Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part III
July 4 edition
By its very nature, a newsletter like this tends to focus on problems to be solved, rather than former problems that have already been solved. Social media does this to an even crazier degree, because it favors extremism, drama, and doom, especially if it’s all caused by an out-group you despise. I’m also prone to a little excitability, especially on the doom front. So on this American holiday, I thought it would be a good idea to leave aside my “moral panic” about threats to liberal society, and instead point out facts and stories that actually suggest a brighter future ahead.
Let’s take the plague we just endured — which is still raging in many parts of the world. In the US and the UK and Israel, we’ve essentially beaten it, with newly innovated mRNA vaccines that are fantastically effective. It took just a few months to create these vaccines — even if it took much longer to conduct human trials to ensure their safety. Just a few months. Imagine if we’d been able to do that for HIV in the early 1980s (we still don’t have a vaccine).
We fought madly over lockdowns and restrictions — but it seems to me that, looking back, we may well congratulate ourselves. No plague in human history has been matched by similar levels of mass behavioral change and such huge scientific breakthroughs. And if America and the UK can find a way to get these vaccines to the vast numbers of people still vulnerable across the globe, it could be the most effective PR move for the West in a very long time. Meanwhile, as we found out this morning, jobs are coming back fast. The black male workforce actually reached a record high last month, and “the gap between Black and White labor-force participation shrank to its lowest level ever.”
Some even better developments: since last summer’s mass rallies to defund or even abolish the police, real people, largely black and brown, have pushed back hard. The movement may stagger on in a few increasingly crime-ridden leftist cities, but again, it’s effectively over — punctuated by President Biden’s call for more police funding and the apparent victory of a former cop, Eric Adams, in the NYC mayoral race. I think it’s a vital and good thing that abuse of power by some cops was so strongly protested. But it’s an even better thing that we can now demand what we need: more and better-trained cops on the streets. Yes, add social workers. But only with a police surge.
I don’t even think the far left’s attempt to dismantle liberal democracy through critical race theory has been entirely a bad thing. It has revealed a consensus too: that we need to do better in telling the brutal truth about our white supremacist past. It’s been encouraging that even Republicans now agree that the Tulsa Massacre, one of the darkest moments in American history, should be taught without any attempt to disguise its evil. If this helps historians — and not critical race theorists — to uncover more of this shame, and to reckon with it, we will be a stronger country for it. It’s a real gain to have bipartisan support for a new federal holiday celebrating Juneteenth. And it’s also clear that the stealth campaign to indoctrinate children in the methods of CRT has begun to meet a real obstacle: parents of all races and backgrounds appalled by its racism.
As for tribal polarization, particularly polarization by race and sex, it may be waning a little. The 2020 election showed a slight, but clear decline in racial polarization. Biden won because of an increase in support from white suburbanites. But Trump did much better than expected with non-whites. He got a 12-point gain in non-college-educated non-whites — a 14 percent increase from women and 9 percent from men.
Money quote: “Hispanic working class voters were particularly likely to shift to the Republicans in 2020. Pew data show a 30 point shift toward the GOP relative to 2018 (2016 not available). In terms of support levels, the Pew data indicate that noncollege Hispanics gave Trump a remarkable 41 percent of their vote in 2020.” More to the point: “nonwhite working class voters thought the economy, jobs, the coronavirus, health care and crime were more important issues than racial equality and way more important than immigration.” The obsession with “equity” is an elite white obsession.
On the gender front, there’s another encouraging sign in the Pew survey: “In 2020, men were almost evenly divided between Trump and Biden, unlike in 2016 when Trump won men by 11 points. Trump won a slightly larger share of women’s votes in 2020 than in 2016 (44% vs. 39%), while Biden’s share among women was nearly identical to Clinton’s (55% vs. 54%).”
It is also an unmitigated good that polarizing, dumb-as-rocks cable news is in such sharp decline. Part of the promise of Biden is that he would keep tribal drama in its place. And he has! Monthly traffic for far-left outlets has dropped 27 percent in the last ten months; for left-leaning media by 17 percent; and for the mainstream (effectively left) by 18 percent. But look at the collapse of far-right media traffic: down 44 percent.
Or check out a deeper, structural improvement: a rebound in the number of children being brought up in a two-parent home. There is no greater predictor of success in American life. From a low of 67 percent in the mid 2000s, “the proportion of children living with two parents has gradually recovered, reaching 70% in 2020. And the fraction living in one-parent families has slipped from 28% to 25%, while the number living with neither parent has leveled off between 4 and 5 percent.”
And the biggest shift has occurred in black families, where the proportion of children raised with two parents in the home inched up from 24 to 30 percent. It’s still startlingly low — and, in my view, is easily the most powerful “structural” reason for racial inequality in America — but this turnaround will do more for African-Americans than any “equity” program.
Abroad, we’re finally ending the longest war in American history in Afghanistan — handing it back to the Taliban after two decades, vacating the Bagram Airbase just today. And Netanyahu’s reign is finally over. Back at home, we’re beginning a revolution in the treatment of PTSD and depression. The deployment of trials for psilocybin and ketamine, as well as MDMA and even ayahuasca, could rescue the minds and souls of countless Americans, perhaps our veterans most of all.
