The commercial success of the country star Jason Aldean’s ode to small-town vigilantism helps explain the persistence of Donald Trump’s grip on red America.  

Aldean’s combative new song, “Try That in a Small Town,” offers a musical riff on the same core message that Trump has articulated since his entry into politics: that America as conservatives understand it is under such extraordinary assault from the multicultural, urbanized modern left that any means necessary is justified to repel the threat.

In Aldean’s lyrics and the video he made of his song, those extraordinary means revolve around threats of vigilante force to hold the line against what he portrays as crime and chaos overrunning big cities. In Trump’s political message, those means are his systematic shattering of national norms and potentially laws in order to “make America great again.”

[Read: Trump’s rhetoric of white nostalgia]

Like Trump, Aldean draws on the pervasive anxiety among Republican base voters that their values are being marginalized in a changing America of multiplying cultural and racial diversity. Each man sends the message that extreme measures, even extending to violence, are required to prevent that displacement.

“Even for down-home mainstream conservative voters … this idea that we have to have a cultural counterrevolution has taken hold,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. “The fact that country music is a channel for that isn’t at all surprising.”

Aldean’s belligerent ballad, whose downloads increased more than tenfold after critics denounced it, follows a tradition of country songs pushing back against challenges to America’s status quo. That resistance was expressed in such earlier landmarks as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a staple at Republican rallies since its 1984 release. Aldean even more directly channels Merle Haggard’s 1970 country smash, which warned that those opposing the Vietnam War and “runnin’ down my country” would see, as the title proclaimed, “the fightin’ side of me.” (Earlier, Haggard expressed similar ideas in his 1969 hit, Okie From Muskogee, which celebrated small-town America, where “we don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street.”)

Haggard’s songs (to his later ambivalence) became anthems for conservatives during Richard Nixon’s presidency, as did Greenwood’s during Ronald Reagan’s. That timing was no coincidence: In both periods, those leaders defined the GOP largely in opposition to social changes roiling the country. This is another such moment: Trump is centering his appeal on portraying himself as the last line of defense between his supporters and an array of shadowy forces—including “globalist elites,” the “deep state,” and violent urban minorities and undocumented immigrants—that allegedly threaten them.

Aldean, though a staunch Trump supporter, is a performer, not a politician; his song expresses an attitude, not a program. Yet both Aldean and Trump are tapping the widespread belief among conservative white Christians, especially those in the small towns Aldean mythologizes, that they are the real victims of bias in a society inexorably growing more diverse, secular, and urban.

In various national polls since Trump’s first election, in 2016, nine in 10 Republicans have said that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault; as many as three-fourths have agreed that bias against white people is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities; and about seven in 10 have agreed that society punishes men just for acting like men and that white men are now the group most discriminated against in American society.

The belief that Trump shares those concerns, and is committed to addressing them, has always keyed his connection to the Republican electorate. It has led GOP voters to rally around him each time he has done or said something seemingly indefensible—a process that now appears to be repeating even with the January 6 insurrection.

In a national survey released yesterday by Bright Line Watch—a collaborative of political scientists studying threats to American democracy—60 percent of Republicans (compared with only one-third of independents and one-sixth of Democrats) described the January 6 riot as legitimate political protest. Only a little more than one in 10 Republicans said that Trump committed a crime in his actions on January 6 or during his broader campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.

The revisionist whitewashing of January 6 among conservatives helps explain why Aldean, without any apparent sense of contradiction or irony, can center his song on violent fantasies of “good ol’ boys, raised up right” delivering punishment to people who “cuss out a cop” or “stomp on the flag.” Trump supporters, many of whom would likely fit Aldean’s description of “good ol’ boys,” did precisely those things when they stormed the Capitol in 2021. (A January 6 rioter from Arkansas, for instance, was sentenced this week to 52 months in prison for assaulting a cop with a flag.) Yet Aldean pairs those lyrics with images not of the insurrection but of shadowy protesters rampaging through city streets.

By ignoring the January 6 attack while stressing the left-wing violence that sometimes erupted alongside the massive racial-justice protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Aldean, like Trump, is making a clear statement about whom he believes the law is meant to protect and whom it is designed to suppress. The video visually underscores that message because it was filmed outside a Tennessee courthouse where a young Black man was lynched in 1927. Aldean has said he was unaware of the connection, and he's denied any racist intent in the song. But as the Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer wrote for CNN.com last week, “Whether he admits it or not, both Aldean’s song and the courthouse where a teen boy was murdered serve as a reminder that historically, appeals to so-called law and order often rely just as much on White vigilantism as they do on formal legal procedures.”

Aldean’s song, above all, captures the sense of siege solidifying on the right. It reflects in popular culture the same militancy in the GOP base that has encouraged Republican leaders across the country to adopt more aggressive tactics against Democrats and liberal interests on virtually every front since Trump’s defeat in 2020.

A Republican legislative majority in Tennessee, for instance, expelled two young Black Democratic state representatives, and a GOP majority in Montana censured a transgender Democratic state representative and barred her from the floor. Republican-controlled states are advancing incendiary policies that might have been considered unimaginable even a few years ago, like the program by the Texas state government to deter migrants by installing razor wire along the border and floating buoys in the Rio Grande. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy raised the possibility of impeaching Joe Biden. The boycott of Bud Light for simply partnering on a promotional project with a transgender influencer represents another front in this broad counterrevolution on the right. In his campaign, Trump is promising a further escalation: He says if reelected, he will mobilize federal power in unprecedented ways to deliver what he has called “retribution” for conservatives against blue targets, for instance, by sending the National Guard into Democratic-run cities to fight crime, pursuing a massive deportation program of undocumented immigrants, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political opponents.

Brown, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed out that even as Republicans at both the state and national levels push this bristling agenda, they view themselves not as launching a culture war but as responding to one waged against them by liberals in the media, academia, big corporations, and advocacy groups. The dominant view among Republicans, he said, is that “we’re trying to run a defensive action here. We are not aggressing; we are being aggressed upon.”

