Paul Krugman- The New Political Correctness (Newspeak)

[starroute]

19. I think the elephant in the room is multiculturalism

Reading both Krugman and the piece on the teaching of American history that he links to, it struck me that what the right is really unhappy about is the notion of presenting American history as the story of its minorities and their struggles.

But there are good reasons for doing that.

When I was in high school, the version of American history that we got had to do with the rise of democracy and the battle against totalitarianism, immigrants and the melting pot, and the gradual expansion of democratic rights to women and minorities. And as late as 1961-62, when I took 11th grade American history, that narrative seemed to account for everything, right up through the latest headlines.

But then the world changed and changed again, and this particular narrative became increasingly less useful for understanding what was going on *right now* -- whether your "right now" was the 1970s, the 1980s, or the 1990s.

That is why serious historians, for whom history is about explaining the past in a way that makes it possible to understand the present and build towards the future, had to change their focus. In particular, the "E pluribus unum" story about a motley collection of new arrivals being melted down and fused into a single people with a broadly shared set of social, political, and religious norms became obviously false.

Instead, it became apparent that Americans have never been a single people, that the persistent differences and conflicts among us are where you have to look for an understanding of events, and also that one particular minority group -- affluent, white, Christian men -- has always held a privileged position with respect to everyone else.

Basically, that's where we are now, and oddly enough, both the left and the right have bought into this new narrative. The only difference is that the left wants to concentrate on it and attempt to resolve the issues it raises, while the right wants to insist that the history of America *is* the history of the growing power of that one small privileged group and exclude everyone else on the grounds that examining things from any minority's point of view is negative and divisive.

One might almost conclude that the right has a deliberate objective of forcing the majority of Americans to hate America. But that would be giving insufficient credit to their stupidity and narcissism.