This is a follow-up diary to the one
I posted last night from my visit on Monday to the conservative Hudson Institute to hear a speech from British neoconservative Douglas Murray [
full speech on PoliticsTV].
This diary focues on Murray's strong distate for multiculturalism. After a little research, I found out this hatred of multiculturalism was not at all limited to Mr. Murray; he was merely echoing what many others have said before him.
More below the fold.
Murray explained [
Windows Media /
QuickTime /
Full Speech]:
MURRAY: Because relativism gives equal credit to the wrong and the right, it can, and does, end up with a single result, which is the wicked is unnaturally elevated and the good maligned, the malignant raised up and the brought low.
Such a philosophical problem now affects not only our foreign policy, but the very existence of the West at home. The absurd and disingenuous prosthelitizing of multiculturalism over the past few decades is just such a case.
This is not about the whole world becoming a melting pot, and nor is it about people being nice to each other. It's about making the West a laboratory for an experiment that can only lead to the destruction of the West. I have sympathy here with Kristol's description of multiculturalism as 'as much a war against the West as Nazism and Stalinism ever were' and Samuel Huntington's claim that multiculturalism is, in it's essence, anti-European civilization and anti-Western ideology.
Reading further through, I smelled a straw-man ... whenever Nazi comparisons are offered, there's usually a scared pundit with imaginary enemies trying to hide a bad argument. This anonymous blogger says almost exactly what came to my mind after hearing Murray rail on multiculturalism (but he/she puts in better than me so I'll go with his/her comment):
Conservatives hate the very idea of such a thing, and have made opposition to "multiculturalism" a center piece of their culture wars. Numerous conservative writers, from George Will, to Buckley, to Charles Krauthammer, to numerous bush league pundits, routinely take a poke at "multiculturalism." They all use the same argument, everytime. Cultural values must be objective. Otherwise how can we "condemn" such practices as cannibalism and human sacrifice? Never mind, that no progressive has ever advocated that we "tolerate" cannabilism or human sacrifice as a legitimate religious practice. The extreme case they cite is for purposes of establishing the "superiority" of some cultures -- theirs in particular. Why do they do this? They wish to justify imperialism, and otherwise kicking around brown people. [...]
I don't think that very many progressives appreciate the power [of] one word labels like "multiculturism" routinely used by rightwing ideologues. There is an entire worldview, and line of reaonsing -- such as it is -- behind that, and many other conservative words and phrases. The conservatives have internalized the underlying worldview, many of them not even knowing where it came from. [...] We're not beating them, because we are not cutting to the heart of that worldview, and letting the air out of it.
And conservatives do use "multiculturalism" as a one word label that to them has sinister implications. For example, Little Green Footballs titled a post about one of the 9/11 hijackers meeting with a USDA loan officer as simply "multiculturalism at work".
Maybe it's time progressives began regularly offering a positive definition of multiculturalism, because frankly, the actual definition of multiculturalism might be a political winner (if I'm being too optomistic, let me know in the comments):
Multiculturalism is an ideology advocating that society should consist of, or at least allow and include, distinct cultural groups.
Isn't communism the absence of 'distinct cultural groups', among many other things? Do these folks who keep crowing about freedom hate it when it means people of other cultural groups don't become 100% just like them when they become citizens of the USA? Do we want to live in a world with no cultural differences?
The progressive retort that keeps coming to my mind might go something like this: "You're against people who look or act different than you living in your community? That's a shame you have such coldness in your heart."
(If you have some time, I highly recommend gabbardd's diary from yesterday giving a rich history of neo-cons and neo-liberals.)