America Doesn’t
Need a New Revolution
Can
the country confront its current problems with its traditional can-do spirit?
We have barely four months to figure out how.
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Outrage
is the natural response to the brutal killing of George Floyd. Yet outrage and
clear, critical thinking seldom go hand in hand. An act of police brutality
became the catalyst for a revolutionary mood. Protests spilled over into
violence and looting. Stores were destroyed; policemen and civilians injured
and killed. The truism “black lives matter” was joined by a senseless slogan:
“Defund the police.”
Democratic
politicians—and some Republicans—hastened to appease the protesters. The mayors
of Los Angeles and New York pledged to cut their cities’ police budgets. The
Minneapolis City Council said it intended to disband the police department. The
speaker of the House and other congressional Democrats donned scarves made of
Ghanaian Kente cloth and kneeled in the Capitol. Sen. Mitt Romney joined a
march.
Corporate
executives scrambled to identify their brands with the protests. By the middle
of June, according to polls, American public opinion had been transformed from
skepticism about the Black Lives Matter movement to widespread support.
Politicians, journalists and other public figures who had denounced protests
against the pandemic lockdown suddenly lost their concern about infection. One
Johns Hopkins epidemiologist tweeted on June 2:
“In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to
systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”
Although
I am a black African—an immigrant who came to the U.S. freely—I am keenly aware
of the hardships and miseries African-Americans have endured for centuries.
Slavery, Reconstruction, segregation: I know the history. I know that there is
still racial prejudice in America, and that it manifests itself in the
aggressive way some police officers handle African-Americans. I know that by
measures of wealth, health and education, African-Americans remain on average
closer to the bottom of society than to the top. I know, too, that
African-American communities have been disproportionately hurt by both Covid-19
and the economic disruption of lockdowns.
Yet
when I hear it said that the U.S. is defined above all by racism, when I see
books such as Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” top the bestseller list, when
I read of educators and journalists being fired for daring to question the
orthodoxies of Black Lives Matter—then I feel obliged to speak up.
“What
the media also do not tell you,” I tweeted on June 9, “is that America is the
best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you. We
have our problems and we need to address those. But our society and our systems
are far from racist.”
America
looks different if you grew up, as I did, in Africa and the Middle East. There
I had firsthand experience of three things. First, bloody internecine wars between
Africans—with all the combatants dark-skinned, and no white people present.
Second, the anarchy that comes when there is no police, no law and order.
Third, the severe racism (as well as sexism) of a society such as Saudi Arabia,
where de facto slavery still exists.
I
came to the U.S. in 2006, having lived in the Netherlands since 1992. Like most
immigrants, I came with a confidence that in America I would be judged on my
merits rather than on the basis of racial or sexual prejudice.
There’s
a reason the U.S. remains, as it has long been, the destination of choice for
would-be migrants. We know that there is almost no difference in the
unemployment rate for foreign-born and native-born workers—unlike in the European Union.
We
immigrants see the downsides of American society: the expensive yet inefficient
health-care system, the shambolic public schools in poor communities, the
poverty that no welfare program can alleviate. But we also see, as Charles
Murray and J.D. Vance have shown, that these problems aren’t unique to black
America. White America is also, in Mr. Murray’s phrase, “coming apart”
socially. Broken marriages and alienated young men are problems in Appalachia
as much as in the inner cities.
If
America is a chronically racist society, then why are the “deaths of despair”
studied by Anne Case and Angus Deaton so heavily concentrated among middle-aged
white Americans? Did the Covid-19 pandemic make us forget the opioid epidemic,
which has disproportionately afflicted the white population?
This
country is only 244 years old, but it may be showing signs of age. Time was,
Americans were renowned for their can-do, problem-solving attitude. Europeans,
as Alexis de Tocqueville complained, were inclined to leave problems to central
authorities in Paris or Berlin. Americans traditionally solved problems
locally, sitting together in town halls and voluntary associations. Some of
that spirit still exists, even if we now have to meet on Zoom. But the old
question—“How can we figure this out?”—is threatened with replacement by “Why
can’t the government figure this out for us?”
The
problem is that there are people among us who don’t want to figure it out and
who have an interest in avoiding workable solutions. They have an obvious
political incentive not to solve social problems, because social problems are
the basis of their power. That is why, whenever a scholar like Roland Fryer
brings new data to the table—showing it’s simply not true that the
police disproportionately shoot black people dead—the response is not to read
the paper but to try to discredit its author.
I
have no objection to the statement “black lives matter.” But the movement that
uses that name has a sinister hostility to serious, fact-driven discussion of
the problem it purports to care about. Even more sinister is the haste with
which academic, media and business leaders abase themselves before it. There
will be no resolution of America’s many social problems if free thought and
free speech are no longer upheld in our public sphere. Without them, honest
deliberation, mutual learning and the American problem-solving ethic are dead.
America’s
elites have blundered into this mess. There were eight years of hedonistic
hubris under Bill Clinton. Then came 9/11 and for eight years the U.S. suffered
nemesis in Afghanistan, Iraq and in the financial crash. After that we had
eight years of a liberal president, and the hubris returned. Sanctimonious
politics coincided with deeply unequal economics.
Through
all this, many Americans felt completely left out—of the technology boom, of
the enterprise of globalization. I never thought I would agree with Michael
Moore. But at an October 2016 event, he predicted that Donald Trump would win:
“Trump’s election is going to be the biggest [middle finger] ever recorded in
human history.” I still think that analysis was right. Mr. Trump wasn’t elected
because of his eloquence. He was elected to convey that middle finger to those
who had been smugly in charge for decades.
But
you can’t give the middle finger to a pandemic, and 2020 has exposed the
limitations of Mr. Trump as a president. Yet when you look at the alternative,
you have to wonder where it would lead us. Back to the elite hubris of the
1990s and 2010s? I can’t help thinking that another shattering defeat might
force sane center-left liberals into saying: That wasn’t a one-off; we’ve
got a real problem. They’ll be in the same position as the
British Labour Party after four years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and two
election defeats, when eventually the moderates had to throw the leftists out.
One way or another, the Democratic Party has to find a way of throwing out the
socialists who are destroying it.
The
Republicans, too, have to change their ways. They have to reconnect with young
people. They have to address the concerns of Hispanics. And they have to listen
to African-Americans, who most certainly do not want to see the police in their
neighborhoods replaced by woke community organizers.
We
have barely four months to figure this out in the old American way. To figure
out how to contain Covid-19, which we haven’t yet done, because—I dare to say
it—old lives matter, too, and it is old people as well as minorities whom this
disease disproportionately kills. To figure out how to reduce violence, because
the police wouldn’t use guns so often if criminals didn’t carry them so often.
Perhaps most pressing of all, to figure out how to hold an election in November
that isn’t marred by procedural problems, allegations of abuse and postelection
tumult.
Who
knows? Maybe there’s even time for the candidates to debate the challenges we
confront—not with outrage, but with the kind of critical thinking we Americans
were once famous for, which takes self-criticism as the first step toward
finding solutions.
Ms. Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution.