That fear of being displaced in an evolving America has become the most powerful force energizing the GOP electorate—what I’ve called “the coalition of restoration.” From the start of his political career, Trump has targeted that feeling with his promise to “make America great again.” Aldean likewise looks back to find his vision of America’s future, defending his song at one concert as an expression of his desire to see America “restored to what it once was, before all this bullshit started happening to us.”

[Read: How working-class white voters became the GOP’s foundation]

As Brown noted, the 2024 GOP presidential race has become a competition over who is most committed to fighting the left to excavate that lost America. Aldean’s song and video help explain why. He has written a battle march for the deepening cold war between the nation’s diverging red and blue blocs. In his telling, like Trump’s, traditionally conservative white Americans are being menaced by social forces that would erase their way of life. For blue America, the process Aldean is describing represents a long-overdue renegotiation as previously marginalized groups such as racial minorities and the LGBTQ community demand more influence and inclusion. In red America, he’s describing an existential threat that demands unconditional resistance.

Most Republicans, polls show, are responding to that threat by uniting again behind Trump in the 2024 nomination race, despite the credible criminal charges accumulating against him. But the real message of “Try That in a Small Town” is that whatever happens to Trump personally, most voters in the Republican coalition are virtually certain to continue demanding leaders who are, like Aldean’s “good ol’ boys raised up right,” itching for a fight against all that they believe endangers their world.

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A Trump-Biden rematch is inevitable in 2024, even though polling has shown that most Americans wish it weren’t (and even though the former president is possibly facing a third indictment). But the 2024 field is still quite crowded—and the contenders can tell us a few things about America’s politics and anxieties.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Gary Shteyngart: “I watched Russian television for five days straight.” Being anxious or sad does not make you mentally ill. Climate collapse could happen fast.

A Race for Silver

Today, the long-shot Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified in a hearing organized by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. If the GOP using a Democratic presidential contender as an empathetic witness in a hearing sounds strange to you, you’re not alone. But the choice makes more sense when you understand how RFK Jr.’s conspiracy-theory-laden platform speaks to many voters, and how scores of right-wingers are promoting his candidacy.

RFK Jr.’s role in today’s hearing underscores his unique place in contemporary American politics, my colleague John Hendrickson, who recently profiled him, told me today. RFK Jr. is not the only 2024 contender who, despite low odds for winning the presidential race itself, has managed to hold on to something of a spotlight—or at least to elicit some fear from the competition. Below is a short guide to some of these candidates.

The first MAGA Democrat has real support.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign was initially written off by some as a stunt. But Kennedy’s support is not a joke, John noted last month: “So far, Kennedy is polling in the double digits against Biden, sometimes as high as 20 percent.”

Kennedy is “tapping into something burrowed deep in the national psyche,” John writes: “Large numbers of Americans don’t merely scoff at experts and institutions; they loathe them … Scroll through social media and count how many times you see the phrase Burn it down.” And Kennedy is promising to do just that. On the campaign trail, he speaks about collusion among state, corporate, media, and pharmaceutical powers. He has said that if elected, he would “gut” agencies like the FDA and order the Justice Department to investigate medical journals for “lying to the public.”

Across the GOP, it’s a race for second place.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continues to lag far behind Trump in polling because “his basic theory of the campaign is turning out to be wrong,” my colleague Helen Lewis wrote yesterday. “He promised to run as Trump plus an attention span, and instead he is running as Trump minus jokes. The result is ugly enough for the Republican base to recoil.”

DeSantis has long believed that “mainstream journalists are the enemy and should be treated with undisguised contempt,” Helen writes. But his decision earlier this week to sit down for an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper suggests that he finally understands he needs the mainstream media’s support if he hopes to bolster his candidacy.

I called my colleague David A. Graham, who keeps up our 2024 election “cheat sheet,” to see how he’s thinking about the non-Trump GOP contenders right now. “Tim Scott and Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy are all in this interesting place where you could imagine them busting out of the pack to either match or supplant DeSantis as the leading non-Trump contender, but it’s hard right now to imagine any of them mounting a serious challenge to Trump,” David told me. In the end, he said, “it seems like this is all just a vigorous race for silver.”

And the third-party problem is coming into view.

The centrist group No Labels, whose founding chairman is the former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, is preparing to back a third-party presidential ticket in 2024—“to the growing alarm of Democrats,” my colleague Russell Berman wrote earlier this week. (So far, the group has refused to discuss who its nominees might be.)

No Label leaders say they’re hoping to protect voters from a rematch between Trump and Biden. “But Democrats and more than a few Republicans fear that such a plan might ensure exactly what Lieberman insists he would hate to see: Trump’s return to the White House,” Russell notes. No Labels says it will decide whether to nominate a ticket in the spring of 2024. The group might be holding out for two unlikely scenarios, Russell explains: that Biden will change his mind about running for reelection, or that “Trump’s legal woes will finally persuade Republican voters to look elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, a long-shot candidate is inspiring outsize fear in the White House. The academic, civil-rights activist, and Green Party candidate Cornel West will probably not win, my colleague Mark Leibovich writes today, but West has Democrats worried all the same. “West inhabits a particular category of Democratic angst, the likes of which only the words Green Party presidential candidate can elicit,” Mark explains; Jill Stein, as you may recall, swept up votes in key battleground states in 2016 that exceeded the margins by which Hillary Clinton lost in those states.

Democrats’ fear of a third-party candidate is not unfounded: As Mark notes, recent polling suggests that in a head-to-head race between Trump and Biden, Trump is more likely to benefit from the addition of a third-party candidate.

We may see the first real test of the GOP contenders next month, at the first Republican debate on August 23; Trump is reportedly considering skipping the event entirely. The Democratic National Committee, for its part, will not be holding primary debates, which is the norm for the party of an incumbent president seeking reelection. As we head into this next phase of the election, the race for silver will intensify. And other surprises could still await.

Related:

The humiliation of Ron DeSantis The long-shot candidate who has the White House worried

Today’s News

Wheat prices rose for a third day after Russia pulled out of a wartime deal that protected the export of Ukrainian grain, a move that could stoke a global food crisis. A planned burning of the Quran in Stockholm led to counterprotests in Iraq and the expulsion of the Swedish ambassador from the country. New York City will pay about $13.7 million to settle a class-action lawsuit arguing that unlawful police tactics violated the rights of protesters demonstrating after George Floyd’s murder.

Evening Read

Richard Kalvar / Magnum

Seriously, What Are You Supposed to Do With Old Clothes?

By Amanda Mull

In February, I ran out of hangers. The occasion was not exactly unforeseen—for at least a year, I had been rearranging the deck chairs on my personal-storage Titanic in an attempt to forestall the inevitable. I loaded two or three tank tops or summer dresses onto a single hanger. I carefully refolded everything in my dresser drawers to max out their capacity. I left the things I wore most frequently on a bedroom chair instead of wedging them into my closet. I didn’t buy anything new unless I absolutely needed it. Eventually, though, I did need some things, and I didn’t have anywhere to put them.

Realizing you’ve exceeded the bounds of your closet is a low-grade domestic humiliation that’s become familiar to many Americans.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

If you, like me, are waiting for various loved ones to return to town before joining the Barbie-Oppenheimer fray (or if tickets are sold out), I’d suggest seeing Past Lives, a beautiful film released by A24 still playing in select theaters. My colleague Shirley Li put it perfectly: The movie is an ode to the kind of love that can be both platonic and romantic at the same time; somehow, that gives the film double the resonance and the depth of a classic romantic tale. It’s not overly sentimental, either; the movie is suffused with subtle wit throughout.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Last September in Paris, I attended a screening of the Netflix feature Athena, about an apocalyptic insurrection following the videotaped killing of a teenager of North African descent by a group of men dressed as police. The unrest begins within an isolated French hyperghetto and blooms into a nationwide civil war, a dismal progression that no longer seems entirely far-fetched. To log on to social media or turn on the TV in France over the past week was to have been transported into Athena’s world.

Late last month, an officer in the Parisian banlieue of Nanterre shot Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan descent who was driving illegally, after he accelerated out of a traffic stop. His death has triggered days of violence that have convulsed the country and at times verged on open revolt. Groups of disaffected youth have incinerated cars, buses, trams, and even public libraries and schools. Roving mobs have clashed with armored police; giddy teens have ransacked sneaker and grocery stores; frenzied young men have filmed one another blasting what look to be Kalashnikovs into the sky.

When scenes like this appear in fiction, many people reflexively flinch. After Athena premiered in September, the far-right demagogue Éric Zemmour dismissed the film as anti-law-and-order propaganda. Other critics have accused its creator, Romain Gavras, of indulging a reactionary and borderline racist depiction of life in the banlieues, one that plays into nationalist stereotypes of immigrant savagery. Before Athena, Gavras was already widely known for virtuosic, mind-bending camerawork in some of this century’s most visually stunning music videos—and for expansive, highly choreographed scenes about riots, mass demonstrations, and other depictions of social outcasts resisting authoritarian control. His video for “Stress,” by the French electronic duo Justice, follows a mostly Black gang of adolescents menacing the suburbs of Paris, beating up bystanders and aggressively occupying public space. In M.I.A.’s “Born Free,” redheads are rounded up and exterminated by U.S.-government agents. For “No Church in the Wild,” by Jay-Z and Kanye West, he shows a diverse mob of masked youth lighting up the streets of Prague with Molotov cocktails as militarized police officers on horseback beat them.

[From the March 2023 issue: The French are in a panic over le wokisme]

Gavras happens to be a friend of mine. As the pandemonium escalated over the past week, I texted him to say that Athena was prophetic.

But his lucid vision didn’t come from nowhere. In recent years, mass protest in France has trended toward ever greater violent disarray. President Emmanuel Macron’s government was effectively derailed by the “yellow vest” movement, and the ancillary unrest that it began lasted from 2018 to 2020, until the coronavirus pandemic effectively changed the subject. Earlier this year, the country was crippled by strikes and sometimes violent—and, yes, fiery—protests in response to Macron’s deeply unpopular pension reforms delaying retirement by two years. For the better part of the 21st century, the country has suffered from an ambient rage that remains partially inexplicable and knows no racial boundary. As the philosopher Pascal Bruckner told me when I called him, the sad truth is that “every type of protest now degenerates into a riot.”

At the same time, rioters seem to be getting younger and appear more willing to cross previously unthinkable lines. In L’Haÿ-les-Roses, a suburban town south of Paris, several days ago, unidentified assailants smashed a car into the home of the mayor, Vincent Jeanbrun, and lit the automobile on fire in an attempt to destroy his house. Jeanbrun’s wife and children were asleep. Two of his family members sustained injuries trying to escape. Even as people in France have grown numb to excess, we sense that few limits remain. Jeanbrun correctly observed that this was an assassination attempt and that “democracy itself is under attack.” In all, 99 town halls and 250 police stations or gendarmeries have been stormed; about 3,400 people—on average, just 17 years old—have been arrested; more than 700 police officers have been injured; 5,000 vehicles have been burned; and 1,000 buildings have been damaged or looted.

Yet these incredible numbers still don’t convey the intensity of the destruction or the sheer nihilism that has seized and shocked a country that is quite familiar with protests and rioting. This time, according to Le Monde, just “five nights and as many days of violence have exceeded the severity of the riots in the fall of 2005, which lasted three weeks” and have remained a kind of national high-water mark of violent insurrection.

