Good librarians can change lives. As Leah Gregory of the Illinois Heartland Library System puts it in a 2023 article, “A school librarian can turn a resolute non-reader into a voracious reader by suggesting a magical book that converts them. It’s a miracle that happens regularly in school libraries, but it requires a staff member who has the time to build a connection, a collection to pull from, and the skill to do reader advisory.”

Sometimes, all it takes to get students looking at books in the school library is someone taking them there and pointing out interesting examples of what is available. For example, a decade ago, I was teaching geography at a community college, and I had assigned a project to research and design a trip to another part of the world. The instructions required at least ten sources, including three books. “Three?” students said, as if this was way over the top. A few weeks later, one piped up that they had been to the college library and found it contained no books about Mozambique, their destination, nor about Africa in general. Skeptical, after class, I strolled down to the library and found a long bookcase filled with books about Africa, with many sections on Mozambique. It was then that I realized how little experience some students have with finding books in a library, rather than just using it to chat and work on their laptops. So I collaborated with the librarians to set up mini-field trips to the library in which we showed the students where they could find books on every inhabited region of the world. Over the rest of the semester, I found myself bumping into my students in the library, looking for books for their project.

There are also schools that never had a library to dismantle. “I have never worked in a school with a functional school library,” wrote Philadelphia public school English teacher Lydia Kulina-Washburn in her 2022 Education Week article Book Bans? My School Doesn’t Even Have a Library. “In the absence of school libraries, it is not uncommon for teachers to create private classroom libraries from donations. Like mine in Room 250, these usually take the form of clusters of orange Wawa shelving crates.” If book apps on phones were enough, as an increasing number of school districts seem to believe, why would teachers be scrambling to build physical libraries in their classrooms?

A US Department of Education study found that 61 percent of low-income families with kids had zero books for children in the home. This often leaves it to school libraries to introduce students to the world of books. But the current trend of closing, shrinking, and repurposing school libraries robs many students of the opportunity to discover and love books. Moreover, it stands in stark contrast to America’s long history of finding innovative ways to connect people with books and spaces to explore them.

For example, the concept of a bookmobile—a library on wheels—was invented by an American librarian with the mind of a social entrepreneur. In 1902, Mary Lemist Titcomb became head librarian at the Washington County Free Library in Hagerstown, Maryland, which had just opened the year before as only the second county library in the US. It was there that Titcomb started a book outreach service which sent boxes of 30 books each to some 66 “book stations” located in stores, post offices, and other public places. But she realized that the books still were not reaching many rural dwellers. So she enlisted Joshua Thomas, a janitor at her library who lived in a rural area, to drive a horse and buggy full of books out to the countryside. Her instructions were to make sure families have enough time to browse and enjoy the books. “The book goes to the man,” said Titcomb, “not waiting for the man to come to the book.”

During my own early childhood in the DC suburbs, our area’s bookmobile was a library in a truck. It would roll in each week during summer and park for an hour at the entrance to our townhouse development. The driver-librarian would open the doors, and I would step up and scour the shelves from microscopes to baseball fundamentals to the Sioux Indians to Frog and Toad and Encyclopedia Brown. At the end of the hour, I would step back down onto the sidewalk and walk home with a big stack of books in my arms, and the bookmobile would roll on to the next stop.

Long before Mary Lemist Titcomb invented the bookmobile, many of America’s Founders also worked extensively to build and support libraries. For example, in 1731, a 25-year-old Ben Franklin and his philosophy club, the Junto, founded the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first public library in what is now the United States.

Thomas Jefferson allowed friends and the public to use his library at Monticello in Virginia, where he amassed between 9,000 and 10,000 volumes. It was the largest personal book collection in the early United States. Jefferson inherited some of his books, while others he obtained through book dealers in Georgetown, Washington, DC, New York, and Philadelphia. And he procured many books during his five years in Europe as America’s Minister to France. He sailed home to Virginia with trunks full of books from across Europe. In 1814, after the 3,000 volumes in the Library of Congress were lost when the British burned the US Capitol building, Jefferson more than doubled the size of the library by selling the government 6,487 of his own books. They were left in their original bookcases, which were put into ten horse-drawn wagons and hauled 300 miles from Monticello to DC. Jefferson described the collection he sent in a letter to his friend Samuel Harrison Smith, DC’s most prominent journalist and newspaper owner:

I have been 50. years making it, & have spared no pains, opportunity or expence to make it what it is. [W]hile residing in Paris I devoted every afternoon I was disengaged, for a summer or two, in examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hands … [and] during the whole time I was in Europe, in it’s principal book-marts, particularly Amsterdam, Frankfort, Madrid and London, [I searched] for such works relating to America as could not be found in Paris. … and after my return to America, I was led to procure also whatever related to the duties of those in the high concerns of the nation.

When the final shipment left Monticello for DC, Jefferson wrote to Smith, “Our 10th and last waggon load of books goes off to-day. … [And] an interesting treasure is added to your city, now become the depository of unquestionably the choicest collection of books in the US. and I hope it will not be without some general effect on the literature of our country.”

What Jefferson, Franklin, Titcomb, and Carnegie all understood was the value of putting books in people’s hands. Too often today, centuries of work are being reversed by misguided initiatives that shrink the distribution of printed books. A 2024 article in Publisher’s Weekly reported that “In 2022 there were 162 million fewer books on US library shelves than in 2010, a roughly 20% decline.”

On the other hand, in 2021, six Congressmen from both houses introduced the Build America’s Libraries Act, which would provide $5 billion to build and upgrade libraries in underserved communities across the country. And the exploding classical school movement centers on daily reading and discussion of great books. These developments are in step with Americans’ long history of finding innovative ways to connect people with books.

Backward cultures find reasons to dismantle libraries. Wise, flourishing cultures find ways to build and expand them. Rather than using new technology as an excuse to downsize and repurpose libraries, we can better use it to orchestrate funding and logistics to expand school library collections and design and improve library spaces. Anyone donating to schools should recognize that school libraries are often an endangered species and consider stipulating that their donations are for the maintenance and expansion of libraries—especially ones on the brink of extinction. The real progress lies in creatively improving school libraries and educating students about what they have to offer, turning deserts into springs once again.

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How do insidious ideologies like wokeism die? They die when the real consequences and dangers of their fallacies become widely recognized. One way this can happen is by thinking through the consequences of different courses of action. As Alfred North Whitehead put it, “The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.” Thinking can save us from suffering.

But sometimes ideologies end only after suffering. In his 1990 book After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom, Catholic University of America political theorist David Walsh examined the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, such as Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism. He found that the destructiveness of such ideologies only became fully apparent to the larger society after the ideologies had been implemented and people had suffered the consequences in the real world. For example, only after the Holocaust did Nazism fade and anti-Semitism drop precipitously in the West. Only after communism drove the Soviet Union and China into poverty and two of the worst famines in human history did their governments finally change course. Similarly, only after years of suffering caused by DEI are companies like Meta, McDonald’s, Google, and Walmart now finally cutting or rolling back their DEI programs. Only after years of doctors mutilating children did a group of responsible doctors come out in opposition to gender-affirming care in 2023.

Walsh argues that mankind has a dual nature, both good and evil, and that only through suffering the consequences of its bad choices can a society reject evil and return to its true destiny. He says that, like the characters in Dostoevsky’s novels, we must “undergo the most ancient law of the cosmos: wisdom through suffering.”

