From my new Taki's Magazine column:
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld note that these three common traits of successful minority groups—which I would call ethnocentrism, paranoia, and self-repression—are not liberal virtues:
"Paradoxically, in modern America, a group has an edge if it doesn’t buy into—or hasn’t yet bought into—mainstream, post-1960s, liberal American principles."
And yet of the eight minorities, only Mormons are uncool enough to admit they reject liberalism.
Mormons are interesting because they are the minority among minorities—an odd group out whose members publicly aspire to being ordinary Americans, as Americans used to define themselves before the 1960s.
Being an insular sect that pretends to be regular Americans, the Mormons are the only minority that publicly dissents from the reigning worldview that minorities are inherently morally superior to the majority.
But do Mormons actually benefit much financially from their strong moral culture? Or does their notorious niceness, their lack of a chip on the shoulder (which Chua and Rubenfeld cite as essential to minority success), their shortage of hostility toward the majority keep them from fully cashing in?
Read the whole thing there.