My friend Andrew Stuttaford points to a piece at “Dispatches from the Culture Wars” that takes President Bush’s speech writers to task for misrepresenting Thomas Jefferson’s view of religion in a speech the President gave at Monticello on July 4. It was “telling,” the author writes, that Bush’s speech writers “cut out an anti-religious statement from a long and famous quote.” Here’s what Bush said to the assembled multitude:

Thomas Jefferson understood that these rights do not belong to Americans alone. They belong to all mankind. And he looked to the day when all people could secure them. On the 50th anniversary of America’s independence, Thomas Jefferson passed away. But before leaving this world, he explained that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were universal. In one of the final letters of his life, he wrote, “May it be to the world, what I believe it will be — to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all — the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.”

Jefferson wrote this in a letter to Roger Weightman. He went on to say that

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

You can almost hear the purr of delighted indignation on the part of the author of this post. “Clearly,” he concludes, such remarks “are best edited out by those who advocate nothing if not monkish ignorance and superstition.”

Leaving aside the question of who it is who advocates “nothing if not monkish ignorance and superstition,” I feel it worth pointing out that Jefferson’s attitude towards religion was not quite so cut and dried–nor so uniformly hostile–as some secularists would have us believe.

Jefferson’s anti-clericalism–it was an unattractive part of his Enlightenment kit–is well known. But if Bush’s speech writer’s omitted a bit about “monkish ignorance,” secularists often quote Jefferson’s brusque dismissal of religion in Notes on the State of Virginia (”It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”) But they somehow never get around to quoting the passage that occurs a few pages later: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are the gift of God?”

As president, as Gertrude Himmelfarb notes in her superb book The Roads to Modernity, Jefferson was even more respectful of religion, and specifically Christianity, as the foundation of liberty and public virtue. On his way to church one Sunday, Jefferson was met by a friend:

“You going to church Mr. J. You do not believe a word in it.”

“Sir [Jefferson replied], no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good morning Sir.”

Perhaps Bush’s speech writers had some such passage in mind.

Over at Real Clear Politics, Thomas Sowell has some thought on the “conservatives for Obama” phenomenon. It’s partly sour grapes–John McCain is not the dream candidate, ergo some conservatives are planning–or say they are planning–to vote for someone who is closer to a conservative nightmare. And it’s partly wishful thinking. Conservatives point out  that Obama has been moving toward the center in his recent speeches, but it is (at best) a fantasy to  believe that what a man says is more important than what he does, and Obama has done plenty to belie his recent centrist noises. As usual, Sowell gets to the heart of the matter: “What is becoming ever more painfully apparent,” he writes,

is that too many people this year– whether conservative, liberals or whatever– are all too willing to judge Barack Obama on the basis of his election-year rhetoric, rather than on the record of what he has advocated and done during the past two decades.

Many are for him for no more serious reasons than his mouth and his complexion. The man has become a Rorschach test for the feelings and hopes, not only of those on the left, but also for some on the right as well.

Here is a man who has consistently aided and abetted people who have openly expressed their contempt for this country, both in words and in such deeds as planting bombs to advance their left-wing agenda.

Despite the spin that judging Obama by what was said or done by such people would be “guilt by association,” he has not just associated with such people. He has in some cases donated some serious money of his own and even more of the taxpayers’ money, as both a state senator in Illinois and a member of the Senate of the United States.

Read the whole thing here.

Does he (or she) like hot tamales? No? How about Chicken Vindaloo? Or scrambled eggs with hot sauce? If not, she (or he) may have IRS–no not that IRS, but another one that is almost as dangerous: Incipient Racist Syndrome.

Think I am making it up? Check out this story at the London Telegraph:

Toddlers who dislike spicy food ‘racist’

The National Children’s Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care.

This could include a child of as young as three who says “yuk” in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.

The guidance by the NCB is designed to draw attention to potentially-racist attitudes in youngsters from a young age.

It alerts playgroup leaders that even babies can not be ignored in the drive to root out prejudice as they can “recognise different people in their lives”.

The 366-page guide for staff in charge of pre-school children, called Young Children and Racial Justice, warns: “Racist incidents among children in early years settings tend to be around name-calling, casual thoughtless comments and peer group relationships.”

It advises nursery teachers to be on the alert for childish abuse such as: “blackie”, “Pakis”, “those people” or “they smell”.

The guide goes on to warn that children might also “react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying ‘yuk’”.

The scariest bit, as my wife points out, comes at the end:

“Some people [says an NCB guide] think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution. In fact, the opposite is the case.”

Why? One reason is that  the more reported incidents of racism, the more work for the NCB.

This garbage isn’t worth dignifying with a response, only caustic ridicule–Yuk is a mild expression that comes to mind–but it seems to be spreading, so let me just quote these words of wisdom from Sidney Hook:

As morally offensive as is the expression of racism wherever it is found, a false charge of racism is equally offensive, perhaps even more so, because the consequences of a false charge of racism enable an authentic racist to conceal his racism by exploiting the loose way the term is used to cover up his actions. The same is true of a false charge of sexism or anti-Semitism. This is the lesson we should all have learned from the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Because of his false and irresponsible charges of communism against liberals, socialists, and others among his critics, many communists and agents of communist influence sought to pass themselves off as Jeffersonian democrats or merely idealistic reformers. They would all complain they were victims of red-baiting to prevent criticism and exposure.

Indeed.

Hat tips to Instapundit and Jonah Goldberg, whose daughter doesn’t like Salsa (neither does our son).

OK, Class: today’s story comes to us from The New York Post via Instapundit.

So, this footpad espies a van–a red van, class–parked for about a month on at 53rd Street and Second Avenue in Sunset Park in Brooklyn. On July 3 at about 5:00p.m. he decides to check out the contents of said vehicle and effects entry with larcenous intent. He was, as the Post reports, “stunned” to discover the haul:

it was filled with gas cans and Styrofoam cups containing a mysterious white substance with protruding wires and switches.

The street is lined with brownstones, and there’s a ballet studio and a small Muslim school. So he drove the van 15 blocks to 37th Street and parked it at a desolate waterfront location behind the Costco store and next to some little-used piers.

He then called a cop he knew and alerted him to the van and its contents, probably, said a hig-ranking police office, “saved a lot of people’s lives.”

So, what do we notice about this story? What is the most salient detail?

1. The van is red. Y or N

2. There’s a ballet studio on the street where the van was parked. Y or N

3. It was 5:00p.m. when the prospective robber broke into the van. Y or N

4. There’s a Muslim school on the street where the van was parked. Y or N. (Hint: In the last ten years, this part of Sunset Park has seen “a growing Arab muslim population mostly of Palestinian background.”)

Time’s up! How did you do?

Take a brief recess. Then consider the overall picture, again via Instapundit, in The Daily News. The headline gives a good sense of the burden of story:

Undercover city detective finds hints of danger among mosques

And the body of the story has the expected details:

At great personal risk, he participated in everything from prayers at a mosque to martial arts training under cover of darkness to watching jihadist videos, with many of the activities laced with talk of killing, according to a source familiar with the undercover’s investigations.

His experiences paint a vivid portrait of the potential for local terror.

Based on your reading of other such news reports, common sense, and the general state of your instinct for self-preservation, how will the next sentence mostly likely begin?

No hurry.

Take your time.

Ready?

Do you have a piece of paper and a pencil?

Ok, write your answer.

And here’s what the story says: “While the picture is in no way indicative of the city’s Muslim population. . . ”

Did you come close?

Yesterday, in my post “Obama: Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do to you,” I quoted PrestoPundit, who animadverted about Obama’s latest effort to bring us all up close and personal with the engine of the government by requiring high school and college students labor on behalf of various governmental “service programs” (”we’ll make federal assistance conditional on school districts developing service programs, and give schools resources [for “resources” read “your tax dollars”] to offer new service opportunities,” etc. etc.). PrestoPundit suggested this was a step down the road towards good old-fashioned European serfdom, and I have to say I agree. But he also went on to make this Fourth-of-July point: “Barack Obama somehow believes that advocacy of a return to European style serfdom is a good way to celebrate the American Declaration of Independence from the oppression of English tyranny.” I’m as pleased as anyone that the American Revolution turned out the way it did. But for those of you salivating over the prospect of an Obama administration, I’d like to share a note I received from a canny English reader:

‘Oppression of British tyranny’?!

The colonies were taxed at 10 percent of British metropolitan rates and most of that was spent on protecting them from the French and Indians. Obama’s 56 percent marginal tax rate will put British ‘tyranny’ into better perspective for you …

 It’s a long way to Lent yet, but I guess I am going to have to start reading Barack Hussein Obama’s speeches. I caught his latest musings on “national service” thanks to Instapundit, but that came via Jonah Goldberg from PrestoPundit. How is he going to back away, triangulate, move to the center on this?

when I’m President, I will set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year. This means that by the time you graduate college, you’ll have done 17 weeks of service. We’ll reach this goal in several ways. At the middle and high school level, we’ll make federal assistance conditional on school districts developing service programs, and give schools resources to offer new service opportunities.

The real name for this, as PrestoPundit noted, is a return to serfdom, i.e., the intrusion of the coercive arm of the state into everyday life.

For example, in France, citizens were required to perform public service building and repairing roads and other public projects for hundreds and thousands of hours a year. Serfdom wasn’t eliminated in France until the French revolution, one of the “liberty” parts of that revolution. It was largely the American revolution which inspired this escape from serfdom. Indeed, the American revolution was all about escaping from the European model of servitude, with the American’s insisting that even very moderate taxation without representation was a form of oppressive servitude. Incredibly, Barack Obama somehow believes that advocacy of a return to European style serfdom is a good way to celebrate the American Declaration of Independence from the oppression of English tyranny.

Let’s hope that people wake up to what an Obama administration would really be like–that they wake up to the coercive reality behind the bloviating rhetoric–before it is too late.

I.

On a trip to Maryland a few years ago, I stopped at Baltimore Harbor with my wife and five-year-old son to see Fort McHenry. This was the site, in September 1814, of the Battle of Baltimore, a decisive episode in the War of 1812. The late April afternoon was glorious: the sky an infinite azure punctuated by a flotilla of stately white clouds.

