Identify groups and political correctness are killing civil society

IDENTITY GROUPS AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS ARE KILLING CIVIL SOCIETY. From What is needed for free institutions to work, by Steve Kates:

John Stuart Mill once observed that democracy could work only among a unified homogeneous people. This ominous passage is from Chapter XVI of his Considerations on Representative Government:

“Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another. […] For the preceding reasons, it is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.” (Mill [1861] 1991*: 291-294).

The rise of identity politics, fanned by the Left and supported by political correctness over the last few decades, has led to many groups in society nakedly promoting their identities and interests.

However one group in the West however is forbidden by the Left and political correctness from identity politics — whites. Whites see other groups gaining political privileges and advantages, sometimes at their expense. The inevitable is now coming to pass, as political correctness is increasingly scorned — whites are starting to identify too, if only as as a defensive reaction. Tolerance is stretched, and political correctness gets ever more deleterious to the interests of the mainstream, which isn’t quite so “main” anymore. Recent insults such as preferred treatments for Muslims (of all people!), and the bathroom wars, are accelerating the trend.

See these photos of protestors blocking Trump’s motorcade and causing chaos at the Californian Republican convention. The kid holding the “Make American Mexico Again” sign in front of a big Mexican flag is typical — La Raza (“the race”) is “good” in PC world, but any hint of white solidarity is “as bad as the Nazis”.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this will mean the end of politics as usual in the West. As Kates quotes Mill above, “democracy could work only among a unified homogeneous people,” and as the late Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore said: “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.” In the coming decades, we might be about to reap the whirlwind of encouraging identity politics and discouraging assimilation.

hat-tip Matthew

UPDATE: The new white-guilt concept is ‘white fragility’, where

you’re racist if you push back against the people who imagine a world without whiteness or who openly say they want to breed white people out of existence.
The racial prejudice in this, or “racism” is you prefer, is easily exposed by switching the name of the race to, say, “black” or “mexican.”

hat-tip Stephen Neil