The Way of the WASP: How It Made America, and How It Can Save It, So to Speak

National Review, Jan 28, 1991 by Lawrence Auster

Brookhiser's recommendations add up to a call for counter-revolution: make war on group-mindedness; reject the Progressivist paradigm (which Reagan failed to do); return to the concept of human nature and a politics deduced from that nature. Lastly, encourage open debate in the Protestant churches. In a real debate, errors will be exposed, and "a restored cultural amalgam will emerge."

In sum, The Way of the WASP is a devastating refutation of the "all-cultures-are-equal" pieties. Yet, as invaluable as his ideas are, I fear that Brookhiser has skipped over an important dimension of the cultural debate. Focused as he is on America's own (potentially reversible) spiritual foibles, he ignores the irreversible impact on American culture of our open-borders policy. Like many conservatives today, he believes that while group-think (a/k/a multiculturalism) is bad, unlimited immigration is wonderful; the implication is that if we restore the WASP civic-mindedness which encourages assimilation, we will be able over the coming century to absorb scores of millions of Latin Americans, Asians, Middle Easterners, and Africans with no loss to America's Anglo-form cultural heritage. But that's hardly a unanimous view-least of all among the immigrants themselves. Novelist Bharati Mukherjee, a moderate who opposes multiculturalism and supports cultural "fusion," speaks of Asian-Americans as We, the new pioneers who are thinking of America as still a frontier country

. .Letting go of the old notions of what America was shouldn't be seen as a loss." Now, if ongoing mass immigration and cultural fusion mean letting go" of America's historical identity and cultural heritage, what happens to the way of the WASP, which-the author himself would acknowledge-has its historical and imaginative roots in that heritage? Richard Brookhiser is not the only conservative who has thus far failed to ask, or answer, that question.