The Revolt Against the Masses by Fred Siegel

The problem was that supposed multiculturalists were often “ethnocentric separatists” (in the manner of the recent National Book Award winner Ta-Nehesi Coates) who, in Schlesinger’s words, “see little in the Western heritage other than Western crimes.” Pluralism assumed that Americans shared a common identity even as they retained ancestral attachments.

Multiculturalism displaced a hyphenated Americanism in which we spoke of Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, and, eventually, African-Americans as the norm. Well before the evils of Western achievement were written into the catechism of college courses, cultural pluralism-not white supremacy-had become the American norm. Related: Left Intellectuals Hovering over the Campus Both lament and warning, The Disuniting of America reflected a Schlesinger disconcerted by the rise, within overwhelmingly liberal academia, of multiculturalism and political correctness, the linked solvents of American identity. Academic expertise was, as Schlesinger understood it, the key to the American future.īut in the wake of the Black Power movement, feminism, and anti-Enlightenment postmodernism, the quota-driven academia of the late 1980s lost its rationalist moorings. The Schlesinger of the 1950s idolized Adlai Stevenson, whose professorial demeanor endeared him to academia. Schlesinger, Jr.-premier historian of twentieth-century American liberalism, highbrow courtier to the Kennedys, and grey eminence for the Kennedy’s would-be successors-published The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.

The Revolt Against the Masses by Fred Siegel