Joe Biden and acceptable bigotries

It’s funny. Progressives are quick to defend the customs and mores of non-Western peoples. They celebrate women who wear the hijab. They defend non-traditional cultures at home and traditional cultures abroad. This doesn’t bother me, really. Indeed, in some cases I often find it admirable and wish more conservatives would do likewise. But what does bother me is how this tolerance tends to be selective. For many progressives, when the practices are usefully at odds with mainstream traditional culture, diversity is wonderful. But when the practices are consistent with or — shudder — reinforcing of traditional culture, progressives are often appalled…

But the glib and fashionable double standard against traditionalists and orthodox Christians isn’t what I have in mind. It’s the far more widespread and fashionable bigotry against the past.

If a visitor from Sudan comes to your house for dinner, it’s simply good manners to make allowances for the cultural differences. If you go to a foreign country, it’s understood by most decent people that you should be making the lion’s share of adjustments to how people do things. The quintessential ugly American refuses to bend to — or even respect — the norms of foreign cultures, norms that can sometimes be ugly, nasty, or backward by a lot of Western standards.