The very fact that this essay will seem incendiary (and save the conniption fits; I’m not on social media and never read online comments) is testimony to how gender has grown destructively hypersignificant. We’re in the process of taking a giant cultural step backward. The women’s liberation movement of my adolescence advocated a release from gender roles, and now we are entrenching them—pigeonholing ourselves with picayune precision on a continuum of gender identity, as if arriving at the right relationship to cliché is tantamount to self-knowledge. But I do not want my epitaph to read, “She was a she.” I am a writer, a cook, a sculptor, a tennis player. A big mouth, a hothead, a cutup, and a ham. A woman, yes, there’s no denying the fact of it. But that detail is incidental—and way down the list.

  “A Monumental Matter”

  The Spectator, 2017

  Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I took the monuments around the state capitol for granted. Among the first Confederate soldiers killed in the Civil War, Henry Lawson Wyatt has leaned into the wind on those grounds for one hundred years. Atop a pedestal inscribed to north carolina women of the confederacy, a mother in billowing skirts reads to her young boy, his hand on his scabbard. Only in adulthood have I done a double take. I was raised in a slightly weird place.

  In an era of fungible Walmarts, regional distinction in the United States is hard to come by, and I treasure Raleigh’s funk factor. Yet I didn’t grow up around folks who wished the South had won the Civil War and wanted to bring back slavery. For much of my lifetime (OK, North Carolina isn’t in a salutary political place in Trump World), cities like Raleigh have had better race relations than many northern ones.

  Up against the movement to cleanse the American South of Civil War tributes, aesthetic attachment to regional oddity constitutes a weak argument. I’ll make it anyway. These sculptures are curious, interesting, specific to one part of the country, and often better crafted than anything that would replace them. Some are defiant; many others have a mournful cast. They are sobering reminders of a dreadful juncture in American history, and you have to remember a war even to regret it. Junking all these memorials off in some cluttered museum would result in an ineffable atmospheric loss for my complicated hometown.

  Yet post-Charlottesville, any reflective discussion of the fate of these relics is regarded overnight as over. Mysteriously, after one unfortunate woman was murdered by a single right-wing malefactor with a driver’s license, it’s a given that every Confederate monument must come down. Dissension, even ambivalence (like mine), means you’re a white supremacist.

  Columbus cost indigenous peoples dear. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. As Oxford University was recently reminded, Cecil Rhodes was an imperialist. Prior to 1960 or so, every celebrated man in the Western world would probably qualify in today’s hyperbolic terms as a “misogynist.”

  We now require those we admire for particular achievements to be blameless in every respect, while the very definition of blamelessness, ever stricter, is a moving target. Applying today’s demanding standards of rectitude to previous generations—requiring all past notables to have embraced racial equality, feminism, disability rights, anticolonialism, nonsmoking, and gender fluidity—means pulling down virtually every statue standing. Named after the Duke of York, involved in the slave trade, New York could be in for rebranding.

  This campaign is potentially limitless, not to mention antihistorical. More, any drive for ideological purity is hair-raising. Can we have a little more “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”? This rampage against any regard for ancestors who didn’t tick every modern political box has a totalitarian texture, and would leave Americans a sterile public environment with only statues of Eleanor Roosevelt and Harriet Tubman—until, that is, some eager beaver unearths, say, their insensitive remarks about cross-dressers.

  Aside from contributing to a general ambience—a sense of something having happened once, of someone having done, you know, whatever—most public statuary functions as outdoor furniture. It’s decorative. With signal exceptions (DC’s Vietnam memorial), most people ignore monuments, never reading the inscriptions—and the older the statuary, the more oblivious the public. They’ve no idea who’s up on that pedestal, and they don’t care; at best, little girls fancy the horses. (Don’t imagine that I recalled those two bronzes around Raleigh’s capitol. I had to look them up.) The only folks I see study big, dated statues are bored foreign tourists. Consequently, the terrible injury these tributes ostensibly cause a range of minorities feels manufactured.

  Thus, while I’m happy for statuary to be “recontextualized” with a contemporary slant, the real effect would be negligible. No one to speak of would read the plaques.

  In contrast to the spontaneous, celebrative destruction of homages to Stalin or Saddam in the heat of overthrow, this drive to politically decontaminate public memorials is a cool power contest. The social justice brigade is muscle-flexing. Yet their righteous efforts will have little palpable effect on people’s lives. Perhaps the most expedient solution is to “recontextualize” what a monument is: a three-dimensional record of what and whom some predecessors wanted to remember at the time it was erected, rather than a lauding in the present of absolutely everything these figures ever said and did.

  Symbolism is important, but purely symbolic gains belong low down the list of vital social reforms, when in the United States, blacks’ median income is half that of Asians and two-thirds that of whites. Take a jackhammer to Jefferson’s visage on Mount Rushmore, and what have you got? Gesture without substance. Do American progressives really want to confront, “Never mind that we let some cops shoot whomever they like and never serve a day in jail, because we chucked that bronze of Robert E. Lee that you’d never even noticed before”?

