It is very gratifying that European leaders, among them Nicholas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, and David Cameron, have repudiated multiculturalism, at least theoretically, and have pointed out its deleterious consequences in modern Western societies. I don’t expect that this will lead to the immediate collapse of the structures of multiculturalism in our schools and colleges, but I believe it will gradually have an effect.

But the failure of multiculturalism also underscores the dangers in the idea of universality, that all men desire and deserve freedom as we understand it, and are immediately capable of realizing it right now.

Clearly, the failures of multiculturalism and the persistence of large, unassimilated populations in Western democratic societies indicate that freedom and equality as we understand them require cultural anchorage and do not transmit themselves automatically. Tutelage in the founding documents of our nation is helpful but not sufficient because these documents themselves rely on the cultural matrix out of which they arose. Even different democracies have different interpretations of freedom.

It is odd also to hear people insist on American exceptionalism and yet at the same time claim that freedom and democracy as we understand them are universal and immediately practicable for all mankind everywhere. “Freedom is special and rare,” President Reagan warned in his farewell address to the country. “It’s fragile; it needs protection.” Indeed, one of the very meanings of American exceptionalism is that the disposition to freedom, liberty, and representative self-government has been continuous in our country when so many hopeful revolutions turn around and eat their young.

It doesn’t seem possible and yet it was so: Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Cheney believed that the individual’s desire to be personally free would translate instantly into a liberal self-government in Iraq once Saddam was overthrown. So much so that the looting of Baghdad was allowed to take place under the very nose of the American Army. For his part, Tony Blair told the British Iraq War inquiry that he was expecting the civil service to carry on while a new government was formed. He was thinking of Sir Humphrey Appleby, I guess, the canny Permanent Secretary in the splendid BBC series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, who knew more about the government than the elected officials. But if that’s what Blair was expecting, why sit still for the looting of government offices? Because “stuff happens” in freedom? It does, but that doesn’t mean we sit around and watch it happen.

As the cultural supports of freedom, such as the intact two-parent family, erode, fewer and fewer people seem to understand what it means to take responsibility for one’s own life. And yet many conservatives are eager to declare a “truce” or even an “end” to the culture wars — which mainly means conservatives lose — not realizing that if one leg of the stool of conservatism (traditional values, free markets, strong foreign policy) is removed, the stool no longer functions and the others will eventually erode as well. We should take advantage of the denunciations of multiculturalism on the part of European leaders not to promote unadorned universality but to re-emphasize our own cultural embodiment of those universal ideals and to insist on their transmission in our educational institutions.