Diversity

If you would like to see the background on these action items (and we recommend that you do), please see the book The American Ideas: 13 American Originals to Know, Love, and Defend available in hardcover and eBook.

CHAPTER 2: Diversity – To ensure the future of this American Idea, we should:

• Agree on the core that makes America exceptional.  There has to be something that binds us together or we’re lost.  The 13 American Ideas are the perfect place to start.

One prominent politician and writer said that “If we do not get control of our borders and stop this greatest invasion in history, I see the dissolution of the U.S. and the loss of the American Southwest – culturally and linguistically…What do we have in common that makes us fellow Americans?  Is it simply citizenship?  Or is it blood, soil, history, and heroes?”[i]

He misses the point that the “invasion” of immigrants from Europe was much larger, and those widely diverse ethnic and racial groups – after warring forever in the Old World – did assimilate.  But he also misses the bigger point:  Healthy assimilation is around ideas, principles, and values, not “blood, soil, history, and heroes” – something more accurately said about the German Reichs of Bismarck and Hitler.

The core we choose determines our destiny.  For example, during the French Revolution the core was called “Liberty, equality, fraternity.”  This turned out to be an intellectual and societal mishmash for a variety of reasons.  Liberty can’t work well with equality when everyone is viewed as one of “the People” and those people expect equality of results.  Liberty and fraternity (brotherhood) can’t be forced together – as they found out when a newly free country began executing thousands of its brothers.  Equality only worked with fraternity by demanding conformity.

The result?  Even though initiated later than the American Revolution (1789 vs. 1776), the French have had 5 constitutions, innumerable revolutions, and dictators like Napoleon and de Gaulle – among others.

America has a much better, much stronger core.  But each new generation has to understand it and commit to it for it to maintain its unifying role and power.

• Keep diversity and unity in equilibrium.  Freedom thrives only where a society has learned to put diversity and unity into a steady balance.  We should run for the hills fast when we hear either “Everyone believes this and you should too” or “no one believes this so how can you?”

We can have both elements.  We are and can be a diverse melting pot and a people with clear identity.  We can be tolerant and accepting of difference and we can treasure what it is that’s given this place called America matchless freedom and prosperity.

• Keep in mind that diversity can be destructive.  All diversity isn’t equal.  It’s always a powerful force.  Sometimes a bad one.

Destructive diversity is at its worst when it’s a cultural shredder and a forced equalizer.  Some sub-groups can develop their identity around what they perceive to be wrong with the culture at large, and spend their energies bad-mouthing that culture.  Others take the approach that there’s nothing special about one culture over another, that they’re all of equal value, and that because of that no culture has a right to claim primacy.  Some do both.

The first group misses the points that their own sub-culture has flaws, that those flaws should be addressed first, and that there’s something positive to be said about a culture that allows their destructive behavior.  The second group misses the points that cultures are very different in their goodness and badness, that some cultures elevate while others annihilate, and that cultures based on high Ideas are worth a second look.

To say we want to protect our culture doesn’t make us know-nothings or the anti-other group of the 19th century.  It makes us know something – that our culture is protected or America dies.

Those that take either or both of these destructive approaches are cultural poison – not to be eliminated, but to be ignored.  Diversity can be a tremendous asset, but is always a terrible god.

• Refuse to let individualism destroy American culture.  Diversity isn’t God.  We want people to be able to do their own thing without demolishing the Big Thing we share that allows us to do our own thing. That Big Thing is America, with its wonderful array of historically diverse Ideas.

Ultimately, individualism is only safe in a community that honors shared Ideas, including the American Idea of Diversity.  We can’t afford to allow our love of individualism to destroy the only place where individualism is safe.

• Refuse to let tribalism destroy American culture.   We can be proud of our separate ethnic or racial heritage without substituting it for our shared American heritage.  But tribalism is advancing within nations, including our own, as people identify with ever-smaller groups and then make those groups their whole.

