The Forbidden Topic – Western Voices World News

Some conservatives don’t want to know about the link between multiculturalism and immigration. 
Lawrence Auster | National Review | April 27, 1992 ACROSS the country, America’s mainstream identity is being dismantled in
the name of “inclusion.” Half of last summer’s New York City
Shakespeare Festival was given over to Spanish and Portuguese
translations of Shakespeare. Christmas has been replaced in many schools
by a non-denominational Winterfest or by the new African-American
holiday Kwanza, while schools in areas with large Hispanic populations
celebrate Cinco de Mayo. The exemplary figures of American history have
been excised from school textbooks, replaced by obscure minorities and
women. Despite massive additions of material on non-Western societies,
school texts are still being stridently attacked as “Eurocentric,” and
much more radical changes are in the works.

Yet even as the multiculturalist revolution rolls through the land,
there is still profound disagreement about its meaning, its aims, and
most of all its origins. Mainstream media and educationists describe the
diversity movement as, in part, an effort to be more inclusive of
America’s historic minorities; in its larger dimensions, however, they
see it as a response to the prodigious changes that are occurring in
America’s ethnic composition. America is rapidly becoming multiracial
and white-minority, and, these observers say, our national identity is
changing in response. If that is true,—and it is stated or implied in
almost every news story on the subject—then it is also true that massive
Third World immigration, the source of America’s changing demographics,
is the ultimate driving force behind multiculturalism. <img width=”255″ height=”126″ src=”http://wvwnews.net/images/teaser/laraza.jpg" />
Virtually alone in resisting these assumptions, which are shared by
people on both the right and the left, is the conservative
establishment, particularly the neoconservatives. There is thus a
peculiar ideological arrangement in this debate. Liberals, who support
both unrestricted immigration and multiculturalism, do not hesitate to
point out a causal link between the two; indeed, they appeal to the
inevitability of continued Third World immigration as an unanswerable
argument for multiculturalism. Traditional conservatives like Pat
Buchanan, who with equal consistency oppose both multiculturalism
and Third World immigration, also have no difficulty in seeing the
causal connection. Neoconservatives, by contrast, have dissociated these
two issues, leading the fight against multiculturalism while
passionately clinging to the ideal of unrestricted immigration. Their
pro-immigration stand, based on a conviction of both its economic
necessity and its political morality, compels them to ignore, or
ritually dismiss, the mounting evidence that the sea-change in America’s
ethnic identity is fueling the cultural-diversity movement. To keep
immigration from coming under attack, they are forced to hunt for
alternative explanations for multiculturalism.
This approach was brought into focus last summer in articles by Irving Kristol in the Wall Street Journal, by Nathan Glazer in The New Republic, and by Midge Decter in Commentary.
Despite wide differences on the effects of multiculturalism (Kristol
thinks it’s a threat to the West equal to Nazism and Stalinism; Glazer
thinks it’s no big deal), they reached startlingly similar conclusions
about its causes.
Multiculturalism, they argued, has essentially nothing to do with
America’s increasing ethnic diversity; at bottom, it is a desperate,
misguided attempt to overcome black educational deficiencies—an effort
that radicals have opportunistically seized upon to advance their
separatist and anti-West agenda. “Did these black students and their
problems not exist, we would hear little of multiculturalism,” Irving
Kristol declared. Assimilation, he believes, is proceeding apace: “Most
Hispanics are behaving very much like the Italians of yesteryear; most
Orientals, like the Jews of yesteryear.” Nathan Glazer agreed: “t is
not the new immigration that is driving the multicultural demands.”<div align=”center”><img width=”215″ height=”133″ src=”http://wvwnews.net/images/teaser/laraza_flag_skull.jpg" /></div>
Down with Eurocentrism
IRONICALLY, on the same day Irving Kristol was denying that Hispanics are pushing for multiculturalism, the New York Times
ran this typical item: “Buoyed by a growing population and by a greater
presence on local school boards, Hispanic Americans have begun pressing
textbook publishers and state education officials to include more about
Hispanic contributions in the curriculums of public schools,” as well
as to correct “stereotypes”—a familiar code for the elimination of
Eurocentrism.
A spate of letters to the Wall Street Journal protesting
Kristol’s view offered a revealing glimpse into mainstream opinion on
the subject. The chief factor in multiculturalism, wrote Martha
Farnsworth Riche of the Population Reference Bureau, is that “racially
and ethnically, America’s school-age population is increasingly unlike
its past generations… . This ensures that the school-age population will
become even less a product of what we call ‘Western civilization’ in
the future.” Multiculturalism, said another correspondent, “is not an
attempt to address the social problems of African-Americans. Latin
Americans and Asian-Americans have been equally involved.” From the
cultural Left, Gregory K. Tanaka said that as a result of the increasing
proportion of non-whites in America, “it is becoming clear that our
Western ‘common’ culture no longer works. What Mr. Kristol overlooks is
that this decline of Westernism leaves us no surviving basis for social
order.”
While it might be tempting to dismiss these views as multiculturalist
propaganda, the clincher is that Nathan Glazer himself, after at first
denying that the increase of non-European groups is propelling
multiculturalism, turned around and admitted it: “I do not see how
school systems with a majority of black and Latino students, with black or Latino leadership at the top … can stand firmly against the multiculturalist thrust … demographic and political pressures change the history that is to be taught.”
(Italics added.) It was in this same article that Glazer, to the great
consternation of his neoconservative allies, announced his reluctant
support for Thomas Sobol’s radical curriculum reforms in New York state.
That Glazer subscribed to the demographics-multiculturalism link in the
very act of surrendering to the new curriculum supports my point that
once multiculturalism is accepted, the key role of immigration and
ethnic diversity in driving multiculturalism loses its stigma and can be
freely acknowledged. 
To this, conservatives reply Glazer is not admitting a forbidden truth
but is simply adopting the multiculturalists’ fallacious “demographic
inevitability” argument. In The New Criterion, Heather MacDonald
agrees that demographic changes are “fueling” multiculturalism, but
criticizes Glazer for “[mistaking the actual for the inevitable.” In
other words, neoconservatives will concede that multiculturalism has
been adopted because of our society’s increasing diversity; but, they
insist, this was not “logical.” Since immigration is only the “actual”
cause and not the “logical” cause, we should leave immigration alone.<img width=”262″ height=”118″ src=”http://wvwnews.net/images/teaser/lemming_march.jpg" />
One can’t help being reminded of the people who say that the failures of Marxism do not prove its theoretical
unsoundness. Just as one cannot persuade a devoted Marxist that Marxism
must lead to tyranny and poverty, one cannot logically demonstrate to
an open-borders conservative that precipitately changing a historically
European-majority country into a multiracial, white-minority country
must result in a breakdown of the common culture. Nevertheless, whether
logical or not, that is what is happening.
Here neoconservatives fall back on the familiar argument that it is only
the ethnic activists, not the great bulk of the immigrant groups, who
are pushing for multiculturalism, a case advanced most recently by Linda
Chavez in Out of the Barrio. But as Tamar Jacoby has pointed
out, Miss Chavez’s own evidence suggests quite the opposite conclusion:
that Hispanics of all classes are eagerly embracing the call to cultural
separatism. According to one study cited by Miss Chavez, a large and
rising percentage of Hispanics describe themselves as “Hispanic
first/American second”—a preference made clear by the Hispanic majority
in San Jose, California, who angrily protested, as a “symbol of
conquest,” a statue commemorating the raising of the American flag in
California during the Mexican War.
But even if it were true that most of the new ethnics didn’t “want”
multiculturalism, it is undeniable that their swelling numbers empower
the group-rights movement by adding to its clientele. Scott McConnell
has pointed out in the New York Post that as soon as minority
immigrants arrive in this country, they become grist for the
affirmative-action mill, eligible for an elaborate web of preferences.
