Multiculturalism vs. America

Today, multiculturalism and its politics of identity pose an existential threat to the American political order comparable to slavery in the 1850s or communism during the Cold War. Once confined to graduate seminars and the ethnic "studies" departments at our nation's colleges and universities, multiculturalism is now the authoritative ideology reigning over higher education, our media and political establishments, legal system, and corporate boardrooms.

If we do not reverse multiculturalism's advance, it will continue to undermine our country and constitutionalism, destroying the possibility of a common good and a life of civic peace. Indeed, multiculturalism threatens to take down western civilization as whole.

By multiculturalism, we do not mean the mere presence of many cultures, races, or ethnic traditions, which are a fixture of modern American life and can be found across our states, communities, institutions, and private associations....

Multiculturalism, on the other hand, is not this benign tolerance of diverse traditions. Multiculturalism is a comprehensive ideology, demanding obeisance to a rigid system of justice, vices, and virtues. It boasts an intellectual tradition that guides its leadership and adherents in the policing of its boundaries and the maintenance of its categories. It keeps a running list of friends and enemies, a roster of praise, shame, and blame.

In short, multiculturalism is a worldview - a regime, in the classical sense; a political and cultural way of life all wrapped up in one. As an ideology, it stands for nearly the opposite of America's national motto. It seeks to divide and conquer Americans, making many groups out of one citizenry. The modern Left, accustomed to running the campuses according to the new social justice diktats of multiculturalism, now wants to run the world that way.

The threat multiculturalism presents to the American regime and our way of life is now urgent.

We have decided to use the term "multiculturalism" instead of "identity politics" or a similar term, because despite its limitations and current usage "multiculturalism" is more comprehensive. It is a new system of truth and justice that seeks to revolutionize and transform the American way. Identity politics is the coalitional strategy of multiculturalism and political correctness its enforcement arm....

The failure to apprehend fully and take seriously multiculturalism has also led many on the Right to misinterpret and underappreciate President Trump's virtues and his significance as a political phenomenon. Trump understands instinctually that multiculturalism (and its politics of identity and political correctness) is anti-American. He understands that the unity found in patriotism is the antidote to a politics of group identity that if left unchallenged will irreparably divide and balkanize the American citizenry and lead to disunion....

The American Right's failure to evaluate correctly President Trump, his political movement, and the nature of his opposition stems from a much deeper error. They cannot think prudentially....

There are few categorical rules in politics, but in a republic, public opinion is everything. Public rhetoric and political demonstration can shape the public mind decisively.

Much of the American Right, regrettably, does not think of politics in this way. They are enamored with process rather than substance and do not think comprehensively about the rhetoric of justice. They take too narrow a view of politics. Unless conservatives begin to think about politics as Lincoln did - comprehensively - they will lose to multiculturalism....

The modern multiculturalist Left is intent on proliferating divisions without concern for American unity, cohesion, and stability. The modern Right is confused about the threat to the union posed by this political strategy. We must change course, and soon....

Many conservatives did not see that Trump had framed the 2016 election as a choice between two mutually exclusive regimes: multiculturalism and America. What I call “multiculturalism” includes “identity politics” and “political correctness.” If multiculturalism continues to worm its way into the public mind, it will ultimately destroy America....

I realize the term “multiculturalism” is somewhat dated, but I mean to freshen it up by using it in its most comprehensive sense—as a political philosophy. Multiculturalism conceives of society as a collection of cultural identity groups, each with its own worldview, all oppressed by white males, collectively existing within permeable national boundaries. Multiculturalism replaces American citizens with so-called “global citizens.” It carves “tribes” out of a society whose most extraordinary success has been their assimilation into one people. It makes education a political exercise in the liberation of an increasing number of “others,” and makes American history a collection of stories of white oppression, thereby dismantling our unifying, self-affirming narrative—without which no nation can long survive....

During the 2016 campaign, Trump exposed multiculturalism as the revolutionary movement it is. He showed us that multiculturalism, like slavery in the 1850’s, is an existential threat. Trump exposed this threat by standing up to it and its enforcement arm, political correctness. Indeed, he made it his business to kick political correctness in the groin on a regular basis. In countless variations of crassness, he said over and over exactly what political correctness prohibits one from saying: “America does not want cultural diversity; we have our culture, it’s exceptional, and we want to keep it that way.”...

Most conservatives did not see Trump in 2016 as a man defending America. This was in large part because they did not see that America was in need of defending....

... the impulse for electing Trump was patriotic, the defense of one’s own culture ...

... Multiculturalism, not Trumpism, is the revolution. Trump’s campaign, and its defense by his intellectual supporters, was not a call for a revolution but a call to stop a revolution. Trump’s intellectual supporters did not say things could not get worse; they said without a sharp change in course there was a good chance we shall never get back home again....

The core idea of each of these [Trump's] anti-P.C. blasts, when taken in aggregate, represent a commitment to America’s bourgeois culture, which is culturally “Judeo-Christian,” insists on having but one language and one set of laws, and values: among other things, loyalty, practical experience, self-reliance, and hard work....

Trump understands that “diversity is our greatest strength,” which is multiculturalism boiled down to an aphorism, is exactly backwards. America’s greatest strength is having transcended race, and the one major exception was very nearly our undoing. In light of this history, the history of the world (one “tribal” war after another), and the multicultural car wreck that is Europe today, to manufacture cultural diversity is nothing less than self-immolating idiocy. Trump might not put it in these words, but he gets it. The average American gets it too, because it is not very difficult to get: it is common sense....

From openness to emptiness: Our bipartisan elite wants to replace America with a vapid utopia where anything goes....

Thomas Klingenstein labels this regime “multiculturalism.” That’s as good a label as any. It expresses a dream of porous borders, heroic affirmations of difference and diversity, limitless openness, and life without an authoritative center. The regime is not “left.” It is bipartisan. Addressing the United Nations after the fall of the Soviet Union, the reliable voice of the American establishment, George H. W. Bush, dismissed the antiquated world of partisan loves and consolidating loyalties. He intoned, “I see a world of open borders, open trade, and, most importantly, open minds.” Multiculturalism stands as an ideologically developed version of this bipartisan establishment consensus in favor of ever-greater openness....

Almost the entire conservative apparatus is now captive to a libertarian-inflected political correctness. It promises to protect free speech and (perhaps) religious freedom, but shrinks from any substantive positions on cultural issues....

... In practice, in the United States, identity politics is the atomization of the entire vast and intricate demography of 325 million Americans into dozens of overlapping aggrieved sub-sets, each claiming discrimination. This is the fragmentation of society into victim associations: ethnicities, groups of minority sexual orientations, people with physical and mental handicaps, with career reversals—an ever-broadening range of bearers of attitudes and afflictions. All groups except straight adult white males are endlessly hunted and outed to be embraced as yet another wronged collectivity that American virtue requires to be highlighted, elevated, and compensated; all, of course, in exchange for their votes.

In this seething deconstruction of the ostensibly united American people, political correctness is the iron code of discipline. Every step of the march is a debunking of America, a shaming of its hypocrisy, presumption, and moral turpitude....

Multiculturalism is bad policy when large groups of immigrants decline to assimilate to their new country. Virtuous and sincere and successful immigration need not mean cultural deracination. But immigration requires a conscious, determined decision to assimilate to the society where the immigrant arrives....

Yet, as Klingenstein rightly objects, advocacy of this form of immigration has become the official policy of the Democrats, who have been demographically captured and have sold out, bag and baggage, to illegal Latino immigrants....