Tribalism is self-identity made too small and carried too far.  The apparent short-term opportunity to tribalize – to isolate and become hyphenated-Americans and have a variety of official languages – can only lead to cultural warfare, sub-group arrogance, selfishness, and a curse on the liberty and cultural life of all.  Historian Jacques Barzun wrote that

…steps were taken that have magnified the idea of race and made it of decisive importance almost everywhere in the culture.  Not the lawmakers, who passed in 1964 a wise act compelling equity, but afterward, certain public and private agencies imposed rules that ensured a preferential right to work or to qualify for posts on the basis of status as “a minority.”…this new privilege increased mutual hostility among individuals and groups….Here and abroad the state has lost the virtue of being impartial and thus the moral authority to make impartiality the law for all.[ii]

• Eliminate the destructiveness of sub-group hyphenation. When our uniqueness separates us from others, and excludes them from who we are (rather than being one of the things that makes us who we are), we’re on the road to internal warfare and ruin.  We can, and should, lose the hyphenated-American syndrome.  “American” is what unites us.  Everything before the hyphen is perfectly designed to tear us apart.

When we hyphenate ourselves, we emphasize one characteristic out of hundreds that differentiate us.  This causes us to over focus on that one thing, and to underemphasize everything else.

America has always been the melting pot, not the mosaic.  It paved the way for everyone to access the best of this common entity called “American” while allowing – even encouraging – them to keep the best of who they were and are.  In a mosaic (like in most societies with distinct sub-cultures), it’s hard to make the pieces fit, and the likely outcomes range from unhealthy competition to cultural cleansing.  In a melting pot (like in America and few other places), the pieces merge and yet somehow remain distinct.  It’s a rich stew, with its own unique flavor (American) that is owed to the rich seasonings (Americans) who have richly spiced it for four hundred years.

Giving up hyphenation doesn’t mean giving up yourself or your individuality.  In America, it means committing to a common ideal, but one that includes enhancing you and providing a safe place for your individuality to flourish.  “America” is a big, richly textured word that already includes the prefix words – English, German, French, Irish, African, Asian, and all the rest.

• Eliminate tracking of Americans by race and ethnicity.  On census forms Americans are asked to choose a group identity.  This should be eliminated, or at the very least, “American” should be the first choice.  Actor Will Smith said, “It was as if part of me was vindicated.  It was something that I’ve known for a long time that I couldn’t really say: ‘You know guys, I really don’t think America is a racist nation…There are racist people who live there, but I don’t think America as a whole is a racist nation.’  Before Obama was elected president, I wasn’t allowed to say that out loud…”[iii]

• Stay clear on the difference between tolerating difference and tolerating evil.    All differences aren’t evil, but some of them are.  Having a big-tent version of tolerance, where anything and everything is acceptable or becoming so, is a very sure path to cultural suicide.

Under an all-ideas-and-values-are-equal lie, the line between different-and-good and different-and-evil is being erased.  No culture in history has ever had that line disappear without itself disappearing.  Deciding where that line is or should be can be very difficult – but not as difficult as having no line and being tossed into the dust bin of history.

• Cherish diversity of thought.  America is the one place where thinking differently is treasured immeasurably more than thinking alike.  The American Idea of Diversity calls us to keep it so.

This means that it’s way out of bounds to accuse someone of being un-American because they think differently.  It’s unfair to attack them personally because of their views.  And even if they think we’re heretics – as some will think of me because of my book – we have to remember that being a heretic doesn’t mean we’re wrong.

• Make a common language a special way to bond.  English is a beautiful language, but the key is a common language, not the English language.  It just so happens that English – or at least the Americanized version of English – is the common language of America.

We do no one any long-term favors by making it easy for them to avoid this common ground.  We allow them to stay on the margins and to be viewed as marginal: “They have their own language, but it doesn’t matter to us because they’re insignificant in the larger cultural picture.”  How can people participate when they can’t communicate?

At some point, having two or more languages gives us a division that can’t be overcome.  If we disagree and can talk about it, we have a chance.  If we disagree and can’t even talk about it, we’re finished – even if discussion could bring us to common ground.  We have to use a common language, or we misunderstand because we just can’t understand.

