Sublime

he had far more firsthand experience with the poor and with minorities than do most urban elites. His writings are therefore focused on classism rather than racism as being the quintessential American divide.

The peril to democracy under present conditions of information isn’t any of these things: it’s the spread of nihilism in the public and the demoralization of an elite class that has lost any claim to authority.

After forty years of warning us about the dangers of postmodernism, the right now sounds like Jacques Derrida, and in the wake of Trump’s kidnapping of Perspectivism, the left now sounds like Allan Bloom.

But this misunderstands the populist complaint.

In the same way that liberalism opens the door to progressivism which opens the door to socialism, Taylor’s genteel race realism opens the door to racism of the vulgar kind. One day Mona Lisa is the world’s greatest masterpiece; the next she is on bookmarks and adapted on greeting cards. Leonardo da Vinci could not have imagined such a thing, but

As Real America breaks down the ossified libertarianism of Free America, Just America assaults the complacent meritocracy of Smart America. It does the hard, essential thing that the other three narratives avoid, that white Americans have avoided throughout our history. It forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to

becoming a matutinal rite as inevitable as coffee and orange juice. When the New York World—famous for its liberalism and the wit of its columnists—had ceased publication in February, 1931, Lippmann, its editor, had gone over to the Herald Tribune and to sudden national fame. Clear, cool, and orderly in his thinking, he seemed to be able to reduce