the Twilight of Common Dreams
by
TODD GITLIN

ALSO BY TODD GITLIN

Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (coauthor)

Busy Being Born

The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of
the New Left

Inside Prime Time

The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

The Murder of Albert Einstein

Campfires of the Resistance: Poetry from the Movement (editor)

Watching Television (editor)

METROPOLITAN BOOKS

Henry Holt and Company · New York

To Laurel

Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Company, Inc.  Publishers since 1866
115 West 18th Street New York, New York 10011

Metropolitan Books is a division of Rowohlt and an imprint of Henry Holt
and Company, Inc.

Copyright 1995 by Todd Gitlin All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gitlin, Todd.

The twilight of common dreams: why America is wracked by culture wars /
Todd Gitlin.--lst American ed.

Includes bibliographical references ( ) and index.  1.  Pluralism
(Social sciences)--United States.

2.  Multicuhuralism--United States.

3.  United States-Social conSitions--1980I.

Title.

E184.A1G48 1995 95-22321 30c20 CIP

ISBN 0-8050-4090-0

First Edition--1995

Designed by Paula R.  Szafranski

Printed in the United States of America All first editions are printed
on acid-free paper.

The slaveholder, were he kind or cruel, was a slaveholder still, the
every-hour violator of the just and inalienable rights of man, and he
was therefore every hour silently but surely whetting the knife of
vengeance for his own throat.  He never lisped a syllable in
commendation of the fathers of the republic without inviting the sword,
and asserting the right of rebellion for his own slaves.

--FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Preface

The culture wars have produced shelves of war stories.  There is
something of a standard script and, indeed, a standard narrator: the
conservative writer who deplores "the closing of the American mind,"

"political correctness,"

"illiberal education,"

"thought police," the "dictatorship of virtue." Pundits and politicians
denounce the depredations of affirmative action and multicultural
history.  News-magazine cover stories cry panic against Afrocentric
know-nothings and restrictive "hate speech" codes.  The presumption is
that, in the not too distant past, an incontestable consensus reigned,
and deserved to reign, about the virtue of Western civilization, the
nature of merit and authority, the rules of reason, the proper
constitution of canon and curriculum, the integrity of American history,
the civility of men.  Now, however, the grand old consensus is under
assault from the battering rams of irrationalists, totalitarians,
reverse racists, antiAmericans, and their ilk.  Millions of people thus
labeled plead innocent, hunker down, reverse the terms, claim the mantle
of victimhood, resist self-questioning, and cry out against racism and
sexism, against white males, against fraudulent claimants to
objectivity.

Who or what is at the root of these distempers?  In the standard script,
the facts speak for themselves, and the decisive facts are that the
subversives of the Left are back, aliens in our nest, Sixties radicals
all, refugees from the rigors of civilization, having burrowed into the
Modern Language Association, the National Endowments for the Arts and
the Humanities, the English department at Duke, the black studies
department at the City College of New York, the Whitney Museum, the
Smithsonian Institution .  .  .  and so on.  With Communism dead
everywhere in Europe and hanging on in China only by dint of a boom in
private investment, writers on the Right have found a surrogate enemy to
brandish.  Mao is dead, now Mapplethorpe is the devil king.

Citizens of the United States have been given to purification crusades
from the moment there was a United States to purify--indeed, earlier. In
the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the nativist upsurges of the 1840s,
and many subsequent classification movements, those who have imagined
themselves to be real Americans, normal Americans, have declared that
various groups of abnormal or hyphenated Americans threaten the
integrity of the nation.  The tired, the poor, the huddled masses
yearning to breathe free have had to strain to prove that they could be
trusted to breathe in the approved rhythms.  Nor are Americans uniquely
stringent far from it: every nation's nationalism is the search for a
principle that distinguishes insiders from outsiders and elevates the
former over the latter.

But Americans are not only, perhaps not even primarily, exclusive.

They have frequently'been at odds over exclusiveness.  For a long time,
an important part of being an American has been to take sides in culture
wars over what it means to be an American.  Americans have stared
endlessly in the mirror, inspected and classified themselves, marveled
at or decried what they saw there, argued about whether the mirror was
accurate and whether they needed a new one.  Almost always they have
felt uncertain just what it is to be a member of the American nation.
Indeed, lacking a founding nationality in which the political structure
is rooted, Americans came up with a term to signal that they were a
nation after all, or were steadily trying to form one--this very term
American that vexes Latin Americans and Canadians, who feel equally
entitled to it.  Thus, unlike the Mexicans or Australians, the French or
the Chinese, we

have one term for our political entity, the United States, and a
linguistically quite independent one for the people who inhabit it.

The premise of this book is that the culture wars do not settle disputes
or explain themselves.  As honest partisans of all stripes declared in
the Sixties, "The issue is not the issue." Most of the offenses and
defenses have strong points--and gaping holes--but none is self-evident,
none can be taken at face value.  Pressures for "political correctness"
and attacks on "political correctness"; revisions of American history
and attacks on those revisions; disputes within the academic hothouse
and the fact that these are the disputes of the day--all the obsessions
need scrutiny.  For the culture wars have more sources than their
partisans own up

to.  Some are relatively recent: the end of the Cold War, demographic
changes, political choices of Left and Right.  Some go deeper: economic
dislocations, long-running identity muddles, and philosophical currents.

Taking positions is fine, exposing petty orthodoxies virtuous, pointing
out historical error necessary.  I am not averse to rooting for good
guys.  But my chief aim is to understand where our symbolic melodramas
come from, and what these distortions and distempers reveal and conceal
about perennial dilemmas of American identity and the contemporary
incapacity of American politics.

Most of all, this book is about the fates of two ideas: that of America
as a force for individual freedom, and that of the Left as a force for
equality.

It may seem odd that I should want to discuss them together.  The
collapse of Soviet Communism and the end of the Cold War have been
claimed by the trumpeters as a victory of "the market" and so the end of
the Left's long and treacherous road.  America has triumphed and
therefore the Left has declined--so sounds the chorus, in a clangor as
shrill as the sense of national malaise is pervasive.  The irony is
that, partly because the enemy broke down, whatever consensus existed
about the direction and meaning of American history has also loosened,
and the pressures against a single, coherent American identity, always
strong, have intensified.

Strange to tell, the idea of the Left and the idea of America share a
history--I am tempted to say also a destiny.  They are the two great,
heavily burdened ideas of the Enlightenment.  They have at times
competed, at times overlapped.  They arose from the same stock, these
beliefs in progress and redemption: rival claimants to the heritage of
freedom,

equality, and the rest of the promises of the modern world.  During
their battered--and battering--histories, they have provided pictures of
the whole, offered meanings for sacrifice, laid out compass points for a
turning world, promised that human beings could take hold of their
destinies and, together, transcend blood and accident and economic
station and become more than themselves, more, even, than their local
communities, members of something encompassing and enduring.  If today
the two classical stories have both worn thin--if they often seem
virtually incomprehensible, especially to the young, if they are
embattled, or greeted with grimaces and shrugs, if reverence for their
heroes looks like nostalgia or stupidity, or both--we should try to
understand how this happened.

The Problem

It is bad to arrive too quickly at the one or

the many.

--PLATO, Philebus

A Dubious Battle in Oakland

Columbus Day of 1992 should have been the perfect occasion for teaching
schoolchildren about American Indians or, as the city of Oakland,
California, officially calls them, Native Americans.  Oakland, with an
African-American plurality and a white minority in its population and on
its city council, was no partisan of the conquering ex-hero from
Imperial Spain, who was now frequently held an author of genocide.
Indeed, the Oakland Board of Education had resolved that schools should
"focus the October 12th curriculum of every year on Native American
culture, contributions and history."

Moreover, after much travail, the State of California had just adopted a
new kindergarten-through-eighth-grade history-social science textbook
series published by Houghton Mifflin, offering little comfort to
traditionalist partisans of Columbus or, indeed, to anyone inclined to
see American history as the unbroken progress of benign Europeans across
a savage and underutilized continent.  Of the pages devoted to
historical narrative in Houghton Mifflin's fourth-grade book, Oh
California/, 15 percent went to sympathetic accounts of several
California Indian nations.  In the

eighth-grade text, A More Perfect Union, an insert in chapter 3 entitled
"Understanding Eurocentrism" cautioned against regarding American
history simply as the saga of triumphant European "discovery." ("As you
read more about the colonial period, try to imagine how American history
might have been different if European settlers had been more open to the
ways of other cultures.") The text declared: "Although their names and
discoveries live on in romantic stories, most of the conquistadors acted
ruthlessly in their search for riches and power.  They treated the
native inhabitants of America cruelly, enslaving them and often killing
them.  The conquistadors left a trail of slaughter as they searched for
lost cities of gold."

The politics of textbook adoption in California, as in a number of other
states, are intricate.  The process could be called messy and political,
or it could be called democratic.  To be adopted by California schools,
textbooks have to pass through several filters.  Roughly every seven
years, the state chooses a list of acceptable textbooks.  The texts must
be written in accordance with a "framework" approved by the state board
of education.

After public hearings, they must be cleared by the board's curriculum
commission, then certified by the board itself.  Once certified as
eligible for adoption, they are referred to local school boards for
further open hearings.  All these hurdles have to be passed before
textbooks are voted on by local school boards.

In the summer of 1990, when the Houghton Mifflin series came up for
certification by the state's curriculum commission in Sacramento, one
might have expected Christian fundamentalists, long dismayed by what
they saw as a dangerous undermining of American verities, to rise in
righteous indignation against so "politically correct" a dismantling of
the "we came, we saw, we conquered" version of American history.  After
all, attacks from the cultural Right have long been a staple of textbook
adoption proceedings.

But on this occasion, although one Christian fundamentalist, wielding
the psychological jargon that has become routine on these occasions, did
maintain that the new textbooks "could be very damaging to the
self-esteem of a fundamentalist Christian child" because they implied
that fundamentalists are "emotional and hysterical," the complaint was
easily addressed, was not followed up, and had no great effect.

Rather, the focus in Sacramento, and in the media, was on the groups of
the cultural Left.  To great media fanfare, a number of group
representatives testified passionately that the books were "racist,"
religiously discriminatory, and otherwise demeaning.  Muslims, Jews,
Chinese Americans, gays, and, most vigorously, African Americans
objected.  A group calling itself Communities United against Racism in
Education (CURE) offered eighty-five single-spaced pages of objections
to the kindergarten through fifth-grade books alone, charging that they
contain "stereotypes, omissions, distortions, exaggerations, and
outright lies about peoples of color"; that they are "unidimensional"
and "Eurocentric," taking "the side of colonialism and exploitation,"

"uncritically extolling] the white supremacist concept of Manifest
Destiny" and "anthropologiz[ing] indigenous peoples"; that they "justify
and trivialize .  .  .  some of the most vicious social practices in our
history," and "marginalize the lives and struggles of women, working and
poor people, people with disabilities, and gay and lesbian people." In
CURE's view, Houghton Mifflin "places the white establishment at the
center of the universe and all the rest of us as their 'burden." The
insidious message is: in order for some children to be proud of their
histories, other children must be made ashamed of theirs."

CURE pointed to some genuine instances of establishment bias, and to a
number of places where the books were uncritical in a Dick-and-Janeish
way, even arguably jingoistic in a traditional civics-book manner.

They did find occasional passages in the books that could reasonably be
read as subtle or not-so-subtle disparagements of foreign and minority
cultures-for example, a European's jocular account of lengthy Chinese
names.  They rightly objected to a traditional account of Thanksgiving
for failing to mention that Puritans and other colonists killed Indians.
They chastised the third-grade book for calling John Wesley Powell "one
of the first people to explore the Grand Canyon" when, of course, he was
one of the first white people to do so.  They pointed to a literature
excerpt that contained the line: "She had blue eyes and white skin, like
an angel." They argued that telling the children to make simulated
Kwakiutl masks trivialized the spiritual qualities of Kwakiutl
ceremonies--though they neglected to note that textbooks customarily
trivialize the spiritual qualities of everybody's ceremonies.  Where a
teacher's edition referred to helpful police, CURE wrote: "In many
communities, specifically communities of color, police officers are
regarded not as helpers, but as people to fear."

But CURE and other critics did themselves no favors by interspersing
valid criticisms among scores of indiscriminate ones.  The majority of
CURE's charges were trivial and hypersensitive.  They were so eager to
find ethnocentrism in these texts that they seemed to quarrel with the
notion that there was or is a dominant American culture.  They objected
to the profusion of American flags in the texts' pages.  They objected
that in the kindergarten book's illustrations people of color looked
"just like whites, except for being tinted or colored in," and that when
photographs of children of color appeared, "there was no discussion of
their respective ethnic identities and specific contributions." When the
books singled out minorities' customs, CURE saw disapproval; when the
books didn't single them out, they saw neglect.  They saw cultural bias
against Cambodia when the second-grade book mentioned that a Cambodian
child living in Boston plays in the snow when he couldn't have done so
in Cambodia, since it "never snows there." They again cried bias when
the second-grade book traced an AfricanAmerican family back one
generation less than a family of German descent, and chastised the book,
written for seven-year-olds, when it failed to discuss the details of
sharecropping.  They denounced a passage on the baseball player Roberto
Clemente for not mentioning that Jackie Robinson opened the way for him,
and objected to a list of inventions because all were invented by white
men. They criticized an exercise inviting students to write a personal
story from a slave's point of view, on the ground that it is impossible
"to imagine being enslaved."

In Sacramento, however, CURE's and related objections grabbed the mighty
attention of the media.  So did flamboyant statements like that of an
African-American woman calling the books "Eurocentric pap--slanted,
racist, and wrong" and maintaining that they contributed to a "mental
holocaust" of "self-esteem problems" for black children.  Such claims
were supported by the Black Caucus of the state assembly.  So were
Chinese Americans' complaints that the books trivialized the
exploitation of the Chinese laborers imported to build the
transcontinental railroads.  There were Muslim objections to a
description of Mohammed- strictly forbidden in Islam--as well as to a
suggestion in a teacher's edition that a student play the part of
Mohammed in a skit.  Another strong objection was that in the world
history volume, a diagram of a camel and its trappings was used to
illustrate the "Moment in Time" capsule contained in the chapter on "The
Roots of Islam"--the only animal used for such a purpose.

Nowadays, people of color have no monopoly on hypersensitivity.  The
California Jewish Community Relations Council brought its own list of
offenses against the sixth-grade book, A Message of Ancient Days.  They
argued that the text presented Judaism as a passing prologue to
Christianity. They objected to capitalizing the Christian "God" while
the Jewish "god" was lower-case.  They objected to treating the Jews as
a people of laws and rituals, invidiously compared to Christians with
their belief in kindness and love.  They objected to the phrase "Old
Testament," wishing it changed to "Hebrew Bible"; they deplored one
lesson title, "An Age of Transition," and a reference to "His [Jesus']
Resurrection." They objected to the book's version of the story of the
Good Samaritan, on the grounds that the bad neighbors were identified as
Jews.  Unremarked, however, on the same page, the source of this parable
was referred to as "a popular Jewish teacher named Jesus."

The protesters were unimpressed by the fact that the seventh-grade world
history volume included fifty-three pages on sub-Saharan Africa (10.6
percent of the entire narrative), fifty-six pages on Islam (11.2
percent), thirty pages on China (6.0 percent), and thirty-four pages on
Japan (6.8 percent).  As a memo from California's Superintendent of
Public Instruction Bill Honig later pointed out, where a previously
adopted world history text had devoted only one of its forty chapters to
African history and ancient American Indian cultures combined,
one-eighth of the new seventh-grade book was devoted to the Indians, or
Native Americans, alone-an increase by a factor of ten.  Nor did the
critics seem to care that the textbooks frequently represented a radical
departure from the history taught in earlier decades.  The same
seventh-grade book that offended some Muslims with the camel picture
also noted that "Christian and Muslim sources portrayed the crusaders
differently," and declared: "Traditionally, we learn history from the
point of view of the winners." (Of

course, the crusaders were losers in the short run, but Europe's
storytellers have traditionally awarded them the righteous victory and
not dwelt on the embarrassing denouement.)

For their part, the authors plausibly defended the accuracy of their
text on the great majority of points but agreed to a list of corrections
on others-John Wesley Powell as the first white man to travel down the
Grand Canyon, the Central Pacific railroad hiring "thousands," not
"hundreds" of Chinese, and so on.  The pictures of Mohammed were
deleted, and the suggestion that a student play the role of the prophet
replaced by the suggestion that a student interview a Muslim scholar.
Gary B.  Nash, the UCLA historian who was one of the authors of the
series, later acknowledged to me that the offending camel was "a
mistake.  We thought it would be neat to show how an animal could be a
means of diffusion of culture.  Our mistake was that it's the only
capsule which shows an animal. From the orthodox Moslem point of view,
it plays on the stereotype of the Arab as a 'camel jockey." The camel
will go as soon as we revise the seventh-grade book." One sentence
disliked by the Christian Right was revised.  As for the Jewish
objections, "Old Testament" became "Hebrew Bible,"

"An Age of Transition" became "Religious Developments," and an insert
was added on developments in Judaism after Christ.  The story of the
Good Samaritan was modified to note that the man beaten by robbers was
also a Jew.  But some corrections were inconsistent.  Many of the
references to the Israelites' "god" were shifted to the upper case, but
many--at times on the same page--were not.  (Christianity's God was now
consigned to the lower case only once.)

With the disputatious hearings completed, the state curriculum
commission recommended adoption of the Houghton Mifflin books, subject
to corrections.  In October 1990, the state board of education approved
the revised Houghton Mifflin books at every grade level, along with an
eighth-grade text published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Local school
boards were free to choose whichever they preferred for the eighth
grade.  At other grade levels, local boards would have to accept the
Houghton Mifflin books or seek a state waiver to use funds that would
otherwise be spent on textbooks to acquire their own materials, pending
state approval.

Opponents now turned to the local adoption proceedings.  Over the next
few months, Los Angeles and San Francisco school boards, among many
others, held their own contentious hearings, and ended up approving the
Houghton Mifflin series.  The opponents' only victory in a big city came
in Oakland, the sixth-largest school district in the state.  One
consequence was that when Columbus Day rolled around in 1992, Oakland's
fourth-, fifth-, and seventh-grade teachers had no textbooks at all to
help

them teach about Columbus African Americans, Indians or, indeed, about
anyone else.

The textbook battles took place in circumstances that were primed for
rancor and inauspicious for education.  Years of fiscal crisis had taken
their toll on resources available for public services in California.  A
tax revolt kindled with the passing of the 1978 citizens' initiative
called Proposition 13 had accelerated with the passing of several
sequels.  The result had been the slashing of the revenues available to
local governments, and state funds had failed to make up the shortfalls.
In addition, a downturn in California's economy not only worsened the
social conditions that demoralize children but cut state school funds,
gutted art, music, and other academic programs, closed libraries, and
crowded the classrooms.  In Oakland, for example, teachers were
routinely responsible for more than thirty students at a time.  Between
1969 and 1994, California slid in per-pupil school allocations from
among the top ten states to forty-first.  Still, the state had allocated
money for new textbooks.  Moreover, Bill Honig, the energetic reformer
who was the state's top school official, was committed to a curriculum
that would take account of the multiple cultures of America.  Long
before the time came to purchase new textbooks, Honig had established a
commission to draw up a new "framework"--a slate of specifications that
publishers would have to meet by 1990 to qualify for statewide approval.

That framework, approved in 1987, was a brave attempt to square the
pedagogical circle.  It required that grade school history be taught
with an emphasis on the multiplicity of historical experiences while
stressing the "centrality of Western civilization." At the same time, it
insisted that history be integrated with social studies and literature,
and told as a coherent story.  It required that the K-8 curriculum
include three full years of world history-one of which was to cover the
ancient world--along with three years of American history and one of
California history.  It insisted that the study of religion be
integrated into the historical

curriculum.  (Perhaps it was this provision that placated the right
wing.) The framework's coauthors were Charlotte Crabtree, a professor of
education at UCLA, and Diane Ravitch, a professor of history at Teachers
College of Columbia University, a leader of the fight against
"Afrocen-trism" in New York State's curriculum, subsequently assistant
secretary of education in the Bush administration, and a political
lightning rod. "Diane Rayitch was chosen to do a sneaky end-run," Toni
Cook, then vice president (and later president) of the Oakland Board of
Education, told me later.  "She wanted to put things in the books which
were very kindred to what the conservative forces were trying to do in
New York.  For example, this idea that all Americans are immigrants."

Though California accounts for 11 percent of America's textbook sales
and offers a market of more than $50 million, the $20 million cost of a
new series was such that the only publisher willing to meet the deadline
with an entire line of new books was Houghton Mifflin, which lacked a
history series of its own.  Houghton Mifflin linked up with a group of
textbook entrepreneurs called Ligature Inc.  Ligature's education
experts wanted to break with one of the hoariest of textbook traditions,
namely, stodginess.

Their designers, trained at the Rhode Island School of Design,
specialized in dazzling wake-up devices---overlapping illustrations,
questions stuffed into the margins, colored inserts alternating with
black-and-white segments, visuals dripping down and across the pages,
full-page drawings encapsulating "Moments in Time." When they showed a
prototype segment to focus groups of California teachers, the teachers
approved.

For two years, Gary Nash told me, "we just went hell-for-leather." Given
the elaborate back-and-forth process of outlines and drafts, comments
from experts and teachers, and redrafts, Nash agreed that two years was
just not enough time to compile ten books (kindergarten through eighth
grade, in addition to an alternative fourth-grade book for possible use
outside California).  "Each of the four authors was supposed to read
everything," Nash said, "though it was impossible." Nash himself was
teaching a full load at UCLA and trying to finish two other books.  His
coauthors, Beverly J.

Armento, director of the Center for Business and Economic Education at
Georgia State University, Christopher L.  Salter, chairman of the
geography department of the University of Missouri, and

Karen K.  Wixson, a professor of education at the University of
Michigan, were not historians.  Nash played his main role in the earlier
stages--setting up extensive outlines and trying to insure that the
books would, in fact, be multicultural.  Much of the carelessness of the
texts, he said, the lines attacked for racism and bad faith, came from
the rush job.

In any event, with the books accepted at the state level, Gary Nash
thought the worst was over.  He had not anticipated much flak in the
first place.  He was, after all, well known as a multiculturalist, as
well as one of the most prolific American social historians of a cohort
trained in the 1960s and devoted to reconstructing American history, in
the words of an early revisionist slogan, "from the bottom up." Nash's
books included Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America,
which, in the words of his introduction, "proceeded] from the belief
that to cure the historical amnesia that has blotted out so much of our
past we must reexamine American history as the interaction of many
peoples from a wide range of cultural backgrounds over a period of many
centuries." In 1970, when (under Governor Ronald Reagan) the regents of
the University of California fired the activist Angela Davis from her
philosophy post at UCLA, Nash headed her defense committee, which raised
enough money to pay her salary.  That same year, he helped redesign the
introductory course in American history at UCLA, turning it into the
history of an interaction of peoples.  He had already written a popular
textbook for eleventh-grade American history that many districts,
including Oakland's, had adopted unopposed.

At fifty-nine, the sandy-haired, neatly bearded Nash was wearing a work
shirt and stonewashed jeans when I spoke to him at his comfortable
Pacific Palisades home.  The art on the wall was Mexican, the lunch was
burritos.  Nash was now president-elect of the Organization of American
Historians--with the support of colleagues of all colors--and was being
considered for the position of head of the National Endowment for the
Humanities.  During a four-hour period, his phone rang five times for
conversations about other textbooks he was working on.

Nash has the easy, welcoming manner California has made famous, although
he grew up in Philadelphia.  During the interview, he spoke
deliberately, in an unruffled tone, until one of two subjects came up.
The first: the downgrading of ordinary people in the old-fashioned
version of

history.  Then he accelerated.  "What does it tell our kids, to say that
only great men make history?" He swept passionately into an example of a
person he wanted to write about when the Houghton Mifflin books were
first being outlined: Fred Korematsu, an ex-welder and high school
graduate who had tried to enlist in the U.S.  Army during World War II
and who, when the authorities came to intern him along with his
Japanese-American compatriots, refused to comply, was arrested, tried,
convicted, and appealed his internment all the way up to the Supreme
Court.  "Or take the sixth-grade book, A Message of Ancient Days, on
world religions," Nash went on.  "In the course of the school year, you
don't even get to Europe until February.  Just by doing it this way, we
broke the mold."

The second subject that aroused Nash'sire was the attack on his
textbooks as "racist." Like many another--especially many another
white--who identifies with the universalist tradition of the Left, he
was stunned.  He did not fully grasp how his ecumenical position could
have come under such intense, downright unheeding fire.  In his
incomprehension, Nash was, and is, in good company.  In the heat of the
battle, it is hard to grasp why people who care about justice strike so
venomously against those who, whatever their differences, stand closest
to them.  During recent years, many men and women of goodwill have had
trouble understanding why they, of all people, have been singled out as
enemies. They are rationalists.  Confronted with unbalanced, ungenerous,
sometimes downright bizarre accusations, they go on trying to meet them
with straightforward arguments: Jews did not dominate the slave trade;
melanin in skin pigment does not increase intelligence.  But this was
not the project white leftists were supposed to have signed up for! They
were supposed to be teaching about conquest and slavery, struggles for
freedom, and how history goes on from there.  Nash, like many another
man and woman of the Left, didn't know what hit him.

Nowhere was the outcome more shocking than in Oakland.  With an elected
school board composed of four African Americans, two Chinese Americans,
and one white leftist; a school superintendent of African-American and
Latino descent; and a teaching staff almost half nonwhite (and largely
left-of-center in disposition) responsible for teaching a student body
that in 1990 was 46.9 percent black, 24 percent white, 18.8

percent Asian and Pacific Islander, and 15.2 percent Hispanic, Oakland
might have been the very model for what is called, these days,
multicultural education.  Moreover, school administrators had decided
that, for the first time, teachers at the various grade levels would
make their own text recommendations, and for the most part, the teachers
liked the new books.  So Nash was not prepared for the eruption that
greeted him when, on March 18, 1991, he flew to Oakland to address an
open meeting sponsored by the Berkeley and Oakland school boards at
Claremont Middle School in a middle-class, largely white section of
Oakland near the Berkeley city line.  (The Oakland and Berkeley school
boards were debating the books simultaneously.)  All the seats were
taken long before the meeting began and the room was overflowing with
more than a hundred people.  Some were parents, but at least as many, by
various accounts, were ethnic studies students, mainly black, from San
Francisco State University across the bay.  The hall was festooned with
placards bearing

slogans like STOP POISONING YOUNG MINDS!  Mary Hoover, a professor of

ethnic studies at San Francisco State (now a clean at Howard
University), was Nash's principal antagonist, accusing the books of
"sheer Eurocen-tric arrogance." Hoover focused on a passage in A Message
of Ancient Days in which an early "naked dark-skinned" human on the east
African plains carries a "bloody bone" that "oozes .  .  .  red marrow."
Hoover maintained that there was an implication that these early
Africans were cannibals.

"She misrepresented the books," says Steven Weinberg, an eighth-grade
history teacher who, when I spoke to him, had spent twenty-four years at
Claremont Middle School and supported the adoption of the Houghton
Mifflin books.  "I said, they're not talking about cannibalism. They're
carnivorous." (By the time the books were published, the "bloody marrow
bone" had become, simply, "a bone" containing, incidentally, marrow, and
the naked persons were no longer specified as "dark-skinned.") "The way
she distorted these books," Weinberg says, "they were like something out
of the eugenics movement.  It was as if they were worse than Goebbels.
There was cheering and yelling.  It was really ugly.  The attacks on
Gary Nash were ridiculous and ad hominem.  He was trying to establish
his credentials, and he said he had been on the Angela Davis defense
committee.  Someone got up and said, 'We have to remem bet that there
were plenty of people on that who did not have Angela Davis's best
interests at heart.""

