Douthat is a thick young man

Ross Douthat’s cheerful gloss on the history of ethnic bigotry really is quite appalling. His most ignorant claim, arguably, is that the “persecution” — he never hints at the details — of religious and ethnic minorities was somehow aimed at assimilating them more quickly than they preferred. Thus, he claims, the occasional ugliness of xenophobes was somehow “necessary to the American experiment’s success” while having the happy effect, he notes, of “inspiring” the Catholic church to soften its “illiberal tendencies” and “persuading” Mormons to abandon polygamy. This allows Douthat to say things like this:

During the great waves of 19th-century immigration, the insistence that new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture — and the threat of discrimination if they didn’t — was crucial to their swift assimilation. The post-1920s immigration restrictions were draconian in many ways, but they created time for persistent ethnic divisions to melt into a general unhyphenated Americanism.

Similarly, I’d love to hear Douthat’s reflections on how the West Coast riots of 1885-1886 helped “nudge” the Chinese away from heathenism, or how the lynching of Leo Frank was really inspired by the same impulse — to “create the unum” — that led Jane Addams to found Hull House. And while Jim Crow segregation was draconian in many ways, I’m sure Douthat would agree that it created time for persistent racial hostility to melt away.

…and I should add that Douthat’s views here are entirely predictable. The sort of person who believes that marriage is best understood as a coercive institution designed to keep straight people from fucking everything in sight is precisely the sort of person who would believe that fear is an admirable driver of cultural change.