Our first stop was a modern outbuilding adjacent to the eighteenth-century fort. We crowded into a small theater with about thirty fourth-graders and their teachers to watch a short film. We learned about the origins of the war, about how the British took and burned Washington, about how at last a thousand U.S. troops under George Armistead at Fort McHenry successfully defended their bastion against the British naval onslaught, saving Baltimore and turning the tide of the war.

It was (as the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo) a “damn near thing.” The British ships, anchored out of range of Armistead’s cannons, pounded the fort with mortar and Congreve rocket fire over the course of twenty-five hours. Sitting on a truce ship behind the British fleet was a young American lawyer and amateur poet named Francis Scott Key. He watched as the battle raged, dappling the night sky with noisy coruscations.

Sometime before sunrise, the bombardment suddenly stopped. Key was uncertain of the battle’s outcome until dawn broke and he saw the American flag fluttering above Fort McHenry. (When he had taken command, Armistead asked for an extra large flag so that “the British would have no trouble seeing it from a distance.”) There would be no surrender. The Brits abandoned their plans to invade Baltimore. The war would soon be over. As soon as he caught sight of Old Glory, Francis Scott Key began scribbling what would become “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the back of a letter. He finished it in a hotel in Baltimore a day or two later. The poem was an instant hit and was soon set to “The Anacreontic Song,” an eighteenth-century English drinking tune. It became the official national anthem in 1931.

The film ended and strains of the song began floating out from the loudspeakers–softly at first, then louder and louder. Everyone in the room scrambled to his feet.

O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

The schoolchildren stood reverently, each with his right hand over his heart. A floor-length curtain wheeled back, flooding the room with light. There was Fort McHenry. And there, rising above it, was the American flag, waving gently in the breeze. With the possible exception of our son, who was busy attacking The Enemy with his toy F14, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Of course, that calculated piece of theater was in part an exercise in sentimentality, a deliberate effort to manipulate our emotions. Is that a bad thing? Wallace Stevens may have been right that, in general, “sentimentality is a failure of feeling”–a sign of counterfeit emotion rather than the real thing. Nevertheless, there is a place for a bit of affirmative sentimentality in the moral economy of our society. Among other things, it provides emotional glue for our shared identity as Americans. These days, perhaps more than ever before, that identity needs glue.

II.

As we contemplate the prospects for America and its institutions in the twenty-first century, it is not only particular cultural and social institutions that deserve scrutiny. What we might call the institution of American identity–of who we are as a people–also requires our attention.

It is often said that the terrorist attacks of September 11 precipitated a new resolve throughout the nation. There is some truth to that. Certainly, the extraordinary bravery of the firefighters and other rescue personnel in New York and Washington, D.C., provided an invigorating spectacle–as did Todd “Let’s roll” Beamer and his fellow passengers on United Airlines Flight 93. Having learned from their cell phones what had happened at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Beamer and his fellows rushed and overpowered the terrorists who had hijacked their plane. As a result, the plane crashed on a remote Pennsylvania farm instead of on Pennsylvania Avenue. Who knows how many lives their sacrifice saved?

The widespread sense of condign outrage–of horror leavened by anger and elevated by resolve–testified to a renewed sense of national purpose and identity after 9/11. Attacked, many Americans suddenly (if temporarily) rediscovered the virtue of patriotism. At the beginning of his remarkable book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity , the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington recalls a certain block on Charles Street in Boston. At one time, American flags flew in front of a U.S. Post Office and a liquor store. Then the Post Office stopped displaying the flag, so on September 11, 2001, the flag was flying only in front of the liquor store. Within two weeks, seventeen American flags decorated that block of Charles Street, in addition to a huge flag suspended over the street close by. “With their country under attack,” Huntington notes, “Charles Street denizens rediscovered their nation and identified themselves with it.”

Was that rediscovery anything more than a momentary passion? Huntington reports that within a few months, the flags on Charles Street began to disappear. By the time the first anniversary rolled around in September 2002, only four were left flying. True, that is four times more than were there on September 10, 2001, but it is less than a quarter of the number that populated Charles Street at the end of September 2001.

There are similar anecdotes from around the country–an access of flag-waving followed by a relapse into indifference. Does it mean that the sudden upsurge of patriotism in the weeks following 9/11 was only, as it were, skin deep? Or perhaps it merely testifies to the fact that a sense of permanent emergency is difficult to maintain, especially in the absence of fresh attacks. Is our sense of ourselves as Americans patent only when challenged? “Does it,” Huntington asks, “take an Osama bin Laden . . . to make us realize that we are Americans? If we do not experience recurring destructive attacks, will we return to the fragmentation and eroded Americanism before September 11?”

III.

One hopes that the answer is No. The behavior of those schoolchildren at Fort McHenry–behavior that was, I am happy to report, quietly encouraged by their teachers–suggests that the answer cannot simply be No. But I fear that for every schoolchild standing at attention for the National Anthem, there is a teacher or lawyer or judge or politician or ACLU employee militating against the hegemony of the dominant culture, the insupportable intrusion of white, Christian, “Eurocentric” values into the curriculum, the school pageant, the town green, etc., etc. The demonstration of national character and resolve following September 11 was extraordinary. It did not, however, purchase immunity from the virus of cultural dissolution. The display of national heroism and resolve following 9/11 has had little if any effect on the forces behind the fragmentation and “eroded Americanism” to which Huntington refers.

