Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future.

Multiculturalism, at first glance, appears to posit a happy playground where everyone is included, regardless of race, creed, or color. In practice, it often means the imposition of a bland, Benetton International version of world culture, with all the gritty details nicely bleached and Americanized. In between these two poles lurks the stubborn reality of any given culture, with all its natural conservatism, its taboos and intolerance. Multiculturalism, therefore, is not an easy subject for tactful discussion; strong opinions can always be reduced to the ethnocentric or political bias of the speaker. Richard Bernstein's awareness of this danger shows up in every page of Dictatorship of Virtue. He makes a full confession of his personal and political biases, and he maintains a sober independence from that ideological food-fight know as the Culture Wars. He tempers his critique of multiculturalist orthodoxy with professions of faith in some sort of renewed and balanced pluralism.

Nonetheless, Bernstein's argument is familiar. He is convinced that multiculturalism has become "the dominant ideology of the late twentieth century"; and his evidence consists, for the most part, of anecdotes in which liberal educators and activists impose a shallow orthodoxy of "sensitivity" and "diversity," jeopardizing truth, careers, and our national committment to unity. Although Bernstein, who was for several years a cultural correspondent for the New York Times, writes about newspapers, high schools, churches, and municipalities as well as universities, his views are sympathetic with the attacks made against the academy in recent years by conservatives such as Allan Bloom, Dinesh D'Souza, and Roger Kimball. It is no accident that his title is adapted from Robespierre, the architect of the Terror. For Bernstien, multiculturalism as it is currently practiced is a tragic perversion of the liberal impulse, a pluralism turned awry. He makes this claim effectively where the academy is concerned, showing how the language of liberal inclusiveness has often led to an exclusive orthodoxy. But for Bernstein these excesses are more than mere jiggles of the scale in an evolving dialogue on politics and education. They are symptoms of a national loss of faith in the assimilationist ideal, with dire (though vague) consequences for the American future.

Bernstein devotes many pages to controversies at the University of Texas and the University of Pennsylvania, where what should have been minor incidents involving race and the curriculum became lengthy battles, damaging careers and further polarizing the environment at both institutions. Sometimes it is hard to know whether the rhetoric of multiculturalism is the cause of such disputes--as Bernstein argues--or merely a symptom of administrative incompetence. Often it appears to be a bit of both.

Bernstein insists, however, that these tendencies are present and powerful outside of education as well. He describes corporate "diversity training" sessions that crowd out true diversity of opinion and inculcate a simple-minded view of racial and ethnic diversity. He demystifies the alleged "massive increase in hate crimes" in recent years by showing that in at least one city (Saint Paul, Minnesota) the statistics on hate crime are subject to manipulation and have only been recorded in recent years anyway. Such studies, Bernstein argues, are "more a consequence than a cause of multicultural doctrine." He may well be right; but his findings do not amount, in my mind, to the discovery of a "dominant ideology." It is certainly true that Columbus did not enjoy the same joyous national celebration in 1992 as he did a hundred years previously. But that does not mean, as Bernstein argues, that the politics of difference have triumphed over the politics of equality.

Multiculturalism is often invoked in the mainstream press in the context of immigration. The country, according to the common wisdom, is undergoing a massive "browning"; by the twenty-first century, whites of European descent will no longer be the majority. These facts are often given as a justification for bilingual town meetings or for changing the literary canon, as though demographic change necessarily implied cultural change. This kind of "diversity," Bernstein rightly argues, "negates the very existence of a common culture valid for all of us who are already here." And that is particularly odd, because most of the immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island a hundred years ago knew less about America than those arriving today; yet they embraced their "Americanization" eagerly and successfully. Bernstein attributes our current loss of faith in the power of the "melting pot" to the national disillusionment of Vietnam and Watergate. Those events, he reminds us, formed the political baptism of most Americans now in their thirties and forties; and it is easy to feel gloomy about what such cynicism will breed in the years ahead. But a longer historical view would help to alleviate the gloom. Ever since the revolution, America's almost constant social and political transformations have elicited prophecies of doom, some of them far more eloquent than Bernstein's; but somehow the country always manages--like New York City--to totter on from year to year.

Bernstein ends his book by insisting, somewhat vaingloriously, that "it takes no bravery to be a multiculturalist." They control the academy, the grants, the liberal press--therefore they control the country. That inference, made repeatedly in the book, is unconvincing. It may take no bravery to be a multiculturalist, but it doesn't take much bravery to be a critic of multiculturalism either, unless you happen to be an English professor at a liberal university. There are plenty of journalists and critics who like nothing better than bashing multiculturalism, and they will greet Bernstein's book with ardor. One can only hope that they will also honor his noble intention: to reclaim multiculturalism, not to abandon it.