Back in August, the New Yorker ran an interview with Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. The interview was, of course, adversarial: Professor Wax, a woman of exceptional intelligence and courage, is an outspoken conservative and defender of traditional Western values and ideas.
In this interview Professor Wax spoke about immigration, and advocated what she calls “cultural-distance nationalism” — which she has described as the view that “we are better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically, at least in fact if not formally, by people from the first world, from the West, than by people from countries that had failed to advance.”
She’s obviously right, of course. (Long-time readers of this blog will recall that I made the same argument back in 2013.) Given her prestigious position at one of the nation’s flagship schools, this makes her a threat. Indeed, I’ll admit that it was rather brave of the New Yorker to give her a platform at all, even if it was just to try to hold her up for scorn and ridicule, and to denounce her as — wait for it — a racist. The interview is full of so many “truth bombs” that a few of them likely detonated even in the minds of that magazine’s faithfully partisan readership.
Read the interview here.
7 Comments
It seems Prof. Wax and some others like Prof. Jordan Peterson and Prof. Rachel Fulton Brown are committing the made up sin of ‘racism’. The anti Western Left feels set upon by these types of people who in their view are obstructing the Divine Right of the Left to fulfill their mission. That mission is destruction simply for the sake of it.
Racism is real, but it’s no more a sin than carbon dioxide is a pollutant. Racism is essential to long-term survival because if you don’t think there’s anything special in your DNA, why bother having children?
The fate of white liberals is to die without issue, pillowed in nursing homes or hacked to death in the streets by their beloved diversity.
the irish, germans, scandinavians, and jews have all consistently voted left since they got off the boat. even “europeans” have proven to be too much.
not to mention what happened to the natives, like the ancestors of indian maiden liz warren.
“europeans” are not all the same peoples.
Angela Merkel has just admitted the “bleedin’ obvious”:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-merkel-immigration/merkel-says-german-multiculturalism-has-failed-idUSTRE69F1K320101016
My “shocked face” is around here somewhere.
@Whitewall, that article is from 2010.
jabrwok,
So it is. I picked it up on Instapundit this morning.
Wax needed a better interlocutor, somebody like Charles Murray who is sympathetic to HBD but also with his classically liberal credentials might have pressed her perceptively on the key issue that the professor and Chotner really only danced around, in my opinion (although I think the former acquitted herself in the interview much better than the latter): can acknowledging the empirical reality of ethnic and other differences ever lead in practice to racism or bigotry, even while doing one’s best to also underscore our moral equality? And more to the point, a corollary: is racism (or sexism or anti-Semitism or the like) ever justified?
Consider Wax’s remark about Enoch Powell, depicting him as a kind of prophet about the dangers of immigration who too easily was portrayed as a racist for his skepticism about the assimilability of non-whites. She might have been a bit slippery there, for I think Powell was a racist, or perhaps putting it better a “racialist,” and not one simply concerned about “ethnicity” being the basis of national identity as the professor put it. Although I can completely understand why she didn’t, honesty might have dictated Wax biting the bullet here and stating forthrightly that, yeah, Powell believed race—generally speaking, since you’ll always find many exceptions to the rule—determined culture. Therefore, unless you can ascertain perhaps the high intellectual ability of immigrant Africans or Asians, just allowing them in without distinction will eventually transform the character of a nation.