If Walsh and Mill are right, society must collide with error one way or another, through argument or experience, to move beyond ideologies like wokeism. But these collisions are productive only if society learns from them. So it is not enough to let wokeism slink off into the shadows. We have to keep holding it up to the light after it fades, just like it is mandatory to teach about Nazism and the Holocaust in German schools.

False ideologies like wokeism are destined to fail because they are contradicted by human nature and empirical reality. Philosophers use their minds to try to comprehend the world; woke ideologues have tried to fit the world to what it is in their minds. In Brave New World, the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center tries to reprogram babies to hate things they naturally crawl towards, like picture books and flowers. Similarly, woke education has tried to reprogram kids to hate their country, their culture, their institutions, and certain so-called “identities.” Such distortions can fool some of the people some of the time. But common sense always makes a comeback.

And that is what is happening now. America is engaged in a “revolution of common sense,” as President Trump put it in his second inaugural address. The Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico believed that common sense and piety are the fundamental forces creating civilization out of barbarism. The West is recovering and renewing aspects of civilization by taking back its institutions. But this is not enough.

In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Those who hope that the colored Americans needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the colored citizen is granted his citizenship rights.”

We cannot return to business as usual after colliding with wokeism. Failure is the best teacher, and for many years the West failed to stop wokeism from destroying large swathes of our education system and culture. Now, we must identify and fix the deeper flaws in our society that allowed wokeism to get as far as it did. Our failures reveal ways we need to become stronger.

Wokeism tells us we should take conflict from the political sphere and project it into every aspect of private life. Not only is this illogical, but we have seen empirically that it is a recipe for perpetual discord, dysfunction, and waste. We have seen that scapegoating identity groups deprives us of the synergy and productivity of a thriving society. So we need to work on all the things wokeism worked against, like creating unity, harmony, meritocracy, and competence. Pursuing these is, as Joshua Mitchell puts it, the only way we can “build a world together” and “have a tomorrow.”

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Seeing further than the prevailing culture is often difficult. Today, technology encourages us to live like Dominic Toretto in The Fast and the Furious, “a quarter mile at a time,” focused on the next swipe, the next click, the next headline in a nanosecond news cycle. The pressing demands of COVID, an unstable job market, and an inflationary economy have absorbed our attention in recent years. But without seeing further, contemplating the longer term, the future falls apart. How do we avert this?

To Tocqueville, the tendency toward immersion in the immediate is part of the nature of democracy. Unlike aristocracies, democracies have no inherited classes to provide generational continuity. Anyone’s fortune can plummet with a few bad investments or career moves. Social ranks and roles are often transient, unstable, precarious, and fleeting. Thus “everyone is constantly striving to change his position,” says Tocqueville. This forces individuals to engage in a perpetual scramble to establish and maintain their place in society, a foothold in an unstable world.

On the positive side, however, Tocqueville observed that the dynamic social order of democracies can unleash great economic energy, which can be extremely productive. Removing class barriers to competition can encourage people to hustle. And compared to the elitism of aristocracies, democracies allow a much wider range of citizens to contribute their personal ingenuity to society.

But life in a social order that encourages perpetual, and often frenzied, competition takes a psychological toll. It nudges people toward impulsiveness and an obsession with the moment. As Tocqueville puts it, in democracy the “instability of society itself fosters the natural instability of man’s desires. In the midst of these perpetual fluctuations of his lot, the present grows upon his mind, until it conceals futurity from his sight, and his looks go no further than tomorrow.”

This tendency to look “no further than tomorrow” helps to explain why Western democracies often elevate causes of the moment to religious significance, like some forms of ethnic nationalism, social justice, and environmentalism. It also gives context to our cultural habits of continually updating our CVs, defining and redefining our “identities,” and sculpting our “personal brands,” as we broadcast our place in society at the current instant. By contrast, in aristocracies, citizens inherit an established personal brand of sorts, predetermined by their family name, title, and rank. While a more prescribed and fixed identity perhaps can limit their options, there are benefits to having earthly questions of status and identity settled from birth. It can leave people freer to focus on the longer term.

Tocqueville notes that among the many social forces, one provides the most powerful counterbalance to the sometimes-pathological pull of immediacy in democracies. Religion is strong precisely where the democratic soul is weak. Religion wrenches the mind away from the scrambles of the moment and points it toward the eternal. Tocqueville finds that highly religious democracies have an ingrained collective habit of long-term thinking and that this habit spills over into their approach to worldly affairs:

In the ages of faith the final end of life is placed beyond life. The men of those ages therefore naturally, and in a manner involuntarily, accustom themselves to fix their gaze for a long course of years on some immovable object, towards which they are constantly tending; and they learn by insensible degrees to repress a multitude of petty passing desires, in order to be the better able to content that great and lasting desire which possesses them. When these same men engage in the affairs of this world, the same habits may be traced in their conduct.

Here, Tocqueville observes how religious thought encourages people to contemplate greater aims on the distant horizon, which they form a habit of prioritizing and pursuing over the endless temptations of the instant. This idea was echoed by Edmund Burke, who wrote that leaders “should have high and worthy notions of their function and destination, that their hope should be full of immortality, that they should not look to the paltry pelf of the moment nor to the temporary and transient praise of the vulgar, but to a solid, permanent existence in the permanent part of their nature, and to a permanent fame and glory in the example they leave as a rich inheritance to the world.” Conversely, societies marked by an absence or weakness of religion suffer from shortsightedness. Their lack of long-term vision leaves them far more prone to getting caught up in the “multitude of petty passing desires.”

Besides religion, governments can also promote long-term vision by maintaining the stability and continuity of laws and institutions, so that citizens have a reliable framework in which to plan further than tomorrow. Burke criticized those who are overeager to tear up existing political systems, such as institutions and laws protecting property rights, without considering how this affects citizens’ ability to project and design their own future. The more the future is uncertain, the more it becomes impossible to know how to raise children:

[When leaders] think it among their rights to cut off the entail or commit waste on the inheritance by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society … Nothing stable in the modes of holding property or exercising function could form a solid ground on which any parent could speculate in the education of his offspring or in a choice for their future establishment in the world. No principles would be early worked into the habits. As soon as the most able instructor had completed his laborious course of institution, instead of sending forth his pupil, accomplished in a virtuous discipline, fitted to procure him attention and respect in his place in society, he would find everything altered, and that he had turned out a poor creature to the contempt and derision of the world, ignorant of the true grounds of estimation.

Here, Burke observes that dismantling the systems that underpin society destabilizes both “holding property” and “exercising function” or one’s “place in society,” i.e. jobs and other social roles. These changes throw the future up in the air, making it difficult to establish and aim at goals. For example, Venezuela obliterated property rights by nationalizing industries from oil and mining to farms, banking, retail stores, transportation, electricity, and even tourism and travel. Doing so destroyed or made ineffective a multitude of private leadership roles, including executives, entrepreneurs, and farm owners. This left millions without roles to educate and prepare themselves for, and without property and businesses to own, grow, invest in, and pass on. In short, they no longer had a chance to navigate the long term in their own lives. Moreover, as Aristotle observed in Politics, private property is a prerequisite for private generosity. When the state expropriates private property, it takes a monopoly on generosity. This leaves private citizens unable to promote the long-term prosperity of their community through giving. And where state generosity cannot provide, and private generosity is impossible, the desperate who fall through the cracks are left to steal. This helps explain why Venezuela has the highest crime rate in the world.