Perhaps we should call our language, with all of its ability to absorb cultural diversity, “American” and not “English.”  As Professor Higgins reminded us in My Fair Lady, “…in America they haven’t spoken English for years.”[iv]   But they have spoken American.

• Eliminate dual citizenship.  The oath would-be citizens take requires renunciation of foreign citizenship and loyalty.  In practice, however, people can lie and keep their former citizenship as well.

No way.  In America, you’re either an American Citizen only, or you’re not an American citizen.  Being an American is and should be enough for anyone.

• Remember where we came from.  Most of us don’t have to go back very far into our ancestry before we start running into people from other places, people who spoke strange languages and wore funny clothes and ate odd food.  And most of them would have been illegal immigrants if they had tried to immigrate under current thinking and laws – or they wouldn’t have been able to come at all.

• Welcome everyone into America who is already an American.  We can have the unique-in-history mindset of welcoming strangers.  We can find ways to let people in legally in a way that doesn’t burden the economy, morality, or the immigrants themselves.  We can create a lease-to-buy guest American program, where a person can, after a reasonable number of years, convert an honorable work and social record into American citizenship.

I can think of a number of natural-born Americans who hate America.  We’re keeping them?  While keeping lovers of America out?

• Refuse to see immigration and safe borders as mutually exclusive ideas.  Should we have open immigration or closed borders?  Of course we should.

We can maintain an openness to immigration, that quintessentially American idea, even as we take every possible step to make immigration of Americans-in-spirit safe and legal and immigration of criminals and terrorists impossible.  The only thing missing from having a steady flow of decent American immigrants and a tightly controlled but accessible border is the will to have them both.

How do we do it?  First, we have to choose to do it.  Having bad rules or fuzzy rules is in some ways worse than having no rules.  Having rules that aren’t applied fairly or at all is very contrary to the American Idea of Justice.

Second, we should build a barrier – not to keep people in, like the Soviet Union did in Berlin, or to keep them out, as some who hate immigration demand, but to bring order and fairness to the process of welcoming immigrants.  We have a 3,169 mile border with a developing country that encourages illegal immigration to avoid the revolution that its own bad policies would ignite.  We have a right to prevent all that is bad about Mexico from transforming Southwestern America.

We should populate that barrier with enough security to ensure that it isn’t a joke.  How?  If we were to bring, say, 300,000 soldiers home from our foreign entanglements and place them along our Southern border, we would have 95 soldiers per mile, or one soldier every 55 feet.  The cost would be much less than deploying them overseas, and they’d have the pleasure of living in America.  This level of security isn’t really needed, of course – but it illustrates that the problem is one of will, not ability.

And we should have clear plans for people to buy, lease, or lease-to-buy – whether they want to become citizens, simply be guest students or workers, or be treated as guest students or workers who want their time here to count toward citizenship.  If we go at it graciously, fairly, and rationally, it shouldn’t be that hard to figure out.  President Benjamin Harrison said,

We should not cease to be hospitable to immigration, but we should cease to be careless as to the character of it.  There are men of all races, even the best, whose coming is necessarily a burden upon our public revenues or a threat to social order.  These should be identified and excluded.[v]

And President Grover Cleveland said,

The laws should be rigidly enforced which prohibit the immigration of a servile class to compete with American labor, with no intention of acquiring citizenship, and bringing with them and retaining habits and customs repugnant to our civilization.[vi]

• Take the burden of immigration control off of businesses.  Right now, the U.S. government allows porous borders and illegal immigration and then wants to use businesses to do its work.  It’s not the job of business to control immigration after illegal immigrants have already been allowed inside America.

• See assimilation and cultural identity as compatible.  Assimilation doesn’t require the loss or degradation of our cultural identity.  We can be one and still be many.

But we have to be one or we aren’t a people at all.  For example, we need outstanding Mexican immigrants to move North, but we don’t need Mexico to move North.  We’ve seen Mexico, and it doesn’t work.