What is their grudge against the old America that eats at their heart?
In 1976, presidential candidate Jimmy Carter defended ethnic enclaves formed by free association and pledged not to use federal power to reengineer them.
I am not going to use the Federal Government’s authority deliberately to circumvent the natural inclination of people to live in ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods.… I think it is good to maintain the homogeneity of neighborhoods if they’ve been established that way.7
To define these communities Carter used the phrase “ethnic purity”: “I have nothing against a community that’s made up of people who are Polish or Czechoslovakian or French-Canadian, or black, who are trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination on the part of people.”8
What Carter said of neighborhoods is what Americans who oppose mass immigration say about their country: “This is a natural inclination on the part of people.” It is those who are so repelled by the ethnic character of the old America that they wish to see it expunged whose motivations need to be explored and explained.
When the 1992 Los Angeles riot erupted in the spring of that year, and Koreans and whites were attacked in the worst urban violence since the New York draft riot of 1863, Vice President Dan Quayle was in Japan. When his host inquired if perhaps the United States was not suffering from too much diversity, Quayle responded, “I begged to differ with my host. I explained that our diversity is our strength.”9
One imagines the Japanese were unpersuaded. So fearful is Japan of the diversity Dan Quayle celebrates, the Japanese refuse to open the country to immigration, even with a birthrate that is more accurately described as a death rate. Has Japan suffered from a lack of diversity? Though reduced to rubble in 1945, and only the size of Montana with fewer resources, Japan still boasts an economy one-third that of the United States and is in some ways our superior in manufacturing and technology.
DIVERSITY AS IDEOLOGY
All of us appreciate a diversity of restaurants and food—French, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Mexican, Serb, Thai, and Greek, for example. This adds spice to life. A diversity of views in politics makes for more interesting debate and better decisions. Thus freedom of speech and the press are protected. Academic freedom is sheltered in colleges and universities for the same reason. We learn from hearing what we did not know and from those with whom we may not agree.
There is also a beneficial diversity of function in society. In building a home, one needs an architect, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, masons, roofers, and a foreman. In a symphony orchestra, there is a diversity of talents and instruments: strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion—violins, cellos, clarinets, trumpets, French horns, trombones, tubas, harps, all synchronized by one conductor. On an NFL team, quarterbacks have different talents than running backs. Tight ends are bigger and stronger, but slower than wide receivers. Linebackers and safeties have complementary but different duties. Place kickers and punters are specialists. The diversity with which this chapter deals is an ideological concept. As Peter Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars and author of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, writes, diversity (which he italicizes) refers to a “contemporary set of beliefs … distinct from its older meanings.”10
Diversity bids us to think of America not as a single garment but as divided up into separate groups—on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex, for starters—some of which have historically enjoyed privileges that have been denied the others.
Diversity.… is above all a political doctrine asserting that some social categories deserve compensatory privileges in light of the prejudicial ways in which members of these categories have been treated in the past and the disadvantages they continue to face.11
The ideology of diversity instructs us that, as women and people of color were discriminated against in our past, justice dictates that they receive preferential treatment in hiring, promotions, admissions, and contracts until the equality of sexes and races is achieved.
Beyond being simple justice, we are told, diversity is morally and socially beneficial, leading America to a better place than any nation has ever been. The exhilaration that marks the diversity enthusiast is akin to that of journalist Lincoln Steffens when he came home from Lenin’s Russia exclaiming, “I have been over into the future—and it works!” Again, Wood writes:
The ideal of diversity is that once individuals of diverse backgrounds are brought together, a transformation will take place in people’s attitudes—primarily within the members of the formerly exclusive group, who will discover the richness of the newcomers’ cultural background.12
Wood is saying that, under this ideology, as diversity takes hold of America, white men, whose fathers ran the country to the exclusion of women, African Americans, and Native Americans, will come to appreciate and embrace what their fathers never knew—the beauty and beneficence of diversity. America is striding toward a brave new world that will make her the envy and model for all mankind. Here is Wood describing the “ideal of diversity.”
Diversity will breed tolerance and respect, and because it increases the pool of skills, will enhance the effectiveness of work groups and contribute to economic prosperity. In the more extended flights of the diversiphile’s imagination, diversity creates good will and social betterment in every direction. The African-American manager, the gay white secretary, and the Latino consultant learn from each other’s distinctive cultural experience and become better workers, better citizens, better persons.13
In We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, Derbyshire capitalizes diversity when using it in Wood’s context, and advances his own “Diversity Theorem”:
Different populations, of different races, customs, religions and preferences, can be mixed together in any number or proportions at all, with harmonious result. Not only will the result be harmonious, it will be beneficial to all the people thus mixed. They will be better and happier than if they had been left to stagnate in dull homogeneity.
A corollary to this Diversity Theorem states that if the experiment were to be carried out on a nation … then the nation would be made stronger and better by an increase in Diversity, so long as the system was controlled by properly approved and trained Diversity managers. It would be more peaceful, more prosperous, better educated, more cultivated, better able to defend itself against its enemies. Diversity is our strength!14
Diversity, as Woods and Derbyshire describe it, is utopian, in that it envisions a nation that has never before existed. Yet, this utopian vision has America’s elite enraptured. “America’s diversity is our greatest strength,” said Bill Clinton.15 “Diversity is one of America’s greatest strengths,” echoed George W. Bush.16 Google the exact quote, “Diversity is our greatest strength,” and you get around twenty thousand results.
To former NATO commander Wesley Clark, a candidate for his party’s presidential nomination in 2004, “Democrats have always believed that our diversity is our greatest strength whether in our schools, our workplaces, our government or our courts.”17 Well, not exactly, as the general, who grew up in Arkansas, knows well. For it was his Democratic Party that maintained segregation for a century after slavery, and his Democratic governor Orval Faubus who, in 1957, could not tolerate the presence of a single black student at Little Rock High School. As Wood writes:
Once upon a time Americans encountered the world’s diversity with awe, anger, prejudice, disgust, erotic excitement, pity, delight—and curiosity. Then we recast ourselves as champions of tolerant diversity, became fearful of inconvenient facts, and lost interest.18
Indeed, the old concept of America, as melting-pot nation, was about melding immigrant Irish, Italians, Germans, Jews, Poles, Greeks, Czechs, and Slovaks into Americans. The melting pot was about the abolition of diversity and the Americanization of immigrants, which is why our multiculturalists reject it as an instrument of cultural genocide.
THE FOUNDERS’ FEARS
“In our diversity is our strength” is now an article of faith of our ruling class. To ridicule the notion as risible, unrooted in history, and an affront to common sense is to identify oneself as a reactionary or racist.
When did diversity and multiculturalism become national treasures? For this was surely not so in colonial times.
The first decision of the Jamestown settlers was to build a fort to protect themselves from the Indians they held responsible for exterminating the colony known as Roanoke. An Indian raid in 1622, resulting in the massacre of a third of all the Jamestown colonists, appeared to vindicate their judgment that “red men” were mortal enemies who must be driven out of the lands they claimed in the name of England.
The colonists were WASP supremacists. Without moral qualms, they drove the Indians over the mountains and established a society of white and Christian men and women along with African slaves. Catholics were unwelcome. Priests were put back on the boats that brought them. Virginia had been named for the “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth, who was determined to complete the work of her father, Henry VIII, who sought to end religious diversity in England by eradicating Catholicism.
America was largely settled by colonists from the British Isles. Nearly two centuries after Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, when Washington took his oath as president, the thirteen states were 99 percent Protestant. In 1790, U.S. citizenship was opened up for “free white persons” of “moral character.” No others need apply.
To the English, Scots-Irish, Welsh, and Dutch, however, there had been added Germans whose presence in Pennsylvania alarmed that icon of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin.
Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation … and as few of the English understand the German Language, and so cannot address them either from the Press or Pulpit, ’tis almost impossible to remove any prejudices they once entertain.… Not being used to Liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it.…
Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.19
With the end of the French and Indian War, German immigration receded, easing the concerns of Dr. Franklin. Yet General Washington shared his fears. In peril at Valley Forge, he did not mean to entrust the cause to immigrants: “Let none but Americans stand guard tonight.”
In Federalist No. 2, John Jay looked out and saw a nation of common blood, faith, language, history, customs, culture, and principles:
Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.20
Jay is describing the nation of Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson, and he is saying it is our sameness that makes it possible for us to endure and succeed as a great nation. Jay goes on to issue this warning:
This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.21
Here Jay expresses the fear that this country, so fitting for a “band of bretheren, united to each other by the strongest ties,” could be lost, should the nation “split into a number of unsocial, jealous and alien sovereignties.”
Today we embrace what our fathers feared.