“One does not unleash violence with impunity,” Bruckner recently warned. “It is a fire that spreads with astonishing mimicry. The more we tolerate it, the more it becomes the only language of conflict.” The uprising has a purely memetic aspect—one evident in the anglophone media’s haste to dub the current unrest “France’s George Floyd moment,” and in some French activists’ adoption of the American framework of structural racism to explain and at times even justify wanton violence and devastation. In his first remarks on the recent riots, Macron controversially observed the power of social media at play. “We’ve seen violent gatherings organized on several [social-media platforms]—but also a kind of mimicry of violence,” he said, according to Politico, adding that such networked contagion distances young people from reality. What no one can dispute is that this uprising is not reducible to a single killing.

“The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities,” Camus wrote in The Rebel. “The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.” Almost nowhere in the West is the equality among citizens articulated more forthrightly or consistently than in France; the United States may be the only exception. This might explain why even though France’s social safety net is far more generous than in Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other wealthy, diversifying European nations, malaise and overt fury—the indiscriminate violence that is always ready to erupt even as society becomes measurably less discriminatory—remain far more persistent here. Nor can the gap between beautiful philosophical promises and the granular disappointments of empirical reality be discounted entirely in any consideration of the spate of homegrown terrorism that marred the mid-2010s, when more citizens of France than any other Western nation went off to fight for the Islamic State, and the group’s sympathizers carried out a series of horrific massacres within France itself.

[Pamela Druckerman: Why the French want to stop working]

Since the Lyon riots in the early 1980s—which led to the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism, widely viewed as a civil-rights turning point for the country’s Muslim minority—no riots in France have led to anything like a productive political movement. “It seems as if the neighborhoods exist in a political void, as if the anger and revolts do not lead to any political process, as if the elected officials comment on events rather than convey the anger,” the sociologist François Dubet told Le Monde. This is what he calls “violence and silence,” taking Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous formulation of rioting as the language of the unheard one step further: In France today, rioting is the language of the mute.

The power of spectacle and rage works both ways and seldom favors underclasses simmering with resentment at the society in which they are fated to live. In Athena, the men dressed as police officers who are responsible for the viral killing are unmasked as neo-Nazis whose goal was to spark a rebellion in the banlieues that would cleave the country, submerging the legitimate frustrations of isolated and patrolled immigrant communities in a larger us-versus-them discussion of law, order, and public safety. Here, again, fiction and fact are skirting precipitously close. On Twitter and other platforms, the real-life French far right is also quickly becoming energized by the profusion of videos of street mayhem. Last week, two of the country’s main police unions released an astonishing coordinated statement. “Our colleagues, like the majority of citizens, can no longer bear the tyranny of these violent minorities. The time is not for union action, but for combat against these ‘pests,’” they declared before threatening their own revolt. “Today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the government will have to become aware of it.”

In the world of Athena, the revelation that the uniformed killers are fascists offers the audience some catharsis. In real-life France, no such deus ex machina can tidy this story up. The same sickening plot just repeats. The riddle that grips this country today is one it has long professed to have solved: How do you make a multiethnic nation of equal citizens believe that liberté, égalité, and fraternité truly exist? Until that question can be answered in a convincing way, France’s politics will continue to be made pathetically in the streets.

John D. Haltigan sued the University of California at Santa Cruz in May. He wants to work there as a professor of psychology. But he alleges that its hiring practices violate the First Amendment by imposing an ideological litmus test on prospective hires: To be considered, an applicant must submit a statement detailing their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

According to the lawsuit, Haltigan believes in “colorblind inclusivity,” “viewpoint diversity,” and “merit-based evaluation”—all ideas that could lead to a low-scoring statement based on the starting rubric UC Santa Cruz publishes online to help guide prospective applicants.

“To receive a high score under the terms set by the rubric,” the complaint alleges, “an applicant must express agreement with specific socio-political ideas, including the view that treating individuals differently based on their race or sex is desirable.” Thus, the lawsuit argues, Haltigan must express ideas with which he disagrees to have a chance of getting hired.

The lawsuit compares the DEI-statement requirement to Red Scare–era loyalty oaths that asked people to affirm that they were not members of the Communist Party. It calls the statements “a thinly veiled attempt to ensure dogmatic conformity throughout the university system.”

Conor Friedersdorf: The DEI industry needs to check its privilege

UC Santa Cruz’s requirement is part of a larger trend: Almost half of large colleges now include DEI criteria in tenure standards, while the American Enterprise Institute found that 19 percent of academic job postings required DEI statements, which were required more frequently at elite institutions. Still, there is significant opposition to the practice. A 2022 survey of nearly 1,500 U.S. faculty members found that 50 percent of respondents considered the statements “an ideological litmus test that violates academic freedom.” And the Academic Freedom Alliance, a group composed of faculty members with a wide range of political perspectives, argues that diversity statements erase “the distinction between academic expertise and ideological conformity” and create scenarios “inimical to fundamental values that should govern academic life.”

The Haltigan lawsuit—filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a right-leaning nonprofit—is the first major free-speech challenge to a public institution that requires these statements. If Haltigan prevails, state institutions may be unable to mandate diversity statements in the future, or may find themselves constrained in how they solicit or assess such statements.

“Taking a principled stand against the use of the DEI rubric in the Academy is crucial for the continued survival of our institutions of higher learning,” he declared in a Substack post earlier this year.

Alternatively, a victory for UC Santa Cruz may entrench the trend of compelling academics to submit DEI statements in institutions that are under the control of the left—and serve as a blueprint for the populist right to impose its own analogous requirements in state college systems it controls. For example, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, who was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis to help overhaul higher education in Florida, advocates replacing diversity, equity, and inclusion with equality, merit, and colorblindness. If California can lawfully force professors to detail their contributions to DEI, Florida can presumably force all of its professors to detail their contributions to EMC. And innovative state legislatures could create any number of new favored-concept triads to impose on professors in their states.

That outcome would balkanize state university systems into factions with competing litmus tests. Higher education as a whole would be better off if the Haltigan victory puts an end to this coercive trend.

The University of California is a fitting place for a test case on diversity statements. It imposed loyalty oaths on faculty members during the Red Scare, birthed a free-speech movement in 1964, was a litigant in the 1977 Supreme Court case that gave rise to the diversity rationale for affirmative action, and in 1996 helped inspire California voters to pass Proposition 209. That voter initiative amended the Golden State’s constitution to ban discrimination or preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. In 2020, at the height of the racial reckoning that followed George Floyd’s murder, voters in deep-blue California reaffirmed race neutrality by an even wider margin. This continued to block the UC system’s preferred approach, which was to increase diversity in hiring by considering, not disregarding, applicants’ race. Indeed, the insistence on nondiscrimination by California voters has long been regarded with hostility by many UC system administrators. Rewarding contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion is partly their attempt to increase racial diversity among professors in a way that does not violate the law.

[Read: The problem with how higher education treats diversity]

The regime these administrators created is a case study in concept creep. Around 2005, the UC system began to change how it evaluated professors. As ever, they would be judged based on teaching, research, and service. But the system-wide personnel manual was updated with a novel provision: Job candidates who showed that they promoted “diversity and equal opportunity” in teaching, research, or service could get credit for doing so. Imagine a job candidate who, for example, did volunteer work mentoring high schoolers in a disadvantaged neighborhood to help prepare them for college. That would presumably benefit the state of California, the UC system by improving its applicant pool, and the teaching skills of the volunteer, who’d gain experience in what helps such students to succeed. Giving positive credit for such activities seemed sensible.

But how much credit?

A 2014 letter from the chair of the Assembly of the UC Academic Senate addressed that question, stating that faculty efforts to promote “equal opportunity and diversity” should be evaluated “on the same basis as other contributions.” They should not, however, be considered “a ‘fourth leg’ of evaluation, in addition to teaching, research, and service.”

If matters stood there, the UC approach to “diversity and equal opportunity” might not face legal challenges. But administrators successfully pushed for a more radical approach. What began as an option to highlight work that advanced “diversity and equal opportunity” morphed over time into mandatory statements on contributions to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The shift circa 2018 from the possibility of credit for something to a forced accounting of it was important. So was the shift from the widely shared value of equal opportunity to equity (a contested and controversial concept with no widely agreed-upon meaning) and inclusion. The bundled triad of DEI is typically justified by positing that hiring a racially and ethnically diverse faculty or admitting a diverse student body is not enough—for the institution and everyone in it to thrive, the best approach (in this telling) is to treat some groups differently than others to account for structural disadvantages they suffer and to make sure everyone feels welcome, hence “inclusion.”

That theory of how diversity works is worth taking seriously. Still, it is just a theory. I am a proponent of a diverse University of California, but I believe that its students would better thrive across identity groups in a culture of charity, forbearance, and individualism. A Marxist might regard solidarity as vital. A conservative might emphasize the importance of personal virtue, an appreciation of every institution’s imperfectability, and the assimilation of all students to a culture of rigorous truth-seeking. Many Californians of all identities believe in treating everyone equally regardless of their race or their gender.

UC Santa Cruz has not yet responded to Haltigan’s lawsuit. But its chancellor, Cynthia K. Larive, states on the UC Santa Cruz website that the institution asks for a contributions-to-DEI statement because it is “a Hispanic-Serving” and “Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution” that has “a high proportion of first generation students,” and that it therefore seeks to hire professors “who will contribute to promoting a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment.” In her telling, the statements help to “assess a candidate’s skills, experience, and ability to contribute to the work they would be doing in supporting our students, staff, and faculty.”

Perhaps the most extreme developments in the UC system’s use of DEI statements are taking place on the Davis, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Riverside campuses, where pilot programs treat mandatory diversity statements not as one factor among many in an overall evaluation of candidates, but as a threshold test. In other words, if a group of academics applied for jobs, their DEI statements would be read and scored, and only applicants with the highest DEI statement scores would make it to the next round. The others would never be evaluated on their research, teaching, or service. This is a revolutionary change in how to evaluate professors.

This approach—one that is under direct challenge in the Haltigan lawsuit—was scrutinized in detail by Daniel M. Ortner of the Pacific Legal Foundation in an article for the Catholic University Law Review. When UC Berkeley hired for life-sciences jobs through its pilot program, Ortner reports, 679 qualified applicants were eliminated based on their DEI statements alone. “Seventy-six percent of qualified applicants were rejected without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence, or their ability to contribute to their field,” he wrote. “As far as the university knew, these applicants could have well been the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, or they might have been outstanding and innovative educators who would make a significant difference in students’ lives.”

At UC Davis, 50 percent of applicants in some searches were disqualified based on their DEI statements alone. Abigail Thompson, then the chair of the mathematics department at UC Davis, dissented from its approach in a 2019 column for the American Mathematics Society newsletter. “Classical liberals aspire to treat every person as a unique individual,” she wrote. “Requiring candidates to believe that people should be treated differently according to their identity is indeed a political test.”

More striking than her argument was the polarized response from other academics, captured by the letters to the editor. Some wrote in agreement and some in substantive disagreement, as is appropriate. But a group letter signed by scores of mathematicians from institutions all over the United States asserted, without evidence, that the American Mathematics Society “harmed the mathematics community, particularly mathematicians from marginalized backgrounds,” merely by airing Thompson’s critique of diversity statements. “We are disappointed by the editorial decision to publish the piece,” they wrote. Mathematicians hold a diversity of views about mandatory DEI statements. But just one faction asserts that others do harm merely by expressing their viewpoint among colleagues. Just one faction openly wanted to deny such dissent a platform. Are members of that progressive faction fair when they score DEI statements that are in tension with their own political beliefs? It is not unreasonable for liberal, conservative, and centrist faculty members to be skeptical. And many are.

A rival group letter decried the “attempt to intimidate the AMS into publishing only articles that hew to a very specific point of view,” adding, “If we allow ourselves to be intimidated into avoiding discussion of how best to achieve diversity, we undermine our attempts to achieve it.”

