In today’s editorial concerning David Cameron’s important speech on multiculturalism, the editors quote the lament of journalist Mihir Bose that “the tragedy with modern Britain is that it seems not to care any longer for the qualities that make it so special and that drew me and many others to this country.” Bose goes on to say that “unless Britain rediscovers its pride in its values this wretched multiculturalism will never die.”
Although the United States hasn’t traveled as far down the road of multiculturalism as Britain, Bose’s observation is applicable to a number of precincts in America — especially among the elite classes who see little special about America: Senators take to the floor of the Senate to compare American soldiers to Nazis; a president bows to despots, apologizes for America, and remains agnostic about its exceptionalism; schoolbooks are scrubbed of the extraordinary sacrifices, accomplishments, heroism, and generosity of Americans, concentrating instead on the myriad failures and depredations — real and imagined — of this purportedly rapacious republic; Hollywood broadcasts to the world a picture of degenerate America and Americans, reinforcing the vilest propaganda and conspiracy theories of our enemies; disparate schools and town councils order the removal of the American flag, lest it offend those convinced it represents little more than racist imperialism; our elite universities bar ROTC and military recruiters from campus, apparently oblivious to (or contemptuous of) the fact that the freedom to act childishly was bought at a steep price by those evil soldiers; politicians ignore the integrity of our borders as if American security and sovereignty are less important than an approving nod from the editorial board of the New York Times; elected officials in the enlightened regions of San Francisco refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and on and on.
With such a view of America, all cultures must be equal.
The aggressive multiculturalism we see in America today — and its enabler, political correctness — will soon be as dangerous to this nation as it is currently to Britain. It causes us to be blind to the evidence leading to a Ft. Hood, it atomizes the strengths of American culture, confuses its purpose, and retards its resolve.
And it promotes division rather than encouraging unity. When my parents came here decades ago, they had absolutely no doubt they were coming to the greatest nation on earth. They were coming for freedom, opportunity, and to immerse themselves in the uniqueness of American culture. Sure, they retained a pride and love for the best things about the old country (admittedly difficult in regard to a totalitarian regime), but they were determined to be in all things American — and they had little doubt what that meant because all of the institutions that mattered conveyed what it meant without apology. That didn’t mean that warts — and there were plenty– were covered up, but they were placed in context and with an expectation — a demand – that they soon would be remedied.
Multiculturalism discourages legitimate cultural confidence, the ramifications of which are on display in much of Europe. Our own elites, particularly in the political class, would do well to take notice. Many of their constituents have.
Well spoken. Would that it be equally well spoken by the challenger in 2012.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIn a related topic, aol today recommends that we dump the national anthem. Too much war talk.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOne minor quibble to an excellent post:
"With such a view of America, all cultures must be equal."
To the dedicated multi-culturalist all cultures must be equal except America's -- which is the worst.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOur kids *are* taught that America is unique, uniquely evil, from Columbus through to the present day. Anti-Americanism is the one thread which holds the left together.
What we're missing is vigorous push-back. We defend specifics, but never call anti-Americanism anti-Americanism.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe conservative comedian Evan Sayet has two excellent, quite serious speeches easily found online, and they explain the pathology of multiculturalism.
Here Peter writes, "all cultures must be equal," and that captures the driving idea but not the consequences.
As Sayet explains, the Left insists that all cultures are equal, but they cannot account for the material success of our culture. They cannot even consider the possibility that, while no culture is perfect, some cultures are better than others in terms of promoting freedom and virtue: that cannot possibly account for greater peace and wealth.
No, the Leftists decide that the ONLY possible reason for America's success is that we cheated -- that we rob and exploit others, and so our unmatched prosperity is proof positive that we are (as Griswel here says) unique in being uniquely evil.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"...especially among the elite classes who see little special about America: Senators take to the floor of the Senate to compare American soldiers to Nazis..."
Why can't our brilliant multiculturalist elites compare the Muslim Brotherhood to the Nazis, who were their allies and mentors in the 1930's and 1940's? Instead, they make excuses and provide cover for the Muslim Brotherhood to threaten our security interests.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMy mother's family history includes her parents meeting at a work camp in Austria after being taken from Poland by the Nazis. My mother was born in that work camp. After the war they emigrated to England because my grandfather refused to return to Poland, seeing the problems there with communism.
My grandparents learned to speak broken English and made sure that my mother and my uncle went to school and learned English. Somehow they managed to retain their Polish heritage.
My mother later came to America in the late 1960s. She is always annoyed, I think as many legal immigrants are, by those that refuse to learn English and refuse to assimilate, claiming some undefined fear that they will lose their heritage. It is simply not true. My mother still speaks Polish and still shares with me and her granddaughters her Polish heritage.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhen will the American politicians (including -- or especially -- the likes of Jeb Bush) drop the diversity mumbo-jumbo and recognize that our own little multiculti foray in "open borders for Mexicans / closed borders for educated immigrants from around the world" is just going to result in the same sort of cleavage of citizens from their government that multiculturalism has caused in the EU and Canada?
The first place to start -- especially for Jeb -- would be an immediate end to pandering to a bizarrely overhyped Hispanic vote, enforcement of existing law, and mandatory E-Verify.
Beyond that, we can move toward the commonsense policy of prioritizing immigrants who are educated, speak English, are upwardly mobile, create jobs, and who in turn have kids who'll be raising the bar in terms of education and income expectations.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIn my locale (New Paltz, NY) the school district's "vision statement" includes the wish that students learn to live in a "social democracy" and how to be "citizens of the world." The school superintendant once attended a workshop called "Undoing Racism" and returned to hail Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," or, as I call it, "America With All the Good Parts Left Out."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt seems to me that in the 70s and 80s conservatives were in favor of multiculturalism. Ethnic identity was deemed a contributor to strong neighborhoods and communities, as opposed the old notion of a 'melting pot.' So I don't think it's right to pose multiculturalism as the natural antithesis to exceptionalism.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe left really does blame America first.
I don't understand how the left can live here and benefit so abundantly from our open society, and at the same time prefer and pay tribute to totalitarian regimes. They pander to the Islamists, which is a singularly suicidal attitude. Do they not understand that THEY embody what Islamists hate about our culture? That theirs will be the first heads on the chopping block if the Islamists take over?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAs an immigrant to US from, Europe i love many things about the US (of course). But i have never understood the concept of exceptionalism as anything more that conservatives engaging in some warm fluffy wishful thinking.
Every definition i have seem could be applied to most Western liberal democracies and is in fact not unique to the US e.g. 'freedom', 'opportunity', a haven for immigrants (Australia anyone?).
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe problem with exceptionalism right now is that we are bankrupt,and bankruptcy has been the process throughout history by which great nations and empires decline. We are not exceptional to the bankruptcy process;we're a member of the club. In what way has the economic management of America been "exceptional"?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI gotta say there is, in my judgment, way too much of the right's mentality of victimhood in this post and in the comments that have followed.
I'm from the left and I think America is the greatest country in the world; I always have.
However, there is hardly a single point or corollary in the post's second paragraph which I don't find patently ridiculous; in fact, most of what the author wrote there seems to me to be complaints that could only be distressing to a supremely insecure individual and citizen of a nation.
I'd like to go point by point to skewer and ridicule each embarrassing claim as each richly deserves, but instead, I'll focus only on his claims about how American history is taught in our schools.
I have been reading my son's 8th grade U.S. History textbook with him this year, and I do agree that it does not make the effort to portray America and Americans in the heroic terms I recall being taught as a child. However, I wouldn't say the text denies credit where it's due; that is to say, such facts and judgments are not "scrubbed" from the text. Now, I would agree that there is value in the children of a nation being taught of the virtues and triumphs of their nation and its people. It's more important, though, that they be taught a clear history of where their nation and its people have gone wrong-- not just because we must hope that such learning will make us wiser in the present, but also because the people of any time period are in some genuine measure accountable and responsible for the history of their nation, even despite the apparent unfairness of this.
This is a complex issue, but suffice to say that there is a way to teach the ugliness of American history-- and American history is very, very ugly in some ways-- so ugly that we will probably never fully live down the legacies of the three big sins I alluded to above. Surely there is a way to teach that truth while also making an equally vigorous case for what America and Americans have done well.
To me, this is merely obvious. What bothers me about writers who make this the all or nothing thing that the writer of this post did usually mean, whether they think they do this or not, that they seek a return to the history I was taught as an elementary school kid in the seventies-- one that gave me pride, but a pride based on a lot of incomplete and misconstrued history-- the whole story of slavery, for example, was taught in a manner which, though it made an appropriate moral condemnation of it, then went on to focus more heavily on how white Americans from the north, because they fought the civil war, emerged in 1865 as basically unblemished moral heroes, despite the fact that ending slavery was nothing more than America's moral and historic obligation since it had been America that had enslaved the Africans in the first place. Moreover, as is the case with the native Americans and Mexico, America has never made even a cursory effort at repayment to these peoples; in fact, the average American considers the notion that the nation bears such an obligation an absurdity.
It would seem on its face to be patently outlandish that a nation whose laws and courts allow individuals to sue one another and recover damages for emotional injuries inflicted upon them would clearly acknowledge the enormity of its historical obligations to the descendants of those upon whom such atrocity was committed that there is no means known to man to measure it. But after a quick second thought, the American ability to explain its wrongdoing away so consistently and thoroughly that in its collective mind it has never been and is never responsible for anything, and in fact was (to hear Americans tell the story) actually the most heroic of all involved even in the most egregious instances of its wrongdoing. This American peculiarity is perhaps the strangest aspect of our character, but we should NOT be surprised by it, and the reason we shouldn't is because of our shallow and blind faith in our notion of "American Exceptionalism."
Mind you, as I wrote above, I believe America is exceptional, and that it is so for many virtuous reasons. But too many Americans believe, or act as though they believe our exceptionalism can be summed up by saying, "we're exceptional because we're better than everyone else." And that statement, in all of what should be its appalling simple mindedness, is, in my judgment, a deadly accurate portrayal of what most on the right take the phrase to mean. And the problem it creates for us is obvious-- since we believe we're everyone's superior, it follows that no one can ever legitimately accuse us of anything. A people which believes such a thing to be true of itself is then free to construct pretty much all of reality in any way it wishes to, and thus, when confronted by the contradiction of our allowing slavery in our nation at the same time we were telling ourselves and the whole world that the freedoms and values enshrined in our founding documents made us the greatest nation on earth, we solve the problem easily-- we told ourselves black American slaves weren't really human-- they were 3/5 of a human. Ergo, no contradiction; our Declaration referred to "men," as in humans, being "equal and endowed with rights-- but the slaves weren't fully men or human. Problem solved-- AND, while our forbears were at it, they did themselves one better-- they took the next logical step in claiming that slavery was not only not a moral crime-- in fact, it did the blacks a huge historic favor-- it brought them into civilization where their interests could be protected by their owners-- as opposed to the much more unfortunate blacks that had been miserably left behind in Africa.
There's much more that should be said about this but this is as far as I wish to go today. I'll conclude with a final observation: because Americans passed on this foolish interpretation of our exceptionalism to each succeeding generation, it was inevitable that this collective delusion would eventually come into conflict with the genuine conditions of the world. Vietnam and our larger Cold War policies come to mind. More recently, we went to war with Iraq believing our set of false justifications justified our action because it had been US which had made them. We went to war ill prepared for what came after the fall of the Baath Party because it had seemed obvious that since it was our army invading and occupying, both efforts would be swift and easy.
And now today, we are ignoring the science that warns us about the effect we are having on our environments and the planet because we have decided "global warming" doesn't-- in fact, CAN'T, exist since we have said it doesn't. We haven't said it doesn't because we've studied the issue carefully and dispassionately; we've said it doesn't because acknowledging and addressing the problem is too much of an inconvenience.
In this, we are little different in our collective foolishness than were the Americans who hanged 19 people in Salem for the supposed crime of witchcraft. Our arrogance is equal, our knowledge is better but not by much. The big difference between us now and throughout all other eras of history is that today, we have the ability to inflict damage on an unimaginably larger scale.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI disgree with RCAR. My parents immigrated during the depression when EVERYONE was bankrupt. They came with nothing except their idealism - to do better than what they were leaving behind. This IS what American Exceptionalism WAS. They needed to LEARN English to survive and there were no "English as a Second Language" classes. This idealism is now gone because we have made Americanism too easy for immigrants - multilingual accommodations are the norm. No pain, no gain!
When my Dad joined the US Army in WWII (as a non-U.S. citizen), he was called all the ethnic slurs in the book - which instilled more pride, not less, for the U.S. He started his own business and put two children through private college. Today if you even DISAGREE with someone who is not white you're called a racist!
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusedmerrin10000's response is typical of the left. They condemn America's past (Salem witchcraft hangings) but cannot condemn America's present when it is caused by multiculteralism (e.g., the Fort Hood massacre). Blah blah blah blah! Get real ... I have no patience to go further!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseA few days ago I reported that British Prime Minister David Cameron pronounced at a Munich conference that “State Multiculturalism Has Failed.” Yesterday there appeared in the Wall Street Journal an excellent column explaining the west’s “awakening” to this tragic experiment called “multiculturalism,” which is really a cloak for “moral relativism” and “non-judgmentalism.” Ironically, we have radical Islam to thank for this momentous new development of western resistance to multiculturalism. All links and commentary are found at www.mrformansplanet.com
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt is quite telling that the only example of individuals executed as witches (below) is that of the 19 who were hung in the 1690s (and I happen to be a descendant of one of them). How about all those who were executed as witches in Europe during the "dark ages"? The Holocaust? Stalin's enemies? Chairman Mao's? What about those who are executed for failing to live up to theocratic rules in Islamist republics today? It seems to me that the focus on America's evils proves the point that leftists blame America first.
I agree that America's sins are many (and how ironic it is that we are discussing sins here, when the left insists there are no moral absolutes). Chief among them is our insistence on murdering unborn children and insisting that those we dismember in the womb are not really children.
The US from its inception did recognize slavery - a grave evil, indeed. However, it was outlawed here beginning in 1863. It is still legally practiced elsewhere today.
Perhaps the leftist view of the US and its many sins is merely insular and ignorant.
America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse-- Alexis de Tocqueville
Both ideals built this country. One could very easily make the argument that multiculturalism is the bedrock of American Exceptionalism. There is too much bickering from the right saying those on the left don't care about America. That is one of the easiest cop-outs to any form of intellectual reasoning or logic. While it's fair to say there are differences with action towards the way policy is carried out, but defining a lackluster view of America, just because of a person's political view on policy and issues, raises not only a weak argument, but basically laughable, and very refutable.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseA number of commenters have questioned "American exceptionalism." I have an illustration of what it might mean, courtesy of an immigrant.
A long time ago, I lived in Germany as a student. One of my fellow American students, we’ll call him Mr. Dan, was gung-ho to immerse himself in the German experience, and came equipped with a big head start. He had lived in Germany before, as a high school exchange student, so he was way ahead of most of us in language skills and comfort in the culture. He hung out with Germans, spoke only German, read only German books, wore German shoes, etc. The Director of the program, a college professor we’ll call Doc, was a German native who had immigrated to the US, married an American woman, and become a naturalized citizen. One day Doc sidled up next to me not long after Mr. Dan had been animatedly expressing his love of all things German. Doc whispered to me, “Poor Mr. Dan. He is trying to do the impossible. Even if he lives in Germany for the rest of his life, loses his accent, drives a German car, takes on German citizenship, eats German food, marries a German woman, raises German kids, he will never become a German. It can’t be done. Forty years from now his German friends and relatives will still think of him as ‘the American.’ Not in a bad way, just as a matter of fact. They bear him no ill will, they may embrace him fully, love him and respect him, but he will never be for them a German. It’s not like America. The genius of America is that you can actually BECOME an American.”
Immigrating into America cannot be first and foremost about feeding your family or escaping repressive regimes. Those may be arguments in favor of EMigration, but I think the desire to become an American has to be the touchstone of IMmigration. After all, if there is a repressive regime where you are, there are ways other than coming to America to get that boot off your neck. If becoming an American is not primarily why you want to come here, then you are not an immigrant, you are a tourist or a visitor or an invader.
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