  Bulldozing statuary long part of a local landscape is gratuitously divisive (people do notice memorials when you smash them). We’ll have too little to show for these scuffles once the dust settles. Neither Britain nor the United States needs more discord. This short-of-monumental matter is an elective conflict. Let’s pick our battles with care.

  “Would You Want London to Be Overrun by Americans like Me?”

  The Spectator, 2021

  [OK, here’s the third cancellation trip wire. I realize that writing about immigration in any but the most enthusiastic terms is incendiary, but I can’t help myself. The point of this piece—which does not regard race—was bound to prove unpopular with certain elements. But my central observation is also true.

  Standard theater repeated itself. Twitter erupted with accusations that I was promoting the “Great Replacement” narrative of the French right wing and branded me a Nazi. Companies threatened to withdraw their advertising from The Spectator. A long screed in The Observer—the Sunday Guardian—so maliciously misrepresented my views that The Spectator’s editor allowed that it was probably “actionable.” But life’s too short to squander my time in court.]

  The Afghans the Home Office is scrambling to resettle in Britain present one of immigration’s most sympathetic cases: translators and other support workers for allied troops whose lives are potentially imperiled by the Taliban’s revenge against collaborators. Councils are searching for big, multiply bedroomed properties to rent or repurpose, as fleeing Afghan families can have a dozen members. The Home Secretary has offered to resettle twenty thousand Afghans in due course.

  Yet if history serves, we’ll soon see many more than twenty thousand Afghans land on British shores, all of whom won’t necessarily have worked for NATO and few of whom will wait to be invited. Like those of nearly all immigrants, their stories are bound to be heartbreaking. Surely only a monster would deny such decent yet desperate people “a better life.” That’s the winning moral reasoning that has currently turned America’s southern border into no more than a notional scribble on a map.

  In Britain, Migration Watch released two reports this summer whose key findings I will try to present as succinctly and neutrally as possible. In the last twenty years, foreign-born residents of the United Kingdom have doubled to nine million, going from 8 percent to 14 percent of the population. In tandem, the white British proportion of the population has fallen from 89 percent to 79 percent, while ethnic minorities have grown from 10 percent to 21 percent. Since 2001, 84 percent of UK population growth has been due to immigrants and their children, rising to 90 percent since 2017—the majority of these immigrants being from non-EU countries.

  Over a third of UK births now involve at least one foreign-born parent; in parts of London, 80 percent of births are to foreign-born mothers. Indeed, non-UK nationals are disproportionately concentrated in British cities. The majorities of London, Slough, Leicester, and Luton have an ethnic-minority background. About half the births in London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Cambridge are to foreign mothers. Unsurprisingly, then, a third of British schoolchildren are already from ethnic minorities; in twenty years, ethnic-minority children will constitute over half the students in state schools. As of 2018, 90 percent of immigrants were under forty-five. That means the ethnic transformation of the United Kingdom, whose white population is far older, is destined rapidly to accelerate.

  Even delivering those dry statistics feels dangerous. As for their implications, none of you readers is supposed to care. In particular, white Britons who greet those figures with anything short of delight know perfectly well to keep their traps shut. The lineages of white Britons in their homeland commonly go back hundreds of years. Yet for the country’s original inhabitants to confront becoming a minority (circa 2060) with any hint of mournfulness, much less consternation, is now racist and beyond the pale. I submit: that proscription is socially and anthropologically unnatural.

  We are a political and territorial species. Although Pollyannas push us to regard ourselves as members of one big happy human family, we compulsively clump into groups. These groups claim territory and, under normal circumstances, defend it. For Westerners to passively accept and even abet incursions by foreigners so massive that the native-born are effectively surrendering their territory without a shot fired is historically extraordinary. I’m hardly commending such an approach, but in times past the inflow of newcomers on such a scale would often have been regarded as a military matter.

  This is not all about race. Kenyans resent Somali immigrants. Black South Africans resent Zimbabwean immigrants. Colombians resent Venezuelan immigrants. In 1983, Nigeria expelled over two million migrants, the majority Ghanaians, to the cheers of the native populace. Anywhere, when the proportion of the “other,” however they may be defined, crosses a critical and perhaps even quantifiable statistical line, people who were born in a place stop getting excited about all the new ethnic restaurants and start getting pissed off.

  With no sense of irony, Mexicans resent the droves of American retirees who settle on their coasts, radically transforming the local culture and nattering along the beach exclusively in English. I’m sympathetic, too. This is normal. Call them “xenophobic” if you will, but most people want to live around people like themselves. Most people are capable of hospitality toward foreigners who arrive in modest numbers, but balk when outsiders become so populous that they seem to be taking over. Most people of any race or religion do not like vast numbers of people entering their territory from elsewhere and making themselves permanently at home. This is not some sick, especially Western meanness. This is what human beings are like all over the world. The blithe welcoming of their own dwindling and loss of dominion now demanded of Western majorities is fundamentally inhuman.

