Mike Gonzalez, writing for Heritage's Daily Signal
* * *
* *
Is multiculturalism a decent if banal posture that
basically boils down to respecting other cultures and getting sloshed on St.
Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo?
Or...
(*PURSED LIPS*)
...is it a much darker social model used as a Trojan
horse to transform Western society fundamentally, especially this one?
* I WOULD HAVE TO GO WITH... THE LATTER.
I think both can be true, but I worry only about the
fundamental transformation part.
Bryan Caplan seems to think it’s only about the respect
part and doesn’t think we should worry.
After we both appeared at a panel over the weekend, Caplan, a professor of economics at George
Mason University and a senior scholar at the Mercatus Center, penned a blog
post in which he said he “didn’t strongly disagree with anything” I said. He
wanted to add, however, that we could stand to borrow good ideas from
elsewhere, and that in the end, multiculturalism won’t have much of an impact.
* UH-HUH...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD IN AMAZEMENT*)
Obviously, America can absorb good ideas. That was the
whole thing about the “melting pot” — remember that?
* YEP! I REMEMBER!
As my colleague Hans von Spakovsky never tires of saying,
we are a multi-ethnic society, but one with a unique American culture.
* THE PROBLEM BEING... (READ ON!)
That is what multiculturalists hope to change.
* YEP...!!!
In my talk, I underlined the point that another friend,
Niger Innis, always makes: Even if we were to shut the immigration doors
completely, the next president will have to start reversing the social
engineering of the past five decades.
(*NOD*)
If he or she doesn’t, we will end up with another
country, and not a better one.
* I FEAR IT ALREADY MAY BE... PROBABLY IS... TOO LATE.
Bryan Caplan is a nice guy, but he’s wrong;
multiculturalism is taking root and reordering society.
* AND NOT FOR THE BETTER!
It is there in small ways.
For example, when the principal at a San Francisco middle
school cancels the student government election because too many white students
won — and cluelessly defends abrogating the student’s choice by saying, “I want
to make sure the voices are all heard!”
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
It is also there when Salon writes the umpteenth
brainless blog post (of the morning) decrying how there are not sufficient cast
members of this group or that on any given TV show.
(*RUEFUL CHUCKLE*)
The whole new environment has left Peggy Noonan pining
for Joe Biden, because the vice president reminds her of Democrats of old. Those
Democrats “did not spend their time endlessly accusing people of being
sexist-racist-homophobic-gender-biased persons of unchecked privilege,” Noonan
writes. “They would have thought that impolite.”
On a bigger, more draconian level, multiculturalism ends
one of our universities’ core missions, truth discovery, by closing students’
minds to other viewpoints.
* YEP...!!!
And at its worst, multiculturalism is a blueprint for
replacing the American narrative with a counter-narrative formed by values of
the Left such as income redistribution, reliance on government to apportion
participation in society, and thinking of people as groups rather than as
individuals and their families.
(*NOD*)
Perniciously, multiculturalism builds on the works of
Marxist European thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Gramsci, whose
“Critical Theory” has greatly influenced American progressives.
As my colleague John Fonte and I wrote recently in The
Weekly Standard, multiculturalism inherits from Critical Theory the idea that
society is “divided along racial, ethnic, and gender lines into a dominant
group (white males) and ‘marginalized’ groups (ethnic, racial, linguistic, and
sexual minorities). The goal of politics should be first to ‘delegitimize’ the
ideas of the American system and second, to transfer power from the dominant
group to the ‘oppressed’ groups.”
Gramsci himself was crystal-clear on this: “In the new
order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration
of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the
consciousness of society.”
(*CONTINUOUS NODDING*)
Multiculturalism has corrupted our vocabulary: The term
“minorities” no longer applies to groups with ideas that must be
constitutionally protected, as Madison worried, but to ethnic background. The
word “communities” has become a functional abstraction (“the Puerto Rican
community”) rather than a physical place with neighbors, churches, stores, and
a bowling league.
(*NOD*)
Multiculturalism is, thus, precisely what Peter Thiel and
David Sacks say it is in “The Diversity Myth,” their 1995 book: A “word game”
that has allowed Marxists to succeed, where “an honest discussion would not
lead to results that fit the desired agenda.”
(*STILL NODDING*)
And it succeeds because progressive multiculturalists
incessantly have told immigrant groups that they need the government to protect
them from native privilege. So, yeah, we are increasingly a nation of groups.
That can lead to a fragmented culture and country, with dangerous long-term
effects on our stability.
* I'M AFRAID IT'S ALREADY HAPPENED.
You know things are bad when Obama’s own pollster,
Cornell Belcher at Harvard University, is urgently warning that we have
self-segregated into a “Tribal America.”
(*STILL JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
“I think you will see our politics, our legislative
bodies come to a complete halt, more so than they already have, if we don’t
solve for this problem, if we can’t solve for the tribalism in our politics and
be one big tribe and not several separate smaller tribes,” Belcher said.
I don’t mind celebrating St. Patrick’s Day or Cinco de
Mayo, especially if the food will be Mexican and the beer Irish on both
occasions. But we’re talking about something much bigger here, Mr. Caplan. The
next president should take heed.
* WE SHOULD ALL TAKE HEED; AND ALL FIGHT THIS MADNESS!
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