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

FORTY-FOUR years after the death of George Orwell we find ourselves immured in an Orwellian culture, where language has become an instrument of political coercion and institutions created for intellectual enlightenment have been turned into bureaucracies of untruth. Having vanquished what Robert Conquest accurately described as "the biggest concentration of brute power the world has ever seen: a tremendous armament, a huge bureaucracy, an enormous police machine, a vast propaganda apparatus"--in other words, Soviet Communism--we are surrendering at home to mendacities even more insidious, because imposed from within, in their power to corrupt democracy.

The names we have conferred upon this rapidly accelerating threat to our democratic order--"political correctness," "multiculturalism," "diversity," and the rest--do not really describe the nature of the assault. For these names have themselves evolved into Orwellian euphemisms, which lie about goals that dare not disclose their true character.

Everyone--both the partisans of those goals and their adversaries--now understands that "political correctness," long shorn of its irony, has come to signify systematic falsehood; that "multiculturalism" stands for the monocultural imperatives of minority political interest groups; that "diversity" means enforced conformity. Yet the publisher of the New York Times now regularly issues a "diversity newsletter" instructing his employees in the goals to be met in what he describes as "a new way of thinking about people," and the State of New York mandates a "multicultural" curriculum to be taught in public schools where almost no other standard--not even that of basic literacy--is strictly enforced.

The term "political correctness" has, as a linguistic invention, been ridiculed for its dishonesty, and has therefore been widely denied even in those quarters where its commands continue to be ruthlessly imposed as public policy. It would clarify the discussion significantly if we were able to call this socio-political-cultural movement by its right name. In a recent issue of Partisan Review, Steven Marcus, the dean of Columbia College, brought us closer to the reality of "political correctness" by labeling it "soft totalitarianism." Paul Johnson, the English journalist and historian, has performed a similar service in labeling it "liberal fascism." Yet because we remain essentially defensive and even at times apologetic in our criticism of this anti-democratic plague, such terms have proved to be too confrontational to be generally adopted even for polemical purposes.

Thus, the battle continues to be fought, for the most part, on the enemy's terms, lest the critics of multiculturalism and its allied poisons find themselves stigmatized in the liberal press, in the councils of government, and in the business world--never mind the world of popular culture--as racists, sexists, homophobes, and other species of scoundrels.

Into the discussion of this disastrous development in our democracy there have lately entered a number of dissenting liberal voices. While they have been late in arriving at the barricades--and often bring with them the kind of liberal baggage that muddles the arguments and obscures the degree to which liberal orthodoxy is itself a major contributor to the disaster they now wish to address--they are nonetheless indicative of the crisis that has lately overtaken liberalism as a result of the multiculturalist assault.

The best of these works of liberal dissent, in my view, is Richard Bernstein's Dictatorship of Virtue. This is a book that is important, above all, for its excellent journalistic account of the lives--the lives of conventional liberals, for the most part--that have been irreversibly damaged by the illiberal doctrines that have come to be enforced in the name of a new liberal orthodoxy. The book is not an exercise in political theory, and still less is it a conservative polemic. It is social reportage of a high order--reportage born of moral conscience in the face of grave injustice. It thus represents the kind of old-fashioned liberal journalism that has been earmarked for destruction by the new "soft totalitarianism."

Because the principal strength of Dictatorship of Virtue is to be found in the many compelling stories it recounts, let me focus here on what is for me the most poignant of the personal histories that Mr. Bernstein has uncovered in his harrowing travels through our new multiculturalist America. It is the story of a white male heterosexual college student and what he was made to suffer at the hands of the multiculturalist bureaucracy at one of our elite universities.

"You wouldn't call Timothy Gregory a conservative," writes Mr. Bernstein, certainly not a conservative ideologue. He is a medical student at the State University of New York who graduated from Cornell University in 1992, a practicing Catholic from a working-class family in Erie, Pennsylvania, whose basic political position is infused with notions of tolerance and openness. He espouses support for gay rights; he believes in equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, creed, sex, or national origin. He is not a member of the WASP establishment. No silver spoon was in his mouth at birth. He is a dark-haired young man of medium height, modest in demeanor, polite, respectful of authority, a kind of average guy in many ways."

Coming from a family of five children, Tim Gregory needed to make some money to help meet expenses at Cornell, and so he applied for a job as a resident advisor (RA) in an undergraduate dormitory. He was accepted, and then, as Mr. Bernstein writes, "in August 1990, went to Ithaca for a nine-day session of training, repeating more or less the same procedure the following year when he got the RA job a second time." In these training sessions, Gregory was introduced to the multiculturalist facts of life.

There were seminars on sexual harassment, attitudes toward homosexuality, alcohol and drug abuse, and multiculturalism itself. "Tim was somewhat surprised," Mr. Bernstein writes, "when he found himself quickly labeled . . . simply and bluntly as a `privileged person.' The others occupied various rungs on the ladder of the `oppressed,' meaning gays and lesbians, the physically handicapped, all women, and all members of racial minorities."

It did not matter that, as Mr. Bernstein writes, "there were black kids at Cornell who came from families far wealthier than his, who went to exclusive prep schools whose interior he had never seen." But it was not permitted to question or discuss the facile classifications of "oppression" that provided the underlying ideology of the RA training program. "In fact, on the sensitive subjects," writes Mr. Bernstein, "opinions different from those of the trainers were not tolerated. Resident-life training at Cornell, like so much of multiculturalism in practice, proclaims the richness of difference when difference is a matter of race, sex, and sexual preference, but suppresses differences of opinion."

But Tim Gregory needed the job, and so he generally kept his mouth shut. Or tried to, anyway. "Once during the `Issues of Oppression' workshop," writes Mr. Bernstein, "a fellow trainee (she happened to be black) asserted ... that white men have life handed to them on a `silver platter."' This proved to be too much for Tim, and he imprudently responded to it. "He did not mean to downplay the disadvantages of people of color, he said, but he came from a rural part of Pennsylvania where many white people lived lives of dire poverty, so it did not seem to him that all whites automatically have lives of great privilege and ease."

For this infraction of the rules, he was branded a racist by the other RAs, and later the same day he was required to attend a session at which he was obliged to explain "his offensive comment." At this session, moreover, the officials in charge of the New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade were denounced as "just a bunch of drunken Irish" for excluding militant gays from the parade. Tim Gregory is, of course, of Irish descent.

It got worse. "On the first Sunday of the training program Tim told his group leaders that he wanted to go to Mass," Mr. Bernstein writes. But that wasn't allowed. This is now Tim Gregory speaking: "That day was gay day, and they brought in members of ZAP, which is the gay, lesbian, and bisexual group . . . they showed us explicit sex movies, first one of lesbians and then one about gay men. The gay movie was really triple X." Thus, instead of going to church, Tim Gregory was compelled, as he said, "to watch a movie that is against my religion."

There are a lot of other terrible stories recounted in Dictatorship of Virtue--stories about what one newspaper editor in Brookline, Massachusetts, describes in the book as "character assassination and intellectual terrorism" that reflect a remorseless indifference to, if not contempt for, "the heritage of free thought and free speech which lie at the center of this community and this country"--and they should all be read with care.

The book opens with a grim account of what happened at the Philadelphia Inquirer when, in 1990, the paper published an editorial entitled, "Poverty and Norplant: Can Contraception Reduce the Underclass?" Amidst charges of racism, "diversity-training" sessions were immediately ordered for the entire staff, and blacks on the editorial board were given a veto over future editorials. The chronicle of horrors ends with the tale of Professor Alan Gribben's departure from the University of Texas in 1991 after he had been turned into a pariah for opposing the politicization of the teaching of English composition for freshmen. The Brookline saga is about a fight that parents waged over how European history was taught to their children in the local school.

Quite as important, however, is the story of the fate suffered by Mr. Bernstein's book since its publication earlier this fall. Mr. Bernstein is, of course, a highly respected reporter for the New York Times. He was formerly that newspaper's Paris bureau chief, and before that be served as Time magazine's first bureau chief in Peking. His previous books are studies of China and France. It therefore speaks volumes about the degree to which the New York Times itself has been made hostage to the new multiculturalist orthodoxy that none of the stories Mr. Bernstein recounts in Dictatorship of Virtue could be published in the paper in the way Mr. Bernstein has told them in this book. For the New York Times is now following precisely the kind of "diversity" brain-washing program that Mr. Bernstein describes in such vivid detail.

It was no doubt for this reason that New York Times editors arranged for two hard-nosed attacks on the book to be published in the paper's own pages, one in the Sunday Book Review and the other in the daily Times. This is, 1 believe, unprecedented in the history of the New York Times. But then, so is the "diversity" program itself, which has reshaped the way the New York Times now reports the news on a great many matters having to do with race, crime, sex, education, and social policy. Thus the author of Dictatorship of Virtue finds himself, in the aftermath of the book's publication, to be another of his own case histories. Perhaps he will now write a sequel focusing on his personal experience as a casualty of the cultural revolution he has recounted so brilliantly.

Mr. Kramer is the editor of The New Criterion.