Diversity Is Not Our Strength
12th May 2025
A nation of groups is thus an oxymoron. In the best of times, it will be a festering federation. In the worst, it will dissolve into warring tribes.
People used to get this. It was part of our popular understanding.
Toward the end of the 1952 Hollywood classic “Ivanhoe,” King Richard the Lionheart asks those assembled before him to kneel as Saxons, Normans, Danes, and Jews and then commands them to rise as “Englishmen.” Nobody had to explain why.
Today, we have set up a system in which we seemingly ask Americans to kneel and then rise as members of groups.
This baleful system dates to the 1970s. Activists intimidated the bureaucracy into creating new racial groups, which the Office of Management and Budget did in the 1970s, crafting umbrella clusters such as “Hispanics” or “Asian Americans” to include in the 1980 census. To these were later added groups based on sex, gender, sexual preferences, etc.
Then, these groups were kept apart by pursuing a diversity policy in the schools that deters assimilation. Finally, you instill actual grievances into the members of some groups by teaching them that members of others are oppressing them.