[This article appeared in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Summer 2005, pp. 203-239.]

“Multiculturalism” and the West

Dwight D. Murphey[1]

It is becoming increasingly recognized that the changing demographic caused by large-scale immigration and the declining birthrate among the peoples of the West is challenging the long-term continued existence of Western civilization as we have known it. This challenge is given voice today by the ideology of “multiculturalism,” which deflates Western culture while exalting the perspective and ways of life of non-European peoples who are coming to live in the West. This article explores the historic forces that provide the larger context for this challenge, the facts about the demographic shift that is occurring, and many (though by no means all) of the nuances and implications of multiculturalist ideology.

Key Words: multiculturalism; intellectual alienation; slavery; colonialism; globalism; demographic changes; immigration; balkanization; classical liberalism; neo-conservatism; “political correctness”; ethnic perspectives.

The word “multiculturalism” had no special ideological connotation until recently. As a name given to an ideology, it has come into existence since the 1960s. In its more strident forms, the ideology expresses a reservoir of alienation against the cultures, ethnicities, religions and mores of Europe and of peoples who derive their origins from Europe (such as those of the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada), while championing the perspectives and ways of life of non-European peoples. When expressed less stridently, it praises “diversity” as a high value and supports the substitution of non-European customs for those that have heretofore prevailed in the West. This is a “diversity” that is advocated for Western nations, but is not at the same time pressed upon other cultures such as those of China, Japan or Latin America.

The ideology does not exist in a vacuum. It is accompanied by, and encourages, a vast demographic shift that is rapidly bringing non-European peoples into the West. This provides the ideology with “numbers” and “on-the-ground realities” that give it substance, making it far more than merely academic. Moreover, the ideology has become the conventional wisdom of the world’s governing academic, managerial and professional elite. All of these things together make it an almost irresistible force.

As Patrick Buchanan argues in The Death of the West, what is at issue is the continued existence of Western civilization.[2] The geographical locations now occupied by European peoples will, of course, continue to exist; but the human content of those places will be very different. For those who prefer to speak in terms of race, it is not too much to say that the same forces pose an existential challenge to the Caucasian race, which may cease to be identifiable within the coming century.

Our tasks in the present discussion will be to gain some perspective about the historic forces that have come to bear on the present situation, to grasp the fact of demographic swamping, and to explore some of the facets and implications of multiculturalist ideology. Needless to say, much that is pertinent must necessarily be omitted.

Historic Forces That Provide the Larger Context

1. The Many Implications of the Alienation of the Modern Intellectual

The modern world cannot be understood without taking into account a force that has provided the motive-power for much that has occurred since before the French Revolution: the intense dislike (“alienation”) that the intellectual subculture of the West (the “intelligentsia”) has felt toward virtually every aspect of modern Western society. Rousseau captured its scope well in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men when he argued that men lived in contented simplicity in a state of nature, but thoroughly messed things up when they entered into civilization. It is not too much to say that, beginning with Rousseau, the social critic has stood outside the predominant civilization voicing dissatisfaction with all its essential features. The alienation is often referred to as having been against the “bourgeoisie,” the predominant middle-class, commercial strata; but, regardless of the breadth of that middle class, this is too narrow: farmers have by no means been immune, but have been pictured as louts; whole sections of the United States, such as the South, have been portrayed as “rednecks”; Dadaistic and post-modernist art has militated against all “conventional” art forms; and even the various classes of have-nots the intelligentsia has championed have been seen not as exemplars in themselves, but as a humanity sorely in need of making-over. Susan Sontag was speaking in the spirit of this sweeping condemnation when in 1967 she wrote that “the white race is the cancer of human history.”[3]

During the nineteenth century, this alienation gave rise to the angry ideologies that (in varying degrees of anger) have so characterized the modern period. These have included the Left in its various forms: left- and right-wing Hegelianism with their extensions, respectively, into Marxism and German Volkish thought; the blood-and-thunder points of view described by Julien Benda in The Treason of the Intellectuals; Russian nihilism; and, in the United States, “modern liberalism,” when the alienation coalesced into an ideology in the late nineteenth century under the influence of the German Historical School after a great many American students went to Germany for graduate studies. This School (not to be confused with the later Frankfurt School) was socialist but not Marxist; supported the Bismarckian welfare state; favored statistical and quantitative rather than deductive methods in the social sciences; and critiqued classical and neo-classical economics relativistically as being merely statements of how things would work in a bourgeois system rather than a universally valid science of economic behavior.

Much of the content of the Left’s and of “modern liberalism’s” thinking has been molded by their perpetual seeking of allies to give the intellectual subculture political strength. Many of the concepts are formed by the resulting necessity to take the point of view of those allies. In The Ordeal of Change, Eric Hoffer wrote that the modern intellectual “has consistently sought a link with the underprivileged. So far, his most potent alliance has been with the masses. The coming together of the intellectual and the masses has proved itself a formidable combination.”[4] Auguste Comte said “it is with the working class that the new philosophers will find their most energetic allies.”[5]

Even as early as World War I, however, many disillusioned Marxists came to know that “the proletariat” was a less-than-reliable ally. Not only did the proletariat prefer to “march to its own drummer,” but the great mass of Europeans marched off ecstatically in support of their respective nations despite the Marxists’ expectation that they would refuse to fight “the bourgeoisie’s war.” Over a period of several years, the alliance became tattered. In the United States, the “New Deal coalition” fell to pieces after World War II, so that by 1972 George McGovern was seeking a “new coalition.”

The effort has been to forge an ideological-political coalition with any group that is disaffected and/or unassimilated. The point that is most worth noticing about all this so far as understanding multiculturalist ideology is concerned is that since World War II the most propitious “target of opportunity” has been non-white ethnic groups. Some of these, such as American blacks, are situated within the society itself; others are from mass immigration. Lawrence Auster comments on both the intensity of the alienation and the recent cultivation of Third World immigrants when he says that “there is no doubt that the cultural left hates America and wants to destroy it; and there is also no doubt that the left see mass immigration from Third-World countries as a handy way of achieving that.”[6] The intellectual culture, the penumbra of which is now expanded to embrace the managerial, professional, academic elite, is sponsoring a massive, bloodless demographic invasion that over time will remold society in a new image.

What does this ideology say? Much by way of devaluing Western history, symbols, norms, folkways, religious beliefs, heroes; and much more, too, by way of elevating the same cultural ingredients of the championed groups. As a bare minimum, “the evolving concept of multiculturalism… holds that Western civilization merits no special consideration,” according to classics professor Victor Hanson, author of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming.[7] Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., though himself prominent within American “liberalism” during the second half of the twentieth century, dissents from the ideological cultivation of ethnic allies, and writes about multiculturalism that “the cult of ethnicity exaggerates differences, intensifies resentments and antagonisms, drives ever deeper the awful wedges between races and nationalities. The endgame is self-pity and self-ghettoization.”[8] For those who preach the ideology, assimilation is no longer the ideal. “Diversity” is sought in its place.

There is irony in all this. It is by no means certain that the incoming ethnicities will in the long-run embrace those who now cultivate them as allies. Several years ago, I wrote: “There is no assurance that the alienated intellectual culture will like the results. Who is to say that in the end a non-white America will give the intellectuals the social role they crave? Or that the new immigrants will not value precisely the ‘bourgeois materialism’ that the intellectuals have found so distasteful in American culture for almost two centuries? Most of the intelligentsia’s alliances (as with organized labor, say) have gone sour, running afoul of the desire of people just to be people. Indeed, considerable resentment arises among the members of any ‘disaffected group’ against the intellectuals themselves. Ultimately, few people like to be led by those who feel superior to them.”[9] One of the best examples came in the 1960s when the black militants kicked the white liberals out of the Civil Rights movement.

An analysis of all this leads one to reflect on yet another factor. It is that the attacking ideology is met not with an opposing force, but with lethargy, indifference and acquiescence. One of the major facts about modern life has been that the predominant culture since the downfall of the medieval consensus has had no (or very little, relatively speaking) intellectual culture supportive of, and appropriate to, itself. This has been true of the “bourgeoisie” (the commercial middle class) in virtually every phase of history, going back to the Greeks and Romans. There has been little intellectual defense of the mainstream society of the modern West.

The alienated subculture’s main enemy hasn’t come from an opposing ideology, but from the fact that the mass of humanity simply goes about its life. Events roll on, not really dictated by what the ideology yearns for. Instead of feeling exhilarated with their success, most of those who have shared in the alienation have been depressed by how little control they really have. As I studied the history of “modern liberal” thought in the United States, I was surprised by the almost-chronic despondency I found in it. And yet they press on, now armed with a coalition that gives them a renewed chance of success at least so far as the process of social deconstruction is concerned.

2. The Emergence of a Long-Buried and Overlooked Corpus of Humanity

In the multiculturalist ideology, one of the central concepts of the Left before the middle of the twentieth century – that of “exploitation,” which asserted that the owners of capital in a market economy took systematic advantage of those they hired – has been replaced by “victimization,” which in one context after another asserts that non-Western peoples have in effect been plundered and raped by Europeans and Americans. As with “exploitation,” “victimization” builds on resentment, this time by virtually all non-Western ethnic groups. It is the perfect concept by which to tie together the intellectuals’ alienation and the perceived interests of those ethnicities. The spirit of victimization is now so pervasive, spreading beyond non-white ethnic groups, that a university professor finds that many students who don’t study and hence don’t do well blame the professor and feel the despondency and resentment of victims.

What is not generally understood is that this perception of victim status is utterly perverse. It turns inside-out what has actually occurred. The masses of people who have most benefited from developments within recent centuries are precisely the ones who feel most put upon, and they are blaming the very forces that have elevated them.

Until recent centuries, the great corpus of mankind was a submerged giant. In virtually all societies throughout history, participation in the political and social society was limited to a relative few. For vast numbers of people, this has changed. Even though it is true that within the past century horrific tyrannies have swept over mankind, resulting in enslavement or death to many tens of millions, the historic forms of slavery, peonage, bonded labor and serfdom that for millennia held most of humanity in subjugation have, with a few exceptions, disappeared.

It is is not generally appreciated that for thousands of years a vast proportion of people were slaves or the equivalent. An excellent scholarly account of the subject was written in 1858 by George S. Sawyer. Some excerpts that give part, at least, of the picture: “By the law of nations the whole ancient world regarded captives taken in war as slaves… The traffic in slaves was certainly tolerated and practiced by the ancient Egyptians, as well as by the Phoenicians, Chaldeans, Hebrews, and surrounding nations… [During the Crusades,] for centuries the two religions waged a merciless war upon one another; and Christian, Saracen, Jew, and Infidel, were indiscriminately sold in countless numbers into irredeemable slavery.” The number of slaves in ancient Greece was so great that a census in Attica listed 21,000 free citizens, 10,000 aliens, and 400,000 slaves. In Rome, the slaves came to vastly outnumber the freemen; there were 60 million slaves during the reigns of the Caesars, and they included “Medians, Moesians, Bithynians, Celts, Germans, and Britons” (which is worth noting because it contradicts today’s naïve notion, born out of a failure to see things in a larger time-frame, that slavery has centered on black Africans). The public works which were so magnificent in ancient Rome were constructed by masses of slaves. Sawyer wrote that in West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century “cruelty and oppression everywhere prevail. It is estimated that one-sixth of the population own and enslave the balance of the entire population.”[10]

Robert Ryal Miller, in his Mexico: A History, informs us that “Classic Maya society was stratified… At the bottom was a large component of slaves who were convicted criminals, or prisoners of war, or those who sold themselves or were sold by their families into servitude.” Among the Aztecs, Miller says, a warrior could “acquire former enemy property and slaves, have a harem, and eat human flesh. Portions of sacrificial victims, cooked with squash and flowers, were served to warriors.” How many slaves were there? They constituted “about five percent of the population” – but this was what was left after “male captives taken in warfare were usually sacrificed.” Following the Spanish conquest, thousands of Mexican Indians were made slaves.[11]

Writing recently, James Jamieson sums it up: “Slavery was practiced widely throughout the world in societies that had advanced beyond hunting and gathering and developed pre-industrial agriculture, fishing and advanced pastoralism as methods of subsistence.” He describes a broad spectrum about how cruelly or humanely the slaves were treated.[12]

But we need not limit our discussion to slavery per se. Whatever their status, the great bulk of people occupied the lower stations in pre-modern societies. It was only two centuries ago that Samuel Johnson in England was able to argue that “subordination is very necessary to society… A man is born to hereditary rank… Subordination tends greatly to human happiness.” Until the relatively recent attack on the principle of social hierarchy, if a man’s father was a chimney sweep, he too would be one; and so would be his son.

Thus, the perspective fostered by multiculturalist ideology and that makes up much of the psychology of Third World peoples that those people are “victims” who deserve redress against the West is based on a compressed time-perspective. It fails to understand their condition and recent “liberation” in the context of a much longer history.

We see this illustrated remarkably well in the thinking of those women who are most influenced by feminist ideology. There is a psychology of “victimization” there, too. They point to the fact that women didn’t get the vote in England and the United States until the Suffragette movement forced it more or less a century ago. They have no comprehension of the fact that even wealthy middle class males in England didn’t get the vote until the Reform Act in the 1830s, and that universal male suffrage wasn’t introduced until it came in in successive stages in the 1860s and 1880s. In historical terms, both men and women got the vote at nearly the same time. Before that, it had been an age of aristocracy.

The worldwide resentment against “colonialism” lacks perspective in much the same way. What is forgotten about Africa, for example, is that the European “scramble for Africa” didn’t occur until the last quarter of the nineteenth century (although of course there was a long period of penetration before that), and that the dismantling of the colonies took place rapidly after the end of World War II in 1945. The period of colonization was, in historical terms, very short. It was longer in other places (such as in Mexico and the rest of Latin America), but again was brief in historical context. Indeed, the short-lived domination by European countries can be seen much as Marx saw capitalism, which he thought to be a “mid-wife” to the age of the proletariat. European colonialism was indeed an instrument of passage for a number of peoples from pre-modern cultures into the cosmopolitanism of the modern age. Thus, it was the Spanish conquest that carried the inhabitants of Mexico from the Aztecs to modern Mexico.

3. The Ease of Migration Made Possible by the Industrial and Cybernetic Revolutions, and by Modern Transportation, Commerce and Mobility.

As long ago as the 1920s, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset saw enormous significance in the fact that “the world has suddenly grown larger, and with it and in it, life itself. To start with, life has become, in actual fact, world-wide in character; I mean that the content of existence for the average man of to-day includes the whole planet; that each individual habitually lives the life of the whole world.”[13] Since then, it has become commonplace to remark how “the world has become smaller” (which, oddly enough, means the same thing as Ortega meant when he said it had become larger) because of the worldwide extension of rapid transportation, communication and trade.

The vastly enhanced mobility no doubt plays a large role in the demographic invasion of the West. In his book Dark Star Safari, Paul Theroux more than once tells about conversations with blacks living in the miserable conditions of eastern Africa in which they say “I want to go to America.” A century ago, and most certainly two centuries ago, the mass of mankind were so rooted to the land of their particular locales that they would never have entertained such a thought.

On a national level, we recall the nineteenth-century opening up of Japan and China. Before that, they had existed unto themselves. They are now part of a global society.

4. The West’s Ubiquitous Cultural Influence on Other Cultures.

There would be some tunnel-vision involved in speaking only of the Third World’s growing impact on the West. The impact runs the other way, too, with all heretofore culturally autonomous peoples undergoing virtually irresistible influence from outside themselves.

Fifty years ago the United States was washed over by the “cultural” influence of The Beetles from Britain. In turn, France and Germany have long exhibited concern over the dissipation of their respective cultures, which they have sought to preserve against the flood of American and British influences. Imagine, then, the impact upon non-Western cultures.

A recent article by Peter Hitchens tells of “the Kingdom of Bhutan, squeezed between India and Chinese-occupied Tibet,” which has “managed to remain apart from the rest of our globalized world, partly because of its naturally fortified position thousands of feet on the edge of the great Himalayas.” He tells how “for many years, the kingdom sought to keep out television, which it saw as a great danger to its people. But five years ago the king abandoned the struggle… Everything – from wrestling to ultra-violence, bad language, and pornography – now comes howling, hissing, and roaring down from the satellites that can reach even into the most guarded and secluded valley.” An American teacher “told me of a ghastly event at one school, where he had watched little Bhutanese girls wearing make-up and western dress, bumping and grinding to the sound of rock music.” Hitchens concluded ruefully that “perhaps there is, in the end, no defense against the hot rage of the modern world that endangers every good thing.”[14]

5. Arab Pressure to Expand Its Reach.

The demographic invasion of the West includes as one of its ingredients a rapid movement of Islam into Europe and the United States. It was of some interest to me, then, when I received a copy of an article written recently for Pakistan Today, said to be “California’s most outspoken South Asian paper.” The author, a friend of mine since his school days at Wichita State University, is from Bangladesh. He writes of the threat to Bangladeshi culture from Arab encroachments: “In the past, in the Levant and Africa the cultural genocide was effected with a sword under the guise of religion. Today in Bangladesh and elsewhere, as the religious mask of the Arab invader remains intact his sword has been replaced by his abundant cash… Many poor children in the hinterlands and metropolises alike find no avenue for education but the mushrooming madrassas and maktabs run by Wahhabi funded clerics who transmit their misogyny, hatred, and prejudice to a brand new generation that is growing up to despise the culture of its forefathers.” The author speaks of “this frontal assault on our heritage.”[15]

6. The Desperate Migrations that Will be Driven by “the End of Work.”

At the present time, there is much concern in the United States about the loss of jobs to much-lower-cost workers, many in educated and technical areas, in China, India, Central America and elsewhere. But this is a transitory phenomenon. As Jeremy Rifkin has explained in his book The End of Work, the need for millions (indeed, tens and hundreds of millions) of people to “work” is progressively being done away with through the development of non-labor-intensive technology. Because until now the great mass of mankind has supported itself through income from work, an upheaval of unprecedented proportions looms as a possibility in a world that will have an abundant capacity for production but no established method for distributing that abundance to the billions who expect to eat.

Unless each society solves this problem for its people, great masses of them will be desperate to migrate from the places of their misery to the world’s centers of affluence. The advanced economies will have their own distribution problems, but, as important as they will be, they will be dwarfed by the tsunami of desperate migration. This will greatly exacerbate the “demographic invasion of the West.”

The Demographic Invasion of Europe and the United States

1. Statistics About the Influx.

Before 1965, United States’ immigration laws gave preference to Europeans, who had historically been by far the largest source. A radical redirection occurred, however, with the 1965 Immigration Act. It removed the preference, putting the whole world on an equal footing.

Since then, there has been a tidal wave of immigration from the Third World, most especially from Mexico. “In 1960,” Buchanan tells us, “only sixteen million Americans did not trace their ancestors to Europe. Today, the number is eighty million.”[16] The Mexican National Population Council has reported, based on Mexico’s 2000 census, that 9.9 million people born in Mexico now reside in the United States (a number equivalent to nine percent of Mexico’s population). An additional 400,000 stay every year. Of the 9.9 million, almost 80 percent have not become American citizens.[17]

We are told that between eight and 12 million illegal immigrants, from all countries, are now in the United States.[18] In March 2004, 42 Mexican government employees, including some immigration agents, were arrested by the Mexican government and charged with smuggling people from several countries into the United States.[19] The following October, “the [U.S.] Border Patrol said that it nabbed nearly 600,000 illegal immigrants coming into Arizona [just one of the border states] in the last year, … an increase of nearly 184,000 compared to the previous year.”[20] American television commentator Lou Dobbs says that “many illegal aliens are no longer held in jail to await deportation or processing. Rather, they are simply handed a notice to appear in court and released into the country.” The result: “The Department of Homeland Security admits that nearly a half a million people have been arrested and released, and failed to show up in court.”[21]

This has an impact most particularly on certain places, such as California, but is reshaping the demographics of the United States as a whole. Thirty-two percent of illegal immigrants – 2.2 million people – live in California. The INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] reports that during the ten years between 1990 and 2000, Georgia’s share of illegal immigrants increased from 34,000 to 228,000, while in North Carolina the figure jumped from 26,000 to 206,000.[22] The Census Bureau has reported that in just three counties in south-central Kansas the number of Hispanics grew from 19,773 in 1990 to 40,353 in 2000.[23]

What is expected for the future? In March 2004, the U.S. Census Bureau made preliminary projections that by 2050 whites will be just 50.1 percent of the U.S. population, which compares with 75 percent in 1990 and 90 percent in 1960. The number of Hispanics and Asians will almost triple, to over 100 million and 33 million, respectively. Blacks will experience a 71.3 percent increase, adding over 25 million to their present numbers.[24] A recent article on the political impact of immigration into the United States says “the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the University of California at Los Angeles estimated that by 2019 the majority of young adults living in California turning 18 years of age, and thereby becoming eligible to vote, will be Latino.”[25]

In The Death of the West, Patrick Buchanan recites in detail the similar demographic revolution occurring in Europe. The birthrate of the white population is so low that, without immigration, the population is expected to fall from 728 million in 2000 to 600 million in 2050. “Mass immigration,” Buchanan says, “has already begun. In 2000, England took in 185,000 immigrants, a record. In 1999, 500,000 illegal aliens slipped into the European Union, a tenfold increase from 1993.”[26] Elsewhere, he says that 20 million Moslems now live in Europe.[27] Anthony Browne in The Observer says that “whites will be an ethnic minority in Britain by the end of the century. Analysis of official figures indicates that, at current fertility rates and levels of immigration, there will be more non-whites than whites by 2100… Whites will be a minority in London by 2010.”[28]

