The forbidden topic: some conservatives don't want to know about the link between multiculturalism and immigration

National Review, April 27, 1992 by Lawrence Auster

Some conservatives don't want to know about the link between multiculturalism and immigration.

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 the massive Third World immigration is itself the ultimate driving force behind multiculturalism.

Virtually alone in resisting these assumptions is the conservative establishment, particularly the neoconservatives. 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: "[I]t is not the new immigration that is driving the multicultural demands."

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."