BACK TO BLOOD:

QED:

As Tom Wolfe wrote in his last novel, “A phrase pops into his head from out of nowhere. ‘Everybody… all of them… it’s back to blood! Religion is dying… but everybody still has to believe in something. It would be intolerable — you couldn’t stand it — to finally have to say to yourself, ‘Why keep pretending? I’m nothing but a random atom inside a supercollider known as the universe.’ But believing in by definition means blindly, irrationally, doesn’t it. So, my people, that leaves only our blood, the bloodlines that course through our very bodies, to unite us. ‘La Raza!’ as the Puerto Ricans cry out. ‘The Race!’ cries the whole world. All people, all people everywhere, have but one last thing on their minds — Back to blood!

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Reader John Steakley writes:

I wonder what the three-way intersection is between trust, diversity, and wealth redistribution.

I.e., if every group saw every other group pulling their own weight, then there’s not much room for resentment. But when it appears that politicians use taxes disproportionately from one group to provide benefits disproportionately to another group, that fosters resentment, and trust erodes.

To foster that resentment, one needs a diverse society AND redistributionist economic policies.

But the silver lining may be that the resentment isn’t innate; it isn’t racist; it isn’t some hardwired tribal urge; it’s man-made. It’s almost as if the politicians intentionally pander to pit one group against another for votes based on the resentment they foster with their policies.

In other words, I remain convinced that we CAN all get along, if the race-baiting politicians would let us.

Yes, in C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow, he reports that immediately after the Civil War, race relations in the South were surprisingly good compared to what came before and after, but once the local power structure started reasserting itself it quickly had people divided in the ways it found convenient. That said, the more opportunities there are for the power structure to do that, the more likely it is to happen.