2. The Many Practical Impacts.

The scope of this article will not permit us to explore exhaustively the impact on the various aspects of American life, except as they affect the conceptual issues discussed later. The magnitude of the consequences, however, is suggested by a few representative details: An article in a Claremont Institute publication says that “it is estimated that the state of California spends nearly $6 billion per year on services for illegal aliens… In 2002 alone Los Angeles County spent about $350 million providing health care for illegal immigrants.”[29] An article in the San Diego Tribune says that in 2002 the percentage of Hispanics in the San Diego County schools came to exceed that of white students for the first time.[30] Jerry Seper of the Washington Times reports that “nationwide, the Justice Department says about 40,000 illegal aliens are being held in the federal prison system, about 25 percent of the prison population.”[31]

There are positive effects, of course, but they are not to be seen in isolation from the cost of health care delivery, the expense of educating immigrants’ children, the impact on unemployment and wage-rates, the spread of ethnic gangs, heightened rates of crime, poverty, welfare, racial conflict, the bringing in of new or long-defeated diseases, and environmental effects. As to the last of these, it is to be remembered that former Colorado governor Richard Lamm recently ran for election to the national board of the Sierra Club, a major environmentalist organization, on a platform of limiting immigration as an essential to environmental protection. The fact that he was strongly opposed, and defeated, by those in control of the Sierra Club gives some indication of how much those leaders have tied environmentalism to leftist ideology. Lamm’s point seems an obvious one: that if the population of the United States goes to 600, 800 or 1,000 million, the environmental degradation will inevitably be much greater than it is today.

3. The Role of a Peoples’ Unwillingness to Do Certain Types of Work, Importing Vast Amounts of Labor from Outside.

The importation of cheap labor, such as the Chinese to work on railroad construction in the American west in the nineteenth century and Mexicans to pick grapes in the American southwest, seems to have been an important part of the economies of many societies. White South Africans generally looked with disfavor on manual labor, and this led to encouraging immigration into South Africa of large numbers of blacks who had not previously been there. We have already noted the extent to which slavery, peonage, bonded labor and serfdom provided labor-power throughout pre-modern history.

A huge pool of near-subsistence labor has often been thought economically essential. The point is made today that Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, “are willing to do work that Americans aren’t willing to do.” Victor Hanson, author of Mexifornia, says that “millions of us who used to cut our own lawns and clean our own houses now consider such tasks beneath us, as if America’s middle class has embraced as its birthright the culture and leisure once confined to an aristocratic elite. Suddenly our young people, our poor and our unskilled find jobs picking apples or laying tiles somehow demeaning. So-called dead-end jobs are no longer a rite of passage for our youth, but are deemed proper only for unskilled laborers from Mexico, whose toil, we are assured, keeps our produce, restaurants and hotels inexpensive.”[32]

There is a significant ideological twist to this, however, that is not often recognized. In the pro-immigration literature recently, the low-cost labor has been presented as a boon. What is not seen is that eventually the low remuneration and poor accommodations are presented quite militantly, by the alienated intellectual culture and by activists representing the workers themselves, as “exploitation.” What previously the main society perceived as benign is then seen, from another perspective altogether, as morally depraved. So it is that a Cesar Chavez comes to be seen as an ethnic saint. A hue-and-cry goes up that the people who came in to perform the low-pay work are victims; and this is a moral point of view for which the main society has no principled reply. The grape boycott led by Chavez received widespread support by those who proclaimed the change in moral perspective, and he is a hero whose portrait is prominently displayed in the American southwest.

We need not think back so far as to Chavez and his grape boycott. The Washington Times reported in 2004 that in California a class action suit has been filed against major supermarket chains by large numbers of Mexican workers asserting discrimination. Columnist Samuel Francis asks, with appropriate sarcasm, “Well, what else would you expect? What, after all, is the point of hiring illegal aliens if you can't exploit them in ways that you can't exploit Americans?" [33]

4. The Existential Threat to the West and to Others.

What is at issue, of course, is the continued existence of the peoples, as peoples, who are being demographically invaded. If they don’t care about their continuing, no one will; certainly it is not something that bothers the millions who are arriving, or the intellectual culture that for ideological reasons welcomes the undercutting of the existing societies. This is not a matter of science, but of the heart. It relates to values, loyalty, heritage.

Former Colorado governor Lamm gives a speech on “How to Destroy America.” In it, he says that “history shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict, and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it is a curse for a society to be bilingual.” He points to “Canada, Belgium, Malaysia and Lebanon” as among those who “all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons, and Corsicans.”[34]

Kosovo provides an excellent example. As a place, it is a virtually sacred site to Serbians. But demographically it came to be populated very heavily by immigrants from Albania, and their descendants. This posed an unanswerable conundrum: Which has the most valid moral claim as between a peoples’ national mythology and love of place, and a differing population’s “right of self-determination”?

Once the majority population of the American southwest (or perhaps more than a mere majority) comes to be Latino, what principle that Americans embrace will stand in the way of their moral claim to autonomy or independence? Short of asserting a Lincolnesque “preservation of the Union” position and resisting autonomy by force, it will be too late to argue the point about the then-population’s right to be self-governing. To those for whom such balkanization seems undesirable, the time to oppose it is before, not after, the demographic change has occurred.

5. The Prospective Role of a “Tipping Point.”

The statistics we gave earlier about the extent of the demographic change presented something of a static picture (except to the extent forecasts were made for future years). It is likely, however, that the rate of change will not remain constant, but will accelerate, because of the phenomenon of the “tipping point.” Both in terms of moral sensibility and practical politics, the more immigrants there are, the more irresistible the introduction of additional millions becomes.

