Multiculturalism, like environmentalism and many other liberal ideas, started out with the best intentions. The idea was to encourage tolerance of other cultural concepts, in keeping with the fact that our own culture can often be enhanced by ideas from other cultures. A quick look around America reveals that a huge amount of our culture, not to mention the English language, is imported from many places other than Anglo-Saxon England, and is demonstrably better for it.

The caveat, of course, was that this tolerance and willingness to pick up other ideas should not extend to those ideas that conflict with or destroy the basic foundations of freedom and individual rights that underlie our own Western culture.

What "multiculturalism" has decayed into is the modern idea that Western culture is inferior to almost all other cultures, if not actually evil, and that in any conflict between the two, the other culture should override our own, even when it violates the most basic American values and the rights of others.

And of course, many ideas of the Left are in fact racist, that is, they elevate externalities like skin color, national origin, language, and other things to a level of vast importance in dealing with people.