Those forces are not isolated phenomena; they are not even confined to America. They are part of a global crisis in national identity, coefficients of the sudden collapse of self-confidence in the West–a collapse that shows itself in everything from swiftly falling birthrates in “old Europe” to the attack on the whole idea of the sovereign nation state. It is hard to avoid thinking that a people that has lost the will to reproduce or govern itself is a people on the road to destruction.

Only a few years ago we were invited to contemplate the pleasant spectacle of the “end of history” and the establishment of Western-style liberal democracy, attended by the handmaidens of prosperity and rising standards of health care and education, the world over. Things look rather different now as a variety of centrifugal forces threatens to undermine the sources of national identity and, with it, the sources of national strength and the security which that strength underwrites.

The threat shows itself in many ways, from culpable complacency to the corrosive imperatives of “multiculturalism” and political correctness. (I use scare quotes because what generally travels under the name of “multiculturalism” is really a form of mono-cultural animus directed against the dominant culture.) In essence, as Huntington notes, multiculturalism is “anti-European civilization. . . . It is basically an anti-Western ideology.”

The multiculturalists claim to be fostering a progressive cultural cosmopolitanism distinguished by superior sensitivity to the downtrodden and dispossessed. In fact, they encourage an orgy of self-flagellating liberal guilt as impotent as it is insatiable. The “sensitivity” of the multiculturalist is an index not of moral refinement but of moral vacuousness.

Multiculturalism is a moral intoxicant; its thrill centers around the emotion of superior virtue; its hangover subsists on a diet of ignorance and blighted “good intentions.” Wherever the imperatives of multiculturalism have touched the curriculum, they have left broad swaths of anti-Western attitudinizing competing for attention with quite astonishing historical blindness. Courses on minorities, women’s issues, the Third World proliferate; the teaching of mainstream history slides into oblivion.

A profound ignorance of the milestones of American culture is one predictable result of this mood. The statistics have become proverbial. Huntington quotes one poll from the 1990s showing that while 90 percent of Ivy League students could identify Rosa Parks, only 25 percent could identify the author of the words “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

In a 1999 survey, 40 percent of seniors at fifty-five top colleges could not say within half a century when the Civil War was fought. Another study found that more high school students knew who Harriet Tubman was than knew that Washington commanded the American army in the revolution or that Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation.

But multiculturalism is not only an academic phenomenon. The attitudes it fosters have profound social as well as intellectual consequences. One consequence has been a sharp rise in the phenomenon of immigration without–or with only partial–assimilation: a dangerous demographic trend that threatens American identity in the most basic way.

These various agents of dissolution are also elements in a wider culture war: the contest to define how we live and what counts as the good in the good life. Anti-Americanism occupies such a prominent place on the agenda of the culture wars precisely because the traditional values of American identity–articulated by the Founders and grounded in a commitment to individual liberty and public virtue–are deeply at odds with the radical, de-civilizing tenets of the “multiculturalist” enterprise.

IV.

To get a sense of what has happened to the institution of American identity, compare Robert Frost’s performance at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 with Maya Angelou’s performance thirty-two years later. As Huntington reminds us, Frost spoke of the “heroic deeds” of America’s founding, an event, he said, that with “God’s approval” ushered in “a new order of the ages.” By contrast, Maya Angelou never mentioned the words “America” or “American.” Instead, she identified twenty-seven ethnic or religious groups that had suffered repression because of America’s “armed struggles for profit,” “cynicism,” and “brutishness.”

Repellent though Maya Angelou’s performance was, it did seem the appropriate rhetorical embroidery to welcome Bill Clinton, a president infatuated with the blandishments of multiculturalism and who sought a third “great revolution” to emancipate America from the legacy of European civilization and its Anglo-Protestant values. It has to be acknowledged that considerable progress toward that goal was made during his administration.

A favorite weapon in the armory of multiculturalism is the lowly hyphen. When we speak of an African-American or Mexican-American or Asian-American these days, the aim is not descriptive but deconstructive. There is a polemical edge to it, a provocation. The hyphen does not mean “American, but hailing at some point in the past from someplace else.” It means “only provisionally American: my allegiance is divided at best.” (I believe something similar can be said about the feminist fad for hyphenating the bride’s maiden name with her husband’s surname. It is a gesture of independence that is also a declaration of divided loyalty.) It is curious to what extent the passion for hyphenation is fostered more by the liberal elite than the populations it is supposedly meant to serve. How does it serve them? Presumably by enhancing their sense of “self-esteem.” Frederick Douglass saw through this charade some one hundred and fifty years ago. “No one idea,” he wrote, “has given rise to more oppression and persecution toward colored people of this country than that which makes Africa, not America, their home.”

