CAMPAIGN 2000 III: Our Inglorious Revolution.

REVOLUTIONS can take place relatively unnoticed. The reason has often been given:that the most profound revolutions are not those that overturn institutions, but those that leave institutions standing while emptying them of all significance. Of course, institutions are too useful to remain empty; revolutionaries eventually fill them with a significance that suits their purposes. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, for example, kept the monarchy, but transformed the state into a "crowned republic." Everything looked the same; but everything was different.

Are Americans living through a similarly invisible transformation? A striking feature of the current campaign is that not a single major candidate stands for the concept of America that was universally celebrated until about 20 years ago: America as an ethnic melting pot, in which is forged a new, un hyphenated American nation united by a common culture. Politicians of all parties, and countless Hollywood movies, saluted this unifying vision.

Yet, almost overnight, the melting-pot ideal vanished-replaced by a bastard ideal called "diversity." Although there are superficial similarities between these two concepts, what distinguishes them profoundly is that, under diversity, different ethnic groups fail to melt into one another to produce an American ethnicity. Each group retains its own culture; their common American identity is a diluted legal one, which does not have the first claim on their loyalty.

Diversity has successfully presented itself as a more tolerant ideal than the melting pot. Politicians and cultural leaders have swallowed the comforting notion that it allows people to preserve their identities instead of forcing them into the "brutal bargain" of assimilation. But this ideology has toxic consequences: It encourages the belief that culture is genetically transmitted and racially specific, that true insights into the thoughts and feelings of another race or sex are impossible, and that political representation must therefore be based upon ethnic and gender proportionalism rather than majority rule. In their combination of racial essentialism and postmodern sentimentality, such views are a sort of soft fascism.

Yet these views have thoroughly replaced melting-pot Americanism in political rhetoric. Al Gore's famous mistranslation of e pluribus unum as "from one, many" is actually a perfect description of what Gore thinks America is: a permanent bazaar of self-conscious minorities. Both Gore and Bill Bradley made blatant appeals to ethnic divisiveness, pandering to the race-baiter Al Sharpton, accusing each other (absurdly) of hostility to minorities, and defending-without qualification-race and gender preferences.

The two leading Republicans were better, but not good. Both George W. Bush and John McCain equivocate on racial preferences, and support bilingual education (except for some brief criticisms by McCain). Strong rhetorical support for the melting pot-or the related idea of "color blindness"-was confined to fringe candidates.

How has the idea of a common American identity been banished to the fringes of politics? How have absurd racist theories of culture- admittedly softened, sentimentalized, and made respectable by ethnic association-become the common coin of public debate? In the middle of this revolution, as we are, we can only glimpse the reasons as through a veil. But let me suggest the following:

1) Official policy. The government has created significant financial and other incentives to adopt an official identity such as the "Hispanic" one. It facilitates admission to college, job hiring, and promotions. When such privileges have existed for several years, they come to be seen as entitlements. The identity on which they depend comes to seem natural. And the group shaped by that identity develops a common interest in defending its "rights." Hence the rise of diversity.

2) Race. The common American culture has been relativized as "white" culture. That is nonsense, of course, since a thousand ethnic influences have helped reshape the original culture of the English settlers. But the lie serves to delegitimize assimilation, by characterizing it as the imposition of an alien culture on all non-Anglo Americans; this, in turn, justifies the establishment of minority cultural enclaves. And once America is relativized as a "white" construct, it can hardly be defended, let alone celebrated, by whites with a guilty conscience about race. Hence the weakness of the opposition to diversity.

3) Immigration. Persistently high levels of immigration make diversity and mul ti culturalism plausible, because they introduce into society even more people who bear different cultural traditions. This fosters cultural enclaves like those in Miami; the more Spanish-speakers arrive, the easier it is for everyone to avoid assimilation. They strengthen existing ethnic political organizations and even, sometimes, awaken ethnic loyalties in long assimilated individuals and groups-a phenomenon Scott McCon nell has called "de-assimilation." In these circumstances, many immigrants want to assimilate but are discouraged from doing so. Hence the persistence of diversity.

4) President Clinton. He is the first president actually to embrace the notion of diversity in conscious opposition to that of the melting pot. He has stated that America has embarked on the unprecedented experiment of living without either a majority race or a majority culture. It is actually not unprecedented: The Habsburg Empire, RIP, tried the same. What made America more successful-until now-was that it had diluted ethnic passions by mixing them with the sympathies generated by a common culture.

But Clinton has done more than merely predict the development of a nation without a common culture. Through his ruthless exploitation of ethnic divisions in everything from the "Chinese espionage" case to the burning of black churches, he has demonstrated that diversity maximizes the tensions in a multiethnic society.

It would be nice to imagine the Republicans taking up the cause of the melting pot; but that would require their thinking seriously about race, culture, and the American identity.