"It was an auto-da-fe, a one-sided battle," maintained Harry Chotiner, a
former UC Santa Cruz professor of American history and member of the
editorial board of Socialist Review who now teaches at the private
College Preparatory School in Oakland.  Chotiner had accompanied a
friend, an Oakland curriculum official, to the meeting because, he told
me, "Gary Nash had been a hero of mine.  When I was a graduate student
in history, I had a lot of respect for what he'd written about Native
Americans and blacks, the new social history.  It was a pilgrimage for
me." Chotiner was shocked, therefore, to find that "not one speaker was
willing to give him or the editors the benefit of the doubt.  No one
said, 'I like this about the book, but on the other hand I don't like
that." Instead, the objections ranged from the thoughtful to the silly
to the scurrilous." The point about the camel Chotiner agreed was
thoughtful.  An example of the silly was the objection that a section on
black history in one volume didn't focus on Jackie Robinson, Martin
Luther King, Jr., or Malcolm X.  (This particular volume stopped at the
year 1900, Nash responded.)  An example of the scurrilous was the
contemptuous charge from an African-American student that the use of the
term Afro-American at one point in the series was "clear evidence of
deep-seated racism, and so he as a white man and a racist had no
business trying to teach her."

Chotiner estimated that there were twenty or thirty of the silly and
scurrilous attacks.  "In most cases, bad motives were assumed, and Gary
and the editors were the enemy.  People would have spoken in the same
tone if the authors had been George Wallace, Ross Barnett, and Bull
Connor.  There were no attempts to bridge gaps, to find common ground. I
was really stunned by the anger.  It wasn't even an anger of
betrayal'How dare you do this when we share something in common?" The
anger was, 'This is just what we expected." I was completely intimidated
by their anger.  I thought, this is outrageous, but I couldn't get up
and talk.  My legs would not support me, my arm would not go up into the
air.  If you asked me, Why not?  Were they going to beat me up?  No.
Were they going to slash my tires?  No.  Throw a rock through my window?
No.  I think I would have been heckled, and I don't think my comments
would have made a difference."

"I wasn't expecting a dispute in which the critics declaim but they
don't point to evidence," Nash said later.  There was, for example, the
charge that the books "trivialized" slavery.  The seventh-grade book
includes, among other descriptions of the horrors of slavery and the
endurance of slaves, a graphic two-page passage from Frederick
Douglass's autobiography.  "Just fifteen years ago," Nash says, "the
textbooks were full of happy slaves grateful to have been lifted up out
of barbarian Africa.

Getting an accurate account of slavery into the textbooks is the whole
point of my career." He was, moreover, incredulous when a
Japanese-American woman stood up to charge that the books trivialized
the suffering of her people during World War II internment, saying: "We
want our history written by our people." In truth, the seventh-grade
book does sweep through its discussion of the relocation camps in a few
lines.  But these lines call the camps "prison-like" and point out that
the internees were forcibly dispossessed (in a section entitled "The
Ongoing Struggle for Justice").  In the fourth-grade book on California
history, lesson 1 of the chapter "California in Wartime" begins with two
pages on the internments-almost half the entire lesson.

Nash acknowledges that some criticisms were legitimate, in particular
the accusation by some Chinese-American parents that not many pages were
devoted to their ancestors in the California history volume.  Still, he
defended his choices.  "My response was, you can't produce a book which
is all-inclusive.

You can't emphasize the Chinese in San Francisco and the Armenians in
Fresno and the Portuguese in San Pablo and the Italians in North Beach
and the Koreans in L.A.  You can't write the history of every ethnic
group in California.  You certainly can't do it for the entire country."
Arguably, the experience of the Chinese in America was more significant
than the others.  In any event, Nash's point is not likely to be
persuasive to some minority parents convinced that their children,
systematically humiliated by their exclusion from public imagery, need
to find exemplars who look like them in history books.

Despite the criticism that they are not inclusive enough, the books as
they stand already strain at the seams to enfold two contradictory
stories.  The master contours of American history are the traditional
ones.  "In fact," Nash affirms, "the way the story is told does follow
the Europeans, [for] that is the story of how power worked." Here,
shifting the ground of

his argument, Nash subscribes to a conventional historical sequencing
and choice of topics.  History should be neither a feel-good exercise
nor a census of the experiences of preferred peoples.  It should not be
simply an inventory of "contributions," as if the historian's mission
were to distribute party favors.  Its purpose is not to make anyone
"proud" of any group's historical record.  Whether one likes the status
quo or not, history should be, in important part, the record of what
power has done.  A student who does not know how the powerful
acted--indeed, often over the objections of the weak and
oppressed-cannot begin to understand why the world has become what it
is.  Like it or not, the decisions that shaped America's political,
legal, and economic institutions were largely made by Europeans and
their descendants.

Nash's texts, on the other hand, do try to make their peace with history
from below.  They frequently interrupt their master narrative for
snippets of social history.  They indicate what women were doing.  They
pause to tell stories about the people who were not movers and shakers,
people rolled over by "progress," people who had to fight for their
places in the American sun.

History from above rolls forward with seeming relentlessness.  History
from below is always stopping, retracing its steps, moving sideways,
shifting back and forth, pausing to say "meanwhile" and "despite."

The disjointedness of the books, their occasional self-contradiction,
their jumpiness as they juxtapose one historical account with
another--all this is a direct consequence of working in both keys at
once for fear of being dismissive." Disjointedness is built into their
nature as the product of two rival traditions.  In this, they are
typical of the textbooks that followed the 1960s.  Starting in the
1970s, as Frances FitzGerald observed in America Revised, textbook
writers frequently slapped revisionist views of the European conquest,
of slavery and capitalism, onto the old triumphalist upward-and-westward
story.  The Houghton Mifflin books illustrate her point that the result
is riddied with inconsistencies.  Thus, in Houghton Mifflin's
eighth-grade book, lesson one speaks of the "discovery of the new
world," says that "America was different promises to different people,"
and declares that the conquistadors "subdued whole civilizations of
native peoples." In lesson two, the reader is invited to

identify with a Spaniard on his ship; in lesson three, with an Indian.
("Europeans were not the first to discover the 'new' world.") Downright
inconsistencies passed through the revision net.  When I mentioned to
Nash that, despite the argument against the discovery myth, a reference
to "the discovery of New World" appeared on page four, he was surprised
to see it.

The books total, after all, more than three thousand pages, and they
were hurried into shape to meet a bureaucratic deadline.  Any scrupulous
or--depending on your point of view--nit-picking reader could find grist
for his or her sense of injury.  Activists took offense--they chose to
take offense--at what seemed to them a casual quality to some of the
books' reminders that American history has long been marked by contempt
and discrimination directed at people of color.

The books' thematic disjointedness is embodied in, and intensified by,
their format, which gives them the look of scrapbooks.  Even Sheila
Jordan, an Oakland teacher formerly on the city school board (and later
elected to the Oakland City Council) who voted for adoption and used the
Houghton Mifflin books in the lower grades, acknowledged to me that
"they're fragmented.  There are too many color patches, too many little
synopses and boxes.  They don't flow easily.  The layout gets in the way
in an attempt to be hip, multimedia, and all that.  The books don't put
the fragments together."

Indeed, to anyone raised on linear texts, these books bear a
disconcerting resemblance to MTV.  The master text is frequently broken
up by tinted paragraphs of quotations.  Even teachers who thought the
series an advance on what had come before didn't like everything about
them.  The "narrative" that starts each lesson runs no longer than two
paragraphs--for example: "Thunderclouds rise like mountains off to the
east.  The once calm ocean has suddenly grown restless, loudly thumping
the ship's prow.  You're crossing the Atlantic Ocean in the mid-1500s .
.  ."--before the generalizations kick in.  Although many teachers and
students found the books useful, others demurred.  One bright
eleven-year-old of my acquaintance found the sixth-grade book lacking
"enough of a story." Nash accepted some of this criticism.  "There were
so many 'features,' they interfered with the story.  I objected, but I
almost always lost."

However, incoherence was not the charge leveled against the Houghton
Mifflin textbooks when the dispute surfaced in Oakland.  The charge was,
in fact, coherence--coherent racism by inclusion, exclusion, and, at
times, intention.  Frequently, this was joined to a charge that most
teachers deferred to the texts, that they used them as crutches, even
that they were downright lazy; they should have been out writing or
rustling up their own materials--as, in fact, some of the most
conscientious teachers did.  I spoke with one of these, Carol Chinn, a
fourth-grade teacher at Malcolm X School in neighboring Berkeley, who
supplemented textbook lessons by assigning literature on Indians and
other groups and leading field trips to missions and museums as a way of
satisfying the framework's demands.  To present a unified history, Chinn
would focus on a single period and come at it from various angles at
once so that, for example, while teaching the Gold Rush, she was also
asking what was happening to women, to Chinese miners, to Indians,
rather than having ethnic groups pop up here and there and then vanish
for long stretches.  "I've been doing this for a long time," she told
me.  "I feel strongly that these children have to live in the year 2010,
when a majority of California will be nonwhite.  I wasn't willing to
accept bias at all."

Oakland's teachers, who had never before been so involved in selecting
school textbooks, were not uncritical of the Houghton Mifflin series.
Even a supporter like curriculum official Shelley Weintraub noted that
the fourth-grade California history book lost interest in the California
Indians after the Gold Rush, and gave scant attention to Americans of
Asian origin.

Man teachers found the eighth-grade book too difficult, as well as
confusing at times.  On such grounds, and in the belief that there were
better alternatives at hand, Oakland teachers opposed adoption of the
Houghton Mifflin books for kindergarten through third grades and for the
eighth grade.  They endorsed the others--the seventh-grade teachers by
more than 90 percent, the fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade teachers
narrowly.  The Oakland school superintendent, Richard ("Pete") Mesa,
supported the teachers.

When opponents proposed to devise their own substitute materialsba
decision the school board eventually endorsed--the teachers' reaction
was, according to Steven Weinberg, "Who are they kidding?" There was no
time, they thought, to do a serious job of assembling comprehensive

equivalents.  But many teachers held a more relaxed view of what
textbooks were for in the first place.  They knew that textbooks were
intrinsically limited.  Still, they wanted to get them into the
students' hands--at least as the source of homework assignments.  As
Weinberg said, "A textbook is not a course.  Just because a textbook
leaves something out doesn't mean that the course has to leave it out."
The Oakland school board could have adopted the books as flawed but
useful tools--so that, at the very least, teachers had them in place for
background--and at the same time promoted the use of supplements.  In
the end, this is what the Los Angeles school board did.  In the course
of the debate there, Nash agreed to edit a set of primary source
materials by Americans of indigenous, African, Hispanic, and Asian
origin, 172 pages' worth, which Houghton Mifflin included with the
textbooks at no extra charge.  By law, this very same supplement had to
be available to every school district in the state.  When I interviewed
her a year after the fight, Toni Cook, of the Oakland school board,
called this "a responsible compromise."

But when push came to shove in Oakland, the opponents were not in the
market for "a responsible compromise." They wanted all or nothing.  The
debate was not about actual textbooks to be used as practical
instruments of schooling but about symbols, overloaded with emotional
meaning, totems of moral conviction.  For many people---administrators,
teachers, and parents--textbooks are symbols to start with: signs that
some larger community exists.  The community exists, so the assumption
goes, insofar as it shares collective knowledge.  The textbook is
therefore a carrier of the publicness of the public schools.  It
suggests the possibility-indeed, the actuality-of a shared collective
identity.  This is why textbooks are revised, why they are defended and
fought over.

When the Oakland teachers endorsed most of the Houghton Mifflin books,
some of the early critics changed their positions.  Thus school board
member Sheila Jordan, who had shared in a unanimous board decision
calling on the state to reject the books when they had first come under
attack by CURE, had become a vociferous defender and, for her pains, was
falsely accused of taking Houghton Mifflin money for her successful city
council election campaign.  Jan Malvin, a Jewish psychologist and parent
who had brought the issue of the depiction of Judaism to

the Oakland board's attention in the first place, was swayed by the
teachers' vote.  Since the teachers had endorsed the books as amended,
she was willing to defer to their judgment.

But despite such accommodations, when the Oakland school board met to
make a decision in June 1991 the atmosphere was acrimonious--not much
different from the atmosphere at the Claremont Middle School meeting
three months earlier.  One school board member was heard to say
beforehand, "We're going to mau-mau Gary Nash." An Oakland Tribune op-ed
article by two leading opponents of the texts, San Francisco State
University's Mary Hoover and Kitty Kelly Epstein, an associate professor
of education at Oakland's Holy Names College, sounded off, though they
offered only two specific criticisms of the books.  The fifth-grade
book, Hoover and Epstein wrote, referred to the frontier as
"unexplored"--a case, they charged, of ethnocentric wording.  The other
example, however, was something else.  "The essence of the books'
portrayal of American history," Hoover and Epstein wrote, "is captured
in the title of the fifth-grade text, 'The U.S., A Nation of
Immigrants,' .  .  .  [which] does not capture the experience of a huge
part of the American population.  Native Americans, Mexican Americans
and African Americans were not lucky immigrants but victims of some of
the worst murder and pillage in human history." When junior high school
history teacher Steven Weinberg rose at the school board meeting to say
that the claim was false, that the fifthgrade book was not, in fact,
entitled The U.S., A Nation of Immigrants, that it was, in fact,
entitled America Will Be, from a Langston Hughes poem, the crowd booed
him down, Weinberg recalls, "with shouts of 'Put on a swastika' and
'You're quoting out of context." How can you quote a title out of
context?" A white teacher defending the books was told, "Shut up, white
bitch."

"What do you mean, 'white bitch'?" she said.  "Well, you are white," was
the reply.

Everything about Steven Weinberg is trim--his beard, his V-neck sweater,
his gold-rimmed glasses, his manner of speaking--but for his frayed
white collar.  "The Muslims are usually faceless hordes," Weinberg says.
"Not in this book.  This book, in fact, teaches that the Muslims were
more tolerant than the Christians.  This was the first time you had any
reference to important people in Muslim history.  The Muslim kids in
school can see references to the people they're named after.  In the
eighth grade book, Mexican soldiers are called 'brave,' while the
Americans are given no adjective.  I was surprised, in fact, that there
was no right-wing attack on these books.  !  said to myself, Be happy
for small favors." Weinberg describes himself as a moderate Democrat and
"a pluralist in almost all dimensions." A year before the debate, he had
used his own money to buy his students copies of Dragonwings, a novel by
Lawrence Yep about a ChineseAmerican aviator.  "I really believe in
having many voices in the curriculum.

I don't feel myself naturally allied with people who say that we should
teach traditional American history.  I don't like being lumped with
them."

When I interviewed Weinberg, the walls of his classroom at Claremont
Middle School were festooned with questions scrawled in childish
lettering on signed white sheets of paper: "What group of Indians were
the first ones to live in America?  ....  Why are blacks treated so
poorly?  ....  Why are people so obsessed with money and power?  ....
Why don't the U.S.  have women as President?  ....  Why did the U.S.
take over Mexico's land?"

"Who makes rules for America?" The children, Weinberg explained, chose
the questions they wanted to see answered by the end of the school year.

I asked Weinberg how he taught Columbus.  He showed me one of his
assignments: Write a paragraph saying whether we ought to celebrate
Indigenous People's Day or Columbus Day.  The next week, he gave his
students two statements to refute.  The first said: "The American
Indians were uncivilized barbarians.  They had no religion.  They had no
art.  They were disorganized, with no laws or governments.  They were
half-naked and lived in flimsy huts.  They created nothing of value."
The second: "All Native Americans lived in harmony with nature and in
peace with each other before the European invasion began in 1492."

"It's very hard to do this right," Weinberg added.  "What makes sense to
a student from Cambodia?  I have a boy from Ethiopia in my class.  We
have people from South America.  It constantly forces me to rethink,
because I don't want simply to teach what !  was taught.  I spent a lot
of time trying to teach the Alamo accurately.  The traditional view
minimizes slavery in Texas.  I found something that speaks to
interracial harmony: the Anglo and Hispanic Texans who were long-term
Texans were the ones trying to avoid the war in the first place."

On June 5, 1991, the Oakland school board voted against adopting the
Houghton Mifflin books that the teachers had wanted for grades four
through seven.  For kindergarten through third grade and for the eighth
grade, they selected other books.  At the sixth-grade level, the board
voted in favor of an older book published by Scholastic, a book that
they did not consider in detail, that they chose largely because it was
not from Houghton Mifflin, and that one white teacher involved in
curriculum matters considers "far more racist than Houghton Mifflin."

"I haven't heard of any teacher who likes" the sixth-grade Scholastic
book, Renee Swayne, a thirdgrade teacher in Oakland who supported the
Houghton Mifflin books, told me.  "The board needed to be clear what
they were voting on," she said.  "If they were opposed to a racist text,
some of the previously adopted materials that they were instructing us
to continue to use were even more racist." $wayne, an African American
and a twenty-year veteran of the Oakland schools, resented the
opponents' attitude.  "They presuppose that there is only one black
ideology, and if you spoke against it you were hissed, harassed, and
humiliated.  I don't like that kind of intimidation.  I don't like that
overzealous quality.  I consider myself to be liberal but I don't toe
the line.  It put me in a funny position to be aligned with the quote
unquote 'establishment." But I tried to come up with a decision that was
in the best interests of the children.  There's no safe, single, easy
solution."

I asked Swayne how she approached Columbus.  "I taught the Columbus myth
so I could debunk it," she said.  "I read them the story and then we
began to question it.  I asked the students: How can you discover a
place where people already live?  What if you invite someone home and
they take over the room?  Can they say they discovered it?  We talked
about the concept of value, how gold meant something to the Europeans
but not to the Indians.

The Indians were not stupid, they just had other values." I asked if she
thought her students had ended up confused.  "I told them it wasn't a
matter of right and wrong.  They talked about whether Columbus was a
hero or a villain.  There was a point at which they were beginning to
model themselves after my opinions.  It was more important to get them
to reason than to come to a specific conclusion.  If one kid becomes a
questioner, you've achieved something.  But now, without the books, I
think there are classrooms where no social studies is being taught."

Just beneath the surface of such disputes lies the wound in all American
dreams, the question of race.  To the most vigorous opponents, the deep
issue was simple: the schools ill-serve African-American youth.  One
leading antiHoughton Mifflin activist, Fred Ellis, a husky, affable
African American who has been teaching hard-to-teach children for thirty
years, says: "Textbooks are one reason why kids have dropped out of
school.

If you don't believe me, listen to rap artists.  Some of what they say
is vulgar, but they're sometimes relevant.  Public Enemy came out and
said young people should be the teachers.  I've worked with kids who are
dropouts.  You can't use material that is irrelevant.  These kids sleep
on the street, they're abandoned, they have experiences I haven't had."

Another activist, Kitty Kelly Epstein, was the particular bane of many
textbook supporters.  A slender, intense woman in her forties, Kitty
Epstein was a veteran of the Marxist Left and had worked with Sheila
Jordan to democratize the American Federation of Teachers and in a
campaign against school vouchers.  But in recent years, she has been
fired by the conviction that "progressivism doesn't mean anything."
Attacks on the Oakland school board--there had been corruption
charges--were, in her eyes, covers for racism.  The fact that a majority
of Oakland's teachers wanted the Houghton Mifflin textbooks did not cut
much ice with Kitty Epstein: she dismissed textbooks as "crutches,"
adding that many teachers don't even use them anymore.  Epstein said
scornfully: "There are teachers who say, 'Oh, my God, what shall we do
for these poor kids?" We don't think about them that way.  We don't pity
them.  They're smart.  We're excited about these kids.  We don't think
these are poor little kids the way a lot of the teachers do.  I've
talked to these kids.  These are the most intellectually exciting
conversations I've had in my life."

Still, I asked, wouldn't it have been better to have the Houghton
Mifflin books available for classroom use as references, sources of home
work assignments, baselines for class discussion?  But the books,
Epstein and Ellis insisted, lacked "positive materials." They assumed
that the selfesteem of children is at risk unless they can be taught
history peopled by exemplary figures who look like themselves.  Renee
Swayne, on the other hand, thought the books did well enough at that,
and applauded the books for being true to a terrible history: "I don't
think slavery is anything to be unproud about.  Some people don't want
to teach slavery.  But we are survivors!  We should be appalled by
slavery, but it's nothing to be embarrassed about." I asked Steven
Weinberg to respond to the argument that "irrelevant" textbooks are one
reason why black students drop out of school.

"I think that may be true of some kids at the high school grade levels,"
he said.  "Very few at eighth grade.  I think this image is extrapolated
from high school and college, when they've seen enough of the world to
feel alienated."

Accused of offering no alternatives to the Houghton Mifflin textbooks,
the opponents took the position that they could develop their own
homegrown substitute curriculum in a hurry.  For this purpose, they
would use the state money that the school board would save by not
adopting statesanctioned textbooks--S18 to $30 per child, depending on
the grade level.  "It's very easy to develop a new curriculum," Epstein
told me.  The Oakland school board thought so too, and agreed to let
Ellis and Epstein recruit teachers and others to write new materials to
compensate for the missing textbooks.  During the summer of 1991 Ellis,
Epstein, and their allies did work up parts of a surrogate curriculum.
But many were less history than contemporary polemics.  Even the NAACP,
which had supported the original protest, objected to a caricature of
Clarence Thomas that appeared in one curriculum segment.

In the tenth and eleventh straight years of Republican rule in
Washington and the ninth of Republican rule in the governor's mansion in
Sacramento, why did committed people devote so much energy to mobilizing
against the most pluralist textbooks ever brought before the State of
California?  Why were they able to command so much of the public debate
on educational subjects overall?  How could one gay activist have
accused

the books of "extermination" for failing to take note of Americans who
had loved people of the same sex?  Why so vehement?  Even allowing the
books' flaws, why the urge to demonize them?

The bitterness of the attack on the textbooks in Oakland was, by any
stretch of the imagination, out of all proportion to the real stakes. In
this, it was typical of many (not all) of the recent multicultural
donnybrooks.  In the background, whether noted directly or not, were
intractable facts: a stupefying degree of inequality in American society
and, in particular, of poverty among African Americans.  Wealth in the
United States has sometimes trickled, sometimes cascaded upward for a
quarter of a century so that, to put the matter in raw statistical
terms, in 1989, the wealthiest 1 percent of American households owned 39
percent of total household wealth, and 48 percent of the sum of all bank
accounts, stocks, and bonds.  The median nonwhite household, which in
1983 owned 9 percent of what the median white household owned, owned
only 5 percent in 1989.  In 1989, 35 percent of nonwhite and Hispanic
families had zero or negative net worth, compared with 12 percent of
whites.  In 1993, 46 percent of black children were living below the
poverty line.  Between 1984 and 1989, the life expectancy gap between
white and black males widened from 6.3 years to 8.2 years; according to
the most recent data available, males in Bangladesh have a better chance
of living past age forty than males in Harlem.

While most Americans deplore these facts, and at least outside
(admittedly, growing) white supremacist and Social Darwinist circles it
is generally bad form to insist that they are in the natural order of
things, there is no political consensus about what to do and no vigorous
political movements welling up from those populations most affected.
Those who suffer most are often most quiescent.  As Clara Sue Kidwell, a
professor of Native American studies at the University of California,
Berkeley, told me at the time of the 1992 protests against Columbus, "We
have tremendous issues to deal with: jobs on the reservation, health
issues, the dropout crisis.  No political agenda comes out of the attack
on Columbus. Instead, there's the assumption that all our problems
follow from Columbus." Instead of moving to organize against rock-bottom
class inequalities and racial discrimination, many activists choose to
fight real and imagined symbols of insult.  They do not know what else
to do, and they are not trying to find out.  Their critics do not offer
a convincing means to heal America's wounds, either.

Dedicated people like Fred Ellis and Kitty Epstein resort to a deeply
censorious assumption: in the beginning and in the end is the Word. They
assume that school is omnipotent, that pride develops from talk of
pride, that guilt is the engine of political change.  The assumption of
the textbook opponents is that more "relevant" textbooks make alienated
youth less alienated, keep them in school, thus help them succeed.  They
agree with textbook advocates, in fact, that better textbooks--whatever
they mean by "better"--will make a significant difference in keeping up
the morale of Oakland's students and thereby equip them to fare better
in a future economy that will have less need of the less skilled.  But
genuflections are made toward these arguments in the absence of strong
evidence.

Or against the evidence.  John U.  Ogbu, a professor of anthropology at
the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues concluded
after much research that neither the ideal of a common curriculum
defended by conservatives nor the ideal of multiculturalism defended by
liberals "is likely to enhance appreciably the academic achievement of
those minority groups who have not traditionally done well in school."
The disturbing possibility raised by this research is that poor students
are put off less by the tilt of the textbooks than by the fear that
their peers will define any academic success as "acting white."

There is also the disconcerting question of how much academic success
the American economy could actually abide.  If all African-American
youth in Oakland graduated from high school with a B average or better,
would there be jobs for them anywhere but McDonald's?  For that matter,
would there be places for them to continue their education?  One thing
was certain: with community college fees rising by 290 percent between
1990-91 and 1994-95, student fees in the nineteen-campus California
State University system rising by 103 percent and in the nine-campus
University of California system by 134 percent, with experienced
professors being seduced into early retirement and courses being
eliminated accordingly to cut costs, there wouldn't be room for most of
these high school graduates in the moldering halls of California's
college system.

During years of tax revolt, declining revenues, state budget crisis, and
educational cutbacks, much of the popular energy and commitment it would
have taken to fight for the preservation--let alone the improvement-of
public education was channeled into acrimony among potential allies.
Oakland's school fight was a shadow play at the edge of the precipice.

"It was a symbolic fight," said Sheila Jordan, who was the only educator
on the school board.  "They won a symbolic victory but they lost a piece
of the struggle.  If we had gotten these textbooks, they could have used
any supplementary materials they wanted.  I'm not against a certain
Afrocentricity, I'm not against distributing political material--let the
kids have anything that could help.  There had never been such a wide
representation of teachers in the selection process.  Previously, a much
smaller group of teachers had made recommendations, and they were being
lobbied by the publishers.  I think most parents wanted the books.  But
the issue became so politicized.  If you were for the Houghton Mifflin
books, you were called 'racist.""

Shelley Weintraub put it this way: "I thought the textbook debate was
totally misplaced.  You pick false symbols, you call each other names,
you stifle real debate.  There's virtually no connection between the
rage that the opponents are feeling and the object of their attack. They
can't affect the federal government, they can't affect the state
government, so they're going to trash the local school board."

Weintraub is herself a Berkeley veteran of the antiwar and women's
movements.  "I regard myself as a multiculturalist," she said, "and I
think this is the prevailing view among teachers.  To give an accurate
understanding of American history, you have to give an accurate picture
of the Chinese working on the railroad, and a lot of other groups doing
a lot of other things.  But I'm not a big one for basing the curriculum
on self-esteem. It's hippie-dippy.  My sense of my students is that they
gain self-esteem when they develop skills and feel their power, and not
because they had someone to look up to.  I'm not against role models and
heroes, but I think it's ahistorical to base a curriculum on that.  My
kid came home from kindergarten with a badge that said, I FEEL SPECIAL.
I think there are other ways."

I asked Steven Weinberg what he thought was driving the protest. "The
important thing is that most of the testimony wasn't about the
textbooks, actually.  People were recounting experiences of racism:
their children were beaten up, called names.  The testimony was real
heartfelt.  A lot of people took a leap of faith that there was some
connection between this and the textbooks." This is the leap of faith
that makes for the wrong fight on the wrong grounds.  Weinberg
continued: "Something else happened.  !

said, If we don't have textbooks, it's going to be harder to keep our
best teachers.  This year, we have all new faces teaching the seventh
grade.

Anyone who could went to the eighth grade, where we had a textbook, or
went to another subject.  Or retired early.  This is hard work. You
don't have time to develop a curriculum.  You need all the help you can
get." He pointed to an inch-thick stack of papers he had to grade over
the weekend.

"Two things anger me," Weinberg added.  "There are all the untruths that
were told about the books.  And all of that made the job harder for some
awfully good teachers, and in that way the protest hurt the education of
the kids."

Two years after the Columbus quincentenary, Oakland's fourth-, fifth-,
and seventh-grade classes still had no history textbooks.

All family fights are different, but Oakland's t¢.xtbook fight has a
familiar ring.  Who by now isn't used to atrocity tales in the culture
wars?  But why is there so much bitterness on all sides?  Why such
hypersensitivity?  Why have so many people who have suffered grievously
from the West's many abrogations of Enlightenment reason lost faith in
the Enlightenment?  What has become of the ideal of a Left---or, for
that matter, of a nation--that federates people of different races,
genders, sexualities, or for that matter, religions and classes?  Why
has this ideal been neglected or abandoned by so many of the poor and
minorities who should share the Left's ideal of equality?  Why are so
many people attached to their marginality and why is so much of their
intellectual labor spent developing theories to justify it?  Why insist
on difference with such rigidity, rancor, and blindness, to the
exclusion of the possibility of common knowledge and common dreams?

Today it is the conservatives who claim common culture and color
blindness as their special causes and who denounce the obsession with
difference--as it is frequently right and necessary to do.  It suits
them to identify the Left as a whole with the illiberality that they
often properly despise.  Yet they miss the fact that much of the energy
of the party of difference is, in fact, directed not against
conservatives but against the left wing of the party of commonality. One
of the striking features of the Oakland dispute is that it was, in so
many respects, internecine.  Many of those who confronted each other so
harshly were veterans of the 1960s Left.

They had shared a radical ambiance and fought together for civil rights,
peace in Vietnam, the strengthening of public support for schools,
welfare, and job creation.  Once again, in the not-so-grand tradition of
the Left, some leftists targeted other leftists (who now called
themselves "progressives") and dominated the discussion by dint of their
fury.  Sheila Jordan had been a Trotskyist.  Toni Cook had been an
activist in the Black Student Union and a supporter of the black
nationalist Ron Karenga as a student at UCLA in the late 1960s--at the
same time Gary Nash was a prominent member of UCLA's faculty Left.

The leaders of both camps were not Republicans.  None sided with the
party of tradition, the nationalists who, in this country, we call
conservatives, whose cultural passion is to shore up conventional forms
of authority.  No, Oakland's days as a Republican stronghold are long
gone mainly because of a steady influx of African Americans and, even
more, a linked exodus of whites (who declined from 50.5 percent of the
population in 1970 to 28.3 percent in 1990).  The textbook dispute does,
however, display the incapacity of the so-called Left.  There is no it
there.  What we have instead is an ill-fitting sum of groups overly
concerned with protecting and purifying what they imagine to be their
identities.  Yet the conscience they still tug on is the conscience of
the Left.  The energies they drain are the energies of the Left.  What
we are witnessing in the culture wars is not the triumph of the Left but
its decline.

The cautionary tale with which I have begun is a severe case of a larger
wrongheadedness, a misplacement of energies.  True, part of the reason
why textbook politics took the course it did in Oakland was local.  The

San Francisco Bay Area has nourished many a mass social movement, from
labor in the 1930s to the student and antiwar insurgencies of the 1960s,
each asserting the right of citizens to organize and clamor and
intervene in the workings of institutions.  Mobilization against
tradition is itself a tradition there.  Precisely because the
population--if hardly the economy or the media--is dominated by racial
minorities, political culture in the Bay Area tilts toward a recognition
that America is inhabited by a multiplicity of cultures, each with its
own legitimate social, political,

and cultural claims.

But there is a crucial imbalance.  Whatever glories of
"multiculturalism," there is only a

the protestations about the weak sense of collectivity

that claims the loyalty of citizens across racial and ethnic grounds.
There are, rather, on many issues, "communities"--African-, Chinese-,
and Japanese-American, the many Spanish-speakers lumped together as
Latino, gays, lesbians, and radical feminists .  .  .  each with its
activists, its lineage, its injuries, its martyrs, and its claim to
justice.  Each, to some degree, encompasses particular habits and
assumptions, yet at the same time partakes of an unacknowledged and
shared American way of life.  One thing that some group members can
claim in common is enemies real or imputed.

Where better to find them than among the ranks of the different who are
often more prosperous, yet closest to their hopes?  In the current
climate, there are no impediments to the'demonization of white
leftliberals, males in particular.  Rather, there is breathing space for
the kind of sectarianism that claims attention and resources, and often
enough succeeds by mobilizing small, visible, passionate groups against
the very idea that cornmortality might be as important as, even more
important than, difference.

Episodes of intellectual and cultural secession, of flagrant disregard
for the truth and flagrant contempt for the common enterprise, are not
necessarily slated to succeed.  If anything, as the historian Sean
Wilentz has pointed out, many if not most campaigns of what might be
called extravagant multiculturalists are beaten back.  The Houghton
Mifflin books were adopted almost everywhere in California.  In Los
Angeles, notorious for its ethnic antagonisms, all parties to the
textbook controversy were willing to compromise on adding to the
curriculum primary-source supplements by writers from racial minorities.
Eventually the

tempest in the teapot blew itself out.  But win or lose, these dubious
battles show no sign of subsiding, and win or lose, they derail what
slender chances might exist for a left-wing version of commonality. They
demoralize the proponents of commonality, choke off the forbearance, the
reciprocity, and, yes, the deal-making that are the prerequisites of a
successful democratic politics in a complicated society.  They help
undermine the only basis for a politics of equality that might succeed
on a national scale--a majoritarian spirit.  Often enough, they target
as enemies those they need as allies, if not friends.

In the meantime, the conservative nationalists who defend their own
version of a politics of commonality have also staked out their
exclusivity. Virtually every party to such disputes feels like an
embattled guardian on the ramparts of American culture.  The result is a
universality of defensiveness, a generalized resentment, and a feeling
that, if one is definitively limited by minority status, there is
nothing better to do than secede--or to draw fast the wagons and get
yours.  The white heterosexual male, feeling besieged or abandoned by
blacks, or feminists, or gays, abandons them--unless they agree with
him.  Blacks feeling disrespected by whites, gays feeling embattled by
straights (and AIDS), the handicapped feeling unfairly treated by the
able-bodied--all feel they have been silent too long while their people
suffer.  The result is a cacophony without much listening or the
sympathy needed to keep up a common conversation.  There are those who
secede in the name of self-defense, hoping to protect their people from
more oppression, and those who secede in the name of universal
rights--using their belief that they stand for the common good to
justify turning their backs on their own defaults, and on the oppressed.

The result is petty--and sometimes more than petty--aggression and
deafness, an obsession with purifications.  The squandering of energy on
identity politics, the hardening of the boundaries between groups, the
insistence that individuals are no more than their labels, is an
American tragedy.  But no tragedy is simple, and this one, too, has a
philosophy and a history.  Even if the alarm about "political
correctness" is too shrill--and even if the exaggerations themselves
require explanation--the tragedy slowly playing out in the obsession
with separate identities is consuming the energy and imagination we are
going to need if there is to be

any way at all out of a deep trap that has been a long time in the
making. Identity politics is a very bad turn, a detour into quicksand,
but it did not come out of the blue.  Rather, it is a set of false
solutions proclaimed for real problems false solutions that began with a
certain plausibility.  The oddity is that the Left, which once stood for
universal values, seems to speak today for select identities, while the
Right, long associated with privileged interests, claims to defend the
common good.  How the terms have been reversed is what I hope to
explain.

II.


The Exhaustion of Commonality

What meaning .  .  .  can continue to attach to such a term as the
"American" character?-what type, as the result of such a prodigious
amalgam, such a hotchpotch of racial ingredients, is to be conceived as
shaping itself?

--HENRY JAMES, The American Scene

There is a religious war going on in this country, a cultural war as
critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for
this is a war for the soul of America.

--at the 1992 Republican National Convention

"A Prodigious Amalgam"

1.  The Dream, the Pot, and the Popular Front

The attack on the Houghton Mifflin textbooks could only have been so
fierce if the old saga of a common America had already, in good measure,
unraveled.

What resulted was a dispute between two new versions of the American
story.

Gary Nash and his allies strained to enfold racial and other social
differences within a recognizable common history.  They were, in effect,
the left wing of the party of commonality.  Differences, insists the
party of commonality, exist within a whole history that doesn't differ.
The same history may, and should, be told from different vantage points,
and should attend to diverse, indeed divergent experiences; but these
diverse histories take place in history--a history that speaks to, and
for, everyone, and in the name of which Americans contend.  The
experience of slavery does not belong to African Americans alone; nor
the conquest and the reservation system to native peoples alone; nor
economic growth

39

to the wealthy alone.  Whatever milieu you come from, you do not know
American history unless you know the victims as well as the victors.

The textbook supporters tried--not impeccably--to be sensitive to the
complexity of perspectives and interests represented among their
readers. Their work was, of course, like the work of all textbook
writers, political, though not in any direct polemical way.  They sought
to cultivate the common ground beneath all understanding.  They believed
that there is not only shareable knowledge about America, but a story
held in common--a story of progress.  Some version of this story is
shared by people of many different persuasions, from the enlightened
left-liberalism of Gary Nash to the elitist conservatism of Allan Bloom
("Our story is the majestic and triumphant march of two principles:
freedom and equality").  In Nash's progressive version, American history
rests on a shared constitutional faith.  In the name of that faith, the
weaker go up against the stronger and fight, neither easily nor
irresistibly, to extend democratic rights against concentrations of
power.  In this view, the multiple claims of rival groups in a democracy
can be decently adjudicated if (and only if) care is taken to preserve
the sense of a common interest on which the interests of the various
parts must rest.  The textbooks' mission, then, is to cultivate this
common interest by telling a single tale--that of the American struggle
to extend constitutional rights to the oppressed and unrecognized and to
achieve greater equality.  In this view, common culture is not ancestor
worship, but it is common knowledge in the cause of justice.

Yet the disjointed and self-contradictory quality, the very
cumbersomeness of these textbooks, indicates something about their
vulnerability to attack.  They look basted together.  They are basted
together, like the nation they chronicle.  They are gaudy, but they lack
confidence.  They do not sound the brass for the unquestioned pieties of
yore, for what Tom Engelhardt has called "victory culture." They are not
jubilant celebrations of the melting pot or of a westward-flowing
empire.  The America of these books is haunted.  American culture is no
longer celebrated for its splendid uniqueness, but turns out to be,
rather, just one culture (and a loosely bound one, at that) among many.
The flow of the narrative is so disrupted as to stutter.  The lingering
sense of a saga of unending progress that culminates in the United
States of America is forced.  "America," the

books maintain, "will be." The lingering insistence that America the
coherent, the good, and the just, lies in the future--that is to say,
that it does not exist---only halfheartedly conceals the revelation that
the old firm America was not really there in the past where it was
supposed to be and where once, in the textbooks, it was unquestionably
assumed to be.

This lack of confidence, anxiety, even incoherence about what the
national identity is and ought to be, or even whether there ought to be
one at all, today crops up everywhere in American culture.  In the
spring of 1994 it was widely reported that a school board in Florida was
insisting that teachers instill in their students the belief that
America's basic values are "superior to other foreign or historic
cultures." But the truly remarkable thing--all the more remarkable for
being unremarked upon--was that this was a newsworthy story in the first
place.  Not so many decades ago, it would have been taken for granted
that America was the pinnacle of civilizations.  Now, this insistence on
the superiority of America was controversial, treated by the national
media, at least, as a newsworthy oddity, a man biting a dog.  Soon
thereafter, moderate Republicans who pledged to repeal the Florida
school board decision were elected to replace the conservative Christian
majority who had supported it.

Thus does the new anxiety, sometimes called "multiculturalism,"
circulate throughout American society, especially through the mass
media, which, even in a time of centrifugal motion, still capture such
common images as exist.

One tip-off on the rise of such anxieties came on the cover of the issue
of Time magazine that was on newsstands on July 4, 1991--an issue
published at the end of the season when those wicked little letters PC
had gained media currency and howls were being heard from many quarters
about the suppression of thought by know-nothing vigilantes on the
nation's campuses.  Instead of celebrating the national holiday in full
bombast, with yet another unity rally against the barbarians, Time chose
for its cover a most untraditional Revolutionary icon: a LIFE-and-drum
corps whose white male drummer is flanked by a headbanded Native
American and a black woman playing an African drum.  Bringing up the
rear are a dark-skinned person of indeterminate sex or ethnicity and an
Asian woman.

The entire tableau is erablazoned with these less-than stirring words:
"Who Are We?" The subhead reads: "American kids are getting a new--and
divisive--view of Thomas Jefferson, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of
July."

Compare, for example, Time's July 4 cover of 1987, with a gallery of
various American types emblazoned "We The People"; or 1986's' Ronald
Reagan portrait against a backdrop of fireworks bursting in air; or
bicentennial 1976's "THE PROMISED LAND: AMERICA'S NEW IMMIGRANTS," in
old-timey lettering; or 1955's portrait of Dwight David Eisenhower,
identified

solely as "THE PRESIDENT OF THE U.S.," against a backdrop of the Liberty

Bell.  That the national ideology's onetime flagship of received
opinion, whose founder famously declared the coming of "The American
Century" in 1941, should admit to such uncertainty--admit to it and
also, perhaps, express a certain pride in 'fessing up--suggests the
agitation so evident in the corridors of established opinion.  Who are
we indeed?  What do we belong to, and what belongs to us?  Obsessive
questions that come up again and again these days, along with the rustle
of two linked questions just behind: Who qualifies as insulted and
injured?  And what are they owed by those who are not injured, at least
not as badly?

Who are we?  The acrimony is as intense as the quarrels are predictable.
Follow the script of each battle in the culture wars and before long you
arrive at the same tangle of questions: What is America anyway, and who
wants to know?  Who gets to say, and with what consequences?  Are we
finding ourselves through or despite our differences, or are we falling
apart despite what we hold in common?  Do we become more equal as we
become more antagonistic?  Is separateness the necessary prologue to a
commonality that can only be attained once the most oppressed secede to
cultivate truths that the majority long suppressed?  Are there bridges
worth building?

These disputes have enough roots for an entire ideological forest, but
there is a surprising connection among all the contending parties, an
unacknowledged commonality.  They share more than they want to
acknowledge. It is normal to be perplexed and dismayed by questions of
belonging and respect.  How American, this passion for respect, this
fear of exclusion, this need to belong, this anxiety about worthiness!
To express and cope with these questions has been a perennial democratic
problem, for one thing Americans have long respected is a certain
disrespect .  The United States is that paradoxical nation where people
are taught that they deserve respect; in which many feel deprived of
respect; in which many of these, in turn, find it legitimate to complain
that they are so deprived; and in which many also find the demand for
respect, at least in its blustery form when it comes from somebody
else's lips, funny.  We cultivate egalitarian irreverence.* Our culture,
to be sure, has its strongly conformist side, but one thing it conforms
to is the presumption that no one is so high as to be above scrutiny, no
one so low as to be beneath dignity.  America: land of slavery,
abolitionism, slave revolts, Emancipation, segregation, a civil rights
movement, and drastic racial inequalities with respect to wealth,
longevity, and virtually every other measure of life condition.

There have been both reformist and pluralist versions of the principle
of equal respect.  The reformist version fuels democratic movements. For
all the many inequalities and oppressions in American history, the
egalitarian streak in American ideology has buttressed the antislavery,
women's suffrage, civil rights, feminist, gay rights, and other reform
movements.  That most contentious program, affirmative action, has a
root in the Declaration of Independence's commitment to equality from
birth, minorities and women having generalized the principle of one
person, one vote to one group member, one job.  The pluralist streak,
meanwhile, undergirds our famous multiplicity of civic organizations. It
was, according to Alexis de Tocqueville, our special genius to cultivate
the organization of interested groups.  Of the enduring nations of the
last two centuries, it is America, uniquely depicted as a "democracy of
nationalities," that is the most inviting to the pressures of group
affirmation and also, perhaps, the most accommodating to them. In
retrospect, it is difficult to believe that a nation of immigrants,
slaves, and conquered natives, a nation run by Europearts but claiming a
universal mission, a nation ostensibly liberal in its belief that people
make their own destinies yet subjecting

* I understood vividly how distinctive this concept is as I was about to
give a lecture containing the phrase in Taiwan in December 1993.  (The
subject was the spread of American popular culture.)  To iron out
translation difficulties, I was meeting beforehand with the
interpreters, at their request.  What did I mean, egalitarian
irreverence?  one of them asked.  Or was this a typographical error and
did I perhaps mean reverence?  No, I explained, what is singular about
America is the widespread respect for the disrespect of authority.

whole categories of people to special oppressions and humiliations,
could have postponed forever a protracted convulsion over the question,
"Who Are We?"

Time's urgent question fairly quivers with anxiety.  Are we no more than
a muddle?  Is there a "we" at all?  And if not, or if "we" are
uncertain, then what?  Such a question, asked so insistently, answers
itself: we are a people who don't know who we are.  "We" bother to ask
such a question only because we suspect, to say the least, that this
"we" is problematic.  According to Time, "we" might be able to construe
ourselves as a unity if we work at it, but we are going to have to work
at it, because we begin as a plurality.  No sooner have we asked about
commonality than we have to acknowledge difference.  And so the question
of collective identity, however simple it appears, is actually compound.
It leads to other questions: Who are my kind of people, who are the
other kinds, and what do we or should we have to do with each other?
What shall I, from within my segment, render unto the whole?

There is a lineage to this anxiety, for Americans have frequently
worried about where our essence lies--and lashed out at people who
seemed to challenge it, whatever it was.  American history is, in no
small part, the bloody ground of these fights.  From the seventeenth
century onward, future Americans spoke a multiplicity of languages and
held to a multiplicity of religions.  Gaining access to an abundance of
land, they encouraged not only broad property-holding but continuing
immigration from the nations of Europe.  All these factors combined with
geographical remoteness from Europe to weaken the hold of any religious
or secular bonds imposed from abroad.

Quickly, however, pressures toward uniformity emerged.  Although an
American nation is never once mentioned in the Declaration of
Independence, the peculiar term "unAmerican" is in use, at least by a
visiting Englishman, as early as 1818-the same year that Congress
rejected a petition from the Irish societies of New York and
Philadelphia for a western land grant.  Periodically, under popular
pressure, the nation's governing classes have erected boundaries
dividing the ins from the outs.  Americans have often been fearful that,
as a whole, the nation does not really exist, or that it will not last.
Conservatives arise frequently to complain about centrifugal motion:
thus, the eighteenth-century Tory Jonathan Boucher's comment that "every
observant man who has resided in America must have seen that men are
less attached to each other, and the bond of social or political union
is looser there than in almost every other country." On July 4, 1845,
long before "Native Americans" became the label of choice for many
former "Indians," the Native American Party met in Philadelphia "for the
purpose of devising a plan of concerted political action in defence of
American institutions against the encroachments of foreign influence,"
decrying the presence of "a foreign body of citizens," a "swarm" of
strangers committed "to perpetuate foreign clannishhess among adopted
citizens of the United States, in contravention of that spirit of union
and nationality, without which no people can legitimately claim a place
among the nations of the earth." The Native American Party faded fast,
but its preoccupations have never been long absent from American life.
The fear lest national integrity be weakened by interlopers has remained
a fixture of national culture.

If the common identity of a people derives in important part from their
sense of a common past, tied to their sense of a common present
condition, Americans have good reason for perplexity, and a long history
of it. America, Wait Whitman's "Nation of many nations," is unusual, if
not unique, in this respect.  The country was settled by refugees,
adventurers, conquered peoples, and slaves--in sum, by peoples, not by a
singular people claiming a common root.  With less than 2 percent of its
population deriving from preColombian tribes or Mexicans conquered in
the Mexican war, and some 12 percent of its population descended from
African slaves, the United States today owes the great majority of its
ethnic diversity to neither federation (like Switzerland) nor conquest
(like the former USSR) but to never-ending mass migrations.  Well into
the twentieth century, a relatively weak national government was in no
position to enforce any uniform identity.  In fact if not in ideology,
America was multinational, multicultural, multilinguistic, multiracial.
In ideology if not in fact, it was seen by its thinkers--and by at least
some of its citizens--as a nation unlike all others.  We exhibited a
"composite nationality"; we were "not a nation, so much as a world"; we
were, or harbored, or had, oddly, a "way of life" and a "dream."

At the beginning of the republic, we were not quite Horace Kallen's
"democracy of nationalities"--certainly not equally so: the European ha
tionalities monopolized the privilege.  But there was in principle, at
least, the possibility that we would become a unity, one rising from
many, and this was so partly because the common nation's roots in the
past were relatively shallow.  Founded without the unifying assurances
that other nations have derived, at least at times, from blood ties of
long duration, thoughtful and influential Americans frequently claimed
that our commonality derived from imagined and yet unrealized
potentials.  Like Marx's hypothetical revolutionaries, Americans would
take their poetry from the future, not from the past.  American history
is thick with proclamations to the effect that Americans are coming into
existence but have not yet arrived.  Here is John Quincy Adams writing
in 1819 of German immigrants: "They must look forward to their posterity
rather than backward to their ancestors." In 1845, Emerson declares in
his diary that "in this continent--asylum of all nations, the energy of
Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, & Cossacks, & all the European tribes-of
the Africans, & of the Polynesians, will construct a new race, a new
religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as
the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages, or
that which earlier emerged from the Pelasgic & Etruscan barbarism." In
1908, Israel Zangwill has the hero of his influential play The
Melting-Pot ask: "What is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all
nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory
of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!
.  .  .  The real American has not arrived.  He is only in the Crucible,
I tell you--he will be the fusion of all races, the coming superman." In
1936, Langston Hughes, acutely conscious of the harshness of the
American past and present, affirms: "America will be!" In 1960, Walter
Lippmann writes: "The bond of American union has not been piety and
reverence for the past but a conviction of purpose and of the destiny it
would bring for posterity.  America has always been not only a country
but a dream." In 1980, that keen student of the American audience,
Ronald Reagan, says: "Americans live in the future."

If we are to be bound and known by what has not yet taken place, no
wonder we set out, we Americans, with a built-in uncertainty about what

exactly it is to be American.  When the entity that one belongs to has
not yet arrived but perpetually shimmers in a state of becoming, in a
future that may, for all we know, recede forever, then the very concept
of identity fails to take on a very clear shape.  The journey
("purpose") is everything, the destination ("destiny") murky.
Metamorphosis is all.  Opportunity is at least as important as
achievement; potential, at least as important as actuality.

Pause for a moment on this central cliche of American rhetoric, "the
American dream." Has any other nation, even an empire, ever identified
itself so closely with a dream?  Is there a Spanish or Pakistani dream?
Was there a Roman dream?  a T'ang dream?  a Hapsburg or Napoleonic
dream?  It is one thing to have a "vision," to invoke glory or reason,
or for that matter Aryan supremacy, as a national purpose; it is quite
another to identify the nation with something so insubstantial as a
dream.  A dream may be evocative, illuminating, fascinating, or
frightful, but one thing it is not is a fait accompli.  It is incapable
of verification.  It invites revision. Intrinsically ambiguous, it begs
for interpretation and reinterpretation.  A dream, after all, is the
most private and invisible of experiences.  So, to paraphrase Lippmann:
America is not yet.  It is a collective anticipation. But how does one
identify with a potential?

What a collective dream gains in vividness, it loses in fixity.  In
America, the very idea of the nation is free of the nationality that
weighs down the definition of every other nation-enough so that freedom
from definition is central to the definition of Americanness.  At least,
Americans believe that it is their dream that sets them apart--not their
blood, like the Germans, or their language, like the French, or even
their political institutions, which are in bad odor.  True enough, the
official civic ideal is a compound of relatively stable attachments: to
the social equality of individuals; to the preeminent value of personal
freedom; to official symbols of union like the flag; to some rough idea
of a national community.  But intrinsic to American freedom is the
absence of a requirement that Americans do things the way they or their
forebears did in their old countries.  "The way we do things here" is an
opening to diversity.  Each attempt to arrest the flux of Americanness,
to pin down once and for all the nature of national membership, has
failed.

Perhaps it is foolish even to contemplate compressing the sense of

what it is to be an American into a single procrustean idea.  One reason
is that, in a country lacking ethnic coherence, the idea of the United
States of America has been ideological, and far from seamless.  We, if
there is a "we," are a people of ideas.  We were formed by documents,
above all the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  The
United States, in theory, was to be the homeland of an idea: a democracy
of free individuals. This new nation was to be more than another nation,
it was to be the homeland of liberty, showing the rest of the world that
what it wanted to be was, in fact, America.  In its most liberal, least
nativist version, America was the truth of the world unveiled, a
decisive moment in the revelation of humanity to itself.*

But American ideology was also intrinsically strained.  Its main ideas
clashed.  Dissolving the bands that tied them to the British Empire, the
American founders felt impelled to justify themselves to the entire
world not only by itemizing their grievances against George III but by
stating first their conviction that "all men are created equal" and that
they are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." Not
"all colonists," not "all whites" not even "all North Americans," but
"all men"the idea of equal rights setting a standard against which to
measure all injustice, all brutality, all concentrations of illegitimate
power, although it was to take decades of suffering and political clamor
to pry open the definition of "men" to include enslaved African
Americans and women.  From the beginning, Americans fought over who
precisely was entitled to life, liberty, and the PUrsuit of happiness;
which men, precisely, were created equal; which authorities, precisely,
were illegitimate; and therefore whose rebellion was justified.  The
phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is at war with
itself; as the abolitionists insisted, the liberty of the slave owner
steals the happiness of the slave.

To some, we were the people who disliked authority; to others, the
people who embraced the republican idea and civic virtue.  Later, to
some we would be the people of economic liberty above all; to yet
others, the people bound together by white supremacy or Christianity.
This slackness

* As if to prove the point, thirteen years later, with the help of the
Marquis de Lafayette and his American-inspired rhetoric, French
revolutionaries produced a "Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen"-not a "Declaration of the Rights of Frenchmen"---declaring men
equal "in respect of their rights," though again distinctly failing to
take women into account.

of definition was in turn rooted in a huge material fact.  The conquest
of an entire continent and the forcible removal of its indigenous
peoples meant that cheap land was widely available to settlers, which
made for a large number of property owners--large in contrast to other
societies of the time-which, in turn, made possible a relatively high
order of political democracy and an openness to political and
ideological experimentation. Millenarian religious awakenings also
weakened secular authority and hence fixed identity.  A fierce utopian
streak in the nineteenth century--from Robert Owen and Brook Farm to
Mormonism and Edward Bellamy --was yet another sign of the provisional
and unfinished quality of much of America's political culture.

But from the start, foreign menaces helped greatly to consolidate the
idea of the nation.  The nation understood itself to have been conceived
under siege from the Indians in the first place.  One grievance recorded
in the Declaration of Independence was that the king inflamed "the
merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an
undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." Then,
from the birth of the republic onward, if intermittently, actual and
potential European adversaries bound the United States into a community
that felt entitled to demand a certain uniformity of its citizens.
Nations born in revolution feel pressures from real and fancied enemies,
and the United States was no exception.  Jefferson, the great
promulgator of liberty, embraced the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. By
the War of 1812, alarms had been sounded over French revolutionaries and
Spaniards as well as over the Indians and the British.  The march
westward heightened the sense of nationhood.  The Civil War---or rather,
in Lincoln's formulation, the war to preserve the Union-led to a further
burst of nationalist sentiment.

Consider, for example, Edward Everett Hale's famous "The Man Without a
Country," published in The Atlantic in 1863, with half a million copies
reprinted within a year.  The story was set in 1807, when a cocky naval
officer named Philip Nolan is supposed to have been convicted for
supporting the treasonous Aaron Burr.  Nolan cries out "in a fit of
frenzy,--'Damn the United States!  I wish I may never hear of the United
States again!'" To explain Nolan, Hale tells us that he "had grown up in
the West of those days, in the midst of 'Spanish plot,' 'Orleans plot,'
and all the rest." He had been brought up among foreigners (a Spanish
officer,

a French merchant, an English tutor).  He had dwelt on the margins of
national life: "He had spent half his youth with an older brother,
hunting horses in Texas; and, in a word, to him 'United States' was
scarcely a reality." He had not, in short, been acculturated into
national attachments. But most of all, Nolan's offense is civic, not
cultural: he violated his duty.  Hale tells us: "He had sworn on his
oath as a Christian to be true to 'United States." It was 'United
States' which gave him the uniform he wore, and the sword by his side."
Nolan is condemned to spend the rest of his life on a prison ship, never
again to see the name of the United States, or to hear its name.  The
story's very conceit suggests that attachment to the American nation was
something to be achieved and not (yet) taken for granted.

Yet what common condition could be ascribed to the whole of this
multiple, contentious people?  Unifiers frequently attempted to compress
differences into a single national character: Americans were sturdy,
brave, God-fearing, freedom-loving, devoted to work, committed to the
civil covenant.  This core could enfold components as distinct as the
rectitude of the banker, the revivalism of the evangelist, and the
republicanism of the radical artisan.  Moreover, throughout the
nineteenth century and intermittently since, school textbooks assumed
that a combination of European "racial stock" and pioneer character made
for superiority.  The nation composed of such persons was destined to
increase the freedom of its citizens in the process of becoming more
unified.  The slaves were reduced, in effect, to un-Americans on
American soil.  In this light, more than two centuries of African
slavery were an inconvenient exception to the general freedom.

To further complicate the quest for unity, the American experience was
relatively open to encounters and collisions with newcomers--as long as
they were white.  America's binges of nativist and antiradical
intolerance were, throughout the nineteenth century, relatively shallow
and short-lived.  The Alien Act was allowed to expire in 1800 without
the deportation of any flesh-and-blood aliens, and it wasn't until the
1880s, in the midst of labor organizing and anti-anarchist panics, that
immigration was first restricted on racial and ideological grounds.
Successive generations who might have thought that they had settled the
question of who they had become, that they had arrived at some final
resting place of

Americanness, have had to contend not only with contradictions in their
own thought but with the unsettling presence of those other Americans,
the newcomers and claimants, the enslaved and the radicals, the
mil-lenarians and schismatics, those who were unwilling, or had not been
permitted, to transform themselves into normal Americans, and tried to
transform or at least bend the ideal.

While national identity has never been altogether immobile for long,
there have been periods of greater or lesser firmness.  The Union
victory in the Civil War became the linchpin of an American victory
saga.  It was after the Civil War, and especially toward the end of the
nineteenth century, that one heard a growing clamor to the effect that
the United States had become a nation.  The transcontinental push on the
iron rails, the defeat of the Indians, the opening of the territories
westward to the Pacific, together generated a new identity--to be
American was to feel implicated in the idea of the frontier; it was to
hold a share in the continental territory, to partake of the struggle by
which civilization slowly but steadily liberated a continent from the
forces of backwardness and barbarism.  Outside the suppressed cultures
of "Indians," blacks, and some others, American identity was stable
enough that pressures for consolidation and uniformity needed not be so
intense.  Groups were free to remain unassimilated by standing apart
from the whole.  Neither the national state nor the national economy was
strong enough to overcome centrifugal tendencies, not least the massive
immigration from Europe, which scattered hybrid and hyphenate American
identities around the country, where immigrants could, if they wished,
cultivate a certain separateness.  "Prior to 1917," the historian Gary
Gerstle writes, "an ethnic group could choose, if its members desired,
to remain separate from the American cultural mainstream and to
cultivate its Old World traditions; the American landscape was dotted
with insular ethnic communities, whose cultural life remained remarkably
autonomous of the Protestant, republican, and commercial culture around
them." Immigrants clustered in towns and neighborhoods and organized
fraternal and burial societies, festivals, newspapers, schools, and
theaters alongside work and commercial associations that were themselves
frequently kin-based.  In nineteenth-century Cincinnati, schools taught
German half the day.  Between 1860 and 1890, the German piano
manufacturer William Steinway

established a distinct German-American town at College Point, Long
Island, in part to avoid unions.  Within and aside from ethnic
communities, myriad radical groups and religious movements flourished.

It was around the turn of the century that advancing uniformity
transformed the terms of American identity.  As the historian John
Higham has written about the 1890s: "Under the inroads of industrial
bureaucracy and specialized knowledge, the self-sufficiency of the
'island communities' was irretrievably passing.  As national
organizations crisscrossed an increasingly crowded terrain, more and
more of the American people became integrated into economic networks and
status hierarchies that drastically reduced the significance of the
local arena." There is no need to dwell here on the relative
significance of the various interwoven factors at work--industrial
growth, labor shortages, mass production, war, technical improvements in
transportation and communication, the rise of bureaucracy, the growth of
national associations.  The result can be summarized: as an economy and
a culture, America was nationalized.  Racial segregation forced on
blacks and Chinese, in particular, no other choice but to live in
distinct subcultures; but white enclaves were dissolving into a
mainstream.  An awareness of differences fueled an intense desire to
police deviants.  America's cultural authorities grew harsher, more
puritanical. Thus the heightened attacks on immigrants and the vigorous
purification crusades directed against prostitution, alcohol, drugs, the
movies, and other sinful pursuits.  The crusades were not automatically
successful--New York City harbored a thriving gay world overlapping with
a larger Bohemia from the 1890s through the 1920s---but the pressure for
a conformity of manners and mores was generally fierce.  This cultural
pressure was intensified by new patriotic rituals of "Americanization":
it was in 1892, for example, to celebrate the Columbus quadricentennial
that President Benjamin Harrison declared October 12 a national holiday
and instituted the Pledge of Allegiance.

But the American catechism was to be imparted through more than schools
and political rituals.  To become an American was coming to mean to
embrace the promise of better living through the acquisition of consumer
goods.  The consolidation of corporations, the rise of both "scientific
management" and the marketing apparatus, abetted by national
communications--movies, radio, news wires, magazines---offered a vast,

efficient market to meet the growing desire for an improved way of life.
Genuflections were made to the virtues of free speech and tolerance, but
to a great degree, freedom came to be understood as access to consumer
choice: the right to acquire purchasing power and to dispose of it as
one liked.  In the course of the twentieth century, a new formula for
becoming a real American came to prevail: work hard, consume well, marry
properly, and stay out of trouble.  Once freedom, that most explosive
element in American identity, had been safely redefined as the ability
to acquire things, a uniform American identity could be baptized in a
sanctioned history of heroes: the Puritan pilgrims, the Founding
Fathers, Lincoln, and selected gunslingers of the Old West.  The new
identity was not force-fed to unwilling victims; it was, by and large,
welcomed--if not with enthusiasm, at least with a sense of
inevitability.

Add to these standardizing pressures the fact that differences actually
were diminishing.  The Civil War eradicated one significant regional
distinction, though the defeat of Reconstruction and its replacement by
white rule throughout the South preserved an essential difference from
the North.  The Indian wars and the white (and, let it not be forgotten,
black) settlement of the West, along with the mystique of the West
enshrined in the popular culture of the latter decades of the nineteenth
century, bulked up the sense of what was distinctive about America,
Frederick Jackson Turner famously declaring in 1893 that "in the
crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated
and fused into a mixed race." From now on, differences would be seen as
dangerous, especially when they resulted from the infiltrations of
foreign enemies.  The subversive became an American--that is,
"unAmerican"--type, that which no law-abiding, self-respecting American
should permit him- or herself to be.

War is the health of uniformity.  It was the coming of World War I that
moved the United States to a crest of fierce nationalism
indistinguishable from xenophobia.  Now we were at risk from aliens.  It
was during the war that "The Star-Spangled Banner" was adopted by the
U.S.  Army as a national anthem, although the words had been written to
declare America "the land of the free and the home of the brave" a
century earlier.  Soon the meanings of both freedom and bravery were to
be brutally clarified, as was the price of failing to be an
authentically color-coded--true-blue,

red-blooded--American.  Spasms of anti-German patriotism alerted
Americans that the test of Americanness was opposition to the Hun.  In
the interest of self-defense and the extension of democracy, Americans
were now to be molded into liberators, Kaiser-haters, English-speakers.
In 1916, Wilson had made a point of repudiating the "hyphenate vote." In
the spirit of uncomplicated loyalty, Theodore Roosevelt frequently
denounced "hyphenated Americans," demanding in 1917 that his
countrymen-even recent "British-American" immigrants--acknowledge that
"we Americans are the children of the crucible."

Not surprisingly, it was an opponent of the war, Randolph Bourne, who
made one of the early arguments for what today would be called
multiculturalism, maintaining that the true American destiny was to be
"trans-national." His principle was impeccable but his timing
inauspicious. Free speech and antiwar advocates were brutalized, tarred
and feathered, lynched, driven out of towns, arrested, jailed,
prosecuted, deported, their periodicals banned from the mails and shut
down, their elected representatives expelled from legislatures.  From
the wartime repression of pacifists, socialists, and anarchists, it was
only a short step to a postwar red scare, race riots against the growing
numbers of northern urban blacks, and still tighter limits on
immigration.  The spirit of the antiradical crackdowns enshrined
paranoia as a feature of Americanization-to be a proper American now
required that one be vigilant against Communists, immigrants from the
wrong countries, the unassimilated, and other "foreign" influences.

With World War I, then, all the elements were in place for an American
identity combining affirmation and negation, plenitude and panic, built
on an American way of electricity and mobility, promising the
opportunity for personal success, and dignified with words like freedom,
equality, and opportunity--and not only the words, but also a
substantial, if scarcely universal, experience of these words in action.
Whites were invited to sit at the grand table and partake of the
luscious fruits, and at the same time stand ready lest they, out there,
take them away.  The good life among good things was the American ideal
that would fill the movies, the magazines, and the other symbolic
treasuries of culture during most of this century.

This image of a singular "American way of life" came into circulation

coupled with the image of Americans "re-formed" in the melting pot-"born
again," to borrow a later usage.  Total immersion, consecration,
baptism, alchemy--the melting down of inferior coinages "to begin the
world over again" (Thomas Paine)--this was the American promise, and it
was usable for manifold purposes.  As president, Theodore Roosevelt had
wholeheartedly embraced this symbol of bully nationalism, crying out
from his box at the 1908 American premiere of Zangwill's play, "That's a
great play, Mr. Zangwill, that's a great play." (Roosevelt promptly
agreed to let Zangwill dedicate the published version to him, writing
him: "I do not know when I have seen a play that stirred me as much."
Roosevelt did not seem to mind that this exponent of the American ideal
was an English Jew.)  In 1916, the same year Wilson was rejecting the
hyphenate vote, the virulently antiSemitic Henry Ford was running his
immigrant employees through "Ford English School Melting Pot" rites in
Detroit, symbolic baptisms in which, under a sign reading E PLURIBUS
UNUM, the newcomers relinquished their Old World belongings, stepped
into a designated "melting pot" and emerged dressed in American clothes
and waving American flags.  (What the proto-Nazi Ford made of the fact
that the phrase was popularized by a universalist-feminist Jew who
believed passionately in miscegenation is unfortunately not revealed by
the records.)

But boiling as it was, the pot was not thought to be capable of melting
just anyone.  The descendants of African slaves were a caste to be kept
out.  State laws forbade race mixing.  Moreover, the crude nationalism
of World War I, larded with the rigmarole of "scientific" race theory,
fueled a racist version of the antiforeigner panic.  In 1921 and 1924,
Congress imposed national quotas on immigrants.  Asian immigration,
already heavily constrained, was essentially ended altogether, and
northern, paler, Protestant Europeans were privileged over the Catholic
and Jewish, the Mediterranean and eastern.  The national origin
principle for preserving the ethnic dimensions of the American
population would last almost forty years.

The pot melted its ore selectively, and for that reason alone served as
a useful metaphor for national identity.  It promoted amnesia and saved
embarrassment.  This kept the color-caste system compatible with hymns
to American liberty.

Yet, in the same year that Henry Ford was melting the ethnics down,

John Dewey, America's principal philosopher of democracy, was opposing
narrow racist and nativist varieties of nationalism, defending instead a
democratic version of Americanism.  In this popular view, the war was
admirable because it was designed to "make the world safe for
democracy." Dewey's wager was that, in the wake of the war, a newly
powerful national government would be vulnerable to appeals for the
extension of political rights; that one result of the wartime
mobilization would be an invigorated ideal of Americanism.  Old World
customs would be discarded, not simply for the customs of
Americanization, but for more expansive political values.

Enter that influential offshoot, democratic Americanism, which required
the extension of political rights to all citizens.  Women's suffrage
followed, although during the Republican years that ensued, the dominant
idea was that no further rights were necessary.  It took the Depression
to shatter the belief that the free flow of capital was itself the
guarantor of economic well-being.  When Franklin D.  Roosevelt came into
office in 1933, democratic Americanism flowered into the New Deal, whose
premise was that government initiative was needed to benefit the common
man (and woman).  The welfare state, inaugurated first for soldiers and
mothers, was generalized.

The cultural side of democratic Americanism was an amalgam of populism,
Progressivism, militant industrial unionism, and sentimental leftism
that united the New Deal and the Communist Party into the Popular Front.
The photography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, among others,
celebrated the unfamous.  Song and story celebrated the virtues of
little guys who found themselves up against hardhearted bankers and
corrupt politicians.  Frank Capra honored John Doe and Mr.  Smith; Carl
Sandburg sang the praises of The People, Yes; Communist Party leader
Earl Browder smoothly retailed the slogan, "Communism is twentieth
century Americanism"; Frank Sinatra and Paul Robeson inhabited a "House
I Live In" devised by two Communists, celebrating "the little bridge at
Concord where freedom's fight began." On this view, true patriotism was
a love of equality.  The Working Class melted into The People. "If you
like America .  .  .  if you like its Rocky Mountains, its Storm King
highway, its low-priced automobiles, the hot and cold running water

in your well-tiled bathroom," declared an ad in the Communist New
Masses, then American Communism was for you.

Here was a nationalism that invited entry into an open Americanness on
the ground that, as Woody Guthrie put it, "this land is your land, this
land is my land .  .  .  this land was made for you and me." In the
left-wing version of Americanism, being Polish, Finnish, Jewish, or
German was a route into the democratic political amalgam.  How to be
black and American was the most tortuous problem, of course, since the
boundary was racial and not simply ethnic, and there was a most virulent
racism to combat.  No more than anyone else did the Left know just how
to square the circle, allowing space for autonomous black life while
encouraging a shared culture.  The key, in any event, was tolerance in
the interest of composing a popular commons--a "people's America"
against "the interests." One of the most original of American Marxists,
Leon Samson, went so far as to argue, in 1933, that Americanism was a
sort of moral equivalent of socialism, "a substitute for socialism .  .
.  and that is why the socialist argument falls so fruitlessly on the
American ear."

Democratic Americanism, a sort of ethnocentrism from below, was an
ideology splendidly tailored for the Great Depression.  This period of
desolation made visible the cliche so resonant it seems always to have
been with us: the American dream.  In print, at any rate, this indelible
phrase appears the product of the scion of an impeccably white,
Anglo-Saxon, Protestant family, one of whose forebears was an indentured
servant in Virginia who rose to landowning status.  James Truslow Adams
had no ties to the Left--he was far and away too much the aristocrat for
that -but he was close to the Progressive tradition and was as deeply
suspicious of business as he was enamored of immigrants.  In his
best-selling popular history The Epic of America, published in 1931,
Adams rhapsodized about "that American dream of a better, richer, and
happier life for all our citizens of every rank which is the greatest
contribution we have as yet made to the thought and welfare of the
world.  That dream or hope has been present from the start.  Ever since
we became an independent nation, each generation has seen an uprising of
the ordinary Americans to save that dream from the forces which appeared
to be overwhelming and dispelling it." This embattled dream, Adams
wrote, was of "a land in

which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with
opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement." He meant
not only opportunity but also social equality, for he followed this line
with an anecdote about a French visitor who, on being asked what struck
him most about America, answered: "The way that everyone of every sort
looks you right in the eye, without a thought of inequality." Still,
Adams was no fool.  He knew the dream had been disfigured by "ugly
scars," by "three centuries of exploitation and conquest." The dream
that had drawn tens of millions of immigrants, a dream of being
"unrepressed by social orders which had developed [elsewhere] for the
benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and
every class .  .  .  has been realized more fully in actual life here
than anywhere else, though very imperfectly even among ourselves." He
denounced the greed of big businessmen and proposed a more equitable
distribution of wealth.  Such reforms were necessary to bring the dream
to fruition.

Adams concluded his book with a long quotation from Mary Antin, the
immigrant Russian Jew who published a best-selling book called The
Promised Land in 1912, animated by fulsome images of the future: "The
endless ages have indeed throbbed through my blood, but a new rhythm
dances in my veins ....  The past was only my cradle, and now it cannot
hold me, because I am grown too big ....  America is the youngest of the
nations, and inherits all that went before in history ....  Mine is the
whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future." Placed below Mary
Antin's rapturous words, on Adams's last page, was a woodcut.  A godlike
muscular malel an Adamic figure, waded through the ocean, lifting an
airplane on its flight.  Mary Antin, meet Charles Lindbergh.  The Jewish
author of The Promised Land shared the page with Charles Lindbergh, the
lone master of the machine (and future isolationist and proNazi): two
versions of Americanism, each embodying "the dream."

Adams's version prefigured many another variation on the theme of the
Popular Front.  The mission of America was to serve as a refuge for
minorities, who may have looked or sounded different but were all the
same under the skin, willing and even eager to assimilate, to make
themselves at home in an America that would earn their assimilation and
not humiliate them.  America would honor outsiders by absorbing them
into the mainstream.  As Mary Antin wrote in her next book, subtitled A
Complete Gospel of Immigration (1914), in this way Americans could play
out their world mission of "hastening] the climax of the drama of
unification" in which all peoples "merge] their interests, their
cultures, their bloods."

But, of course, not all Americans were the descendants of voluntary
immigrants.  The awkward truth about the celebrants of this American
merging was that it was premised, almost exclusively, on the whiteness
of all the merging parties.  Rhapsodic invocations of de-hyphenated
Americans usually left the descendants of Africans out of consideration.
African Americans did not have the luxury of merger fantasies.  Rather,
their fate was twohess, that famous compound identity named by W.  E. B.
Du Bois: "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of
others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in
amused contempt and pity," the knowledge that one is "an American, a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring
ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being
torn asunder." The despised outsiders had to make homes in the margins
of the world from which they were excluded.  One of the classic themes
of their literature has been the ordeal of outsiders who try to honor
the whole of their multiplicity: to cling to their origins even as they
find themselves churning around and alongside and against the so-called
mainstream.  Outsiders produced yet another American tradition: the
tales of the unmelted, the torn, the compound identity.

2.  Red Blood, Green Lawns, and the Grand Creed

War revived unifying Americanism just when it might have slackened.
Sometimes World War II invoked xenophobia and uniformity, sometimes the
democratic values of the Popular Front.  For the most part, government
propaganda discouraged the expression of difference.  The voices of
uniformity said: Whatever your separateness, transcend your tribe; or
rather, fold it into the whole.  In the commanding words of one
government

poster, "DON'T SPEAK THE ENEMY'S LANGUAGE!  SPEAK AMERICAN!"

Popular culture enlisted in the war effort.  in books and pamphlets,
movies and radio, popular artists and social scientists produced an
image

of a unified, finally fused America.  America embraced an identity that
gained coherence from the fact that it was under assault.  A good many
of the propagandists were liberals and leftists.  This was, after all, a
war against fascism and racial subjugation (even if the Japanese were
racially demonized in the process).  Ethnicity was inducted into the
team.  Popular Front consciousness became virtually obligatory in the
multiethnic platoons of World War II movies ("O'Hara!  Antonelli!
Goldberg!  Martinez! Washington!"), where mutual reliance is the bond
that distinguishes the good guys from the Nazis.  As film historian
Jeanine Basinger writes, the clear moral of this kind of movie was: "We
are a mongrel nation--ragtail, unprepared, disorganized, quarrelsome
among ourselves, and with separate special interests, raised, as we are,
to believe in the individual, not the group.  At the same time, we bring
different skills and abilities together for the common good, and from
these separate needs and backgrounds we bring a feisty determination."
The formula African American was integrated into Hollywood's army years
before he was admitted into the real one--a case of Hollywood's dream
factory functioning as a social avantgarde.  The dark-skinned members of
the platoon frequently had the good grace to make the ultimate sacrifice
for the good of the whole unit, expressing supreme loyalty in the
process of expressing their nearly mandatory expendability.  Similarly,
the presence of the Pima Indian Ira Hayes among the flag-planting
Marines of Iwo Jima certified the democratic significance of the war.
The war against fascism became a war of liberation in behalf of what was
distinctly American: the diversity of the demos fused into a single,
solid phalanx.

Not that xenophobia vanished.  Anti-Semitic attitudes and practices
(restrictive covenants, university quotas, and job discrimination)
thrived through the 1940s.  Of all discriminations, phobic reactions to
skin color proved the least meltable, and fierce racism not only
remained but, in one respect, intensified during the national
mobilization as Japanese Americans were interned and their property
expropriated.  In anti-Japanese propaganda, the buck-toothed, dementedly
grinning "Japs" signified subhumanity.  Restrictions on Chinese and
Filipinos, our allies, persisted through the war and beyond.  Still, the
Japanese Americans--and, for a time, the rare Italian and German
Americans suspected of fascist sympathies-were the exceptions to an
assimilationist impulse.  America under stood itself mainly as a nation
that gathered peoples and fused them into a singular people.

But victories lead to dissension.  Once the pressure for unity subsides,
quarrels of interpretation break out.  Hence the triumph of 1945 might
have spurred a round of centrifugal cultural motion--an upsurge of
class, race, and political tensions--but for the coupling of an
extraordinary economic boom and the onset of the Cold War, two potent
forces that between them offered quick and emotionally compelling
answers to the perennial predicament of American culture, or at least
ways of suppressing lingering doubts and staving off crisis.  First, the
Cold War: Who were we?  We were what they were not, what they were
trying to crush.  They were slavery; we were freedom.  They were
faceless hordes ruled by secret police; we were middle-class
individualists ruled, in principle, by ourselves.  The time-honored
riddle of American identity evidently had a solution: we Americans were
all of us who lined up against them.  We were, in fact, the very proof
of the commonality of mankind, an omniurn gatherurn of immigrants who
had the great gift of absorbing differences into a common crusade--a
veritable popular front against Communism.  Defined most firmly by what
we were not, declaring ourselves to be in our deepest spirit the
negation of what we rose so vigorously to fight, Americans could sustain
an appearance, even a conviction, of unity.  If any more proof were
needed, former Vice President Henry Wallace's disastrous presidential
campaign against the Cold War in 1948 proved that the new consensus
reached far beyond elites; it was a popular cause, the popular cause, a
rock-bottom conviction that marked the boundary of all legitimate
political discourse.

To a considerable degree, the principle of unity through antagonism
continued the fused Americanism of World War II.  The sociologist Nathan
Glazer has written that even at the end of the Fifties, the intellectual
mood was still "shaped by the aftermath of the war against Hitler, and
part of our propaganda effort in that war--one in which social
scientists as well as publicists and politicians were engaged--was to
argue that there were no meaningful differences among groups." Ideology
crowded out difference.  The ideological bedrock of unity was
anti-Communism.  Liberals and conservatives disagreed on whether the
enemy was principally without or within, but all could agree on the
evils of Communism.  So

flagrantly brutal was its Stalinist incarnation that Communism in the
Soviet Union and its satellites mobilized a countertotalist reaction
that was almost as bracing and embracing for its partisans as Communism
had been for its own adherents.  Still, the many crimes of Communism
could not explain the paranoid energy of anti-Communism.  Communism was
a gift to Americans who, without it, would have lacked a sustaining
cause.

With Communism in foul odor, the Popular Front Americanism of the 1930s
quickly crumbled.  The common man had a new cause: stop the Red Army.
During the Depression, such popular figures as Will Rogers, John
Steinbeck, and, for that matter, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had
crystallized sentiment about the virtue of the common man into a
rhetoric aimed against economic royalists and Republican skinflints. Now
these were no longer the favored enemies.  When President Harry Truman
proposed a crusade against the commercial control of medicine, he was
beaten back by the medical profession's counterattack against
"socialized medicine." McCarthyism, a populism of fools, arose out of
the Midwest to transform class and regional resentments into a single
iron conviction.  The common man was now encouraged to express his
hostility to striped-pants Eastern Establishment types by sniffing out
Communists in the State Department.

Still, for the purpose of shaping popular identity, McCarthyism was of
limited value.  For several years a successful political crusade, it was
still not a source of social location and ultimate meaning for most
Americans. Hence the importance of the second adhesive force working
against centrifugal cultural motion: the rising standard of living.  The
prospect of an unceasing improvement in private life became a decisive
foundation of American political identity during the quarter century
after the end of World War II.  For if the common man was, in fact,
making a good deal of progress, as measured by the sole criterion for
progress that was alive in the culture--namely, economic
advancement--then Americanism worked.  Government policies were
mobilized to deliver a postwar cornucopia. From the Servicemen's
Readjustment Act of 1944, guaranteeing low-interest home loans to the
sixteen million servicemen who would return from the war, and insuring
builders' investments, to the road-building laws culminating in the
Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, government action created the material
base for a culture of affordable

acquisition.  In the suburban home, the family commanded an array of
technical services that not so long before had been available only to
the very rich: central heating, indoor plumbing, telephones, automatic
stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines.  The dream of the common
man materialized in the common home.  Thanks to government subsidies,
private utopia was readily affordable: in 1948, Levittown's tract houses
could be bought so cheaply that mortgage, interest, principle, and taxes
combined amounted to less than sixty dollars a month.  The sense of
having arrived (in the suburbs, in a car) was extraordinary.  The
majority felt comfortable.  Who needed a Popular Front?  The demobilized
troops could disperse to the suburbs, to be middle class with the rest
of the lonely crowd.

The salient identity, the one that mattered, was: middle class.  The
term "middle class" has a long lineage in America, and a different one
than in Europe, where in the Marxist tradition it signified bourgeois
prosperity.  As early as the 1820s, the term was used in the United
States to mark out a distinct social group with something of its own
self-awareness. In 1858, none other than Wait Whitman, the poet of the
brawny lumberjack and the wind-burned sailor, editorialized: "The most
valuable class in any community is the middle class, the man of moderate
means." By 1900, American cities were already surrounded by rather
homogeneous "middle-class" suburbs, joined to the city by streetcars.
The boom in clerical and sales whitecollar jobs made the term "middle
class," even "the great middle class," steadily more common.
Increasingly, an American was someone who wished to join that middle
class--this was the meaning of the "Dream," the "Way of Life." By the
mid-twentieth century, "middle class" had become a catch-all label of
choice beloved by pollsters and politicians and editorial writers, and a
brilliantly flexible one it was, enabling office and technical workers
to share status with doctors and corporate managers.  To identify
oneself as part of that great blur was an affirmation of normality--the
averageness that Americans cultivate as an ideal while loudly
proclaiming their individualism.  To say you were middle class was to
say that you were a regular person, an ordinary Joe or Jane--and
eventually, that you belonged to the majority.  For by the 1980s, more
Americans identified themselves (to pollsters, at least) as middle class
(43.3 percent) than as working-class (36.6 percent),

and the self-professed middle, supplemented by the self-professed
uppermiddle (8.2 percent), added up to a majority.  Among voters, the
middle-class majority would be still greater.

The middle-class ideal took on a special allure in the suburbs.  The
freestanding home was now integral to American identity.  It was the
present-day extension of the homestead, the marker of yeoman liberty.
Men readily described themselves as homeowners; the majority of women
were housewives.

You were where you lived.  To say home was to say family, and to say
either was to say goodness--moral goodness as well as a good way of
life.  The family home was a place to make babies and rear children, to
display the luster and powers of income, to make the grass grow and the
car glow and the television set radiate images of carefree people mowing
their grass and burnishing their cars to a fine gloss.

The small screen was far more than a machine for perpetual
entertainment. Television was an amusement bank, a national bulletin
board, a repertory of images, an engine for ideas, a classification
index, a faithful pet, and a tranquilizer.  Perhaps most of all, the
television networks were crucial dispensers of America's master idea of
itself.  The dream of normality was incarnate in The Adventures of Ozzie
& Harriet, Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, and comparable
rituals of cheerfully intact white families living the good life within
their white picket fences and solving their silly problems.  The
boundaries of morality were marked by the likes of Dragnet and The
F.B.I.  policing transgressions.  The Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke gave the
moral law roots in a mythological history.  For exotica, Americans could
turn to Disneyland, hosted by folksy Wait Disney of Kansas City,
certifying that we were a fun-loving, innocent people who deserved to be
on top of the world.

All in all, television flattered Americans that they had never had it so
good--and that they had a common destiny.  According to programs and
commercials alike, they had no regions, no accents, no divergent
histories. Television was a school for manners, mores, and styles; for
repertories of speech and feeling; even for personality.  Television
helped teach Americans how to talk, look, and behave--which meant, in
some measure, teaching them how they should think, how they should feel,
and how, perchance, they should dream.  And so, while certifying the
highconsumption way of life, network television also served as an
instrument

for the nationalization of culture--and in the end, therefore, helped
further a certain bland tolerance while eroding ethnocentrism and other
forms of parochialism.  It was no small blow against white supremacy, in
the 1950s and 1960s, to bring into American living rooms images of the
brutality meted out by Southern segregationists against noble civil
rights campaigners demanding their rights.