But Burke’s observation, that tearing up the “original fabric” of social systems undermines citizens’ ability to prepare for the future, has also played out in a series of sweeping changes to the US job market over the past half-century. America gutted many of its vocational training programs in the 1970s, destabilizing the future of a whole critical category of the workforce. Innovation, automation, and outsourcing have made many degrees and skills marketable one day and unmarketable the next. DEI tore up the fabric of hiring and admissions criteria. All this has left many feeling they do not know what or where to study, whether a degree is worth it, or what career to pursue. This inability to perceive the long term has many stuck in the immediate. They spend hours every day surfing job sites and sending out hundreds of job applications, rather than building a career. Many others hover in limbo. As Nicholas Eberstadt shows in his book Men Without Work, some six million American men in their prime are either not working or not looking for work. A large percentage of these, says Eberstadt, devote their days to drugs and video games (perhaps using the manual and spatial abilities that could have been harnessed in vocational training to build buildings and infrastructure). With no long-term vision for a career, they are “waiting on the world to change,” as John Mayer put it.

Besides promoting stability, leaders can model and encourage long-term thinking in their rhetoric, no matter how large or small the scope of the project. For example, in his “Moon Shot” speeches, John F. Kennedy articulated the need to be the first nation to put a man on the moon, both to stay ahead of the Soviets in the Cold War and to fulfill what he saw as America’s role as a pioneering nation in the long history of mankind. Only a tiny percentage of Americans were directly involved in the space program. Yet Kennedy’s rhetoric in the Space Race inspired a generation of citizens to dream big, challenge limits, and think in decades.

Beyond religion and politics, the face-to-face voluntary associations that Tocqueville famously identified also promote long-term thinking. These include family, schools, and local civic associations—all the myriad “little platoons” we belong to, as Burke put it. Through the long process of showing up and engaging in the meetings, the classes, the games, the dinners, the services, and the ceremonies, people establish a continuity of collective thought and a shared hierarchy of values that creates trust, communication, and structure necessary to ponder long-term aims and how to achieve them. In so doing, citizens secure their place, status, and identity in society—all the things that the tumultuousness of democracy tends to destabilize. This self-created stability frees citizens up to contemplate the long term.

Since Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835, the culture of immediacy in modern democracies has escalated by orders of magnitude. Thus now more than ever, we need to recognize the importance of creating the conditions that make it possible for citizens to contemplate the long-term. If Tocqueville is right, one way to do this is by emphasizing the value of religion and the perspective it encourages, which redirects citizens’ attention beyond the momentary vicissitudes of democratic life and toward the eternal. This means emphasizing the aspects of religion that call for service and sacrifice and enduring hardship in the pursuit of worthy long-term aims. And if Burke is right, another way to promote long-term thinking is to promote the stability of the economy and the social order, so that when citizens look to the future, they can have some confidence that what they are aiming at will still exist when the future arrives.

One way to do this is to spend less time online and more in embodied life. Through face-to-face associations, citizens stabilize their social identities and connections and map the future together. Another way is by improving career education, which is woefully inadequate in America. What could be more stable than a country of agile, resilient workers who can envision a realistic, successful career for themselves, thanks to a strong understanding of both the complex job market and the value of their own natural talents? Only when such counterbalances to the pull of immediacy are established does it become possible to fulfill the promise of democracy, for average citizens to be able to see further and chart the course of their own lives toward distant horizons.

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Yet when democracy grew corrupt, so did philosophy, which sank into skepticism. Learned fools took to maligning the truth. … People now misused eloquence. … Like furious winds lashing the sea, they stirred up civil wars in their republics and reduced them to utter chaos. Thus the state fell from its perfect liberty into the perfect tyranny of anarchy, or the unbridled liberty of the free peoples, which is the worst of all tyrannies.

A professor of rhetoric and law in Naples, Vico believed that language and laws represented the height of cultural achievement. He thought language and laws were a way of conveying senso commune, common sense, and piety, which he held to be the fundamental civilizing forces that pull humans out of barbarism. Vico believed that, when used honestly and properly, language and laws extend the radius of common sense and piety from the few to the many; but in times of cultural decline, they increasingly come to work against common sense and piety, rather than in support of them. Words originally designed as vessels for carrying truths are hollowed out, and new false meanings are inserted. Language is twisted to deceive—until deception becomes the norm.

Today, Vico’s theory is born out by the language of identity politics. It starts by hollowing out the word identity itself. Identity politics discards the human identity that unites everyone. It does not acknowledge the common-sense reality that we all share a common human nature, which leaves the illusion that finding common ground is impossible. Real individuals are treated as instantiations of abstract categories, walking chunks of whiteness and blackness, masculinity and femininity, oppression and victimhood, not real embodied individuals with unique minds, bodies, souls, and personal agency.

To add force to the “furious winds lashing the sea,” as Vico might put it, identity politics constructs epithets to praise and blame group identities. These ascribe some combination of stain, contamination, suspiciousness, malevolence, and abnormality. There are Churchill’s “foul” Hindus, Trump’s “shithole countries,” Joe Biden’s blacks who “ain’t black” because they did not vote for him, and wokeism’s “toxic masculinity” and “toxic whiteness.” If someone believes that kids should not be using puberty-blocking drugs, they must be “transphobic,” i.e. they must have a phobia, a mental disorder.

Each of these terms defies common sense—which, again, Vico found to be one of the hallmarks of civilization—by equating superficial, incidental traits with some combination of guilt/wrongdoing/contamination. But this equation is absurd, as incidental traits are properties of a thing, not entities in themselves. A skin color does not have moral agency.

Identity politics then redefines the words we use for relationships among group identities. A good example is the woke mantra “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI. Of the infinite possible meanings of diversity, successful societies have embraced the common-sense diversity that Aristotle said was necessary for a flourishing community: a diversity of virtues, i.e. a variety of people who bring excellence in many areas, to make a society well-rounded, whole, and complete.

Wokeism replaces the societal aim of a diversity of virtues with the aim of a diversity of group identity affiliations. This automatically ensures that excellence suffers. As Joshua Mitchell alludes to in American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time, wokeism redefines an individual’s contribution to “diversity” according to how distant their group identity is from the heterosexual white male. As the universal oppressor identity, heterosexual white men are dogmatically assumed to contribute zero to diversity, other than self-condemnation and acting as an “ally” for other identity groups. The term “BIPOC” (black, indigenous, and people of color) serves as a euphemism for “anything but white.”

One result of this redefinition of diversity is Brown University, a bastion of DEI where 57 percent of students are BIPOC, compared to 36 percent BIPOC in the US population, and 38 percent of students identify as LGBTQ+, over five times the percentage among adults. At Brown, it seems the operating equation is

diversity = (BIPOC + LGBTQ+) – (white + heterosexual + male)

Again, when diversity is redefined to mean a diversity of group affiliations rather than a diversity of virtues, excellence must suffer. Indeed, the excellence of Brown’s viewpoint diversity—a cornerstone of the idea of the university—now approaches zero on the Kelvin scale. Brown Federalist Society founder Thomas Bickel called out his school for failing at using diversity and inclusion to promote excellence:

Brown’s chronic lack of countervailing viewpoints both within the student body and among faculty is unbecoming of an institution supposedly committed to diversity and inclusion. Put differently, it is difficult to understand how students could possibly receive a well-rounded education at Brown when the College’s [left-leaning] faculty and student body are almost all in ideological lockstep with one another.

Ironically, as Bickel points out, Brown’s redefinition of “diversity” has created homogeneity among viewpoints at Brown, defeating the university’s fundamental purpose as a place to exchange diverse ideas.

