Multiculturalism
How to Destroy America
by Steve Sailer
The American Conservative, 2007-01-15
Multiculturalism doesn’t make vibrant communities but defensive ones.
by Scott McConnell
World Affairs Journal, Spring 2009
[1.1]
The modest contemporary literature on the connection between
America’s immigration and foreign policies
contains this assertion by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan,
from the introduction to their 1974 volume
Ethnicity: Theory and Experience:
“The immigration process
is the single most important determinant of American foreign policy . . .
This process regulates the ethnic composition of the American electorate.
Foreign policy responds to that ethnic composition.
It responds to other things as well,
but probably first of all to the primary fact of ethnicity.”
[1.2]
Yet,
the authors noted a nearly complete absence of discussion of the issue,
and they pursued it little themselves.
Rather, they tossed it in as a supplement to their general argument:
ethnicity was not going to wither away,
leaving only colorful residues for annoyance or celebration.
It would remain a primary form of social life in the United States.
[1.3]
Nonetheless,
ethnicity played little role in
the foreign policy battles of the 1960s and 1970s.
One could discuss the cultural divide between hippies and hardhats,
between war protesters and the “silent majority”
without reference to race, creed, or national origin.
Some scholars would note a dominant ethnic component in the New Left,
as well as in the less visible New Right,
but such considerations were hardly part of the national conversation.
[1.4]
They certainly had been in the past,
in the battles over American entry into World Wars I and II.
Glazer and Moynihan implied they would be in the future as well.
For the two were writing in the wake of the historic 1965 Immigration Act,
which had overturned the restrictionist regime of the 1920s.
That post–World War I legislation, which brought to a halt
the Great Wave of immigration that had begun forty years earlier,
was designed explicitly to freeze the American ethnic balance.
By the 1960s, in the warm glow of the civil rights revolution,
this was no longer plausible.
[1.5]
In any case,
the backers of the 1965 act did not imagine huge demographic changes:
there would be, they claimed,
some modest increase in the number of Greek and Italian immigrants
but not much else.
The sheer inaccuracy of this prediction was already apparent by the early 1970s.
The 1965 Act allowed entry of immigrants from any country,
so long as they possessed certain job skills
or family members living here
or had been granted refugee status themselves.
[1.6]
The family reunification provision
soon became the vital engine of immigrant selection.
By the 1980s,
it had greatly increased numbers of Asians and of Hispanics—
the latter mostly from Mexico.
The European population of the country was now in relative decline—
from 87 percent in 1970 to 66 percent in 2008.
If immigration continues at present rates
(and barring a long-term economic collapse, it is likely to),
by 2040, Hispanics will make up a quarter of the American population.
If that does not guarantee a somewhat different foreign policy,
there is also the prospect of a substantial expansion of
America’s once miniscule Muslim and Arab populations.
[2.1]
To those attuned to
the historic battles over twentieth-century American foreign policy,
ethnicity was an obvious subject.
It played a major role in the debate over American entry into World War I,
which was vigorously opposed by most
German-Americans,
anti-tsarist Scandinavians,
and many Irish-Americans.
Leading pro-war politicians railed against “hyphenated-Americans”
with a ferocity nearly unimaginable today.
And while opposition to America’s entry into the war cut across all regions and groups,
the non-interventionist position always maintained a strong core of support
in the upper Midwest,
where Americans of German descent dominated.
In the 1950s,
the widely read political analyst Samuel Lubell concluded that
isolationism was always more ethnic than geographical,
and owed its durability to
the exploitation of pro-German and anti-British ethnic prejudices
by the Republican Party.
Lubell claimed that isolationists,
far from being indifferent to Europe’s wars,
were in fact oversensitive to them.
[2.2]
This is surely too reductionist an argument.
But the volatile ethnic mix at home
did inhibit Woodrow Wilson from taking sides in Europe.
“We definitely have to be neutral
since otherwise our mixed populations would wage war on each other,”
Wilson was reported to say in 1914.
The “hyphenates,” bullied into silence by 1917,
had their day after the Armistice
when their opposition helped to lay low
Woodrow Wilson’s dreams for the League of Nations.
Walter Lippmann interpreted post-war isolation through this ethnic prism:
any policy that put America in alliance with some European countries against others risked exacerbating America’s own ethnic divisions.
Near the end of his career, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
described the arguments that took place
between the outbreak of war in 1939 and Pearl Harbor as
“the most savage national debate” of his lifetime,
one that “unleashed an inner fury that tore apart
families, friends, churches, universities and political parties.”
[2.3]
In any event,
America’s intra-European divisions began to melt away quickly
after Pearl Harbor,
as military service became the defining generational event
for American men born between 1914 and 1924.
The mixed army squad of WASP, Italian, German, Jew, and Irish
became a standard plot device for the popular World War II novel and film.
The Cold War generated a further compatibility
between ethnicity and foreign policy.
East European immigrants and refugees emerged
to speak for the silenced populations of a newly Stalinized Eastern Europe.
Suddenly, all the major European-American groups were in sync.
Italian-Americans mobilized for mass letter-writing campaigns
to their parents and grandparents
warning of the dangers of voting Communist.
Greek-Americans naturally supported the Marshall Plan.
[2.4]
Bipartisanship now meant that both parties had to woo ethnic Americans.
(And not always so tactfully: the 1948 GOP platform promised to work for
the restoration of Italy’s African colonies).
Eastern Europeans lobbied for the rollback of Soviet rule,
enshrining it as a GOP platform plank if not a practical commitment.
Americans of East European background remained staunchly anti-Communist
long after anti-Communism surrendered its luster in the aftermath of Vietnam,
allying with neoconservative Jews
and hamstringing Nixon and Kissinger’s détente policy.
As anti-Communism became an engine of Americanization,
the Cold War showcased the hyphenated American.
[2.5]
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
America has entered a new era of ethnicity and foreign policy,
whose contours are only just now emerging.
During the 1990s, when multiculturalism was in vogue,
leaders of old and new minority groups steered American foreign policy
toward the cause of their ancestral homelands.
African-American and Hispanic leaders
touted the success of American Jews in lobbying for Israel
as an example to be emulated.
At one major Latino conference,
participants nominated themselves the vanguard of
a “bridge community” between the United States and Latin America.
[2.6]
Ethnic lobbies, the old as much as the new,
quickly filled the empty space left behind by the Cold War.
Traditional realists
like former defense secretary James Schlesinger
and Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington bemoaned
the diminished sense of national cohesion and purpose.
Ethnic lobbies, they feared,
would inhibit the United States from exercising global leadership.
Indeed, if one were to examine
some of the major policy milestones of the Clinton era—
active participation in the Northern Ireland peace process,
the military occupation of Haiti,
expanded trade embargoes on Cuba and Iran,
the revelation of the Swiss banking scandals—
it could be argued that ethnic lobbies were,
as much as any coherent grand strategy,
the era’s prime movers.
[3.1]
After a brief spasm of patriotic and military display
following the attacks of 9/11,
we have picked up where we left off the day before.
Which is to say that the preliminary indications
point toward a future that will bear some semblance
to the politics of the 1990s and the World War I era,
when ethnic constituencies
operated as a brake on executive power and military intervention.
There is no evidence that
the rallying cries put forth by America’s neoconservatives and liberal hawks—
democratization of tyrannies,
the global war on terror,
the fight against radical Islam—
have gained significant traction
among first- and second-generation immigrant communities.
Certainly they do not resonate with anything like
the intensity that anti-Communism did after World War II.
On the basis of what is visible thus far,
today’s and tomorrow’s Mexican-, Asian-, and Arab-Americans
will more resemble the Swedes, Germans, and Irish of a century ago
than the Poles, Balts, and Cubans of the Cold War era.
[3.2]
The plainest indicator is voting behavior.
The obvious point to make is that
most of the new immigrant groups tend to vote Democratic—
a trend that has intensified since the Republican Party twinned itself with
the war in Iraq and, more generally, with the “war on terror,”
even as the Democratic Party has reverted to
a traditional skepticism regarding foreign entanglements.
