At the New York Conservative Party conference in Albany the other week, I was asked about the party’s role in state politics. I replied that in a multiparty system it’s very important to have some sort of force to the right of the right-of-center party – to arrest the tendency of the “mainstream” right to drift across the spectrum and wind up taking the rest of us to the same destination as the lefties want to go but at a slightly slower speed.
A useful illustration of that role can be seen in Europe’s current debate. Asked on TV about David Cameron’s recent attack on “multiculturalism”, I said flippantly that it was heartening to hear the Prime Minister sounding like a six-year-old Steyn column. Of course, he didn’t go quite that far. But, because I and Melanie Phillips and Henryk Broder and Thilo Sarrazin and Geert Wilders and a relatively small number of “extremists” did go so far, it’s become possible for a lot of folks in the mushy middle to meet us halfway. Hence, the bizarre new phenomenon of European heads of governments stampeding to denounce multiculturalism: If it’s Tuesday, it must be Angela Merkel. That multiculturalism is a failure is the new conventional wisdom, the centrist position.
This in itself is certainly remarkable. One of the oddest moments in my long battle with Canada’s “human rights” shakedown racket came after my TV encounter with the Canadian Islamic Congress’ three sock puppets. After the show, I mentioned to Naseem, the least disagreeable of the socks, that I’d heard her say on NPR that it was improper for me to attack “multiculturalism” because multiculturalism was officially embedded in Canada’s constitution. And I said: So what? A free society shouldn’t have an official ideology, but, if it has, I certainly reserve the right to object to it – as I would have objected to Italy’s official ideology if I’d chanced to live under it 80 years ago. And Naseem looked at me as if I was nuts, and explained, somewhat pityingly, that I didn’t understand that being Canadian means supporting multiculturalism.
Millions and millions of Canadians and Britons and Australians and Germans and French and Dutch and Swiss take the same position: A concept that barely existed two generations back is now regarded as a defining attribute – the defining attribute – of some of the oldest nation states on the planet. What can’t be sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism? British public buildings should cease to fly the national flag because it no longer “reflects our multicultural society”. Canada should ditch the monarchy because it no longer “reflects our multicultural society”. Belgian cops should eschew doughnut consumption during Ramadan because their dietary practices no longer “reflect our multicultural society”. You’d almost think this “multicultural society” was some sort of organic societal evolution, as opposed to a racket consciously imposed on the nation by its ruling elite. Initially, mass immigration was justified on economic grounds – we need immigrants to come to the west and work in the mills. But the mills closed anyway, and now there are mosques and madrassahs, and gender-segregated swimming sessions at municipal pools and Islam-compliant nurses’ uniforms in state hospitals, and reoriented non-Mecca-facing toilets in prison. “Multiculturalism” was invented as a cover for the failure of the economic rationale: okay, mass immigration won’t make us richer, but it does make us better.
The central argument of America Alone is that culture trumps economics: Even assuming there was a modest economic benefit to mass immigration, would you be willing to lose your country for it? In order to keep a handful of mills open, would you want your Yorkshire town to adopt Mirpuri practices of cousin marriage and a rate of congenital birth defects to match? Had the political class put it like that in the Sixties, there’s no doubt what the answer would have been.
So now the same political class is telling us that multiculturalism is a failure – “a wrong-headed doctrine that has had disastrous results,” as David Cameron put it, leading immigrant communities “to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream.” The Prime Minister said the cure for multiculturalism is “muscular liberalism”, which sounds pretty butch for a 21st century Brit pol. But, as the speech went on, the muscle turned to flab before your very eyes: Don’t worry, there’s no problem with Islam – “a religion observed peacefully and devoutly by over a billion people” – only with “Islamist extremism”, and while the problem with “Islamist extremism” can manifest itself in unfortunate ways – “the biggest threat that we face is terrorist attacks” – it is “important to stress that terrorism is not linked to any one religion or ethnic group”.
If you were one of those lavishly-funded Muslim lobby groups that dreams of seeing the Islamic crescent flying over Buckingham Palace, you’d be forgiven for thinking that, for all the muscle, it’s just PC bollocks as usual. The “biggest threat” is not that al-Qa’eda will blow up the Tower of London or the Pompidou Centre, but that in the nullity of the modern multicultural state, through simple demographic arithmetic and a thousand trivial, incremental concessions, the west will day by day Islamize – remorselessly and disastrously.
What do Cameron and Merkel and Sarkozy intend to do about that? Give another speech denouncing multiculturalism two years from now? Until the Sixties, it was taken for granted that a sovereign state had the right to pick and choose to which, if any, foreigners it extended the right of residency. Fifty years later, “multiculturalism” has so distorted the language that even to suggest a Slovene might be more easily assimilated than a Somali puts one beyond the pale. All that survives of those assumptions is the question I had to answer on my US immigration form about whether I had been a member of Germany’s National Socialist Party between the years 1933 and 1945.
Suppose I had been. Long time ago. Might have changed my views on a lot of things since then. Yet the Government of the United States still reserves the right to draw certain conclusions about one’s suitability based on ideological enthusiasms. Why should America and Canada and Britain and Europe not apply that principle more broadly? If certain communities have a 40-year track record of ever more intense self-segregation, why can that not be taken into account in their immigration application?
Instead, Cameron’s answer to the failure of multiculturalism is that “we” need to work harder “to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong”. But what if that’s too much hard work? So much hard work that it is, in fact, never going to happen? Wouldn’t it just be easier to cut back on mass immigration at a time of ever higher levels of unemployment and welfare dependency? Or even cut back on mass immigration from, ahem, certain parts of the world?
Whoa. If any such thoughts crossed Cameron’s mind, Sir Humphrey’s blue pencil took care of them. For hardcore leftists, “multiculturalism” was a polite cover for social engineering. For the somnolent brain-dead of the mushier liberals, it was one of those fluffy pain-free words it was easy to be in favor of. So it’s quite an achievement to have shifted the multiculti word off the pink-bunny side of the ledger. Nevertheless, the real question is what, if anything, follows therefrom.
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