Editor’s note: The following commentary is adapted from Hans Zeiger’s forthcoming new book, “Reagan’s Children: Taking Back the City on the Hill” (Broadman and Holman, June 2006). Used by permission.
Racial and ethnic diversity is the way of the future for America. “In 1960, the U.S. population was 88.6 percent white; in 1990, it was only 75.6 percent – a drop of 13 percentage points in 30 years,” writes Peter Brimelow of Forbes. By 2020, “the proportion of whites could fall as low as 61 percent.”
When Pat Buchanan cites Brimelow in his book “Death of the West,” he considers the prospect of diversity a significant threat to America’s future, adding that “by 2050, Euro-Americans, the largest and most loyal share of the electorate the GOP has, will be a minority.”
Buchanan predicates his fears on the belief that immigrants and racial minorities will seek government handouts and will thus become a natural constituency for the Democratic Party.
Conservatives like Buchanan assume that racial and ethnic minorities – immigrants in particular – will necessarily side with the Left. Why? First, it is true that the Democrats have tended historically to attract minorities more than the Republicans. Second, and more important, some conservatives are unable to imagine an America in which diversity is combined with conservative values. They have lost confidence in the strength of our ideals and our institutions – they don’t trust the foundations of the nation enough to believe that those foundations have the capacity to hold a more racially and ethnically diverse population. And since the rise of diversity is a stark inevitability, Buchanan and others warn of the impending death of Western Civilization.
But what is that civilization? Are we so naive as to think that our civilization is limited to certain borders or certain national origins? That idea – that Western Civilization is as small and as insignificant as race and skin color – is undeniably the same argument of the politically correct elite in colleges and universities that portend unceasingly that they themselves will tear down the West. There is no inherent, principled dignity to the ideas of the West, say the radical establishment – civilization is but blackness or whiteness or Chicano-ness or queerness or womyn-ness, and civilizations are but little groupings of people who look alike. The belief that an influx of newcomers to America will necessarily defeat the civilizational basis of American life is as bigoted against civilization itself as those rambling radicals in the Ivy League.
Civilization is a body of principles – absolute truths about the nature of God and man – that have prevailed through many generations. America is deeply rooted in principles that hail from the classical tradition of Greece and Rome, from the spiritual heritage of the Hebrews and the Christians, from the Protestant Reformation, and from the founding lineage of England. So long as we are willing to say that principles are the stuff of civilization – and not skin color or gender or national origin or ethnicity – we may hold the banner of America to the world with all enthusiasm.
Conservatives need not fear diversity. Diversity is simply a neutral thing: skin color and national origin. As a fact of life – and an apparently inevitable condition of our future – diversity should be welcomed.
Conservatives may object that other skin colors and national origins necessarily mean other cultures, and that other cultures import other moral systems. In other words, it is feared that cultural diversity may amend or destroy Western Civilization. This is a reasonable objection. But to suggest that minorities would contravene our ability to preserve the distinctive things of America – our faith, our ideals and our character – is to admit both a certain desperate weakness in our national resolve and a belief in the impermanence of our creed.
We have already a firm code of qualifications for a man or woman to call him or herself an American. It is a code of conduct and belief that is best stated in the Ten Commandments. Each of those commandments establishes a fundamental principle:
- that liberty comes from God;
- that no man or state or anything else can exact allegiance that is properly due to the Almighty;
- that reverence is the hallmark of character;
- that we are both to work and to keep our work subordinate to our faith;
- that we are to respect the authority of the family;
- that the right to life is sacred;
- that marriage is the foundation of civilization;
- that the right to private property is inviolable;
- that mankind has the right to truth;
- that we owe both thanks and contentedness to the Living God for His blessings.
This generation is responsible not to withdraw that code on either extreme of the spectrum – on one hand by allowing unrestrained alterations to our culture and our way of life, and on the other by removing any possibility of a growing diversity – but to affirm that code just as it is. Civilization, rather than being the protagonist against the antagonistic forces of diversity, is the grand framework under which diversity may be both expanded and regulated. If respected in our time, our principles can become a blessing to America and a light to the world.
It is for us, the inheritors of Western Civilization, to fortify our principles.
Rather than strangle diversity for fear that it may feed into a left-wing agenda, we must struggle to end the false incentives that make immigrants and minorities an expected constituency of the Left. We must look to the faith and compassion of the private sphere – churches and families and communities – to solve our social problems rather than appropriating those social problems to government.
The transfer of social power to government is the very definition of socialism. It is natural that minorities who want socialism should find a spot in the political party that celebrates socialism. But it is socialism, not minorities, that is incompatible with the American dream. Socialism is a pretty veil over the American ideal, but it is only a veil. We must make America beautiful on her own merits.
