Making The Case For Bigotry ???

Here's a strange opinion piece by David Brooks:

Once upon a time, white male Protestants ruled the roost. You got into a fancy school if your father had gone to the fancy school. You got a job at a white-shoe law firm or climbed the corporate ladder if you golfed at the right club.

Then we smashed all that. We replaced a system based on birth with a fairer system based on talent. We opened up the universities and the workplace to Jews, women and minorities. University attendance surged, creating the most educated generation in history. We created a new boomer ethos, which was egalitarian (bluejeans everywhere!), socially conscious (recycling!) and deeply committed to ending bigotry.

You’d think all this would have made the U.S. the best governed nation in history. Instead, inequality rose. Faith in institutions plummeted. Social trust declined. The federal government became dysfunctional and society bitterly divided.

You can read the rest @
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/opinion/failure-educated-elite.html

What you leave out, David, are the roles played by patriotism, bigotry, and what is now called "white supremacy" in achieving the former "greatness" of the USA. We became great (if that's what it was) because we loved ourselves (in the national sense) and hated everyone else.

We still love ourselves and hate everyone else, but now it's in the PERSONAL sense. We've gone from being Nazis to being snowflakes, and as we know snow melts as soon as it encounters heat or pressure. And nothing is going to change that.

We cannot go back, and we're not prepared for what lies ahead.