The Outstater
Count Me Uncivilized
“A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.” — James Madison
THE FIRST ANNUAL Project Civility Summit has adjourned to much hope and acclaim in our lovely, homogenous Carmel. In addition to the “leadership training” that such summitry always presumes to provide, one of the more creative ideas was something called “porching,” a grassroots movement encouraging community engagement and conversation.
I could go through the rest of the agenda but you get the idea — an egghead version of Rodney King’s 1992 cry, “Can’t we all get along?”
Well, no, we can’t, as it turns out. The experiment with classless, multicultural democracy faces daunting challenges post George Floyd. They start with the fact that the only Americans who still take it seriously are wealthy white liberals, race grifters and the mass media. But its problems, unfortunate and unfashionable though they may be, deserve to be intelligently assessed.
Again, for the hundredth time, this country was not built as a democracy. It was built as a constitutional republic. That means it may deny the wishes of one group or another, even a majority, to ensure liberty for the individual. The late economist Walter Williams was surely correct:
“Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual. The Founders knew that a democracy would lead to some kind of tyranny. The term ‘democracy’ appears in none of our Founding documents.”
And please know that classlessness or multiculturalism is ironically more difficult to sustain in an open society such as ours. There’s no reason to believe that we as a nation will fare better in this regard than Mugabe’s South Africa, say, or Caldera’s Venezuela or a dozen other societies where “one man, one vote, once” came to be the rule. It is not explained by a lack of civility but by game theory. Let Grok lay out the logic:
“The open system’s strength (impartiality) becomes its fatal flaw against defectors (immigrants, cultural marxists, ethnic identities, etc.). This prediction aligns with historical precedents, that is, the recurrent fall of high-trust empires to infiltrative groups.”
Here is the progression:
Short-term — Defectors gain footholds (e.g., ethnic enclaves in business/politics), appearing “meritorious” while siphoning benefits and outwardly conforming to merit rules to gain entry/power (e.g., assimilating just enough to access jobs, institutions) but inwardly prioritizes identity.
Medium-term — Defectors alter rules (e.g., from merit to identity metrics), reducing overall efficiency (lower trust, innovation). The system’s initial cooperators face relative decline — higher costs (integration, conflicts) without returns.
Long-term — The system loses legitimacy (why cooperate if defectors win?). Merit erodes into cronyism; trust plummets (diversity correlates with lower social capital). Game theory predicts convergence to mutual defection: Even cooperators adopt identity tactics to survive, but by then, the original openness is dead — replaced by fragmented tribalism or authoritarianism.
Pretty grim, huh? And left unaddressed in Carmel was how to maintain civility while a defector group abides murder as an expression of social grievance or another group insists rape is justified as religious conquest.
What would change our prospects is if these initial defectors from our constitutional system could be convinced that it protects their own life, liberty and property just as it does those whom they would supplant or degrade.
That seems unlikely at this writing. Relating even the settled history of Western Civilization is now considered racist. A Gallup poll of U.S. adults this summer asked: “How proud are you to be an American?” Generation Z (ages 18–28) mustered an anemic 41 percent, mostly scoring in the “only a little proud” cross tab.
One risks despair asking how many in this generation have read the Declaration of Independence let alone have grasped its profound and world-shaking import. They have been taught a simplistic definition of America as a place where equality of results (rather than of opportunity) is guaranteed to anyone who can set foot here, period. That will render the Declaration moot as well as erase great swaths of the Constitution.
Getting together on your front porch, at that point, won’t make a difference. — tcl
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