You can’t so easily constrain a conventionalized narrative that mainstream reportage and experts collaboratively disseminate that just so happens to advance a strongly vested financial interest that is diffused across a particular business sector or range of organizations. Even if that story leaves out vitally important details, or is simply wrong in some crucial respect.

For example, almost every mainstream story I’ve read or heard about the financial struggles of Sears, Toys R Us, and other brick-and-mortar retailers leaves out the role of private equity, debt and cult-like management strategies employed by neophyte CEOs (often installed by private equity firms). The shorthand instead is always: couldn’t compete with Amazon. Which is a story that benefits Amazon and its shareholders: it is how Amazon survived years and years of continuous losses, because reporters and experts kept describing it as the inevitable future, kept using it as the singular causal explanation for every other event in retail.

Another example: autonomous cars. A ton of big players have a huge bet down on the table on autonomous cars, and virtually everyone writing about the issue is compliantly doing their best to make that bet pay off by describing autonomous cars as inevitable no matter what technical, political and economic challenges might remain in their implementation. Just saying something is inevitable doesn’t overcome fundamental material limitations: flying cars, jetpacks and moonbases were also once represented as inevitable in a near-term future, but all three turned out to be basically impossible within present circumstances. But in a sense the actual money knew that: no one but fringe visionaries put serious investment into those projects. With autonomous cars, there’s real money involved, and so every time an expert or a reporter casually and thoughtlessly treats them as a certainty, they are creating the certainty that they only claim to predict. If it turns out that you can’t simply unleash tens of thousands of perfectly working autonomous vehicles onto the current road network, it will be made to happen by changing the infrastructure. The autonomous car makers will buy out HOV lanes and put guides on them and get manually driven cars banned from them, in the name of safety or experimentation or innovation. Then they’ll argue that any accidents on non-guided roadways are actually human error, not autonomous car error, and push for eliminating manual drivers from all high-speed highways. Inch by inch it will happen–and “prediction” will have played its role.

The example that’s really got my goat this week, however, is the way that much of the press and a particular group of experts report on the closure or threatened closure of colleges and universities. Let’s take three examples that have been reported recently: Newbury College, Green Mountain College, and Hampshire College.

The reporting and prognostication tends to lump these closures together as a single phenomenon, stemming from a singular cause, interpreted within a conventionalized story. That’s usually something like, “College is too expensive, families are no longer certain of the value of traditional higher education, and this is just going to accelerate as we hit the edge of a demographic drop-off”. All of this is true enough in terms of pressures on the entire sector: college is expensive, its consumers are feeling doubtful about its value, and there’s a demographic drop-off coming. But it’s also a story that has a client behind it: various “disruptors” who have a huge bet down on the table that various kinds of for-profit online education will and must replace expensive, inefficient, “traditional” brick-and-mortar education. Those folks are getting impatient–or are starting to worry they’re going to lose their money. They’ve been moving fast but so far not that much has been broken. They’ve been angling to do the usual smash-and-grab theft of public goods but so far all they’ve been able to do is sneak a few bits of bric a brac into their pockets. So the story that all colleges are near to failing, about a kind of institutional singularity, is especially important for them to tell–and to urge others to tell for them.

The problem with that story is two-fold. First, even if we’re talking about “all of American higher education”, this is not the first time that the entire sector has been faced with severe economic and sociopolitical pressures and not the first time that these pressures have produced new institutional forms and marketing hooks–and waves of consolidation and failure. It’s not even the first time that people enamored of a new mass medium have specifically sought to use it to replace colleges and universities–it happened with television, it happened with radio, it happened with the postal service. And yet for the most part, the variety and richness of physical institutions of higher learning has remained intact in the United States through all those failures and consolidations and transformations. The current storyline forgets all of that. There is an unbroken clumpy mass of “traditional higher education” and then there is the disrupted, innovated future. Only occasionally does an expert or prognosticator go a bit deeper into the history before breaking out the shill for the brave new innovated future–Kevin Carey, for example, does an actually fair and responsible job of recounting how contemporary research universities in the US took on the shape they now have and understands that this doesn’t extend all that far back.

But it’s at the individual level of institutional closures that the conventionalized narrative is just plain misleading or even false. Because many of the places that have announced closures or crises recently have never been stable or successful institutions in the first place, or have always been outliers in certain respects.

Let’s take Newbury to start.

The United States is known, correctly, for a unique variety and quantity of institutions of higher education. This was primarily generated in the 19th Century between 1830 and 1890. Every institution created subsequently in the 20th Century was to some extent building on this unique earlier history, trying to fit into the infrastructure created in that era, but there were at least two significant waves of later institutional creation, one in the 1920s that capitalized on the new centrality of higher education to the training of professionals and specialists, one in the 1960s that was a response both to a massive new investment in public education and to the demographic bulge known as the “Baby Boomer generation”.

