“The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society”, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

160 pages, W.W. Norton & Co., ISBN-13: 978-0393033809

The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. is from way back in…1992, just when I was discovering my political philosophy; as such it was a real eye-opener to the manner in which the modern American Left thinks and operates, for though it is a quarter of a century old (!), the arguments and warnings put forward within its covers are, sadly, only all too relevant. Schlesinger’s eminence as an historian wasn’t enough to protect him, or his book, from the usual smears, as it was such an uncompromising look at the fraud of multiculturalism and Afrocentrism that he and it had to be destroyed (See? Some things never change). While (sadly) predictable, the hostile response to The Disuniting of America was particularly discouraging, for it is difficult to imagine a book expressing greater compassion for the racial frustrations that Schlesinger saw as fueling Afrocentrism or greater candor about the past injustices of American society and historiography – and if a card-carrying liberal like Schlesinger could be denounced as nothing more than a neo-Nazi propagandist (the man was the court-historian for the Kennedy Administration, fer chrissake!) than any possibility for a good-faith discussion has been strangled in its crib.

Schlesinger’s thesis is that the “Cult of Ethnicity” that has commandeered the universities of the Western World imperils the very basis of the American experiment, for although multiculturalists may think they own the patent on “diversity”, Schlesinger shows that this so-called diversity that they peddle has been America’s trademark since its very inception; America’s unique admixture of peoples has prompted both native-born and foreign observers to ask: “What can hold so variegated a nation together?” From the 18^th to the 20^th Centuries the answer has remained constant: the “American Creed”, for as Gunnar Myrdal, the notable Swedish economist wrote in 1944, Americans hold in common “the most explicitly expressed system of general ideals” of any country in the West: the ideals of equality and the inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity. It is adherence to those ideals, not one’s race, original nationality, or ethnicity, that makes one an American. Today, says Schlesinger, the American identity is in jeopardy as multiculturalism and Afrocentrism elevate the racial and ethnic identities of various and competing groups over everyone’s natural national affiliation. At the end of this road, he warns, lie Yugoslavia and other contemporary battlegrounds of racial and ethnic separatism. While the analogy may seem a touch overwrought, there can be no question that multiculturalists are playing with weapons that can wreak havoc on our already inadequate schools, our social structure and economy.

In defense of their policies, multiculturalists routinely cite the sins of the European “canon” against which they are rebelling, an allegedly monolithic, exclusive, and intellectually repressive structure which, in the words of a leading Afrocentrist, is “killing [black] children, killing their minds”. Western culture as a whole, they add, is the world’s leading source of racism, imperialism, sexism, and all-around nastiness. Yet as Schlesinger points out, the Western canon – a fluid, immensely complex cultural inheritance that contains voices of rage and protest as well as voices of celebration and devotion – is precisely what has inspired the great black political theorists and philosophers, not to mention innumerable critics of the West both white and black. And though Schlesinger can be severe about the West’s failure to live up to its ideals, including the treatment of blacks and other minorities, he is scathing on the relative merits of other cultures compared with ours:

There is surely no reason for Western civilization to have guilt trips laid on it by champions of cultures based on despotism, superstition, tribalism, and fanaticism. In this regard the Afrocentrists are especially absurd. The West needs no lectures on the superior virtue of those “sun people” who sustained slavery until Western imperialism abolished it (and, it is reported, sustain it to this day in Mauritania and the Sudan), who still keep women in subjection and cut off their clitorises, who carry out racial persecutions not only against Indians and other Asians but against fellow Africans from the wrong tribes, who show themselves either incapable of operating a democracy or ideologically hostile to the democratic idea, and who in their tyrannies and massacre, their Idi Amins and Boukassas, have stamped with utmost brutality on human rights.

The eloquence and erudition of The Disuniting of America make its hostile reception all the more disturbing. Reading this book, one is torn between admiration for its arguments and the sad conviction that they are utterly futile. To warn against the dissolution of our common national ideals and our common culture holds little threat for people who claim, however speciously, that they never shared those ideals and were never part of that culture. One of the most pernicious effects of multiculturalism has been to destroy the linguistic ground necessary to debate it. For such a debate would have to invoke terms like “we” and “commonality”. Yet multiculturalists reject any such appeal to an American “we” as an act of imperialist violence. The only language that remains is that of an increasingly narrow “us” versus an increasingly alien “them” – and this is the language of civil war.