Tell me a national story, Daddy!

It's not only Election Day, and the day after Guy Fawkes, but also, as it happens, Diwali, the Hindu darkest new-moon night of the year, and a festival of liminality, where doorways are fantastically decorated with colored rice powder and lit up with candles. In Singapore,where it is known after the Tamil name as Deepavali, the government policy of strenuous ethnic integration has meant that all the different kinds of Chinese, Malay, and other citizens have Indian neighbors if they live in a Housing Development Board estate, as most do, somewhere up or down the common corridor, and walk past one of these doorways as they get home. Image via. 

David F. Brooks confronts "The Central Challenge of the Age": Write an entire paragraph with only one "e":

What is the Democratic national story? A void.

Well, admittedly it's a short paragraph. It's only voids, and voids are all I have to take your heart away.

No, seriously, he's got to get out his "why Democrats have failed" piece before its sell-by date, which is coincidentally today, November 6, and the central challenge of the age is, obviously, the one he's most confident Democrats have failed to meet:

Here’s the central challenge of our age: Over the next few decades, America will become a majority-minority country. It is hard to think of other major nations, down through history, that have managed such a transition and still held together.

It seems that the Democratic Party is going to lead us through this transition. The Republicans have decided to pretend it’s not happening. Trump had a chance to build a pan-ethnic nationalist coalition but went with white identity politics instead. Republicans have rendered themselves irrelevant to the great generational challenge before us.

But if the Democrats are going to lead this transition, they’ll need not just a mind-set that celebrates diversity, but also a mind-set that creates unity. They’ll need policies that integrate different groups into a coherent nation, with shared projects, a common language and culture and clear borders.

That top bit is an indication to me of how far Bannonism has really begun to affect our political discourse. I was busy this morning, but Jonathan Katz on the Twitter pointed out that there are many countries that have settled in successfully without an ethnic majority, including France, China, and Brazil, and he didn't even get around to the more interesting places like Singapore, India, Paraguay, or Mexico. Or Canada. Or Spain. Or Ghana or Nigeria. Or...

It seems that white people in the United States have lost their knack of incorporating newcomers into their loosely defined and continually redefined ethnic identity, which absorbed Germans from the late 18th through late 19th century, Roman Catholics from Germany and Italy and Ireland in the mid-19th, and so on, and some of them such as Stephen Bannon and Donald Trump, as Theodore "Race Suicide" Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson may have done before them, seem to feel threatened by the concept of being a minority "in our own country". What am I supposed to say? That's really their problem, and they ought to figure out a way of getting over it the way most of us white people have managed to do, or at least stop making it a problem for others.

Democrats have policies that integrate population into a shared health care system and education. You don't need a common language—it's best for everybody to be multilingual so everybody has a choice—and borders aren't that important. (He had to put borders in his paragraph, as if he were writing a State of the Union address, because people would be perturbed if he left them out.) I know Brooks can't understand any of that. I don't know what's wrong with him, but a short number of years or even months ago, David F. Brooks stood more or less for the conventional, indeed Lincolnesque view that the United States is a nation that is not defined in ethnic terms but in terms of a boldly explicit social contract laid out in the Declaration of Independence, the first nation to come into being in such a fashion, and I hate to say it, because I understand he's generally wrong about everything, but he was right about that.

I just can't believe he keeps forgetting it!