The op-ed laid out what bourgeois culture is, here's a brief synopsis provided by Trevor Thomas:
Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.That's it. Nothing shocking. Nothing too over the top. Nothing extreme. But to hear from a letter by 54 UPenn doctoral students, you'd think that these things are somehow “racist.” They even went so far as to try to tie the Wax/Alexander op-ed to the events that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia. That's some darned convoluted thinking to be able to do that, or at least to attempt to do that. Then Professor Wax “doubled down in her defense of the bourgeois culture.”
Declaring Anglo-Protestant cultural norms superior, Wax told the student paper, "I don't shrink from the word 'superior.'" She added, "Everyone wants to come to the countries that exemplify" these values. "Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans." Furthermore, Wax made it clear – because when talking to liberals, one must always make this clear – that she was not implying the superiority of whites. "Bourgeois values aren't just for white people."Having been to a large number of countries around the world over a 20-year period during some of my younger days, I can attest to Wax's observations. There are some cultures, some values that are so reprehensible that they cannot be explained away or claimed to be as being equally valid as Western values.
In other words, as the professors' original piece concluded, "all cultures are not equal." This is like saying "all pizzas are not equal," but such a conclusion flies in the face of the multiculturalism preached by the modern left. And all cultures are not equal because all values are not equal.
Thomas goes on to show the dichotomy between the bourgeois values and those epitomized by the annual Burning Man Festival in Nevada, one that seems to extol debauchery and eschews many of the more common morals and ethics.
Read the whole thing.