To imagine that we can turn back the multiculturalist and group-rights
ideology by persuasion alone, while continuing the large-scale
immigration that feeds that ideology, is like pouring liquor down a
man’s throat while “advising” him to stay sober.<div align=”center”><img width=”256″ height=”189″ src=”http://wvwnews.net/images/teaser/mestizo_flag_raise.jpg" /></div>
Apart from ideology, it is important to understand that massive
deculturation is occurring as a direct result of the demographic changes
themselves. Commenting on the impact of the huge Hispanic presence in
California, a Hispanic academic tells the New York Times: “What
is threatened here is intellectual life, the arts, museums, symphonies.
How can you talk about preserving open space and establishing museums
with a large undereducated underclass?” The program director of the
Brooklyn Academy of Music speaks matter-of-factly about the inevitable
displacement of Western music as the Academy gears its programs to the
cultural interests and traditions of Brooklyn’s intensely heterogeneous,
Third World population.
Another consequence of this profound population shift is an
intensification of white guilt. Since in our emerging multiracial
society any all-white grouping is increasingly seen as
non-representative (and presumptively “racist”), the same assumption
gets insensibly projected onto the past. The resulting loss of
sympathetic interest in Western historical figures, lore, and
achievements creates a ready audience for the multiculturalist rewriting
of history. When we can no longer employ traditional reference points
such as “our Western heritage” because a critical number of us are no
longer from the West; when we cannot speak of “our Founding Fathers”
because the expression is considered racially exclusive; when more and
more minorities complain that they can’t identify with American history
because they “don’t see people who look like themselves” in that
history, then the only practical way to preserve a simulacrum of common
identity is to redefine America as a centerless, multicultural society.
Multiculturalism, in sum, is far more than a radical ideology or misconceived educational reform; it is a mainstream
phenomenon, a systematic dismantling of America’s unitary national
identity in response to unprecedented ethnic and racial transformation.
Admittedly, immigration reform aimed at stabilizing the country’s ethnic
composition is no panacea; the debunking of multiculturalism must also
continue. But if immigration is not cut back, the multiculturalist
thrust will be simply unstoppable. 
What explains the conservatives’ refusal to face the demographic
dimensions of multiculturalism? Martha Farnsworth Riche believes the
reason is psychological: “The older white academics are facing a shift
in power. They’re denying that reality by saying, in effect, that
minorities ‘should’ assimilate; they don’t want to face the fact that
their world is disappearing.” <img src=”http://wvwnews.net/images/teaser/mestizo-illegal_beatch.jpg" />More to the point, they are evading the
uncomfortable necessity of dealing with the racially charged immigration
issue.
Indeed, the conservatives’ greatest reason for not allowing a
fundamental debate on immigration is their understandable fear of
opening up a forum for racist attitudes. But as last year’s election in
Louisiana suggests, the establishment’s refusal to take seriously Middle
America’s legitimate concerns about cultural displacement only makes it
more likely that those concerns will be taken up by extremists. If
opposition to racism is not to become a destructive ideological crusade,
then racism must be defined according to a norm of racial justice that
is rationally achievable in this world. Understood in a non-utopian
sense, racial justice means that the majority in a country treats
minorities fairly and equally; it does not mean that the majority is
required to turn itself into a minority. If it does mean the
latter, then nation-states, in effect, have no right to preserve their
own existence, let alone to control their borders. The immigration
restrictions of the early 1920s, discriminatory though they plainly were
(and against the group to which this writer belongs), reduced ethnic
hatreds, greatly eased the assimilation of white ethnics, and kept
America a culturally unified nation through the mid twentieth century.
The fall-off in cheap immigrant labor also encouraged capital-intensive
investment and spurred the great middle-class economic expansion of the
1920s. It is ironic, therefore, that our open-borders advocates
constantly appeal to the turn-of-the-century immigration as a model for
us to follow today, since one of the key reasons the earlier immigration
turned out, in retrospect, to be such a remarkable success was that it
was halted. The same caveat applies even more strongly to our present, uncontrolled influx from the Third World.<img src=”http://wvwnews.net/images/teaser/mestizos%20jumping%20fence.jpg" />
 NATIONAL REVIEW / April 27, 1992

2012-10-09