David Brooks: The Death of Multiculturalism

[BurtWorm]

In today's column, Brooks cheers what he calls the death of multiculturalism, basing his claim on his reading of Michael Tomasky's vastly more nuanced piece in The American Prospect, "Party in Search of a Notion." Brooks says:

Multiculturalism is in decline for a number of reasons. First, the identity groups have ossified. The feminist organizations were hypocritical during the Clinton impeachment scandal, and both fevered and weak during the Roberts and Alito hearings. Meanwhile, the civil rights groups have become stale and uninteresting.

Second, the Democrats have come to understand that they need to pay less attention to minorities and more to the white working class if they ever want to become the majority party again. Third, the intellectual energy on the left is now with the economists. People who write about inequality are more vibrant than people who write about discrimination.

Fourth and most important, 9/11 happened. The attacks aroused feelings of national solidarity, or a longing for national solidarity, that discredited the multiculturalists' tribalism.

Tomasky is now back with an essay in The American Prospect in which he argues that it is time Democrats cohered around a big idea — not diversity, and not individual rights, but the idea of the common good. The Democrats' central themes, Tomasky advises, should be that we're all in this together; we are all part of a larger national project; we all need to make some shared sacrifices and look beyond our narrow self-interest. Tomasky is hoping for a candidate who will ignore the demands of the single-issue groups and argue that all Americans have a stake in reducing economic fragmentation and social division.

<Brooks' article is available in full behind the Times' subscription firewall: http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/opinion/27brooks.html?hp=&pagewanted=print>


It's really worthwhile to read all of Tomasky's article. He doesn't dismiss multiculturalism, much less diversity. He tries to put it in historical perspective. His central point is not, as Brooks would have you believe, to rescue the Democratic Party from "the demands of the single-issue groups" as it is to argue for a recognition by Democrats that the historical moment is ripe for a resurgence of liberalism that is global in perspective. Tomasky writes:

What the Democrats still don’t have is a philosophy, a big idea that unites their proposals and converts them from a hodgepodge of narrow and specific fixes into a vision for society. Indeed, the party and the constellation of interests around it don’t even think in philosophical terms and haven’t for quite some time. There’s a reason for this: They’ve all been trained to believe -- by the media, by their pollsters -- that their philosophy is an electoral loser. Like the dogs in the famous “learned helplessness” psychological experiments of the 1960s -- the dogs were administered electrical shocks from which they could escape, but from which, after a while, they didn’t even try to, instead crouching in the corner in resignation and fear -- the Democrats have given up attempting big ideas. Any effort at doing so, they’re convinced, will result in electrical (and electoral) shock.

But is that as true as it appears? Certainly, today’s Democrats can’t simply return to the philosophy that was defeated in the late 1970s. But at the same time, let’s recognize a new historical moment when we see one: Today, for the first time since 1980, it is conservative philosophy that is being discredited (or rather, is discrediting itself) on a scale liberals wouldn’t have dared imagine a few years ago. An opening now exists, as it hasn’t in a very long time, for the Democrats to be the visionaries. To seize this moment, the Democrats need to think differently -- to stop focusing on their grab bag of small-bore proposals that so often seek not to offend and that accept conservative terms of debate. And to do that, they need to begin by looking to their history, for in that history there is an idea about liberal governance that amounts to more than the million-little-pieces, interest-group approach to politics that has recently come under deserved scrutiny and that can clearly offer the most compelling progressive response to the radical individualism of the Bush era.


I don't know if Tomasky is right, but his argument deserves a more thoughtful reading than Brooks' wishful professional white-guy one.

[BurtWorm]

1. kick

[Bandit]

2. "that discredited the multiculturalists' tribalism."

His first "point" was on feminism and how hypocritical they were during Clinton's term. I did not realize feminist were of a certain "tribe".:shrug: