At every turn, we are assured by the media, too many politicians, and a whole host of activists that “diversity is our strength.” Is it? Some of the Founders would have dismissed such an idea. John Quincy Adams, son of the second President, had this to say to his father in 1811:
“America is destined to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs.” (emphasis added)
In this he was not falling far from the tree, so to speak. During and after the American Revolution, the elder Adams strongly advocated English as a common language for the new nation. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, noted the conditions of the younger Adams’ later observations were already present:
“With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.” (emphasis added)
We’re told that American-style liberty and self-governance is the desire of every human being; that in everyone, there’s an American struggling to break out. Is that really true? If so, then why are second-generation immigrants participating in terrorism? Why are some advocating the adoption of an alien Sharia law system in the U.S.? Why are there alien enclaves here waving foreign flags (while burning the U.S. one) and looking more like the lands of their ancestors than part of the United States? Most importantly, who benefits from this conscious policy and why?
Culture is the wellspring from which a nation’s institutions flow. The culture that created the United States was steeped in the Christian faith, the history of British self-governance and Enlightenment thinking about limited government. Even today, those are hardly universal foundations for societies. Around the world there are plenty of examples of what results when any or all of those pillars are missing. So why would we not demand they continue to predominate here?
America is now decades into its multicultural fetish. But there is a tremendous difference between enjoying colorful assortments of dress, dance and cuisine, and acting as if all worldviews produce the same positive results. They clearly do not. I couldn’t help but think of the multiculturalists when I recently read about the custom in Madagascar of literally dancing with the corpses of dead family members. I guarantee there are doctrinaire multiculturalists who would demand we not frown on such a horrific practice; that instead we celebrate what they would emphasize as an expression of love. The problem is, such things have predictable consequences, such as the spreading of disease. In most of Latin America (especially Brazil), the annual “Carnival” celebration is a license for utter debauchery. In much of Islamic Africa, the genitals of young girls are mutilated in an attempt to mute their sexuality, a practice now flourishing in immigrant communities such as Detroit.
So what do we expect to happen when we have “diversity lotteries” for admission to the U.S., resulting in people moving here in large numbers directly from societies with such practices? Is it not strange we have elected officials more concerned with protecting illegal immigrants than U.S. citizens? We have forgotten, to our own peril, that the U.S., and more broadly Western Civilization, is unique in human history and that most of the world’s story is a uniform one of various flavors of subservience and misery for the average individual. Too few Americans have personally experienced how different life outside the “developed world” can be, so they have no idea what’s at stake.
At the rate we’re going, though, many are about to find out. Western Civilization once had the audacity to proclaim universal truths and standards of right and wrong. But today it thinks of itself as merely one voice among many, and nothing special worth defending. I believe the “diversity drive,” coupled with the now-prevalent idea there is no objective truth, will be noted by historians as the fatal acid that ate away the foundations of the United States. The key question at this point is whether any of the original culture of this country will be preserved in what follows its approaching demise, or whether, as Winston Churchill once warned of the Nazi threat, “the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
A True Progressive 