The Salad Bowl of Diversity

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Introduction

The second chapter of Disarming Leviathan is an interesting affair that might best be called Campbell v. Campbell. The first part of the chapter is at complete odds with the second half of the chapter, and vice versa.

I am here volunteering to serve as something of a referee.

In the course of this chapter, Campbell signaled what general direction he is coming from when he distinguished Christian nationalism from Christian conservatism, and the good-guy conservatives he helpfully listed for us were “Michael Gerson, Liz Cheney, Russell Moore, Paul D. Miller, Peter Wehner, and David French” (p. 32). So now we know.

This the kind of conservatism that stands athwart history, calling out something like “don’t mind us!” Or perhaps standing beside the Arc of History Highway, thumbs out.

The Campbell of the First Half

In the first half of this chapter, Campbell writes as if the American melting pot has been entirely replaced by the salad bowl. We are a variety of nations—bacon bits here, croutons there, raisins on the bottom. Not only so, but he writes as though we have always been a salad bowl, as though the American genius at the Founding was to embrace our salad bowl destiny.

He does acknowledge that Americans tend to use the words nation and state interchangeably, but argues that we are not being particularly accurate when we do that. He leans away from that as a confusion. He believes it would be far more accurate to say that we are one state, one that contains a multiplicity of nations.

What do we Americans as Americans have that unites us culturally? Very few things. True social cohesion can only be found within all the little nations scattered across the great Federal Land Mass.

Remember when American normies were being told that the “great replacement” idea was just a conspiracy theory that was only believed by skinheads and white supremacists? Now we are at the stage where we are being told that it already happened, and that it was a good thing too. Correct that. We are not being told that it already happened; we are being told that it has always been this way. Thomas Jefferson’s household staff was apparently made up of Puerto Ricans, lesbians of color, Chinese, Pacific Islanders, and Vietnam era vets. And let us not forget the heroics performed by the Hispanic regiment at Bunker Hill.

Mark this. He says there are “very few” unifying customs or traditions that would distinguish someone as having an American nationality. The same flag flies over everybody, sure, and is out in front of all the government buildings, but after that the Melanesian Frog Worshiping Nation has got to stick together. As does the Tater Tot Casserole Nation. As do the Apache.

Campbell doesn’t see it yet, but he has painted himself (and a bunch of other people) into a bad corner, and the fumes of that paint are going to give him a ripping migraine, with the cognitive dissonance starting at the ankles and working its way up.

Pay attention to that quote, for we shall come back to it. There is poison in that quote.

So, according to him, we are a bewildering array of nations, thrown into a junk drawer called America.

Thus far Campbell #1

But Now, the Campbell of the Second Half!

And so I would like to take a moment to introduce our author to Campbell #2.

And to this, one can only look around in bewilderment, as a prelude to saying something like wut?

And then I say wut once more. And as I continue to say wut, I have not exhausted the energy that makes me want to continue to say wut.

Now the list in that first quote is pretty particular, and even includes the unconditional love that must be shown by fans of the Dallas Cowboys. He lists “my home,” the particular places where he grew up, hamburgers, which are a distinct culinary choice, a sparkly celebration of a uniquely American holiday, and the driving back beat of American music. He is actually talking as though America were a regular country, like all the other countries, which (let us be frank, you and I), it is.

But then . . . maybe a little voice in his head said uh oh . . . remembering for just a second or so his role in the first half of his chapter. So perhaps he tried to smuggle references into the array of cultures we have. Notice he said cultures, plural. The ways of being in the world, plural. So for a second there he jumped back to Campbell # 1, and slyly acted like one of the croutons praising the presence of the bacon bits. But then he went right back into the Americana schtick, celebrating all those customs that the first half of the chapter said that we didn’t have.

If America is just a bureau, then patriotism is nonsensical. If patriotism is appropriate, then there is a larger ethnic identity that encompasses all the smaller sub-cultural nations. There is such a thing as a cultural American. In addition, if patriotism is a valid and virtuous thing, then it will be possible for some to take it to jingoistic extremes, as has been done.

I Have Questions

I have lots of questions, and the basic one is pretty simple. What is my nation? I don’t get to celebrate any kind of American ethnicity, because that is just a state, a government, and little else. I do understand that Campbell gets to be ethnically apple-pie American, but that is only because this is his book, and the editor at IVP didn’t catch the contradiction.

So according to Campbell, people like me can’t be ethnically American, at least not without being chastised by him. What do I get to be then? What nationality may I join? What cultural heritage am I allowed to have? If I cultivate anything with people who look like me, then I am accused of white supremacy. If I cultivate anything with people who don’t look like me, then it is cultural appropriation. This is starting to look suspiciously like No Country for White Men.

[Parenthetical aside] There will be some on the dank right who will read that preceding paragraph and say, “Glad you are finally coming around, Wilson. You are finally admitting that we whites have to stick together.” Two observations for you guys. First, you are not doing the cause of white solidarity any favors by boasting in reading comprehension skills that would not get you out of second grade. And second, you are not resisting Campbell #1 at all—you have simply surrendered and have joined up with his disintegration project.

Campbell made a pretty big promise earlier, and remember that I asked you to remember it . . . “What makes them a nation? Whatever they say it is.” But it seems that everybody gets to do this except for the people he is teaching his readers how to love . . . meaning by this the people he doesn’t like.

Okay, but wait a minute. Given what he has said thus far, what could be wrong with that? And given his definition (“whatever they say it is”), this is not a surrogate for ethnicity, it is ethnicity. Moreover, as far as Campbell is concerned, it is the one prohibited ethnicity. It is the one ethnicity that Campbell calls a cult, led by false teachers.

According to him, “America” is just a political catch-all, and so every last person needs to seek out and celebrate their own cultural heritage within that American framework. “No, not so fast, Angus.”

You can apparently have a nation based on a shared affinity for tater tots, or for rugby haka, or the Bostonian way of pronouncing the letter a. Okay, I would like to live in a nation that has a shared affinity for the Christian basis of Anglo Saxon common law. “Nooooooo!”

In other words, according to Campbell, I can’t have America because that isn’t really a thing. I can’t go live in Chinatown either because that would be an attempt at appropriation or gentrification, or something bad. I can, however, celebrate the Fourth of July with a sparkler, but nothing more exuberant, like the fireworks that we get from the Indian reservation. I can enjoy the residuals of Americana trivia, but nothing substantive. If it is at all substantive, I will find myself reading a book about the cult I am apparently leading. Written by a gent named Campbell.

His Gas Station

Campbell sees a bunch of people driving their cars to places he disapproves of. He does not understand that he owns the gas station that keeps gassing up their cars.

If relativism is the case, then anything goes, including the worst forms of absolutism. And if relativistic ethnic identities are celebrated, then you will soon discover you are not able to prohibit the worst forms of ethnic absolutism. These worst forms of ethnic absolutism are in fact your doing. I quite agree that we have far more white fecal-matter-poasting than we used to have, but we disagree on where that came from. While it would be easy to call these disgruntled whites moronic, I will say this for them. They follow Campbell’s logic far better than he does. The liberal idea was that they could adopt new rules for everybody except for whites, and that the whites would have to continue playing the game by the old rules—as though that game were still going on. But that game is long gone, and the white kinists are just playing the new game, with the new rules. As Kurt Schlichter puts it, “You’re not gonna like the new rules.”

A lot of the energy that is driving our current cultural angst and ethnic unrest has been the result of just the kind of thinking exhibited by Campbell. They take away from white Americans a cultural identity that had enabled them to identify broadly with people who belonged to other sub-cultures, all doing so as fellow Americans. And I am not talking about some raw propositional glue that bound us all together, but rather all the things that bind regular countries together, including some propositions. You know, things like ice cream on the Fourth of July, rock and roll, and the Anglo Saxon legal tradition. Oh, and don’t forget the Christian faith.

Now sinners were involved in it, so there were problems, but it did actually work. It worked for a long time. There was a time when there really was a shared consensus.

But then the frenzy of multicultural hyphenation started, with multiple minorities being celebrated over against the national identify that was being taken away from everybody, and with whites being routinely vilified. What did you think was going to happen?

So we have been forced—by folks like Campbell—to remember that America had real social cohesion back when it had a shared Christian consensus. Without that Christian consensus, it has all started to come apart, shattering into all these little bits. Good job, guys.

Back to the foundations then. It is Christ or chaos.

A Final Note About Jargon

This is the second part of a quotation cited earlier, but I needed to come back to it. Then I will be done for the present.

This is the kind of jargon you should expect to hear from a nondescript politician running for Congress. You know, the kind of politician who promises to take us into the future, as though there were any other place for us to go.

Patriotism brings people together, don’t you see? Around common beliefs! Yay, common beliefs! Nationalism excludes the outsiders, which is bad! I see. So what do you patriots do with people who reject your common beliefs? Do you not exclude them as outsiders? Come on. This entire book excludes me as an outsider.

This is a political debate. Everybody includes, and everybody excludes. The only debate worth having has to do with what principle we use as the basis for inclusion and exclusion. It is an inescapable concept—not whether but which. Not whether we exclude, but which principle we use to exclude. And Campbell excludes as enthusiastically as anyone. But because he has that liberal bone in his arm, he cannot be made to see that he is doing so.