This is a guest post by my friend Professor Salim Mansur, a Muslim immigrant to Canada from Pakistan, who teaches Political Science at the University of Western Ontario. He manages to confuse further his already confused opponents when, in debating against the destructive ideology of “multiculturalism,” he describes himself as “a brown person.”
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The most dangerous element in the systematic subversion of American politics and culture as bequeathed by the founding fathers and maintained even through the Civil War and after, is the corrupting idea of so-called “multiculturalism.” I say “so-called” because this is not a culture, properly speaking. It is a political ideology.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. of Harvard, a lifelong Democrat, published The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society just before his death, in which he warned Americans that multiculturalism is an anti-American ideology.
Similarly, Samuel Huntington, also of Harvard, and also a lifelong Democrat, published his last book, titled Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity – a study of the decline of American culture currently underway due to the toxin of multiculturalism. My own study on this matter, Delectable Lie: a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism (Mantua Books, 2011) was in part inspired by those two books.
But such warnings have been deliberately ignored, or even denounced, mostly by means of personal attacks on those giving the warnings, motivated mostly for the obvious reasons of electoral advantage, and justified on the grounds of “globalism” – now the dominant ideology of the post-Cold War world.
The sound and appeal of multiculturalism is seductive, however, because it appears to be “progressive” and “inclusive”. But what is being torn down as a result of such a sweet-sounding ideology, is the fundamental structure of an historically unique culture, a culture built on the principle of individual rights and freedoms, that emerged only in the West, and that has found expression only in the West.
Rome was destroyed by “barbarians” coming from beyond its empire who overwhelmed the resources of that empire. But beginning in the 1960s, the West embarked mindlessly on its own internal self-destruction. Homegrown ideological barbarians hating the West and all it has stood for, chose to adopt multiculturalism as their latest ideological weapon. Their intent was to dilute, and in the end destroy, the central premise or the keystone of the modern Western civilization by accommodating wave after wave of migrations into its own heartland from alien, predominately anti-western nations.
And now, a half-century later, the capacity of the West to maintain its own unique core culture in the face of this twin assault on its unique historical identity is the biggest existential challenge with which the West is faced.
This American culture until very recently served as the common binding power for all immigrants to America and an affirmation of Americanism to which people of different backgrounds have always previously been expected to assimilate under the national motto: e pluribus unum (from many people, one people). Multiculturalism, however, is a blunt rejection of this core American ideal and, by extension, of this once core Canadian and British ideal.
I do not know whether Trump can reverse the half-century of subversion of Americanism, a subversion that reached its apogee under President Obama. He may not have the time, as even two terms in office is unlikely to be sufficient. He is also constrained by the entire edifice of elite political, academic and media influence built around the notion of multiculturalism, with its widening circle of identity and gender politics, all which is at this moment producing additional destructive movements, such as Black Lives Matter, Planned Parenthood, the BDS movement, Islamism, globalism, climate change deception, and more.
I see Trump as “the last man standing” – as the last defender of Americanism, as a patriot resisting a swelling tide of misconceived public opinion, of shallow, self-serving grievances and demands built, sadly, mostly on envy and resentment. This whole panoply of negativity is camouflaged often by the sweet-sounding label of multiculturalism.
In this sense Trump is another version of Churchill, who stood alone. Despite Churchill’s heroism in that crucial moment of Western history, his flaws ultimately doomed the effort he was engaged in. Within weeks after leading Britain to victory, Churchill was gone, and soon after him began the end of the British Empire.
I fear something similar is lurking around the corner for Trump. The immense effort to destroy him, in which so many in the West are now engaged, tells me that the most debilitating disease for any once-powerful civilization, the disease now at work in so many Western nations, is … self-loathing.
I hope I am wrong.
Best,
Salim
