Multiculturalists Ignore the Great, Glorious Anglo Traditions

"I want to know when we're going to have the White Anglo Saxon Protestant parade," a woman friend of mine exclaimed one Sunday last spring. This remark came, not coincidentally, in the midst of "Paradetide," as a priest at St. Thomas Church on 5th Ave. has wittily dubbed it, that long season of Sundays each spring during which one segment after another of our gorgeous mosaic takes over 5th Ave., celebrating its "identity" and making much of Manhattan unusable to everyone else.

The thought of a WASP parade gives rise to some amusement. Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers marching in their sober Sabbath garb? Wiry old ladies and gentlemen dressed in golf clothes, politely crocked on martinis sipped from silver flasks?

My friend's remark was facetious but it pointed to an important reality. Lost in the multicultural hysteria in which we live today is any sense of acknowledgment of the historic foundations of the country in which so many of us enjoy such unprecedented freedom and prosperity. It is not so much as a separate, self-identified ethnicity that the so-called WASP assumes importance, but as a representative of the Anglo tradition of individual rights, rule of law and private property that formed the basis of our country and the sense of peoplehood that we are all meant to share, and upon which the contributions of later groups, including my own, have been built.

Multiculturalists seem ignorant of this. Perhaps they fancy that our freedoms are just a force of nature that will always exist even if we do nothing to cherish them, to pass them on or to understand their historic basis. Far from gratefully acknowledging the unique particularity of the society we are privileged to inhabit, multicultural education denigrates the American founding as racist and exclusionist, despite its proven capacity to expand and to correct earlier injustices. Far from honoring the Founders themselves for their wisdom and courage, and for the genius of what they bestowed on us, the multiculturalist derides them as "old white men" and meanspiritedly picks at their flaws.

Perhaps multiculturalists think that the universality of American ideals makes the particularity of our country unimportant. While this may be true to a certain extent, it is obvious that even universal ideals must have historic form to be of use to human beings and human societies. These ideals must be embodied in particular institutions, documents and symbols, and they must be preserved in a people's shared memory of the heroic ancestors who sacrificed to establish them. Our particularity is especially important to ponder and commemorate because, despite the theoretical universality of our ideals, most peoples of the world have been unwilling or unable to put them into practice.

As the country expanded ethnically in the 19th and early 20th centuries, an unwritten pact was struck. The people who had come here earlier didn't insist upon their ethnic identity as primary to being American, and we newcomers didn't publicly insist on ours. Previous immigrant identity (including parades) was built on the idea of public assimilation, not separatism, and certainly entailed no demand that America divest itself of its historic character.

But since the 1960s and 70s, the pact has been broken. On the one hand, the country has cast off its particularity and embraced an even more expansive universalism; on the other hand, the newer groups, in imitation of the divisive identity politics practiced by black leaders, take advantage of that universalism not only to promote their identity of origin but to seek political power and public goods on its basis. In doing so, they undo the very nature of the society upon which their own freedom is based, and push us over the line to a new form of political organization?no longer equality of persons before the law, but group rights, group representation, group consciousness, complete with demagogy, intimidation and the naked exercise of group power. That mind-dulling slogan "Diversity is our strength" is worthy of the barn wall in Animal Farm, along with "Freedom Is Slavery" and "Some Animals Are More Equal than Others."

Diversity as practiced today does not mean strength. Diversity means weakness, fragmentation, bickering and endless manipulation. Diversity is not benign, but belligerent and full of resentment, forcing us to erase every historical memory and to drive any sense of a collective and particularly American peoplehood out of public life. The proposed falsification of the statue honoring the patriotism displayed by the firemen who hoisted the flag at the WTC is a painful example of how diversity does not free us, but binds us. We are increasingly allowed no public symbols, no public utterances that do not pronounce the primacy of diversity, as if we stood for nothing else. We begin to resemble those totalitarian countries from which some of our citizens have escaped?propagating falsehoods as we lose the blessed simplicity of the truth.