Wanting to Preserve Your Culture Is Not a Bad Thing

The nation and its culture (or cultures) can be defended without our devolving into warring camps of tribes.

A ll men are created equal — but not everyone is identical. Human nature may be universal, but culture is particular and distinct, and it grows differently in different soil. Those twin facts raise one of the central dilemmas of a nation founded on classical liberal principles of equal individual rights: Can we seek to preserve and defend our own culture against demographic-driven changes without falling into the traps of treating people as groups or discriminating against individuals?

Our own culture, in this case, refers both to American culture at large and to the many and diverse local, regional, and community cultures within it. The most conspicuous flashpoint flares up when large or rapid demographic change comes to communities, whether those be local, state, or national communities. This can come from mass immigration, but it can also come from internal population movements or from generational shifts when different groups of people have different birth rates.

Changing the religious, racial, ethnic, regional, educational, or class makeup of a community can and often does change its culture. That has happened in the past, here and in other places, and it will happen again. The people who are concerned about preserving their culture may be people whose families have lived in the same place for centuries, or those who built their own communities after arriving here as immigrants. They may be Native Americans looking to keep their traditions alive or black businesses being squeezed out by gentrifying white hipsters.

Negative reactions to demographic change are often accompanied by outbursts of xenophobia, racism, and religious and ethnic bigotry. Bigotry should be denounced, marginalized, and delegitimized. But is bigotry the only possible reason for people to object to changes in their communities caused by demographic shifts? To listen to a lot of commentators on the left side of the political spectrum, you might think so.

Even to raise the topic of demographic change in less than celebratory terms leads to being smeared as a white nationalist or neo-Nazi by left-wingers obsessed with “Great Replacement Theory.” Never mind that progressive pundits and Democratic politicians will wax eloquent at the drop of a hat on how they expect demographic change to deliver for them an “emerging Democratic majority,” or how they expect their vision of society to be delivered by their opponents’ dying off. It’s a conspiracy theory you’re not supposed to talk about . . . unless you’re in favor of it.

For a certain style of progressive, liberal, or libertarian-oriented classical liberal, there is nothing worth preserving in culture, tradition, or community. All of these things are treated as at best abstractions, or at worst, obstacles to progress. Thus, there are no tradeoffs in demographic shifts; there can only be benefits. From this point of view, people are as fungible as widgets, and replacing one set of people with a different set of people has no downside that any decent person could ever find objectionable. In a truly global society, in this view, it is either a tolerable side effect or a positive good for every community to look, think, and act exactly the same as every other. Diverse communities, with their own distinct cultures, are disposable.

Is it healthy for our politics to delegitimize every fear or fret about cultural and demographic change? Conservative political parties around the world have long offered voters an outlet for popular worries and grievances about preserving the continuity and character of communities. Are they wrong to do so?

Demographic Change Matters

Consider the following real-world examples, all of which are common enough, of things that can happen when the mix of a community’s population changes:

• The loss of friends and neighbors — people you may have known your whole lives, webs and networks of friendships and support systems people have had since childhood and through the raising of their children.
• A dearth of playmates for children if groups of people move in who do not have families or who keep mainly to themselves.
• The loss of religious institutions. Declining Catholic, Jewish, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or other sectarian populations leads to the shuttering of parishes, schools, temples, synagogues, yeshivas, and summer camps, reduced Mass schedules, higher tuitions for religious education, and the loss of other communal events and benefits of belonging to a religious community such as foreign pilgrimages.
• The loss of businesses with a culturally particular focus, which are irreplaceable to patrons and to business owners who have made them their life’s work. There are all kinds of businesses of this nature, such as Italian, Polish, or Jamaican food markets, soul food and BBQ joints, Irish pubs, Latin American music clubs, and Catholic supply stores. Some will survive population shifts, but some do not.
• The end of ethnic or religious parades and festivals, from St. Patrick’s Day to the feast of San Gennaro.
• Language barriers. Older people in particular find it hard to manage even simple commercial transactions — ordering food, arranging home or car repairs, giving directions to a house — if they have to deal with thick accents, broken English, and foreign-language signs.
• Changes to the entertainment options available in the community, such as different styles of music and other public spectacles.
• Rising crime rates, including the importation of street gangs and drug-dealing networks, some of them with international connections. Not only do gangs prey on the neighborhood, they may suck teens into rival gangs for self-protection.
• Gentrification, which results in rising rents and property taxes that price people out of places they have lived all their lives.
• Overcrowding, as traditional single-family homes may be replaced by developments that are either upscale (oversized McMansions, luxury apartment towers), downscale (public housing developments), or just aimed at expanding occupancy (multifamily homes). That, in turn, destroys lawns and trees and leads to streets choked with traffic and diminishing options for parking.
• Economic competition from cheap labor by immigrants, especially illegal immigrants.
• The tearing down of local landmarks, memorials, monuments, and even sacred spaces.
• Changes to whose concerns animate the local politicians.

A few of the problems on the list, such as rising crime and gangs, are driven by the misconduct of the new arrivals. But in many other cases, the newcomers to the neighborhood are acting in ways that are admirable: working hard, making money, practicing their faith, raising their own families, celebrating their own culture, seeking a voice in their new community. One need not be hostile to immigrants or immigration, however, to see the cultural costs that can be imposed on communities.

Some of these disruptions are driven as much by free markets as by immigration: gentrification, wage competition, business failures. Some, like the loss of music and food markets, were perhaps inevitably going to come with generational changes anyway.

Different problems come with the arrival or departure of different groups, but pick and choose any two distinctive groups of people, and nearly any of these things can happen by replacing one of them with another en masse.

None of that, however, changes the fact that people facing any of these issues have suffered a real, tangible harm to their quality of life because their community has changed. They lost friends, schools, churches, money, safety, culture, food, and other things they valued. And the speed of demographic changes is in many of these cases directly and visibly responsible for that.

Neighborhoods and communities are not fungible. Scores of songs, films, and novels have been written about the pain of their loss when they undergo dramatic evolutions. Consider two songs from the 1980s, both of which were seen as politically liberal statements at the time. One is Living Colour’s “Open Letter to a Landlord,” written from the perspective of black city-dwellers angry at gentrification:

Now you can tear a building down
But you can’t erase a memory
These houses may look all run down
But they have a value you can’t see…

This is my neighborhood
This is where I come from
I call this place my home
You call this place a slum

The second is John Mellencamp’s “Rain on the Scarecrow,” written from the perspective of Midwestern farmers losing their land:

I grew up like my daddy did, my grandpa cleared this land
When I was five I walked the fence while grandpa held my hand

Rain on the scarecrow blood on the plow
This land fed a nation this land made me proud
And son I’m just sorry there’s no legacy for you now . . .

Well there’s ninety-seven crosses planted in the courthouse yard
Ninety-seven families who lost ninety-seven farms
I think about my grandpa and my neighbors and my name and some nights
I feel like dying like that scarecrow in the rain

I could go on with Bruce Springsteen songs on this topic for pages, but you get the point. Community, and the sense of continuity that goes with it, is a valuable thing.

These are not all changes the government should necessarily do something about. The free movement of people, like the free movement of goods and capital, will always bring with it a certain necessary amount of creative destruction. But liberal and progressive politics — by which I include both government actors and cultural commentators — offers most of the people suffering from the side effects of demographic changes only one answer: calling them a bunch of bigots. Some of them probably are, or at least have become so as they fumed at the new entrants while nobody did anything. But their worries about demographic change making their lives worse are not some paranoid fever dream: It’s reality, lived and felt and experienced.

