Slouching Towards Gomorrah (51 page)

Is there hope that multiculturalism will fade as other passions
have? The best guess is that it will not. We have started down the road that other societies have taken, societies that are now riven with ethnic violence, and ethnic violence seems to cease only when a stronger force imposes peace. The center of the agitation in America is the educational system, and particularly the universities. Will they abandon the multiculturalist enterprise? Some think so. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is one of the optimists: “The situation in our universities, I am confident, will soon right itself once the great silent majority of professors cry ‘enough’ and challenge what they know to be voguish nonsense.”
²⁰
Well, they have had thirty years to cry “enough” to voguish and pernicious nonsense and haven’t done so yet. This silent majority seems to be like the previous ones we have heard about, permanently silent. That is what Morson’s Law would predict.

We are, then, entering a period of tribal hostilities. Some of what we may expect includes a rise in interethnic violence, a slowing of economic productivity, a vulgarization of scholarship (which is already well under way), and increasing government intrusion into our lives in the name of producing greater equality and ethnic peace, which will, predictably, produce still greater polarization and fractiousness. Since multiculturalism is a movement of the left and a yearning for more power, which is necessarily government power, its spread and entrenchment also bodes ill for the institutions of capitalism.

As Ortega y Gasset said, “Civilisation is before all, the will to live in common…. Barbarism is the tendency to disassociation. Accordingly, all barbarous epochs have been times of human scattering, of the pullulation of tiny groups, separate from and hostile to one another.”
²¹
Multiculturalism is barbarism, and it is bringing us to a barbarous epoch.

P
ART
III

16

S
ir Henry Maine made the point that, looking back, we are amazed at the blindness of the privileged classes in France to the approach of the Revolution that was to overwhelm them.
¹
Yet Maine finds “the blindness of the French nobility and clergy eminently pardonable. The Monarchy … appeared to have roots deeper in the past than any existing European institution.”
²
In his own place and time, men looked upon popular government and the democratic principle as destined to last forever. Maine asked whether the confidence of the French upper classes just before the Revolution “conveys a caution to other generations than theirs.”
³
In the following century, of course, nations that had adopted the democratic principle, in whole or in part, rejected it for totalitarian systems.

Yet we seem at least as sanguine about the prospects for democratic government as were Maine’s contemporaries.
⁴
The democratic principle is in rhetorical ascendancy everywhere, and yet it is worth asking whether in actuality, as a matter of practice rather than declamation, it is not in retreat, particularly in what had been its strongest bastion, the United States. Unlike the sudden cataclysm that overtook the French monarchy, ours appears to be a slow crisis, a hollowing out of democracy from within, that gives
ample warning of the unhappy condition towards which matters tend.

Modern liberalism is fundamentally at odds with democratic government because it demands results that ordinary people would not freely choose. Liberals must govern, therefore, through institutions that are largely insulated from the popular will. The most important institutions for liberals’ purposes are the judiciary and the bureaucracies. The judiciary and the bureaucracies are staffed with intellectuals, as that term is used in this book, and thus tend to share the views and accept the agendas of modern liberalism.

In his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln asserted: “The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court … the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.” Lincoln was thinking of
Dred Scott
, the infamous decision that created a constitutional right, good against the federal government, to own slaves. Today, however, his observation is even more pertinent, as we have resigned into the hands of the federal judiciary ever more vital questions affecting the whole people. We have in very significant measure ceased to be our own rulers.

Chapter Six discussed the manifold ways in which the Supreme Court, without authorization from any law, has changed our politics and our culture. That process continues as the lower federal courts and state courts are following the Supreme Court’s example. The courts, without authorization from law, are taking out of the hands of the American people the most basic moral and cultural decisions.

There seems no possibility of retrieving democratic government from the grasp of the Supreme Court, which now governs us in the name of the Constitution in ways not remotely contemplated by the framers and ratifiers of that Constitution. Lino Graglia, a professor of law at the University of Texas, concludes:

Graglia is quite right about what the Court has become, but he does not suggest how we can return to the system of representative self-government that the Constitution contemplates and that the courts, most especially the Supreme Court, are gradually but inexorably destroying. As we saw in chapter 6, the only practical way of reining in the Supreme Court is a constitutional amendment making its rulings subject to democratic review. As matters now stand, the Court’s assumption of complete governing power is intolerable, and yet, absent a constitutional amendment, we have no way of refusing to tolerate it.

The question is not only one of the illegitimacy of the Courts performance in usurping powers that belong to the people and their elected representatives. The judiciary is slowly disintegrating the basis for our social unity. Our cultural elites, the modern liberals, have contempt for democracy because it produces results and elects politicians they disapprove of. The courts have long since run out of ways to derive modern liberal results from even distortions of the original understanding of the Constitution. They, and the academic commentators who sustain them and urge them on, have, therefore, resorted to increasingly abstract and meaningless moralistic arguments and to lifeless legalisms.

We too often forget that the liberties guaranteed by our Constitution were not based on legalisms or moral theorizing but upon the historical experience of being governed by the British Crown. Our Constitution, and most particularly our Bill of Rights, were designed to prevent the federal government from becoming as oppressive as British rule was perceived to be. But as the historical meaning of the Constitution fades from memory, or
is regarded as irrelevant, its guarantees begin to change. We have a student who can say, with no sense of incongruity, that speech should not be free unless it is also correct. Far worse, constitutional adjudication has become the battleground of warring minorities who seek to capture the Supreme Court, and who have, on significant occasions, including the present, done so.

As it departs from the constitutional text and history that give our rights life, rootedness, and meaning, and substitutes abstractions reflecting modern liberalisms agenda, the Supreme Court brings itself and the entire concept of the rule of law into disrepute. It expends a dwindling moral capital and weakens both political authority and the possibility of a common culture. The increasing legalization of our culture is a sign of the fracturing of that culture, the continuing disappearance of the vestiges of unity. John Gray, after discussing the fragmentation of British culture, noted:

A variety of forces are destroying America’s political and cultural unity, and judicial activism must surely be ranked among them. As the courts recklessly squander our common cultural inheritance in the names of radical individualism and radical egalitarianism, they necessarily offer themselves and their authority over law as the only institution capable of holding our turbulent society together. But that task will prove beyond the capabilities of the courts. It takes more than legalisms, abstractions, and judicial diktats to hold a community together. Indeed, by its emphasis on individual
and group rights—rights it has invented—against those of the larger community, the Court denigrates the idea that there is value in community, the idea that the collectivity should exert a centripetal force. What the Court is doing is forcing the libertarian-egalitarian philosophy of our cultural elites upon the rest of us.