E-Pluribus | July 26, 2024
The Olympics, meritocracy and reality; what makes an American an American; and Gen-Xers, Boomers, Zoomers and Millennials, oh my!
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Editor’s note: The Dispatch invited me to write today about the Kamala Harris “border czar” kerfuffle. The article can be found here.
Robert Tracinski: Olympic Lessons for Our Debates Over Affirmative Action
The Olympics is intended to showcase excellence, the best of the best from around the world. As history has shown, that’s not always the reality. At Discourse Magazine, Robert Tracinski examines Olympic ideals and how those principles, admittedly imperfectly applied even in the Games themselves, should allow everyone to compete to the best of his or her ability in every aspect of life.
The Olympics are a kind of pure meritocracy, where standards of achievement are completely equal, and this is guaranteed by the fact that, in most cases, they are objectively measurable. How many seconds does it take you to run 100 meters? If it’s less than everybody else on the track that day, you win, simple as that.
Yet it’s not always quite that simple. There are a few Olympic events where the standards are not strictly quantitative and there is an element of judgment, even of aesthetic taste. In the Summer Olympics, the leading example would probably be rhythmic gymnastics, which combines gymnastic skills with a form of dance. The standards may not be entirely objective, even though they are judged by experts, and there are sometimes cases of bias or outright corruption.
[. . .]
The bigger problem for this narrative is that the element of subjectivity in judging is more the exception than the rule, certainly at the Olympics. There are still objective underlying measures of performance, which is what allows us to tell when someone is putting a thumb on the scale in the first place.
More to the point, the Olympics provides many examples of national disparities, where one country or group of countries persistently dominate a particular event in ways clearly not caused by bias. The Jamaicans, for example, are famously at a disadvantage when it comes to winter games like bobsledding—not surprising for a country where it never freezes—yet they dominate in the sprinting events, achieving astonishing success for a nation of fewer than 3 million people.
Some people speculate that this might be due to genetic and environmental factors, but most of the credit seems to go to simply having a good athletic development and training system. To compete at top level takes raw athletic talent, which depends on genetic factors and early experience. But to develop that talent requires training, coaching, a reserve of experience and constant practice from a young age. Countries that do well in a particular sport are those that have good systems for finding young talent and developing it. And when you have a good system, all the athletic talent in the country tends to get filtered into that one sport rather than, say, bobsledding.
In the New York Times, Orlando Patterson sums up the reason for Jamaica’s sprinting success in one word: Champs.
Officially called the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association Boys and Girls Athletics Championship, Champs is an annual competition attended by 30,000 wildly enthusiastic fans. Jamaica is perhaps the only country in the world where a track and field meet is the premier sporting event.
But it’s not just Champs. The competition is one part of a broader framework—track and field is huge at every educational level, with periodic regional meets drawing athletes of all ages from the most remote rural areas.
This explains why some nations consistently do better at certain sports and can also explain racial disparities within countries. Until recently, there were few well-known Black tennis players, golfers and gymnasts, simply because these sports were not as readily available to young people in Black communities, so the best and most driven young athletes were directed into other activities, such as basketball.
[. . .]
In the real world, there is no inherent reason why everyone can’t rise to a higher level of achievement and make their lives better. This means we should be less focused on the exact results and more focused on providing the skills that will help everyone achieve.
We should conceive of this less as a game in which one person loses if another wins and instead look at it as a race to the top in which everyone can improve, going swifter, higher, stronger—which, come to think of it, is supposed to be the underlying spirit of the Olympic Games.
Read it all here.
Francis Fukuyama: Who Is an American?
What makes an American an American? Should birthright citizenship exist? How easy (or hard) should it be to become a citizen? Almost 250 years after America’s founding, these questions keep coming back around. At Persuasion, Francis Fukuyama reviews the history of who “we the people” are and how that has changed over time.
In his acceptance speech for the vice presidency at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance stated that “one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea.” But, Vance asserted, the country was not just a “set of principles … but a homeland.” He went on to illustrate this by referring to his family’s cemetery where he hoped seven generations would be buried in a plot in eastern Kentucky. He said the country welcomed newcomers like his wife’s family from India, but “when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.”
[. . .]
The real question is what Vance means by the phrase “on our terms” as a condition for Americanness. I would have thought that “our terms” meant precisely those ideas that constitute the American creed: loyalty to the Constitution and to the rule of law, and acceptance of the words of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” But Vance seems to be making the point that in addition to these ideas, ancestry is somehow also critical to Americanness. That quality is conferred by your progenitors, and is not simply a matter of your individual choice.
And here we have a problem. For many decades after the Founding, American identity was indeed based on ancestry. Americans struggled mightily to move beyond ancestry to an identity based on ideas alone.
We can trace changing ideas of American identity by the evolution of requirements for voting and citizenship. The first sentence of the Constitution refers to “We the People of the United States of America,” but does not define who “The People” are. It was in fact quite restrictive. At the moment of the Constitution’s ratification, only white men who owned property qualified as full rights-bearing members of the political community.
[. . .]
For the first time black men could vote [after the country ratified the Fourteenth Amendment], and African Americans were elected to office both in the states and at a federal level. But shamefully, these rights were progressively taken away as the Southern states were readmitted to the Union after 1876, and the country looked away as legal segregation and restriction of voting rights for black people were imposed. Throughout this period, women did not have the right to vote either; their citizenship was codified only by passage of the Nineteenth Amendment after World War I. It was not until the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the 1960s that the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment was finally realized and women and racial minorities were accepted as full rights-bearing citizens, even if they faced continued discrimination on a social level.