The indispensable Ward Connerly would agree. Connerly has campaigned vigorously against affirmative action in California. This of course has made him a pariah among the politically correct elite. It has also resulted in some humorous exchanges, such as this telephone interview with a reporter from The New York Times in 1997.

Reporter: What are you?
Connerly: I am an American.
Reporter: No, no, no! What are you?
Connerly: Yes, yes, yes! I am an American.
Reporter: That is not what I mean. I was told that you are African American. Are you ashamed to be African American?
Connerly: No, I am just proud to be an American.

Connerly went on to explain that his ancestry included Africans, French, Irish, and American Indians. It was too much for the poor reporter from our Paper of Record: “What does that make you?” he asked in uncomprehending exasperation. I suspect he was not edified by Connerly’s cheerful response: “That makes me all-American.”

The multicultural passion for hyphenation is not simply a fondness for syntactical novelty. It also bespeaks a commitment to the centrifugal force of anti-American tribalism. The division marked by the hyphen in African-American (say) denotes a political stand. It goes hand-in-hand with other items on the index of liberal desiderata–the redistributive impulse behind efforts at “affirmative action,” for example.

Affirmative action is a perfect Orwellian phrase since what announces itself as an initiative to promote equality winds up enforcing discrimination precisely on the grounds that it was meant to overcome. Thus we are treated to the delicious, if alarming, contradiction of college applications that declare their commitment to evaluate candidates “without regard to race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or national origin” on page 1 and then helpfully inform you on page 2 that it is to your advantage to mention if you belong to any of the following designated victim groups. Among other things, a commitment to multiculturalism seems to dull one’s sense of contradiction.

The whole history of affirmative action is instinct with that irony. The original effort to redress legitimate grievances–grievances embodied, for instance, in the discriminatory practices of Jim Crow–have mutated into new forms of discrimination. In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Committee because blacks were openly barred from war factory jobs. But what began as a Presidential Executive Order in 1961 directing government contractors to take “affirmative action” to assure that people be hired “without regard” for sex, race, creed, color, etc., has resulted in the creation of vast bureaucracies dedicated to discovering, hiring, and advancing people chiefly on the basis of those qualities. White is black, freedom is slavery, “without regard” comes to mean “with regard for nothing else.”

V.

Had he lived to see the evolution of affirmative action, Tocqueville would have put such developments down as examples of how in democratic societies the passion for equality tends to trump the passion for liberty. The fact that the effort to enforce equality often results in egregious inequalities he would have understood to be part of the “tutelary despotism” that “extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd.”

Multiculturalism and “affirmative action” are allies in the assault on the institution of American identity. As such, they oppose the traditional understanding of what it means to be an American–an understanding hinted at in 1782 by the French-born American farmer J. Hector St. John de CrÅ vecoeur in his famous image of America as a country in which “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” This crucible of American identity, this “melting pot,” has two aspects. The negative aspect involves disassociating oneself from the cultural imperatives of one’s country of origin. One sheds a previous identity before assuming a new one. One might preserve certain local habits and tastes, but they are essentially window-dressing. In essence one has left the past behind in order to become an American citizen.

The positive aspect of advancing the melting pot involves embracing the substance of American culture. The 1795 code for citizenship lays out some of the formal requirements.

I do solemnly swear (1) to support the Constitution of the United States; (2) to renounce and abjure absolutely and entirely all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which the applicant was before a subject or citizen; (3) to support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; (4) to bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and (5) (A) to bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law, or (B) to perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by law . . .

For over two hundred years, this oath had been required of those wishing to become citizens. In 2003, Huntington tells us, federal bureaucrats launched a campaign to rewrite and weaken it.

But if “Americanization” is a dirty word among the cultural elite, it was been an abiding concern of thoughtful American statesmen since the time of the Founders. “We must see our people more Americanized,” John Jay declared in the 1780s. Jefferson concurred. Teddy Roosevelt repeatedly championed the idea that American culture, the “crucible in which all the new types are melted into one,” was “shaped from 1776 to 1789, and our nationality was definitely fixed in all its essentials by the men of Washington’s day.”

It is often said that America is a nation of immigrants. In fact, as Huntington points out, America is a country that was initially a country of settlers. Settlers precede immigrants and make their immigration possible. The culture of those mostly English-speaking, predominantly Anglo-Protestant settlers defined American culture. Their efforts came to fruition with the generation of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison. The Founders are so denominated because they founded, they inaugurated a state. Immigrants were those who came later, who came from elsewhere, and who became American by embracing the Anglophone culture of the original settlers. The English language, the rule of law, respect for individual rights, the industriousness and piety that flowed from the Protestant work ethic–these were central elements in the culture disseminated by the Founders. And these were among the qualities embraced by immigrants when they became Americans. “Throughout American history,” Huntington notes, “people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values. This benefitted them and the country.”

Justice Louis Brandeis outlined the pattern in 1919. Americanization, he said, means that the immigrant “adopts the clothes, the manners, and the customs generally prevailing here . . . substitutes for his mother tongue the English language” and comes “into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate[s] with us for their attainment.” Until the 1960s, the Brandeis model mostly prevailed. Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish groups, understanding that assimilation was the best ticket to stability and social and economic success, eagerly aided in the task of integrating their charges into American society.

