The last two Democratic presidents have one thing in common: they have both given commencement speeches at Morehouse College, an HBCU for black men, whose alumni include Martin Luther King Jr. But the two speeches are worlds apart. One reason for this, of course, is that Obama was himself a black man, and so had more leeway to offer some hard truths than Biden did. But even taking that into account, the moderation and uplift of Obama contrast so vividly with Biden’s fatalistic leftism.
Obama encouraged Morehouse men to reach high:
[O]ver the last 50 years ... barriers have come tumbling down, and new doors of opportunity have swung open, and laws and hearts and minds have been changed ... So the history we share should give you hope. The future we share should give you hope.
Here’s Biden on where America is on race a little more than a decade later:
What is democracy if Black men are being killed in the street? What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leave Black — Black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot? And most of all, what does it mean ... to be a Black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?
Here’s Obama:
Your generation is uniquely poised for success unlike any generation of African Americans that came before it ... There are some things, as black men, we can only do for ourselves ... One of the things that all of you have learned over the last four years is there’s no longer any room for excuses.
And here comes Biden with the excuses:
If Black men are being killed on the streets, we bear witness. For me, that means to call out the poison of white supremacy, to root out systemic racism.
Obama calls on the graduates to seize the day, overcome the residual racism in this country, fix their own problems, resist cynicism, and join America’s progress. Biden tells them that all they can do is “bear witness” to the horror of “white supremacy” and fight against “systemic racism.” (And of course the vast, vast majority of black men “killed on the streets” are not killed by cops, as Biden sickeningly implies.)
Leave aside for the moment the question of which president is more accurate in telling America’s racial story — and focus instead on the psychological impact of both messages. Obama evokes personal energy, taking command of your own life, living up to your own responsibilities, acting to make the world better for you and others. Biden’s evokes passivity, helplessness, “bearing witness” to racism, and despair about the eternal nature of America’s racial evil.
Yes, Biden included some boilerplate about the brightness of the futures of the Morehouse grads; but every policy he mentioned was something government had done or could do: mainly channeling money to black universities, and practicing constant race discrimination against Asians, Jews, and whites, in order to give blacks an advantage. There was nothing wrong with black America, he seemed to imply, that white Democratscan’t solve by discriminating in favor of them.
This message is empirically wrong, I’d say. But more importantly, it is psychological poison. It disempowers minorities, robs us of agency, encourages fatalism, and stirs endless resentment. Even if it were true that America were an eternal white supremacist nation, as Biden seems to think, believing that will sap you of optimism, self-confidence, direction, and self-esteem. Which will perpetuate everything you say you oppose.
This vision of America has been imposed most thoroughly on the generations educated in the last decade, especially since 2020. And we can see the results: a huge increase in depression, anxiety, and mental illness among the young, especially the young women who form the core of the social justice cult. Everyone under 30 is more depressed than in the past, but leftist women, and “non-binary” Americans, are in a class of their own. From Greg Lukianoff’s latest essay:
57% of very liberal students in our study reported feelings of poor mental health at least half the time, compared to just 34% of very conservative students ... 41% of very liberal males report feelings of poor mental health more than half the time, compared to 60% of very liberal females, and a whopping 70% of very liberal non-binary students.
This makes a huge amount of intuitive sense. Wokeness tells you the world is evil and hates you. It tells young women that they are permanent victims of patriarchy, even as they now way outnumber men in higher education, and have never had such levels of income, status, and success in the workplace. It tells minorities that majorities are always to be suspected, and always wish to annihilate you.
Wokeness also tells young gays and trans people that they are under “unprecedented attack.” Unprecedented? Seven decades after the Lavender Scare, three decades after the AIDS plague ended, eight years after Obergefell, and three years after Bostock, HRC announced last year: “We have officially declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States for the first time.” For those of us who lived through AIDS, and won the civil rights we had long wanted, this isn’t just absurd; it’s offensive.
And when it comes to race, perhaps no passage captures the fatalism of the successor ideology as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates addressing his young black son:
The terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own ... You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels ... The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return. … The struggle is all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control.
Marinate in the idea that you have no control over anything but resistance to your own eternal oppression and — guess what? — your mental health will understandably suffer. Lukianoff again:
In practice, intersectionality is a combination of two cognitive distortions: overgeneralizing and blaming. It also arose from a perspective in which the world is utterly dominated by impersonal forces, against which human beings are simply objects that are acted upon rather than people with agency. Within this framework, individuals understandably don’t really feel like they have an internalized locus of control — or an ability to guide the course of their own lives.
Believing you have agency to change your life — what I always took to be a defining character of American democracy — gives you direction and energy; it allows you to see beyond your own self-pity toward helping others; it helps you moderate the ups and downs of life; it gives you a sense of control over your destiny, things you can do to improve your life.
I believe this not simply as an abstract idea, but because it has been the story of my own life. I have almost always been a minority in every part of my life. I was an English Catholic among Protestants and atheists; I was a gay man among Catholics; I was deemed a naive subversive by the religious right and an Aunty Tom by the queer left; I was an immigrant among Americans; I am a conservative among gays; I am a gay man among conservatives; I was openly HIV-positive when almost no one else was (and was threatened with deportation solely because of my HIV status for two decades); for 15 years, I was for marriage equality before almost anyone else was. I may be cis, white, and “privileged,” but I do know something about the psychological challenges of being in a minority.
And at every step of the way, I could have seen myself as a victim — of anti-Catholicism, xenophobia, homophobia, HIV-phobia, right and left intolerance — with little control over my life. And I would not have been entirely wrong. I had some truly grim moments when it felt as if the world had conspired to make my own complicated, authentic life impossible. But I soon realized that capitulating to those odds was a psychological dead-end, could consume and define me, and lead to resentment and bitterness, and self-fulfilling failure.
So I learned to internalize the great Eleanor Roosevelt’s dictum that “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” That’s also why I argued for placing marriage at the center of gay rights — because it was something positive we could actually do, live out, and prove ourselves with. And what actually is the alternative anyway? A lifetime of grievance, anger, and empty performative “activism” that does nothing but perpetuate its own marginalization and make you miserable.
The happiness gap between right and left is growing for all these reasons. And the misery seems disproportionately young and female — the demographic that has succumbed most completely to the cult. (If you check out the anti-Israel protests, it’s extremely pronounced.) Lukianoff’s data are echoed in a recent Finnish study that found that the more someone agreed with the statement “Other people or structures are more responsible for my well-being than I myself am,” the more likely they were to be unhappy: “People on the left endorsed this item (around 2 on a scale of 0 to 4) far more than people on the right (around 0.5).” And women were far more likely to hold this sense of powerlessness than men; and among women, “female liberal adolescents [were] experiencing the largest increases in depressive symptoms.”
I suspect that the trans explosion in this very demographic is related to this: indoctrinated into believing that being a woman is to be oppressed, to be merely “a hole,” some came to believe that becoming a man was one way out. What a tragic end for feminism: injecting yourself with testosterone because the patriarchy always wins.
And once you become ever more attuned to and aware of how society is rigged against you — the definition of becoming “woke” — you can see it everywhere. Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology, argued in his 2020 paper “Harm Inflation” that the cultural left has increasingly “broadened [the meaning of ‘trauma’] to include adverse life events of decreasing severity and those experienced vicariously rather than directly”; and that “‘abuse’ extended from physical acts to verbal and emotional slights.”
What Biden did at Morehouse, and what his administration has done in every way imaginable, is to uphold this view of the world. From its crude race and sex discrimination to its support for critical queer theory and transing kids, it is spreading a message that not only holds minorities back; it tells them that the country they live in — the freest and most diverse in human history — is defined by hatred of the black, brown, gay, queer, and trans populations, and was really founded in 1619 to oppress, and not in 1776 to liberate.
My entire adult lifetime has proven this wrong with respect to gay men and lesbians. The transformation of American culture, society, and law on this question shows how ready Americans are for change, if they are engaged respectfully and reasonably and in good faith. And it is simply absurd to describe the country that elected a black man twice for president, and whose immigrants are overwhelmingly non-white, as somehow a form of “white supremacy.”
It is therefore in no way surprising to me that, for members of minorities like me who do not share this dark worldview, the Democratic Party is increasingly seen as out of touch, disempowering, and condescending. And it will be the most startling proof of this if Donald Trump wins an Electoral College landslide, largely because a rising percentage of minority voters — sick of woke pessimism, fatalism, and despair — want to start afresh and control their own destiny.
We minority members are doing what we always have in this blessedly tolerant and open country. We are getting on with our lives with confidence and personal optimism. And for all the attempts to hold us back, on right and left, we’re winning.
(Note to readers: 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 chat with Bill Maher about his career, and debating various topics, namely religion; dissents and assents over my latest column on gays and lesbians; a bunch of pod dissents over the episode with Oren Cass; nine notable quotes for the week in news; 21 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Hathos Alert of Maher and Trump from the early ‘90s; a Mental Health Break of ASMR cooking; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a longtime subscriber:
I’ve been a loyal Dish reader for almost 15 years, and this week is the first time I’ve ever taken part in the VFYW contest. This is also the first time I’ve had any clue where the photo might’ve been taken. Is it fair that I live in the city where it was taken? Or that this hotel is where many of the out-of-town guests for my wedding stayed? Probably not. Nevertheless, I’m excited to submit a VFYW answer for the first time.