Lawrence Auster comments on the ideological tipping point. He observes that once Americans had affirmed that “the only thing that defines us as a people is non-discrimination toward other peoples,” there was no longer any “justification for saying that maybe it’s not such a great idea to import people adhering to radical Islam or Mexican nationalism… Having cast aside our own culture, we had no choice but to yield, step by step, to the elevation of other cultures” [emphasis added].[35]

The political tipping point is evident in the United States when in 2004 the presidential candidates of both major political parties favored either de jure or de facto amnesty for the millions of aliens who are in the country illegally. Political competition rages for the support of the immigrant populations. This leads away from restriction and toward an even more open-door policy.

If under these pressures the influx accelerates, the forecasts for 2019, 2050 and 2100 cited earlier will be found ultimately to have been seriously understated. The loss of majority white status will occur much earlier than projected.

6. For Some Considerable Time, the Affected Societies Will Continue to Live Off of the Accumulated Cultural Capital of the Past.

It is doubtful whether Europe or the United States (or Canada, Australia and New Zealand) will be transformed overnight into Third World cultures. There is much cultural capital already present, and it takes a long process to empty a society of it. This process is already underway, as in the growing prohibition of Christian symbols from public places and the elevation of ethnic heroes and myths (such as in the delighted publicity given to the newly-created Kwansaa holiday, the Cinco de Mayo celebration, the attacks on honoring Columbus, and the like). But there is much farther to go.

A factor that will preserve European identity, albeit in increasingly circumscribed areas, is that of “white flight,” by which whites flee from cities to suburbs, from whole states to other states, and indeed from country to country. This produces oases in the form of walled communities. Because it shelters the erstwhile majority population from what they see as the less desirable features of the demographic invasion, and gives that majority an easy out, it prevents widespread opposition. Nobody “stands and fights.” That augments the “tipping point” phenomenon. At the same time, it will provide continuity, within the oases, for Western culture for so long as the oases last.

7. The Growth of Political Blocs, Separatisms and Balkanization.

Examples are legion of the extent to which ethnic bloc-formation and separatism (something very different from assimilation) are present in American life today. Separately, many of the instances are small; but together they are significant:

· The Mexican immigrant population has “their own radio and TV stations, newspapers, films, and magazines,” which according to Buchanan means “the Mexican Americans are creating an Hispanic culture separate and apart from America’s larger culture. They are becoming a nation within a nation.”[36]

· Spanish-language commercial directories listing Hispanic-owned businesses are circulated within the Hispanic community.[37]

· There is a separate Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.[38]

· Hispanic leaders organized a national boycott of California in September 2004 to protest Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto of a bill that would have allowed illegal aliens to drive lawfully.[39]

· When the governor of Kansas abolished a small Advisory Committee on Hispanic Affairs and created a “multicultural affairs office” to assist all minority groups, Hispanic leaders objected on the ground that this would dilute the attention given to Hispanic interests. Black leaders similarly called for a committee centered on black needs.[40]

· In 1996, “Ebonics,” also called “Black English,” was recognized as a “second language” in Oakland schools. This followed the American Speech, Language and Hearing Association’s classifying Ebonics as a “social dialect with its own lexicon and syntax.”[41]

· Emulating the black Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, buses carried more than 1,000 people to Washington, D.C., in September 2003 as the “Immigrant Freedom Riders.” The objective was to “gain public and congressional support for legislation that would legalize millions of illegal immigrants….”[42]

· Kwanzaa is widely promoted each December as an African-American holiday “to reflect on their heritage.” J. R. Clairborne in The Wichita Eagle explains: The “karamu” feast concludes the week-long celebration, and features the beating of African drums and the display of the red, black and green colors “introduced by the black nationalist Marcus Garvey.” The name “Kwanzaa” is Swahili for “firstfruits,” and stems from “the African harvest festival. It was created in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, the executive director of the Institute of Pan-African Studies in Los Angeles.”[43]

· The Associated Press told in 2003 of a Census analysis showing that the given names for blacks have diverged to where there is now “scarcely any racial overlap in the most popular names.” Until the 1960s, whites and blacks gave their children the same names.[44]

· It was estimated in 1993 that 50,000 people in South Florida are followers of Santeria, a Caribbean cult that practices animal sacrifice. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in that year that animal sacrifice is a religious practice protected by the First Amendment, so that it can’t be declared criminal.[45]

· Victor Hanson tells of “California’s new apartheid communities like Orange Cove, Mendota and Parlier, communities where Mexican immigrants make up the vast majority of the population and struggle with dismal schools, high crime, little revenue and other social problems akin to those in Mexico.”[46]

· Lawrence Auster gives other examples: “…the town in Texas that declared Spanish its official language; or the thousands of Hispanics at an international soccer match in Los Angeles who booed and threw garbage at the American team; or the decline in educational and environmental standards in areas dominated by Hispanics; or the Hmong people from Laos who bring shamans and witch doctors into hospital rooms; or the customs of voodoo and animal sacrifice and forced marriage and female genital mutilation that have been imported into this country….”[47]

· President Clinton signed an executive order mandating the provision of government services in foreign languages. President George W. Bush left this intact, and “started his own presidential bilingual tradition, delivering a Spanish version of his weekly national radio address,” according to Auster. “Even the White House web site is now bilingual,” with links to speeches translated into Spanish.[48]

As all this proceeds, there is no offsetting majority white bloc acting self-consciously as such. Indeed, anything on behalf of the majority is considered “racist” and hence morally reprehensible.

Ideological incoherence on an international level results in a similar double standard applied to different peoples with regard to whether it is legitimate for them to assert separate ethnic identity. Without any principle to rationalize the differences, the “world community” has supported independence for ethnic groups in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor, but has thought independence beyond question for, say, the Kurds, the Congolese province of Katanga several years ago, and Flanders.

8. The Threat of Entry by Terrorists.

In June 2004, a press report said “the Department of Homeland Security figures that 2.3 million people are in the [United States] on expired visas, but the GAO [General Accounting Office] said the real number is considerably higher because federal officials didn’t count millions of Mexicans and Canadians, and because the government tracks exiting visitors haphazardly.”[49] The relevance of this to the terrorist threat inside the United States is obvious. It is illustrated by the fact that Mohammed A. Salameh from Palestine’s West Bank, who was considered the main suspect in the 1993 bombing of New York City’s World Trade Center, had in 1988 entered the United States on a one-year visa — and had stayed as an illegal alien.[50]

Staying after the expiration of visas is one way for terrorists to arrive. Another possibility appeared when U.S. officials discovered that between 1999 and 2002 the operator of a Lebanese café in Tijuana, Mexico, smuggled no less than 300 Arabs into the United States.[51] If, as we have seen, as many as 600,000 illegal aliens entered the country in just one border state recently, an indeterminate number of them could be coming as terrorists. The inescapable conclusion is that this fact alone makes a charade out of U. S. homeland security efforts.

9. Creation of a Two-Tiered System of Rights.

Ironically, Americans have championed a “colorblind society” at the same time they have permitted their legal, political elite to create a two-tiered system with one set of rules for the majority and another for minorities. The most egregious expression of this came when Mary Berry, the Chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, said that “civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them.”[52]

The legal double-standard had its origin in Justice Harlan Fiske Stone’s famous “Footnote Four” to the decision in United States v. Carolene Products, 304 U.S. 144 (1938). Arguably, this footnote constitutes a “third Constitution” for the United States, if the original Constitution and the post-Civil War amendments are counted as, in effect, the first two. The 1938 decision laid down a revolutionary paradigm that has now governed the United States for two-thirds of a century.

What Footnote Four said was that governments can do almost anything they wish in regulating economic relationships, since the governmental action there will be judged by a judicially unquestioned “rational basis” test. Three other areas of governmental activity, however, would be subject to “strict judicial scrutiny.” These three are (1) where a specifically enumerated Constitutional right is involved, (2) where something relates to democratic process, and (3) where the rights of “discrete and insular minorities” are concerned. This has given rise to a “double track,” as distinguished from a unified, system. The mainstream society has virtually no judicial protection from governmental power, while at the same time certain specific liberties are given exaggerated emphasis (as where the First Amendment is said to bar a libel suit against a cartoon depicting Rev. Jerry Falwell having intercourse with his mother), and minorities have stringent protection that others don’t receive.

In late 2004, Hispanic newspaper columnist Mary Sanchez pointed out a 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that to Hispanics matched in importance the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, the 50^th anniversary of which was then being celebrated. She spoke of Hernandez v. Texas, which she said “was the first time Mexican-Americans won the legal argument that they were a distinct ethnic group worthy of constitutional protection… Before, the fact that they were white racially was used to muffle the reality of their situation.”[53] In other words, they were defined as a “discrete and insular minority” under the Footnote Four distinctions.

The double-track system of rights has been reinforced by legislation and social double standards. Thus, as Victor Hanson tells us, “California extends in-state tuition discounts to resident illegal immigrants, even as it charges nearly triple the in-state amount for American citizens from Arizona, Nevada and other states.”[54] And at the same time that college scholarships set aside specifically for white students are strictly forbidden, it is acceptable, according to a press report, that “Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates pledged Thursday to donate $1 billion for college scholarships for minority students….”[55]

The two-tiered system is not limited to the United States. In an article on “Race in Scandinavia,” Mikael Widmark says that in Sweden “in more and more cases they [immigration opponents] have been imprisoned for violating the Swedish law against ‘incitement to ethnic hatred’” – to which he adds that it is “a law used only against Swedes and never against immigrants.” For their part, “immigrants can write just about anything.” He tells of one article where the author says, “may the western world of the white race perish in blood and suffering.” The author “has not been charged with ‘incitement of ethnic hatred.’”[56]

Nuances of Multiculturist Ideology

1. The Ideology is Ubiquitous Among the Academic-Managerial-Professional Elite.

Continuing stress on multiculturalism and the goal of “diversity” is everywhere to be found within academic life, American corporations and professional circles. The number of examples is so great that we will content ourselves here with simply giving a couple of illustrations.

The Wichita, Kansas, newspaper carried a story recently reporting that “Sedgwick County will begin an initiative this week that will place more emphasis on diversity training, including classes, discussions and cultural community events… Manager Bill Buchanan said he would like to see it become mandatory… The transition may result in requiring managers to earn a ‘diversity certificate’ through training.”[57] It is difficult to imagine that in such a context managers or employees will not endanger their careers by voicing any opinion contrary to those taught as mandatory.

Typically, at Wichita State University there is a “Multicultural Resource Center.” Among its activities, it publishes an annual “Diversity Calendar,” offers “minority mentoring” and circulates a quarterly newsletter.

2. Sources of Ideological Support.

Two significant sources of support for the ideology come from what many would suppose to be the “conservative” side: many classical liberals, who support an individualistic perspective; and “libertarians,” who take their individualism to even greater lengths. Historically, each has focused almost exclusively on what used to be called “political economy,” not feeling it necessary to inquire into the cultural preconditions of the free society they advocate. Their ideologies are universalist in positing truths that they see as good for all mankind, and in that context they reject any particularlist concern about a specific nation or people. (Here we are speaking of the ideological proclivity of many adherents, and certainly don’t wish to suggest that there have not been other thinkers for whom these generalizations don’t hold true.) Victor Hanson expresses his surprise at the lack of cultural conservatism among those who hold to free market and/or libertarian ideas when he speaks of “the Orwellian alliance of many libertarian-leaning conservatives… with the race industry of the Left.”[58] As always, Lawrence Auster has an excellent grasp: “The reason Americans cannot effectively oppose the transformation of our culture is that they subscribe to the belief system that has led to it… What is that belief system? At its core, it is the quintessentially American notion that everyone is the same under the skin – that people should only be seen as individuals, with no reference to their historic culture, their ethnicity, their religion, their race.”[59]

The global market, with jobs and capital flowing to the places of lowest-cost production, has brought to the fore an aspect of classical and neo-classical economics that has always been present, but that under other conditions has not precipitated a split between those who do and those who do not take culture into account. Hal Netkin tells how when he was a “head hunter” in the professional employment business he talked with one executive about out-sourcing, and was told “the purpose of corporate globalization is not to enhance the number of jobs in the U.S. It is to maximize the corporations’ profits.”[60] The newsletter of the Acton Institute expresses the core idea in more theoretical terms that are traceable to the classical economist David Ricardo, when it says that “world economic integration… permits workers in all countries to specialize in what they do best and to trade with others based on the division of labor.” Overwhelmingly, the intellectual tradition coming out of classical economics has embraced this view and has rejected the nationally-particularist theory of a market economy formulated in the early nineteenth century by Friedrich List.[61]

Another ideological source of multiculturalism today comes from the “neo-conservative” school that is so influential in the George W. Bush administration. Representative of this viewpoint is Ben J. Wattenberg’s book The First Universal Nation. In a review, Daniel Vining says that to Wattenberg “the first ‘universal nation’ means that the U.S. is rapidly becoming a country with all the diverse races and ethnic groups of the world in it… According to Wattenberg, the U.S. is made up of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants… Because [of this], he argues, it is therefore uniquely able to prosper….”[62] Along the same lines, Washington Times editor Wesley Pruden has written that “immigration is the life’s blood of the nation, the source of the vitality and industry that is the envy of the world….”[63]

Closely tied to the free-market and neo-conservative groups just mentioned in supporting massive immigration are American “big business” and agricultural interests. Television commentator Lou Dobbs has provided extensive coverage to business and agriculture’s support for large-scale immigration. He says “the ethnic advocacy groups provide the moral outrage and racial politics, while the business community provides the political influence, the big guns and the big money to prevent law enforcement [against illegal entry].”[64] The support from business and agriculture comes from the competitive pressure of the global market that makes it imperative to be the “low-cost producer,” and from a mindset, born out of the ideologies just mentioned, that does not regard identifying with cultural continuity as a part of loyalty to ones country.

3. The Concept that the United States is a “Creedal Nation” (also called a “Proposition Nation”).

The idea that the United States finds its essence in a set of ideas, and at the same time denies any role to culture or continuity as a people, was succinctly expressed in 1994 in a statement written for neo-conservatives William Bennett and Jack Kemp: “[T]he American national identity is not based on ethnicity, or race, or national origin, or religion. The American national identity is based on a creed, on a set of principles and ideas.”[65] In his First Inaugural, President George W. Bush said “America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals….”[66] Although he is highly critical of the position, Lawrence Auster explains the concept well: “Since the end of World War II, and especially since the 1960s, conservatives have tended to define America not in terms of its historic civilization and peoplehood, but almost exclusively in terms of the individual – the individual under God and the individual as an economic actor.”[67] (Of course, I indicated above that this omission of the role of culture actually goes back as far as the origins of classical liberalism as found in classical and neo-classical economics.) This combination of affirmation and denial is the basis for the term “creedal nation,” or its twin “proposition nation.”

If we analyze the “creedal nation” concept, we see that it ignores the distinction between early-American immigration and that now occurring. The American colonies were formed by migration to the New World of peoples from Great Britain and northern Europe. These peoples had a great deal in common, and assimilated in a “melting pot” into something easily identifiable as the “American people.” For a number of years beginning with the revolutionary year 1848 in Europe, extensive immigration entered from Eastern Europe, Russia and the northern-Mediterranean countries. This altered the culture and ethnic nature of the American population in countless ways. Since 1965, there has been a third source for immigration – the Third World. Large numbers have come in from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Simply to say that “we are a nation of immigrants” obscures these distinctions in American history, and in effect shows no affinity for the “peoplehood” the American people once represented.

The concept further brushes aside the fact that the American “creed” is very different from what it was a century ago, and will almost certainly be very different in a few years from what it is now. To proclaim that the conventional wisdom among America’s current elite has an ultimate truth to it that allows it to serve as an anchor for national identity is suppositious in the extreme. Nothing is shakier or of more recent invention than the current mix of ideas and double standards. (A realization of this is important in critiquing the idea of a “creedal nation,” and it is equally important in recognizing one of the fallacies behind the doctrine that the United States should now crusade to make the whole world over in its current image. Conventional thinking in the United States today would certainly not want to crusade to refashion the world in the image of what the United States stood for even so recently as fifty years ago. There is a certain arrogance in the presumption that suddenly the United States has hit upon a mix of ideas that is so much nearer to perfection that it can be made the standard to which all nations should be pressured to repair.)

Further, the “creedal nation” concept fails to understand the richness and virtually existential differences among cultures worldwide. The assumption is that immigrants from anywhere in the world will be anxious to adopt the America