Steve Sailer writes:
…seems not to have occurred to either Putnam or Murray: America has become simply a much more crowded and thus expensive country. The 1960 Census found the population was 181 million, compared to 321 million today. Some of the growth has been due to the Baby Boom that went on through 1964, but much has been due to the revival of mass immigration by Congress starting in 1965 after four decades of restraint, a subject that neither Putnam nor Murray discuss. (…)
If you read Putnam closely you can figure out what the deal is with Troy. But he doesn’t make it easy for readers because he wants you to believe race isn’t very relevant anymore: today, it’s all about class. But now race drives class far more than in his day when the country was over 85 percent white.
Orange County had once exemplified the broad prosperity of the postwar era, making Richard Nixon’s home county the bedrock of the GOP’s hopes for the White House. Today, though, Orange County is 56 percent nonwhite. With its Tiger Mother Asians and minimum wage-earning Mexicans, Orange County symbolizes how inequality of opportunity is exacerbated by mass immigration.
But thinking clearly about immigration is taboo in Putnam’s world.
Sometimes I think Sailer is losing his touch:
At one point he calls Putnam “the liberal Charles Murray,” but these days, the perfect nominee for that title is Mr. Murray himself:
By 2045, Hispanics, Asians and African Americans are expected to grow from more than a third of the population to a little more than half of the people living in the United States.
“The degree of cultural diversity that this introduces to this country is rather like the cultural diversity we had in the 19th century, and for that matter in the 18th century at the time of founding,” observed American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray. In many ways, according to Murray, diversity has been a positive force throughout America history.
“We used to have radically different ways of life among different groups in this country. And the 20th century was something of an anomaly in this regard as we saw an increasingly homogeneous culture with the rise of mass media,” Murray said. “In many ways, I think the America of the 21st century with its increased cultural diversity is going to look familiar to historians of America. And in that respect, it’s as American as apple pie.”
