If there is one glaring side-effect of “fighting like the Left”, it is that seems to necessitate “thinking like the Left”, or at least gravitate thinking thereto, not only as it pertains to tactics and strategy—superficially at least—but as it regards ideological underpinnings.
Such as is the case with the criticism of “asymmetrical multiculturalism”. For the Left, it is a tool to divide people, not only amongst identity groups associated with the Left, but to reduce America into a small intersectional identity group with it tarred with the appellation of “oppressor”. They insist on all cultures, both real and invented, be not just tolerated, but affirmed and venerated, while denying the same to the now designated “oppressors”.
Your humble author has long been an opponent of the divisive and Unamerican concept of “multiculturalism” and how it has been used as a stalking horse for attacking the common American monoculture. America is diverse: Diverse states, diverse local community, a diversity of thought. However, there is nonetheless a common and unifying heritage and American essence that binds Americans and is what makes Americans to be Americans as a distinct people. America is built up from the individual to families and local communities, to come together and hold sacred something that we not only share, but share because we believe in it and it is part and parcel of being American, as those individuals, families, and local communities are the building blocks for something that binds us—not because we are compelled or obligated—but rather because it is that higher commonality that is held so dear.
Fighting for that monocultural and precious inheritance is difficult, especially when the tolerance and anti-uniformity sentiments of Americans is exploited by the Left; this is especially so when some go out of there way to fit the stereotype of a small minded bigot who believes that people can not become Americans and feels that even some who are natural born Americans are not “of the body”, so as to speak. Rather than fight the long and hard fight against multiculturalism, some have decided to embrace it, but with a reversal of which side in the Progressive’s laid out scheme is good and which side is the villain.
One such example is provided by U.K. academic Eric Kaufmann, via The American Conservative writer Rod Dreher, who talks of this “asymmetric multiculturalism” who rather that fight the Progressive notion that White identitarianism (and presumably other intersectional identities) is uniquely evil amongst ethnic/cultural identities, embraces the device by demanding an equal place and equal respect as one of many groups in this multicultural brave new world. In other words, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. As Mr. Dreher describes it:
“But the Right plays its own version of denial, in Kaufmann’s view, with its belief that all identity politics are immoral. They do this in part because they are trying to maintain moral symmetry: if it’s wrong for white people to identify with their race, and to pursue political policies based on what’s good for their race, then it must also be wrong for every ethnic group to behave that way. The problem with this, says Kaufmann, is that it’s unnatural and just plain wrong. People of various ‘tribes’ do this all the time, and though it obviously can be abused, it’s better (in Kaufmann’s view) to allow everybody to engage in a limited version of this, rather than to deny that it has any validity at all. If whites were allowed by the popular culture to think of themselves collectively in the way blacks, Latinos, Asians, and others are allowed to think of themselves, then perhaps non-liberal whites would recognize that some identity politics claims made by racial minorities are valid and important to recognize.”
This, of course, runs contrary to the very essence of America as a nation and a people that isn’t defined by neither Blut nor Boden. By blut (blood), how many Americans can trace ancestry to the American Revolution, or to English Colonists, let alone all the way back to a denizen of England when the Magna Carta and Charter of the Forest were signed? Nor is it a question of Boden (the land/soil). It is our common heritage and common government derived therefrom that gives meaning to the land over which it exercises jurisdiction, and not the land that gives meaning to whatever idea, more, or custom that exists therein. Again, the Magna Carta and Charter of the Forest predate the existence of America as either a nation or as a collection of English colonies, yet both are part and parcel of that, our American Heritage.
This is a dangerous move, though perhaps one that is inevitable as more and more give up on a monoculturally intact America and help the Progressives nail the coffin with a diverse array of multicultural nails. After all, by rejecting a common and overarching identity and common culture, the Progressives are aided and abetted in marginalizing and isolating and increasingly smaller identity group that they will never ever allow symmetric respect to, if in the future they allow it at all.
“I hate asymmetrical multiculturalism because in the world I live in — among media, academic, and cultural elites, broadly speaking — it is a strategy for disempowering and marginalizing people on the basis of race, sexuality, and religious belief, and psychologically disarming any instinct for self-preservation among them. I’m one of those right wingers that Eric Kaufmann says is mistaken in his opposition to all identity politics.
“He might be right about me and my kind. One thing is for sure, though: in this time of turmoil and social transition, conservatives who think like me are going to lose ground to white right-wingers — not conservatives; right wingers — who think like the black Democrat Ayanna Presley. Who, by the way, has more in common with Lester Maddox than she could possibly understand. In that sense, Donald Trump is arguably playing by the rules Pressley, Omar, and the asymmetrical multiculturalists of the American Left observe — and that’s why they hate him so much. I don’t think Trump is any kind of political genius, but perhaps it takes someone as uncultured and unformed by the norms of his economic class to reject the asymmetrical multiculturalism that is received without question by our elites.”
America is worth fighting for, and its common and unifying monoculture will always stand superior to any multicultural replacement, no matter how symmetric it is.
