American History Redux - Prairie Justice, An End To Protected Groups, And A Return To Laissez-Faire

For anyone who grew up even a few decades ago, it is hard to understand how Americans' skins have become so thin - how insults, innuendos, slights, and insinuating remarks have become such causes célèbres.  Bullying was par for the course on school playgrounds, an element of maturing; a learning process whereby the weak in their defeat learned about the enemy and the middling figured out how to evade, negotiate, compromise, or avoid.

Taunts were expected – racial and ethnic slurs and remarks about disability were common currency, the labeling of ‘other’, the natural signifiers of difference and threat to the community  No one was animated by hatred.  There was no hostility towards Jews, Poles, or Italians.  They, after all, were the furriers, druggists, and clothiers of our communities; those who worked lathes and presses or cut hair, paved streets, or cut hair.

At the same time, it was assumed that in an America still honoring self-improvement, individualism and enterprise,  foreigners would quickly and surely become economic and social players.  It wasn’t long before ‘No Irish Need Apply’ became ‘Only Irish Need Apply’.  Irish Americans quickly figured out the system and within a generation or two ran Boston, Philadelphia, and New York .

The Mafia, perhaps the most powerful and influential organization of civil society since the partisans of radical Republicanism during Reconstruction, was quintessentially American.  Its communitarian, hard-knuckled, authoritarian, and generous neighborhood rule after only a few decades of struggle, expressed the best of the Republic.

In a generation the Jews of the Lower East Side, rag-pickers, pushcart-sellers, and money-lenders came to rule New York and Hollywood.

This self-reliance, individualism, and fiercely competitive spirit was not just an occasional feature or one which applied only to the waves of immigration in the early Twentieth Century.  It came a century before when the new American republic learned of the vastness of the lands that lay beyond Philadelphia and Boston.

In the spirit of Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny, new Americans moved across the Ohio River and settled the prairie, the plains, the Southwest, and the Pacific coast.  There was no law and order, no government caretaker, no one to tell settlers what to do or how to do it.  Lawlessness was met with force, justice at the end of a six-gun, compromise and contract by standoff, violators shot, rustlers and cattle thieves hanged from the nearest tree.  

It was a time of rugged individualism, self-motivation, optimism, and adventure. Wealth was created, income earned, the market was no different from Paleolithic trading of cowrie beads. According to embryonic market forces, things increased in value and required more defense, will, and commitment to hold. The algorithm had not changed an iota millennia later. 

The West was a violent place.  If it wasn't rustlers, thieves, and outlaws, it was the Comanche, the Apache, and the Piute - all intent on defending their land from white usurpers.  To make the new nation whole, to build it from coast to coast took courage, determination, and purpose.  Settlement by settlement the nation became populated, productive, and wealthy. 

Nobody gave anything to those who settled western lands.  Pioneers, settlers, farmers, and ranchers built their own empires and defended them with resoluteness and defiance. 

The American character of today is a product of the past. America's recognition of history, pride and cultural patriotism is a living legacy.  Westward Expansion, that heady period of American history where Monroe and Jefferson were determined to create a country from coast to coast, to create a European continent in the New World, to dominate, control, and profit from the remarkable land discovered by Columbus, settled by pilgrims and cavaliers in New England and Virginia, explored and claimed by Lewis and Clark, and settled by new citizens tempted by the unimaginable richness newly settled. 

Wagon trains, the horse-drawn caravans of 'prairie schooners', the Donner Party and the crossing of the Rockies to the promised land of California, the winning of the Southwest, the clearing of the cypress, snake-infested swamps of Mississippi to make way for cotton plantations, the northward expansion to Alaska...all were not simply the ordinary territorial imperative common to all countries in history, but an expression of common character.  

So it is with dismay and disbelief that anyone with even a cursory look at American history and culture sees the erosion of this individualist ethos, the closing of the American mind, the inhibition of free expression, the dampening of an entrepreneurial spirit in favor of communalism, and the attempt to reform and reconfigure the country according to utopian notions. 

The genius cluster - Musk, Page, Ellison, Huang, Zuckerberg, Bezos and others - are called oligarchs by progressives. Wealth and individual success are ipso facto signs of elitism, white privilege, and rightwing extremism. Protected groups - blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians, transgenders among others - are deemed off limits for criticism, social satire, inquiry, and doubt. Legitimate inquiry into the nature of intelligence, talent, creativity, social integration and any other socially relevant characteristic can only be carried out within careful, 'respectful' parameters - i.e. not at all. 

The culture of diversity and identity demands an ipso facto acceptance of all racial, ethnic, and social groups as equal and thus beyond criticism or inquiry.  Why the black man still is a product of lawless, dysfunctional, and anti-social communities is a question not to be asked because it has been answered - racism and white oppression.  The seemingly irrational conclusion that biological sex is no proven indictor of sexuality which is a social construct is considered received wisdom.  The redistribution of wealth to create a fictitious state of universal equality is an a priori truth.  

As a result of both trends - the creation of protected, untouchable classes and the assumption that a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion is the final, absolute, unquestioned final social paradigm, the ethos of America has been seriously challenged.  The individual is not only dismissed but demeaned in the pursuit of social justice.  European civilization is at heart a racist, colonialist, exploitive culture which should be expunged from history, of no relevance to the new America. 

The American Left is most like Pol Pot, the Cambodian dictator who announced that his country was in The Year Zero.  The past existed only to be destroyed.  Every trace of the bourgeois, capitalist, depraved culture which came before his Maoist insurgency had to be erased.  As a result millions of Cambodians were killed in a nationalist genocide. 

With Donald Trump, progressive shibboleths are being taken down one by one.  The redistribution of wealth, the gender spectrum, open borders, multiculturalism, the derogation of private enterprise, the rise of statism and big, interventionist government, limitations on free speech as a means of engineering equality, are being challenged as features of a discredited, failed socialist system.  

Outliers are becoming fair game for satire once again, a sign of the health of free speech, in danger during the depths of the Biden era.  Every protected community has enough strange and curious habits and characteristics to fill a Jackie Mason bill at Grossinger's a thousand times over.  Comedic satire is hilarious because those outlandish clothes, pimp walks, street slang, and faux white talk of the ghetto are funny! And so are swishy, girly-girl, sashaying gay men.  Or the 'I Am Me' waddle of plus-sized woman. 

For very European immigrant group the taunts heard from resident Americans were shots across the bow, urgent messages to shape up, fly right, and act American. Italians, Poles, Irish, and others were not robbed of their ethnic identity.  They just subsumed it within the larger cultural ethos of the times. 

Today's identity culture says, 'Hands Off!' and the journey to full integration within society is slowed, deferred, and made even more difficult.  The 'Other', the outlier has always been suspect since the earliest human settlements. 'Stick to your own kind' has been the rule, not the exception; but majorities have always been inclusive when outsiders join in. 

Progressive 'diversity' and identity politics have encouraged separatism and isolation 

The genius cluster - the billionaire entrepreneurs who have remade American culture through almost unimaginable technological advances - are not oligarchs but seminal Americans.  Schools should not focus on those who will be the least productive members of society but those with the most potential.  Talent, intelligence, creativity, individualism, and ambition should be promoted not discouraged. 

The artificial, politically-sponsored tethers that restrict children's activities and speech should be removed.  Let children figure out who they are by themselves, thus preparing themselves for the adult world. 

Let America be America again.