[3.3]
Consider first Hispanics, a group that has always leaned Democratic.
George W. Bush received 35 percent of the Latino vote in 2000
and 40 percent in 2004.
John McCain’s share dropped to 30 percent.
The GOP’s harsher tone on immigration surely played a role in this.
But it bears noting that in one recent survey of Hispanic voter attitudes,
the same percentage cited Iraq as an important issue as cited immigration.
[3.4]
Though Latinos constitute the largest new immigrant group
(and Mexican-Americans count as the only national group whose relative size
rivals that of German-Americans in the early twentieth century),
their foreign affairs activism remains modest.
Apart from highly-mobilized Cubans, it is not clear Latinos have either the resources or will to influence foreign policy in a singular way.
By virtue of history and geography,
they are as much the unwilling subjects of American expansion
as they are immigrants—
a circumstance captured by Jorge Dominguez’s pithy remark that
“the boundary migrated, not the Latinos.”
[3.5]
There is little evidence that Mexicans have much loyalty to the Mexican state,
which most, with good reason, view as corrupt.
In fact, before immigration became a harshly contested issue in the 1990s,
a majority of Mexican-Americans tended to think there was too much of it.
Moreover, it seems unlikely that this increasingly Democratic constituency
will become a pillar of support for globalism of any sort,
much less military interventionism.
Obviously one can’t draw broad conclusions from a single political figure.
But Colorado’s former senator Ken Salazar,
named by President Obama to head the Interior Department,
gave an address at last summer’s Democratic convention that,
for all its rooted-in-the-soil rhetoric,
might, with slight shifts of emphasis,
have been delivered by an editor of the paleoconservative journal Chronicles.
[3.6]
The Asian-American shift from aggressive red to pacifistic blue
has been far more dramatic.
This group,
once heavily weighted with refugees from Chinese and Vietnamese Communism,
voted Republican in 1992 and 1996.
But by 2004 the Asian vote began to trend heavily Democratic,
an estimated 60 percent for Kerry over Bush,
and 63 percent for Obama over McCain.
Like most voters, Asians ranked the economy first,
but according to one recent survey, the war in Iraq rated second.
Seventy percent wanted the U.S. to leave as soon as possible.
[3.7]
Beyond their turn to the Democrats,
there is little hard evidence upon which to gauge
the future influence of Asian immigrants on U.S. foreign policy.
While there are surely Chinese-Americans
who yearn for greater freedom in Beijing,
they evince little of the refugee-from-Communism zeal
displayed by East Europeans or Cubans of the Cold War period.
Generally,
Chinese-Americans seem proud of China’s progress and emergence as a great power.
It follows that, as their political participation grows,
it may become a constituency that encourages
American accommodation to a powerful China,
or at least one that does not weigh in on the side of confronting it.
[3.8]
The Iraq War is likely to be seen a great clarifier
in the partisan identification of the expanding Latino and Asian electorates.
In the Gender and Multicultural Leadership Project’s
2006–2007 survey of minority state and local elected officials,
only 24 percent of Latino respondents and 19 percent of Asians
believed the United States had made the correct decision to invade Iraq.
[3.9]
And what of America’s Arab and Muslim populations,
hailing from regions where the United States is presently engaged in two wars?
Their numbers tend to be smaller, and hard to tally precisely.
But according to Daniel Pipes,
the most prominent of those alarmed about
the prospect of “Islamism” gaining a foothold in America,
there were 3 million Muslims in the United States in 2002.
The U.S. census estimates
a current U.S. population of 1.25 million Arab-Americans,
the majority Christian.
(The Arab American Institute estimates that
over 3 million U.S. citizens have some Arab ancestry.)
But this population, comparably tiny, grows steadily through immigration.
According to statistics compiled by the Arab American Institute,
the Arab-American population doubled in size between 1980 and 2000,
with about 26,000 new Arab immigrants entering the United States every year.
[3.10]
Once a swing group,
which split evenly in the 2000 election between Bush and Gore,
Arab-Americans have essentially abandoned the GOP.
Republican identification had dropped to 20 percent according to one 2008 estimate. Not surprisingly,
the Israel-Palestine conflict is the main area of contention,
where Arab-American views part most dramatically
from those now predominant in Congress.
Past generations of Arab-Americans have assimilated seamlessly enough,
usually by declining to call attention to their background.
Those who rose into the public eye
typically adopted a low profile on anything related to the Middle East.
But that is changing.
One can see early harbingers:
Congressman Michael McMahon,
recently elected to represent Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn,
promised some of his Arab constituents that
they could chaperone him on a tour of the occupied West Bank.
Of course, members of Congress who have toured Israel with Israeli guides
number in the hundreds at least.
But this kind of politicized sightseeing may soon become a competitive enterprise.
[3.11]
Indeed, political competition over the Middle East
now riles most elite American colleges, where it did not twenty years ago:
almost every campus boasts an active Arab-American student organization,
often cooperating with left-liberal Jewish students—
and presenting a narrative of the Israel-Palestine issue far more critical
than what was recently a commonplace.
The parents of these students were immigrants,
unsteady in their English,
uncertain of their place in America.
Their children have no similar restraints.
[4.1]
It may be decades before we talk seriously about
a revived and very different kind of “China lobby” or a new “Palestine lobby.”
But the demographic landscape has changed already,
and the political coloration of the change does not seem in dispute.
Those sections of the country—
the South, lower Midwest, and the regions touching the Appalachian mountains—
that have received the fewest immigrants
from the waves of immigration of the past 130 years
not only count as the most Republican;
they are the regions least likely to send white antiwar politicians to Congress.
They provide a disproportionate share of the nation’s soldiers.
(If one were to subtract the very poor and very white state of Maine,
one would need to go through a list of twenty states
ranked in order of per capita Army recruitment
to reach a state that John Kerry carried in 2004.)
One political conclusion is obvious:
current rates of immigration will not only
diminish the “white” proportion of the American population;
they will also diminish the political weight of those regions
with the most hawkish and pro-military political cultures.
[4.2]
These observations about immigration and foreign policy
complicate present debates among Republicans and conservatives.
Consider first the more influential neoconservatives,
whose viewpoints were neatly summarized during the campaign by
Rudy Giuliani and GOP nominee John McCain.
Both boasted hawkish views on Iraq and other war-on-terror-related issues;
both sought out neoconservative foreign policy advisers.
[4.3]
Both men were entirely out of sync with the Republican base on immigration.
As mayor, Giuliani liked to tout New York as a “Capital of the World.”
During the presidential campaign
he was accused by rivals, with some justification,
of running New York as a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants.
Similarly, John McCain’s campaign was nearly derailed by
grassroots hostility to his proposal for
normalizing the status of illegal immigrants (derided as “amnesty”).
[4.4]
The Giuliani and McCain positions corresponded to
the neoconservative perspective on immigration.
True, the 9/11 attacks made neoconservatives, and everyone else,
more conscious of border security,
and nudged some neoconservatives in the direction of restrictionist positions.
But at bottom neoconservatism is a movement that originated among
urban Jewish intellectuals,
often the children or grandchildren of immigrants themselves,
and it retains a good deal of that sensibility.
Yet the demographic and political base for a neoconservative foreign policy
may be found, to an overwhelming extent,
in Protestant red state America, the areas least settled by new immigrants.
[4.5]
And what of the immigration restrictionists?
They have contradictions of their own to sort out.
They include Democratic environmentalists and liberals
worried about immigration’s impact on wages.
But most of the restrictionist momentum
comes from the traditionalist or paleoconservative camp.
Paleoconservatives tout their attachment to old communities,
to “the permanent things.”
They tend to be more opposed to change,
more skeptical about the universal appeal, or relevance,
of American ideals to the wider world.
In some notable cases,
they view themselves as the heirs of the Old Right isolationism
that opposed American entry into World Wars I and II.
[4.6]
Paleoconservatives compose too small a faction
to have much of a say in the Republican Party.
(Pat Buchanan, the most prominent paleo,
has been effectively banished from GOP policy debates since 1996.)
But there remains a broader category of Republicans,
including some prominent intellectuals, with considerable paleo tendencies,
sentiments shared by a substantial portion of the American public.
Consider two men with long and highly influential careers,
the late George F. Kennan and Samuel Huntington.
[4.7]
As a State Department official in the 1940s,
Kennan was the primary architect of the Cold War containment strategy.
But he spent much of his career arguing that
the United States had placed too much emphasis on
the military aspects of containment.
He was frustrated by what he perceived as
an uninformed and moralistic streak running through American foreign policy.
In particular,
he despaired over the power of ethnic lobbies to influence American policy.
These lobbies, he once wrote,
“seem more often than not to be on the militaristic or chauvinistic side.”
He urged the United States to exhibit
more humility and less hubris
in its approach to the international scene.
[4.8]
As much as Kennan the diplomat had immersed himself in foreign cultures,
he was an ardent immigration restrictionist.
In Around the Cragged Hill, published when he was nearly ninety,
Kennan lamented the cultural changes brought about by poor immigrants.
If they came to America in sufficient numbers, they would create
“conditions in this country no better than
those of the places the immigrants have left . . .
turning America into part of the Third World . . . [and]
thus depriving the planet of one of the few great regions” able to maintain
a “relatively high standard of civilization.”
Kennan also touted the virtues of small republics,
and proposed that
the United States might better manage its own civilizational problems
if it divided itself into smaller self-governing segments,
some of which would become culturally part of Latin America.
[4.9]
Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington
was the other leading WASP intellectual
to take on the immigration question.
Writing in Foreign Affairs in 1997, Huntington worried that
the end of the Cold War had left the country without a defining mission.
He cited John Updike:
“Without the cold war, what’s the point of being an American?”
During the mid-1990s, he noted grimly,
the void of national purpose was being filled by
the special pleading of ethnic subgroups,
with little trouble finding receptive ears in Congress.
In his final book, Who Are We? published in 2004,
Huntington probed deeper.
What would become of America’s national identity
in an age of mass and especially Hispanic immigration?
[4.10]
“National interests,” he wrote, “derive from national identity.
We need to know who we are before we can know what our interests are.”
Throughout much of the past century, that identity was clear enough.
America was a Western democracy, and both terms were significant.
But a changing country would assume new identities
and frame its vital interests differently.
If American identity were to be defined by
commitment to the universal principles of liberty and democracy, then
“promotion of those principles in other countries” would guide our foreign policy.
Yet if the country was a “collection” of various ethnic and cultural identities,
it would promote the interests of those entities,
via a “multicultural foreign policy.”
If we were to become more Hispanic,
we would reorient ourselves accordingly toward Latin America.
What we do abroad depends on who we are at home.
[4.11]
To Huntington,
America,
the historical nation that had existed
from the Jamestown and Plymouth Rock settlements
until well into the last century,
was Anglo-Protestant to the core,
as Protestant as Israel is Jewish or Pakistan is Muslim.
Huntington was referring to an Anglo-Protestantism of culture,
not race or religion—
but his ideal culture was definitely the product of the early settlers.
The English Puritan Revolution was
“the single most important formative event in American political history.”
Out of the culture of dissenting Protestantism
emerged a secular “American Creed” open to all.
The Creed placed emphasis
on individual conscience,
on work over idleness, and
on personal responsibility to overcome obstacles to achieve success.
It forged a populace
ready to engage in moral reform movements at home and abroad.
Americans became accustomed to
an image of their nation as one with a divine mission.
[4.12]
Previously,
the nation’s elite had been able to “stamp” Protestant values
on waves of immigrants.
But because of Mexico’s geographic proximity
and the sheer number of immigrants,
the old assimilation methods would no longer suffice.
The major political battles of the 1990s over bilingualism and multiculturalism foreshadowed a larger renegotiation concerning
whether the new immigrants would subscribe to the American Creed at all.
Huntington favored lower immigration rates and hoped for
a reinvigoration of America’s Protestant culture and
a renewed commitment to assimilation.
But he was not optimistic,
and other national possibilities presented themselves.
One was a bilingual, bicultural America, half Latin-Americanized;
another a racially intolerant, highly conflicted country;
still another was a multicultural country
subscribing loosely to a common American Creed,
but without the glue of a common culture to bind it.
Huntington considered the American Creed without its cultural underpinning
no more durable than
Marxist-Leninism eventually proved in Russia and Eastern Europe.
[4.13]
Protective of the uniqueness of America’s Anglo-Protestant culture,
Huntington was a nationalist who hoped to maintain
the American “difference” from the rest of the world.
But he was acutely aware that
one of the distinguishing aspects of Anglo-Protestantism
was its messianism,
the sense of America as a chosen nation—
and one not inclined to leave a corrupt world to its own devices.
Anglo-Protestantism had transformed the United States,
in Walter McDougall’s words, from “promised land to crusader state.”
[5.1]
Thus, while many have laid the blame for the war in Iraq
with the Bush administration or the neoconservatives,
that may cast the net too narrowly.
Andrew Bacevich is one author who describes a much longer fuse
to the impulse that led America to miscalculate
how receptive the world would be toward a military campaign to end tyranny.
In The New American Militarism,
Bacevich noted that evangelical Protestantism,
which had evolved from political quietism in the first half of the century,
to respectful deference to the Cold War establishment during the Billy Graham era,
had, by the 1980s, evolved into a passionate embrace of military culture.
The American officer corps made a transition from
being mostly Episcopalian to heavily evangelical.
And evangelicals embraced not just the soldiers and their values,
but militarism as a chosen foreign policy.
As Bacevich starkly put it:
“In the developed world’s most devoutly Christian country,
Christian witness against war and the danger of militarism
became less effective than in countries
thoroughly and probably irreversibly secularized.”
Conservative Christians have fostered among the faithful
“a predisposition to see U.S. military power as inherently good,
perhaps even a necessary adjunct
to the accomplishment of Christ’s saving mission.”
[5.2]
Bacevich’s analysis illuminated a principal weakness of Huntington’s prescription.
For if solidifying the American nation
required a re-invigorated Anglo-Protestant culture,
the initiative would have to come to a considerable degree
from Anglo-Protestants themselves.
Reading Huntington (and Kennan as well),
one cannot but sense that what they really seek is
a revival of something resembling
the American national elite of the 1940s and 1950s,
exemplified by the foreign policy “wise men” of the Truman [33] era
(of whom Kennan was one).
But that particular Protestant elite,
whose cousins held
the commanding positions of America’s industries and universities,
was more or less banished from the national stage in the 1960s.
[So various people say.
Are there books which describe why and how this “banishment” occurred?
Although perhaps a clue is given by
the response one WASP female made when her husband asked her
what he could to regain the love she once had for him.
She responded: “Be more like Woody Allen.”
That tells a lot about what this woman,
and no doubt many in her circle of friends, wanted.
And, of course, they maneuvered to
advance the careers of men who thought like they did,
and hinder the careers of men who thought otherwise.]
Not only is its return impossible; it barely exists.
What has replaced it as the dynamic core of American Protestantism is
the evangelical culture Bacevich describes, rooted in the South and West,
whose attitudes were epitomized by the Bush-Cheney administration.
[5.3]
If the emergence of an American elite
able to cement a strong national identity and coherent national interest
is unlikely,
what options remain for a country now irreversibly multicultural?
Huntington saw the choice as either imperialism or liberal cosmopolitanism,
both of which would erode what is unique about America.
Imperialism seems an unlikely choice since the Iraq War,
an experience few Americans in or out of the military
will want to repeat anytime soon.
[5.4]
What seems more likely is the entrenchment and expansion of
a worldly, cosmopolitan elite,
increasingly multicultural and transnational,
that bears little connection to
the WASP establishments of the twentieth century,
the cold warriors,
or even the Bush administration.
American foreign policy will necessarily become less ambitious,
more a product of horse-trading between ethnic groups.
Messianism, in either its Protestant or neoconservative variants,
will be part of America’s past, not its future.
Americans will not conceive of themselves as
orchestrators of a benevolent global hegemony, or as
agents of an indispensable nation.
Schlesinger, for one, exaggerated the extent of the fall
when he averred that
a foreign policy based on “careful balancing of ethnic constituencies”
was suitable only for secondary powers,
like the late Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
But he exaggerated only slightly.
[5.5]
As I have noted, George F. Kennan,
patron saint of both foreign policy realists and many paleoconservatives,
spent the long second half of his career
urging a greater sense of humility abroad.
The rethinking of global commitments,
the readiness to modify the go-go economy that seems to require them—
these have become a refrain of some of Kennan’s heirs.
So here is a second paradox,
which parallels the irony that
neoconservatives support an immigration policy
that undermines their own political base.
The realists and America-Firsters will find
their foreign policy aspirations at least partially satisfied
via the unlikely avenues of immigration and multiculturalism.
The paleoconservatives, losers in the immigration wars,
will end up winners of an important consolation prize:
the foreign policy of what remains of their cherished republic.
Scott McConnell is co-founder and editor-at-large
of The American Conservative.
claims Chancellor Angela Merkel
By Alan Hall
Daily Mail (UK), 2010-10-18
[It is most interesting how the New York Times buried this story.]
Video of the key part of her talk (English translation):
By JOHN F. BURNS
New York Times, 2011-02-06
LONDON -
[1]
Faced with growing alarm about Islamic militants who have made Britain one of Europe’s most active bases for terrorist plots, Prime Minister David Cameron has mounted an attack on the country’s decades-old policy of “multiculturalism,” saying it has encouraged “segregated communities” where Islamic extremism can thrive.
[2]
Speaking at a security conference in Munich on Saturday, Mr. Cameron condemned what he called the “hands-off tolerance” in Britain and other European nations that had encouraged Muslims and other immigrant groups “to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream.”
[3]
He said that the policy had allowed Islamic militants leeway to radicalize young Muslims, some of whom went on to “the next level” by becoming terrorists, and that Europe could not defeat terrorism “simply by the actions we take outside our borders,” with military actions like the war in Afghanistan.
[4]
“Europe needs to wake up to what is happening in our own countries,” he said. “We have to get to the root of the problem.”
[5]
In what aides described as one of the most important speeches in the nine months since he became prime minister, Mr. Cameron said the multiculturalism policy — one espoused by British governments since the 1960s, based on the principle of the right of all groups in Britain to live by their traditional values — had failed to promote a sense of common identity centered on values of human rights, democracy, social integration and equality before the law.
[6]
Similar warnings about multiculturalism have been sounded by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. But, if anything, Mr. Cameron went further. He called on European governments to practice “a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism,” and said Britain would no longer give official patronage to Muslim groups that had been “showered with public money despite doing little to combat terrorism.”
[7]
Perhaps most controversially, he called for an end to a double standard that he said had tolerated the propagation of radical views among nonwhite groups that would be suppressed if they involved radical groups among whites.
...
cbn.com, 2011-02-11
by Kevin MacDonald
The Occidental Observer, 2013-11-05
...
In Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, American military interventions were justified to the American people and to the world in moral terms — as promoting democracy and human rights. However, the results have done nothing to reduce the ethnic and religious divisions within these societies, and there is no end in sight for armed conflict and terrorism. After 10 years of occupation by American forces, we read about daily bombings in Iraq in which dozens of people die.
Nevertheless, the ideology that multiculturalism is a superior form of social organization is dominant among American elites and throughout the West with the result that these societies are actively seeking to have increasing ethnic diversity. Those of us who oppose this policy are labeled as “racists” and “haters,” but the belief that increasing diversity is linked to greater conflict is well established by scientific research.
...
It is one thing to encourage multiculturalism in a society with a large and stable ethnic majority. I am all for treating minorities equitably and without discrimination. There is no question that legal prohibitions and mass media messages can have the effect of blunting the most extreme forms of intergroup conflict and hostility resulting from social identity processes.
However, it is quite another thing to encourage multiculturalism as an ideology of mass immigration that will make the former majority into a minority.
...
The West Opts for the Multiculturalism of Displacement of Traditional People and Culture
Despite the long history of ethnic and religious conflict between groups,
the West has embarked on a path of
officially promoting a new type of multiculturalism
resulting from high levels of immigration of ethnic groups from around the world.
Population projections in many Western countries, including the United States,
show that as a direct result of these policies,
the traditional peoples of these areas will be minorities in societies dominated by their ancestors,
in the case of Europe, for thousands of years.
Such a situation is unprecedented in human history—
the voluntary ceding of ethnic and cultural dominance to other groups,
many with historical hatreds against them.
This revolution has been a top-down revolution:
the impetus for the shift toward displacement-level immigration and for multiculturalism
has come from hostile elites centered in the media, academia, and politics.
This has been true throughout the West.
For example, in America polls of European-derived peoples,
who formed approximately 90% of the population 50 years ago,
have consistently opposed non-White immigration.
The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965
which opened the door to non-European immigration,
was specifically advertised as having no effect
on the ethnic balance of the country.
However, immigration policy was formulated by political elites
and strongly favored by the media, non-White ethnic lobbies,
the academic world, and some business interests.
Individuals who oppose these policies are labeled “racists” and “extremists”
and they are depicted as psychiatrically impaired and morally depraved.
Those who oppose these policies are also in danger of
losing their jobs or even going to prison.
Throughout the West, there are strong sanctions against
people who violate the norms of “political correctness.”
People who publicly disagree with multiculturalism and displacement-level immigration
or criticize non-White ethnic groups
or call attention to the power of certain ethnic groups
have lost their jobs or had major setbacks in their careers.
In many Western countries but not the United States,
there are laws against publicly expressing such attitudes,
resulting in fines or prison sentences for those who violate these norms.
...
The Inculcation of Guilt among Whites
I have noted that multiculturalism and the ideology of massive non-White immigration
are well-entrenched in the media.
One aspect of this is that the media produce a drumbeat of messages
that encourage Whites to feel guilt about their past and for opposing immigration and multiculturalism.
The media is replete with depictions of Whites as inflicting harm on non-Whites historically and in the contemporary world.
[E.g., the media's efforts to portray Trayvon Martin as victim of George Zimmermann.]
The history of slavery and segregation of African Americans
is a particular focus of the media.
Another focus is the persecution of Jews during World War II.
Even though America did not perpetrate the Holocaust,
there is the implication that National Socialism was a product of Western civilization,
so that Western civilization itself has no moral legitimacy and therefore cannot be defended.
The result has been that White Americans have been made to feel guilt about their culture.
Any objection to non-White immigration and the moral superiority of multiculturalism
is then regarded as morally debased—
as supremely wicked.
As a result, opposition to these trends has been muted and almost non-existent
in the mainstream media and among mainstream politicians and academics.
Not only are anti-White messages prestigious,
they are also badges of moral rectitude.
Displacement-level non-White immigration has become a moral imperative.
To dissent from such policies is to place oneself
outside the moral universe of the contemporary West.
Conclusion
Western societies have embarked on an entirely novel program
of combating the interests and attitudes of the majorities of their native populations.
This has been accomplished by
constant propaganda inculcating guilt in those who diverge from the elite consensus
and by
penalties such as job loss and even prison for those who disagree publicly.
At the same time,
native White populations are coalescing in organizations that are implicitly White,
so that Western societies are becoming increasingly racialized.
My view is that in the long run these race-based coalitions are unstable
and that there will be high levels of conflict in these societies,
with unpredictable consequences.
The history of ethnic and racial conflict has often been bloody,
and the history of projects rationalized with a high level of moral idealism,
such as the present policies of immigration and multiculturalism,
have quite often led to disaster for peoples not having power.
This is surely the lesson of communism—
rationalized with high moral idealism,
but resulting in the murders of tens of millions of people.
Miscellaneous Articles
2007
2007-01-15-Sailer
Fragmented Futureby Steve Sailer
The American Conservative, 2007-01-15
Multiculturalism doesn’t make vibrant communities but defensive ones.
2009
2009-Spring-McConnell
Not So Huddled Masses: Multiculturalism and Foreign Policyby Scott McConnell
World Affairs Journal, Spring 2009
[1.1]
The modest contemporary literature on the connection between
America’s immigration and foreign policies
contains this assertion by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan,
from the introduction to their 1974 volume
Ethnicity: Theory and Experience:
“The immigration process
is the single most important determinant of American foreign policy . . .
This process regulates the ethnic composition of the American electorate.
Foreign policy responds to that ethnic composition.
It responds to other things as well,
but probably first of all to the primary fact of ethnicity.”
[1.2]
Yet,
the authors noted a nearly complete absence of discussion of the issue,
and they pursued it little themselves.
Rather, they tossed it in as a supplement to their general argument:
ethnicity was not going to wither away,
leaving only colorful residues for annoyance or celebration.
It would remain a primary form of social life in the United States.
[1.3]
Nonetheless,
ethnicity played little role in
the foreign policy battles of the 1960s and 1970s.
One could discuss the cultural divide between hippies and hardhats,
between war protesters and the “silent majority”
without reference to race, creed, or national origin.
Some scholars would note a dominant ethnic component in the New Left,
as well as in the less visible New Right,
but such considerations were hardly part of the national conversation.
[1.4]
They certainly had been in the past,
in the battles over American entry into World Wars I and II.
Glazer and Moynihan implied they would be in the future as well.
For the two were writing in the wake of the historic 1965 Immigration Act,
which had overturned the restrictionist regime of the 1920s.
That post–World War I legislation, which brought to a halt
the Great Wave of immigration that had begun forty years earlier,
was designed explicitly to freeze the American ethnic balance.
By the 1960s, in the warm glow of the civil rights revolution,
this was no longer plausible.
[1.5]
In any case,
the backers of the 1965 act did not imagine huge demographic changes:
there would be, they claimed,
some modest increase in the number of Greek and Italian immigrants
but not much else.
The sheer inaccuracy of this prediction was already apparent by the early 1970s.
The 1965 Act allowed entry of immigrants from any country,
so long as they possessed certain job skills
or family members living here
or had been granted refugee status themselves.
[1.6]
The family reunification provision
soon became the vital engine of immigrant selection.
By the 1980s,
it had greatly increased numbers of Asians and of Hispanics—
the latter mostly from Mexico.
The European population of the country was now in relative decline—
from 87 percent in 1970 to 66 percent in 2008.
If immigration continues at present rates
(and barring a long-term economic collapse, it is likely to),
by 2040, Hispanics will make up a quarter of the American population.
If that does not guarantee a somewhat different foreign policy,
there is also the prospect of a substantial expansion of
America’s once miniscule Muslim and Arab populations.
[2.1]
To those attuned to
the historic battles over twentieth-century American foreign policy,
ethnicity was an obvious subject.
It played a major role in the debate over American entry into World War I,
which was vigorously opposed by most
German-Americans,
anti-tsarist Scandinavians,
and many Irish-Americans.
Leading pro-war politicians railed against “hyphenated-Americans”
with a ferocity nearly unimaginable today.
And while opposition to America’s entry into the war cut across all regions and groups,
the non-interventionist position always maintained a strong core of support
in the upper Midwest,
where Americans of German descent dominated.
In the 1950s,
the widely read political analyst Samuel Lubell concluded that
isolationism was always more ethnic than geographical,
and owed its durability to
the exploitation of pro-German and anti-British ethnic prejudices
by the Republican Party.
Lubell claimed that isolationists,
far from being indifferent to Europe’s wars,
were in fact oversensitive to them.
[2.2]
This is surely too reductionist an argument.
But the volatile ethnic mix at home
did inhibit Woodrow Wilson from taking sides in Europe.
“We definitely have to be neutral
since otherwise our mixed populations would wage war on each other,”
Wilson was reported to say in 1914.
The “hyphenates,” bullied into silence by 1917,
had their day after the Armistice
when their opposition helped to lay low
Woodrow Wilson’s dreams for the League of Nations.
Walter Lippmann interpreted post-war isolation through this ethnic prism:
any policy that put America in alliance with some European countries against others risked exacerbating America’s own ethnic divisions.
Near the end of his career, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
described the arguments that took place
between the outbreak of war in 1939 and Pearl Harbor as
“the most savage national debate” of his lifetime,
one that “unleashed an inner fury that tore apart
families, friends, churches, universities and political parties.”
[2.3]
In any event,
America’s intra-European divisions began to melt away quickly
after Pearl Harbor,
as military service became the defining generational event
for American men born between 1914 and 1924.
The mixed army squad of WASP, Italian, German, Jew, and Irish
became a standard plot device for the popular World War II novel and film.
The Cold War generated a further compatibility
between ethnicity and foreign policy.
East European immigrants and refugees emerged
to speak for the silenced populations of a newly Stalinized Eastern Europe.
Suddenly, all the major European-American groups were in sync.
Italian-Americans mobilized for mass letter-writing campaigns
to their parents and grandparents
warning of the dangers of voting Communist.
Greek-Americans naturally supported the Marshall Plan.
[2.4]
Bipartisanship now meant that both parties had to woo ethnic Americans.
(And not always so tactfully: the 1948 GOP platform promised to work for
the restoration of Italy’s African colonies).
Eastern Europeans lobbied for the rollback of Soviet rule,
enshrining it as a GOP platform plank if not a practical commitment.
Americans of East European background remained staunchly anti-Communist
long after anti-Communism surrendered its luster in the aftermath of Vietnam,
allying with neoconservative Jews
and hamstringing Nixon and Kissinger’s détente policy.
As anti-Communism became an engine of Americanization,
the Cold War showcased the hyphenated American.
[2.5]
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
America has entered a new era of ethnicity and foreign policy,
whose contours are only just now emerging.
During the 1990s, when multiculturalism was in vogue,
leaders of old and new minority groups steered American foreign policy
toward the cause of their ancestral homelands.
African-American and Hispanic leaders
touted the success of American Jews in lobbying for Israel
as an example to be emulated.
At one major Latino conference,
participants nominated themselves the vanguard of
a “bridge community” between the United States and Latin America.
[2.6]
Ethnic lobbies, the old as much as the new,
quickly filled the empty space left behind by the Cold War.
Traditional realists
like former defense secretary James Schlesinger
and Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington bemoaned
the diminished sense of national cohesion and purpose.
Ethnic lobbies, they feared,
would inhibit the United States from exercising global leadership.
Indeed, if one were to examine
some of the major policy milestones of the Clinton era—
active participation in the Northern Ireland peace process,
the military occupation of Haiti,
expanded trade embargoes on Cuba and Iran,
the revelation of the Swiss banking scandals—
it could be argued that ethnic lobbies were,
as much as any coherent grand strategy,
the era’s prime movers.
[3.1]
After a brief spasm of patriotic and military display
following the attacks of 9/11,
we have picked up where we left off the day before.
Which is to say that the preliminary indications
point toward a future that will bear some semblance
to the politics of the 1990s and the World War I era,
when ethnic constituencies
operated as a brake on executive power and military intervention.
There is no evidence that
the rallying cries put forth by America’s neoconservatives and liberal hawks—
democratization of tyrannies,
the global war on terror,
the fight against radical Islam—
have gained significant traction
among first- and second-generation immigrant communities.
Certainly they do not resonate with anything like
the intensity that anti-Communism did after World War II.
On the basis of what is visible thus far,
today’s and tomorrow’s Mexican-, Asian-, and Arab-Americans
will more resemble the Swedes, Germans, and Irish of a century ago
than the Poles, Balts, and Cubans of the Cold War era.
[3.2]
The plainest indicator is voting behavior.
The obvious point to make is that
most of the new immigrant groups tend to vote Democratic—
a trend that has intensified since the Republican Party twinned itself with
the war in Iraq and, more generally, with the “war on terror,”
even as the Democratic Party has reverted to
a traditional skepticism regarding foreign entanglements.
[3.3]
Consider first Hispanics, a group that has always leaned Democratic.
George W. Bush received 35 percent of the Latino vote in 2000
and 40 percent in 2004.
John McCain’s share dropped to 30 percent.
The GOP’s harsher tone on immigration surely played a role in this.