Conservative politics, properly understood, can and should give people in these situations an outlet to express their frustrations at things that actually harm their lives. It should also try to be constructive, fair, and humane in how those frustrations are addressed, and channel them along the lines of our best American principles. None of that, however, can be done by people who do not start from the proposition that they are dealing with legitimate grievances in the first place.

Conservatism, Humanity, and the Tribe

At its foundation, prior to any of its political positions, philosophies, or doctrines, conservatism begins with the impulse of the tribe: the preference for one’s own, for the dear and familiar, hearth and home and tradition, for family, community, and continuity.

With any tribe comes a culture. Most countries have a distinctive culture of their own — no reasonably educated person denies that. So do many regions, faiths, and ethnic groups. If different cultures didn’t exist, there would be no such thing as multiculturalism, for example, and no real reason for people to travel the world to learn more about other cultures. You could just assume that the whole world is the same as a McDonald’s in Manhattan.

A great many of the people who live in just about any place value the culture they have lived in all their lives. If you bring in a whole lot of new people at once from somewhere else, you lose some of that culture. People who like their own cultures should be concerned about losing them.

European culture, for example, is gradually decaying across the continent. It is decaying much more from a lack of European children and a loss of interest and confidence in the history and culture of the place — problems not unfamiliar to Americans — but the addition of a ton of immigrants who have none of Europe’s long and ancient history is part of that, too. If you think European culture has anything unique left to give the world, that should be sad.

The same might be said of Japan, which has many of the same problems of demographic decline and cultural self-doubt. Japan has none of Europe’s issues of mass immigration; it remains to be seen whether that does more to help preserve its culture, or more to seal its economic fate as its population ages with few children. What Japan has not lost is its distinctive sense of itself as a tribe apart.

An excess of tribalism can lead to all sorts of bad things (the histories of Europe and Japan are full of examples of this, as is our own history), but that does not mean that tribalism is in all circumstances an evil that can or should be stamped out. We are communal beings, and the need to belong to a community is wired deep into us. We cannot belong equally to everyone. The need to belong will always imply the need to exclude, if the group we belong to has any meaning.

When tribal connections are severed, people do not become idealized “citizens of the world.” (Even people who style themselves that way are typically just identifying themselves as part of a particular tribe.) Instead, one or both of two things happen. On the one hand, a loss of human connection: loneliness, isolation, alienation — the themes of Tim Carney’s book Alienated America. We know that these things have become epidemic in our society, and in others around the world. On the other hand, new tribal identities rush in to fill the void: an excessive investment in politics, an embrace of extremist ideas, or simply becoming Extremely Online. We know that these things, too, have become epidemic. It is hard to look around without seeing evidence of them.

Both conservative philosophy and conservative politics in practice are realistic about the enduring features of human nature, including the human instinct for tribal loyalty and the tendency to be suspicious of outsiders to the tribe. Conservatism also offers guardrails for those instincts, guardrails that draw on centuries of thought about striking the proper balance between liberty and community.

Fusion, Free Markets, and the Classical Liberal Ideal

Modern American conservatism is more than just the tribe. It represents a fusion between traditional conservatism and the classical liberal ideas of the American Founding — the natural and inalienable rights and liberties of all men, equal justice, and the rule of written law.

Moreover, that fusion is not purely abstract; it also incorporates our own specific American culture. There are four central pillars underlying the American cultural patrimony: Western Civilization (the heritage of Greece and Rome), Judeo-Christian religion (the heritage of ancient Israel), the Anglo-Saxon political tradition (principally the heritage of England), and the marriage between the Enlightenment and the Protestant work ethic that gave us capitalism (mainly the heritage of England, Scotland, and the Netherlands). That patrimony grew in the soil of a culture that was predominantly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant between 1607 and about 1830, but it has endured as waves of immigration, assimilation, and liberation broadened the sources of that culture in the succeeding two centuries. The resiliency of that culture throughout that process is an argument against undue alarm at demographic change, but that does not mean that the culture is entirely immune to losing its character.

