Christopher Caldwell Quotes

If one abandons the idea that Western Europeans are rapacious and exploitative by nature, and that Africans, Asians, and other would-be immigrants are inevitably their victims, then the fundamental difference between colonization and labor migration ceases to be obvious.

Since the turn of the century, Europeans have been faced with the most basic question about their future: whether they have one. In some countries — especially Italy, Germany, and Austria — the native population has been shrinking for decades. Birth rates have fallen so low that each native generation is about two-thirds the size of the last. The decline was masked for a while by the size of the almost wholly autochthonous Baby Boom generation, but now those native Europeans have begun to retire and die. Non-European immigrants, especially those from the Middle East and North Africa, have rushed to claim a place on the continent.

[Y]ou see evidence in the united Europe—in which there is free circulation of people and ideas—of a much more homegrown European-style antisemitism. You see a sort of waning of vigilance. You see a rise of the kind of clubby, dinner-party type antisemitism in England, where it is very strong. So I do think there is a new antisemitism, but I'm afraid it hasn't so much replaced the old antisemitism as exists alongside of it.

Civil rights survived because it proved an extraordinary tool—unlike any in peacetime constitutional history—for contravening democratic decision-making. By withholding money, by suing states and businesses, the federal government can use civil rights law to coerce local authorities ­into changing policies; it can alter the behavior of private citizens. When Bill Clinton broadened the remit of civil rights, he didn’t have to spend money to do it. His predecessor, George H. W. Bush, had taken the first steps down this road. Bush’s Civil Rights Act of 1991 introduced punitive damages in a broad range of civil rights cases, creating major incentives to file lawsuits for race and sex discrimination.

[T]he escalation of the radicalization of Muslims in Europe, I think, has, in the past 2 or 3 years – and you know the incidents – the Nice truck bombing, the Berlin Christmas Fair bombing, those sorts of incidents, I think, have really worried Europeans.

Bizarrely, as immigration began to change Europe at its economic and cultural core, the political vocabulary remained the same as when immigration had been a fringe phenomenon. People kept talking about restaurants.

Europe can be the scene of world history even if it’s not the protagonist in world history, but it seems to show very little sign of being the protagonist.

In the wake of the 1992 L.A. riots, Bush lowered standards of creditworthiness for inner-city home buyers. But it was Clinton who opened the floodgates of housing credits by threatening, on the strength of misrepresented agency data, to find lenders guilty of “redlining” black neighborhoods. He used the Carter-era Community ­Reinvestment Act to pressure banks politically. Black homeownership rose by 25 percent between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s. This was the era of subprime loans, which would bring on the crash of 2008 and the ensuing global recession. The American media has never been comfortable acknowledging that minority homeownership programs were at the root of an international economic calamity. But economists (notably Atif Mian and Amir Sufi of Chicago, and Viral Acharya of NYU) have understood it all along, and the progressive Cambridge University ­historian Gary Gerstle, in his recent The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, puts the Bush-Clinton subsidies squarely at the center of the 2008 crash.

The policing of tolerance had no inbuilt limits and no obvious logic. Why was 'ethnic pride' a virtue and 'nationalism' a sickness? Why was an identity like 'Sinti/Roma' legitimate but an identity like 'white' out of bounds? Why had it suddenly become criminal to ask questions today that it was considered a citizen's duty to ask ten years ago?

When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.

The social, spiritual, and political effects of immigration are huge and enduring, while the economic effects are puny and transitory. If, like certain Europeans, you are infuriated by polyglot markets and street signs written in Polish, Urdu, and Arabic, sacrificing 0.0035 of your economy would be a pittance to pay for starting to get your country back. If, like other Europeans, you view immigration as a lifeline of excitement, worldliness, and palatable cuisine thrown to your drab and provincial country, then immigration would be a bargain even if it imposed a significant economic cost.

Important demographic distortions created conditions for a more open attitude toward both blacks and gays than had been possible before or would be possible after. A program of mass incarceration, launched as part of Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, had landed the great majority of young black criminals in jail. For the first time in a generation, black neighborhoods became safe for non-blacks to enter and spend money in, and the non-incarcerated remainder had more in common with their non-black contemporaries than had seemed to be the case in previous generations. What had most bothered people about gays, as late as the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, was the promiscuity of the anonymous “bathhouse” scene. Then the AIDS epidemic arose, and by the time effective therapies came on the market in 1994, hundreds of thousands of the men who had belonged to that world were dead. The survivors had been selected for fidelity and bourgeois prudence, and many had shown extraordinary courage and character in enduring the worst ordeal any group of American men had undergone since the Vietnam War. The movement for gay marriage won over Hawaii’s Supreme Court in 1996 and Vermont’s in 1999.

The thing I worry about in Europe is that there is a logic of escalation in some of this. That the people whose voices aren't heard have to do things to make their voices heard. Do you know what I mean? They’ll have to, you know, like, demonstrate and that kind of thing.

One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong.

[L]aws against Holocaust denial have done more harm than good. On a practical political level, I think that they give very intolerant mischief makers a cheap and easy way to pose as something more exalted than what they actually are, as sort of martyrs of free speech.