The Wages Of Multiculturalism Again - Road to the Middle Class

A BIG PROBLEM in the war on terror, Michael Barone opines, is that we are not just fighting Islam. We are also at war with the usual suspects: the western left.

[I]n terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society... But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.

Then Barone writes, like a deconstructionist pro, about the notion of privileged ideas and narratives. There are people in our society who have made it their business to emphasize the bad parts of our history and ignore the good parts.

You might say that while they rail against the privileged dead white male narrative they have constructed their own privileged narrative, one that you dissent against at your peril.

But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don't want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

The trouble is that necessary process of rooting out this covert enemy and refounding the American narrative of hope and optimism is going to be a long and divisive war.

And it hasn�t even got started yet.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

Comments:

Posted by: Gary Stamper on 09/07/06 8:55am

"But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes." Oh, yeah....Dick Cheney and Karl Rove....and don't forget that other guy........

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Civil Society

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

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[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
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Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

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Faith and Politics

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Never Trust Experts

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