Sowell: The peril of identity politics.

Dr. Thomas Sowell, at Townhall.com, gets it about half right.

Back in the days of the Hapsburg Empire, there was a town in Bohemia called Budweis. The people in that town were called Budweisers and the town had a brewery which produced beer with the same name -- but different from the American Budweiser.

Like many communities in Bohemia during that era, Budweis had people of both Czech and German ancestries, speaking different languages, though many were also bilingual. They got along pretty well and most people there thought of themselves as Budweisers, rather than as Czechs or Germans. But that would later change -- for the worse -- not only in Budweis, but throughout Bohemia.

So far, so good.

People on both sides learned to live with this situation and Czechs were welcomed into the German cultural enclaves when they mastered that culture. In Budweis, they could all be Budweisers.

As in so many other countries and in so many other times, the rise of a newly educated intellectual class in the 19th century polarized the society with ethnic identity politics. All over Bohemia, the new Czech intelligentsia urged Czechs to think of themselves as Czechs, not Bohemians or Budweisers or anything else that would transcend their ethnic identity.

Demands were made that street signs in Prague, which had been in both Czech and German before, now be exclusively in Czech. Quotas were demanded for a certain percentage of Czech music to be played by the Budweiser orchestra.

If such demands seem petty, their consequences were not small. People of German ancestry resisted ethnic classifications but the Czech intelligentsia insisted and Czech politicians went along with the trend on many issues, large and small.

Eventually, Germans as well began in self-defense to think of themselves as Germans, rather than as Bohemians or Budweisers, and to defend their interests as Germans. This ethnic polarization in the 19th century was a fateful step whose full consequences have not yet ended completely, even in the 21st century.

A crucial turning point was the creation of the new nation of Czechoslovakia when the Hapsburg Empire was broken up after the First World War. Czech leaders declared the new nation's mission to include a correction of "social injustice" so as to "put right the historic wrongs of the seventeenth century."

Uh oh.

Government policies designed to undo history with preferential treatment for Czechs polarized the existing generation of Germans and Czechs. Bitter German reactions led eventually to demands that the part of the country where they lived be united with neighboring Germany. From this came the Munich crisis of 1938 that dismembered Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II.

When the Nazis conquered the whole country, the Germans now lorded it over the Czechs. After the war, the Czech reaction led to mass expulsions of Germans under brutal conditions that cost many lives. Today refugees in Germany are still demanding restitution.

If only the grievances of past centuries had been left in the past! If only they had all remained Budweisers or Bohemians.


There is one rather large problem with all this. Deracination.

What does one lose or give up when one becomes a "good Budweiser", or a good American, for that matter?

What if conforming to Budweiserian mores means you have to renounce certain tenents of the faith of your fathers or perhaps the whole faith? That most likely would lead to the breakdown of the Bud family and that creates crime, divorce, perversion, and other social pathologies. Then what happens, Dr. Sowell? Is it still worth being a Budweiser if doing so wrecks everything around you, everything you hold dear?

This is where the whole libertarian house of cards hits the fan. By the grace of God, men are not the rational animals of libertarian (and other) fantasy. We love as well as work. We are passionate as well as rational.

And whether you like it or not, the spiritual constantly battles the material in all of us. Even those of us who deny the existence of the spirit.