LAST FEBRUARY, Time published “The Fraying of America,” an essay by Robert Hughes devoted mainly to a ferocious attack on multiculturalism, the political-correctness movement, and particularly Afro-centrism. According to Hughes, these enterprises are not merely intellectually fraudulent (“To plow through the literature of Afrocentrism is to enter a world of claims . . . so absurd that they lie beyond satire”) but, if allowed to “Balkanize” our common culture, could actually endanger democracy.
Which is all old news, but the fact that Hughes chose to say it, and in the pages of Time, did come as a surprise. Could it be that Robert Hughes has moved to the right? Not exactly. According to him, conservatives pose an equal if opposite threat to the good, the true, and the beautiful. Hughes sees the American Right and the PC movement (which I shall use here as shorthand for the whole constellation of political and intellectual ideas associated with the term “multiculturalism”) as “two puritan sects, one masquerading as conservative, the other posing as revolutionary but using academic complaint as a way of evading engagement in the real world.” In the center, we are given to understand, stands Robert Hughes, lonely defender of the West.
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