  After all, try reversing the paradigm. If white Westerners were immigrating by the tens of millions to developing nations—if Liverpudlians were pouring into Lagos—the Left would decry the mass migration as neocolonialism. Such white flight would be denounced as invasion—as it would be. Yet for today’s Left, nonwhite cultures must be protected, preserved, and promoted, while evil European cultures deserve to be subsumed. That version of events is neither fair nor salable.

  In the perfect world, it’s Pakistan that would have to accept still more millions of disaffected Afghans, after harboring the Taliban for twenty years. Yet plenty of Afghans are likely to make a run for Europe. For now, most Britons will feel magnanimous toward anyone who escapes the joyless oppression of rulers who hate music—although a guilty “we broke it, we buy it” obligation to welcome all comers doesn’t pertain; Afghanistan was already broken in 2001.

  Many of these refugees will be wonderful people, and all thirty-six million arguably persecuted Afghans could probably qualify for asylum. But in the big picture, along with the native populations of other Western countries, white Britons needn’t submissively accept the drastic ethnic and religious transformation of their country as an inevitable fate they’re morally required to embrace without a peep of protest. Well over half the residents of your capital city weren’t even born in your country—a proportion that continues to climb—and a trace of dismay would seem fitting. I’m one of those foreigners myself, and should London have become majority American, you’d have every right to be irked.

  “The Criminalization of Making Money”

  New Criterion, 2010

  [While I’m walking on the wild side with that last one, why not go whole hog? Even more unacceptable than uttering a discouraging word about immigration is making any money and then grumbling about your tax rate. Yet my accountant was so struck by the spot-on nature of this essay’s central point that he forwarded the text to all his colleagues at the firm. At least you’re unlikely to read such a confession anywhere else. Voicing even a smidgeon of sympathy for the better off is too self-destructive.

  This essay has been revised, so any figures are updated to the most recent I could find as of late 2021.]

  It’s considered unseemly to discuss one’s personal finances in public. But I’m not very polite. Furthermore, while we hear a great deal about the overtly sympathetic travails of the poor, the tribulations of the more prosperous go largely unexpressed. If you earn anything to speak of, you’re never supposed to complain. You’re to feel fortunate, if not sheepish, and keep your mouth shut. But every once in a while, we might allow the people who disproportionately keep state coffers afloat to share their anxieties. Because that’s what earning money in the West has become: an anxiety.

  Until my late forties, I earned very little. Although I now realize that the taxes I paid in my younger days were trifling, the bills seemed whopping at the time, and being expected to pay any taxes whatsoever struck me as an injustice. I relate this with chagrin. Yet I suspect this attitude is typical for taxpayers in bottom brackets: All these other people make way more money than I do, so taxes should be their problem. I didn’t take government handouts, so I fancied that I covered the cost of my communal existence. In retrospect, I doubt that. At best, I may have covered the wear on the roads from riding my bike and the police time required to issue me tickets for running red lights. My tiny taxes wouldn’t have begun to educate the next generation or to build the public libraries I frequented, much less would they have financed any wars or bloated bureaucracies.

  On the upside, at least my tax returns were gloriously simple. So long as I’d paid my rent for the month, I was free to think about other things besides money.

  Then I had a novel take off commercially. Now, authors don’t rake in nearly the royalties that most people imagine. Nevertheless, a while back I enjoyed—though I do not believe that is the right word—a single windfall year. It seemed that every significantly remunerative event in my life occurred within twelve short months.

  Given that this sudden embarrassment of riches was the fruit of a lifetime in fiction writing, the experience of that windfall should have engendered a sense of achievement. Instead, I became choked by a rising dread. Every time another payment came in—for a translation, a film option—I groaned. Moreover, when a payment arrived during the latter part of that year, I no longer regarded it as my money. That’s because the government didn’t regard it as my money, either.

  Having to preface this account with assurances about my keen awareness of how lucky I was is a little tiresome. This ought to go without saying, but it probably doesn’t. Most writers make next to nothing. If you have any sense, you never become a novelist for the purpose of financial gain. Having even one book earn out, much less show a profit, was a stroke of extraordinary good fortune, for which I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. In fact, I’ve had a wonderful life overall, and the expectation that I make some contribution to the general welfare in return is perfectly reasonable. (I would cheerfully pay Estonia’s flat tax of 20 percent to the end of my days. Under the aegis of such a sensible, straightforward, evenhanded regime, I hope I’d have matured from a selfish, petulant stripling into a grown-up who gladly recognizes the individual obligation to chip in to defray social running costs. Alas, “sensible,” “straightforward,” and “evenhanded” are some of the last adjectives we might apply to most Western tax codes.) Obviously as well, the problems of abruptly having too much money cannot compare with the problems of having too little. After living on a ferociously tight budget for years, I should know.

  Nonetheless, I believe my emotional experience of that windfall year is politically and economically instructive. I don’t remember it fondly. I was fearful; I felt stalked. I felt strangely guilty, as if I’d done something wrong—and I don’t think that was due to my Presbyterian upbringing. I felt guilty because the experience of entering a top tax bracket is one of being punished.