During the first two postwar decades, then, television helped
crystallize a sense of the privileges to which a majority of Americans
were to feel entitled.  The privilege included upward mobility--not only
for one's children, but for oneself.  If one's own house, one's home,
looked meager, there was a solution to that, too: work harder, earn
more, and trade up.  If the ladder upward was real, then opportunity
could compensate for envy, which Tocqueville rightly considered the
democratic sentiment par excellence. What did the inequality of income
and the far greater inequality of wealth matter?  The majority of
Americans were willing to overlook inequality as long as opportunities
for improvement abounded.  Through the 1960s, enough upward mobility
took place among a middle-class person's middle-class acquaintances and
relations that those who failed to ascend apparently had only themselves
or their spouses to blame for not being up to snuff.

Whatever the failures and false promises of the past, America would be,
was coming to be, was on its way.  So the combination of postwar boom
and Cold War made palpable a new basis for national unity.  Together
they formed a Grand Creed.  For the majority, any class resentment
yielded to gratitude for a system that delivered the goods, or enough of
the goods to warrant the gratitude.  The common man had a double cause:
to achieve home and family and to defend the community of homes and
families against the Communists.  You did not have to be a McCarthyite
to share this sentiment of the Fifties.  In fact, it was in the name of
the common condition of Americanhess that McCarthyism was eventually
brought low, tarnished as divisive, anti-individualist, and therefore,
in a certain respect, unAmerican.  Thus, the significance of two
symbolic confrontations of the 1950s.  The first came during the
televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, when McCarthy not only had the
gall to attack the military but also cast aspersions on the left-wing
past of a junior lawyer on Joseph Welch's team.  Welch brilliantly
counterthrust, casting McCarthy as the

bully who would deny a man the opportunity to remake himself into a
respectable middle-class American.  Five years later, during an American
exposition in Moscow, Vice President Nixon asserted that most American
families could afford the panoply of kitchen goods on display.
Khrushchev, waving a finger in Nixoh's face, denied it.  Nixon, however,
was on the mark, and his audience back home knew it. Anti-Communism and
suburban pride converged.  Freedom worked.

For four decades, anti-Communism remained a binder in the American
cement.  Amalgamated with economic expansion, it could accommodate
several versions.  In the right-wing version, racial equality,
socialized medicine, and militant unions alike were the immoral
prologues to Communism; they led to disunity and therefore, by
definition, aided the enemy.  In the liberal version,
equality--especially racial equality--was the opposite: a form of
fortification against Communism, necessary to woo postcolonial Africa.
Either way, anti-Communism defined the periphery of the debate.  The
Cold War propped up America, and in any event, what were the
alternatives?

No other popular and compelling idea was available with which to express
the unity of America.  To put it symbolically: During the war against
fascism, Germany was the enemy that helped unite our states.  After the
war, the Iron Curtain that tore Germany asunder helped hold America
together.

Yet even in the frozen 1950s there were certain intimations that the
potent combination of Cold War and prosperity was not an all-purpose
answer to the question.  of what America had in common.  Race was a
centrifugal pressure, especially at the time of the Brown v.  Board of
Education decision, the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, and the Little
Rock school integration crisis.  And there were other signs of
discomfort as well.  At the height of the Cold War, the American
establishment wondered aloud what was the common national purpose.  Such
insecurity led President Eisenhower to appoint, with much hoopla, a
Commission on National Goals--the sort of enterprise one cannot imagine
in Great Britain, or France, or Mexico.  In the final report, released
in 1960, NBC mogul David Sarnoff answered the question of purpose with
official cant: "Our message to humankind must be that America has
decided, irrevocably, to win the cold war." But the editor of the
report, a Life magazine editor, approvingly quoted Walter Lippmann,
America's premier pundit, who had no clarion call to sound:

The critical weakness of our society is that for the time being our
people do not have great purposes which they are united in wanting to
achieve.  The public mood of the country is defensive, to hold on and to
conserve, not to push forward and to create.  We talk about ourselves
these days as if we were a completed society, one which has achieved its
purposes, and has no further great business to transact.

Not that African Americans were speaking of themselves as part of a
completed society.  But outside the South, the rest of the nation could
take pleasure in the fact that it was, after all, not the South, and
that eventually the South would be brought--would be integrated--kicking
and screaming into the whole.

3.  The Vietnam Crackup and the "Anti-American" Left

The Cold War unified only as long as it played well.  If, in America,
nothing succeeds like success, by the same token, nothing fails like
failure; and when the Cold War went hot in Vietnam, the result was a
shattering failure on a scale that the architects of postwar American
identity could not have imagined.  Therefore, Vietnam proved not only a
bad war and a failed war but a wedge in the binding idea of America.

For their part, the elites who embraced the war regarded it--and
promoted it--as more than a policy.  During the decisive years of
escalation, 1960-68, whatever their policy differences, they presented
it as a manifestation of moral excellence, a test of the Grand Creed,
and (they believed) the logical extension of the Cold War.  "Limited
war" anywhere was to be a decisive test of indivisible national will.
One breach in the wall and containment was doomed.  Vietnam was a
Station of the American can Cross, a decisive battle in the endless war
to "defend free peoples," the reincarnation of Tripoli, Fort Defiance,
San Juan Hill, the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima: the testing gound
of the hour, the newest frontier where "freedom" would be defended by
"guardians at the gate." America's war policy was more restrained than
many hawks wished, but the weaponry was sufficiently monstrous and the
rhetoric sufficiently bellicose and sweeping to make of Vietnam not a
war but the war.

At the mythic level, Vietnam was more than a place or a policy.  It was
engraved in the national soul as the exposed salient point in an
unending line of demarcation.  The nation's security and honor were at
stake, declared the partisans of the war.  Since the war is the deed
that stands for America's word, said the party of war, those who oppose
the war are enemies of the nation.  Such beliefs had their logic.  If
America's nature was to be an ideological bastion, then opposition to
policy was tantamount to heresy.

But this identification of the nation with the war held a potential for
backfire, for the Americanness that Cold War and economic boom held
together was more fragile than it appeared.  A critical mass of the
young middle classes slowly followed an emotional logic of their own to
the conclusion that "affluence" was hollow, boring, and stupid, and that
nuclear-tipped anti-Communism was too dangerous to justify patriotic
surrender and meltdown in the caldron of unity.  A critical mass of
blacks had their own reasons for staying out of that caldron.  In
backlash, a movement of whites surged up from the Right, expressing
outrage and dispossession.

The seams of American identity began to give way.  Growing numbers in
the civil rights and antiwar movements began by rejecting American
practices, went on to reject American ideals, and soon, since America
was its ideals, rejected the conventional versions of American identity
altogether.  The early New Left rejected the American political
consensus as hypocritical: the country was in default on its promise to
recognize equal rights.  The later New Left and the black liberation
movement rejected the promise as well: the American political consensus
was cursed by original sin, it was and had ever been racist and
imperial, it had long been making its way to napaim in the defense of
freedom; the very idea of a common America came to feel like a
pernicious defense of unwarranted and injurious privilege.  Revisionist
history arose to support what the New

Left already suspected: that Vietnam was only the latest battlefield in
the Indian wars.  The war gave rebirth to a Left, but the Left it
spawned was moved by a negative passion that matched the warmakers' own
negative passion: their commitment to stamp out Communism in Vietnam by
destroying the country.

As the war burned on, the problem of what to say about it turned into
the problem of how to feel about America as a civilization.  With an
eerie suddenness, virtually before anyone noticed how drastically the
terms had changed, American identity was at stake.  On the Left, the
first impulse of militants in the antiwar movement was to deploy their
own patriotic imagery in an attempt to capture the flag.  In November
1965, for example, Carl Oglesby stole the show at a mild rally against
the Vietnam War (the official signs reading "Negotiate Now") by treating
the war as the product of an imperial history.  Oglesby refused to let
"the bitter ugliness of Czechoslovakia, Poland, those infamous Russian
tanks in the streets of Budapest" justify the war: "My anger only rises
to hear some say that sorrow cancels sorrow, or that this one's shame
deposits in that one's account the right to shamefulness." But Oglesby,
the son of an Akron rubber worker, also self-consciously invoked "our
dead revolutionaries" Jefferson and Paine against the likes of Lyndon
Johnson and McGeorge Bundy.  He romantically summoned up a
once-democratic America against the "colossus of...  our American
corporate system." He wanted to rescue the good name and promise of
"American humanism" from an "anti-Communist corporate liberalism"
responsible for imperial expeditions in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, and
elsewhere during the Cold War.  He chastised chastisers who might say
"that I sound mighty anti-American.  To these, I say: Don't blame me for
that!  Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American
heart."

In the summer of 1966, the Berkeley antiwar leader Jerry Rubin,
subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, was persuaded
by the head of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, R.  G.  Davis, to dress up
in an Uncle Sam Revolutionary War costume--to convey, as Davis told me
later, "the straight image of America." Some elders also promoted the
idea that opposing the war was, in fact, the height of patriotism.  "I
don't like the sight of young people burning the flag of my country, the
country I love," thundered the old-time socialist leader Nor man Thomas
in 1967.  "If they want an appropriate symbol they should be washing the
flag, not burning it." By the fall of 1968, though, Jerry Rubin was
dressing up for the cameras in a pastiche of Indian war paint, hippie
beads, Vietnamese sandals, and a toy machine gun.  With hellfire raining
on the land and people of Vietnam, Norman Thomas's fusion of Protestant
patriotism and cautious politics looked less and less impressive to the
growing ranks of the militant antiwar young.

But if the war incited the New Left to detest patriotic symbols, there
were other causes as well.  To start with, those young radicals moving
leftward were already prone to a deep and passionate alienation from the
whole ensemble of American normality, its racism and suburbs, its sexual
hypocrisy and cultural fatuoushess alike; the patriotic, Victorian,
suit-and-tie attachments of a Norman Thomas were not for them.  Worse,
in the case at hand many a prominent left-of-center patriot, including
Thomas himself, was equivocal about leaving the war.  As late as 1967,
liberals like Victor Renther of the United Automobile Workers, Joseph
Rauh, Jr., of Americans for Democratic Action, John Kenneth Galbraith,
and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., were unwilling to support American
withdrawal.  Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to uphold the constitutional
faith while opposing the war.  But his murder in 1968, followed by that
of Robert F.  Kennedy, refuted the hope that America could make itself
safe for democracy.  The anti-American outrage of Malcolm X and the
Black Panthers became far more appealing.  Increasingly, in the later
Sixties, when the advocates of the war plastered their bumpers with
America, love it or leave it!  antiwar militants responded, So be it!
and to hell with you, we have left it and its napalm.

Good riddance.

In an effort to reclaim a patriotic aura, moderates arose in vast
numbers, waving American flags, dressing respectably, working in
political campaigns "within the system." But militants also reproduced,
fueled by disgust at this apparently endless war, and often by rage
against its supporters as well.  Among the militants was a minority
ready and eager to offend the majority, and able to command the
attention of TV cameras by carrying North Vietnam's banners.  Later,
antiwar Vietnam veterans would try to recapture symbols of American
history, naming their 1972 hearings on war crimes after the "winter
soldiers" celebrated by Thomas Paine--the true (as opposed to
"sunshine") patriots who defend their nation's

honor during its bleakest hours.  But efforts of this sort were too few
and too late.  The symbols of patriotism were firmly in the hands of
Richard Nixon.  Democratic Americanism, an Americanism of constitutional
faith strong enough to override the racism of American history, an
Americanism despite everything, was throttled.

It is important to be clear about what this anti-Americanism of the time
was and was not.  It was a sentiment more than a commitment, a loathing
more than a theory, a yelp of anguish more than an ideology.  It was
built on disappointment--the crashing of a liberal faith in American
goodness, and, as a result, the turning of that faith upside down.  The
result was that as the war ground on, any lingering New Left belief in a
redemptive American dream to be held in common bled away.  The climate
became so inflamed, the disbelief in constructive change so fierce, and
the despair over the course of American policy so pervasive, that even a
critical-minded figure like the journalist Paul Cowan could call his
1970 memoir The Making of an Un-American.  From the early nineteenth
century onward, nativists and immigrants alike had each proclaimed that
they were the real Americans, as opposed to those Others.  Now, for the
first time in American history, there were groupings who had no stomach
to be included, and wanted out.

A sympathetic though critical onlooker, someone possessed of a large and
not punitive vision, might have discerned the rage of the rejected child
pleading to be let in and loved--a plea that America be refashioned, in
fact, so an outsider might find an honorable place.  But the populace
who recoiled were not large of vision.  Their Americanness was too
narrow, too resentful, too negative itself to permit commiseration with
rebels.  Attacks on American symbols they took at face value, and
personally. If they were immigrants (especially from the Communist bloc)
or the children of immigrants, their own need to prove themselves loyal
was too great.  AntiAmericanism seemed indiscriminate, a slap not only
at established elites but at their hard-won privileges and achievements,
at the myths they wished to believe.

The New Left proved, for several reasons, largely uninterested in
celebrating or proposing a common American identity.  With the eclipse
of Martin Luther King, Jr., followed by his murder, the most energetic
and conspicuous African-American leaders could not summon up any romance
in behalf of a concept from which they had been excluded for so long, or
to which they had been appended as an afterthought.  From the start, by
contrast with earlier American Lefts, the New Left had been unimpressed
with the common man.  Many student radicals insisted on being uncommon.
Despite attempts to plant roots in a historical soil of slave revolts,
abolitionism, labor and feminist organizing, the movement found it hard
to summon up faith in American redemption.  A common American identity,
if there had ever been one, was either a hoax or a menace.  There was to
be no revived Popular Front.

True enough, during the 1960s many white activists collected every scrap
of evidence they could scour up that common men and women could be wooed
to a radical movement.  They celebrated salt-of-the-earth commoners who
had been found friendly.  Some tried to organize soldiers and
draft-eligible working-class youth, hoping to cross the class barrier,
and in the case of antiwar soldiers, succeeded to a considerable
extent--though after the student movement had crested, and at a time
when antiwar activists had been discredited in the eyes of many GIs.
Otherwise, the gestures were frequently forced, the projects usually
less than brilliantly successful.  On the whole, the New Left could not
deeply imagine a populism in which it might take part.  Often it defied
popularity altogether.  It was suspicious of majorities.  Majorities
were, after all, suspicious of it.  Majorities could turn genocidal.
White majorities in particular were connoisseurs of the privileges of
skin.  Common men (and women) lined up at draft board demonstrations and
glared at comfortably raised youth chanting "Power to the people!"

It was left to the imagination to conjure a majority three that might be
coaxed into existence.  hnagination responded with fantasy.  Some
activists leapt out of the American frame altogether and conjured images
of a new Popular Front on a global scale: a Third world hypothetically
unified in revolution against the white world (excepting white "mother
country brothers and sisters").  Here was one root of the multicultural
impetus of later decades.  Outside the New Left properly speaking, but
sharing its bravado, was the counterculture's claim to be, in Abbie
Hoffman's memorably wrongheaded phrase, Woodstock Nation.  (A slice of a
generation is never a nation.)  The Third World and woodstock Nation
images looked, in effect, like exits from the expressway of straight
America's common dreams.

Thus did young insurgents imagine themselves storming away from the
overstuffed American way of life.  In the process, the idea of a cotnmon
America, if there was to be one at all, was ceded, by default, to the
Right.

4.  The Reagan Restoration

When prowar demonstrators laid claim to the American flag and with it
the national legacy, they were asserting that there was a single
national identity with a single mission, and that they embodied both.
But during the bitter days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Right
had its own sizable problems formulating the terms of American unity.
The Grand Creed had been profoundly shaken.  Hawkish anti-Communists
were reduced to waving about the symbols of their Americanness at just
the time flesh-and-blood Americans were deserting their cause en masse.
Americans may not have been prepared to admii that they had lost their
war, but they certainly had no doubt that they had failed to win it--and
failed to hold together, to boot.  If Vietnam was what happened when the
Cold War ceased being theoretical, what was to be said about this Cold
War itself as a righteous cause and a source of national identity?  If
war passions were unavailing, then what was the collective mission?

At the very least, not to be--in Richard Nixon's phrase--a "pitiful,
helpless giant." But a pitiful giant the nation did seem.  Certainly,
nobody danced in the streets as the soldiers straggled home from their
impossible mission in Vietnam.  To the contra%T: those streets were soon
to be filled with cars waiting in line for gasoline.  The postwar boom
was fading on terms as humiliating, in their own way, as the Vietnam
War.  In 1971, the United States ran its first trade deficit since
11393.  The inflation kindled by Johnson's refusal to raise taxes to pay
for the war began to eat away at the savings of the elderly
population--precisely those who had until then gained most from the
postwar bargain.  During the gasoline shortage of 1973, Americans even
discovered that the automobile, insolent chariot of American freedom,
was dependent on the goodwill of oil sheiks.  The air

was thick with signs that America was no longer Number One, and the
Germans and Japanese were back, too.  If we were not born to win, who
were we?

The consensus on Cold War and prosperity was rubble.  By the time the
Americans evacuated Saigon, Nixon himself was a pitiful (although thanks
to Gerald Ford's pardon, not exactly helpless) ex-president.  The long,
twilight humiliation of Watergate left the Right with a sense of
betrayal and the nation with a sense of broken authority.  Vietnam,
Watergate, and the unraveling of the economic order virtually all at
once: triumphalism shuddered.

Was a rebirth of aggressive nationalism the inescapable outcome, then?
Blows to national pride are, in principle, excellent fodder for a
nationalist politics of resentment, but there was nothing inevitable
about the Right's subsequent victory.  To restore a sense of national
mission was the political and ideological achievement of Ronald Reagan
and his handlers. They had to find an enemy and cheerfully launch into
battle, but more: they had to forge a political majority.  The
traditional imperial motif of Manifest Destiny came to the fore.  What
more unifying emotion than popular truculence about the decline in
America's fortunes?  In his 1976 campaign against Gerald Ford's status
quo, Reagan denounced an impending Panama Canal treaty as a "giveaway"
and insisted on the need "to halt and reverse the diplomatic and
military decline of the United States." The security of Panamanian
waterways was not a sufficiently urgent concern for Republicans to carry
him to nomination over an incumbent of their party, but on the strength
of his rousing nationalist appeals, Reagan won more than 47 percent of
his party's delegate's votes.

Four years later, Reagan was able to rekindle the nationalist passion
and propel the Right into power.  To do so, he could not blow on the
ideological embers of the Vietnam War.* He needed to confront America
with conspicuous enemies in the present tense.  These readily presented
themselves in the onetwo combination of Ayatollah Khomeini and Leonid

* Indeed, the Vietnam War set a trap for him.  Reagan's dubbing the war
a "noble cause" in a 1980 speech to the ;veterans of Foreign Wars turned
out to be, according to his own pollster, the greatest mistake of his
campaign against President Carter.  To profit from the nationalist
potential in American political culture, Reagan needed.  in fact, to
aroid the subject of Vietnam, for the memory' was living proof of the
perils of indiscriminate nationalism.

Brezhnev.  The Shah of Iran fell, khomeini rose to power, OPEC boosted
the price of gasoline again, and Revolutionary Guards chanting "Death to
the Great Satan" took over the American Embassy in Teheran.  If that
weren't enough, Brezhnev's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 restored the
roar of the Soviet bear and revived the Cold War.  America's rock-bottom
Cold War purpose had been, after all, to contain the military power of
the Soviet Union--and here were Red tanks taking advantage of detente
and rolling across a national border.

What gripped Americans most was the psychological humiliation in Iran,
raised to the nth power by a nonstop media barrage.  The long-running
hostage crisis launched "America Held Hostage," a nightly crisis report
on ABC News, and seemed to demonstrate, in living color, that America
was indeed a pitiful, helpless giant.  For the second time in a decade,
Americans were branded losers.  Conspicuous defeat was getting to be a
habit-even an identity.  All over the globe, revolutions were hollowing
out what was supposed to be the American Century.  From the vantage of
the embattled American, it mattered little whether the revolutions were
Communist or Islamic; all that mattered was that they were fervent and
unremitting.  Nightly, relentlessly, as the weeks turned into months and
the months piled up into a year and more, Walter Cronkite closed his CBS
News broadcast by ticking off "the nth day of the captivity of the
American hostages in lran."

At least as important, Reagan profired from the substantial economic
travail of stagflation, easily pinned on the realadroit Jimmy Carter.
The economic troubles appeared to be largely a consequence of America's
loss of global hegemony.  How could it have turned out that America,
God's country, the Free World giant, proved dependent on foreign
lubrication?  Carter's economic and foreign policy defeats dovetailed in
the gas lines of 1979.  Americans did not suffer a shortage of
affordable gasoline with equanimity.  Such an infringement on the
American way of mobility was a symbolic wound of major proportions.
Double damage was done: to a dream of absolute freedom, and to the most
egalitarian thing about that dream--the fact that the vast majority
could afford to take an engine out on the open road.  It was the hapless
Carter's fate to preside over the shriveling of the cornucopia.

As the prosperity that had bound American identity against its

centrifugal tendencies wore thin, conditions for a nationalist revival
were ripe.  But necessary conditions are not sufficient, and the revival
was not automatic.  One of the ingenuities of the American
constitutional system is that it furnishes an institutional means of
symbolic unification for a nation whose identity is frequently under
pressure: the presidency, in principle standing above the nation's
diversities and transcending them.  As a result, no one should
underestimate the latitude of a popular president to federate a majority
and overcome centrifugal tendencies, assuming only that he begins with
the elements of a promising coalition.  In his person---or his persona,
which in practical terms amounted to the same thing--Reagan was the
nation that its voting majority wished to exist.  Never mind his
lackadaisical, frequently somnolent "management style," the fumbling and
ignorance easily mocked by the likes of the liberal cartoonist Garry
Trudeau ("In Search of Reagan's Brain").  It was neither "management
style" nor incisiveness that spoke to the symbolic expectations of a
majority of the voters.  Reagan's mission was to preside over the
in-gathering of a majority and the invocation of a unity, and this he
did with extraordinary aplomb.

To start, he enfolded conservative differences.  The Right was, like the
populace as a whole, an assemblage.  Social and economic conservatives
had to be brought together.  Indeed, early in the twentieth century,
many of the former, personified by William Jennings Bryan, had been
Democrats, detesting Wall Street as much as the teaching of evolution.
No, the new Republican majority was not born; it had to be made.  "The
time has come," Reagan told a banquet of the American Conservative Union
less than a month into Jimmy Carter's term, "to see if it is possible to
present a program of action based on political principle that can
attract those interested in the so called 'social' issues and those
interested in 'economic' issues." Reagan brought together the old
probusiness, antiregu-latory right of small-town chambers of commerce,
"Reagan Democrats," principally white workers, weary of feeling that it
was they who had been compelled to pay the price for black progress,
Protestant fundamentalists, and antiabortionists alongside mainly
Jewish, ex-leftist and ex-liberal neoconservative intellectuals, and the
palcoconservatives personified by William F.  Buckley, Jr., and his
National Review.  There were enough whites in this mixed bag to compose
a majority impressed by common

identity as well as common enough interests.  There were, in particular,
enough white men--Reagan received 59 percent of their votes.  Academic
leftists like to talk about "Gramscian intellectuals" who fuse diverse
interests, or "class fractions," into functioning "historic blocs" by
enunciating their common cause.  In this light, no American in the
latter half of the twentieth century has been half so Gramscian an
intellectual as Ronald Reagan.  He invoked a most historic bloc indeed.

But Reagan spoke for more than concerted conservatism.  His images
brought him front and center as the stand-in for the common man: the man
of football and movies, of small-town Illinois and Iowa, of Hollywood
and the Sacramento statehouse and the Santa Barbara ranch; the loyal son
of an alcoholic father; the good husband and (on camera) good father and
grandfather all at once.  He was the reigning master of the ensemble of
American myths: the man who could kick off his campaign in Philadelphia,
Mississippi, without mentioning the civil rights workers buried there by
their murderers in 1964, and still chop wood like the rail-splitter Abe
Lincoln himself; the ex-Democrat who could invoke John Wayne and
Franklin Delano Roosevelt without fear of self-contradiction.  With his
solid and twinkly face, his broad shoulders and manly frame, his
perfectly delivered colloquial lines, his husky whispers of reassurance,
his plainspoken anecdotes and hometown rhetoric, he embodied some
imperishable idea of the common America, the America of the common
people--an America that was, at once, his audience, parish, and
platform.  He was the folk incarnate, presiding over the Puritans' city
upon a hill.

Can there be any doubt that Reagan, Central Casting's idea of the common
man, owed his achievement in good measure to his personal aura?  In the
wake of the 444-day hostage drama in Teheran, his buoyant and
grandfatherly persona lifted spirits.  After Carter's hard-luck term in
office, Reagan seemed the very incarnation of victory.  As long as the
top one-fifth of the population experienced some measure of economic
improvement, and a majority could bask in the return of the hostages and
then in the military boom that Reagan delivered, his personal triumph
played as a national triumph.  He punctuated his policies with
ceremonies meant to evoke triumphs over adversity, surrounding himself
with heroes, teachers, and rescuers, hitherto unsung savers of lives,
ordinary people who rose to the occasion, like Ronald Reagan himself.
"Morning in America" was a reincarnation of "The People, Yes." With this
vision of an America perennially reborn innocent, its tensions and
hungers dissolved into a modest and cheerful Main Street, Reagan
rekindled the most utopian American rhetoric.  Accepting his nomination
in 1980, he declared that Americans are "the kind of men and women Tom
Paine had in mind when he wrote, during the darkest days of the American
Revolution, 'We have it within our power to begin the world over
again.""

In the eyes of followers and pundits alike, Reagan promised to be the
oneman antidote to identity crises.  In his spectacular public relations
effort, he started out as a premium product, benefited from skilled
handlers, and played to a popular will to believe.  It was the press,
bedazzled by his aura, that sprayed that famous Teflon on him--because,
disproportionately Democrats themselves, they were bending over backward
to seem fair; because they were charmed and flattered by him; because
they had loathed Carter, whom they saw as a bumpkin who had the ill
grace to come on moralistic; because they were patriots who couldn't
help thinking that Reagan was toughening up the "pitiful, helpless
giant"; because they thought he did genuinely represent an America
poorer and more provincial and less articulate than themselves, and they
were eager to circumvent the charge of undermining national self-esteem.
It was the press that attributed to Reagan an aura of invincibility,
claiming that he was far more popular than their own polls testified.
Whatever their on-camera insouciance, they were pleased to see, and say,
that "America is back."

In Reagan's iconography, America was back in considerable part because
the common man was confronted yet again by an uncommon foe. Social
disputes, especially over abortion, could be postponed, internal
disputes on the right muted by the more urgent task of confronting the
Soviet bear.  Reagan's grandiloquent and yet festive views of America's
mission harked back to John F.  Kennedy's inaugural speech.  Reagan
varied his Cold War tones at times, but always deplored the Soviet Union
as the principal obstacle to the realization of America's mission:
freedom.  The imposition of martial law in Poland on December 13, 1981,
lent at least superficial credence to the all-or-nothing rhetoric of a
revived Cold War.

Speaking to British Members of Parliament at the Palace of Westminster
on June 8, 1982, in what he later called "probably one of the most
important speeches I gave as president," Reagan barked to the memory of
Winston Churchill in calling for "a crusade for freedom," and decried
"the shyness of some of us in the West about standing for these ideals
that have done so much to ease the plight of man and the hardships of
our imperfect world." Speaking to the National Association of
Evangelicals in Orlando on March 8, 1983, he famously denounced the
Soviet Union as "an evil empire," called it "the focus of evil in the
modern world," and proclaimed the Cold War a "struggle between right and
wrong and good and evil." The way Reagan wanted to "begin the world over
again" was to erase a good deal of the past--but in this, too, he was
the quintessentially American common man.

By contrast to the revitalization Reagan seemed to offer, the Democrats
offered no commonality, no alternative crucible, no compelling rhetoric,
no political culture----only a heap of demands piled on demands. Reagan
told Americans, especially whites, who they were, and equally important,
who they were against; Democrats told Americans, especially women and
minorities, about their interests.  The lackluster Walter Mon-dale
advanced no unifying symbol to overcome race and class tensions within
the Democratic base, and not surprisingly, two out of three white men
voted for Reagan in 1984.  Michael Dukakis offered himself as a
son-ofimmigrants American success story, but his fatuously ill-fitting
tank helmet symbolized the apparent mismatch that resulted when a
Democrat now tried to convince the country that he had the right stuff
to tough it out as commander in chief.  Not surprisingly, now that
Vietnam had discredited Democratic muscularity abroad, it was the Right
that did best with jaunty toughness, the Ramboesque and
Schwarzeneggerian masculinity that had become the measure of national
guardianship, while the Democrats offered no other image of national
unity, no ringing answer to the question, "Who Are We?"

