There’s an aspect of the Rev. Wright business that tells us something about human nature – something that makes most Americans uncomfortable.

From the May 3 issue of The Economist:

[Wright] is far more than the blustering buffoon who was on the stage on Monday. He has presided over an increase in the size of his congregation from 87 when he arrived in 1972 to 8,000 today. Trinity is a welfare state in its own right, providing more than 70 welfare programmes for the poor, the unemployed, prisoners, and HIV patients.

As a religious entrepreneur, in other words, Wright has been a roaring success. He has mobilized people to organize and help each other. Probably his district has been greatly improved by his presence.

What has been the secret of his success? How did he do all that? By appealing to racial solidarity and pride, that’s how. All that stuff that grates on our ears – the “black value system,” loyalty to “the African motherland,” “white folk’s greed drives a world in need,” and the rest – was an essential component of the Wright success package. Wright succeeded by tapping in to one of the deepest wells of human emotion and motivation: group solidarity, loyalty to the tribe, the gens.

Anyone want to tell me that Wright would have been just as sensationally successful if he had eschewed all the hate-whitey stuff and preached a message of universalism, color-blindness, and racial reconciliation?

One of the must-read essays of recent months has been Jerry Muller’s “Us and Them” in Foreign Affairs. Here’s the summary:

Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But in fact, it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, it is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.

If you think the U.S.A. is somehow magically immune from this trend, you’re dreaming.