Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism.

Books about the decline of American nationalism will surely become a growth industry. The term "citizen" frequently seems less relevant than Italian or Latino, male or female, gay or straight. Salad bowls have replaced melting pots. Even the United States as a geographical entity has become less important in an age when the availability of labor in Manila determines wages in Fort Wayne, or electronic mail to Warsaw is more convenient than a letter to Los Angeles.

Few explorations of these matters will be as incisive as David Hollinger's Postethnic America, a thoughtful meditation on the need for liberals to reassert their allegiance to the national community.

This is old-fashioned advice. As Hollinger is well aware, the most wideranging intellectual project of the past generation has been to reassert the importance of the particular and the provincial, to unmask assumptions concealed behind abstract language. When scholars in the 1940s spoke about Man, we have learned, they frequently meant white men. Thornton Wilder's Our Town became the model for an "American way of life," not Richard Wright's Chicago.

Hollinger acknowledges these multicultural insights. His subtitle includes the word "beyond," not "against." What he regrets is the relentless equation of culture with the options available on census forms. Initially an effort to assist victims of past discrimination, racial classification schemes became demands for cultural recognition. An "Asian-American" culture is now assumed to include impoverished Cambodian refugees and Hong Kong financiers. Alternatively, the term "white" stretches from descendants of the Mayflower to Jews fleeing the former Soviet Union.

But individuals do not fit neatly within the boundaries of what Hollinger disparagingly terms the "Ethno-racial Pentagon" (African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and whites). More Native Americans marry outside the group than within it, as do one-quarter to one-third of Japanese-Americans. Marriages between African-Americans and whites have increased 300 percent in a quarter century.

Some advocates of multiculturalism discreetly ignore these facts, but Hollinger celebrates them. The more fluid the society and the more opportunities offered to move beyond the limitations of race or class, the more hope that current tensions might subside. In Hollinger's "postethnic" view, informing the daughter of an African-American father and an Asian-American mother that she must be African-American revives a most pernicious aspect of our Jim Crow past. Society's obligation is not to sustain particular cultures, but to provide an open arena for individuals to determine their own identity.

Defining an open arena is the tough part. Hollinger favors a society where individuals choose "affiliations" from a broad menu of ethnic and religious options. The content of these choices matters less than the assurance that they are made in a noncoercive environment. The wall of separation erected between church and state by the Supreme Court in the 1940s, Hollinger suggests, might also serve as a useful barrier between public institutions and the pressure to celebrate various ethnic cultures.

Behind this view, implicitly, is a philosophical stance that stresses individual autonomy. As much as possible, decisions made by parents or the larger society about sensitive matters such as religion and ethnicity should not limit the options available to their children.

While appealing in some respects, this account of the formation of group loyalties is not altogether convincing. A school system supervising the education of each student from the age of four to twenty-two that dismisses religious belief as irrelevant to modern life, for example, makes the choice of a religious "affiliation" after graduation less likely. Few traditions--religious, ethnic, or otherwise--sustain themselves through self-conscious, adult conversion. And religious people often view their faith as the response to a call or the understanding of a vocation, not simply as one among a handful of individual affiliations.

Hollinger might respond that American society cannot guarantee the survival of any ethnic or religious group, a burden necessarily shouldered by families and faith communities. Groups live or die in a cultural free market. All true, but building a wall between these groups and an expanding state may inadvertently shorten life expectancies

More compelling is Hollinger's plea for liberals to reclaim a nationalist, even patriotic, language from their political opponents. Franklin Roosevelt's and Lyndon Johnson's ability to inaugurate social welfare programs in the name of "the people" is a lost, liberal art. Yet most citizens understand that obligations to residents of inner-city Detroit or rural West Virginia differ in kind from duties to impoverished Indonesians. An emphasis on this national bond, instead of a rhetoric of difference and separation, might make common responsibilities, such as health care, more visible. And a more visible public concern for less fortunate citizens might channel energies away from endless culture wars. As Hollinger reminds us, Martin Luther King's invocation of the noble goals at the heart of the American experiment helped awaken a broad public to the gap between those goals and the more sordid realities of Jim Crow and urban poverty.

A certain nobility graces Postethnic America as well. Hollinger is a professional historian, but the book is first-rate public philosophy, a sober reflection in a literature frequently distorted by polemics. Analytical clarity alone will not resolve these matters, but it does ensure, at a minimum, more productive disagreements.

John T. McGreevy teaches government at Harvard.