Another longtime subscriber, Bill Maher, said on the Dishcast this week:
I’ve told you this before, but you are my lodestar. If I had to read just one person, I would read you. And that’s with the religion!
New On The Dishcast: Bill Maher
Bill needs no introduction, but he’s been the formidable host of HBO’s Real Time for 21 years now, and before that he hosted Politically Incorrect, which ran from 1993 to 2002. He has a new book out, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You — a collection of his best editorials on Real Time. Also check out his podcast, “Club Random,” which he recently expanded into a pod network, Club Random Studios. Bill manages to do all of that and still perform standup on the road — schedule here.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on Bill not caving to political correctness after 9/11, and the two of us debating the credibility of the Gospels. That link also takes you to a ton of commentary on last week’s episode with Oren Cass on Republicans turning left on economics. We also hear from readers on my proposed “Independence Day for gays and lesbians,” and I respond throughout.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Nellie Bowles on the woke revolution, Noah Smith on the economy, George Will on Trump and conservatism, Lionel Shriver on her new novel, Elizabeth Corey on Oakeshott, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty; and the great Van Jones!
Please send any guest recommendations, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. A listener writes:
Thank you for doing the podcast each week and taking on some tough issues. I’m probably to the left of you on many things, but your compassion and tolerance really comes through in each of your exchanges with your guests. Listening to the Dishcast on my way home to Saratoga from Albany (approx. 45 min) is something I look forward to each Friday evening, as it gives me “my time” in the car before I walk in the door and my kids begin protesting what we are having for dinner.
On behalf of all of us who have made the Dishcast part of our weekly routine, please keep up the great work.
Is the “LGBTQ” coalition really “sacrificing gay kids”? Statistics are very hard to come by in this debate, so it’s useful to at least share what statistics we have.
According to the census, there are approximately 50 million Americans age 6 to 17. For argument’s sake, let us assume that between two and ten percent of them are gay/queer/gender-non-conforming or whatever label you like. That’s between one million and five million kids.
According to Reuters/Komodo Health, about 4000-5000 minors are receiving hormone treatment and about 1000-2000 are getting puberty blockers. The number having top surgery is 200-300, and I can’t find any stats on other kinds of surgery, which suggests it’s rare or non-existent. As a percentage of gay kids, it’s de minimus. So if gay kids as a class are being wiped out by ideology and medicine, there’s very little evidence of it in the actual stats. Whatever the merits of the Cass Review and its recommendations, it applies to a vanishingly small number of children.
Sure, a lot of queer kids and adults are choosing different ways to describe themselves other than “gay,” but what’s wrong with that? Objecting to labels like “non-binary” is just a cranky way of denying the lived reality of other people, in exactly the same way as people objected to “gay” in the 1970s.
Balancing benefit against harm is the tricky balance that every medical decision should hinge upon — including medical treatments for trans children — but to unilaterally deny such treatments to any child under any circumstances to prevent the “elimination of gay kids” is hyperbole and hysteria, given the statistics.
Read my response here, along with another dissent. Many more dissents — over my conversation last week with Oren Cass — are over on the pod page. As always, keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the upcoming UK election, Trump’s veepstakes, and Biden’s climate wins. Below are a few examples:
Why did the Tuskegee Airman, oppressed under the law, fight for America?
Ed West asserts that mobile phones are “the greatest law enforcement tool in history.”
You can also browse all the substacks we follow and read on a regular basis here — a combination of our favorite writers and new ones we’re checking out. It’s a blogroll of sorts. If you have any recommendations for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: 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 deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). 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 free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Here’s a followup on last week’s contest:
I’m quietly pleased with myself for getting the right house. As with the super-sleuth in DC, it took me ages to match up the roof profiles to work back to the house. It was a fun write-up — thanks! — and tonight we are going to make the Sidecar du Sud created by your mixologist sleuth, since a Sidecar is one of my favorite cocktails!
Another followup comes from “your average super-sleuth in NYC”:
After Renoir in the Chatou contest, Van Gogh in the Saint-Remy contest, and Monet at Giverny in last week’s contest as well, I noticed you snuck in a view from Moorea in the main Dish. That island is less than 20 miles from Papeete, which is where Gauguin painted. Here’s his painting Nafea faa ipoipo? (“When Will You Marry?”), the fourth most expensive painting ever sold, at $210M:
Now we just need a view from Cezanne’s Aix-en-Provence.
From a newcomer to the contest:
I’m so impressed by the really far-ranging places your sleuths can identify! Thanks for a thought-provoking, fun, and engaging Substack feed.