The story is very different today. Important pockets of new American immigrants are not assimilating, not learning English, not becoming or thinking of themselves primarily as Americans. The effect of these developments on American identity is disastrous and potentially irreversible.

Such developments are abetted by the left-wing political and educational elites of this country, whose dominant theme is the perfidy of traditional American values. Hence the passion for multiculturalism and the ideal of ethnic hyphenation that goes with it. This has done immense damage in schools and colleges as well as in the population at large. By removing the obligation to master English, multiculturalism condemns whole sub-populations to the status of permanent second-class citizens. By removing the obligation to adopt American values, it fosters what the German novelist Hermann Broch once called a “value vacuum,” a sense of existential emptiness that breeds anomie and the pathologies of nihilism.

VI.

As if in revenge for this injustice, however, multiculturalism also weakens the social bonds of the community at large. The price of imperfect assimilation is imperfect loyalty. Take the movement for bilingualism. Whatever it intended in theory, in practice it means not mastering English. It has notoriously left its supposed beneficiaries essentially monolingual, often semi-lingual. The only bi- involved is a passion for bifurcation, which is fed by the accumulated resentments instilled by the anti-American multicultural orthodoxy. Every time you call directory assistance or some large corporation and are told “Press One for English” and “Para español oprime el numero dos” it is another small setback for American identity.

Meanwhile, many prominent academics and even businessmen come bearing the gospel of what John Fonte has dubbed “transnational progressivism“–an anti-patriotic stew of politically correct ideas and attitudes distinguished partly by its penchant for vague but virtuous-sounding abstractions, partly by its moral smugness. It is a familiar litany.

Item: The philosopher Martha Nussbaum warns that “patriotic pride” is “morally dangerous.” Princeton University’s ’s Amy Gutmann reveals that she finds it “repugnant” for American students to learn that they are “above all, citizens of the United States” instead of partisans of her preferred abstraction, “democratic humanism.” New York University’s Richard Sennett denounces “the evil of a shared national identity” and concludes that the erosion of national sovereignty is “basically a positive thing.” Cecilia O’Leary of American University identifies American patriotism as a right-wing, militaristic, male, white, Anglo, and repressive force. Peter Spiro of Hofstra University says it “is increasingly difficult to use the word ‘we’ in the context of international affairs.”

Thanks for that, professor.

Of course, whenever the word “patriotism” comes up in left-wing circles, there is sure to be some allusion to Samuel Johnson’s observation that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” Right on cue, George Lipsitz of the University of California sniffs that “in recent years refuge in patriotism has been the first resort of scoundrels of all sorts.” Naturally, Dr. Johnson’s explanation to Boswell that he did not mean to disparage “a real and generous love of our country” but only that “pretended patriotism” that is a “cloak for self-interest” is left out of account.

The bottom line is that the traditional ideal of a distinctive American identity, forged out of many elements but unified around a core of beliefs, attitudes, and commitments is now up for grabs. One academic epitomized the established attitude among our left-liberal elites when she expressed the hope that the United States would “never again be culturally ‘united,’ if united means ‘unified’ in beliefs and practices.” Nor is this merely an academic crotchet. Many politicians–and, even more worrisome, many courts–have colluded in spreading the multicultural gospel. The nation’s motto–E pluribus unum–was chosen by Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams to express the ideal of faction- and heritage-transcending unity. America forged one people out of many peoples. Vice President Al Gore interpreted the tag to mean “Within one, many.” This might have been inadvertence. It might have been simple ignorance. It might have been deliberate ideological provocation. Which is worst?

The combined effect of the multicultural enterprise has been to undermine the foundation of American national identity. Huntington speaks dramatically but not inaptly of “Deconstructing America.” What he has in mind are not the linguistic tergiversations of a Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault but the efforts–politically if not always intellectually allied efforts–to disestablish the dominant culture by fostering a variety of subversive attitudes, pieces of legislation, and judicial interventions. “The deconstructionists,” Huntington writes,

promoted programs to enhance that status and influence of subnational racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. They encouraged immigrants to maintain their birth-country cultures, granted them legal privileges denied to native-born Americans, and denounced the idea of Americanization as un-American. They pushed the rewriting of history syllabi and textbooks so as to refer to the “peoples” of the United States in place of the single people of the Constitution. They urged supplementing or substituting for national history the history of subnational groups. They downgraded the centrality of English in American life and pushed bilingual education and linguistic diversity. They advocated legal recognition of group rights and racial preferences over the individual rights central to the American Creed. They justified their actions by theories of multiculturalism and the idea that diversity rather than unity or community should be America’s overriding value. The combined effect of these efforts was to promote the deconstruction of the American identity that had been gradually created over three centuries.

Taken together, Huntington concludes, “these efforts by a nation’s leaders to deconstruct the nation they governed were, quite possibly, without precedent in human history.”

The various movements to deconstruct American identity and replace it with a multicultural “rainbow” or supra-national bureaucracy have made astonishing inroads in the last few decades and especially in the last several years. And, as Huntington reminds us, the attack on American identity has counterparts elsewhere in the West wherever the doctrine of multiculturalism has trumped the cause of national identity. The European Union–whose unelected leaders are as dedicated to multicultural shibboleths as they are to rule by top-down, anti-democratic bureaucracy–is a case in point. But the United States, the most powerful national state, is also the most attractive target for deconstruction.