DEI also hollows out and redefines “equity.” In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines equity as the practice of making an exception to a rule that makes the outcome more just, in situations when a rule is too general to fit the particulars of a case. Laws are by nature general, says Aristotle. Life is too complex and dynamic for lawmakers to foresee and include all the possibilities. This does not mean that laws are bad, Aristotle emphasizes, but it does mean that some cases will inevitably fall through the cracks in the laws. When they do, equity is the attempt to make things right.

Examples of Aristotelian equity are so prevalent in America that we often take them for granted. For example, in K-12 schools, ESL track classes and special education embody Aristotelian equity. Having taught in China and six other countries, I can attest that many parents in foreign countries send their kids to American international schools hoping they will be more equitable toward their child’s special needs than local schools.

But what wokeism means by equity is destroying the rule, not making exceptions to it. For example, traditional equity would mean seeking exceptions to standard education that can boost lower-performing students to help them catch up and reach the level required for college admissions or APs, such as additional resources, tutoring, and supplemental courses. And traditional equity could also mean providing quality non-AP courses for students who do not qualify for AP or are not interested, so that they too can attain the highest level of education possible. Either of these options is in line with the essential aim of education itself, which is to raise students’ academic achievement.

Woke equity is the opposite. Rather than seek exceptions that help those who fell through the cracks reach the goal, it destroys the original goal and makes the exception into the rule. This can be seen in schemes to allow significantly underprepared students to be admitted to colleges or take AP classes, setting up both students and schools for frustration and failure. And it can be seen in high schools removing AP classes or calculus, or in Princeton’s move to remove the Greek and Latin language requirement for majors in Classics. Under the pretense of closing the “equity gap,” all these measures lower, not raise, academic achievement.

In short, equity was all around us long before woke equity attempted to redefine the term and monopolize its use. Rather than do the hard work of finding and implementing exceptions that help raise students up to the standard, woke equity strips society of its standards and calls it progress.

And among the other terms identity politics hollows out and redefines is “inclusion.” Identity politics movements couch themselves in the inclusive language of unity, from the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally to the Marxist slogan “Workers of the World, Unite!” to the radical left’s “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” But in reality, all of these movements are fundamentally about excluding and demonizing some “oppressor” group, and thus they only deepen and entrench divisions in society.

As Vico outlined, identity politics uses words in false and malignant ways to undermine the institutions of society. It uses words to radicalize factions and foment civil discord. This works especially well at universities, where using words at a high level is a fundamental tool of the trade of teaching. We have to recognize the importance of getting words right, because, as Vico pointed out, civilization depends on it. We have to take words back from movements that trade on false eloquence. As New York City mayor Eric Adams recently said of the Pro-Palestine protests at Columbia, “There is a movement to radicalize young people, and I’m not going to wait until it’s done and all of a sudden acknowledge the existence of it. This is a global problem that young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children.”

The late Jewish civil rights activist Abraham Joshua Herschel said, “There can be no nature without spirit, no world without the Torah, no brotherhood without a father, no humanity without attachment to God.” Identity politics obsesses over brotherhood and is fond of the term “solidarity.” But it has so hollowed out this word, that it never stops to recognize that in uniting identities against other identities, it is uniting brothers against brothers. Bereft of any notion of a common human nature, or the recognition that we are all stained and in need of forgiveness, the only solidarity that identity politics can ever know is a brotherhood without a father.

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From the far-right obsession with blood-and-soil nationalism to the far-left obsession with race and gender, identity politics ascribes identities to people it doesn’t know or understand, blames certain identities for the victimhood of others, and pursues entitlements accordingly. Breaking the spell that identity politics holds on large segments of society requires more citizens like Dr. Lee, who not only denounce the absurdities of identity politics but articulate a truer, more exciting conception of what identity really is.

Among the most insightful philosophers on the topic of identity is the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. A social scientist who toured America in the 1830s, Tocqueville has been called the greatest observer of what is unique about American life—of the American identity, one might say. He observed that democracies thrive only when citizens engage in the collective pursuit of goals through voluntary associations. Group identity formation is a natural byproduct of this process. It comes not through stamping oneself with an identity, but as an emergent property of taking real responsibility, or as Jordan Peterson puts it, “the adventure of your life.”

Tocqueville was fascinated by the ways he saw Americans creating new groups, which gave them new identities. In Democracy in America, he compared the way that societies pursue goals in French democracy and American democracy. He observed that French democracy still operated largely through the leftover structures of ancient top-down, hereditary aristocratic hierarchies, in which group identity was largely pre-formed and unchosen. Only the aristocrats—like dukes, counts, earls, and barons—held the wealth and power to bring citizens together into associations to execute big projects, like building cathedrals, palaces, and universities. The rest of society was dependent on the aristocrats, and thus obliged to cooperate with their designs. Thus the associations a citizen belongs to in aristocracy are largely a product of heredity and geographic location.

By contrast, Tocqueville marveled at how, unlike Europe, American society operated from the bottom-up. He found that Americans had a unique habit of forming voluntary associations to achieve goals that average citizens, not just aristocrats, came up with. They managed to convince fellow citizens to join in and commit to their aims, even when democracy offered everyone the freedom to stay apart. Such commitments create a new group identity, which can then be a tool for attracting more members. In fact, Tocqueville believed that this habit of forming and engaging in associations—like family, schools, churches, businesses, non-profits, and local civic groups—comprised the indispensable foundation of American democratic society:

When you allow [citizens] to associate freely in everything, they end up seeing in association the universal and, so to speak, unique means that men can use to attain the various ends that they propose. Each new need immediately awakens the idea of association. The art of association then becomes, as I said above, the mother science; everyone studies it and applies it.

For Tocqueville, the often messy, loud, and contentious operations of voluntary associations are the essential process through which Americans connect and their ever-evolving social identities take shape. Through the give and take of associational life, said Tocqueville, “Feelings are renewed, and the heart enlarged.” The very development of the human psyche and the heart, the core of one’s being, is shaped by the shared interactions that citizens in democracies create for themselves through voluntary associations.

Identities are born out of the commotion of mutual communication, effort, and risk-taking in a dynamic world never fully known or understood. Thus individual citizens do not fully know how identities of association will take shape, because they are not the sole shapers of them. In associations, we cannot know the extent to which we will be accepted by others, or how influential our opinions will be, or the degree to which our aims and efforts will align with those of the group. Moreover, identities of association mutate as groups take on new goals and discard old ones, as illustrated by the changing platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties since their inception. Identities also change as group members take on new roles in relation to each other, for example as newcomers gain experience, or as members become more educated.

By contrast, identity politics presumes to know our identity without a clue as to the ever-changing dynamics of our associational lives. This is absurd, because an identity is not something anyone can just “know.” As Jordan Peterson puts it, identity is not just in your head; it is also in the world. A person’s identity is embedded in the patterns of their relationships with different people. Identity is not simply what one thinks of oneself, or how one defines oneself, as the modern cult of identity teaches.

The popularity of the notion that a person can dictate their identity is, in part, a symptom of our democratic age. It reflects the flawed tendencies of democratic thinking that Plato and Aristotle observed: When citizens are free under the law, they begin to believe the illusion that they are free in every respect, in this case free to dictate who they are. This helps to explain why schools encouraging kids to declare what they “identify as” is a wild goose chase: Identities are not created by declarations any more than declaring oneself to be a doctor makes a person a doctor. Real identity requires concordance between how a person represents themselves, how they act in the world, and—often forgotten—how the world relates to them. You can declare yourself to be a basketball coach, but until someone agrees for you to coach them, you are not a basketball coach. Living an identity involves embedding oneself in the world. It is the misplaced pressuring of kids to do the impossible, to dictate their identity without having truly lived it, that is leading to the mutilation of so many teens through transgender surgeries.

