People can’t see a threat to their country, if their country doesn’t exist for them

This passage, from my article published three years ago yesterday at FrontPage Magazine, “How Multiculturalism Took Over America,” seems relevant in light of the new readiness of mainstream conservatives to speak of America as a culture that is threatened by uncontrolled immigration:

Since multiculturalism claims to stand for the sanctity and worth of each culture, the discovery that its real tendency is to dismantle the existing European-based culture of the United States should have instantly discredited it. Yet it has not—not even among conservatives. A leading reason for this failure is that modern conservatives are themselves ethnicity-blind, democratic universalists. Their conservatism consists in seeing multiculturalism as an attack on their universalist tenets. They fail to understand multiculturalism as an attack on a particular culture and people, namely their own, because as universalists they either have no allegiance to that particular culture and people or their allegiance is defensive and weak. Thus the typical conservative today will say that multiculturalism is bad because “it divides us into different groups”—which is of course true. But he rarely says that multiculturalism is bad because “it is destroying our culture”—America’s historic culture and civilization—since that would imply that he was defending a particular culture rather than a universalist idea. Because conservatives are unwilling to defend the very thing that multiculturalism is seeking to destroy, they are unable to identify the nature of multiculturalism and to oppose it effectively.

The situation described is what we have had for several decades. As long as conservatives do not believe in America as a culture but only see it as an idea, they will not defend America from the cultural changes brought by mass immigration. Or reversing the causative relation we could say that as long as conservatives are unwilling to defend America from the cultural changes brought by mass immigration, they will not see America as a culture but only as an idea. But when they pass some line in their own experience and begin to see that America is indeed threatened, then they being to talk about America as a culture, and not just an idea. Slowly, slowly, conservatives are exiting from the darkness that is liberalism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 10, 2007 05:45 PM | Send