Changing Times

Here’s the opening of David Brooks’s column in the New York Times:

When I was a boy I was taught a certain story about America. This was the land of opportunity. Immigrants came to this land and found an open field and a fair chance to pursue their dreams. In this story Benjamin Franklin could be held up as the quintessential American — the young hustler, who through his ingenuity and dogged self-improvement created new businesses and communities, a new sort of person and a new sort of country.

Let’s stop right there. When David Brooks was a boy (up until about 1975) it was true. A lot has happened since then. Women have entered the workplace in tens of millions. More tens of millions of immigrants have come to the United States, some legally and others illegally, most without skills that would lead to a job that paid more than minimum wage. The number of immigrants as a percentage of the population has risen from 4% to 17%. Health care is an order of magnitude more expensive in real dollars. A college degree has become a basic qualification for all but the most menial of jobs (and even some of them). Higher education is an order of magnitude more expensive in real dollars. And the marginal product of labor which had been increasing for two hundred years has stopped rising.

Things have changed. We either need to change our aspirations and sources of national unity to conform to the times or we need to figure out a way to restore the world of 45 years ago. Either is a very tall order.

Mr. Brooks chose to frame the events of the last 45 years as racism, something manifestly untrue:

As many writers have noted, in the progressive account, racism has the exact same structure as John Calvin’s conception of original sin. It is a corrupting group inheritance, a shared guilt that pervades everything — it is in the structures of our society and the invisible crannies of our minds.

I don’t know about you, but I walk into this next chapter of American life with a sense of hopefulness and yet great fear. America needs to have a moment of racial reconciliation. History has thrown this task upon us.

But we Americans are not at our best when we launch off on holy wars. Once you start assigning guilt to groups, rather than to individuals, bad, illiberal things are likely to happen. There’s a lot of over-generalized group accusation in both these narratives.

History had nothing to do with it. Policy had everything to do with it. What is true is that times have changed.