In democracies, associations are where individuals find strength. It is there that they discover how their own ideas, sentiments, and actions can make a great difference in the world. As Tocqueville observes, democracy is a DIY operation in which citizens must find their own ways to combine their energies if they hope to achieve great goals. Everyone is free and independent under the law—which sounds wonderful, except it can leave citizens disconnected, with little power on their own. The only way individuals can overcome this is to voluntarily connect.

Thus democracy can only be civilized when citizens master the art of association, says Tocqueville. But individuals in democracies cannot wait around for “the system” to dictate whom to associate with, when, and toward what aims, because there are no systems of predetermined associations, no permanent classes and ranks, no aristocrats running the show. Democracy runs on the associations that citizens freely engage in to achieve the goals they aspire to.

What if citizens choose not to engage? What if they use their freedom not to associate, but to isolate themselves from each other? Tocqueville thought this was a very real possibility:

In democratic peoples … all citizens are independent and weak; they can do almost nothing by themselves, and none of them can force their fellows to lend their cooperation. They therefore all fall into impotence if they do not learn to aid each other freely. … [And] if they did not acquire the practice of associating with each other in ordinary life, civilization itself would be in danger.

Tocqueville feared that if democracies ever lost the habit of forming voluntary associations, the result would be not aristocracy but tyranny, the tyranny of the state. Contrary to the principle of subsidiarity, under the tyranny of the state, government assumes roles better handled by voluntary associations, making individuals dependent on government. When democracies stop practicing the art of association, they lose a multitude of identities of association, as all the small links that hold society together are broken. Fragmented and isolated, citizens become weakened and unable to defend themselves from the state, and allegiance to the state becomes the central focus of group identity.

Democracies are about self-government, the rule of the demos, the people. It is through associations that the people learn the art of governing themselves, the art of collaborating to bring great works into being. And here lies one of the tragedies of identity politics: It teaches not the art of association, but the art of finger-pointing, which is anti-associational. Identity politics thus sabotages education in democratic self-government, leading to a fragmented, unproductive society. So instead of using identities to divide society, we should reject identity politics and emphasize how engaging in voluntary associations creates new group identities that can transcend immutable group markers, attract more members, and unite citizens to bring great accomplishments into the world.

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Amidst all the noise and furor about education in this country at present, I have yet to hear this question raised. But it is basic. Liberal education has as its end the free mind, and the free mind must be its own teacher.

As I did, many come to study at the Graduate Institute at St. John’s in order to get the liberal arts education they missed as an undergraduate. I believe many enroll not just for the roundtable discussions, but also simply to get time, structure, and credit for being their own teacher.

Being one’s own teacher means taking responsibility for actively charting one’s own educational course, pressing far beyond “externally imposed classes,” as Buchanan puts it, and refusing to settle for blaming the educational system for one’s shortcomings. But charting one’s own course does not mean always going alone. On the contrary, it means understanding that mentors and peers are essential—as is seeking them out. Humans are mimetic and social beings, and even the most independent individualist needs models, guides, and fellow seekers.

But young children read books and are their own teacher. So how is it that, later in life, adults need Buchanan’s reminder? In part, it is because of forces that pull us toward conformity and complacency, such as what Buchanan calls the “winds of doctrine” and the “jungle of ideologies,” as well as the simplicity of nihilism and the comfort zone of overspecialization. Being one’s own teacher requires resisting these external forces, he says, by listening to the truth-seeking voice in ourselves, however faint: “Have you listened to the small spontaneous voice within that asks continually if these things are true? … Do you believe that knowledge is possible, that truth is attainable, and that it is always your business to seek it, although evidence is overwhelmingly against it?”

Given the forces conspiring to discourage independent minds, what inspires them to continue being their own teacher? Sometimes it is being jarred by the recognition of a lost opportunity, as I was recently when reflecting on the AP US history class I took during my junior year from 1989–90 at Gonzaga, a Catholic high school in Washington, DC. Yes, the class was eighth period, the last period of the day. Yes, it was taught by a rotund Jesuit priest who lectured at a glacial pace and was hard to follow. And it’s true that there were no visuals at all: no outlines to refer to, no notes on the board, no handouts, no overhead projector images, and no slides. It was an hour of soporific lecturing, with very few questions to engage the students, followed by an announcement of another 20 pages of reading for homework. In class, I spent much of the time sleeping and surreptitiously exchanging jokes with my friend. Somehow I managed to get a B+, but what I learned was better indicated by the 2 out of 5 I got on the AP exam.

But I now realize that the primary cause of my poor performance in AP US History was my own approach to the class. I lost sight of being my own teacher. Over the past two years, in addition to teaching, I have tutored online over 600 hours. To expand my tutoring subjects, this summer I have been studying AP US History—the same course I slept through over three decades ago. It’s fascinating. Six weeks engrossed in the 5 Steps to a 5: AP US History study guide, Googling terms and tangents, making notes in the margins, and watching videos have helped tie together countless bits of prior knowledge into a more cohesive narrative. And as I near the end, I realize, “I could have done this 34 years ago. What was I doing during eighth period in eleventh grade?” All that was necessary was a book and a student, being his own teacher.

I found plenty of time for The Washington Post that year, on hour-long bus commutes, during lunch, and sometimes during AP US History class. But somehow, I never found 20 or 30 minutes to read the history textbook, as others who got As did. Had I recognized early on that I simply was not going to learn much from this teacher, abandoned all expectations about the lectures, and treated the course as purely self-study—and better yet, as if I were preparing to tutor students in it—I would have learned far more. But I think that being in school all day has a way of conditioning students to look to the teacher for things they could provide for themselves.

It would not be until over a decade after AP US History class, after seeing the student experience from the teacher’s side—especially how effort often trumps talent in the game of grades—that I would fully realize how having an ineffective teacher is a reason to put in more effort and attention, not less, and be one’s own teacher. Luckily, by the time I started graduate school, I had finally learned this lesson the hard way. But my eleventh-grade self needed someone to step in and say,

Snap out of it! Checking out only exacerbates a difficult situation. This is the history of your country, my friend. In a few decades, there will be teachers who misrepresent your history to push their agendas, so you’d better know it well if you want to defend yourself and stick up for the truth. And guess what? You might be teaching this stuff one day, in school and to your kids. So do a little bit of reading every night. It will make this class a lot easier. And it will open a lot of doors in the future.

But recognizing that you are your own teacher means more than finding motivation. It also means embracing adversity and pushing through discouragement. “[H]ave you persuaded yourself that there are knowledges and truths beyond your grasp, things that you simply cannot learn?” asks Buchanan. “Have you allowed adverse evidence to pile up and force you to conclude that you are not mathematical, not linguistic, not poetic, not scientific, not philosophical? If you have allowed this to happen, you have arbitrarily imposed limits on your intellectual freedom, and you have smothered the fires from which all other freedoms arise.”

