Grumbach, reduce tensions between members of different races. Unions, say political scientists Paul Frymer and Jacob M. It frame society as a zero-sum competition between individuals rather than a cooperative venture (Washington Post):Īs McGhee told Vox’s Sean Illing, “The zero-sum story is the idea that there’s this massive dividing line between Black people and white people, that they’re on opposite teams, and that progress for people of color has to come at white people’s expense.” Dionne this morning invokes Heather McGhee’s sense that racism harms us all. The mask wars of the recent Covid pandemic were fought over whether personal freedom has any obligation to the common good that protects mine while protecting yours.Į.J. Consideration of the common good is secondary, if a consideration at all. It is the mask worn by market-based thinking to convince us that there is somehow moral content behind consumption. What freedom has become is license for radical individualism stripped of responsibility to the matrix of relationships that sustain it. One utters it and genuflects without thinking about why. It has become, as in the original Star Trek episode, a worship word to be spoken as a signifier of tribe, but stripped of meaning. Shibboleth, says Websters, is “a word or saying used by adherents of a party, sect, or belief and usually regarded by others as empty of real meaning.” Freedom as used by many Americans has taken on that sense.