5.  Nothing Fails Like Success

With the collapse of the evil empire, the triumphalist note trumpeted
forth: we were winners again.  But when Germans demolished the Berlin
Wall in November 1989, the rubble fell on our side of the Atlantic, too.

What would a nation that required a raison d'etre do without one?  If
the old saga culminated in victory, what was the new saga?  For all the
selfcongratulation, the collapse of Communism rattled America--not just
the consciously held ideas of what America had won and why we had won
it, but also deeper, barely articulated ideas of what America was and
how Americans were attached to each other.  It was as if for half a
century the nation had been a tug-of-war team, held together largely by
the force of the adversary pulling against us.  When the other team
dropped their end of the rope and fled the field, what was there to hold
us up?

Initially, pundits and politicians, especially on the Right, flattered
us that, having prevailed in a titanic contest, we were entitled to
coast to glory.  The nation was unmatched in its power; the free
market--such was the misleading slogan with which the corporate economy
was advertised-ruled unopposed.  Who or what could stand in our way? But
such self-congratulation ran tinny.  There was an unsatisfying sense of
anticlimax. The peace, it turned out, was even more abstract than the
war had been.  As there had been no great, final battles, so there were
no rites of victory--no ceremonial surrenders, no victory parades, no
tearful reunions. Indeed, the collapse of Communism left America with an
enemy crisis.* The 1991 Gulf War did, it is true, produce a righteous
mobilization, but the yellow-beribboned uproar in behalf of the Desert
Storm troops, intense as it was, came and went within months.  Once the
troops were out of harm's way, national political culture returned to
its fragmented status quo ante, and the media spotlight moved on.
America the centrifugal was left to itself (or its selves).  We fell,
and what we fell into were culture wars.

It was, moreover, evident that as America's Cold War cement cracked, the
economic side of the postwar bargain was also falling apart.  The
world's largest creditor nation in rapid order became the world's
largest debtor nation.  Hell-bent on profit, companies "downsized" and
capital

* The final phase of the Cold War had already proved emotionally too
fiat to capture the collective imagination long enough to dampen
domestic strife and restore a political sense of national union. Neither
Colonel Gaddaft nor General Noriega could produce long-lasting thrills.
Nor could the Sandinistas, nor the obscure Grenadans.  All were too
local, too puny, too unthreatening to the homeland, just as in the years
to come neither Saddam Hussein nor Kim II Sung, neither Colombian drug
lords nor Japanese investors nor Mexican immigrants quite fit the bill.

fled.  Inequality mounted, and the public sector crumbled.  The jolt was
felt most acutely by the Americans who had least expected to lose
momentum and were least equipped to manage a jolt to their expectations:
precisely the middle-or would-be middle--classes who had drawn the most
advantage from the truncated American century of 1945-73.  Undoubtedly,
nobody is comfortable with a decline in living standards, but Americans
may have been uniquely vulnerable because such things were not supposed
to be possible here.  If America is the dream, then in a certain sense,
the end of the dream portended the end of the nation.

'Twas a famous victory, then, the end of the Cold War, but with
victories like this, who could abide defeats?  Without the enemy, what
united the states?  The formula for American commonality would have to
be worked up and fought over anew.  Absent the Cold War, both Right and
Left were in need, first, of cement for their own coalitions, and
second, of compelling ideas to take to the rest of the country about
what Americans had in common.  What would pick us up, restore our
morale, hold us together?  Ideologues of the Right, now in short supply
of external barbarians to help federate their economic and social
conservatives, began to search for domestic ones obstructing the
people's will: Dan Quayle's "cultural elite," the "liberal media," the
universities, the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts,
public television and radio, and later, Newt Gingrich's "counterculture
McGoverniks." These defenders of civilization were at times fully aware
that they longed for the moral equivalent of the Cold War.  The
influential neoconservative Irving Kristol wrote in 1993: "There is no
'after the Cold War' for me.  So far from having ended, my cold war has
increased in intensity, as sector after sector has been ruthlessly
corrupted by the liberal ethos ....  Now that the other 'Cold War' is
over, the real cold war has begun.  We are far hess prepared for this
cold war, far more vulnerable to our enemy, than was the case with our
victorious war against a global Communist threat." Authentic American
identity would draw a line in the sand against "the liberal ethos." In
this spirit, Patrick Buchanan's declaration of "war for the soul of
America" in 1992 was succeeded by Gingrich's denunciation of Bill
Clinton as "the enemy of normal Americans" during the run-up to the
midterm elections of 1994.

The problem of finding a basis for commonality was still more grave

for Democrats, and for the Left at their flank.  The Democrats were a
loose, baggy party, the Left an aggregation of movements, grouplets, and
ideological tendencies, both suffering from a disproportion of margins
to center.  Both now amounted to collections of interest groups and
little more, and lacked a vocabulary for the common good.  Both had shed
the custom of affirming the whole people.  Not only were they ethnically
and racially diverse, and so especially vulnerable to centrifugal
tendencies, but, in the New Deal tradition, they had believed in
government spending as a social binder, an instrument of justice, a
means to reduce inequality and a defense of the middle class all at
once.  Without the Cold War, growing numbers of Americans now asked,
what was the positive point of the government?  It was seen as an
instrument of division, a plaything of "special interests," a broken
machinery---or an ogre.

The Democrats, though frequently distancing themselves from the Left,
had also borrowed its energies and, in return, often reluctantly,
legitimized and absorbed some of its institutions and projects--its
unions in the 1930s, its civil rights movement in the early 1960s, its
antiwar and feminist concerns in the early 1970s.  One could argue about
whether, in the process, the Left was depleted or nourished, but in any
event, the Left and the Democrats had risen and fallen together.  Since
the McGovern convention of 1972, raggedly and selectively, the Democrats
had taken much of their poetry from a Left that had no conviction that
commonality was possible.  As prosperity seeped away, so did the unions
and the Democrats' white working-class base, while the party's very
successes during the postwar boom reduced the numbers of white poor and
of Democrats, especially in the suburbs.  The civil rights movement and
its white backlash cost them the South, and then some.  The Democrats
lost the ability and the will to mobilize the government without
antagonizing the Thirties side of their coalition to benefit the Sixties
side.  Facing their most intractable issue, race, they trapped
themselves in zero-sum programs-busing, affirmative action--that split
their base.

The travail of the Democrats was more serious than a shortage of
policies; it was symbolic.  In the metaphor wars of the post-Reagan
period, the Democrats could not agree on a common story.  They did not
march onward together toward an extension of rights or a rally of the
whole people; they did not march onward together, period.  While the
Republicans upheld "freedom,"

"the nation," or "the family," the Democrats had no America to affirm
against "the interests." As much as George Bush, they lacked "the vision
thing." Instead of a melting pot, they intermittently offered a
"gorgeous mosaic" (without cement), or a "salad bowl" (with cracks), or
a disorderly "rainbow" (whose distinct bands were constantly pulling
apart).  The images themselves were fragile, makeshift, evanescent.  The
Democrats stared uncomprehending into America's post-Cold War identity
crisis, barely aware that they lacked even the terms of unification.  In
1992, Bill Clintoh's "forgotten middle class" was quite a comedown from
"the people."

As for the outriders on the Democrats' left, rarely did they amount to
more than loose collections, nor did they seem to care.  Like the
opponents of the Houghton Mifflin history textbooks--and even like the
books' defenders, with their broken narratives and MTV juxtapositions of
separate group chronicles-they didn't add up.  They were, in theory and
practice, less than the sum of their parts.  Rarely did the segments
recognize that, even to win what each of them wanted, they needed a
whole that was more than a heap.  But their incapacity was a chapter in
a longer ordeal: the breakdown of the idea of a common Left.

The Fragmentation of the

Idea of the Left

1.  United Humanity and United States

Between Left and Right there has taken place a curious reversal.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Left believed in
a common human condition, the Right in fundamental differences among
classes, nations, races.  The Left wanted collective acts of renewal,
the Right endorsed primordial ties of tradition and community against
all disruptions.  The main line of the Left stood for the equality of
all persons; the main line of the Right for distinctions and privileges
of birth, position, nationality.  Thus, the royalist Joseph de Maistre
in 1797: "In the course of my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians,
Russians; I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be a Persian;
but man I have never met." Today it is the Right that speaks a language
of commonalities.  Its rhetoric of global markets and global freedoms
has something of the old universalist ring.  To be on the Left,
meanwhile, is to doubt that one can speak of humanity at all.  So
Oakland's dubious textbook battle is more than a sign

84

of the loosening of consensus about American identity.  It is a sign of
the thinning out of the Left as a live political and intellectual force.

Our secular twentieth century has known two great universalizing
passions: universalizing in the sense of maintaining that humanity has a
common nature and a common destiny; passions in the sense of worldviews
affirmed with a depth of conviction that led millions of people to
sacrifice their lives in their names.  On the one side, liberal
democratic Americanism; on the other, socialism.  Both agreed that
anyone from anywhere could affiliate.  Both fused the modern Western
faith in the active molding of history with a conviction that progress
was already unfolding. Born in rebellion, both were captured by
establishments.  Today, both are damaged---one fatally, the other
perhaps not.  The visions of humanity that once stressed a common
condition, that understood difference against a backdrop of what was not
different, are feeble.  The problem much of the world wrestles with is
how to imagine a common world without their vigor.

For two centuries in the West, if there was no conviction that
deliverance for all was at hand, there was at least a conviction that
the commonality of mankind was a noble and imaginable project.  Whether
the common bond was inalienable rights, reason, man's creative nature,
or membership in the working class, the premise was that human
capacities were the foundation of an improvable society.  Today, we
witness an exhaustion of that core belief shared by Americanism and by
the historic ideals of the Left: a belief in progress through the
unfolding of a humanity present--at least potentially--in every human
being.  What proliferates in the West is the "post" mood.  We belong to
a time of aftermaths: we are after Auschwitz, after Hiroshima, after the
Gulag.  And if this much was already clear in 1945 to anyone who wished
to see, today one must add: after Vietnam, after Cambodia, after
Sarajevo, after Rwanda.  After such knowledge, what faith?  Universalism
has a bad name.  Reason seems frail-or worse, its claim to progress
through understanding is billed as the instrument of white, Western,
male domination, and hence of the pollution and destruction of the
earth.

The "post" mood may appear as exhilaration or weariness, but both
celebrants and disputants of the new disorder are partly right: a sense
of

ending is irresistible.  Certainly, there remain vigorous ideas and
sentiments of a universal humanity, perhaps best expressed in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in organizations like Amnesty
International and Medicins sans Frontieres, in campaigns for the defense
of Salman Rushdie and against genital mutilation.  There remain
cosmopolitan spirits who live in urban zones where identities mix and
multiplicities thrive, where the pleasures of coexistence and the
adhesive forces of solidarity outweigh the arrogance of elites, the
impositions of millennial religion or imperial power, and the tensions
and distentions of difference. There remain, not least, universal
predicaments--we live under one ozone layer, in one single greenhouse,
though certainly the view from the penthouse is not the view from the
basement.

In much of the world, however, the universalist initiative has passed
back to religious faith, with its longing for transcendence and
otherworldliness. In Islam and Christianity, under the scrutiny of the
All-Knowing, the faithful aim to unify the world into the order of the
Prophet or Savior. They imagine that they are already unifying the
world---or would be doing so, were it not for the infidel, the
secularist, the modernist blasphemer. Meanwhile, in recent decades, all
kinds of secular commonality ideas have lost much of their cogency and
power.  The Enlightenment belief in progress rooted in the onward march
of reason seems reserved for scientists, or students of society who
fancy themselves scientists; it is not a popular faith.  The liberalism
of individual rights is under fire for cultivating systematic
irresponsibility and failing to offer a sense of community.  The
secularist, cosmopolitan young who wish to feel part of a global
community turn to the disposable imagery of popular culture--the
Madonnas, Michael Jacksons, Arnold Schwarzeneggers, and Disney creatures
who seem to inhabit a world without locality and to speak some primitive
language without depth.  The weightless, spurious universalism of
commercial culture, the thrill of new technologies for wiring together
the world, the all-consuming blankness of Generation X--such attachments
and detachments are alluring substitutes for deep belief in the whole
human project.  The consumerist utopia of the Mall Without Borders
offers endless enticements, but hopes only to heighten the pleasures of
the ephemeral.  It offers no commonality but the lightest, no vision of
the future but more fun.  There are pleasures and addictions and
evanescent communities galore to be found under the big tent of popular
culture, but what there is not is a sense of common citizenship.
Instead, people seek solidarity among those who resemble themselves.

The loss of the vision of a common future is most striking for the Left,
where the faith in eventual progress was once so strong.  Here lies the
largest meaning of the little frictions, dubious battles, and culture
crusades of our moment.  At the root of the many meanings of what we
call the Enlightenment was a conviction that there is a common human
condition on the basis of which progress, if not perfection, is at least
possi-blc if not imminent.  The Enlightenment was a secular version of
Christian ideas about human destiny.  How fusty these hopes sound today!
Marxism, the principal theology of the Left, has barely any supporters
anywhere, even in Central Europe or Central Asia, where voters return
former Communist bureaucrats to office.  The collapse of Communism and
the Cold War balance of terror did not clear the slate for a renewed
commitment to egalitarian values, but revealed European social democracy
to be in a crisis of its own, unable to rally popular enthusiasm against
the pressures of the global economic convulsion and a declining belief
in the efficacy of the public realm.  Defenders of some Platonic ideal
of a Left have only a tattered flag to wave, and are today, like their
counterparts on the Right, more adept at vituperation against their
enemies than at reflecting upon, let alone practicing, human
arrangements that would make life more supportable and dignified for
humanity at large.

But it will not do to raise the trumpet for a restoration of the grand
old unities.  An abiding faith in the human future is not summoned up by
an act of will.

For two centuries after 1776 and 1789 believers in a common humanity
everywhere clustered around two great progressive ideals: a liberal one
enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S.  Constitution,
and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; and a
radical or socialist one that crystallized as Marxism.  Here was
launched the very language of contemporary politics.  Even the political
metaphor of Left and Right, however much knocked around, has survived on
the strength of an assumption that history is a single story proceeding
along a single time line.  The idea of a Left derives, strictly
speaking, from the seating arrangements of the French National Assembly,
but two-sided

political symmetry has another intuitive appeal.  Like the Christian
division of history into before and after, the language of Left and
Right stems from the idea of a universal history.  Revolution, like the
story of Christ, splits history down the middle.  Past and future are
the essential categories. Old regimes want to conserve, new regimes want
to change.  This is the melodrama the Left has always been partial
to---casting itself as action thrusting into the Future while the Right
represents reaction, the dead hand of the past.

Such legitimacy as the Left enjoyed in the West rested on its claim to a
place in the grand story of universal human emancipation.  The Left
addressed itself not to particular men and women but to all, in the name
of their common standing.  If the population at large was incapable, by
itself, of seeing the world whole and acting in the general interest,
then some enlightened group would take it upon itself to be the
collective conscience, the Founding Fathers, the vanguard party.  Even
Marx, lyricist of the proletariat, ingeniously claimed that his favored
class was destined to stand in for, or become, all humanity.  Whether
reformers or revolutionaries, the men and women of the Left invited
their listeners to see their common interest amply, as citizens of the
largest world imaginable. All men were supposed to have been created
equal, workingmen of all countries were supposed to unite.  The
respective founding fathers left at least half the species out of
account, yet the logic of their language implied the eventual defeat of
their prejudices.

Even the nationalist revolutions that were the nineteenth century's
principal passion understood themselves as tributaries joining a common
torrent, a grand surge of self-determination justified, in the end, by a
general need for peoplehood and the equivalent worth of all national
expressions.  Difference was universal; only autocrats could deny it.
The resulting "politics of recognition," building on the writings of
Rousseau and Herder, was predicated on a general human need for the
dignity of persons, a dignity inseparable from their right to distinct
attachments. When universalist ideals lined up behind national flags--as
they did during most of the nineteenth century--what they paraded was
this interesting paradox: nationalism with a universalist rationale.
Even Mazzini, the guiding spirit of Italian nationalism, told his
followers: "You are men before you are citizens."

2.  From a Theory to End All Classes to

a Theology Without God

Not even its fiercest critics can underestimate the ingenuity of the
Marxist intellectual system, which linked the is and the ought, the
material and the philosophical, the empirical and the theological so
compellingly as to make history for more than a century.  Leave aside
the abundance of colorations under the Marxist flag, many famously
renounced by Marx with the cry: "I am not a Marxist!" Big intellectual
movements are bound to elude the grasp of their founders.  Still,
Marxism's martyrs, hypocrites, and antagonists alike shared a core idea
of what this Marxism was that deserved their sacrifice, lies, and
passions.  Marxism--nothing if not audacious-became the their of all the
other socialisms and solidarities.

Marx's pride and joy was to have "brought philosophy down to earth." In
the nineteenth century, his thinking gained plausibility and urgency
from the convulsive growth of industrial capitalism in Europe.  Had
Marxism been nothing, however, but an economic theory of how capitalism
works, Marx would have accomplished little more than to give capitalists
a name and a notion of what they were up to.  He would have belonged to
the history of economics as a proponent of an oversimplified labor
theory of value, a questionable "law" of the falling rate of profit, a
prediction of sharpening class polarization and immiseration.  As a
founder of sociology, he would have been seen as a pioneer theorist of
the dynamics of productive systems and social classes.  As a socialist,
he would have been one among many.  But Marxism has been an enormous
force in the world not for its economic claims, its sociological
insights, or its values.  Marx mattered because he stood for an
overarching worldview and a vision.  Central to the appeal of his
intellectual system was its prophetic ambition: to frame the meaning of
history and announce the universal destiny of humankind.

Like the idea of Christ's coming, and the idea of America, the whole
intellectual and emotional system of Marxism was predicated on a
messianic faith--a good faith to unmask bad faiths.  In many a tract and
letter, Marx dripped scorn for his contemporaries' ideas about the
common good.  These he saw as nothing more than masks for particular
interests- ideologies, not truths.  In the Communist Manifesto, he
sneered at such naYfs as Germany's "True" Socialists for claiming to
represent "not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of
Human Nature, of Man in general."

Generations of Marxists would go on to consider tenderminded-ness about
universal humanity premature, obscurantist, and (curse of curses!)
"idealist." But Marx objected only to shallow universalisms.  He was
offering the real thing, unftinchingly acknowledging the most
antagonistic social differences, boldly recognizing the ferocious
struggles between classes, asserting, indeed, that they were the engine
of history, but proclaiming that, in the end, the war to come was only
the prologue to ultimate peace in the commons.

In the face of social upheaval, what a trump this was!  Marx's
brilliance was to argue that the imagined future was already in process,
that all humanity was already represented by a class destined to
overcome all differences by ending all classes.  The Left was to be the
marriage of body and soul, muscularity and brains--proletariat and
party--prefiguring a world in which the limits imposed by the division
of labor would break down entirely.  There exists, Marx asserted in his
early writings, a universal identity: the human being as maker,
realizing his "species being" in the course of transforming nature. With
the audacity of a German idealist primed to think in first principles,
Marx adopted from Hegel the idea that there was a "universal class" that
would give meaning to history.  Beginning with people uprooted from the
land, his universal class was bouna for classlessness.  As capitalism
inexorably simplified the class structure, the proletariat would swell
into the majority.  As the world market spread, "entire sections of the
ruling classes [were], by the advance of industry, precipitated into the
proletariat," many an astute bourgeois changed sides, and "the other
classes decayled] and finally disappeared]," only a shrinking minority
of exploiters would remain to be expropriated.  The proletariat was not
only the embodiment of right but the embodiment of might.  No utopian
wish, no moralist sermon, it was a dynamo.  It was already the future in
embryo.

An elegant intellectual system!  The universal class destined to redeem
history would follow in the footsteps of the universal class that had
already appropriated and transformed history: the "constantly
revolutionizing" bourgeoisie, whose "need of a constantly expanding
market for its

products chase[d] [it] over the whole surface of the globe .  .  .
nestling] everywhere, settling] everywhere, establishling] connections
everywhere ....  giving] a cosmopolitan character to production and
consumption in every country," destroying "all old-established national
industries," generating "universal interdependence of nations," making
"national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness .  .  · more and more
impossible," in sum, "creating] a world after its own image." The
universality of capital was the crucible for the universality of labor.

But not without assistance.  To accomplish its transcendent mission, the
class to end all classes required a universal midwife: the revolutionary
Communist.  No matter where he originated, this agent of history
overcame his particular class and nation.  Taking a cue from the
international bourgeoisie, the revolutionary Communist prefigured the
working men of the future, who "have no country." To every particular
circumstance and cause, the universal priesthood of Communists was
charged with bringing the glad tidings that History was the unfolding of
Reason.  The Communist party, like God, had its center everywhere and
nowhere.  Like the church of Jesus, it was charged with inserting
ultimate meaning into everyday life.  The proletariat was the
Communist's nation.  Like the emigre Marx, he was a denationalized world
citizen, prefigured by Lafayette and Thomas Paine, liberated to teach
people of all nations that their destinies were intertwined; for all the
world was becoming one, "national differences and antagonisms between
peoples [were] daily more and more vanishing."

Marx's emissary possessed the key to the future: the overwhelming
majority of human beings were united by their participation in labor.
That was their "identity." But unlike the race, gender, sexual, and
other birthright identities of today, this membership was ecumenical,
open to anyone who migrated, or fell, into the proletariat.  So the task
of Communists was, in the midst of national and particular struggles, to
"point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire
proletariat, independently of all nationality." However thwarted by
local interests, the Communist universalist belonged to the Left, the
one true international church, where the Englishman and the German, the
Indian and the Chinese, met to prefigure the borderless world to come.

With this lyric, Marxism hoped to rescue the universalist passion from

the liberationist cause that absorbed most of the energies of idealists
during the first half of the nineteenth century--nationalism.  Marx's
rhetoric, not the particulars of his theoretical framework, imparted to
revolutionaries a sense of common cause for a century after the death of
the

founding father.  Social democratic, syndicalist, and other variants,
all claiming to be the true heirs, were crushed when they failed to
prevent World War I.  Leninism won the contest of the heirs--in no small
measure because one nation, the German, found Lenin a useful instrument
to wield against another nation, the Russian, and transported him across
the country in 1917.

Lenin ushered into the twentieth century a fusion of thought and action
that brilliantly, and dangerously, updated Marx.  Under Lenin, the Party
and the International purported to see all, know all, and act in the
general interest.  They claimed to embody the Enlightenment's faith in
the knowability of the human situation.  The Bolsheviks would rescue the
working class from its parochial identities and superficial attachments.
Without the Party's high-minded theorizing and planning, Lenin argued,
the working class was doomed to bog down in "trade-union
consciousness"--the defense of its own particularist interests.  Lenin
made intellectuals universalists with a secret police.

What Lenin developed in theory the October Revolution of 1917
accomplished in action.  The Party proved an instrument infinitely
adaptable to circumstance as long as one condition was met--absolute
power.  When the Russian detonator failed to set off the larger European
bomb, Lenin devised a theory for leaping from a to the Revolution.  Just
as imperialism was "the highest stage of capitalism," so
anti-imperialism would be the highest form of anti-capitalism, the
passion that united the world proletariat.  On a world scale, Lenin
argued, it was imperialism that now constituted "radical chains"--the
form of oppression so fundamental that when the oppressed united against
their appointed place in the global system they would bring down the
whole structure.  The road to Paris, Lenin said, led through Beijing.

Marxism retained the grandeur of a universalist dynamic, and neither
Leninism nor Stalinism did much if anything to weaken it.  In Europe,
Marxism took strength from the abundant miseries produced by capitalism,
and Leninism acquired the prestige of an achievement.  Nothing

secures the longevity of a faith better than institutionalization, even
a cynical one.  As a faith, Marxism held onto its universalizing spirit
partly because of its moral authority as a critique of capitalism, but
at least as much because of the peculiar prestige that accrues to
existence.  Whatever one knew of or made of Soviet crimes, the Soviet
Union--and, from 1949 on, Mao's China--was an enormous fact.  However
pointed the criticisms of Trotskyists and anarchists, whatever the
utopian alternatives advanced by anti-Soviet socialists, the Soviet
Union existed.  Existence, the real "propaganda of the deed," apparently
clinched the argument.  Wasn't Marxism supposed to be practical?  Under
the stress of circumstance, it was not difficult for reasonable men and
women to persuade themselves that Moscow was the closest approximation
to the Jerusalem of the Church Militant--the prerequisite for an
eventual triumph of justice and reason.

In the hearts and minds of Communists and their fellow travelers, the
prestige of existence was yoked to the will to believe.  Once one
accepted the either/or logic that decreed that capitalism and socialism
were the only two choices, and concluded that the command economy of the
Soviet Union was as close to socialism as it was possible to get in a
harsh world, then Marxism could easily be blamed for Stalin's inferno.
Democratic socialists were superb moral critics of the Stalinists, but
the command economy was the only economy socialists offered.  While a
few "market socialists" did try to imagine combining free pricing with
the order and justice that could be organized by limiting the freedoms
of capital, they commanded no divisions.

Above all, the command economy gained plausibility because the
capitalist economy was devastated.  It was the combination of global
economic catastrophe in the 1930s and the rise of fascism over much of
Europe that prolonged the life of the Marxist framework and its Leninist
machinery in the West.  Was it not manifest that capitalism manufactured
suffering, and that ruling groups in the democracies had no compunctions
about coming to terms with grotesque police states?  In this setting,
many an egalitarian was willing to overlook the worst of what he knew,
or might have learned, about the Soviet Union in the interest of holding
open the door to a decent universal future.  From 1935 to 1939 and again
after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, the Popular Front could even
conjure a new

commonality--a cobbled-together anti-Fascist alliance.  In the end,
Marxists asked rhetorically, what was the alternative that promised a
universal transformation, universal justice, a single humanity?  Partly,
then, by default, partly by blindness, partly by despair, from one
revision to the next, Marxism haunted all left-wing thought.

Ideologies end with whimpers, not bangs.  In the history of latter-day
Marxism, one disillusion followed another, and yet each time an
intellectual generation emerged to reinvent the promise.  Each
generation wrestled with the system's failings, picked up some pieces,
and launched into a not-sofresh beginning.  But it is clear fifty years
later that once the anti-Fascist alliance of World War II was broken, so
were the prestige and the universalist promise of Marxism, and
correspondingly its appeal--at least outside university circles--in the
United States.  It wasn't simply the Cold War and McCarthyism that
wrecked the Marxist prospect in America.  It was the unignorable
evidence that "actually existing ....  state socialism" was, to put it
mildly, hostile to universalist prospects--except perhaps to the
prospect of a Gulag stretching across borders.  The Prague putsch of
1948, the Berlin guns of 1953, and, most of all, the Soviet tanks
rolling through Budapest in 1956 made obvious even to unreconstructed
sentimentalists that Soviet Marxism amounted mainly to raison d'dtat.
Each reinvention rallied a smaller number of adepts, only to be set
reeling again--by Solzhenitsyn on the Gulag, by news of the Khmer Rouge
atrocities, by the bitter truth about Chinese and Cuban tyranny.  It
required ever more blindness to miss the pattern.  In the face of such
crimes, reason wept.

The Marxist cycle of eschatology and disillusion is finished now.  The
collapse of European Communism wiped out the dtat, leaving Marxist (and
indeed non-Marxist) socialists in thin air, whatever their
protestations.  They point out, accurately, that the breakdown of a
theology does not erase the conditions God was supposed to address; that
unbridled markets may generate economic growth, but also exacerbate
grotesque inequalities; that capitalism's "creative destruction," in the
economist Joseph Schumpeter's words, fuels fundamentalist retrenchments.
Nevertheless, Marxism after Communism lies in ruins, and the
disturbances of capitalism are unlikely to resurrect it.

Socialism is reduced to a sketch of an ethical ideal, or a goad to
social democracy, or what lmile Durkheim once called "a cry of grief,
sometimes of anger, uttered by men who feel most keenly our collective
malaise." Some of the salvage efforts have been ingenious, to be sure.
Academics have tried to stretch the definition of "the working class" in
such a way as to obscure its evident fissures.  Gramsci's vocabulary has
been deployed to sanctify a loose assemblage of fragmentary identity
movements as a "historic bloc." Watching these efforts at
"reconstruction" and "reinvention," one is reminded of Ptolemy's
seventeenth-century followers, whose geocentric view of the universe
rested on the belief that celestial bodies rotated around the earth
along curves they called "epicycles." As more information was gathered
and anomalies piled up, the Ptolemists spun off a profusion of new
epicycles--seventy-nine, eventually--as they strained to hold onto their
antiquated cosmology against the Copernican challenge.  Mirabile dictu,
the model "worked," actually rendering predictions more efficiently than
the Copernican paradigm for decades.  But it "worked" at the cost of an
absurd cumbersomehess, and so was doomed.

In the academy, Marxists can only anxiously clutch at the remnants of
the true faith.  What results is, for example, the broken and desiccated
"Marxism" described in this passage by Michael Berube, a talented and
prominent radical professor of English at the University of Illinois:

The current Marxism of cultural studies, it turns out, is a Marxism that
stopped believing in historical inevitability long before the Wall came
down; it is a Marxism that denies the primacy or unity of "class" (and
emphasizes the relevance of race, gender, sexuality, subjectivity), no
longer believes in an intellectual vanguard, no longer believes in the
centrality of Europe, no longer believes that the base "determines" the
superstructure, that the ruling class owns the ruling ideas, that class
struggle is inevitable, or that ideology is just "false consciousness."

The shapeless malange that results remains Marxist only sentimentally.
Instead of a brief for unification, it descends to a list of
subcultures.

In short, Marxism without a revolutionary proletariat has all the pathos

of a theology without God.  Failing to take its poetry from the future,
as Marx recommended, this gestural Marxism dresses up in a wardrobe from
the past.  From a history that is either failed or catastrophic, it
salvages icons.  The good father is to be protected from the
depredations of bad brothers and sons--the "authentic" (or "early") Marx
unblemished by Engels; or the one read by Luxemburg, not Lenin; or by
Lenin and Trotsky, not Stalin.  Perhaps there is, after all, a global
working class in embryo, but it has been unfortunately misled, or its
hour has not yet come round--give it time!  Even at its best, this
shapeless "Marxism," lacking a labor theory of value, lacking the
transcendent homogenization of a universal class, lacking a
universalizing agency, shrinks into a set of analytic tools with which
to grasp the globalization of capital and offer a moral critique of
exploitation--a valuable angle from which to criticize some social
arrangements, but hardly a mission or a politics, let alone the
invocation of a universal spirit.

3.  The New Left and the Search for

Surrogate Universals

The gross defects of Marxism did not go unnoticed by the early New Left.
Most of the leadership dismissed Marxism for what C.  Wright Mills
called its "labor metaphysic." While prone to a romance with Cuba and
opposed to the American obsession with the Cold War, the movement still
felt no attachment to the promise of the "socialist" camp.  The energy
for radical social change and a new universalist creed came from other
sources, particularly the redemptive spirit of the civil rights
movement.  On the surface, the civil rights movement sought an extension
of traditional civil and political rights in accordance with the
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
To oppose racial oppression was to affirm that everyone had the right to
sit at the same lunch counter, to vote at the same voting booth, to sit
in the same seats on the bus, and swim in the same pool.  But civil
rights actions embodied another objective as well: the experience of
community and solidarity.  Ostensibly a means to secure equal rights,
solidarity also turned out to be an end in

itself.  In the experience of the mass meeting, the organization of the
boycott of buses and stores, fraternitd manifested itself alongside
libert4. Civil rights activists spoke unabashedly of the "beloved
community," as did their student radical allies in the largely white New
Left.

Much of the intellectual work in the New Left, especially the 1962 Port
Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), aimed to
present more than reform proposals: it wanted to find a theoretical
underpinning for such movement experiences.  What was in fact
distinctive about the Port Huron Statement, what excited student
activists around the country, was neither the document's proposals nor
the adversaries it named.  Rather, it was its rhetoric of total
transfiguration.  In a revival of the Enlightenment language of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, SDS spoke selfconsciously, with no sense of
immodesty, about the entire human condition: "Human brotherhood," it
said, "must be willed .  .  .  as the most appropriate form of social
relations." The universal solvent for difference would be the principle
that "decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by
public groupings."

"People Should Make the Decisions that Affect Their Lives"--reduced to a
slogan on a button, this was "participatory democracy," an idea about
the power inherent in all human beings.  Participatory democracy was a
single standard against which to judge all existing social arrangements.
To the limited engagements of representative democracy, it opposed the
unlimited commitments of direct democracy--enshrined, half-satirically,
in the slogan, "Freedom is an endless meeting." In practice, the
principle was tailored to students (students who didn't have jobs, at
that) collected in "knowledge factories" as the industrial proletariat
had once been collected in mills and mines; young people who had grown
up in relatively democratic families or, if not, had been uprooted from
their communities of origin and were now being encouraged to think of
themselves as practitioners of reason.  They were skilled talkers and
writers and had plenty of time on their hands.  They knew how to write
and mimeograph leaflets and how to organize meetings.  It seemed to them
that they didn't need authorities, or even their own leaders, to get
things done.

In effect, the students of the New Left were syndicalists who knew they
were not sufficient unto themselves.  So these radical democrats set

out to level themselves, arguing against the very qualifications that
were theirs by virtue of middle-class birth and education.  When the
early New Left set out to find common ground with a like-minded
constituency, they reached out to the impoverished--the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to sharecroppers and SDS to the
urban poor, all of whom seemed to have little to lose, were free of the
compromises of middle-class life and therefore, in theory, might commit
themselves to democratic participation.

On campuses, student radicals extrapolated from the civil rights
insurgency. The decisive innovation was Berkeley's Free Speech Movement,
heavily influenced by students who had tasted the spirit and danger of
the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 and gone back to school wishing
for a deeper politics of their own.  The movement began with a demand
for elementary political rights--mainly, the right to recruit and rally
for offcampus civil rights demonstrations.  Fearful of recriminations
from influential Republicans like former Senator William Knowland, whose
reactionary paper, the Oakland Tribune, had been picketed by student
activists, University of California administrators cracked down.  When
they sent campus police to arrest a political recruiter, they shocked
the campus and exposed the bureaucratic heavy-handedness and
impersonality of the university as a whole.  These themes were manifest
in radical individualist slogans like: "I am a human being.  Do not
fold, spindle, or mutilate." The ensuing experience of free-form mass
rallies and endless meetings gave participatory democracy a footing in
experience.

But for most of the New Left, most of the time, the ideal of
participatory democracy proved only a secondary force.  In the early
1960s, the passion that drove most activists was civil rights for black
Americans, not the transformation of everyday life or even of political
institutions. The New Left was mainly a movement of solidarity with the
oppressed, though at times it searched for an ideology to transform
itself into a movement for self-liberation.  Demands for student power
swelled into ideological absurdities like a widely distributed pamphlet
called "The Student as Nigger." In any case, the principle of
participatory democracy was too demanding for even a relatively small
movement, no less a whole campus, let alone an entire society.  After a
while, freedom as an endless meeting proved alluring only to those with
the time and taste to go to

meetings endlessly--less and less even to devotees.  Eventually,
participatory democracy would be weakened into a more modest though
still forceful tendency, a movement for citizen involvement.  Citizens
would succeed in prying open faculty councils and government bodies.
Outraged stockholders and consumers would mobilize against corporate
policies.  But the strong form of the idea would crash into the
objection attributed to Oscar Wilde: that socialism would take too many
evenings.

Where, then, were students and ex-students to turn for a useful theory
of general social transformation?  Reenter Marxism.  In the latter half
of the 1960s, New Left intellectuals worked up a host of Marxist
variants, imports, and revivals, each promoting a different surrogate
proletariat.  There was French theory, according to which students
themselves prefigured a "new working class." There were Leninist
retreads, in which students would go to the factories, or working-class
neighborhoods, and lead young workers into revolt.  But most influential
were notions of a Third World Revolution.

Latter-day ex-student radicals, first inspired by the Cuban revolution,
now found further inspiration in the writings of Frantz Fanon, a
Caribbean native who had become a psychiatrist in Paris, worked with
insurgent Algerians, and theorized, often brilliantly, about
anticolonial wars.  Other New Leftists turned eagerly to the Chinese
Cultural Revolution, which they saw as a congenial exercise in radical
democracy, and to the Maoist notion that the Third World, the global
"countryside," would someday overpower the First World, the rich
"cities." The most urgent and compelling invitation to a new
internationalism came from Vietnamese exemplars of revolutionary
redemption.  The more atrocious the American assault on their country,
the more moral force was attributed to the enemy.  The most accessible
single hero was the ascetic yet romantic, indeed sexy, finally martyred
Argentine-turned-Cuban, doc-for-turnedprofessional-revolutionary Che
Guevara, at home (yet homeless) everywhere, calling for "two, three,
many Vietnams," rekindling Marx's ideal of the revolutionary who is no
respecter of borders.

For all the photogenic qualities that boosted their visibility, the
revolutionists were always outnumbered by proponents of more concrete
reforms--equality of condition between blacks and whites, an end to the
Vietnam War, and more democratic institutions.  But however
straightforward and this-worldly these goals may have seemed,
expectations were

rising fast--much faster than conditions were changing.  There was a sea
change in political culture.  If society as a whole seemed unbudgeable,
perhaps it was time for specialized subsocieties to rise and flourish.
For this reason if no other, the universalist impulse fractured again
and again. In the late 1960s, the principle of separate organization on
behalf of distinct interests raged through "the movement" with amazing
speed.  On the model of black demands came those of feminists, Chicduos,
American Indians, gays, lesbians.  One grouping after another insisted
on the recognition of difference and the protection of their separate
and distinct spheres.

What was going on?  Was this separatist urge the result of rational
choices made by activists convinced that ecumenical movements were
futile?  Or was it a return of the repressed, of long-deferred dreams
now bursting to the surface?  From the speed with which separatism
multiplied, the furies it tapped, it is reasonable to assume that deep
impulses were stirred up.  What took place was one of those convulsions
in culture that cannot be reduced to the sum of its immediate causes.
Certainly, separatism was more than an idea, because it was more than
strictly intellectual; it was a structure of feeling, a whole way of
experiencing the world.

Difference was now felt--perhaps had long been felt--more acutely than
commonality.  Initiative, energy, intellectual ingenuity went into the
elevation of differences.  The very language of commonality came to be
perceived by the new movements as a colonialist smothering--an ideology
to rationalize white male domination.  The time for reunification would
come later, so it was said--much later, at some unspecified time.

As the political scientist Donald L.  Horowitz has observed: "There
seems to be a kind of 'Parkinson's Law' at work, by which group identity
tends to expand or contract to fill the political space available for
its expression." If, in the early 1960s, the civil rights movement had
breathed life into commonality politics, in the latter part of the
decade the only thing that kept up the appearance of one big movement
was the fact that there was one big war.  In retrospect, it is
blindingly clear that New Left universalism was fragile from the outset,
that the category of citizen, or even human being, had long felt like a
weightless abstraction.  It was as members of a specific category--as a
black person, a woman, or later as a Jew or a lesbian--that people
increasingly insisted on being represented

in "the decisions that affected their lives." People lived, felt,
desired, revolted as members of identity categories--not as citizens,
let alone as human beings.  The student movement and the Third World
revolutions had briefly revivified the Marxist faith, but the infusion
proved evanescent except among university adepts, which, however much
they stressed the category of class, still could not find an actual
proletariat.  For the most part, divisions of race, then gender, then
sexual orientation proved far too deep to be overcome by universalist
rhetoric.

From the 1970s on, left-wing universalism was profoundly demoralized. It
was an airy notion without a program, a longing without a constituency.
It was scorned as nonexistent, hypothetical, nostalgic, or, worse,
deceptive--a mask assumed by straight white males as they tried to
restore their lost dominion.  Feminists would argue that their politics
were rightly understood as commonality politics: that their
preoccupations deserved to be those of all humanity, and that men, too,
would (ultimately!) benefit from a feminist transformation.  At times,
feminists promoted an androgynous ideal.  Thus, too, did many gay
activists speak of liberating the universal bisexual.  But to most men
and many women, these claims seemed rhetorical fillips, pious
afterthoughts.  Feminist and gay communities organized separately, often
enough antagonistically.  The emphasis in the new movements veered
toward a conception that men and women, gays and straights, were
fundamentally, irreducibly different--a tendency so common as to be
outfitted with the academic shorthand, " essentialism."

In fact, only environmentalists, who had taken a different route out of
the 1960s, still thought about a common human condition--endangered,
like the earth.  But elsewhere, separatism was automatic, a politics
built on identity taken for granted.  One belonged to a caucus,
cultivated a separate culture, and dismissed the idea of the human
condition, or the republic, or the common good, or citizenship, as
hopelessly pre-postmodernist.

Look for theory, said the academy.  But theory did not help much.  The
fragility of universals extended far beyond Marxism.  Throughout the
West, social theorists had strained for decades to produce ideas of a
common human condition.  In psychology, there had been Jean Piaget's
universal model of child development.  There had been the posthistorical

structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, declaring that human
cognition was organized into fixed "binary oppositions" wired into the
human mind.  Or, if humans were not essentially labor, perhaps they were
essentially language.  In America, there was Noam Chomsky's rationalist
linguistics, proposing a uniform cross-cultural capacity for grammar.

Annexing Freud to Marx, there was Herbert Marcuse's utopian tribute to
the free-floating refugees from one-dimensional society.  Or, to replace
Freud's universal Oedipus complex, there were new and recycled
psychologies propounding a uniform human nature: Abraham Maslow's
hierarchy of needs and, rediscovered in the late 1960s, Wilhelm Reich's
effort to smash up "character armor" with orgasmic release.  In an
attempt at a synthesis of Marxism and language theory there was Jtirgen
Habermas's objective of undistorted communication.

By the late 1970s, however, universalists were passe, even if, with a
new generation of leftist intellectuals slogging along on the long march
to tenure, the universities were soon churning out vast numbers of
theoretical trainees.  The allure of their theory seeped beyond the
campuses--to periodicals like the Village Voice, to art schools, to
feminist and gay scenes.  Attention turned to the dazzling French
historian-philosopher, Michel Foucault, renowned for his studies of
power and discourse in institutions like mental asylums, clinics, and
prisons.  Foucault, like Marx, presented himself as an "archeologist" of
intellectual systems, but was himself an unintentional universalist, for
his own intellectual system was predicated on the centrality of one
invariant all-consuming human project: the Nietzschean will to power.
The leftish, the avant-garde, and other would-be transgressors in quest
of theoretical comfort and a justification for social marginality were
attracted by Foucault's conviction that all knowledge and all social
reality were reducible to power relations--that all being was local, all
thinking self-interested, all understanding fatally circumscribed by
history.  The only common condition worth thinking about was the
impossibility of commonality.

On many levels, then, the travail of commonality thinking in the 1990s
has been long in the making.  Many traditional claims that a common
condition already existed were in fact lies, or screens for domination.
Interest groups sprang up to defend the excluded, to recover their
dignity, to study their history and arts.  That was the spirit of the
time--to decompose false claims that universality was cut to the measure
of the West, or of men, or of whites or heterosexuals.  But claims about
the diversity of the human condition that made much good sense (and
wreaked much havoc) in their origins have, over time, hardened into an
orthodoxy that, with drearily uniform slogans, elevates diversity--that
is, fragmentation--to religious heights.  The new identity orthodoxy is
more than a cultural tropism encouraged by a passion for community; it
is enforced by laws and administrative regulations.

Still, to deplore fragmentation is one thing; to formulate, feel, act on
a common human project, quite another.  Universalists today look to
ideals of ecology and human rights, but even these appeals to humanity
unravel into their separate strands.  The ensuing debates are bitter. If
toxic dumps are not, generally, to be found in the wealthy suburbs, and
middle-class environmentalists are not, in general, preoccupied with the
pollution that afflicts factory workers, is the ecology movement
disinterested, or is it the latest cover for class privilege?  If
cultures in large parts of the world support genital mutilation, are
Western feminists imperialist?  If the Marines are dispatched with a
human rights rationale, as in Somalia and Haiti, does one support them?
On the Left, there are few automatic positions.

A liberating denouement, perhaps.  But the break-up of ideas of a whole
Left throws the contest to the Right.  On many matters, the Left's
ragtag party of commonality sounds the clarion call and then reluctantly
swivels to see that the troops are not following.  It speaks for no
movement. It fails to generate an emotional tide.  Many of its public
defenders, white males like myself--Robert Hughes in Culture of
Complaint, Russell Jacoby in Dogmatic Wisdom--are accused of nostalgia.
Women and people of color who look askance at identity politics are
commonly dismissed as interested parties themselves, as fronts for the
powerful or as representatives of ethnic groups--Asian Indians and
Afro-Caribbeans, for examplewho are not officially sanctioned
minorities.

As these two chapters should have made clear, there is no golden past to
recover.  Neither the good society nor the good political movement is
out there, intact and timeless.  Neither the old home ideas of the Left
nor those of America are waiting for prodigals to return to their
welcoming portals.

If there is to be any transcendence of our present broken condition, it
is going to have to be a creation, not a recovery.  We know too much to
rest on the premise that once, before we were lost, we were found; that
once, before we were uprooted, we were firmly planted.  In many ways, a
centrifuge has taken the place of the whole because the whole had
already failed, and the news keeps arriving late, like the light from a
dead star.

III.

The Aggrandizement

of Difference

Is it that every man believes every other to be a fatal partialist, &
himself a universalist?

--RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The Coloring of America?

Were it not for unmistakable changes in the color of American life, Time
would not have been asking, "Who Are We?" According to the 1990 census,
non-Hispanic whites number 75.2 percent of the population.  By the early
years of the next century, a majority of the nation's children--for whom
the textbooks are written--may well be blacks, Latinos, and Asians.  At
the same time, 57 percent of American adult women work outside the home,
including some three-quarters of mothers of school-age children, and
while there is evidently, to date, a glass ceiling beyond which female
executives do not rise, the height of that ceiling has risen relatively
rapidly within a single generation.  Gone are the days when the
establishments of politics, journalism, the professions, and the academy
consisted almost entirely of white males whose interest in fretting that
the rest of their establishment consisted of white males was limited.
The most cursory inspection of a university campus reveals tremendous
racial variety.* No wonder the colors of the faces in the textbooks, on
the billboards

* But this is perhaps the place to record my uneasiness about the casual
and routine use of the term "race."

"Race" is not a biological fact but a cultural assumption (and not only
in the West).  Genetic differences between members of different "races"
are far fewer than genetic differences within

107

and TV shows, in Congress and City Hall, have changed significantly in a
generation.  American imagery seems to be catching up with demographic
arithmetic--not fast enough in the eyes of Oakland's textbook critics,
but catching up nevertheless, faster than in any other plural society
anywhere.

Time's question was, in the simplest sense, demographic, and without
doubt, demographic change is central to America's identity travail.  One
answer to "Who are we?" is turning out to be: less white than we
thought.  It would be simplistic to refer in sound-bite fashion to the
coloring, or unwhitening, of America, but the truth is that whiteness is
not the norm it used to be.

Simply put, the white percentage has been declining for decades, and the
rate of decline accelerated after 1970 (though the actual decline was
frequently exaggerated in the press and popular lore).  Between 1950 and
1970, the white percentage (including those Hispanics classified by the
census as "white") declined by 2 percent, from 89.3 percent to 87.6
percent, while the black percentage rose by 12 percent, from 9.9 percent
to 11.1 percent.  Between 1970 and 1990, the white percentage declined
by more than 4 percent, twice the earlier rate, from 87.6 percent to
83.9 percent, while the black percentage rose by a slightly smaller rate
of 11 percent, from 11.1 percent to 12.3 percent.  Still more striking
changes were evident among Americans whose origins were in Latin
America, Asia, or the Pacific Islands.  Between 1970 and 1990, the
Hispanic population almost doubled, from 4.9 percent to 9.0 percent,
while Asians and Pacific Islanders more than doubled, from 1.4 percent
to 3.0 percent.  On campuses, the shift was even more dramatic.  In
1960, 94 percent of college students were white, and 34.5 percent were
women.  In 1990, the white percentage was down to 84.3, and 54.5 percent
were women.

The magnitude of these shifts swells when we take into account the
upsurge in interracial marriage.  For all America's racial antagonisms,
the number of interracial couples rose by 535 percent between 1960 and
1980 to nearly 2 percent of all marfled couples; whereupon, in the
follow "races." There is only one race: the human race.  For this
reason, Kwame Anthony Appiah, who makes this argument powerfully, uses
the term "race" only within quotation marks.  For the most part 1 have
not followed him down this punctuation road, not wanting to clutter the
text with all those extra marks, but I applaud his impulse to underscore
that the categoD' of race is made, not born.

ing decade, according to preliminary analysis of the 1990 census, it
rose again, to 2.7 percent.  The number of births of mixed-race babies
rose at a rate twenty-six times as fast as that of any other racially
defined group, increasing from 0.7 percent of all births in 1968 to 3.2
percent in 1990. According to the journalist Lawrence Wright, "The
number of children living in families where one parent is white and the
other is black, Asian, or American Indian .  .  .  has tripled--from
fewer than four hundred thousand in 1970 to one and a half million in
1990and this doesn't count the children of single parents or children
whose parents are divorced. Blacks are conspicuously less likely to
marry outside their group, and yet marriages between blacks and whites
have tripled in the last thirty years."

Astonishingly, in 1986, outside the South, more than 10 percent of black
men who married were marrying white women, up from 3.9 percent in 1968.
(The respective rates for black women outside the South marrying white
men were 3.7 percent and 1.2 percent.)  In the South, the rate for black
men jumped from 0.24 percent to 4.2 percent.  While Jews outmay' at a
rate of 52 percent, up from 10 percent in 1960, Japanese Americans are
outmarrying at an astonishing 65 percent, Native Americans at an even
more astonishing 70 percent.  (Many of the latter especially, of course,
are of "mixed blood" to start with.)  Where there was a parent in either
of the latter two categories, more children were born interracial than
not.  Interracial births are still relatively rare, but their growing
numbers may influence the future of racial categorization.  Some of
these statistics were reported in a special issue of Time called "The
New Face of America," featuring a cover portrait of a strikingly
beautiful computerized hybrid representative of the "new Eve," her
features derived from Anglo-Saxon, Middle Eastern, African, Asian,
Southern European, and Hispanic types.

Since Americans live in the future, projections--the sense of the
direction of change--also matter.  By the year 2000, non-Hispanic whites
are likely to compose only 66 percent of the under-35 population.
According to the Census Bureau, between 1990 and 2020, the aggregate
white percentage is expected to fall to 78.1 percent, or an additional
6.9 percent--a substantial decline, though at an annual rate smaller
than the rate of decline between 1970 and 1990.  Between 1990 and 2020,
the

black population is expected to rise by 13 percent, to 13.9 percent, a
smaller rate of growth than during the previous two decades, but the
Hispanic population is expected to rise by almost three-quarters, to
15.7 percent, and the Asian/Pacific Island group to grow by 233 percent,
to 7 percent.  (See table.)  The Hispanic population should surpass the
black population in 2013.

Indeed, the coloring of America--or to put it more clumsily, though more
accurately, the relative decline of the non-Hispanic whites--may be
expected to continue apace through the middle of the twenty-first
century.  According to census projections, by 2050 the Hispanic
population is likely to increase to 21.1 percent, the black population
to 16.2 percent, and the Asian/Pacific Islander population to 10.7
percent.  The non-Hispanic white population is expected to stop growing,
in absolute numbers, by the year 2029, and to decline, by 2050, to 52.7
percent.  Contrary' to popular mystique, differential birth rates are
expected to account for more than twice as much of the change in racial
and Hispanic proportions as new immigration.  Still, during the years
between 1990 and 2050 the descendants of new immigrants will outnumber
the descendants of people who already lived in America in 1990.

Changes in U.S.  Racial and Ethnic Distribution, 1950-2050

(percent)

HITE BLACK ASI ,\N/

P:\CIF1C ISLANDER

1950 89.3 9.9 - 1970 87.6 11.1 - 1990 83.9 12.3 3.0

2020 (projected) 78.1 13.9 7.0

2050 (projected) 72.8 16.2 10.7

HISPANIC

4.9

9.0

15.7

21.1

Moreover, these real and expected changes are magnified because minority
populations are concentrated in big cities and are disproportionately
young.  Whites are already a minority in New York, Los Angeles. Chicago,
Detroit, Atlanta, and other major cities.  Still, a great deal of
America remains extremely white.  In almost half the counties of the

United States, the black population is less than 1 percent.  California
and Texas between them have more than half the Hispanics, while in the
Midwest, fewer than one person in thirty is Hispanic.  California is by
far the most multiracial state in the union, with only 57.2 percent of
its population composed of non-Hispanic whites in 1990.

The numbers sound crisp, but it is dangerous to prophesy about the
racial and ethnic future with much confidence.  Racial and ethnic
categories are scarcely natural or fixed.  They are matters of
convention, and conventions change.  On census forms, Americans are told
to choose racial and ethnic identifications from among the categories
given; but the answers depend, in part, on the alternatives proposed.
And these categories are, to some extent, built on British slavery
codes, which were more rigid than the Spanish or Portuguese and
generated traditional white American paranoia about blacks, which in
turn produced an either/or classification system quite different from,
say, those that prevail in much of Latin America.  For decades, in the
either/or spirit, nine of America's southern and border states imposed a
"one drop of blood" rule, declaring that a person with one black
great-grandparent was legally "black" (in three other states, one
great-great-grandparent would suffice) and therefore banned from
marrying a "white." Africans make innumerable distinctions among
themselves, by color, tribe, and so on.  "Blackness" is highly relative,
indeed arbitrary.  In the United States, in the wake of the civil rights
movement, "one drop of blood" laws were overturned, but the legacy of
the either/or mentality has left us with a system of categorization that
is rigid to a degree that astounds (and horrifies) many people outside
the United States, especially in countries like Canada, Mexico, and
France, which have banned the collecting of racial statistics.  What
these critics often fail to understand, however, is that in the United
States, the categories are not simply imposed from on high; they are
internalized. Whites tend to think "black" on meeting a person with
African features; so do blacks.  In defense and in self-assertion,
increasingly, new categories are demanded.  Racial and ethnic categories
were inserted into the census--"Hispanic" in 1970, "Asian/Pacific
Islander" in 1990--as a result of political pressures from groups
seeking to maximize their representation in public life.  So much rides
on how people name themselves in America!  For many, it is a matter of
recognition as well as a tactic for

garnering resources.  In any event, even if slavery codes are at the
root of our categories, the future is not the past, and the categories
are subject to

flUX.

To make matters more complicated still, the Census Bureau's projections
presume no procreation across race and ethnic lines.  With the curious
flexibility that shapes ethnic and racial "options" in the United States
today, people not only name their own "identities," they can declare
their children's, at least for statistical purposes, and their choices
may alter population projections that are brandished today as if firmly
established. If the next generation procreates in significant numbers
across race and ethnic lines, the choices that parents make about how to
identify their children, as well as their children's own intermarriage
rates and selfdefinitions, will determine the "race" and "ethnicity" of
their descendants.

Research shows that members of different ethnic groups assign ethnic
memberships differently.  Because Hispanics, especially those of Mexican
origin, are more likely than others to intermarry and to identify their
children as Hispanic, the Hispanic proportion of the population might be
expected to grow even more than census figures anticipate.  The
sociologists William Alonso and Mary C.  Waters performed a statistical
experiment in which they assumed that couples in the United States
continue to intermarry and apportion group identities to their children
in the proportions that prevailed in 1980.  Statistically, they "grew"
these children and "married them ofF' in the same proportions for five
generations, roughly 125 Years.  They assumed zero immigration and a
fixed fertility rate across groups.  The result was that the percentage
of Hispanics in their hypothetical population grew by more than 25
percent.  But then again, whether "Hispanic" will have the same meaning
thirty or fifty years hence is debatable.  In 1980, 40 million Americans
claimed Irish origin, many more than could have descended from Irish
immigration alone, partly because of high rates of intermarriage and
partly because of sentimental choices--yet the significance of the badge
(probably at the expense of the numbers claiming Scottish "blood") is
questionable.