Sometimes a spark makes the fires come back strong. One day the AP US History teacher was absent. A different Jesuit priest came to substitute. He had been given no lesson plan. So he told us he was going to teach about something he found interesting, the Cuban Missile Crisis. He told the story well, and with chalk, he drew Cuba on the board, and the Russian missiles pointed at Florida. He wrote the key dates and names: Castro, Kennedy, Khrushchev, LBJ, and McNamara. We learned about the larger context of the Cold War, and proxy wars in other countries I had never heard of. It was a story of suspense, and I watched and listened with rapt attention. When the bell rang, I was disappointed that we had to stop. Inside my head, my brain exclaimed, “This is US history? Can we keep this guy?” The contrast between the regular teacher and the substitute made it unmistakably clear what a difference a good teacher makes. A good teacher inspires students to want to explore more—to want to be their own teacher.

This was the case also in my freshman and sophomore years when I had two social studies teachers who were legendary at Gonzaga. For grade 9 World Cultures, there was Fr. McKee, the self-declared “Zen Buddhist Jesuit priest.” He taught us about faraway places and ways of life: Zoroastrianism and ziggurats, Hindus bathing in the Ganges River, Mayan pyramids, and nirvana and karma. And in grade 10, I had Mr. Carolan, who bore some resemblance to Doc Brown in Back to the Future. He entered the classroom each day with no book, no notes, picked up a piece of chalk, and told the story of European history from memory, while writing an impeccable outline and detailed maps on the chalkboard. He interspersed fact-filled stories with funny details, jokes, and memorable phrases—like Charles “The Hammer” Martel defeating the “Moors at Tours.” He physically re-enacted the defenestration of Prague by tossing various classroom items out the window. A smoker, Mr. Carolan on a rare occasion would illustrate a fiery episode of history by lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke rings. Both Fr. McKee and Mr. Carolan modeled independent thought and unique ways of teaching. They were so off-script, so quirky and idiosyncratic, and so knowledgeable and adept at conveying social studies that they were obviously not just the product of a cookie-cutter educational system, but of a lifetime of being their own teacher.

But being your own teacher does not require such idiosyncrasies and special effects. For example, in my sophomore year at Gonzaga, I had Fr. Bidinger for biology, who had just been ordained a few years before and later went on to be a principal and president of other Jesuit high schools, and the chaplain at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. In Fr. Bidinger’s class, we simply opened the textbook and carefully read through it together. He stopped frequently to explain the concepts and diagrams and ask students questions about what was on the page, and he checked our understanding. That was it. And that was a lot. I learned a ton about biology. And it demonstrated how much we could continue to learn on our own by methodically going through good books. A year later in AP US History, I forgot this.

“You see? Do you really think students today want to be their own teacher?” one might object. “Many students bristle at doing even the simplest homework exercises. How will they be burning the midnight oil in the library?” This is certainly a fair question. But it is often astounding how the way a lesson is presented changes the game. As Elon Musk said in his keynote address at the 2017 International Space Station Research and Development Conference, while context and problem-solving are what students’ brains naturally grab onto, these are often absent in the classroom. “[T]eachers do not explain why kids are being taught a subject,” said Musk. “The why of things is extremely important because our brain has evolved to discard information that it thinks has no relevance. You just sort of get dumped into math. Why are you learning math? What’s the point of this? [Students say] I don’t know why am I being asked to do these strange problems.”

Give students a problem, show its importance, equip them with the concepts and materials to solve it, and let them solve it. This is often called “project-based learning (PBL).” But the problem with much of what passes for PBL is that the educators do not do enough preparation to give students the conceptual and/or physical tools necessary to invent or execute the project. 

Real PBL often takes a long time to set up, but it can be done. For example, in geography, I often assign a project to design a plan for a trip to another part of the world. The trip must visit five specific types of stops, which I change depending on what type of geography class it is (physical, cultural, world regional, etc.): for example, a place where globalization is evident on the landscape; an urban ecosystem; a religious landscape; an indigenous culture region; the site of a transnational border issue; the habitat of an endangered species; a political conflict zone. I teach students all these geographic concepts, with examples, along with the cartographic nuts and bolts to make maps to illustrate and communicate their trips. And I teach them research tools for finding their stops, including ways to navigate books, websites, and databases. Once students have constructed and mapped their trip, they write a research-based background analysis of each stop so they are prepared to understand and interact with what they find when they arrive. Within the given parameters, the students make all the choices as to where they are going. 

I emphasize that this assignment is practice, to help them design real trips in the future. It shows students who have rarely or never planned any trips that they can do it. In fact, one former college student who moved overseas emailed me a few years after class to say that she had now visited all five of her class project stops. So giving students a concrete problem that they naturally want to solve, and providing the tools and structure to do it, is an effective way to encourage them to be their own teacher. This is one area in which the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program, which I have taught in at several schools, excels: It provides many types of structures in which students can design their own essays, investigations, and activities, defining their own problems and seeking the solutions.

There are endless debates about how to improve educational systems. But ironically, one of the best ways to help students is to equip them to cope with broken systems. We should instill the idea that no class can personalize learning like an individual who is adept at being their own teacher. If there is one thing that tutoring has taught me, it is that students—like my former self in AP US History—need encouragement in the face of the clanging and smoke of the educational Crazy Train to keep from getting derailed. They need reminders of what they can still do. When schools declare “we don’t use textbooks,” as many do today, find your own in the library or online. Track down knowledgeable people, wherever they might be, and ask a lot of questions. Become a connoisseur of resources that can teach what teachers will not or cannot. We need to strengthen the educational street smarts of young people, so that even when all the other factors point toward failure, they have the resilience to progress forward and be part of the Great Conversation.

The post On Being Your Own Teacher appeared first on Law & Liberty.

The same was true of activities like international night, where students proudly and loudly displayed music, dancing, arts, sports, and food from their cultures, including some dancing on the tables. To be sure, the student body was not very economically diverse, as most came from wealthy families, except for a few local kids and some whose tuition was paid by corporations or governments. But partly by accident and partly by design, the school hit a nice balance between a melting pot and a plural society, so that the diversity of the whole student body shined through.

There was no DEI office or diversity czar at this boarding school. Yet it functioned well as a “container for diversity,” to borrow Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen’s phrase. This container was built on common agreement on 1) English as the main language and 2) the value of tolerance and open-mindedness toward other cultures. The school attracted students who shared these values. Those who did not share them did not thrive there, and a few managed to get themselves expelled. This made it clear that an appreciation for other cultures and beliefs can be encouraged, but it cannot be forced.

It also became obvious that the success of a diverse student body depends on each unique student figuring out for themselves what they share in common with others around them. Maybe two students both like rap music, or baking, or they both used to live in Dubai. No DEI policy or training can dictate the special commonalities that provide catalysts for bonds between students from different backgrounds.

So how can schools encourage, but not force, an appreciation for diversity? One answer is simple: Let diverse students work together to accomplish difficult things. Set big common goals—in this school, one was to earn the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma—then continuously refocus students’ collective energies on achieving them: study for the test, win the game, enliven the discussion, create harmony in the dorms, travel and see the world. In the process, the students will have to negotiate their differences and find common ground to reach their goals.

In his book American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time, Georgetown University political theorist Joshua Mitchell says schools are among the indispensable mediating institutions which provide the training grounds for developing competency in citizenship, including the art of being a citizen in a diverse society. These institutions also include family, churches, and local civic associations. In and through institutions, says Mitchell, we learn to lead and follow, trust, and establish who we are—our identity. And we establish this identity not by declaring it, but by discovering it through constant face-to-face associations, whose importance Tocqueville emphasized in Democracy in America: “Sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another.” As Mitchell puts it, institutions mediate between the state and the many, and they draw citizens out of themselves to participate in society. This function is especially crucial in democracies, said Tocqueville, because they lack hereditary social structures to act as mediators to bind society together. A downside of the freedom valued by democracies is that it permits citizens to self-isolate and disconnect from society. But only when citizens are drawn out of themselves and connect can society accomplish great things.

