[Mb-civic] The Death of MulticulturalismBy DAVID BROOKS

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 27, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Death of Multiculturalism
By DAVID BROOKS

In 1994 multiculturalism was at its high-water mark, and Richard Bernstein
wrote "Dictatorship of Virtue," describing its excesses: the campus speech
codes, the forced sensitivity training, the purging of dead white males from
curriculums, the people who had their careers ruined by dubious charges of
racism, sexism and ethnocentrism.

Then two years later, the liberal writer Michael Tomasky published "Left for
Dead," which argued that the progressive movement was being ruined by
multicultural identity politics. Democrats have lost the ability to talk to
Americans collectively, Tomasky wrote, and seem to be a collection of
aggrieved out-groups: feminists, blacks, gays and so on.

At the time, Bernstein and Tomasky were lonely voices on the left, and the
multiculturalists struck back. For example, Martin Duberman slammed
Tomasky's book in The Nation, and defended multiculturalism:

"The radical redefinitions of gender and sexuality that are under discussion
in feminist and queer circles contain a potentially transformative challenge
to all 'regimes of the normal.' The work of theorists like Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Jeffrey Weeks, Marjorie Garber and Judith Butler represents a
deliberate systemic affront to fixed modes of being and patterns of power.
They offer brilliant (if not incontrovertible) postulates about such
universal matters as the historicity and fluidity of sexual desire, the
performative nature of gender, and the multiplicity of impulses, narratives
and loyalties that lie within us all."

Duberman insisted that postmodern multicultural theorizing would transform
politics, but today his gaseous review reads as if it came from a different
era, like an embarrassing glimpse of leisure suits in an old home movie.

That's because over the past few years, multiculturalism has faded away. A
different sort of liberalism is taking over the Democratic Party.

Multiculturalism is in decline for a number of reasons. First, the identity
groups have ossified. The feminist organizations were hypocritical during
the Clinton impeachment scandal, and both fevered and weak during the
Roberts and Alito hearings. Meanwhile, the civil rights groups have become
stale and uninteresting.

Second, the Democrats have come to understand that they need to pay less
attention to minorities and more to the white working class if they ever
want to become the majority party again. Third, the intellectual energy on
the left is now with the economists. People who write about inequality are
more vibrant than people who write about discrimination.

Fourth and most important, 9/11 happened. The attacks aroused feelings of
national solidarity, or a longing for national solidarity, that discredited
the multiculturalists' tribalism.

Tomasky is now back with an essay in The American Prospect in which he
argues that it is time Democrats cohered around a big idea ‹ not diversity,
and not individual rights, but the idea of the common good. The Democrats'
central themes, Tomasky advises, should be that we're all in this together;
we are all part of a larger national project; we all need to make some
shared sacrifices and look beyond our narrow self-interest. Tomasky is
hoping for a candidate who will ignore the demands of the single-issue
groups and argue that all Americans have a stake in reducing economic
fragmentation and social division.

Coincidentally, two other liberal writers, John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira,
have just finished a long study that comes out in exactly the same place.
Surveying mountains of polling data, they conclude that the Democrats' chief
problem is that people don't think they stand for anything. Halpin and
Teixeira argue that the message voters respond to best is the notion of
shared sacrifice for the common good. After years of individualism from
right and left, they observe, people are ready for an appeal to citizenship.

Naturally, this approach has weaknesses. Unlike in 1964, most Americans no
longer trust government to be the altruistic champion of the common good,
even if they wish it could. And while writers and voters talk about the
common good, politicians are wired to think about their team. Harry Reid and
Chuck Schumer will never ask their people to make sacrifices, but until they
do, the higher talk of common good will sound like bilge.

Nonetheless, the decline of multiculturalism and the rebirth of liberal
American nationalism is a significant event. Democrats are purging the last
vestiges of the New Left and returning to the older civic liberalism of the
1950's and early 1960's.

Goodbye, Jesse Jackson. Goodbye, Gloria Steinem. Hello, Harry Truman.

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