A lot of those 1960s institutions have lived on the edge of failure for their entire existence. They were responding to a temporary surge in demand. They did not have the benefit of a century or more of alumni who would contribute donations, or an endowment built up over decades. They did not have names to conjure with. They were often founded (like many non-profits) by single strong personalities with a narrow vision or obsession that only held while the strong personality was holding on to the steering wheel. Newbury is a great example of this. It wasn’t founded until 1962, as a college of business, by a local Boston entrepreneur. It relocated multiple times, once into a vacated property identified formerly with a different university. It changed its name and focus multiple times. It acquired other educational institutions and merged them with its main operations, again creating some brand confusion. It started branch campuses. It’s only been something like a standardized liberal-arts institution since 1994. In 2015 it chased yet another trend via expensive construction projects, trying to promise students a new commitment to their economic success.

This is not a college going under suddenly and unexpectedly after a century of stately and “traditional” operations. This is not Coca-Cola suddenly going under because now everyone wants kombucha made by a Juicero. This is Cactus Cooler or Mr. Pibb being discontinued.

Let’s take Hampshire College. It’s a cool place. I’ve always admired it; I considered attending it when I was graduating high school. But it’s also not a venerable traditional liberal arts college. It’s an experiment that was started as a response to an exceptionally 60s-era deliberative process shared between Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke and UMass Amherst. It’s always had to work hard to find students who responded to its very distinctive curricular design and identity, especially once the era that led to its founding began to lose some of its moral and political influence. You can think about Hampshire’s struggle to survive in relationship to that very particular history. You should think about it that way in preference to just making it a single data point on a generalized grid.

Let’s take Green Mountain College. “The latest to close”, as Inside Higher Education says–again fitting into a trend as a single data point. At least this time it is actually old, right? Founded in 1834, part of that huge first wave of educational genesis. But hang on. It wasn’t Green Mountain College at the start. It was Troy Conference Academy. Originally coed, then it changed its name to Ripley Female Academy and went single-sex. Then it was back to Troy Conference. Then during the Great Depression it was Green Mountain Junior College, a 2-year preparatory school. Only in 1974 did it become Green Mountain College, with a 4-year liberal arts degree, and only in the 1990s did it decide to emphasize environmental studies.

Is that the same institution, with a single continuous history? Or is it a kind of constellation of semi-related institutions, all of which basically ‘closed’ and were replaced by something completely different?

If you set out to create a list of all the colleges and universities by name which have ever existed in the United States, all the alternate names and curricular structures and admissions approaches of institutions which sometimes have existed on the same site but often have moved, you couldn’t help but see that closures are an utterly normal part of the story of American higher education. Moreover, that they are often just a phase–a place closes, another institution moves in or buys the name or uses the facilities. Sure, sometimes a college or university or prep school or boarding school gets abandoned for good, becomes a ruin, is forgotten. That happens too. We are not in the middle of a singular rupture, a thing which has never happened before, an unbroken tradition at last subject to disruption and innovation.

This doesn’t mean that we should be happy when a college or university closes. That’s the livelihood of the people who work there, it’s the life of the students who are still there, it’s a broken tie for its alumni (however short or long its life has been), the loss of all the interesting things that were done there in its time. But when you look at the story of any particular closure, they all have some important particulars. The story being told that flatters the disruptors and innovators would have us thinking that there are these venerable, traditional, basically successful institutions going about their business and then suddenly, ZANG, the future lands on them and they can’t survive. At least some of the institutions closing have been hustling or struggling or rebranding for their entire existence.

Quite the contrary: worrying about this exact problem is a persistent theme for me at this blog. Which is why I don’t think Damon Linker or Ross Douthat or Rod Dreher are in fact being honest in their professed concern with this problem. I think they’re using that concern as a form of opinion-laundering, as a vicarious way to advocate positions that they’d rather not attribute to themselves.

Why should anyone worry when a democratically-constituted body of any size finds that there is a substantial minority opinion that is persistently excluded from decision-making or policy formation? At what point is that a concern?

It is not, for example, a concern immediately after when two or more factions disagree with one another on the cusp of an important decision and ultimately, one faction loses out in a vote. It is not a concern because the concerns of the losing faction may disappear or erode over time if the majority’s preferences are enacted and produce good outcomes. In many all-male colleges in the United States that shifted over to co-ed admissions between 1955 and 1975, there was considerable opposition from some faculty and alumni, almost all of which evaporated rapidly after their various predictions of negative consequences turned out to be absurdly untrue or out of touch with the wider society.