The boarding school in Switzerland exemplified the sort of mediating institution that Mitchell and Tocqueville describe. I can think of few situations that draw people out of themselves and connect them more than studying, playing, eating, and socializing together 24/7 on a relatively small campus in the Alps. Students—and faculty—learned how to lead and follow, how to trust, and how to establish their identity within all sorts of formal and informal associations large and small: a dorm room with three other people, a 7-hour team van ride to a tournament, a new club negotiating how to get off the ground, an advisee group dinner talking out thorny issues. These are part of a continuous stream of face-to-face associations that never seems to cease in boarding school life. To be sure, there were innumerable messy conflicts along the way. This is exactly the nature of mediating institutions, through which citizens figure out how to rule themselves, rather than relying on the dictates of aristocrats. Through the process, “the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed.” Should this not be the goal of any educational effort aimed at diversity?

Today’s DEI movement has gone terribly wrong by alienating rather than mediating. Rather than focusing students on big common goals and helping them recognize their commonalities, it tears them apart by focusing their attention on contending even the smallest divisive issues, as indicated by the DEI jargon term “microaggressions.” DEI-gone-wrong is built on what Mitchell calls “the politics of innocence”: dividing society into guilty transgressor identities (ex. “the patriarchy”) and innocent victim identities, based on past suffering, wherein transgressors owe victims a “spiritual debt.” To pay off this debt, the transgressors are silenced and purged, while the victims dictate the rules. Two wrongs make a right, says DEI-gone-wrong. This actively destroys the middle ground. The politics of innocence thus shuts down the formation of Tocquevillian associations before it can start, leaving society with no way out of isolation, fragmentation, and conflict.

The dysfunction of the politics of innocence was on display recently in the Stanford Law School incident in which Tirien Steinbach, the associate dean for DEI, orchestrated a premeditated heckling and shout-down of conservative judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who had been invited to speak by students in the campus Federalist Society. Before the event, Steinbach sent emails encouraging students who opposed the speaker to attend. As the students shouted down the judge, Steinbach stepped in and hijacked the event with her own prepared speech, claiming to support free speech while simultaneously imploring the judge not to speak, saying his words would “hurt” students, who were adults in their 20s. She then looked on with tacit approval as students hurled profanity and vulgar insults, also written on obscene placards they held up. They were engaging in what Mitchell calls “innocence-signaling,” while signaling the guilt of the speaker, whom they sought to purge.

The Stanford incident provides an instructive example of the incompetent use of a mediating institution. Steinbach showed no aspiration to mediation. There was no attempt to draw the attendees out of themselves, focus them on big common goals, or connect them to each other through discussion. Instead, she spoke on behalf of only one viewpoint and shamed the judge for his—before he had spoken—then allowed the students she invited to destroy the forum for mediation itself. Despite being unable to produce a coherent counterargument to the judge’s remarks, the DEI mob eventually walked out in self-congratulation. Steinbach had modeled to them that what really mattered was not developing competence in contributing to a discussion of diverse opinions on the law, but basking in innocence, ensuring that their ideological safe space was intact. Their incompetence in the art of engaging in discussion fits the description Nietzsche made in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “The time is coming when man will no longer shoot the arrow of his longing beyond man, and his bowstring will have unlearned to vibrate.”

By contrast, what made the boarding school a successful mediating institution is what Mitchell calls the “politics of competence,” not the politics of innocence. By providing big common goals, the forums and facilitators necessary to achieve them, and a diverse student body, the school helped students develop competence in living in a diverse society. Life on campus was far from perfect. Were there occasional intolerant attitudes, fights, insults, insensitive jokes, and slurs? Of course. But these were the exception, not the rule, and they were handled by faculty and administration, and often by the students themselves. The idea that anyone would—or would be allowed to—shout down an invited speaker would have been laughable, because students were so habituated to working together with others with different viewpoints.

None of this was achieved by grandiose DEI policies and abstract buzzwords, but through competence in creating real-world experiences in which students had to do difficult things together. Some of these experiences were created by members of the faculty and administration, and others by the students themselves. In the dorms, the prefect system developed students’ competence in leading and following and resolving disputes among each other. One administrator was a retired doctor, and he used his competence in medicine to arrange for many seniors to work in an orphanage in Romania with kids who had contracted AIDS through blood transfusions, as part of Creativity, Action, and Service (CAS), one of the IB Diploma Program’s core requirements. The IB Environmental Systems and Societies teacher arranged an overnight trip to a sustainable agricultural cooperative and taught students how to work together to collect fieldwork data there.

Travel was instrumental in developing competence. One of the traits listed in the IB Learner Profile is “open-minded,” and as Mark Twain said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Besides several required week-long school trips each year, students could invent their own clubs and trips, as long as faculty members agreed to lead them. It was the success of this sort of ground-up process of association aimed at a goal that amazed Tocqueville about America: “I often admired the infinite art with which the inhabitants of the United States managed to fix a common goal to the efforts of many men and to get them to advance to it freely.” The school was founded as a platform for students to see Europe and “stretch their minds,” as the late founder liked to say, and this is precisely why many students chose to go there.

By contrast, it seems unlikely that Steinbach and the student DEI mob came to Stanford to stretch their minds and develop competence in understanding other cultures. In fact, their presence on campus is more likely the result of years spent honing the craft of innocence-signaling. It is hard to imagine a student who spent significant time looking after dorm mates or working with kids at an orphanage yelling “We hope your daughters get raped!” as the Stanford DEI mob did, or a student who spent years adapting to new cultures and foreign environments—and writing IB essays, which require a “clear awareness and evaluation of different points of view”—yelling at a federal judge “You’re not welcome here, we hate you!” “Leave and never come back!” “We hate FedSoc [Federal Society] students, f–k them, they don’t belong here either!”

On the contrary, with no majority nationality or ethnicity at the boarding school, most people on campus recognized the need to be open and make each other feel welcome in order to, as Mitchell puts it, “build a world together and have a tomorrow.” This is the politics of competence at work. Students developed competence in transforming a diverse group of people into a community, one trip, one project, one friendship at a time.

In return for the pursuit of innocence-signaling, the Stanford Law School DEI mob will likely graduate with little more competence in the art of citizenship in a diverse society than they came in with. By contrast, students and faculty at the boarding school often say that the cultural competence and appreciation for diversity they developed in their years living on a hill in the Alps have lasted a lifetime.

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To wrap up this identity exercise, the 20-something workshop leader surprised the hall of over a hundred dining educators from three campuses. Standing in front, and apropos of nothing, she suddenly shouted at the top of her lungs “I am a black queer woman!” All the teachers at my table looked as puzzled as I was. At the table behind me, my 28-year-old history department head then stood up from his chicken cutlet and yelled “I am a white cisgender male!” No one seemed sure how to respond. There was silence. Then everyone went back to their mashed potatoes.

What went unmentioned in the larger discussion were the identities most teachers had written: commitments, relationships, character traits, hobbies, and experiences. The implicit message was that what really mattered—what was worth shouting—was one’s race and gender.

Rewind to 1985. I was 12. Troy, Carlos, and Juan were three black Dominican brothers four houses down. I was white. We played in the street all the time. Race never came up. My baseball coach and his two sons on the team were also black. All the other players were white. Coach had played in the minors and made everything look easy. After we won the league, he and I gave each other a bear hug. Race never came up, on the field or at home.