But it bears noting that in one recent survey of Hispanic voter attitudes,
the same percentage cited Iraq as an important issue as cited immigration.
[3.4]
Though Latinos constitute the largest new immigrant group
(and Mexican-Americans count as the only national group whose relative size
rivals that of German-Americans in the early twentieth century),
their foreign affairs activism remains modest.
Apart from highly-mobilized Cubans, it is not clear Latinos have either the resources or will to influence foreign policy in a singular way.
By virtue of history and geography,
they are as much the unwilling subjects of American expansion
as they are immigrants—
a circumstance captured by Jorge Dominguez’s pithy remark that
“the boundary migrated, not the Latinos.”
[3.5]
There is little evidence that Mexicans have much loyalty to the Mexican state,
which most, with good reason, view as corrupt.
In fact, before immigration became a harshly contested issue in the 1990s,
a majority of Mexican-Americans tended to think there was too much of it.
Moreover, it seems unlikely that this increasingly Democratic constituency
will become a pillar of support for globalism of any sort,
much less military interventionism.
Obviously one can’t draw broad conclusions from a single political figure.
But Colorado’s former senator Ken Salazar,
named by President Obama to head the Interior Department,
gave an address at last summer’s Democratic convention that,
for all its rooted-in-the-soil rhetoric,
might, with slight shifts of emphasis,
have been delivered by an editor of the paleoconservative journal Chronicles.
[3.6]
The Asian-American shift from aggressive red to pacifistic blue
has been far more dramatic.
This group,
once heavily weighted with refugees from Chinese and Vietnamese Communism,
voted Republican in 1992 and 1996.
But by 2004 the Asian vote began to trend heavily Democratic,
an estimated 60 percent for Kerry over Bush,
and 63 percent for Obama over McCain.
Like most voters, Asians ranked the economy first,
but according to one recent survey, the war in Iraq rated second.
Seventy percent wanted the U.S. to leave as soon as possible.
[3.7]
Beyond their turn to the Democrats,
there is little hard evidence upon which to gauge
the future influence of Asian immigrants on U.S. foreign policy.
While there are surely Chinese-Americans
who yearn for greater freedom in Beijing,
they evince little of the refugee-from-Communism zeal
displayed by East Europeans or Cubans of the Cold War period.
Generally,
Chinese-Americans seem proud of China’s progress and emergence as a great power.
It follows that, as their political participation grows,
it may become a constituency that encourages
American accommodation to a powerful China,
or at least one that does not weigh in on the side of confronting it.
[3.8]
The Iraq War is likely to be seen a great clarifier
in the partisan identification of the expanding Latino and Asian electorates.
In the Gender and Multicultural Leadership Project’s
2006–2007 survey of minority state and local elected officials,
only 24 percent of Latino respondents and 19 percent of Asians
believed the United States had made the correct decision to invade Iraq.
[3.9]
And what of America’s Arab and Muslim populations,
hailing from regions where the United States is presently engaged in two wars?
Their numbers tend to be smaller, and hard to tally precisely.
But according to Daniel Pipes,
the most prominent of those alarmed about
the prospect of “Islamism” gaining a foothold in America,
there were 3 million Muslims in the United States in 2002.
The U.S. census estimates
a current U.S. population of 1.25 million Arab-Americans,
the majority Christian.
(The Arab American Institute estimates that
over 3 million U.S. citizens have some Arab ancestry.)
But this population, comparably tiny, grows steadily through immigration.
According to statistics compiled by the Arab American Institute,
the Arab-American population doubled in size between 1980 and 2000,
with about 26,000 new Arab immigrants entering the United States every year.
[3.10]
Once a swing group,
which split evenly in the 2000 election between Bush and Gore,
Arab-Americans have essentially abandoned the GOP.
Republican identification had dropped to 20 percent according to one 2008 estimate. Not surprisingly,
the Israel-Palestine conflict is the main area of contention,
where Arab-American views part most dramatically
from those now predominant in Congress.
Past generations of Arab-Americans have assimilated seamlessly enough,
usually by declining to call attention to their background.
Those who rose into the public eye
typically adopted a low profile on anything related to the Middle East.
But that is changing.
One can see early harbingers:
Congressman Michael McMahon,
recently elected to represent Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn,
promised some of his Arab constituents that
they could chaperone him on a tour of the occupied West Bank.
Of course, members of Congress who have toured Israel with Israeli guides
number in the hundreds at least.
But this kind of politicized sightseeing may soon become a competitive enterprise.
[3.11]
Indeed, political competition over the Middle East
now riles most elite American colleges, where it did not twenty years ago:
almost every campus boasts an active Arab-American student organization,
often cooperating with left-liberal Jewish students—
and presenting a narrative of the Israel-Palestine issue far more critical
than what was recently a commonplace.
The parents of these students were immigrants,
unsteady in their English,
uncertain of their place in America.
Their children have no similar restraints.
[4.1]
It may be decades before we talk seriously about
a revived and very different kind of “China lobby” or a new “Palestine lobby.”
But the demographic landscape has changed already,
and the political coloration of the change does not seem in dispute.
Those sections of the country—
the South, lower Midwest, and the regions touching the Appalachian mountains—
that have received the fewest immigrants
from the waves of immigration of the past 130 years
not only count as the most Republican;
they are the regions least likely to send white antiwar politicians to Congress.
They provide a disproportionate share of the nation’s soldiers.
(If one were to subtract the very poor and very white state of Maine,
one would need to go through a list of twenty states
ranked in order of per capita Army recruitment
to reach a state that John Kerry carried in 2004.)
One political conclusion is obvious:
current rates of immigration will not only
diminish the “white” proportion of the American population;
they will also diminish the political weight of those regions
with the most hawkish and pro-military political cultures.
[4.2]
These observations about immigration and foreign policy
complicate present debates among Republicans and conservatives.
Consider first the more influential neoconservatives,
whose viewpoints were neatly summarized during the campaign by
Rudy Giuliani and GOP nominee John McCain.
Both boasted hawkish views on Iraq and other war-on-terror-related issues;
both sought out neoconservative foreign policy advisers.
[4.3]
Both men were entirely out of sync with the Republican base on immigration.
As mayor, Giuliani liked to tout New York as a “Capital of the World.”
During the presidential campaign
he was accused by rivals, with some justification,
of running New York as a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants.
Similarly, John McCain’s campaign was nearly derailed by
grassroots hostility to his proposal for
normalizing the status of illegal immigrants (derided as “amnesty”).
[4.4]
The Giuliani and McCain positions corresponded to
the neoconservative perspective on immigration.
True, the 9/11 attacks made neoconservatives, and everyone else,
more conscious of border security,
and nudged some neoconservatives in the direction of restrictionist positions.
But at bottom neoconservatism is a movement that originated among
urban Jewish intellectuals,
often the children or grandchildren of immigrants themselves,
and it retains a good deal of that sensibility.
Yet the demographic and political base for a neoconservative foreign policy
may be found, to an overwhelming extent,
in Protestant red state America, the areas least settled by new immigrants.
[4.5]
And what of the immigration restrictionists?
They have contradictions of their own to sort out.
They include Democratic environmentalists and liberals
worried about immigration’s impact on wages.
But most of the restrictionist momentum
comes from the traditionalist or paleoconservative camp.
Paleoconservatives tout their attachment to old communities,
to “the permanent things.”
They tend to be more opposed to change,
more skeptical about the universal appeal, or relevance,
of American ideals to the wider world.
In some notable cases,
they view themselves as the heirs of the Old Right isolationism
that opposed American entry into World Wars I and II.
[4.6]
Paleoconservatives compose too small a faction
to have much of a say in the Republican Party.
(Pat Buchanan, the most prominent paleo,
has been effectively banished from GOP policy debates since 1996.)
But there remains a broader category of Republicans,
including some prominent intellectuals, with considerable paleo tendencies,
sentiments shared by a substantial portion of the American public.
Consider two men with long and highly influential careers,
the late George F. Kennan and Samuel Huntington.
[4.7]
As a State Department official in the 1940s,
Kennan was the primary architect of the Cold War containment strategy.