Celebrants of diversity point to the Irish immigration of the 1840s and the great wave of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe from 1890 to 1920. America, they argue, despite nativist fears, successfully integrated these diverse peoples into one nation. They ignore the crucial elements that made America work.
All these people were Europeans. All were white. Almost all were Christian. After each wave of immigration, there were long periods of little or no immigration that gave America time to assimilate the newcomers. And before they were fully assimilated, their children and grandchildren passed through deeply patriotic public and parochial schools where they were immersed in the language, literature, history, and traditions of this unique people. Today, however, those schools have been converted into madrassas of modernity where it is forbidden to invoke the faith of our fathers and American history is often taught as a series of crimes against peoples of color.
Until 1965, U.S. immigration laws were written with one goal: to preserve the European character of the country. During the debate on the Immigration Law of 1965, Edward Kennedy, chairman of the subcommittee conducting the hearings, was passionate in his reassurances that the new law would not break with tradition or alter the nation’s ethnic character.
[O]ur cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same.… Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.… Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [this bill] S. 500 will not inundate America with immigrants from any other country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.22
Only haters would tell such lies, Kennedy stormed: “The charges I have mentioned are highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact. They are out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship. They breed hate of our heritage.”23
Kennedy was assuring a nation that, in a 1965 Harris poll, said that, by two to one, it did not want any increase at all in immigration.
What has happened since 1965, the diminution and displacement of the European majority, was done against the will of the majority of Americans. For decades, Americans have told pollsters they want immigration restricted and illegal aliens sent home. But what Americans want no longer seems to matter.
“A FUTURE RICH WITH PROMISE”
Hua Hsu, author of “The End of White America?” awaits eagerly the day when white Americans are a minority. “For some, the disappearance of this centrifugal core heralds a future rich with promise,” he writes, and quotes President Bill Clinton’s “now-famous address to students at Portland State University,” where he declared, “In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States.” Professor Hsu continues,
Not everyone was so enthused. Clinton’s remarks caught the attention of another anxious Buchanan—Pat Buchanan, the conservative thinker. Revisiting the president’s speech in his 2001 book, The Death of the West, Buchanan wrote: “Mr. Clinton assured us that it will be a better America when we are all minorities and realize true ‘diversity.’ Well, those students [at Portland State] are going to find out, for they will spend their golden years in a Third World America.”
Today, the arrival of what Buchanan derided as “Third World America” is all but inevitable.24
What Clinton and Hsu see as inevitable is so only if the American people permit it to happen. Still, one wonders, why does the ascendancy and eventual rule of America by people of color mean a better America? Where is the multiracial, multiethnic country that is a better place than the country we grew up in? Everywhere we look, racially and ethnically diverse nations are tearing themselves apart.
Historians will look back in stupefaction at twentieth- and twenty-first-century Americans who believed the magnificent republic they inherited would be enriched by bringing in scores of millions from the failed states of the Third World.
Where has diversity not been a cause of division?
Is a diversity of languages a strength? Ask the Canadians and Belgians whose countries are forever on the cusp of breaking up over language difference
s.
“Language is only the most obvious problem introduced by diversity,” writes Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Peter Skerry in “Beyond Sushiology: Does Diversity Work?” He uses “sushiology” to describe the syndrome that afflicts those who see “the extraordinary variety and quality of ethnic cuisine now available in the United States as evidence of the unalloyed benefits from our racial and ethnic diversity.”25
In Genesis, the pride-intoxicated people of Earth decide to build a great tower to reach up to heaven—in a challenge to Yahweh.
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.…
[L]et us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth.…
Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
Did the God of the Pentateuch strengthen the people he had created when he destroyed the unity of their language and scattered them to the four corners of the earth? To hear men endlessly recite this mindless mantra, “Our diversity is our strength,” when tribal, ethnic, and religious diversity is tearing nations to pieces, is to recall Orwell: Only an intellectual could make a statement like that. No ordinary man could be such a fool.
THE FLIGHT FROM DIVERSITY
Do today’s Americans truly cherish diversity? Why, then, when free to associate, do so many Americans separate and segregate themselves?
In his essay “Equality,” Harvard professor Orlando Patterson writes that though they “have been almost wholly accepted into the public sphere of American life,”
[B]lack Americans remain remarkably excluded from most regions of the nation’s private sphere. They are more segregated now than ever, have astonishingly few intimate friendships with non-blacks, and are the most endogamous group in the nation.… This apartness … has worsened even as blacks’ public integration has progressed apace.26
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