It is only a concern when that strong disagreement turns out to be persistent and when it conditions the relationships between different factions across the totality of their political participation and social interactions. People persistently disagree about whether cilantro is delicious, but unless you’re a maniac who puts it on everything you serve to other people or a person who throws a cilantro-covered taco back at your host’s face, it’s a divide that has little meaning.

When there is a strong, persistent and meaningful division of this kind, what does the majority owe to the minority faction? And what is the minority faction entitled to do about it?

This is the juncture where I think there’s bad faith—or at least wild inconsistency—involved in a certain kind of performative swoon about the alienation of white voters who want dramatic restrictions on immigration. Bad faith of several different kinds, in fact. First, because the question of why one should be concerned has both a practical component and an ethical component that should need some degree of consistent attention. Second, because the solution to this concern is by no means, “Give the minority what they want or else”.

Why is this a practical problem? Basically, because we assume that convictions held by a substantial minority that are wholly unrepresented in the policies or decisions of a body politic eventually lead to that minority leaving if they can or an uprising if they can’t.

There are a few cases where schism is a fine if still often upsetting outcome, say, in a church or non-profit organization where both groups will be happier under their own banner. There are cases where schism is something no one has ever found a way to do easily: nations and states don’t fission easily. If they can’t leave, then an uprising or civil war is bad for everyone.

But note that in both cases, the commitment of the minority group to their convictions has to be sufficient that they simply cannot abide life under the policies of the majority, and that they are potentially happy to get their way in their own organization, community or country. They can’t have their cake and eat it too—they can’t insist that not only do they have to have their own way, they have to have it over the majority. Because at that point, the practical problem doesn’t abate. It gets worse, in fact: there is nothing more explosive in practical terms than a minority faction that controls the policies that a majority strongly oppose. Oddly, this doesn’t seem to perturb Damon Linker or Ross Douthat or any of the other people wringing their hands in public right now about immigration policy. If they’re worried about what a minority frustrated by not getting their way might do, they ought to worry doubly about what a majority that doesn’t have their views proportionately represented in policy might do. In practical terms, that’s much more threatening and dangerous.

In ethical terms, what does a majority owe to a minority? Consideration and engagement, at least. Where it is possible to devolve or schism authority to allow a minority faction to do as it wills in some limited or bounded space of authority, that might be an ethical as well as practical gesture. There are also structures for deliberation in democratic communities that do a better job at checking or modifying majoritarian authority than simple decision rules that give 50.01 percent unlimited authority to determine all outcomes. The United States has federalism and it also has a government where authority is divided on purpose between different branches as a gesture in that direction, and that’s by no means the only way to erode majoritarian power. The reason this is an ethical obligation as well as a practical one is pretty easy to come by. If you’ve ever been outvoted persistently in a group to which you belong, you recognize that your membership in that group very quickly stops feeling like a fair, equal and human relationship. At some point that stops feeling like democracy and starts feeling more like domination. It matters little if you get to cast a vote if there is never any chance whatsoever of the majority respecting your views. I actually agree that we’re not making a good and patient case for pluralism to many people around the world now. There is some obligation to make this conversation a better conversation, and to not simply shout people down: that’s another thing I’ve been saying for more than a decade through this blog.

Just as in practice, though, this is a two-edged sword. A minority view that fails to understand itself as a minority view, that thinks of itself as a majority view that has fallen on temporary hard times, is prone to demand consideration beyond what it has any right to. If I show up as an atheist in a church congregation in my small village, and I ask people to consider me as a human being who has arrived at my own spiritual views with great care, I might be entitled to that consideration. I might even ask for an opportunity to address the group once in a while. But if I demand the pulpit for five minutes every Sunday because otherwise I’m not represented in any of the proceedings, I’m asking for something I have no right to have. I’m not even entitled to some fixed share of the decisions that are made in a democracy, because that undercuts the whole idea of the body politic deliberating together. If we make decisions according to a pie chart in which everyone gets a designated percentage of the decision, we’re not one organization or country, we’re loose association of separate organizations or countries with no right to make demands of one another in the first place. Whether I’m in the majority or minority, I have to be prepared to not have my will enacted sometimes if I’m even remotely serious about democratic decision-making.

