What's Wrong with the Whitelash Thesis

[Free Vulcan]

Liberal professor of political philosophy Mark Lilla is all for the gains on behalf of diversity rightly understood over the last generation. And we conservatives agree there really has been progress on this front, and our country in some key respects is more just than it used to be. Our rigorous “selective nostalgia” — attentive as it is to the ways things are getting better and worse — celebrates the ways things have gotten better for African Americans, women, gays, Latinos, and others.

One of the most memorable days of my life, in fact, was driving through midtown Atlanta the weekend after the same-sex-marriage decision and seeing the gay flag waving next to the American flag everywhere. One downside, of course, was that some religiously observant Americans thought that the working out of the implications of that decision would result in their marginalization as Americans, that our country’s flag would no longer be theirs. I realize the latter need not happen (although there has been more than one step in that direction), but, if it did, it would be at the expense of the inclusive ideal of American citizenship that’s genuinely conservative.

Read more at: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/442338/mark-lilla-vs-identity-obsessiveness

[EC]

@Doug Loss

Not sure if you'll agree with this, but in some ways the author seems to be describing what you are currently working on from the left's perspective. Thought you might find it interesting.

[Doug Loss]

@Doug Loss

Not sure if you'll agree with this, but in some ways the author seems to be describing what you are currently working on from the left's perspective. Thought you might find it interesting.

I read the NatRev piece, but not the Lilla piece at the NYT.  I suspect Lilla is thinking about some similar things to what I intend, but my suspicion is that he's still viewing it as a way to further leftist politics.  What I am hoping to do is to get in under the level of left/right, progressive (liberal)/conservative and address principles directly.  If we can get traditional-American-minded people from all walks of life to talk to each other and to agree on at least a majority of the principles presented, we'll have a group that has been awakened to those things that unite us rather than divide us, and that group may then work to make the government actually represent them rather than try to control them.