In the absence of a distinct program, liberals and leftists redouble their commitment to variegated fraternity

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who did a fair amount of traveling, criticized it as a “fool’s paradise.” “I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe” for art or study, he wrote. But he wondered if travel led to individual growth. “I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples; and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.” A lighter, updated version of this idea can be found in a >New Yorker cartoon in which one woman recounts her travels—not Naples this time, but Tuscany. “Florence was fabulous!” she is saying to an acquaintance. “Wi-Fi to die for!”

Continuous assault on the individual, which begins in childhood, leads not to volubility, but the reverse

[...] To abridge thinking in the name of the emergencies that today are permanent reduces it to slogans, perpetual cheerleading or nay-saying. The notion that liberals cannot criticize liberalism or leftists cannot criticize leftism partakes of a bankrupt tradition. My object in any event is not to criticize the cult of diversity for something worse, but for something better. To understand what renders diversity ideological is to understand what devitalizes it—an endeavor that seeks to realize, not junk it.

the choice is not between a virulent racism and an anodyne diversity; and even if it were, criticism of the latter should not cease