It is a curious development that Huntington traces. In many respects, it corroborates James Burnham’s observation, in Suicide of the West, that “liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.” For what we have witnessed with the triumph of multiculturalism is a kind of hypertrophy or perversion of liberalism, as its core doctrines are pursued to the point of caricature. As the Australian philosopher David Stove pointed out, we in the West “set ourselves to achieve a society which would be maximally-tolerant. But that resolve not only gives maximum scope to the activities of those who have set themselves to achieve the maximally-intolerant society. It also, and more importantly, paralyzes our powers of resistance to them.” “Freedom,” “diversity,” “equality,” “tolerance,” even “democracy”–how many definitive liberal virtues have been redacted into their opposites by the imperatives of political correctness? If a commitment to “diversity” mandates bilingual education, then we must institute bilingual education, even if it results in the cultural disenfranchisement of those it was meant to benefit. The passion for equality demands “affirmative action,” even though the process of affirmative action depends upon treating people unequally.

If there is a bright spot in the portrait that Huntington paints, it revolves around the fact that the centrifugal forces of multiculturalism are espoused chiefly by the intellectual and bureaucratic elite, not ordinary people. Of course, one might ask how the beliefs of ordinary people can prevail against the combined forces of the courts, the educational establishment, the “mainstream” media, and much popular culture?

It is hard to say–at least, it is hard to say anything cheerful. But Huntington does provide several rays of hope. There are many movements to “take back America,” to resuscitate the core values that, traditionally, have defined us as Americans. Indeed, Huntington’s book may be regarded as a manifesto on behalf of that battle. The home-schooling movement is one example. Only a few years ago, it was a fringe phenomenon, allied almost exclusively to certain conservative evangelical sects. Today, home schoolers come from every religious and social background. In 1990-1991, 76,000 children were home-schooled. The estimate for 2007 is more than 2 million. That explosion is not only evidence of disenchantment with the intellectual failure of public schools: much more it betokens disenchantment with the moral tenor of public education.

VII.

We stand at a crossroads. The future of America hangs in the balance. If we are to preserve our identity as a nation we need to preserve the core values that defined that identity.

What are those beliefs and values? They embrace several things, including religion. You wouldn’t know it from watching CNN or reading The New York Times, but there is a huge religious revival taking place now, affecting just about every part of the globe except Western Europe, which slouches towards godlessness almost as fast as it slouches towards bankruptcy and demographic collapse. Things look different in America. For if America is a vigorously secular country–which it certainly is–it is also a deeply religious one. It always has been. Tocqueville was simply minuting the reality he saw around him when he noted that “On my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention.”

As G. K. Chesterton put it a century after Tocqueville, America is “a nation with the soul of a church.” Even today, America is a country where an astonishing 92 percent of the population says it believes in God and 80 to 85 percent of the population identifies itself as Christian. Hence Huntington’s call for a return to America’s core values is also a call to embrace the religious principles upon which the country was founded, “a recommitment to America as a deeply religious and primarily Christian country, encompassing several religious minorities adhering to Anglo-Protestant values, speaking English, maintaining its cultural heritage, and committed to the principles” of political liberty as articulated by the Founders.

Naturally, Huntington was been sharply criticized for prescribing a return to “Anglo-Protestant values” as an antidote for faltering American identity. For example, Michiko Kakutani, reviewing Who Are We? for The New York Times, dismissed it as a “portentous,” “crotchety,” “highly polemical book” that merely “recycl[ed] arguments from earlier thinkers” while imparting to them a “bellicose new spin.” Oh dear.

Kakutani was particularly exercised by Huntington’s criticism of multiculturalism and his advocacy of Anglo-Protestant values. But she misses something important. For Huntington is careful to stress that what he offers is an “argument for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture, not for the importance of Anglo-Protestant people.” That is, he argues not on behalf of a particular ethnic group but on behalf of a culture and set of values that “for three and a half centuries have been embraced by Americans of all races, ethnicities, and religions and that have been the source of their liberty, unity, power, prosperity, and moral leadership.”

No nation lasts forever. An external enemy may eventually overrun and subdue it; internal forces of dissolution and decadence may someday undermine it, leaving it prey to more vigorous competitors. Sooner or later it succumbs. The United States is the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. Its astonishing military might, economic productivity, and political vigor are unprecedented. But someday, as Huntington reminds us, it too will fade or perish as Athens, Rome, and other great civilizations have faded or perished. Is the end, or the beginning of the end, at hand? No one’s crystal ball is sufficiently clairvoyant to allow us to say. For decades–no, longer–we have been getting bulletins about the decline of the West, the rise and (especially) the fall of great powers, etc., etc.

