Cultural transformation, when engineered through policy, often bypasses democratic consensus, signaling the failure of new norms to win voluntary adoption. This legal imposition without cultural consensus breeds selective enforcement, diminishing trust in law’s impartiality.
Bryan Caplan notes immigrants import American values (pre-assimilate); yet, natives paradoxically erode those same values by expansion, widening the cultural aperture socially, while others narrow it legally (policy).
This inconsistency fosters a climate in which identical acts evoke both celebration and condemnation—eroding the coherent identity into which immigrants can assimilate. (ie. You are brave and have human rights we must protect, yet you are a criminal we must punish.)
The pretense of inclusion in our culture masks deeper coercion and manipulation, and in trying to dictate culture from above, society unravels its own moral clarity and sense of self: we de-assimilate internally while condemning a lack of assimilation, yet there is no coherent identity in which to merge.