A Vanishing Breed

Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, 95, may be the last moderate intellectual. A former socialist, "he’s never voted Republican except once in Massachusetts." His specialty is the history of ethnic groups in the United States. [bold added]

Nathan Glazer (City Journal)

Ethnic groups “became interest groups,” Mr. Glazer says, “not on the basis of ethnicity but on the basis of their occupational concentrations. When you’re talking about the Italian Americans,” for example, “you’re talking about the sanitation men’s union.” The Irish were the police, the Jews the small shopkeepers, “and so on.” Ethnic residential clusters also persisted for decades, even after Congress severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in 1924.

Ethnic politics has existed throughout American history, as the country absorbed successive waves of immigrants. But Mr. Glazer sees contemporary identity politics as something new—an offspring of the civil-rights movement. “What happened was black identity became the model. It became the model for a revival of feminism,” Mr. Glazer says. “It became the model for all kinds of groups.”

Mr. Glazer believes that previous immigrant groups--e.g., Italians, Poles, Jews--eventually assimilated in the North without the need for government action. However, blacks in the South needed legal intervention "to be freed from a political oppression—separate schools, separate public facilities."

Mr. Glazer sees today’s racial preferences in college admissions as a legacy of this expansion of the civil-rights model...preferences have expanded far beyond their original purpose, which was to lift blacks.

If, as Mr. Glazer asserts, affirmative action was instituted to help blacks overcome a legacy of slavery that was not applicable to other groups, the identity wars that plague America today were birthed from a well-intentioned government program. Where have we heard that before?

Interesting comments throughout. Example:

Mr. Glazer is a critic of President Trump, but a temperate one. He believes Mr. Trump has benefited from white identity politics, appealing to the “merged white ethnic classes,” but regards comparisons with 1930s Europe as absurd. “I saw the real fascism,” Mr. Glazer says. “I don’t see any relationship—I just don’t.” He dismisses claims that Mr. Trump’s clashes with the intelligence community and law enforcement amount to a bid to destroy democracy. “I can’t get interested in the Mueller thing,” Mr. Glazer says, “in part because I am so against what previous special counsels did, particularly in the Clinton case.”