Assimilation

It's not just for immigrants.

After learning more about what went on in the recesses of the federal bureaucracy (from sources biased in the other direction from those that prevailed till just now), I’m thinking about subcultures—whether society is really all subcultures all the way down, and if so, whether it can survive that way; whether there can be a prevailing culture capacious and . . . vague enough for most well-intentioned people to opt in on; and, again, how Democrats “did all the right things wrong.”

Democrats set out (set sail off the edge of the world, you could say) to protect minority rights and identities by making them the majority culture by fiat, forcing their preferences (pronouns, biological males in women’s spaces, ever-more-hairsbreadth linguistic sensitivities) on everyone. Making the world safe for the most fragile, traumatized, and triggered—whose claims to hypersensitivity became a new source of power—was pushed beyond awareness-raising and enlarging commonsense compassion into a bludgeon with which to bully so-called normies. (Yes, this was revenge, for sometimes lethal, always life-warping exclusion, suppression, and stigmatization; it also offered cover under which genuinely harmful psychopathologies could be normalized along with innocent variations—but then, pedophiles arguably find better cover among "normies,” and always have. This isn’t simple.)

So now we have a backlash. (To repeat my other mantra, “We needed a correction, we’re getting an overcorrection.”) Once again, the old dominant culture (straight, white, square, macho) is being jammed back on top, like a fedora after a fistfight, only slightly the worse for wear from its roughing up.

What norms could most people of goodwill agree on that could coexist with expanded acceptance, even celebration, of human variation—cultural, sexual, racial? Same-sex marriage is a perfect example. By agreeing that commitment and family formation are good, and tenaciously demanding equal access to them, gay people have become “normies” in the eyes of the great majority. (Here’s an animation that shows how its acceptance spread.) If the extremes of trans activism have empowered the minority who never accepted gay love, they’ve also made everyday gayness look even more normal to everyone else, Republicans included. I would venture that a majority of Americans are willing to coexist with, and even to be curious about, other people’s different lifeways, as long as those are not forced on them—and that should go both ways.

Nor does any open-hearted person object to immigrants preserving their own languages and cultures—gifts that never stop giving to this country—as long as they also become fluent in the common culture and language. Code-switching is as American as apple pie. It’s the only way we’ll ever “all get along” (in those plaintive words of Rodney King), not by forcing our ways on each other. But we need a cultural hub, a mothership of shared values, to which all subcultures connect.