The most formidable defender of mandatory diversity statements may be Brian Soucek, a law professor at UC Davis. He’s participated in debates organized by FIRE and the Federalist Society (organizations that tend to be more skeptical of DEI) and recently won a UC Davis Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity and Community. In an April 2022 article for the UC Davis Law Review, he acknowledged that “certain types or uses of diversity statements would be indefensible from a constitutional or academic freedom standpoint” but argued that, should a university want to require diversity statements, it can do so in ways that violate neither academic freedom nor the Constitution. He has worked to make UC Davis’s approach to DEI statements more defensible.

Someone evaluating a diversity-statement regime, he suggests, should focus on the following attributes:

Are statements mandated and judged by administrators or faculty? To conserve academic freedom, Soucek believes that evaluations of professors should be left to experts in their field. Are diversity-statement prompts and rubrics tailored to specific disciplines and even job searches? In his telling, a tailored process is more likely to judge candidates based on actions or viewpoints relevant to the position they seek rather than irrelevant political considerations.    Does the prompt “leave space for contestation outside the statement”? For example, if you ask a candidate to describe their beliefs about “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” you run a greater risk of an impermissible political or ideological test than if you ask them to describe (say) what actions they have taken to help students from marginalized backgrounds to thrive. Applicants could truthfully describe relevant actions they’d taken and still dissent from the wisdom of DEI ideology without contradiction.

Soucek argues that the ability to help diverse students to thrive is directly relevant to a law professor’s core duties, not something irrelevant to legitimate educational or academic objectives. As for concerns that mandatory diversity statements might entrench orthodoxies of thought in academia, or create the perception that political forces or fear of job loss drives academic conclusions, he argues that those concerns, while real, are not unique to diversity statements—they also apply to the research and teaching statements that most job candidates must provide.

“Academic freedom, and the system of peer review that it is built upon, is a fragile business, always susceptible not just to outside interference, but also to corruption from within,” he wrote in his law-review article. But diversity statements strike me as more vulnerable to “corruption from within” than research statements. Although a hiring committee of chemists might or might not do a fair job evaluating the research of applicants, at least committee members credibly possess the expertise to render better judgments than anyone else—they know better than state legislators or DEI administrators or history professors or the public how to assess chemistry research.

[Read: What is faculty diversity worth to a university?]

On what basis can chemistry professors claim equivalent expertise in how best to advance diversity in higher education generally, or even in chemistry specifically? It wouldn’t be shocking if historians or economists or sociologists were better-positioned to understand why a demographic group was underrepresented in chemistry or how best to change that. Most hiring-committee members possess no special expertise in diversity, or equity, or inclusion. Absent empirically grounded expertise, academics are more likely to defer to what’s popular for political or careerist reasons, and even insofar as they are earnest in their judgments about which job candidates would best advance diversity, equity, or inclusion, there is no reason to afford their nonexpert opinions on the matter any more deference than the opinions of anyone else.

Ultimately, Soucek’s idealized regime of mandatory diversity statements—tailored to particular disciplines and judged by faculty members without outside political interference—strikes me as a theoretical improvement on the status quo but, in practice, unrealistic in what it presumes of hiring committees. Meanwhile, most real-world regimes of diversity statements, including those at campuses in the University of California system, lack the sort of safeguards Soucek recommends, and may not assess anything more than the ability to submit an essay that resonates with hiring committees. Whether an applicant’s high-scoring DEI statement actually correlates with better research or teaching outcomes is unclear and largely unstudied.

The costs of mandatory DEI statements are far too high to justify, especially absent evidence that they do significant good. Alas, proponents seem unaware of those costs. Yes, they know that they are imposing a requirement that many colleagues find uncomfortable. But they may be less aware of the message that higher-education institutions send to the public by demanding these statements.

Mandatory DEI statements send the message that professors should be evaluated not only on research and teaching, but on their contributions to improving society. Academics may regret validating that premise in the future, if college administrators or legislators or voters want to judge them based on how they advance a different understanding of social progress, one that departs more from their own—for example, how they’ve contributed to a war effort widely regarded as righteous.

Mandatory DEI statements send the message that it’s okay for academics to chill the speech of colleagues. If half of faculty members believe that diversity statements are ideological litmus tests, fear of failing the test will chill free expression within a large cohort, even if they are wrong. Shouldn’t that alone make the half of academics who support these statements rethink their stance?

Mandatory DEI statements send a message that is anti-pluralistic. I believe that diversity and inclusion are good. I do not think that universities should reward advancing those particular values more than all others. Some aspiring professors are well suited to advancing diversity. Great! The time of others is better spent mitigating climate change, or serving as expert witnesses in trials, or pioneering new treatments for cancer. Insofar as all academics must check a compulsory “advancing DEI” box, many will waste time on work that provides little or no benefit instead of doing kinds of work where they enjoy a comparative advantage in improving the world.

And mandatory DEI statements send the message that viewpoint diversity and dissent are neither valuable nor necessary—that if you’ve identified the right values, a monoculture in support of them is preferable. The scoring rubric for evaluating candidates’ statements that UC Santa Cruz published declares that a superlative statement “discusses diversity, equity, and inclusion as core values of the University that every faculty member should actively contribute to advancing.” Do academics really want to assert that any value should be held by “every” faculty member? Academics who value DEI work should want smart critics of the approach commenting from inside academic institutions to point out flaws and shortcomings that boosters miss.

Demanding that everyone get on board and embrace the same values and social-justice priorities will inevitably narrow the sort of people who apply to work and get hired in higher education.

In that sense, mandatory DEI statements are profoundly anti-diversity. And that strikes me as an especially perilous hypocrisy for academics to indulge at a time of falling popular support for higher education. A society can afford its college professors radical freedom to dissent from social orthodoxies or it can demand conformity, but not both. Academic-freedom advocates can credibly argue that scholars must be free to criticize or even to denigrate God, the nuclear family, America, motherhood, capitalism, Christianity, John Wayne movies, Thanksgiving Day, the military, the police, beer, penetrative sex, and the internal combustion engine—but not if academics are effectively prohibited from criticizing progressivism’s sacred values.

The UC system could advance diversity in research and teaching in lots of uncontroversial ways. Instead, in the name of diversity, the hiring process is being loaded in favor of professors who subscribe to the particular ideology of DEI partisans as if every good hire would see things as they do. I do not want California voters to strip the UC system of more of its ability to self-govern, but if this hypocrisy inspires a reformist ballot initiative, administrators will deserve it, regardless of what the judiciary decides about whether they are violating the First Amendment.

For many years, the English flag was an ambivalent symbol—the flag of the Crusaders who raided medieval Jerusalem, the flag of imperial conquest, and a flag appropriated by the white nationalists of the English Defence League. The cross of Saint George, red on a white background, was also the flag of a bunch of losers. The English men’s soccer team hasn’t won a major title since the 1966 World Cup.

Here in Europe, as in the United States, debates about flags are useful proxies for other cultural anxieties. Flags force us into a confrontation with our country’s history as a source of pride, or shame, or both. They create an us, whose composition can be inclusive or exclusive. And, quite honestly, they can stop the left from winning elections. Being uncomfortable with a national flag is often interpreted (or misinterpreted) as a sign that you don’t love the country it represents. The Scottish saltire and the Welsh red dragon have been thoroughly reclaimed by the nationalist parties of those countries, and even the Union Jack, which blends the flags of Britain’s constituent nations, was rehabilitated in the 1990s by New Labour. But until recently, the English flag languished behind them, unloved and unwaved.

[Read: Raising the American flag made in China]

The flag of Saint George is central to the plot of Dear England, a new play that has just opened at London’s National Theatre. The drama begins with a historical moment of personal and national humiliation. It is the semifinal of the 1996 European championships, England versus Germany, a match that resulted in a 1–1 draw and a penalty shoot-out. The first five players from both teams have all scored, meaning the rules change to “sudden death.” If a player misses his penalty, and his opposing number scores, the first team is out of the competition.

In this cauldron of pressure, a 25-year-old named Gareth Southgate steps up to the penalty spot—and kicks a slow ball directly at the goalkeeper, who blocks it.

For an audience in London, Dear England doesn’t need to show what came next. Almost the whole country knows, including those who aren’t sports fans or hadn’t even been born at the time. England’s goalkeeper, David Seaman, wearing one of the worst shirts ever designed—he looks like a children’s-party entertainer—can’t get a glove to the German team’s next penalty kick. That makes it 6–5 Germany, which goes on to the final and ultimately wins the trophy. Gareth Southgate, meanwhile, goes home with the weight of an entire country’s disappointment upon him. That winter, he makes a pizza ad where the joke is that he has to wear a paper bag on his head in public.

For a while, failure seemed to be history’s verdict on Southgate. “Every single day now, when I walk down the street, it is always mentioned to me,” he told a podcast in 2012. “When you have played for 20 years and that is the first thing people think about you, it is a bit of a downer.” But in 2016, he got the chance to become the temporary manager of the English men’s football team, after the incumbent was caught in a newspaper sting operation over his financial dealings. Since then, Southgate has been an unexpected success in the “impossible job,” taking England to the brink of victory—while nurturing a generation of players who are unafraid to speak out on child poverty and fans’ racism.

Southgate has turned England’s football players from tabloid punch lines into role models, and insisted that no single man should ever bear a team’s defeat alone, as he once did. During a period when Britain has been bitterly divided by Brexit, he’s created a team that belongs as much to a young Black girl in Brixton, South London, as it does to an older white man in Boston, Lincolnshire. He has encouraged a broadly secular, majority-white country to cheer for a young man of Nigerian heritage whose Instagram bio reads, “God’s child.” Southgate once hired a psychologist to encourage his young male players to talk about their fears and feelings, and has made them link arms during penalty shoot-outs. He has become so personally popular that England’s fans have awarded him a chant: “Southgate you’re the one / You still turn me on / Football’s coming home again.”

Okay, okay, after six years of Southgate’s management, England still hasn’t won anything. But the team has played with grace and lost with honor. This has given the country hope.

[Ben Rhodes: This is no time for passive patriotism]

Southgate understands that the power of sport is the power of story—the redemption arc, the last-minute comeback, the underdog triumph, the grudge paid back. He understands that soccer gives people values around which everyone can coalesce, regardless of their political beliefs: hard work, sacrifice, humility, courage. James Graham, the playwright behind Dear England, understands that too. Much of his work for the past decade has been focused on the country’s shifting identity, whether among former mining communities in the BBC drama Sherwood or within the emerging Thatcherite working class depicted in the hit play Ink. Graham is now the closest thing England has to a national playwright. You can probably imagine the demographics of an audience at a subsidized theater performance in London—whiter, richer, and more liberal than the country overall. Yet by the end of Dear England, the crowd was on its feet, shouting along to the unofficial anthem of the Southgate era, Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” (Well, except for the former BBC journalist sitting next to me, who fled after the first half, perhaps finding it all a little too populist.)

Early on in Dear England, a senior football official accuses the Southgate character (played with eerie accuracy by Joseph Fiennes) of picking a team captain, Harry Kane, who is just like him. Kane is a decent guy—a father of three, with another on the way, married to his childhood sweetheart—but he is no one’s idea of an orator. All of his charisma is located in his feet. Graham’s script turns Kane, England’s most prolific goal scorer ever, into an avatar of stoic, unassuming English masculinity, a man for whom finding the right words is less important than leading by example. (The contrast with the hyper-loquacious but unprincipled former Prime Minister Boris Johnson is briefly drawn.) In one scene, Kane is shown wearing a rainbow captain’s armband at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar to support LGBTQ rights, only to be forced to remove it by officials who don’t want to upset the more conservative countries in the tournament. In another, Kane leads the England team in taking a knee to protest racism—a white man from North London genuflecting in solidarity with his Black and mixed-race teammates.

