George Rebane
Cultural cohesion has been the propensity of humans living together for millennia and perhaps longer. The clear and simple dictum is that people like to live with people who share their social values and view the world pretty much as they themselves do. The benefits of such communities is both manifest and manifold because it engenders mutual trust and even affection as it lets people work without having to constantly watch their backs, and therefore specialize, knowing that there is a reliable clientele for their product or service. Promoting this paradigm has been one of the foundations of RR and part of my personal belief system (more here).
People with limited ability to nuance concepts mistake the promotion of cultural cohesion with a childlike understanding of simple black/white alternatives. For them, if you like cultural cohesion, then you are probably a racist who doesn’t tolerate the existence of other cultures. It’s as simple as that.
Some benighted souls even have a problem distinguishing between the notions of American nationalism and white separatism. In their minds, such ideas get mixed together into an easily processed amalgam of hate whose adherents need no further litmus test than their arguments that culturally coherent communities (CCCs) provide certain benefits for their members not available in a multi-kulti society (which more often than not today turns out to be an ideologically narrow path on which its members must tread).
And to add one more twist to their twisted logic, they claim that such islands of cohesion are denied in our Constitution because they, by some mysterious nature, are ‘inequitable’. Among their many deficits, these progressives also appear not to know that the Constitution talks of ‘equality’ only in terms of requiring that "no state shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." There is nothing in the CCC concept that would deny such equal protection. And, as elsewhere, in America CCCs were the norm, not the exception, for reasons explained above.
As foreseen by our Founders, people would be free to move anywhere they would feel comfortable, productive, and accepted in order to conduct their businesses and raise their families. Such communities, and in the larger sense, such states would readily adopt distinct practices of governance and commerce which serve as the ‘laboratories of democracy’ described by SCOTUS Justice Brandeis in how a "state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."
What the progressive does not understand is that cultural cohesion has nothing to do with racial uniformity. But it does have everything to do with things like values, mores, language, traditions, and customs. The more cohesive communities are, the more readily agreement can be reached for a broadly accepted common path forward. This is exactly the opposite of what happens when such cohesion is absent, as we have and continue to witness across the land. The brand of cohesion promoted by the Left is cohesion by coercion, usually by the government gun. And this classical solution by collectivists is meant to overcome the reality that our Constitution requires no one to compromise his culture to that of another. A person culturally distinct moving into a CCC has no right by law to bend the established culture to equally conform to his culture by retreating from their own. The newcomer to a CCC may continue to practice the legal tenets of his culture in isolation if he so wishes, or not. Or invite other more culturally like-minded brethren to join him, and if many do, they will start a counter culture with all the ‘benefits’ that this bestows.
In America the destruction of CCCs has occurred over the last 50 years with alarming regularity as collectivists have migrated to CCCs that valued the individual, entrepreneurship, personal responsibility, and freedom. The common story of such incursions is that when collectivists soil their previous nest, which they do with clockwork regularity as witnessed by our large progressively administered cities, they move to more pristine communities, not having a clue as to what made these destinations attractive in the first place.
Collectivism is a specific and persistent approach to organizing society. As far back as 1944 the Reader’s Digest informed its readers – Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called “the common good.” More recently (1983) Leonard Peikoff (q.v.), political philosopher of the Ayn Rand school, wrote – Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective—society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc.—is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it.
Collectivism is a useful paradigm in several areas of human activity, all of them limited by the size of the collective and/or the duration of its application before becoming authoritarian and oppressive – there have never been any large, happy, and enduring communes. Collectivism works in small groups with a common purpose like a family. But even in a family, as children age, collectivism becomes an authoritarian irritant. That’s one reason why kids move out, and start the cycle over again.
As demonstrated in western culture, with America as its posterchild, the threshold of your home should be where collectivism starts to be replaced by more distributed forms of organized society serving the common criterion of supporting individualism and freedom, forms in which people are free to join or not with others in whom they see profit in communion. And as envisioned by our Founders, individualism would reign supreme as a free people join to forge a federal government of limited powers that serve their freely agreed upon common needs, thereby presenting a collective in its most minimalist form.
Unfortunately, none of the above is accessible to nor makes any sense to today’s progressives. And through their schools, three generations have now been confused about the historical benefits of cultural cohesion, and taught that the evils of the world share a common origin in the spread of western culture.
[22aug17 update] Neo-nazis, white supremacists, KKK, et al are not helping spread the ideas of western civilization in the global marketplace of alternatives for organizing 21st century society. Their ideologies and methods are helping accomplish exactly the opposite. They have nothing in common with the nation’s conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians, and conservetarians. The sad thing is that these idiots are playing into the hands of the lamestream and the grass roots progressives, who also read RR and comment, and who oppose the promotion of individual responsibility, enterprise, constitutionalism, liberty, limited government, minimally regulated capitalism, and self-reliance.
And they give endless ammunition to those low lives who cynically ignore them as a fringe, and instead identify them in the lamestream as the mainstream ideology opposing their authoritarian progressivism.
As a postscript and apropos to the above, I invite you to reread my commentary of a few years back, 'Reflections on Directions'.
rebanesruminations.com 
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