Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future. - book reviews

FORTY-FOUR years after the death of George Orwell we find ourselves immured in an Orwellian culture, where language has become an instrument of political coercion and institutions created for intellectual enlightenment have been turned into bureaucracies of untruth. Having vanquished what Robert Conquest accurately described as "the biggest concentration of brute power the world has ever seen: a tremendous armament, a huge bureaucracy, an enormous police machine, a vast propaganda apparatus"--in other words, Soviet Communism--we are surrendering at home to mendacities even more insidious, because imposed from within, in their power to corrupt democracy.

The names we have conferred upon this rapidly accelerating threat to our democratic order--"political correctness," "multiculturalism," "diversity," and the rest--do not really describe the nature of the assault. For these names have themselves evolved into Orwellian euphemisms, which lie about goals that dare not disclose their true character.

Everyone--both the partisans of those goals and their adversaries--now understands that "political correctness," long shorn of its irony, has come to signify systematic falsehood; that "multiculturalism" stands for the monocultural imperatives of minority political interest groups; that "diversity" means enforced conformity. Yet the publisher of the New York Times now regularly issues a "diversity newsletter" instructing his employees in the goals to be met in what he describes as "a new way of thinking about people," and the State of New York mandates a "multicultural" curriculum to be taught in public schools where almost no other standard--not even that of basic literacy--is strictly enforced.

The term "political correctness" has, as a linguistic invention, been ridiculed for its dishonesty, and has therefore been widely denied even in those quarters where its commands continue to be ruthlessly imposed as public policy. It would clarify the discussion significantly if we were able to call this socio-political-cultural movement by its right name. In a recent issue of Partisan Review, Steven Marcus, the dean of Columbia College, brought us closer to the reality of "political correctness" by labeling it "soft totalitarianism." Paul Johnson, the English journalist and historian, has performed a similar service in labeling it "liberal fascism." Yet because we remain essentially defensive and even at times apologetic in our criticism of this anti-democratic plague, such terms have proved to be too confrontational to be generally adopted even for polemical purposes.

Thus, the battle continues to be fought, for the most part, on the enemy's terms, lest the critics of multiculturalism and its allied poisons find themselves stigmatized in the liberal press, in the councils of government, and in the business world--never mind the world of popular culture--as racists, sexists, homophobes, and other species of scoundrels.

Into the discussion of this disastrous development in our democracy there have lately entered a number of dissenting liberal voices. While they have been late in arriving at the barricades--and often bring with them the kind of liberal baggage that muddles the arguments and obscures the degree to which liberal orthodoxy is itself a major contributor to the disaster they now wish to address--they are nonetheless indicative of the crisis that has lately overtaken liberalism as a result of the multiculturalist assault.

The best of these works of liberal dissent, in my view, is Richard Bernstein's Dictatorship of Virtue. This is a book that is important, above all, for its excellent journalistic account of the lives--the lives of conventional liberals, for the most part--that have been irreversibly damaged by the illiberal doctrines that have come to be enforced in the name of a new liberal orthodoxy. The book is not an exercise in political theory, and still less is it a conservative polemic. It is social reportage of a high order--reportage born of moral conscience in the face of grave injustice. It thus represents the kind of old-fashioned liberal journalism that has been earmarked for destruction by the new "soft totalitarianism."

Because the principal strength of Dictatorship of Virtue is to be found in the many compelling stories it recounts, let me focus here on what is for me the most poignant of the personal histories that Mr. Bernstein has uncovered in his harrowing travels through our new multiculturalist America. It is the story of a white male heterosexual college student and what he was made to suffer at the hands of the multiculturalist bureaucracy at one of our elite universities.

"You wouldn't call Timothy Gregory a conservative," writes Mr. Bernstein, certainly not a conservative ideologue. He is a medical student at the State University of New York who graduated from Cornell University in 1992, a practicing Catholic from a working-class family in Erie, Pennsylvania, whose basic political position is infused with notions of tolerance and openness. He espouses support for gay rights; he believes in equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, creed, sex, or national origin. He is not a member of the WASP establishment. No silver spoon was in his mouth at birth. He is a dark-haired young man of medium height, modest in demeanor, polite, respectful of authority, a kind of average guy in many ways."