It is important to step back and understand what was going on as a result of these changes. American citizenship and therefore American identity were initially based not simply on ideas, but on ascriptive characteristics like social class, race, and gender (“ascriptive” meaning things you are born with and have no control over). The full promise of the Declaration’s assertion of human equality was not formally implemented until the Civil Rights era. In other words, American identity was made creedal over time, by stripping out those other qualifications based on ancestry. Getting to a creedal identity was therefore a huge achievement, one that required war, death, struggle, and nation-wide mobilization.
[. . .]
[A]ny attempt to build a national identity that goes beyond the American creed must be one, like baseball or Thanksgiving, that can be shared equally by all Americans. The “one” that we are building out of the “many” in E pluribus unum must be accessible to the de facto diversity of contemporary America. Anyone who has attended a naturalization ceremony can attest to how moving they are, and how seriously they are regarded. Once the naturalization oath is taken, a person born in Iran or Korea or Guatemala can proudly assert, as my grandfather once did, that they are genuine Americans. Acceptance into the American family should not depend on how many generations of ancestors you have buried in American soil, but on what you as an individual choose and believe.
Read it all.
Joel Kotkin: The Puzzle of Generational Politics
“Every generation blames the one before and all of their frustrations come beating on your door” (a sentiment expressed by the renowned political scientists Mike and the Mechanics) is apparent once again in the 2024 election cycle. At Quillette, Joel Kotkin looks at how our various generational cohorts fit in in the current political landscape, and the impact generational interaction (and conflict) is likely to have in the coming years.
The Gen-Xers have lived in the shadow of the far more numerous and noisy Boomers. Only recently have we started to see this generation emerge with the rise of politicians like Emmanuel Macron, Wilders, Keir Starmer, Giorgia Meloni, and Justin Trudeau.
In the US, Gen-Xers are easily the most pro-Trump generation. Growing up under Reagan, they have become the most conservative of all generations. The emergence of Gen-X power is being delayed by the long rule of the Boomers, and in the case of Biden, even the generation before them. Trump’s victory over promising Gen-Xers like Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley blocked their path to power for the immediate future. Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term in the White House has frustrated the rise of the next generation of Democratic aspirants from the preen king of California, Governor Gavin Newsom, to more promising figures like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro or Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar.
Of course, the Boomers cannot stay in power forever. Dominant figures like the two current presidential candidates, and aging senators like Charles Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Bernie Sanders cannot resist the march of time and biology indefinitely. Their long-term political direction may be complicated by the fact that, despite their right-wing leanings, most American Gen-Xers are short on savings and will want to guarantee their retirement prospects. As current concerns, particularly about taxes and regulations, move them rightwards, like the Boomers, they may discover the virtue of big government when they are the recipients and no longer the donors.
[. . .]
Although they still tilt leftwards, younger voters also seem to be tugged increasingly to the right. Trump lost mightily in 2020 with this cohort (as did the GOP in the 2022 midterms), but that may be changing. Desperate to retain this cohort, Joe Biden has made repeated attempts to unilaterally cancel college debt, although these have usually been dismissed by the courts.
These gambits have not succeeded, in large part, because some Millennials have paid their debts. Most do not attend four-year colleges and the number that do has been shrinking. Across all advanced countries, roughly two-in-three young people do not have a college degree. These voters seem to be far more amenable to right-wing positions than many imagine. Driven by working-class Millennials, the percentage of young voters identifying as Republicans has been on the upswing since 2016. Trump is even gaining among educated voters who rejected him last time.
[. . .]
Millennials face a world in which economic opportunities appear to be fading. They face an environment where many good jobs are disappearing while they have to cope with high rents and exorbitant tuition fees. They may not see many benefits of things like EV mandates, which benefit richer, older customers who can afford them but not younger people forced to buy what are likely to become increasingly expensive used models.
[. . .]
More than Millennials, the Zoomers have inherited a negative world created by their predecessors. Even in the US, which has done somewhat better than its rich-country cousins in the post-COVID era, Zoomers are experiencing a crisis of confidence about the society they are inheriting. One recent survey concluded that most thought they were living what surveyors described as “a dying empire led by bad people.”
[. . .]
In the coming years, generational politics will likely accelerate alienation and polarisation. Faced with hard economic prospects and pummelled by inflation, many seem poised to embrace radical change. Indeed, recent surveys suggest that Zoomers, the face of the demographic future, are the most disillusioned generation, seeing less opportunity for themselves while coping with escalating food prices, high rents, and car-insurance costs.
These sentiments could be decisive in November and in ways not generally anticipated by political operatives. Overall, according to a recent Harris-Harvard poll, barely a third of voters under thirty identify as liberals, while half described themselves as moderates or conservatives.
[. . .]
[A]s long as the stairway to opportunity and advancement is blocked, the new generations will likely embrace a kind of politics, on both the Left and Right, marked by anger and alienation. Bombast and appeals to national greatness offered by Boomer autocrats do not answer the call of the future. Older generations need to think about how to give up some of their own prerogatives as they ask ever more of the young to sustain them on their long inevitable march towards oblivion.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter (X)
In case you have plans this weekend, here’s Greg Lukianoff with some helpful tips to keep you out of trouble. Trouble with the police, anyway.
Believe it or not, in 2024, there are still Whites Only spaces. Separate but equal?
And finally, the New York Times dropped a bombshell on Friday morning. Brace yourself:
