{"id":295,"date":"2026-06-07T07:08:01","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T07:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=295"},"modified":"2026-06-07T07:08:01","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T07:08:01","slug":"the-hyphen-and-the-melting-pot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=295","title":{"rendered":"The Hyphen and the Melting Pot"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

What is your favorite bit of Orwellian Newspeak? Near the top of my list is \u201caffirmative action.\u201d It\u2019s such an emollient phrase, so redolent of cheeriness (savor the word \u201caffirmative\u201d) and practicality (\u201caction\u201d). What it really means is \u201cdiscrimination on the basis of sex, skin color, or some other item in the contemporary lexicon of victimology.\u201d But you can\u2014almost\u2014forget that while the pleasing phrase \u201caffirmative action\u201d echoes in your recollection.<\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s Nationwide Shabbat and the Choices Facing American Jews<\/a><\/p>\n

Given\u00a0the efforts of the Trump administration\u00a0to end that bureaucratic hypostasis of affirmative action that travels under the acronym \u201cDEI,\u201d I thought I would\u00a0take a moment to step back and reflect on the phenomenon of \u201caffirmative action\u201d and its ideological comrade in arms, multiculturalism.<\/p>\n

A favorite weapon in the armory of multiculturalism is the lowly hyphen. When we speak of an African-American or Mexican-American or Asian-American these days, the aim is not descriptive but deconstructive. There is a polemical edge to it, a provocation. The hyphen does not mean \u201cAmerican, but hailing at some point in the past from someplace else.\u201d It means \u201conly provisionally American: my allegiance is divided at best.\u201d (I believe something similar can be said about the feminist fad for hyphenating the bride\u2019s maiden name with her husband\u2019s surname. It is a gesture of independence that is also a declaration of divided loyalty.) It is curious to what extent the passion for hyphenation is fostered more by the liberal elite than the populations it is supposedly meant to serve. How does it serve them? Presumably by enhancing their sense of \u201cself-esteem.\u201d Frederick Douglass saw through this charade some one hundred and seventy years ago. \u201cNo one idea,\u201d\u00a0he wrote, \u201chas given rise to more oppression and persecution toward colored people of this country than that which makes Africa, not America, their home.\u201d<\/p>\n

The multicultural passion for hyphenation is not simply a fondness for syntactical novelty. It also bespeaks a commitment to the centrifugal force of anti-American tribalism. \u201cThe one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin,\u201d\u00a0Teddy Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography, \u201cwould be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.\u201d He then warned against the destructive vogue for \u201chyphenated Americans.\u201d The division marked by the hyphen in African-American (say) denotes a political stand. It goes hand-in-hand with other items on the index of liberal desiderata\u2014the redistributive impulse behind efforts at \u201caffirmative action,\u201d for example. Affirmative action was undertaken in the name of equality. But, as always seems to happen, it soon fell prey to the Orwellian logic from which the principle that \u201call animals are equal\u201d gives birth to the transformative codicil: \u201cbut some animals are more equal than others.\u201d<\/p>\n

Affirmative action is Orwellian in a linguistic sense, too, since what announces itself as an initiative to promote equality winds up enforcing discrimination precisely on the grounds that it was meant to overcome. Thus we are treated to the delicious, if alarming, contradiction of college applications that declare their commitment to evaluate candidates \u201cwithout regard to race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or national origin\u201d on page 1 and then helpfully inform you on page 2 that it is to your advantage to mention if you belong to any of the following designated victim groups. Among other things, a commitment to multiculturalism seems to dull one\u2019s sense of contradiction.<\/p>\n

The whole history of affirmative action is instinct with that irony. The original effort to redress legitimate grievances\u2014grievances embodied, for instance, in the discriminatory practices of Jim Crow\u2014has mutated into new forms of discrimination. In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt established the\u00a0Fair Employment Practices Committee\u00a0because blacks were openly barred from war factory jobs. But what then began as a presidential executive order under JFK in 1961, directing government contractors to take \u201caffirmative action\u201d to assure that people be hired \u201cwithout regard\u201d for sex, race, creed, color, and so on, has resulted in the creation of vast bureaucracies dedicated to discovering, hiring, and advancing people chiefly on the basis of those qualities. White is black, freedom is slavery, and \u201cwithout regard\u201d comes to mean \u201cwith regard for nothing else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Had he lived to see the evolution of affirmative action, Alex de Tocqueville would have put such developments down as examples of how in democratic societies the passion for equality tends to trump the passion for liberty. The fact that the effort to enforce equality often results in egregious inequalities he would have understood to be part of the \u201ctutelary despotism\u201d that \u201cextends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd.\u201d<\/p>\n

Multiculturalism and \u201caffirmative action\u201d are allies in the assault on the institution of American identity. As such, they oppose the traditional understanding of what it means to be an American\u2014an understanding hinted at in 1782 by the French-born American farmer\u00a0J. Hector St. John de Cr\u00e8vecoeur\u00a0in his famous image of America as a country in which \u201cindividuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.\u201d This crucible of American identity, this \u201cmelting pot,\u201d has two aspects. The negative aspect involves disassociating oneself from the cultural imperatives of one\u2019s country of origin. One sheds a previous identity before assuming a new one. One might preserve certain local habits and tastes, but they are essentially window-dressing. In essence, one has left the past behind in order to become an American citizen.<\/p>\n

The positive aspect of advancing the melting pot involves embracing the substance of American culture. The\u00a01795 code for citizenship\u00a0lays out some of the formal requirements.<\/p>\n

I do solemnly swear (1) to support the Constitution of the United States; (2) to renounce and abjure absolutely and entirely all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which the applicant was before a subject or citizen; (3) to support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; (4) to bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and (5) (A) to bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law, or (B) to perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by law . . .<\/p>\n

For over two hundred years, this oath had been required of those wishing to become citizens. In 2003, Samuel Huntington tells us in his book\u00a0Who We Are<\/em>, federal bureaucrats launched a campaign to rewrite and weaken it.<\/p>\n

I shall say more about what constitutes the substance of American identity in a moment. For now, I want to underscore the fact that this project of Americanization has been an abiding concern since the time of the Founders. \u201cWe must see our people more Americanized,\u201d John Jay declared in the 1780s. Jefferson concurred. Teddy Roosevelt repeatedly championed the idea that American culture, the \u201ccrucible in which all the new types are melted into one,\u201d was \u201cshaped from 1776 to 1789, and our nationality was definitely fixed in all its essentials by the men of Washington\u2019s day.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is often said that America is a nation of immigrants. In fact, as Huntington points out, America is a country that was initially a country of\u00a0settlers<\/em>. Settlers precede immigrants and make their immigration possible. The culture of those mostly English-speaking, predominantly Anglo-Protestant settlers defined American culture. Their efforts came to fruition with the generation of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison.<\/p>\n

The Founders are so denominated because they founded, they inaugurated a state. Immigrants were those who came later, who came from elsewhere, and who became American by embracing the Anglophone culture of the original settlers. The English language, the rule of law, respect for individual rights, the industriousness and piety that flowed from the Protestant work ethic\u2014these were central elements in the culture disseminated by the Founders. And these were among the qualities embraced by immigrants when they became Americans. \u201cThroughout American history,\u201d Huntington notes, \u201cpeople who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America\u2019s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values. This benefited them and the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Justice Louis Brandeis outlined the pattern in 1915. Americanization,\u00a0he said, means that the immigrant \u201cadopts the clothes, the manners, and the customs generally prevailing here . . . substitutes for his mother tongue the English language\u201d and comes \u201cinto complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate[s] with us for their attainment.\u201d Until the 1960s, the Brandeis model mostly prevailed. Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish groups, understanding that assimilation was the best ticket to stability and social and economic success, eagerly aided in the task of integrating their charges into American society.<\/p>\n

Read more Europe 2.0, Beyond Brussels: The End of the European Union as We Know It<\/a><\/p>\n

The story is very different today. In America, there is a dangerous new tide of immigration from Asia, a variety of Muslim countries, and Latin America, especially from Mexico. The tide is new not only chronologically but also in substance. During the administration of Joe Biden alone,\u00a0some 10.2 million illegal migrants\u00a0crossed over the border into the U.S.<\/p>\n

The problem is not only one of numbers, though. Earlier immigrants made\u2014and were helped and goaded by the ambient culture to make\u2014concerted efforts to assimilate. Important pockets of these new immigrants are not assimilating, not learning English, not becoming or thinking of themselves primarily as Americans. Take Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, for example.\u00a0As the commentator\u00a0Mike Gonzales has pointed out, \u201cOmar appears not just to put her Somali ethnicity first but to think of herself as a Somali\u2014that is, a citizen of Somalia\u2014and sees her job in Congress as representing the interests of the east African country and its government.\u201d The effect of these developments on American identity is disastrous and potentially irreversible.<\/p>\n

This engine of national deconstruction is abetted by the left-wing political and educational elites of this country, whose dominant theme is the perfidy of traditional American values. Hence the passion for multiculturalism and the ideal of ethnic hyphenation that goes with it. This has done immense damage in schools and colleges as well as in the population at large. By removing the obligation to master English, multiculturalism condemns whole sub-populations to the status of permanent second-class citizens. By removing the obligation to adopt American values, it fosters what the German novelist\u00a0Hermann Broch\u00a0once called a \u201cvalue vacuum,\u201d a sense of existential emptiness that breeds anomie and the pathologies of nihilism.<\/p>\n

As if in revenge for this injustice, however, multiculturalism also weakens the social bonds of the community at large. The price of imperfect assimilation is imperfect loyalty. Take the movement for bilingualism. Whatever it intended in theory, in practice it means\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0mastering English. It has notoriously left its supposed beneficiaries essentially monolingual, often semi-lingual. The only \u201cbi\u201d involved is a passion for bifurcation, which is fed by the accumulated resentments instilled by the anti-American multicultural orthodoxy. Every time you call directory assistance or some large corporation and are told, \u201cPress one for English\u201d and \u201cPara espa\u00f1ol oprime el numero dos,\u201d it is another small setback for American identity.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, many prominent academics and even businessmen come bearing the gospel of what\u00a0John Fonte\u00a0has dubbed \u201ctransnational progressivism\u201d\u2014an anti-patriotic stew of politically correct ideas and attitudes distinguished partly by its penchant for vague but virtuous-sounding abstractions, partly by its moral smugness. It is a familiar litany. The philosopher\u00a0Martha Nussbaum\u00a0warns that \u201cpatriotic pride\u201d is \u201cmorally dangerous\u201d while former University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann\u00a0reveals that she finds it \u201crepugnant\u201d for American students to learn that they are \u201cabove all, citizens of the United States\u201d instead of partisans of her preferred abstraction, \u201cdemocratic humanism.\u201d New York University\u2019s\u00a0Richard Sennett\u00a0denounced \u201cthe evil of a shared national identity\u201d and concludes that the erosion of national sovereignty is \u201cbasically a positive thing.\u201d\u00a0Cecilia O\u2019Leary\u00a0of American University identifies American patriotism as a right-wing, militaristic, male, white, Anglo, and repressive force, while\u00a0Peter Spiro\u00a0of Temple University says it \u201cis increasingly difficult to use the word \u2018we\u2019 in the context of international affairs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, whenever the word \u201cpatriotism\u201d comes up in left-wing circles, there is sure to be some allusion to Samuel Johnson\u2019s observation that \u201cpatriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.\u201d Right on cue,\u00a0George Lipsitz\u00a0of the University of California sniffs that \u201cin recent years refuge in patriotism has been the first resort of scoundrels of all sorts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Naturally,\u00a0Dr. Johnson\u2019s explanation to Boswell\u00a0that he did not mean to disparage \u201ca real and generous love of our country\u201d but only that \u201cpretended patriotism\u201d that is a \u201ccloak for self-interest\u201d is left out of account.<\/p>\n

The bottom line is that the traditional ideal of a distinctive American identity, forged out of many elements but unified around a core of beliefs, attitudes, and commitments, is now up for grabs. One academic epitomized the established attitude among our left-liberal elites when she expressed the hope that the United States would \u201cnever again be culturally \u2018united,\u2019 if united means \u2018unified\u2019 in beliefs and practices.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nor is this merely an academic crotchet. Many politicians have colluded in spreading the multicultural gospel. The nation\u2019s motto\u2014E pluribus unum<\/em>\u2014was chosen by Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams to express the ideal of faction- and heritage-transcending unity. America forged one people out of many peoples. Former Vice President\u00a0Al Gore famously (mis)interpreted the tag\u00a0to mean \u201cWithin one, many.\u201d This might have been inadvertence. It might have been simple ignorance. It might have been deliberate ideological provocation. Which is worst?<\/p>\n

The combined effect of the multicultural enterprise has been to undermine the foundation of American national identity. Huntington speaks dramatically but not inaptly of \u201cDeconstructing America.\u201d What he has in mind are not the linguistic tergiversations of a\u00a0Jacques Derrida\u00a0or\u00a0Michel Foucault\u00a0but the efforts\u2014politically if not always intellectually allied efforts\u2014to disestablish the dominant culture by fostering a variety of subversive attitudes, pieces of legislation, and judicial interventions. \u201cThe deconstructionists,\u201d Huntington writes,<\/p>\n

promoted programs to enhance that status and influence of subnational racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. They encouraged immigrants to maintain their birth-country cultures, granted them legal privileges denied to native-born Americans, and denounced the idea of Americanization as un-American. They pushed the rewriting of history syllabi and textbooks so as to refer to the \u201cpeoples\u201d of the United States in place of the single people of the Constitution. They urged supplementing or substituting for national history the history of subnational groups. They downgraded the centrality of English in American life and pushed bilingual education and linguistic diversity. They advocated legal recognition of group rights and racial preferences over the individual rights central to the American Creed. They justified their actions by theories of multiculturalism and the idea that diversity rather than unity or community should be America\u2019s overriding value. The combined effect of these efforts was to promote the deconstruction of the American identity that had been gradually created over three centuries.<\/p>\n

Taken together, Huntington concludes, \u201cthese efforts by a nation\u2019s leaders to deconstruct the nation they governed were, quite possibly, without precedent in human history.\u201d<\/p>\n

The various movements to deconstruct American identity and replace it with a multicultural \u201crainbow\u201d or supra-national bureaucracy have made astonishing inroads in the last few decades and especially in the last several years. And, as Huntington reminds us, the attack on American identity has counterparts elsewhere in the West wherever the doctrine of multiculturalism has trumped the cause of national identity. The European Union\u2014whose unelected leaders are as dedicated to multicultural shibboleths as they are to rule by top-down, anti-democratic bureaucracy\u2014is a case in point. But the United States, the most powerful national state, is also the most attractive target for deconstruction.<\/p>\n

It is a curious development that Huntington traces. In many respects, it corroborates James Burnham\u2019s observation, in\u00a0Suicide of the West<\/em>\u00a0(1964), that \u201cliberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.\u201d For what we have witnessed with the triumph of multiculturalism is a kind of hypertrophy or perversion of liberalism, as its core doctrines are pursued to the point of caricature.<\/p>\n

Read more The Shell Game and America\u2019s Institutional Enemy Inside our Gates<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is your favorite bit of Orwellian Newspeak? Near the top of my list is \u201caffirmative action.\u201d It\u2019s such an emollient phrase, so redolent of cheeriness\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":294,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics-of-race"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Hyphen and the Melting Pot - Urban Economy news<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=295\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Hyphen and the Melting Pot - Urban Economy news\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What is your favorite bit of Orwellian Newspeak? 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