the
technology boom, of the enterprise of globalization. I never thought I
would agree with Michael Moore. But at an October 2016 event, he predicted
that Donald Trump would win: "Trump's election is going to be the biggest
[middle finger] ever recorded in human history." I still think that
analysis was right. Mr. Trump wasn't elected because of his eloquence. He
was elected to convey that middle finger to those who had been smugly in
charge for decades.
But you can't give the middle finger to a pandemic, and 2020 has exposed
the limitations of Mr. Trump as a president. Yet when you look at the
alternative, you have to wonder where it would lead us. Back to the elite
hubris of the 1990s and 2010s? I can't help thinking that another
shattering defeat might force sane center-left liberals into saying: That
wasn't a one-off; we've got a real problem. They'll be in the same position
as the British Labour Party after four years of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership
and two election defeats, when eventually the moderates had to throw the
leftists out. One way or another, the Democratic Party has to find a way of
throwing out the socialists who are destroying it.
The Republicans, too, have to change their ways. They have to reconnect
with young people. They have to address the concerns of Hispanics. And they
have to listen to African-Americans, who most certainly do not want to see
the police in their neighborhoods replaced by woke community organizers.
We have barely four months to figure this out in the old American way. To
figure out how to contain Covid-19, which we haven't yet done, because--I
dare to say it--old lives matter, too, and it is old people as well as
minorities whom this disease disproportionately kills. To figure out how to
reduce violence, because the police wouldn't use guns so often if criminals
didn't carry them so often. Perhaps most pressing of all, to figure out how
to hold an election in November that isn't marred by procedural problems,
allegations of abuse and postelection tumult.
Who knows? Maybe there's even time for the candidates to debate the
challenges we confront--not with outrage, but with the kind of critical
thinking we Americans were once famous for, which takes self-criticism as
the first step toward finding solutions.
Copyright © 2020. ACT for America, All rights reserved.
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