In 1992, while Los Angeles was seething with race riots over the police killing of the black ex-convict Rodney King, Vice President Dan Quayle of the first George Bush Administration visited Japan. While there, he tried to justify America’s state of civic disarray to his mystified hosts.
“From the perspective of many Japanese, the ethnic diversity of our culture is a weakness compared to their homogeneous society,” Quayle later told an audience back in California. “I explained that our diversity is our strength.”
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As Steve Sailer has pointed out, this seems to be the first introduction of that now-cliched slogan into American public life. It’s important that Quayle was talking about the special, long-standing problem of race relations between America’s black minority and its white majority. Black Americans are already Americans, and have been a significant part of the population’s makeup since before the country was founded. The challenge this presents is one of integration, not assimilation: It’s about negotiating a tolerable peace among the existing citizens so that they work more like a team and less like a scrum.
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Since the ’90s, though, “diversity is our strength” has come to mean not just that today’s Americans can learn to get along but also that anyone who’s not an American today can become one tomorrow, to everybody’s benefit and without meaningful turbulence. This is a rather more ambitious kind of proposal. One spokesman for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, whose 18,000 members advocate looser borders in the nation’s highest courts, put it this way: “Our diversity is not a weakness — it is our superpower. We come from every background, every faith, every story.”
The idea that Americans of various demographics should work together as one body politic can fittingly be called pluralism. The idea that America is a formless receptacle for people from “every background” is better described as multiculturalism. These two words have very different histories and mean very different things.
In philosophy, “pluralism” is the belief that the universe is made out of different raw materials arranged in coordination, like the notes of a musical scale. “From all things comes one whole, and from one whole come all things,” wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus.
The first part of this cryptic saying, translated from Greek to Latin, becomes e pluribus unum — a motto added to the Great Seal of the United States by the Swiss immigrant Pierre Eugene du Simitiere. Simitiere became an American during the founding generation and painted the first known portrait of George Washington. He probably took the Latin version of the tag from a minor poem attributed to Virgil about moretum, a kind of proto-pesto made by mixing vegetables and cheese. You grind all the ingredients together with a little olive oil until their pungent flavors blend into one tasty sauce: e pluribus unum.
When various distinctive subcultures fuse and balance each other like herbs in a dip, losing their separate group identities to accommodate a single collective project, that’s pluralism. Multiculturalism, by stark contrast, is when people refuse to subordinate their tribal allegiances to a higher national one. Among the earliest uses of the adjective “multicultural” was in the subtitle of a 1941 novel by the ex-Marxist Bulgarian immigrant Edward Haskell, Lance: A Novel about Multicultural Men. The critic Iris Barry, reviewing Lance’s book, called it “a fervent sermon against nationalism.”
Multiculturalism gained purchase amid the postwar reaction against fascism, which was commonly explained as an excess of patriotism. It was hoped that the enlightened could temper the violence of national passion with their superior devotion to a placeless “citizenship of the world.” By express design, multiculturalism undermines national cohesion and cuts against the love of country. If this kind of diversity is “our” strength, then “we” are not Americans first and foremost, but a cosmopolitan mob of unrelated and competing interest groups.
The ongoing agony of racial politics in the United States can be blamed in large part on the application of multiculturalist logic to the project of American pluralism. What we want is an integrated communion of equals, moderately open to newcomers but intensely concerned with their commitment to our 250-year-old laws, culture, and creed over and above whatever clannish devotions they bring with them. What we have gotten instead is a leadership class committed to aggravating our existing civilizational conflicts while also importing more.
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This behavior has inevitably produced a backlash against pluralism itself, which many young people now consider just as suicidally foolish as the multiculturalism that travels under its name. But real pluralism is one of America’s great enduring traditions. And yes, it is part, but not all, of our strength. The greater part is our devotion to what is still, per the title of a guidebook handed out to new arrivals by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “One Nation, One People.”
A quarter-millennium into our history, Americans would do well to jettison multiculturalism altogether in favor of our ancestral pluralism. Out of many, one.