In early December, my family and I went to buy our Christmas tree, but instead of buying it in our typical SWPL neighborhood, we ventured outside of the city to make a day of it on a family farm in a working-class suburb. We had an idyllic vision of escaping the problems of city life. We imagined drinking hot chocolate and laughing with similar-looking families, our children playing with their similar-looking children.

There was some of that, but the scene was far from wholesome. A surprisingly significant number of children at the farm had frizzy blonde-tinged afros, the tell-tale sign of black-white miscegenation (I say “sign” because many of these frizzy-haired kids had only one parent with them—almost always a heavily tattooed and obese white mother with creative piercings and hair coloring). Almost all of the adults were white, but many of them mumbled in a barely comprehensible black-imbued vernacular and dressed in sloppy hip-hop attire. This was not the scene we had expected.

That night, we came back to the city and ate dinner at an upscale restaurant. Every single patron was white—mostly young hipsters. The decor was agrarian and the background music, to my surprise, was country (mostly Chris Stapleton). This was the idyllic traditional America that we had hoped to find earlier in the day.

Over dinner, my wife and I discussed what we had seen. Based on the voting patterns in both areas, we could safely bet that the vast majority of the people at the farm voted for Donald Trump. And we were almost certainly the only Trump voters at the upscale city restaurant.

The irony is that much of the diversity at the farm is a direct result of the last 50 years of housing and education policies—the very programs white liberals favor in their politics but flee in their personal lives. This feature of white liberalism has been noted before, perhaps most cleverly by Joe Sobran: “In their mating and migratory habits, liberals are indistinguishable from members of the Ku Klux Klan.”

But white elites do not just flee the consequences of their diversity politics; once freed from the burden of diversity, they create replicas of the aesthetic and culture that their liberalism is destroying. Indeed, at the upscale urban restaurant there were no signs of diversity degeneracy—no hip-hop attire; no frizzy-haired children; no black-imbued vernacular. In fact, it was just the opposite—lumberjack shirts, two-parent families, cohesive and pleasant interaction—a simulacrum of the traditional America these very elites are destroying through their politics.

Our liberal rulers pollute public white culture but then produce an artificial version of it in their private lives to satisfy their longing for community and identity. This would not be such a problem if their poorer white brethren could also maintain this public-private dichotomy. But because the working and middle classes lack the money and mobility to escape the diversity degeneracy that seeps deeper and deeper into white America, they are stuck with the cultural pollution that the elites create.

This recalls another Sobran gem: “The purpose of a college education is to give you the correct attitude towards minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.” But the prescient Sobran did not go far enough. Our elites seek not only the means to live far away from diversity, but the power to impose diversity on others—all in the name of cultural enrichment.

This underscores two features of our predicament that I have been thinking about ever since our day at the farm: (1) how diversity has polluted white suburbia, and (2) how diversity is a new form of cultural warfare.

You can find this pattern throughout the United States. Pick a city and compare its wealthy to its middle-income suburbs. You will find that in many cases the wealthy suburbs are quite liberal but have very few blacks, and the nearby middle-income suburbs are much more conservative and have far more diversity.

This is a pattern that extends beyond geography. Compare the magazines at the check-out at an upper-class grocery store, such as Whole Foods, to those at a more middle-income establishment. You will find that the magazines at the upper-class store are tasteful, restrained, and culturally white—whereas the magazines at the middle-class store bombard the shopper with diversity propaganda. The check-out counter has become a diversity warzone.

Of course, part of this discrepancy is due to the market. Poorer whites do not have the money and mobility to opt out of diversity, and perhaps these less-educated whites have tastes that make them more susceptible to the vulgarity of black culture. But the market is only part of the explanation. A more significant force is that our legal, political, and entertainment institutions are imposing this culture on them.

And again, the free market is only part of this story. This transformation of middle-income communities did not happen until American law hit them with the one-two punch of mandating integration and eliminating the freedom of association.

Thus, it is not simply that diversity means conflict, but that all the rhetoric and sloganeering about our national diversity obsession has become a form of cultural and demographic warfare. Our elites destroy the middle-classes through political slogans promoting our “greatest strength,” and coercive programs that cite the nation’s “great moral victory” over “racism.” When you hear elites extol the virtues of diversity, you are being attacked.

So does our hope lie with the proles? The big difference between Orwell’s 1984 and 2018 is that Orwell’s elites did not bother to indoctrinate the masses, on the ground that the proles’ fidelity to Big Brother was considered irrelevant. By contrast, in our diversity dystopia the masses are at the core of the Left’s indoctrination project. Our “proles” are the ones forced to suffer a bad education in integrated schools. They are the ones subjected to violence, harassment, and intimidation. And they are the ones told, again and again, that any resistance to this makes them betrayers of who we are as Americans, deplorable traitors in need of ever-more reformation.

Leadership may not come from the proles, but good sense and votes will. Those who bear the burdens of diversity see its damage most clearly. It is no accident that Donald Trump swept the white working-class vote.

Whatever our own particular economic station, we all have a role to play in restoring working- and middle-class white America. We should be hiring our own people, tutoring our own people, supporting scholarships for our own people, and doing our best to build schools and cultural institutions that can be healthy environments for our own people.

Dr. Murray may have been right that white America’s “coming apart” defined the last part of the 20th century due to white flight from the cities. But “coming together” may define the first half of the 21st century—because now there is nowhere to run.