These days it seems everyone’s gotten used to the annoyance of Bluetooth speakers, phone calls, and TikTok videos blaring in public. We’ve also gotten used to being called racist if we dare to say anything about it. Like clockwork, the self-appointed centrist gatekeepers come along to tell us why we are right to be annoyed—but suck it up, you racist!

In his weekly column at The New York Times, resident woke-skeptic John McWhorter argues that Bluetooth Americans are the “quintessence of obnoxiousness,” but that those like him who value peace and quiet must put up with them in the name of “diversity.” This grows out of a misguided liberal belief that the dominant culture must always accommodate that of the others, willfully blind to the fact that cultures of quiet and cultures of noise definitionally cannot co-exist. What his claim amounts to is cultural suicide—the total capitulation of silence by admitting it has no right to exist at all. And it’s an all too literal example of the values at stake in the zero-sum fight over American culture.

Now, McWhorter is far too milquetoast to call anyone a racist, but the implication lies just below the surface. After all, urban noise-level preferences vary by neighborhood, class, and culture, and mutual toleration is necessary if we want to keep this melting pot bubbling. Telling a story of his Latin barber, a “contented family man living a peaceful life,” who nevertheless blares loud music on his quiet street, McWhorter dismisses the conventional sociological argument that noise cultures peacock themselves in bad faith, asserting dominance of the public square and/or itching for a fight. Rather, growing up “surrounded by people with tastes similar to theirs,” they make the good faith, even “natural,” assumption that “their music [gives] everyone else joy, too.” Yet it’s he who feels the obligation to confess his preference for quiet is “idiosyncratic.”

At its core, this is age-old liberal paternalism: You might not have racist thoughts, but you’re arrogantly imposing your dominant quiet culture on one that’s just too ignorant to know any better. And that makes you the jerk.

On the merits, this hardly holds up: one may theoretically believe rap music spreads joy on the 6 train, but it’s hard to see how this logic applies to out-of-context TikTok videos or speakerphone marital spats. And it strains credulity to think that anyone, no matter how poor or culturally isolated they are, is completely oblivious to the idea that being loud in public is generally considered rude in America. Yet in this late hour of the culture war, we’re kidding ourselves to think the merits of the argument matter at all, and we do so at our own peril. Good faith or bad faith—it doesn’t matter; you can’t fight universalism with meek particularism.

For a centuries-old universal doctrine, it’s ironic that the hallmark of enlightened liberalism today is to admit that your cultural heritage and values are really no better than anyone else’s, even when on your home turf. Reluctant to be the jerk in their own moral framework, liberals like McWhorter will tolerate just about anything from other cultures, hoping the tolerance will be paid back in kind. But even if all cultures operate in good faith, someone still comes out on top.

Public noise is just the most obvious example: Mrs. Silent Liberal stays quiet out of respect for her fellow passengers, while Mr. Bluetooth Speaker spreads joy to the entire train. Whose culture dominates on the commute to work? Obviously, when the quiet culture fails to assert itself, the loud culture fills the space entirely. Silence must be imposed, or else it ceases to exist.

In almost every instance, however, liberal tolerance is met with bad faith. Even if Mr. Bluetooth Speaker isn’t itching for a confrontation, he still most likely knows his behavior is a nuisance to others. He does it anyway because he wants to, because he can, and because he wants his idiosyncratic preference to win out.

In this, we get to the crux of the broader culture war. Multiculturalism, while a pleasant euphemism, actually amounts to various cultures fighting to come out on top. But when traditional American culture—not just on manners, but bigger issues like equality, justice, and sex—declares itself a pacifist, the other contenders only fight dirtier to take advantage, and American defeat becomes inevitable.

We see it on the border, where the third-world masses know liberal America feels no right to assert itself. So they come right in to flout our laws, scam our systems, and impose their own specific cultural practices.

And it’s not just confined to what we typically consider our culture; we see it in the far-left insurgency as well.

These radicals know the liberal establishment won’t stand against anything under the banner of equality, so they frame the normalization of transgenderism as the fight for “equal rights” and “individual freedoms,” the striated system of legal favor, hiring, and even medical care along racial lines as the long arc of “justice.”

Despite decades of continuous liberal delusion, culture remains a zero-sum game. Far from assimilation, millions of migrants have made America’s once-cohesive society more like the Third World. Rather than progressing further toward the founders’ vision of liberty and justice for all, the establishment has abandoned that vision in favor of one that renders some more equal than others. The America of only a few decades ago is virtually unrecognizable today—all because of the reluctance to draw a line in the sand.

It’s not racist to admit you have a right to exist; any culture that refuses to do it just simply won’t exist. If level-headed liberals like McWhorter can’t admit that, then they’ve abdicated any right they once had to participate in the national conversation for America’s future. When your default choice is cultural suicide, then you’ve really got nothing else to say. Well, good thing he enjoys being quiet!