The Culture That Shall Not Be Named

Plus: What is happening with "young white men"?

Last week, the Senate held an explosive confirmation hearing for Jeremy Carl, President Trump’s nominee for a senior post in the State Department.

The hearing’s most incendiary moments centered on Democratic senators calling into question a simple historical truth that Jeremy identified in his book, The Unprotected Class, but which has become a taboo in elite cultural and political circles: that, in modern America, every group is allowed to have a “culture,” except one. There’s “black culture,” “Latino culture,” “Asian culture,” and “Native American culture.” But there is real angst and discomfort at the very mention of “Anglo-American culture,” which, as previous generations readily understood, represents America’s deepest roots.

Our Anglo-American tradition is visible in numerous ways: our common language, our system of rights and liberties, the Protestant-capitalist economic system. Those things didn’t come from Somalia, Japan, or Brazil; they mostly came from the culture of England. But now, if you acknowledge these plain realities, you are treated as a de facto racialist and purveyor of hatred.