Back to the Future was the number-one movie in 1985. “We are the World” was the number-one song. The latter was written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and produced by Quincy Jones. All three were black, but that was never the story. It was just a great song.

What changed since 1985? How did the America that taught students not to stereotype others based on race or gender go back to the future, obsessing on “the color of their skin” while ignoring “the content of their character,” the opposite of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream?

A big part of the answer is a dynamic identified by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America: As a society moves closer to social equality, citizens become more aware of and more uncomfortable with the inequalities that remain. Wrote Tocqueville:

When inequality is the general law of society, the most blatant inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest variations are marked enough to hurt it. Hence the desire for equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality extends to all. … Men will never establish any equality with which they can be contented.

Tocqueville here observes that more equal conditions put the spotlight on inequalities and make them more glaring, which, ironically, makes citizens more unsatisfied with the equality they have achieved.

And the reverse is also true: The more unequal a society is, the less citizens dwell on inequalities. The vantage point from which contrasting socioeconomic groups view each other is more distant, so their perceptions of each other are blurrier.

I observe this often in Panama, where I have lived for the last three years. Panama is officially a democracy but, like most of Latin America, it is an oligarchic society. It is the fourth most economically unequal country in the Americas, as measured by its GINI coefficient. Panama’s rich and poor are so far apart economically, in such different worlds of opportunity, that they do not spend much time mulling over the multiplicity of ways that they are unequal. Someone driving a Toyota Yaris does not spend time comparing every aspect of it with a Mercedes or a BMW, because those other cars are in a different orbit. There may be class tension, and the poor may resent the rich, but they are not comparing their stations in life point by point.

By contrast, American democracy levels the playing field and allows the whole society to play. But this leads to a new problem: It clogs up the field with competitors. Now, unlike aristocracies, citizens eye their differences more closely, says Tocqueville:

When all the privileges of birth and wealth are destroyed, when all the professions are accessible to all, and a man can climb to the top of any of them by his own merits, men’s ambitions think they see before them a great and open career and readily imagine they are summoned to no common destiny. This, however, is a mistaken view which experience corrects daily. … They have abolished the troublesome privileges of a few men only to meet the competition of all. The barrier has changed shape rather than place. Once men are more or less equal and pursue the same path, it is very hard for any one of them to move forward quickly in order to carve his way through the uniform crowd milling around him. This permanent struggle between the instincts inspired by equality and the means it supplies to satisfy them wearies and harasses men’s minds.

Here, Tocqueville observes how the equality of democratic societies can both inspire and discourage. The open playing field that democracy creates inspires citizens to think they can shoot for the stars. But the “universal competition” democracy opens forms a barrier to advancement, creating a “permanent struggle” which can dishearten citizens. Equality encourages citizens to dream big, but standing in the way of one’s dream is the dream of everybody else.

But lest one think Tocqueville was not a fan of American democracy, he also expounded the benefits of a level playing field, universal competition, and permanent struggle: They unleash the energies of all citizens, he said, creating a dynamism and industry that no aristocratic society can match. This, believed Tocqueville, is the source of America’s greatness:

Democracy does not give its nation the most skillful administration but it ensures what the most skillful administration is often too powerless to create, namely to spread through the whole social community a restless activity, an overabundant force, an energy which never exists without it and which, however unfavorable the circumstances, can perform wonders. Therein lie its real advantages.

Citizens of democracies are therefore torn by the simultaneous pursuit of both equality and inequality. On one hand, they are unrelenting in their pursuit of social equality, which removes the barriers of class and thus unlocks energy propelling “restless activity” across society. But on the other hand, universal competition drives citizens to struggle to pursue social distinction, to stand out from the pack, to be unequal. And the more equal a society becomes, the more energy citizens must put into standing out.

Amid the universal competition of democracy, wokeism is a misguided attempt to achieve these simultaneous twin aims of social equality and social distinction. On one hand, wokeism’s solution to the difficulty of distinguishing oneself amid universal competition is not to help citizens better contribute to society and thus gain recognition, but to change the criteria for honors from social contributions to unearned group markers, like certain “oppressed” races and genders. Put differently, wokeism co-opts the trophies and medals that mark distinction in a competitive society, but it awards them without regard for the criteria that ensured that competition is useful and productive for society. Thus, wokeism leaves society incompetent and uncompetitive and renders its trophies meaningless.

Second, wokeism contradicts itself in pursuing social equality by treating part of society unequally, excluding so-called “oppressor” groups, for example “the patriarchy.” As Joshua Mitchell points out in American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time, this is simply an updated form of the ancient pagan practice of scapegoating, which resurfaces in new forms time and again in history. Scapegoating white heterosexual males today does as much to help oppressed groups gain literacy, job skills, and stable family lives as Stalin’s dekulakization purges helped poor Russians eat and Mao’s purges of traditional Chinese culture in the Cultural Revolution helped advance Chinese culture. Like a marriage counselor who advises that one spouse eliminate all influence of the other to achieve a better marriage, wokeism asks us to believe that purging the influence of part of society through zero-sum identitarian warfare is a path to equality and social justice.

In short, wokeism undermines and wastes what Tocqueville believed is America’s greatest strength. Rather than unleashing citizens’ energies, it shuts down the pursuit of earning distinction by awarding distinction for unearned traits. It calls this the path to equality; and, indeed, it is a path to a society in which all are equally incompetent and unproductive.

In a prescient passage, Tocqueville foresaw how democratic societies’ pursuit of social equality would lead to wokeism’s fixation on oppression: “However democratic the state of society and the nation’s political institutions, you can guarantee that each citizen will always spot several oppressive points near to him and you may anticipate that he will direct his gaze doggedly in that direction.”

The democratic mind conditioned to pursue equality relentlessly will always fixate on some oppression standing in the way, says Tocqueville. Wokeism is a manifestation of precisely this fixation. It started as a call to be “radically aware … of the rot pervading the power structures,” as David Brooks describes it, a rot that blocks the attainment of equality. But it has been taken to the extreme and turned into a massive overcorrection of inequalities, a wild goose chase in pursuit of equality ad absurdum, as I described in a recent article. It equates every inequality of power with oppression—even inequalities that are natural, necessary, and/or beneficial. Wokeism will never run out of inequalities to scapegoat, because as Tocqueville observed, the more equal a society becomes, the more inequalities its citizens will perceive.

Faced with the arduous challenge of universal competition which Tocqueville observed in democracies, wokeism offers an effortless way to stand out from the pack: It confers entitlement on those who possess certain unearned group markers of the oppressed and woke status on those who declare themselves “allies” of the oppressed. Being rich was the status marker of the 1980s; now wokeness is, for many, the new Ralph Lauren Polo or J. Crew Oxford, the status marker of the self-styled superior class. Hence what the two educators shouting “identities” at the DEI meeting were really broadcasting was their woke status.

I have not seen my old baseball coach since 1985. While writing this article, I found him online and reached out. He replied that at 83, he is still working, as the athletic director of a school in Florida. His photo on the school website shows the same strength and warm, contagious smile I remembered. Coach was born during segregation. No doubt he personally encountered racism and inequalities growing up. Through his ascent to the minor leagues in the desegregating America of the 1960s, he must have experienced acutely what Tocqueville observed: democracy’s permanent struggle amid universal competition and its ability to unleash the energies of all citizens by removing barriers to the playing field. The world needs more people like Coach, who stand out not for yelling their unearned race and gender, but for contributing their energies to change lives, like he changed mine.

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