Hi to everyone here at Alexandria!
I’m generally skeptical of multiculturalism because it can undermine the ‘melting pot’ approach to life and immigration here in the United States. When multiculturalism becomes an entrenched governing philosophy, it can eat away at the best assimilator of immigrants we have: A strong economy. After all, economic opportunity and political liberty are two of America’s strongest draws, and two of our freedoms most worth preserving, intimately connected as they are. Working alongside someone in an office can breed familiarity, if not fellow-feeling and friendship.
It often takes a couple of generations for new arrivals to assimilate into American culture, and I don’t believe it’s easy. There can be active discrimination, to be sure. There are certain discriminatory practices I even support prohibiting to achieve equality under the law.
Yet, multiculturalism often balkanizes groups under its banner. It rewards racial and group identity politics, and it can erode equality under the law and many Americans’ sense of fairness as a nation of laws. Political activism, politics, and the treasury too easily become the prizes for these competing groups to get a ‘piece of the pie.’ Laws can be used as levers to reward friends and punish enemies as a political system of patronage develops, much as it has in our big-city machine politics. It can get ugly.
So, dear reader, I was greatly comforted when I read Bernhard Henri-Levy before the 2008 election:
“And one of the reasons I am so much in favor of [Senator Barack] Obama is that his election might be, will be—because I think he will be elected—a real end to this tide of competition of victimhood, and especially on the specific ground of the two communities, Jews and African Americans, who were so close in the 1960s”
…”The Obama election would reconstitute the grand alliance.”
Hail the grand alliance!
After some digging, I found out this black/jewish alliance was strong indeed. Here are further examples from my extensive research. From The Kentucky Fried Movie, Cleopatra Schwartz (NSFW):
“She was six feet of black dynamite. He was a short Hasidic Jew:“
Tom Wolfe wrote about the Black Panthers showing up at Leonard Bernstein’s place: Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic: That Party At Lenny’s.
I’d venture to say that many Americans share in a definition of individual liberty more linked up with organized religion (more so in the past) along with our traditions, institutions, clubs and civic organizations. Most of these organizations allow us to choose for ourselves the obligations we have to our fellow citizens outside of government and away from enforced, top down, collectivist political philosophies.
Perhaps we are simply not ready for Henri-Levy’s more libertine, radical, French liberalism, which he displayed by coming over in the spirit of Tocqueville and pissing on the sides of our highways. Why, he even helped Obama and Hillary Clinton pursue a course of action in Libya.
It’s good to know victim-hood and identity politics are in the rear-view mirror.
Hail the grand alliance!
-Cross-posted-
Welcome! Ahh, if only victimhood were gone.
Steve
Steve, but we’re almost there.
Can’t you see the glorious future that awaits in service of our betters, as the horizon shifts ever out of view?
It strikes me that you didn’t really put your heart into the whole “research” thing: Kentucky Fried Movie? Tom Wolfe? In any case, if a 2008 comment from Bernard-Henri Levy is really the best you’ve got for tilting at whichever windmill–multiculturalism? victimhood?–you have in mind, I suggest you might want to find something a little more current and written by someone slightly more relevant. If you’ve read Mr. Levy’s book LEFT IN DARK TIMES (also from 2008), you’d see that he has many critical things to say about the European left (really, that’s the whole point of the book), and about what he considers to be a new “progressive anti-Semitism” and a weak-kneed tolerance towards Islamic fundamentalism. He’s obscure enough in this country to be an easy target; but really, why are you bothering?
Jack, it was an attempt at humor, not serious research. I have read Left In Dark Times, and was impressed by the stands against anti-Americanism, and the changing demographics of Europe. Henri-Levy goes deep.
But alas, I disagree with the overall rationalist project, from which he comes. I’ll have to make those arguments more clearly going forward.