First reply is just narrowly on the pluralism/diversity point.

The larger issue is marginality and the way we fight over that. Is Colin Powell marginal? No, but some of us have an investment in trying to point out that his personal non-marginality demonstrates nothing about race as a category. On the flip side, we have a lot of investment in using class/social structure to say: if you are a member of a megachurch, if Christianity and whiteness are at the center of power structures, etc., then you are not marginal. But we do have a habit of using some special-case escape hatches if we’re dealing with the heterogeneity of the political economies that Christian, white, male subjects may be emplaced within in structural ways. Scranton and the Main Line are different places in this sense and we have an impoverished language for talking about them. I think we have inconsistent ways of working marginality, centrality; power/subordination that are not about investigating those as empirical social categories but about treating those as prior ethical states. If there’s anything we should know in a post-Foucault context, it is that power is not necessarily a depraved ethical condition; that subordination is not necessarily a producer of intrinsic virtue, and that the categories we use to make people legible, manageable, knowable, should be regarded with a kind of permanent suspicion.

Not especially. I suppose the thought experiment here is trying to separate out:

a) who does not want pluralism and diversity because it is directly contradictory to their immediate self-interest.
b) who wants pluralism and diversity *even though* it is directly contradictory to their immediate self-interest.
c) who does not want pluralism and diversity because they think it’s something other than what it is or could be, or because they don’t like the people advocating it and the style of their advocacy rather than the concepts themselves.
d) who wants pluralism and diversity but actually wants something other than what those mean or could mean, or because of social loyalties (e.g., don’t really like the ideas, just like the people advocating them)

I think if you make a grid of those, you have some interesting population diversity in each quadrant. That makes a political and philosophical difference.

I think many of us don’t know why we’re in favor of such things. I especially think we don’t know what it means that we are in favor even if (especially if) it is not in our immediate self-interest to be in favor of them. I think we’d benefit–and maybe even our opponents would benefit–if we had a better understanding.

But I’m not sure what you are getting at.

E.g.,

“We need to identify the necessary heart of our established systems and practices, whether it’s in a small non-profit, a government office, a university, or a corporate department, and be ready to mercilessly abandon the unnecessary procedures, processes and rules that have encrusted all of our lives like so many barnacles. Those of us who are in some sense part of the larger networks of the Establishment world, even at its edges, can endure the irrelevance of pointless training sessions, can patiently work through needless processes of measurement and assessment, can parse boring or generic forms of managerial prose to find the real message inside.”

I think you may be making a similar kind of mistake as the mistake you think comes from thinking “that virtue can only derive from marginality, a view that speaking from power is always a fallen and regrettable position.”

To give a crude reading of what you are getting at, you are suggesting that somehow people who are enjoying the fruits of civil society, while probably working hard to maintain those fruits for others to enjoy should they care to must take the attack on them as a call to massively overhaul their practices.

The problem is that we fail to communicate the benefits of our thing to outsiders.

Where does this idea of marginality as virtuous come from? It is certainly a mistaken idea but it must come from some notion that the marginal were marginalized by a person or set of institutions. They are not acting, but being acted upon. This seems like a mistake.

It is most definitely a mistaken idea if you are referring to people who don’t find the culture of community gardens or theater troops or universities compelling.

Many of the people who I’m guessing (but not sure) you are thinking of aren’t marginalized. They have megachurches, and rotary clubs, and country clubs, and a whole alternate framework that gives them power and status and comfort and ideas. They don’t want our thing. They don’t need our thing. That should be fine.

You are thinking we can defend ‘the establishment,’ i.e., the vegan who works for $40,000 at the dance complex or whatever by somehow making it clear to people that don’t like her thing that her thing is something that benefits them or they can understand.

Do you really think that would work? How could that possibly work?

We’re only central to ourselves. We’re not central to them. There is no way we can become central to them. They have radically different preferences and interests. I can’t even make my own teenager interested in the things I am interested in.

What is being attacked as the establishment is a fantasy and a projection. It is imaginary. My guess is that you think if we make the reality come through, the fantasy will dissipate. But this is only true if the fantasy is an accident and serves no purpose. It would only work if people were confused in some way and others could change, become more appealing and set them straight.

But what if the imaginary thing that you suppose we are to them–even calling this ‘the establishment’ is an imaginary projection–is very, very useful and even essential to a contrasting identity they’ve set up? What if it is very useful to articulate and mobilize people according to these types of group identifications? What if people *need* this construction of things both for their own sense of themselves as participating in power?

Then any attempt to change to become more palatable or to dispel any illusions or to alter preferences is doomed to fail. What a lot of effort that would take. Isn’t it easier to let people form their identities as they choose but then try to create institutions to let you form yours?

What is keeping people out of the urban centers these establishment lives flourish and education that will allow them to get one of these establishmentarian low-paying non-profit jobs? What are the barriers? They don’t want it. And they don’t want others to have it.

We cannot beg or plead or hope that we can make things more palatable. We are out of power and they are in power and they are going to remake things as they like. There’s a wall around any sort of ‘real message’ we could hope to send and the people on the other side of the wall already know they don’t want the message.

It’s questionable whether we have a democratic system now where messages even go through. However, our system itself up until recently actually had very forceful arguments about pluralism, diversity and difference. And many found those arguments very compelling. The people that don’t know the arguments–but this is not what they want. I’ve never had any success getting other people to want what I want when they are very happy with the thing they have. Have you?

But, as one who has dedicated the last sixty-one years to studying our political and social systems to determine what worked for the common good or worked against it, I can say that our systems, with a couple of dramatic exceptions, has always worked against the common good, and the Trump regime may be worse, but it is not really different.

If you are saying that you and your fellows should work to defend our political and economic system as it has existed, and governed, for the past 280 years, then I am… well, I don’t know what to say… I suppose that I am speechless.

From the beginning, our political and economic systems have worked against the common good. They have mistreated seven hated groups by denying them the rights, resources, opportunities, and protections that they need to be able to build long lives worth living for them and their loved ones. These hated groups are the not white, the not well-to-do, the not heterosexual, the not male, the not native-born, the disabled, and the not Christian. (My list is probably incomplete.) Our systems, and therefore at least one form of the ancien regime, are structured to protect the seven favored groups, Trump’s approach to governance is more angry and more hateful than the ones we have since Dwight Eisenhower was president, but even Ike blinked in 1956 when the Mansfield, Texas, school district refused to integrate after Brown v. Board of Education. The Democratic Governor of Texas ordered the Texas Rangers to go to Mansfield and keep black children out of white schools. He also authorized the Mansfield schools to transfer all black students to Fort Worth. President Eisenhower did nothing. As a result, the Texas Legislature passed unjust laws forbidding integration of the public schools. Mansfield’s evasion and defiance of a court order remained in effect until President Lyndon Johnson threatened to cut off their federal funding. Money, and force, are the only things that tyranni seem to understand.

I don’t want to defend that part of the ancien regime.

But I should cool off. You must be talking about the systems that exist in sheltered places, like, well, you know. But, I can’t let it go. Our education systems have failed miserably. Math courses do not reach rational thinking, English classes do not teach students how to recognize and evaluate subtle distinctions in the written word, instead they teach the Bard—what a joke. What a waste! History classes teach a story that is not true. Even when I was in college, the American History textbooks taught the story of Gone with the Wind for the history of the South, for the history of master and slave relationships. My God!! Our schools do not teach how the individual good comes from the common good. I suppose those texts have been improved, but I know the masters of our education system in Texas are doing their dead-level best to restore the antebellum culture of the South. I don’t want to defend that part of the ancien regime.

Why do only the oppressed march in the streets? Why are they greeted with heavily armed and armored police officers? Why don’t the members of the ancien regime march on their own? Why aren’t they on the news decrying the shameful practices of our systems of economics and political?

And what are they doing about global warming?

I suppose you think you are doing your part by letting me post a comment and not deleting it. Well, that’s something, I guess.