[In the following review, Clausen summarizes Barber's position in regard to Communitarians and multiculturalists and agrees that the communities formed by ethnic groups that multiculturalists encourage often espouse attitudes of intolerance and thus pose a threat to true democracy.]

When Californians decided on June 2 to eliminate most bilingual classes in public schools, the many Asians and Hispanics who voted with the majority were following the lead of virtually every immigrant group since the United States began. Bilingual educators and professional multiculturalists bemoaned the vote as nativist, racist, even imperialistic, but its true meaning transcends those tired clichés. Two new books from opposite ends of the political spectrum examine what is going on as the melting pot unfashionably shows there's a blaze in the old stove yet.

John J. Miller's The Unmaking of Americans: How Multiculturalism Has Undermined America's Assimilation Ethic lays out its thesis in its title. Though Miller does not tell us so, his title plays off the names of two classic immigrant autobiographies: Jacob Riis' The Making of an American (1901) and Marcus Eli Ravage's An American in the Making (1917). Riis was a Dane, Ravage a Romanian Jew (and coincidentally my maternal grandfather). Both men wrote about poverty, hard work, and their eventual success in mastering the language and norms of a brash, confident America during the heyday of immigration.

For Miller as for many conservatives (he reports for National Review), multiculturalism threatens the cohesiveness of the United States by discouraging present-day immigrants from assimilating. Its adherents act deliberately “to fracture the American identity and turn the United States into a small global village, like Epcot Center's World Showcase attraction.” “As the architects of anti-Americanization public policies such as bilingual education, they are intent on using state power to preserve native cultures, native languages, and group solidarity.”

The anti-Americanism of many academic multiculturalists no longer comes as a surprise, but Miller makes the case that it causes real harm by depriving so many immigrants of what they need most—education that rapidly makes English their children's first language. Miller is a libertarian-leaning conservative who supports immigration on the grounds of America's universalist founding ideals. He feels the present dispensation is unfair both to immigrants themselves and to the country they chose.

“The multiculturalists' greatest fear about assimilation,” he aptly points out, “is that it will happen.” Although their success in combating it is debatable—the California vote and similar indications must be discouraging—Miller thinks everyone's interest would be served if this country recovered enough confidence in its institutions to practice the energetic Americanization that used to be so effective. His book ends with a manifesto listing ways to make immigration work better than it does now: “embrace colorblind law” (new immigrants are currently eligible for affirmative-action preferences), “pull the plug on bilingual education,” “deny welfare to noncitizens,” and so forth.

The fact that most of Miller's prescriptions are regarded as conservative implies that most liberals see immigration very differently from the way they once did. Who but a few ethnic separatists thought until recently that preserving foreign cultures in New York or Los Angeles was the job of the government? Not long ago the possibility that immigrants could immediately become wards of the taxpayers was anathema. Now, expressed in less direct language, these are established policies of the Federal government, actively or tacitly supported by both parties.

Not all liberals, of course, accept the assumptions behind current “multicultural” policies, whose ramifications stretch far beyond immigration. Benjamin Barber, a political scientist at Rutgers, has written a succession of books exposing what might be called the dark side of multiculturalism: its celebration of rigid identities that reduce members of officially sanctioned “minority groups” to no more than representatives of their “cultures.” In such a paradigm, woe betide the individual who violates what is supposed to be the group consensus! (Barber does not mention him, but one thinks immediately of Clarence Thomas.) Self-proclaimed cultural relativists can be the most intolerant people of all.

Barber's 1995 book, Jihad vs. McWorld, graphically set forth a global conflict between two irreconcilable forces: American popular culture, with the libertarian, consumerist attitudes it carries everywhere, versus its one remaining formidable enemy, Islamic fundamentalism. In A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong, Barber applies the same set of concerns to American political “culture” on its home ground.

One of his targets is the Communitarian movement represented by such influential social scientists as Amitai Etzioni and Robert N. Bellah. In principle, if not always in practice, Communitarianism represents a threat both to individual freedom and to the power of a democratic state to challenge community standards: “Where libertarians worry that state bureaucrats might impose substantive values on free individuals and groups, communitarians fear that the state may be corrosively agnostic, and have no guiding values at all. They may seek cultural safety not in laissez-faire insulation from ‘the state’ but in its cultural takeover—as Patrick Buchanan and Ralph Reed attempted in their 1992 and 1996 Presidential campaign efforts. …”

When language like this shows up, references to Nazi Germany are rarely far behind, and Barber soon drops the atomic bomb of polemical associations: “The implicit political aspirations of communitarianism were evident in the German ideal of Volksgemeinschaft. … The German experience reminds us that the siren call of community, though attuned to deep needs in the human spirit, can be answered in ways that violate both liberalism and democracy.”

His argument would be stronger without this liberal equivalent of Red-baiting. What he really means is that community or “culture” in the sense employed by many multiculturalists, has become a regressive, sometimes violent anachronism—a superficially appealing alternative to the self-centered shallowness of the McWorld, but still something liberals should resist. Real cultures and communities are inherently exclusive, Barber warns, and one form or another of Jihad is always lurking in the wings.

Furthermore, as a matter of empirical fact, the strong ethnic identities that multiculturalists celebrate are almost extinct in contemporary America. “Communitarians in the throes of a totalitarian temptation,” he declares, “must also confront the paradox that the natural communities which they aspire to fortify are often in practice realized only artificially. Under modern conditions, where the environment for natural community has been undermined by secularism, by utilitarianism, and by the erosion of ‘natural’ social ties, many communities claiming traditional or natural identities must make strenuously artificial efforts to reconstitute themselves as the organic natural communities they no longer are or can be.”

This generalization applies most obviously to ethnic communities: “American-born Polish- and African-Americans may identify with remembered or invented cultural roots, but they quickly discern, when they visit their ethnic homelands, how remote those hypothetical identities are from the largely deracinated Americans they have inevitably become.”

What Barber says of Communitarians is not that different from what Miller says of multiculturalists: “The world upon which they wish to refound a civil society is the world we have lost. They offer us the place we yearn for but can reach only if we retreat to ancestral identities no longer truly our own.”

Postculturalism, as I have elsewhere called it, is the recognition that the overused word “culture” no longer carries its traditional ethnic meaning in America at the end of the century. Not only has assimilation turned once powerful immigrant cultures into little more than bland morsels to be consumed by anyone at will—do you prefer taco salad, sushi, bagels, or the world champion Big Mac? What is sometimes called American “culture” has in the years since World War II become too inclusive, too much a matter of individual choices, to determine its participants' lives with anything like the strength of traditional cultures.

Multiculturalists on the Left, advocates for a vanished small-town Christian America on the Right, and Communitarians at some ambiguous spot on the spectrum are all laboring in the throes of the same nostalgic delusion. What they want to preserve is already gone, and no bilingual or multicultural policies are going to bring it back.

Maybe it's a good thing. Why should I have to choose once and for all between curry and knishes? Or, to put it positively, why shouldn't I get to choose among as many ethnic possibilities as exist, not only in food but in the more important realms of art, attitudes, historical models, and philosophical insights? Assimilation doesn't mean giving up everything that came from somewhere else, though maybe it once did. In its postcultural form it means having equal access to all the world's inherited intangibles.

But the price of this access is that every “culture” loses the power and meaning it had in relative isolation. We pick and choose among fragments, not whole ancestral worlds. As a result, we become more fickle and narcissistic than is good for us. This dish or moral practice pleases me today; that one doesn't; away it goes like a TV series whose ratings dropped. In the absence of a culture that makes enforceable demands, my immediate gratification is the only criterion of value.

As ethnic groups increasingly intermarry and lose what remains of their definition, the good and bad consequences of postculturalism will only intensify. At present, with an exogamy rate of over 40 percent for people of Hispanic and 50 percent for people of Asian descent born in the United States, these two hugely varied census categories continue to project distinct identities merely because their numbers are constantly replenished by new immigration.

Just as Miller's main adversary is multiculturalism, so Barber's bête noire—more dangerous even than factitious “communities”—is “the market,” an abstract entity that, Karl Marx observed long ago, mercilessly grinds up ancient cultures and values. Barber has almost nothing to say about immigration because in McWorld the concept of nationality has lost most of its meaning. Like Miller, he too has a manifesto—a list of ways to subordinate corporations to progressive politics. A postcultural society has many advantages, but it brings its own problems, whatever your ideology.

Meanwhile the people of California have had their say once again.