I don’t cite these things to argue that all is right with America this July 4. The spike in murders, especially of African-Americans, is alarming; anti-Semitism and anti-Asian hate has spread; the existential crisis of climate change continues — and there is little hope that the Biden administration can make much of a difference.
The politicization of electoral procedures and suppression of votes in many red states should set off alarm bells for the stability of our democracy. And the unhinged forces behind Trump have not gone away. But am I the only one who sees the current Trump rallies as tired cringe? I’m getting the sense that the declining audience for the Trump show means he may not be renewed for a second season.
So take the long view. Get off the web. Be with people you love this weekend. Rebuild friendships attenuated even further by the past year of pandemic. And celebrate this brilliant, maddening contradiction of a country. It will drive you crazy from time to time; but trust it. It’s messy, noisy, restless, and has been at war with itself from the very beginning. But there’s a reason one of our problems is stemming the tide of so many who want to live in it. Maybe they see more clearly what we can lose sight of: that our problems, compared with almost anywhere else on earth, are well worth having.
(We’re hoping to make “Reasons To Be Cheerful” an occasional feature. Please send your good news stories — dish@andrewsullivan.com — and we’ll crowdsource this every now and again.)
(This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my reflection on the life and insouciant evil of Donald Rumsfeld in the wake of his death; my fun and un-PC conversation with Katie Herzog and Jamie Kirchick on Pride and the alphabet people; the latest round of reader dissents, this time on my analysis of Biden’s Catholicism as compared to CRT; five notable quotes from the week, including two from a woke mob encircling a black trans woman; nine Substack pieces we recommend, including two critical reviews of Charles Murray’s new book; window views showing the urban and rural beauty of America; a Cool Ad Watch lampooning Boris over the environment; a Mental Health Break of dancing robots; and, as always, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
A subscriber writes:
I just wanted to express my deep appreciation for your article about Biden’s Catholicism — which I suppose ended up being more of a meditation on the role and place of Catholicism in 21st century Western society. I have been following the Dish for a while but this article brought me to tears and affected me more than anything I have read in a long time.
As a Catholic, it brought home for me the point that the compassion for all individuals exemplified by Jesus must form the core of the Catholic message — over and above any specific doctrines. I think we are all too easily pulled into doctrinaire positions such that we leave behind this compassionate core, especially when it comes to emotionally charged issues such as abortion and transgenderism.
I have always appreciated the intellectual discipline by which the Dish avoids getting sucked in to bat for one side of any debate exclusively, and the lengths at which the Dish goes to treat all points of view fairly — this article was a canonical example.
New On The Dishcast: Katie Herzog And Jamie Kirchick
Katie Herzog, one of the last remaining lesbians in America, is the co-host of Blocked and Reported alongside her battered pod-wife, Jesse Singal. Gay neocon Jamie Kirchick is a Brookings fellow and the author of the forthcoming book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. If you’d like to hear a politically incorrect gay and lesbian conversation that would never be aired in the MSM, check it out.
For three clips of my conversation with Jamie and Katie — on the deceitful propaganda surrounding the Stonewall narrative; on the problems with the “Q” in LGBTQRSTUV+; and on the concerns that puberty blockers might be blocking the self-actualization of gay kids — head over to our YouTube page. Listen to the whole episode here.
That link also takes you to reader commentary over the episode with Michael Brendan Dougherty on the spiritual crises of the modern age. It’s supplemented by more comments on Biden’s Catholicism, including a dissent from a Wiccan reader who criticizes my use of “pagan” to describe Trump and a dissent over the latest scandal in the Catholic Church, this time in Canada involving indigenous graves. We close out the podcast post with a few CRT dispatches from readers to give us a better sense of the theory on the ground. Check out the great mix of stories, dissents, and assents, curated by Chris Bodenner, who keeps me accountable every week.
The Insouciance Of Evil
I met Donald Rumsfeld years and years ago, because he was close to the father of a good friend of mine. Purely accidental and nothing to do with my job. It was in the 1990s, when Rummy was busy making lots of money in pharmaceuticals and bio-technology, and was thought of as a Ford administration has-been. And to be perfectly frank, he was a bit of an asshole.
I don’t even mean that as a criticism, because Rumsfeld was such a lively, fun and fearless asshole you couldn’t help but like him in person. I was very young, but not so young he couldn’t mock me mercilessly. Over the years, he never stopped asking me: “Is that blog of yours ever going to make any money?” But the assholery, as is often the case in male company, was meant as a kind of intimacy.
My other distinct memory of him was at a dinner party thrown by a friend, about a month before the start of the Iraq War. It was easily the most intimidating dinner I’ve ever been to.
(Read the rest of the long post here)
Dissents Of The Week: Catholic Theory vs Critical Theory
A reader writes:
I found your position on Biden and abortion incoherent. My own view on abortion is nuanced beyond the limits prescribed by the Church, but I don’t fool myself. Church teaching is very clear. Neither I, nor you, conform. And neither does Biden, whose example is a scandal in the deepest meaning of the word, no matter how many rosaries he carries.
Read the rest of that dissent, my response, and my response to three more dissents, here. As always, keep the dissents coming, along with anything else you want to add to the Dish mix, such as the view from your own window (if we select yours, we’ll give you a free subscription to the Dish, so please indicate your non-subscriber status in the email): dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a three-month sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing!
The results for the last week’s window are coming in a separate email to subscribers later today.
See you next Friday.