Free-market capitalism, largely a gift of the Scottish and Dutch Enlightenments, is one of the core values of classical liberalism. Money and free markets are natural enemies of tribalism, because they enable and encourage everyone to do business with the world on the same terms as with their friends and family. This is a major theme of Jonah Goldberg’s book Suicide of the West.

Christian teachings are also a curb on tribalism for reasons similar to classical liberal political theory (the major classical liberal theorists were nearly all raised as Christians, after all): They demand that we acknowledge the equal dignity and individuality of all. The Samaritans and the Israelites were opposing tribes, but the Good Samaritan was the injured Jewish traveler’s neighbor.

One brake on too much tribalism — encouraged by a broad engagement in religious and other community institutions — is a recognition that many of us belong to multiple tribes simultaneously. It is the people who see the world entirely in terms of red versus blue, or in terms of white versus “people of color,” who become the most toxic. It is useful and important to be reminded that the people in your political party, the people in your community, the people in your church, the people in your racial or ethnic group, the people in your profession, and even the people who share your hobbies and your sports allegiances include a lot of different people who belong to one tribe while being outsiders to another.

Particular Communities and the General Interest

The contradiction between the conservative concern for preserving culture and the classical liberal and free-market drive to restrain tribalism is not always as dramatic as it might seem. American conservatism has long coexisted with both. The Republican Party, from its foundation in 1854, has been a product of the fusion between tradition-and-order conservatism and classical liberalism. For Republicans, as for American conservatives more broadly, ours is a set of general principles applicable to people of all colors and creeds, an antidote to the identity-politics mania of the Democrats and the Left. Yet, from the very beginning of the fusion between Lincoln-style classical liberals and Know-Nothings, traditional conservatism and its aim to preserve the national culture have lived together with Lincoln’s veneration of the principles of the Declaration of Independence. This is why Michael Barone defines Republicans throughout the party’s history as the party of people who see themselves in the American cultural mainstream, and Democrats as the party of people who do not.

Both the history of America’s founding ideals and the history of the Republican Party have conditioned Republican politicians and conservative commentators to argue in terms of the general interest and in language that is race-neutral and equally accessible to all. Of course, recent years have seen pressures that have driven some people on the right to drop that discipline and chase after “identity politics for white people.” But that instinct should be fought.

A key dividing line on immigration, in particular, is between citizens and non-citizens. A citizen, no matter what race, color, or creed, is entitled to the equal rights of all Americans. The tribe is the citizenry in all its variety. Outsiders, while they are guaranteed some basic rights of due process and equal protection of law on our soil, are not due equal citizenship. Immigrants can bring a lot to the country, and my own long-expressed preference falls much more on the side that favors more of them. All four of my grandparents picked up and left their own communities behind in order to come to this country. But those who choose to put the citizenry and the nation above the rest of the world, in the interests of holding back demographic waves that can force unwanted cultural change, are not inevitably engaging in illegitimate appeals to bigotry, nor in offenses against the historic creed of fusionist conservatives. They are invoking the urge to protect something precious and human.

There are also more modest ways in which communities can defend their culture and tradition without engaging in discrimination and bigotry. Zoning, for example, is a deviation from pure free-market principles of property rights and can at times be used as a weapon of discrimination and exclusion. But a reasonable deployment of residential zoning can at least preserve some aspects of the character of a community in ways that are consistent with classical liberal principles of neutrality, and offer something of a speed bump against sudden, dramatic change. Other policy choices can likewise seek a balance between the theoretical extremes of a pure free-market open-borders libertarian state, on the one hand, and a medieval-style fortress resistant to all change, on the other.

A fusionist conservatism ultimately offers a healthier outlet for channeling the tribal instinct rather than either trying in vain to suppress it or letting it totally run amok. The implicit bargain of American conservative fusionism is that the nation and its culture (or cultures) can be defended without us devolving into warring camps of tribes. America can be a place that has its principles, but also has its people and its culture — if we can keep it.