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re: you may have misundersood me
Robert — (archived)

Probably so, and my crack about being supposed to shudder was addressed more generally than to you--there's a noticeable thread of xenophobia running through the current immigration debate even if it's not shared by all individuals. Seems like it's hard to sensibly discuss concepts like multiculturalism without dragging in ethnicity and race (or have it standing there like the elephant in the room nobody acknowledges), because cultures are associated with distinct groups of people. I think it's fair to say that the particular American culture that some people believe is under fire is the Anglo-Saxon subset which can't easily be separated from identification as a Caucasian culture. I know you're not a racist, Frank; I'm focusing on "Anglo-Saxonism" as an unacknowledged and for many unconscious basis for the perception that American culture is under attack. Anglo-Saxon culture has been dominant for so long that we take it for granted and don't generally see it, but I wouldn't define it as synonymous with American culture.

The development of ethnic city-states would be a bad thing, but I don't see much chance of it (unless we make the mistake of provoking it as a backlash against some ill-considered move to impose national uniformity). What you're describing is a ghetto writ very large, and while we've seen ghettos develop in big cities, they've never grown to the point of taking over an entire city. The long-standing policy of trying to discourage ghettoization has a strong practical motivation, on top of bleeding-heart Liberalism. I wouldn't consider ghettoization to be any kind of multiculturalism, but rather the failure of it.

Fifty years out...the world'll be changed beyond recognition. But I'm not worried about the fundamentals. "America" is too strong an idea to ever disappear, even if boundaries and populations shift the map into unfamiliar forms.

I was born in California and to me there's not the slightest sense of alienness in the prospect that the State will be dominated by Latinos and Asians by mid-century. That's just more of what I grew up with, California but even more so. California's a nice example of a confederation of cultures, I think. We were doing fine for centuries, before the US got here in 1849, until recently when Washington politicians got it into their heads to carpetbag the immigration issue on us. The California multiculture had an economic arrangement worked out through free-market principles, and three cultures who'd evolved a way of living side-by-side that, while it might not have achieved the ideal of classlessness, at least worked to everybody's grudging satisfaction. The most positive aspect of it was that assimilation happened continually and inexorably, reliably turning foreigners into Americans. Multiculturalism worked here.

Dontcha just hate it when Washington tries to fix something?

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