But he spent much of his career arguing that
the United States had placed too much emphasis on
the military aspects of containment.
He was frustrated by what he perceived as
an uninformed and moralistic streak running through American foreign policy.
In particular,
he despaired over the power of ethnic lobbies to influence American policy.
These lobbies, he once wrote,
“seem more often than not to be on the militaristic or chauvinistic side.”
He urged the United States to exhibit
more humility and less hubris
in its approach to the international scene.
[4.8]
As much as Kennan the diplomat had immersed himself in foreign cultures,
he was an ardent immigration restrictionist.
In Around the Cragged Hill, published when he was nearly ninety,
Kennan lamented the cultural changes brought about by poor immigrants.
If they came to America in sufficient numbers, they would create
“conditions in this country no better than
those of the places the immigrants have left . . .
turning America into part of the Third World . . . [and]
thus depriving the planet of one of the few great regions” able to maintain
a “relatively high standard of civilization.”
Kennan also touted the virtues of small republics,
and proposed that
the United States might better manage its own civilizational problems
if it divided itself into smaller self-governing segments,
some of which would become culturally part of Latin America.
[4.9]
Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington
was the other leading WASP intellectual
to take on the immigration question.
Writing in Foreign Affairs in 1997, Huntington worried that
the end of the Cold War had left the country without a defining mission.
He cited John Updike:
“Without the cold war, what’s the point of being an American?”
During the mid-1990s, he noted grimly,
the void of national purpose was being filled by
the special pleading of ethnic subgroups,
with little trouble finding receptive ears in Congress.
In his final book, Who Are We? published in 2004,
Huntington probed deeper.
What would become of America’s national identity
in an age of mass and especially Hispanic immigration?
[4.10]
“National interests,” he wrote, “derive from national identity.
We need to know who we are before we can know what our interests are.”
Throughout much of the past century, that identity was clear enough.
America was a Western democracy, and both terms were significant.
But a changing country would assume new identities
and frame its vital interests differently.
If American identity were to be defined by
commitment to the universal principles of liberty and democracy, then
“promotion of those principles in other countries” would guide our foreign policy.
Yet if the country was a “collection” of various ethnic and cultural identities,
it would promote the interests of those entities,
via a “multicultural foreign policy.”
If we were to become more Hispanic,
we would reorient ourselves accordingly toward Latin America.
What we do abroad depends on who we are at home.
[4.11]
To Huntington,
America,
the historical nation that had existed
from the Jamestown and Plymouth Rock settlements
until well into the last century,
was Anglo-Protestant to the core,
as Protestant as Israel is Jewish or Pakistan is Muslim.
Huntington was referring to an Anglo-Protestantism of culture,
not race or religion—
but his ideal culture was definitely the product of the early settlers.
The English Puritan Revolution was
“the single most important formative event in American political history.”
Out of the culture of dissenting Protestantism
emerged a secular “American Creed” open to all.
The Creed placed emphasis
on individual conscience,
on work over idleness, and
on personal responsibility to overcome obstacles to achieve success.
It forged a populace
ready to engage in moral reform movements at home and abroad.
Americans became accustomed to
an image of their nation as one with a divine mission.
[4.12]
Previously,
the nation’s elite had been able to “stamp” Protestant values
on waves of immigrants.
But because of Mexico’s geographic proximity
and the sheer number of immigrants,
the old assimilation methods would no longer suffice.
The major political battles of the 1990s over bilingualism and multiculturalism foreshadowed a larger renegotiation concerning
whether the new immigrants would subscribe to the American Creed at all.
Huntington favored lower immigration rates and hoped for
a reinvigoration of America’s Protestant culture and
a renewed commitment to assimilation.
But he was not optimistic,
and other national possibilities presented themselves.
One was a bilingual, bicultural America, half Latin-Americanized;
another a racially intolerant, highly conflicted country;
still another was a multicultural country
subscribing loosely to a common American Creed,
but without the glue of a common culture to bind it.
Huntington considered the American Creed without its cultural underpinning
no more durable than
Marxist-Leninism eventually proved in Russia and Eastern Europe.
[4.13]
Protective of the uniqueness of America’s Anglo-Protestant culture,
Huntington was a nationalist who hoped to maintain
the American “difference” from the rest of the world.
But he was acutely aware that
one of the distinguishing aspects of Anglo-Protestantism
was its messianism,
the sense of America as a chosen nation—
and one not inclined to leave a corrupt world to its own devices.
Anglo-Protestantism had transformed the United States,
in Walter McDougall’s words, from “promised land to crusader state.”
[5.1]
Thus, while many have laid the blame for the war in Iraq
with the Bush administration or the neoconservatives,
that may cast the net too narrowly.
Andrew Bacevich is one author who describes a much longer fuse
to the impulse that led America to miscalculate
how receptive the world would be toward a military campaign to end tyranny.
In The New American Militarism,
Bacevich noted that evangelical Protestantism,
which had evolved from political quietism in the first half of the century,
to respectful deference to the Cold War establishment during the Billy Graham era,
had, by the 1980s, evolved into a passionate embrace of military culture.
The American officer corps made a transition from
being mostly Episcopalian to heavily evangelical.
And evangelicals embraced not just the soldiers and their values,
but militarism as a chosen foreign policy.
As Bacevich starkly put it:
“In the developed world’s most devoutly Christian country,
Christian witness against war and the danger of militarism
became less effective than in countries
thoroughly and probably irreversibly secularized.”
Conservative Christians have fostered among the faithful
“a predisposition to see U.S. military power as inherently good,
perhaps even a necessary adjunct
to the accomplishment of Christ’s saving mission.”
[5.2]
Bacevich’s analysis illuminated a principal weakness of Huntington’s prescription.
For if solidifying the American nation
required a re-invigorated Anglo-Protestant culture,
the initiative would have to come to a considerable degree
from Anglo-Protestants themselves.
Reading Huntington (and Kennan as well),
one cannot but sense that what they really seek is
a revival of something resembling
the American national elite of the 1940s and 1950s,
exemplified by the foreign policy “wise men” of the Truman [33] era
(of whom Kennan was one).
But that particular Protestant elite,
whose cousins held
the commanding positions of America’s industries and universities,
was more or less banished from the national stage in the 1960s.
[So various people say.
Are there books which describe why and how this “banishment” occurred?
Although perhaps a clue is given by
the response one WASP female made when her husband asked her
what he could to regain the love she once had for him.
She responded: “Be more like Woody Allen.”
That tells a lot about what this woman,
and no doubt many in her circle of friends, wanted.
And, of course, they maneuvered to
advance the careers of men who thought like they did,
and hinder the careers of men who thought otherwise.]
Not only is its return impossible; it barely exists.
What has replaced it as the dynamic core of American Protestantism is
the evangelical culture Bacevich describes, rooted in the South and West,
whose attitudes were epitomized by the Bush-Cheney administration.
[5.3]
If the emergence of an American elite
able to cement a strong national identity and coherent national interest
is unlikely,
what options remain for a country now irreversibly multicultural?
Huntington saw the choice as either imperialism or liberal cosmopolitanism,
both of which would erode what is unique about America.
Imperialism seems an unlikely choice since the Iraq War,
an experience few Americans in or out of the military
will want to repeat anytime soon.
[5.4]
What seems more likely is the entrenchment and expansion of
a worldly, cosmopolitan elite,
increasingly multicultural and transnational,
that bears little connection to
the WASP establishments of the twentieth century,
the cold warriors,
or even the Bush administration.
American foreign policy will necessarily become less ambitious,
more a product of horse-trading between ethnic groups.
Messianism, in either its Protestant or neoconservative variants,
will be part of America’s past, not its future.
Americans will not conceive of themselves as
orchestrators of a benevolent global hegemony, or as
agents of an indispensable nation.
Schlesinger, for one, exaggerated the extent of the fall
when he averred that
a foreign policy based on “careful balancing of ethnic constituencies”
was suitable only for secondary powers,
like the late Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
But he exaggerated only slightly.
[5.5]
As I have noted, George F. Kennan,
patron saint of both foreign policy realists and many paleoconservatives,
spent the long second half of his career
urging a greater sense of humility abroad.
The rethinking of global commitments,
the readiness to modify the go-go economy that seems to require them—
these have become a refrain of some of Kennan’s heirs.
So here is a second paradox,
which parallels the irony that
neoconservatives support an immigration policy
that undermines their own political base.
The realists and America-Firsters will find
their foreign policy aspirations at least partially satisfied
via the unlikely avenues of immigration and multiculturalism.
The paleoconservatives, losers in the immigration wars,
will end up winners of an important consolation prize:
the foreign policy of what remains of their cherished republic.
Scott McConnell is co-founder and editor-at-large
of The American Conservative.
2010
2010-10-18-Daily-Mail-Merkel-declares-multiculturalism-utter-failure
Multiculturalism in Germany has 'utterly failed',claims Chancellor Angela Merkel
By Alan Hall
Daily Mail (UK), 2010-10-18
[It is most interesting how the New York Times buried this story.]
Video of the key part of her talk (English translation):
2011
2011-02-06-NYT-Cameron-criticizes-multiculturalism-in-Britain
Cameron Criticizes ‘Multiculturalism’ in BritainBy JOHN F. BURNS
New York Times, 2011-02-06
LONDON -
[1]
Faced with growing alarm about Islamic militants who have made Britain one of Europe’s most active bases for terrorist plots, Prime Minister David Cameron has mounted an attack on the country’s decades-old policy of “multiculturalism,” saying it has encouraged “segregated communities” where Islamic extremism can thrive.
[2]
Speaking at a security conference in Munich on Saturday, Mr. Cameron condemned what he called the “hands-off tolerance” in Britain and other European nations that had encouraged Muslims and other immigrant groups “to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream.”
[3]
He said that the policy had allowed Islamic militants leeway to radicalize young Muslims, some of whom went on to “the next level” by becoming terrorists, and that Europe could not defeat terrorism “simply by the actions we take outside our borders,” with military actions like the war in Afghanistan.
[4]
“Europe needs to wake up to what is happening in our own countries,” he said. “We have to get to the root of the problem.”
[5]
In what aides described as one of the most important speeches in the nine months since he became prime minister, Mr. Cameron said the multiculturalism policy — one espoused by British governments since the 1960s, based on the principle of the right of all groups in Britain to live by their traditional values — had failed to promote a sense of common identity centered on values of human rights, democracy, social integration and equality before the law.
[6]
Similar warnings about multiculturalism have been sounded by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. But, if anything, Mr. Cameron went further. He called on European governments to practice “a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism,” and said Britain would no longer give official patronage to Muslim groups that had been “showered with public money despite doing little to combat terrorism.”
[7]
Perhaps most controversially, he called for an end to a double standard that he said had tolerated the propagation of radical views among nonwhite groups that would be suppressed if they involved radical groups among whites.
...
2011-02-11-CBN-Sarkozy-multiculturalism-has-failed
France's Sarkozy: Multiculturalism Has Failedcbn.com, 2011-02-11
2013
2013-11-05-MacDonald-multiculturalism-and-the-racialization-of-politics-in-the-united-states
Multiculturalism and the Racialization of Politics in the United Statesby Kevin MacDonald
The Occidental Observer, 2013-11-05
...
In Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, American military interventions were justified to the American people and to the world in moral terms — as promoting democracy and human rights. However, the results have done nothing to reduce the ethnic and religious divisions within these societies, and there is no end in sight for armed conflict and terrorism. After 10 years of occupation by American forces, we read about daily bombings in Iraq in which dozens of people die.
Nevertheless, the ideology that multiculturalism is a superior form of social organization is dominant among American elites and throughout the West with the result that these societies are actively seeking to have increasing ethnic diversity. Those of us who oppose this policy are labeled as “racists” and “haters,” but the belief that increasing diversity is linked to greater conflict is well established by scientific research.
...
It is one thing to encourage multiculturalism in a society with a large and stable ethnic majority. I am all for treating minorities equitably and without discrimination. There is no question that legal prohibitions and mass media messages can have the effect of blunting the most extreme forms of intergroup conflict and hostility resulting from social identity processes.
However, it is quite another thing to encourage multiculturalism as an ideology of mass immigration that will make the former majority into a minority.
...
The West Opts for the Multiculturalism of Displacement of Traditional People and Culture
Despite the long history of ethnic and religious conflict between groups,
the West has embarked on a path of
officially promoting a new type of multiculturalism
resulting from high levels of immigration of ethnic groups from around the world.
Population projections in many Western countries, including the United States,
show that as a direct result of these policies,
the traditional peoples of these areas will be minorities in societies dominated by their ancestors,
in the case of Europe, for thousands of years.
Such a situation is unprecedented in human history—
the voluntary ceding of ethnic and cultural dominance to other groups,
many with historical hatreds against them.
This revolution has been a top-down revolution:
the impetus for the shift toward displacement-level immigration and for multiculturalism
has come from hostile elites centered in the media, academia, and politics.
This has been true throughout the West.
For example, in America polls of European-derived peoples,
who formed approximately 90% of the population 50 years ago,
have consistently opposed non-White immigration.
The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965
which opened the door to non-European immigration,
was specifically advertised as having no effect
on the ethnic balance of the country.
However, immigration policy was formulated by political elites
and strongly favored by the media, non-White ethnic lobbies,
the academic world, and some business interests.
Individuals who oppose these policies are labeled “racists” and “extremists”
and they are depicted as psychiatrically impaired and morally depraved.
Those who oppose these policies are also in danger of
losing their jobs or even going to prison.
Throughout the West, there are strong sanctions against
people who violate the norms of “political correctness.”
People who publicly disagree with multiculturalism and displacement-level immigration
or criticize non-White ethnic groups
or call attention to the power of certain ethnic groups
have lost their jobs or had major setbacks in their careers.
In many Western countries but not the United States,
there are laws against publicly expressing such attitudes,
resulting in fines or prison sentences for those who violate these norms.
...
The Inculcation of Guilt among Whites
I have noted that multiculturalism and the ideology of massive non-White immigration
are well-entrenched in the media.
One aspect of this is that the media produce a drumbeat of messages
that encourage Whites to feel guilt about their past and for opposing immigration and multiculturalism.
The media is replete with depictions of Whites as inflicting harm on non-Whites historically and in the contemporary world.
[E.g., the media's efforts to portray Trayvon Martin as victim of George Zimmermann.]
The history of slavery and segregation of African Americans
is a particular focus of the media.
Another focus is the persecution of Jews during World War II.
Even though America did not perpetrate the Holocaust,
there is the implication that National Socialism was a product of Western civilization,
so that Western civilization itself has no moral legitimacy and therefore cannot be defended.
The result has been that White Americans have been made to feel guilt about their culture.
Any objection to non-White immigration and the moral superiority of multiculturalism
is then regarded as morally debased—
as supremely wicked.
As a result, opposition to these trends has been muted and almost non-existent
in the mainstream media and among mainstream politicians and academics.
Not only are anti-White messages prestigious,
they are also badges of moral rectitude.
Displacement-level non-White immigration has become a moral imperative.
To dissent from such policies is to place oneself
outside the moral universe of the contemporary West.
Conclusion
Western societies have embarked on an entirely novel program
of combating the interests and attitudes of the majorities of their native populations.
This has been accomplished by
constant propaganda inculcating guilt in those who diverge from the elite consensus
and by
penalties such as job loss and even prison for those who disagree publicly.
At the same time,
native White populations are coalescing in organizations that are implicitly White,
so that Western societies are becoming increasingly racialized.
My view is that in the long run these race-based coalitions are unstable
and that there will be high levels of conflict in these societies,
with unpredictable consequences.
The history of ethnic and racial conflict has often been bloody,
and the history of projects rationalized with a high level of moral idealism,
such as the present policies of immigration and multiculturalism,
have quite often led to disaster for peoples not having power.
This is surely the lesson of communism—
rationalized with high moral idealism,
but resulting in the murders of tens of millions of people.
Labels: multiculturalism
posted by KHarbaugh at 12:00
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