This is where I really think Linker and Douthat and others show how little they actually believe in the line they’re slinging about immigration and the views of a faction of white voters. Because the answer to the problem of a persistent minority view is not to always make sure that some aspect of that view is encoded into the end decisions, to ensure that all decisions have something for everyone built into them. The first duty is to ask: who are we dealing with here, and why is it that they’re outvoted? It’s to investigate, and witness. So, let’s say, a population who’ve been systematically excluded from power for profoundly illiberal reasons, because of their ethnicity or race or religion or gender, not because of the content of their views? That requires taking what they say seriously in new ways. A minority who’ve been excluded because they were once the shapers of policy and the majority decided they shouldn’t be? That’s a different consideration. If you’ve actually made policy and you failed or were rejected, then you’re not entitled to the same consideration. If you made policy and you just make it somewhat less—-rather than being excluded completely—-you’re not entitled to the same consideration. If you’re excluded because what you advocate is the destruction of the existing order in its entirety—-you’re not entitled to the same consideration.

Moreover, what on earth do Linker and Douthat and similar writers think is “exclusion”? Even before Donald Trump took office, it was not the case that people who wanted limits on immigration were excluded from the making of immigration policy. The Obama Administration was in fact more aggressive than its predecessors at deporting illegal immigrants. Border controls have been enforced fairly stringently for the last twenty years, and they weren’t exactly porous before that. If you push through, it turns out that what Linker and Douthat really mean is that people who want tight limits on immigration in order to maintain racial and ethnic purity feel as if they’re not welcome to say so in mainstream public discourse. Meaning, it’s not the lack of actual controls on immigration that’s at issue here, it’s the idea that there should be a “place at the table” for the underlying racial and ethnic rationale behind particular limits on particular kinds of immigrants—and that anyone who disagrees should be obligated to be polite in their disagreement.

In a democracy, not every excluded constituency with an opinion has equal status. It’s not a damn equation, it’s a history. Former slaveowners in 1875 still had opinions about slavery that were unreconciled to the new birth of freedom envisioned by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address. They were owed nothing, and it is the everlasting shame of the United States that they were given so much they were as Reconstruction crumbled and failed. It doesn’t matter what their percentages were: the point was that the Republic was or should have been on that point committed to a new understanding of its foundations.

This is where the special pleading that Linker and Douthat and Dreher and others are indulging is laid bare. Because they are not equally concerned for every 25% of opinion that is left unfulfilled by majority opinion. They’re not concerned for the many desires of the American majority, let alone various minority factions, that have gone thwarted for forty years and have “no place at the table” in the making of national policy: for campaign finance reform, for gun control, for reproductive rights, for generous funding of public education. They’re not as concerned for making sure that Black Lives Matter or the Green Party has a place at the table and a share of policy. This is not a generalized practical or ethical position that they are taking, in which every thwarted minority faction that has strong, persistent views needs to be incorporated generously into the making and discussing of national policy. It’s only one group that counts: aggrieved white conservatives who want to control the future demography of the United States so that it remains majority white.

Linker has been beating this drum for a few years: that it ought to be possible and legitimate to have a “particularist” preference—to want to live in homogeneous communities. He likes to attribute this view to those other people whom he just wants to have a place at the table rather than advocate that particularism himself. But he doesn’t really mean all kinds of particularism, just this one particular particularism. What goes uninvestigated is whether that is in fact what whites who want strong restrictions on legal and illegal immigration are in fact seeking. Because it’s actually fairly easy within the present United States to move into racially homogenous communities if that’s all you’re after. Pack your bags and head to Idaho or Oregon or Vermont, they’re very white. Why is that not good enough? Because what we’re talking about aren’t genuinely particularist aspirations for cultural homogeneity. They’re not genuine separatism. They don’t want to build something that expresses some distinctive or special culture and requires discipline to do so. That’s what the Amish do. That choice is already available to any group of people in the United States who feel strongly enough about the maintenance of a distinctive way of life. There is already a “place at the table” for that kind of particularism. What the people that Linker and Douthat are pleading for want is heterogeneity, but where they hold a structurally-guaranteed upper hand. They don’t want an end to Latinos cleaning the toilets and washing the dishes in the towns and places they live.W hat Linker’s objects of sympathy want is the ad hoc power to exclude, expel, and control people that they arbitrarily decide are a threat to their own status. To have a few Mexicans or Laotians or blacks, but not too many. To have people who are racially or culturally different around as long as they keep it quiet and out of sight, or as long as that difference is something that the whites like: a restaurant, say. There isn’t a philosophically coherent or consistent argument about a desired way of life that can be given a place at the table behind all of this, beyond the desire to maintain a form of power over racially defined others, to seek a permanent guarantee of their second-class citizenship.

Which once again casts this all in a different light. Perhaps one thing a democracy shouldn’t make a place at the table for is a desire for something other than democracy. Perhaps one thing a free society shouldn’t make a place for at the table is a desire to impose unequal restrictions on the freedom of some subset of its citizens.