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Is Multiculturalism Discredited?
Writing at National Review Online, Victor Hanson issues yet another of his triumphalist declarations about how multiculturalism is now discredited because of the ugly things that the world now sees about Muslims:
The American left has missed yet another train as it was leaving. Currently it is reeling from an array of staggering developments that in the post-Cold War era threaten to leave it as discredited as segregationist Republicans [sic] were during the civil-rights movement. Anti-Semitism is suddenly more commonly a phenomenon of the academic Left than of the old, white, Neanderthal Right. Multiculturalism and cultural equivalence have been refuted by the ghoulish nature of the Taliban; the more the world learns about the “alternative” universe of Saddam Hussein and kindred Middle Eastern regimes, the more it shudders in horror.Now, multiculturalism may be discredited in Mr. Hanson’s mind and in my mind, but it is hardly discredited in the mind of the modern liberal world at large. Notwithstanding his background in the classics, which ought to have given him a more tragic perspective, Hanson maintains a disconcertingly Pollyannish view of the contemporary world. In particular he fails to understand the energy and destructive nature of liberalism and its power to maintain itself through every reversal. According to Auster’s First Principle of Majority/Minority Relations under Liberalism, the worse the behavior of a non-Western minority group, the more favorably it is viewed by Western society. The increased visibility and favor received by Muslims in America since 9/11 horribly proves my point. Consider the two astonishing, totally approving documentaries broadcast by PBS during the last year on Islam and Muhammad. Nothing like these programs has ever been done before, about any group. Even PBS’s endlessly repeated hagiographic documentaries about the civil rights movement are not as glowing—as utterly lacking in any critical dimension—as the things they’ve recently done on Islam. And those programs were produced after millions of Muslims around the world had already shown themselves to be terror-supporting extremists.
The worse that a minority or alien group demonstrates itself to be, the better it will be portrayed by liberal society. That is the nature of liberalism, whose end is the destruction of the Western civilization that gave birth to it. Notwithstanding 9/11, we are a long way from liberalism itself coming to an end, though its end is required if the West is to survive.
Comments
There does seem to be something immovable in the American character that says that things are really OK no matter what, that all comes right in the end, that bad things do not really happen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once complained that leftists redefined success (e.g., moving from the Lower East Side to Scarsdale) as catastrophe. I think those who pass for conservatives in America have the opposite vice. It’s hard to argue people out of such views though since (as Pascal observed) there’s something at once glorious and disastrous about human life as such. Posted by: Jim Kalb on December 30, 2002 1:48 PM“Currently [the American left] is reeling from an array of staggering developments that in the post-Cold War era threaten to leave it as discredited as segregationist Republicans were during the civil-rights movement.” — Victor Hanson Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t those who supported segregation during the civil rights movement — the late 40s through the first half of the 60s — chiefly southern Democrats, not “segregationist Republicans”? Posted by: Unadorned on December 30, 2002 2:18 PMI noticed that, too (though belatedly), and have added a “sic” after “segregationist Republicans.” I’ve also dropped Prof. Hanson a line about it. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on December 30, 2002 2:27 PMIf Hanson thinks multiculturalism is discredited, he should look at his home state of California. Again, the neocons show their loathing of their “fellow Republicans.” The “segs,” as they were called in those days, were indeed primarily Democrats. They often had fond memories of FDR. Posted by: David on December 30, 2002 6:35 PMHanson has sometimes expressed the view that multiculturalism is like Communism in the waning days of the USSR, meaning that it’s still loved by the minority elites but despised by the minority masses. Of course, neoconservatives have been singing that song ever since the debate on multiculturalism began in the late 1980s. They keep saying “it’s just the elites, it’s just the elites,” even as multiculturalism keeps advancing and spreading over our whole society and facing virtually no resistance, even from Republicans, who now, in the person of President Bush, now ACTIVELY support it. The neocons are in profound denial about all this because, given their abstract universalist mindset, the only alternatives to their current position that they can imagine are surrender to multiculturalism on one side and surrender to white racism on the other. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on December 30, 2002 6:51 PM |