So far, the West–or at least the United States–has disappointed its self-appointed undertakers. How do we stand now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century? It is worth remembering that besieged nations do not always succumb to the forces, external or internal, that threaten them. Sometimes, they muster the resolve to fight back successfully, to renew themselves. Today, America faces a new external enemy in the form of militant Islam and global terrorism. That minatory force, though murderous, will fail in proportion to our resolve to defeat it. Do we still possess that resolve? Inseparable from resolve is self-confidence, faith in the essential nobility of one’s regime and one’s way of life. To what extent do we still possess, still practice that faith?

America also faces numerous internal threats, from the rise of immigration without assimilation to the dissolute forces of cultural decadence and radical multiculturalism. The forces of multiculturalism preach the dogma of bureaucratic cosmopolitanism. They encourage us to shed what is distinctively American in order to accommodate the quivering sensitivities of “humanity”–that imperious abstraction whose exigent mandates are updated regularly by such bodies as the United Nations, the World Court, and their allies in the professoriate and the liberal media. Huntington is right that “America cannot become the world and still be America.” We face a choice between a multicultural future and an American future.

Which will it be?

Buried in a story about baby-boomer profs retiring:

In general, information on professors’ political and ideological leanings tends to be scarce.

Clearly, more research needs to be done: the Ford Foundation should fund a multi-year study to ascertain the “political and ideological leanings” of professors. That’s one of life’s great mysteries.

Update: Of it’s not that great a mystery. A reader points me to a story from The Washington Post which begins: “College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.” Who knew?

Spoof, or reality show?

A police force [in England] has apologised to Islamic leaders for the “offensive” postcard advertising a new non-emergency telephone number, which shows a six-month-old trainee police dog named Rebel.

But some Muslims in the Dundee area have reportedly been upset by the image because they consider dogs to be “ritually unclean”, while shopkeepers have refused to display the advert.

Believe it: the Telegraph has the whole sorry story here.

My favorite bit:

[S]ome Islamic scholars believe that dogs are impure and therefore ‘haraam’ - or forbidden - except for use in hunting or farming, and that it is not hygienic to keep a dog in the house.

They say that the “impurity of dogs is the greatest of animal impurities”, and anyone who touches one must wash the body part that has come into contact with the animal seven times.

Clearly, what we need is MORE DOGS. Lots of ‘em. Pigs, too, of course , not to mention bottles beer, wine, and whiskey. If I were running the police force in Tayside, the first thing I would do–after dispensing with the services of the force’s “diversity adviser”–is stock up on doggies: at least one for every officer. And if the paynim foe is offended? What I say is: Woof, woof, i.e., tough luck, Mohammad. Don’t get your burqa in a twist. You aren’t more offended by fido than I am by you.

“Women,” says a story in the London Telegraph , “prefer men with stubble for love, sex and marriage.”

Except, of course, for those who don’t.

But let’s leave aside this “finding” that catapults folks like Geroge Cloony and (let’s not forget) Yassir Arafat to the head of the line marked “romance.” Let’s grant, for the moment, that this is true. What explains it? Here’s what the story says:

The explanation for the preference is not clear, but experts in human evolution say that that facial hair may be a signal of aggression because it boosts the apparent size of the lower jaw, emphasising the teeth as weapons.

Have you ever heard anything as silly? Well, if you trundle through the literature penned by “experts in human evolution” you undoubtedly have. It’s full of things that make the contention that gals prefer chaps like Yassir because he has menacing looking canines look positively tame.

Consider this, from eminent sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, a great man with the ants, but a theorist who also asserted that “an organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA.”

Now, just sit back and think about that. Think, for example, of your favorite organism–your spouse, for example: is he or she only DNA’s way of making more DNA? Is E. O. Wilson himself only a mechanism for the production of deoxyribonucleic acid?

Or how about Richard “Mr. Selfish-Gene” Dawkins’s claim that “we are . . . robot-vehicle blindly programmed to preserves the selfish molecules known as genes.” We’ve heard something similar, of course, from astrologers, who think people are “robot-vehicles” programmed by the stars, Freudians, who think peoples are “robot-vehicles” directed by the Id, and Marxists who think people are “robot vehicles” programmed by economic forces.

Or how about the claim made by the British evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton who said that “we expect to find that no one is prepared to sacrifice his life for any single person, but that everyone will sacrifice it for more than two brothers [or offspring], or four half brothers, or eight first-cousins.” Really? Want to make a bet about that?

What if Hamilton turns out to be wrong? I mean, what if you have a chap who does not sacrifice his life for two brothers, or four half-brothers, or eight first-cousins? What if you have a 100, or a 1000 such chaps? Would it make him or his followers change their theory? Dream on! As Wittgenstein said in another context, a “picture holds them captive” and the automatic response to contrary evidence is to blame the evidence. William Miller, a 19th-century Baptist preacher, predicted that Christ would return to earth on October 22, 1844. When he failed to make the appointment, many of Miller’s followers left, but a hardy band of true believers honed their hermeneutical skills and kept the faith.

No, such details as the 1000 chaps who don’t sacrifice themselves for their eight first-cousins are said to be “difficulties,” or “anomalies,” or perhaps even “problems” for the theory. But one recalls David Hume’s remark about the absurdity of “calling a difficulty what pretends to be a demonstration and endeavouring by that means to elude its force and evidence.” Where’s Hume when we need him?