The real-life Southgate has been manager through a period when the national team has become much less white, a trend that prompts anxiety among those who worry that immigration and multiculturalism are transforming England into a country they don’t recognize. (In the 1991 census, five years before Southgate missed his penalty, England and Wales were 94.1 percent white. That figure is now 81.7 percent.) Dear England’s soundtrack reflects this, shifting from the white Brit-pop of the 1990s to Stormzy’s 2019 hit “Crown.” That song is a doubly resonant choice. The lyrics—“heavy is the head that wears the crown”—certainly apply to managing the national football team. Stormzy, like Southgate, has also raised questions about what patriotism means today. When the rapper became the first Black British solo artist to headline the Glastonbury music festival, he wore a monochrome stab-proof vest adorned with the Union Jack. It was both a riff on the traditional John Bull caricature of Englishness and a rejoinder to the National Front’s racist slogan “Ain’t no black in the Union Jack.”

Southgate’s great achievement off the pitch has been to elevate national pride above racial divisions and to blend concepts dear to the right and the left into a new-model patriotism. His own beliefs, like those of many successful politicians, defy neat, stereotypical categorization. In June 2021, he wrote the open letter from which Graham’s play gets its title. “Dear England,” it began. “It has been an extremely difficult year.” Southgate referenced his grandfather’s service in the Second World War to explain why playing for England had been such an honor: “The idea of representing ‘Queen and country’ has always been important to me.” (He is a patron of Help for Heroes, a charity for veterans.) Having made this appeal to the right, though, Southgate moved into the tricky terrain of race, traditionally associated with the left: “Why would you choose to insult somebody for something as ridiculous as the colour of their skin? Why? Unfortunately for those people that engage in that kind of behaviour, I have some bad news. You’re on the losing side.” The letter’s final image was of a young England fan watching the team, filling out a wall chart, looking up to the players, and feeling proud of the country they represent. The letter was, by quite some distance, more powerful and deeply felt than any speech I heard a politician give during the same turbulent period.

Inevitably, though, some commentators think that Southgate’s version of patriotism—respecting tradition without being blind to the sins of the past—is taking inclusion too far. Ahead of the last World Cup, the former footballer turned COVID contrarian Matt Le Tissier appeared on a talk show hosted by Nigel Farage, a leading Brexiteer, to complain that “woke Mr. Southgate” needed to instill a more “positive” attitude in the team. When the English forward Marcus Rashford, who was raised by a single mother, used his life story to campaign for free school meals during vacations, he faced similar jibes about “sticking to football.” Raheem Sterling, the English player whose criticisms of racism have been most uncompromising, has come in for particular heat. In 2018, his decision to get a tattoo of a rifle on his right calf led to demands, amplified in tabloids and social media, that he be dropped from the squad. The next day, Sterling revealed that the tattoo commemorated his late father, shot dead in Jamaica when he was 2, and his own promise never to pick up a gun. “I shoot with my right foot so it has a deeper meaning,” he added.

Southgate has always supported Sterling in his decision to speak out rather than suffer in silence. In December 2021, they gave a joint interview in which Southgate described criticizing another Black player for getting a yellow card for bad behavior, before realizing that he had faced racist chants throughout the game. Southgate also revealed his fear that reporting the chants against Black players was pointless because the football authorities would do nothing. “At the very least, this had to be a team where we were united on how we saw it,” he added.

Like the incident with the rainbow armband, this careful answer reveals the difficult terrain Southgate must navigate. He faces backlash from unreconstructed racists, who take loud and ostentatious offense at rich young Black men criticizing their country, even when those criticisms are couched in a desire for England to be better. But he must also steer his lads through the world of the image-conscious, money-obsessed, and sometimes openly corrupt football authorities, which—much like American sports leagues—tend to regard racism and other bigotries as PR problems rather than social-justice issues. (Perhaps if homophobic abuse had prompted a wave of popular outrage equivalent in scale to the George Floyd protests, the soccer authorities would rethink their stance on rainbow armbands. But with virtually no openly gay footballers, that seems a distant prospect.)

The scene that everyone will talk about in Dear England—after warm reviews, I expect it to transfer to a commercial theater, and probably become a television drama—shows Southgate in a meeting with his team, unfurling England’s flag and asking players to define what it means. They express unease with its legacy from the Crusades, and its associations with racism, before he clarifies his request. The team needs to say what the flag means to them. He asks them to talk about the places they grew up—Milton Keynes, a town best known as a temple to the traffic circle; Washington (the one in northeast England, not the United States); Walthamstow in North London; Wythenshawe near Manchester. Some of these are “shit places,” one player observes. Yes, replies another, “but they’re our shit places.”

This is about as perfect a distillation of English patriotism as you could hope to encounter. But the play’s real heart comes earlier, when Southgate first meets his coaching staff and players, and bluntly informs them that they are unlikely to win their next tournament. Why does England, a team that last won a World Cup more than half a century ago, still arrive at competitions expecting to dominate them effortlessly? he wonders. And why does it harbor a sense of wounded entitlement when it fails?

[Read: Britain’s distasteful soccer sellout]

In a drama that could easily have fallen into overripe metaphors for the state of the nation, the actors do not imbue these lines with unnecessary portentousness. But those questions do reflect the central challenge of Englishness in the 21st century. Is England always doomed to feel diminished by the end of its empire and by its relegation from the top rank of world powers? Or can the country rebuild itself, with hard work and humility, into something new? The question also applies to masculinity, the secondary theme of Dear England. “At home, I’m below the kids and the dogs in the pecking order but publicly I am the England men’s football team manager,” wrote Southgate in his famous letter. Both there and in the play, he talks about being a father figure to the players, some of whom have never known their own fathers.

Does change always have to feel like loss? Not if you write a new story instead of mourning the old one, argues Dear England. It’s a message that could also apply to the United States: How about a story where you can take a knee and fly the flag, and do both with equal pride?