Make Minorities Minor Again

It's actually good for us.

This week, my attention was subjected to an unwanted barrage of clips from the inauguration prayer service, which was officiated for some reason by a sort of community center guidance counselor, or perhaps a co-op librarian? Whatever she was, she expressed dire concern about “the people in our country who are scared now,” which includes illegal immigrants and grade-school Tumblr enbies.

The association between the two would likely perplex the Guadalajaran mothers who are apparently staffing our chicken farms and attending our mosques. I confess to being a little confused myself.

But I was more amused than anything. Because the woman’s routine, which represents a point of view that has been dominant for years, suddenly seemed trivial. It felt distant enough from the mainstream of the country’s present attitude to be beside the point altogether.

“Marginalized voices” have been “elevated” to such a pitch, for so long, that I suspect most people were getting a little hoarse trying to have a national conversation with all that elevating going on. The generally enormous patience and goodwill of the American people has clearly been stretched far past all reasonable limit.

Women like the granola priestess, though they still occupy major unmerited positions of power and authority, have nothing whatsoever left of value to say. They are fading into background noise while the adults try figuring out what to do next. In other words“marginalized voices” are at last returning to, well, the margins. And I want to suggest briefly that this is a good thing, not only for the majority but also, importantly, for the minorities.

As Midge Decter pointed out long ago, political ascendancy is actually really bad for countercultures. It drains them of all the cool and panache they get from living life at an odd angle, turning them into drab and tedious pseudo-Sandanistas. Say what you will about gay people, but we used to have style. Now our flag looks like Thomas Kinkade had a seizure and splattered his color palette all over the wall.

Subcultures are supposed to be edgy variations on everyday life, not the main event. I can think of nothing less edgy than getting prayed over by a woman styled like Vice-Admiral Holdo, the spaceship schoolmarm from when Star Wars got weird.

What I’m saying is this: it’s possible to sideline minority ways of life without abusing or persecuting the people who choose them. It’s possible to put stable, traditional families at the center of your culture—the way they have been in every functioning civilization since the dawn of always—without demanding that everybody form one.

The key point here is that even the slightly unusual and off-center among us will benefit from living in a country with a solid core of law, order, and normalcy. Grumpy priest lady doesn’t have to like it, but the rest of us are moving on. It’ll be fun, I promise.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer