Comment on "Obama's rhetoric, American realities"

Eds: The research on the negative effects of diversity on social cohesion and trust are filtering into public discourse (see also following news item).

Here Jonah Goldberg notes that whites most likely to vote for Obama live in overwhelmingly white states, findings highly consistent with Robert Putnam's data showing greater interracial trust among whites who don't live among blacks.

As a neocon, a Jew, and a lover of diversity, Goldberg gives a "soft" interpretation of Putnam's data as indicating more "realism" about race, rather than racial hatred and resentment.

But surely the findings should give pause to anyone contemplating the future of America. As the number of overwhelmingly white areas decreases, we can certainly expect greater distrust.

Rather than entering a post-ethnic America, it's much more likely that we are entering a totally ethnicized America — eventually including whites who, at this time, are still untouched by the effects of diversity. And when this happens, it will definitely dawn on people to ask how and why America gave up its ethnic homogeneity to pursue the pipedream of a post-ethnic world free from strife or even a concern with ethnicity.

Jonah Goldberg

Obama's rhetoric, American realities:

A post-racial country? It's easy to talk about but much tougher to accomplish.

Los Angeles Times

February 12, 2008

Obama has had his greatest success winning white votes in states that are nearly all white, particularly those with caucuses. In non-homogeneously white states, he's only won when he's added enormous shares of black votes to his prosperous white liberal base -- as he did in South Carolina.

But in states that actually "look like America," he tends to get beaten by Hillary Rodham Clinton. He lost such melting-pot states as Nevada, California, Massachusetts and New York largely because he couldn't accumulate nearly enough white or Latino votes.

Some conservatives have mischievously alleged anti-black sentiment among Latinos as one reason why Obama fails to gain Latino support. Many liberals have worried about a "Bradley effect" -- named for former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley -- whereby secretly racist white liberals say they will vote for the black guy but don't follow through.

Although there's got to be some truth to this at the margins, I think it's mostly hogwash. Still, it says something fascinating about our political and racial landscape that the Democratic voters with the most experience living in multiracial, multicultural communities are the ones who are the most immune to Obama's "beyond race" rhetoric. At the same time, the whitest states are the most gaga for Obama (he beat Clinton 80% to 17% in white-supremacist-rich Idaho).

One possible explanation for this might be found in the work of Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam. In 2006, the scholar of civil society and author of "Bowling Alone" released some controversial findings: The more diverse a community, the less trusting it becomes.

"In the presence of diversity, we hunker down," he told the Financial Times. "The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us." Social trust was at its absolute lowest in Los Angeles, America's most diverse city, Putnam found.

The hard interpretation would be that diversity does in fact breed racism and ethnic resentment. But a softer, and I think slightly more plausible, reading would be that increased diversity breeds not so much resentment as realism -- at least among the rank-and-file voters. [more]

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