And what is to say that intermarriage rates and the assignment of
"identities" to children will not change as well, as a result of shifts
in culture or social policy or for other unpredictable reasons?  As
Alonso and Waters point out, "Had there been population projections by
groups during the period of peak European immigration (1880-1920),
trying to guess what the nation would 'look like' in the year 1950 or
1980 or 2000, those predictions would almost certainly have been wrong
in more ways than one.  They would have seriously overestimated the
proportions of some European origin groups and underestimated others."
In the words of the demographer Paul R.  Spickard, "Almost no White
American extended family exists today without at least one member who
has married across what two generations ago would have been thought an
unbridgeable gap." 0 brave new world, where ethnic categories are chosen
and malleable, yet flourish as if they were firm, and are made the basis
for important social decisions as if they were as self-evident as the
colors of the leaves of the trees!

Whites and minorities alike observe the coloring of America, but they
frequently exaggerate the magnitude, speed, and significance of the
change.

Unfortunately, no one seems to have studied systematically the estimates
people make of demographic reality.  But it seems only reasonable to
surmise that because racial minorities are confined to narrow worlds
where they look like majorities, they are prone to magnify their
percentages and minimize the size of the white population.  Folklore
magnifies the evidence of the senses, sometimes absurdly.  Paul Rogat
Loeb reports a 1990 student meeting at Emory University where "black
students kept repeating that America would soon be two thirds people of
color." So astute a critic as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has declared
without warrant that "a majority of our citizens will be people of color
by the year 2020." Deborah Meier, for many years the principal of the
Central Park East School in New York, asked her largely minority
students what the racial makeup of New York City is and was told that
the city is 60 to 70 percent black, perhaps 20 percent Latino, and the
rest white.  (The actual figures from the 1990 census are 29 percent
black, 24 percent Latino, 52 percent white.)  Meier adds that these
young people tend to believe that the country at large must have similar
proportions.

Such factual errors can lead easily enough to the disastrous conclusion
that if only minorities were more militant, they could wrest the country
away from the controlling minority, whites.  Inaccurate knowledge of
this sort, as Deborah Meier says, "shapes the way people imagine the
world," leading in turn to skewed political strategies.  It should go
without

saying that the exaggeration, however understandable, of such a
fundamental fact as numerical strength is a poor foundation for
politics.  Generals could be court-martialed for errors so drastic.  To
base a worldview on an overestimation of strength leads to
overreaching--and almost certain defeat.

Realists have made this point for decades.  Roy Wilkins, longtime head
of the NAACP, deplored the Black Power militancy of the late 1960s in
these terms: "I knew that anyone who was not cautious in leading a
one-tenth minority into conflict with an overwhelming majority was a
fool." In the heated atmosphere of the late 1960s, only a moderate like
Wilkins was willing to stare demographic reality in the face.  While
radicals were going for broke, Wilkins seemed the very personification
of outdistanced, outorganized moderation.  That the one-tenth minority
of 1966 has grown into the one-eighth minority of 1994 does not alter
his point, nor does the invocation of an ideological category, "people
of color," clinch what is now a common assumption that African Americans
can afford to discard the chance of alliances with whites and other
minorities.  Politics in a multiracial society is alliance-making, and
the work of alliance-making is not accomplished by adding up numbers.
There is nothing automatic about it.

Neither is it clear just what automatically follows from the mushrooming
category "Hispanic." The label was an administrative convenience
manufactured for the census.  Its usefulness for describing reality is
something else again.  Of Americans whose origin was given as Hispanic
in 1990, 61 percent were Mexican, the second largest number (22 percent)
being Puerto Rican.  The category eclipses generational differences,
which, as in the case of all immigrants, are culturally immense.  This
jerry-built name ropes together second-generation South Texas Chicanos
and first-generation Los Angeles Chicanos, New York Puerto Ricans and
Florida Cubans, among others.  The people thereby affiliated by
administrative fiat do not even share common music or food, and
frequently not even language, for by the third generation many so-called
Hispanics do not speak Spanish.  Why presume, then, that "Hispanics"
form a functional bloc with a common world view, a "culture"?  Because
of language and skin color, they frequently suffer discrimination in
employment and

housing, but while such injustices may dispose them to a solidarity they
might not otherwise feel, it does not produce anything so hard and fast
as an "identity." Unlike Italians and Poles, but more like Greeks and
Palestinians, "Hispanics"--especially of Mexican origin--are likely to
sustain connections to "the old country." They visit, they send money,
they frequently cross the border.  But this fact in itself does not make
them live, think, or even dance like "Hispanics." The identity
"Hispanic" is made, not born.  It has even been spurned by radicals who
claim that the word foregoes the Indian side of the heritage for the
Spanish.

In their way of life, for that matter, what do the Spanish-surnamed have
in common but a variable relationship to the Spanish language and often
a slightly darker skin than many "whites"--although not, perhaps, than
many Greeks, Italians, or Palestinians?  The second-generation
Mex-ican-American assistant principal of a Los Angeles area school reads
The Economist, votes Republican, and is married to a woman of German
ancestry.  A few miles away, during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Chicanos
criticized Salvadorans for rioting.  During the 1994 midterm election,
23 percent of Hispanic voters supported Proposition 187, which deprived
the children of (largely Hispanic) illegal immigrants of schooling and
all but emergency medical care.

As citizens, leaving aside tastes in food and music, many if not most
second- and especially third-generation Hispanics are indistinguishable
from the grandchildren of Italian, Irish, or Polish immigrants.  Most
likely, with time, their attachment to their nations of origin will
dwindle.  In any event, it is something that they will choose to sustain
or not--which is to say, it is not primordial, not that ineradicable
fact of birth that the term "ethnos" denotes.  Their ethnicity is, as
Mary Waters says of most whites, an "option." It may change in the
course of an individual life.  Indeed, it may change more than once.  In
important respects many "non-Hispanic whites" and "Hispanic whites" will
share life experiences, will agree on political and cultural and
economic matters more than they disagree, certainly more than the
Cuban-American banker in Miami will agree with the Dominican welfare
recipient in Manhattan or, for that matter, than either can be presumed
to agree with the black fireman in Chicago.  If they agree in thinking
that the children of illegal immigrants should be

punished, that may indeed be "ethnicity" speaking; but if they disagree
over welfare stipends or foreign aid, it will be their class position
speaking louder than the language of their parents.

Moreover, even the physical qualities associated with Hispanic whiteness
(or nonwhiteness) are dubious.  Every census table that breaks the
population into "racial" and "ethnic" proportions carries (for good
reason) the obligatory note: "Hispanics may be of any race." That is why
the numbers frequently add up to more than 100 percent--as in the table
on page 110 above.

All in all, given the many uncertainties of those baggy categories
"race" and "ethnicity," to assume any distinct commonality, any
automatic or easy alliance among "people of color," the descendants of
Africans, Puerto Ricans, Koreans, Salvadorans, Cubans, and Chinese, say,
is far-fetched--especially on the strength of the experiences of New
York, Los Angeles, Miami, or San Francisco, where conflicts of interest
and perception among nonwhites range from striking to harsh.  The
antagonism between African Americans and Korean shopkeepers in New York
and Los Angeles is well known.  Everyone has seen footage of the Los
Angeles Koreans defending their stores with rifles against black
attackers, though black rage against the Korean-American shopkeeper who
shot and killed a black teenager for alleged shoplifting was certainly
not so well-publicized as the beating of Rodney King.  (The storekeeper
was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter six months before the Rodney
King verdict.

Although this crime carried a penalty of up to sixteen years in prison,
the failure to convict her of murder was frequently cited by African
Americans explaining the targeting of Koreans during the riots.)  In the
wake of the riots, moreover, fights over resources to rebuild the
damaged city were legion.  In San Francisco, beginning with a 1982
court-ordered desegregation settlement with the NAACP, the student
bodies of all schools were restricted to 40 percent from any single
ethnic group.  In 1993 the elite Lowell High School was found to have
enrolled 42.9 percent Chinese Americans, even after turning away many
other qualified Chinese Americans, and was ordered to return to the 40
percent limit.  When, in 1994, Chinese-American groups announced they
were going to try to overturn the court pact, they were again opposed by
the NAACP.  Similar tensions developed at the University of California,
Berkeley,

in the early 1990s between Asians on the one hand, and blacks and
Hispanics admitted on the basis of affirmative action on the other, with
many Asians convinced that they were the victims of racial quotas that
worked to the advantage of favored groups.  (The actual situation was
more complex, as we shall see in chapter 5.)  In 1994, Latinos in the
Los Angelesarea city of Compton charged police brutality by black police
and demanded affirmative action in city employment--against what they
regarded as an African-American establishment--while at the local high
school, Chicano and black teenagers were squaring off against one
another.  Anecdotes are not conclusive, but in California, they are
always undermining fantasies about the solidarity of "people of color."
In Berkeley in 1992, during some minor local rioting triggered by the
Rodney King verdict, a blonde student told me how frightened she had
been when some black youths surrounded the car in which she was riding,
rocked it back and forth, and screamed and cursed her before letting her
and her passengers move on.  Her surname is Lopez.  Somewhere there are
rhetoricians and political strategists grouping her and her assailants
together as "people of color." The assumption among identity politics
militants that natural alliances exist on the basis of nonwhiteness is
purely sentimental.

Much demographic misrecognition stems from the wish for a collective
movement against the white majority.  There is also a white
misrecognition stemming from fear.  For generations, white racial fears
have magnified estimates of immigrant "waves" or "tides" of immigrants.
The "Yellow Peril" has a large place in the history of white American
paranoia.  In his inaugural address, Theodore Roosevelt warned against
"the suicide of the race." Tom Buchanan, the boorish bond dealer of
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatshy, broods that "civilization's going to
pieces" on the strength of a book he is reading, The Rise of the Colored
Empires, which argues "scientifically" that "if we don't look out the
white race will be--will be utterly submerged."

Submerged, that is, in an ocean of danger.  Whites translate fear of
crime into fear of blacks, although whites are less than half as likely
as blacks to be victimized by violent crime.  On television news, black
criminal defendants are more likely than whites to be shown in mug shots
or still photos, unnamed, anonymous, presumably representative of a
great undifferentiated menace.  They are significantly more likely to
appear in

the physical custody of law enforcement officials, so that, even when
accused of similar crimes, they appear more dangerous.  But even without
media exaggeration, the fear of black criminals has a certain basis in
fact, because---there is no way to deny it--those who are arrested,
charged, convicted, and jailed are disproportionately black.  The fact
that blacks suffer more than whites from black criminals is faint
consolation to whites who have themselves been mugged, or whose children
have been robbed or beaten, by blacks.  Any rational fear is, in turn,
compounded by a welter of sex fears, darkness fears, death fears that
have for centuries been buried deep within whites' own heart of
darkness.  The terror of Willie Horton was one episode in a
long-standing white panic: what the rap group Public Enemy called "Fear
of a Black Planet."

Today, white panic over nonwhite engulfment is fueled by competition for
jobs, promotions, university admissions, and other practicalities.  On
campuses, many students and their parents think that minorities are
"taking over." Since superachieving Asian Americans are generally
admitted by color-blind criteria, and cannot be rationally faulted for
white insufficiency, it is affirmative action for blacks that many
whites blame for taking slots that should, they think, be allocated
strictly by merit.  This is true even on campuses where the percentage
of minority enrollment has, in fact, declined in recent years.  Black
and Hispanic enrollments on college campuses, measured against high
school graduation rates, declined by about 15 percent between 1976 and
1988, and then began to rise again, though by 1991 they had still not
returned to the levels of 1976.

Whatever the facts, large numbers of white males in particular see
themselves losing ground.  Just how much ground they have actually lost,
in the aggregate, is more than a little questionable.  Statistically, it
is blacks whose unemployment rates have risen, relative to whites, since
the late 1970s--until, in 1990, a black person's chances of being
unemployed were 2.76 times those of a white person.  In 1990, 12.1
percent of white men earned more than $50,000 a year, compared to 3.4
percent of black men.  In actuality, blacks are 0.1 percent (one in a
thousand!) of top corporate CEOs, 4.5 percent of college teachers, 3.2
percent of lawyers, 3.0 percent of doctors, and 3.6 percent of
engineers.  Statistics about promotions are harder to come by, or to
assess.  But whereas in 1983 the

median white family possessed eleven times the wealth of the median
nonwhite family, in 1989 the ratio was twenty to one.

And more to the point, people do not live in a statistical universe.
When whites, especially males, feel blocked, in a culture that tells
them they have only themselves to thank for success and only themselves
to blame for failure, they look for culprits.  Why not blame racial
minorities and immigrants?  The corporate boards who can profit just
splendidly without them, the savings and loan executives whose
perquisites everyone's taxes continue to subsidize, are usually
anonymous.  They seem abstract, beyond reach.  By contrast, minorities
stand out.  They are more convenient targets than women, although in all
likelihood, white men's sense of embattlement stems less from
competition with racial minorities than from a relative loss of power
vis-a-vis women in daily life.  In bedrooms, barrooms, locker rooms,
boardrooms, staff and faculty meetings, the white men have lost many of
their male preserves.  They have been targeted as harassers and date
rapists.  They have had to concede language-"chairperson," not
"chairman," and so on.  They feel dispossessed. But misogyny, that hardy
perennial, is hard to express in everyday life.  Forthright loathing is
usually frowned on.  Most men, after all, love women and rely on
them--and, increasingly, on their paychecks.

But minorities?  They are something else.  More than ever before in the
United States, despite low numbers in most professions, minorities are
visible in conspicuous places: members of Congress, mayors, city council
members.  They are celebrities, sports figures, faces on television
news.  They are prizewinning authors and film directors, deans at elite
universities.  Stories of whites who lose government contracts or jobs
to minorities are easily amplified and radiate everywhere.  Since the
traditional lock of white men has been broken in the name of diversity,
if some white men don't get jobs or promotions to which they are
arguably--or in any case feel--entitled, they scream from loss and find
their culprits in dark skins.  Here they can compete for victim status.
In a world of racial and gender definitions, are they not a race and a
gender too?

"White male" is, of course, a statistical category that has always been
with us, but in recent years the category has crystallized.  It looms
large in popular consciousness.  The common sense of relative
dispossession is a major reason.  Another is that white males have been
challenged, even

routinely demonized, by identity groups.  The demonized tend to
reinforce the identities that are singled out by the demonizers.  But
also important is that, in recent years, the media have singled out
white males as a bloc, united by this most salient characteristic, white
malehess.

Consider, for example, Newsweek's March 29, 1993, cover story featuring
Michael Douglas's fierce face, his thin lips, his pores, the right lens
shattered in his glasses, with the headline: "WHITE MALE PARANOIA." Why
frame the image that way?  The popularity of the movie in which Douglas
was starring, Falling Down, could have been interpreted as evidence that
urban angst had reached a boiling point.  It could have been interpreted
as the return of the Western, this time set amid the breakdown of Los
Angeles.  But Newsweek decreed that the wretched Douglas character, a
laid-off defense worker who began his photogenic violent crack-up by
picking a fight with a Korean grocer whose English he could not
understand, stood for white malehood, and that the question of the week
was "New Victims or Just Bad Sports?" The main article inside, by David
Gates, did sensibly note: "White male paranoia isn't old-fashioned white
liberal guilt: it's atavistic racial and sexual dread, and it achieves
critical mass when a rapidly contracting economy becomes overcrowded."
But the cover said something else.  So did the sidebar by Ellis Cose,
which referred to a generic "white male ego" and "white male pique," as
if Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, President Bill Clinton,
singer Boy George, President Boris Yeltsin, President John F.  Kennedy,
Senator Robert Packwood, Woody Allen, magnate Abe Hirschfeld, the CEOs
of General Motors and Lotus, and the sexual marauders of Glen Ridge,
N.J.--to name some of the white men pictured throughout the
magazine--had something significant in common.  In the light
they--we--were presumably all the same.

In one of the sloppy locutions that have become the norm, the Newsweek
writers use "white male" to mean, more or less, prosperous, straight,
white North American.  Thus, in the sidebar, Ellis Cose asked: "Why
would white men feel they are being pushed to the wall when they hold
most of the top jobs?" They hold most of the top jobs.  The checkout
clerk, the investment banker, Slobodan Milosevich, and the Caucasian
holding

a VIETNAM VET WILL WORK FOR FOOD sign were grouped together.  When

Newsweek featured paranoia as a characteristic of the generic white

male---even as, in places, it declared the paranoia unwarranted--it
stood in the front ranks of the terrible simplifiers.  It joined the
makers of Falling Down in one of America's few growth industries: the
exploitation of rancor.

Newsweek was scarcely alone.  Around the same time, Business Week
devoted a cover story to the complaints of white males who feel passed
over in business.  (The magazine had never run a cover story on job
discrimination against blacks, women, Hispanics, or homosexuals.)  In
earlier decades, it is far from true that all white men thought they
were powerful; still, there was always some lingering sense of caste
solidarity, some privilege that even the poorest of white men could
feel; and the change that has had to register on white men in recent
decades is extraordinary and often perturbing to them.  No small thing,
and not to be easily assuaged by pointing out that men, or whites, have
slipped somewhat from the once-commanding heights they did not deserve
to occupy unchallenged for it is not a group's absolute position but its
relative slip-page, or the perception of such, that fuels the reactions
of reactionary movements.

For many whites on campus, the sense of relative decline is compounded
from several directions: by a fear of the declining economic value of a
college degree; by a sense of having been unfairly targeted; by
resentment over (frequently misunderstood) affirmative action policies;
by envy of others felt (often in an exaggerated manner) to be better
organized; by peer pressure; by the anonymity of campus life (though
this is hardly a decisive factor, since some of the most fervent
crusades of identity politics have taken place at small liberal arts
colleges); and by the desire to mimic the identity consciousness of
others.  In 1985, a white Berkeley freshman in a huge undergraduate
lecture class approached me during my office hours to talk about a
quandary.  He was timid, soft-spoken.  Unlike many Berkeley students, he
came from the Central Valley. He had no distinct ethnicity in which to
find refuge, being neither Jewish, nor Italian, nor Irish.  All around
him, students of color were organizing in separate groups, expressing
pride in their races and some antagonism toward his.  He was embarrassed
to ask, but some of his acquaintances were organizing a white student
association, and he wanted advice about whether to join.  The group was
not white supremacist, he insisted.  He did

not have the swagger or truculence of a white supremacist.  Had this
young man of seventeen or eighteen been deeply prejudiced, he would not
have cared about my opinion; he had heard me lecture on the abominations
of American racism.  Another lecture was not what he wanted or needed.
No, what he wanted was an identity group; and yet he felt troubled about
what he found himself wanting.  I told him that I sympathized with his
desire to have a group to feel comfortable in, but that given the grim
history of what happens in America when whites proclaim their whiteness,
a group defining themselves by membership in the dominant race had to be
wrong.  He went away unhappy--possibly less lonely, having gotten his
professor's attention, but no better equipped with a hardand-fast
identity.

How representative is such a young man?  Representative enough to take
seriously, even before the media megaphone goes to work.  In 1991
students at a high school in Anaheim, home of Disneyland, organized a
European American Club, claiming that they felt no racial animus but
wanted to have an identity group to join.  The head of the group was a
girl who was half Lebanese and half Irish, but no matter--she wanted a
group she could call her own.  Her group and the Berkeley student belong
to a demographic obsession already swelling into an identity panic.  To
their eyes, the entire society is apparently grouped into exclusive
"communities." Such is their experience, and so the media insistently
remind them.  Why shouldn't they, too, demand affirmative attention?

With no single racial or ethnic group constituting a racial majority (in
fall 1990, whites were 42 percent of registered students), the Berkeley
campus is scarcely representative of America or even of campuses.  But
even where minorities are few in number, white males who are not wealthy
and not secure--that is to say, most of them--are frequently less than
enthusiastic about the coloring of America.  Very few of them, it is
safe to say, are skinheads, rapists, or gay-bashers.  As well as survey
researchers can detect, a minority--it would sound complacent to say
"only a minority"--are willing to deprecate blacks outright, at least to
a stranger.  Straightforward discrimination and bigoted speech have
certainly waned since the 1960s.  Yet there remains plenty of bigotry,
more than enough to indicate how far whites are from the color blindness
commended as a value--even presumed as a fact--by those who think

that the nation has done enough, or more than enough, to remedy the
situation of blacks.  In a 1990 survey, 29 percent of a national sample
of whites grouped blacks as unintelligent four years before a
best-selling book lent this notion a certain respectability with full
pseudoscientific trappings.  Whites who said they supported
antidiscrimination laws in home sales increased from 34 percent in 1973
to 51 percent in 1990, an improvement of 50 percent; but this means that
almost half were still not willing to support open housing.

And yet white attitudes may be more ambivalent and flexible than these
disturbing results convey.  In 1989 Paul M.  Sniderman of Stanford
University and Thomas Piazza of the University of California, Berkeley,
asked a random sample of whites their opinions of blacks (they could
choose more than one description).  Twenty-six percent said blacks were
"irresponsible"; 20 percent, that they were "lazy." An equal number of
randomly sampled whites were asked their opinions of blacks only after
they had been asked a question about affirmative action: "In a nearby
state, an effort is being made to increase dramatically the number of
blacks working in state government.  This means that a large number of
jobs will be reserved for blacks, even if their scores on merit exams
are lower than those of whites who are turned down for the job.  Do you
favor or oppose this policy?"

In this population, the number who said blacks were "irresponsible" rose
to 43 percent; those who said blacks were "lazy" rose to 31 percent.  In
other words, the mere mention of affirmative action, albeit attributed
to "a nearby state," triggered an increase of more than 50 percent in
the number of whites willing to express outright denigration.

One may suspect that the "mere mention" of affirmative action signaled
to veiled bigots that the researchers might be receptive to otherwise
tabooed expressions of racial hostility.  It is well known that survey
inter-viewees are reluctant to own up to bigotry.  But when Sniderman
and Piazza's interviewers argued with their interviewees in either
direction, even in a rudimentary way, they could easily sway them, or at
least influence the words they were willing to express.  The fact that
people are flexible on these questions is chilling.  But flexibility is
preferable to dyed-in-the-wool prejudice.  It creates latitude for
political leadership. For "mere mentions" are not confined to survey
experiments.  "Mere mentions" circulate through the media and in
everyday talk.  In political campaigns, Republicans need "merely
mention" jobs, taxes, and welfare to get the attention of white
males--the bloc accountable for their sweep in the midterm elections of
1994.

Not so long ago--and before then, in his father's time, and his father's
father's, and so on--the straight white male was the American norm.
Everyone else was measured, and usually found wanting, by virtue, or
vice, of deviance from that norm.  If he was born without many
advantages, still, his whiteness and maleness protected him to a certain
degree.  He took his insulation for granted.  If life dissatisfied him,
he was apt to conclude that he had no one to blame but himself.  Today,
the straight white male frequently finds himself on the defensive.  He
is, like everyone else, a member of a category, the oppressor category
at that, scrambling for cultural space while his own prospects seem less
than luminous.  His intentions with respect to minorities and women may
or may not be noble, but he is tempted to declare himself a victim like
the victims he deplores.

University culture in particular encourages this sort of rivalry for the
crown of thorns.  From minorities, the finger of accusation readily
points at the white male close at hand, presumed guilty ipso facto of
discrimination, or at least of profiting from an institutional bias
based on the discrimination practiced by his forebears or somebody
else's.  In the eyes of

many women's studies professors and students, he may be a "potential
rapist." Although racist and sexist abuse is sometimes exaggerated, many
outbreaks of verbal viciousness and violence do take place.  So the
wellmeaning white male may try to go out of his way to be sensitive.  He
learns that if he finds himself walking down the street behind a woman,
she may well cringe at his footsteps, wheel, check him out--even if she
will feel relieved to discover he is not a badly dressed black.  He may
well know that she has reason to fear, and therefore not begrudge her
the scrutiny.  Still, he carries with him the knowledge that he is
suspect--not because of who he is, but because of what he looks like. He
is weary of having to live on sufferance, weary of having to suppress
his resentment.  Weren't we supposed to be done with labels, he demands,
tempted (to say the least) to make the most of his own label?  He wants
to know why fairness should stop before it gets to him.

"If you want to go with the stereotypes," one white student told the

Berkeley Diversity Project, which studied racial typecasting between
1989 and 1991, "Asians are the smart people, the blacks are great
athletes, what is white?  We're just here.  We're the oppressors of the
nation.  At Berkeley being white is having to constantly be on my toes
about not offending other races, not saying something to be construed
as, 'I am continuing to be the oppressor of America."" If not an
oppressor, the white male is a blank, made to feel he lacks roots,
culture, substance.  "Being white," as one student put it, "means having
no box to check on admission forms"--and means being available to vote
against benefits for the children of illegal immigrants, against
affirmative action, and, not least, against Democrats.

Marching on

Department Right Took the the English While the

White House

1.  The Cant of Identity

The more vociferously a term is trumpeted in public, the more
contestable it is under scrutiny.  The automatic recourse to a slogan,
as if it were tantamount to a value or an argumenL is frequently a
measure of the need to suppress a difficulty Or a vagueness underneath.
Cant is the hardening of the aura around a concept.  Cant automates
thought, substitutes for deeper assessments, creates the illusion of
firmness where there are only intricacies, freezes a fluid reality. Cant
is sincere, usually, and its sincerity also protects against scrutiny.
Cant comforts.  And cant tends to corrupt its opposition into
countercant.  There is the cant of identity and the cant that rises with
righteous and selective indignation against the "political correctness"
of the Left, though not against that of the Right.

The cant of identity underlies identity politics, which proposes to
deduce a position, a tradition, a deep truth, or a way of life from a
fact of birth, physiognomy, national origin, sex, or physical
disability.  The hardening of one of these categories into cant begins
with binary thinking- 126

things are either raw or cooked, male or female, this or that--a
propensity that may indeed be, as Levi-Strauss maintained, universal.
Anxiety generated by difference may well be embedded in the human
condition; so may be the animosity that accompanies anxiety.  Perhaps
the capacity quickly to classify "the other" as same or different,
friend or enemy, once conferred a benefit for survival.  But whether or
not it was originally a means of natural selection, this sort of binary
thinking certainly helps clans, elites, and nations maintain themselves.
From binary thinking follows a propensity for identity thinking, which
categorizes strangers--this is a person of Type X, not Type Y.  The
identity thinking of the powerful reassures them that they deserve to
rule; the identity thinking of the oppressed affirms that they are not
who the rulers think they are.  If the identity affirmation of the
oppressed begins as a defense against claims of superiority, it can
swerve into its own sense of superiority.  All forms of identity
politics are overly clear about who the insiders are "normal Americans,"

"the people,"

"la Raza,"--and overly dismissive of outsiders.  In either case, cant
makes for efficient simplifications, but only at the price of rigidity.
Cant is what we have when we think we know more than we do.  Its
opposite is curiosity.

Today, it is the cant of identity that many Americans espouse, and the
question is why.  The beginning of an answer is that identity does more
than exclude.  It transcends the self, affirms a connection with others.
Erik H.

Erikson, whose writings in the 1960s did a lot to popularize the notion
of identity, put the matter this way: "The functioning ego, while
guarding individuality, is far from isolated, for a kind of communality
links egos in a mutual activation." Identity extends through space,
binding a person to fellow travelers in the human project.  But identity
also extends through time, linking the individual with past and future,
extending beyond the mortal body.  As Erikson wrote, "Psychosocial
identity is necessary as the anchoring of man's transient existence in
the here and now." Erikson warned against fossilizing identity, which,
he said, "is never 'established' as an 'achievement' in the form of a
personality armor, or of anything static and unchangeable." But the cant
retailed from his thinking spread rapidly throughout vertiginous
America, a society founded on rootless-ness, devoted to self-creation,
worshipping evanescence, stuffing its spiritual voids with the latest
gadgets.

Americans are obsessed today with their racial, ethnic, religious, and
sexual identities.  What is supposed to be universal is, above all,
difference.  And yet there is a peculiar blindness.  Beneath the
rhetoric, the

functional assumption shared by virtually all Americans is that the
market is the place to look for values, that what matters is "the bottom
line."

While Americans busily dig for roots, their economy is built on the
steady replacement of old things with new things.  The hypertrophy of
difference, at least at the level of rhetoric, masks disrespect for the
real

thing.

2.  The Beauty and Power of Blackness

For much of American history, Amencamsm was the belief that there was a
correct way to be American--despite the palpable looseness of national
definitions.  The insistence on the virtues of "native Americans" at a
time when this term referred to native-born whites was an attempt to
shore up groups who worried about their prospects in new and unsettling
circumstances.  Racial classification, in particular, is in the American
grain, beginning with the obsessive concern over maintaining the purity
of the category "white." Racism is labeling made invidious, in fact.
Throughout most of American history, the law ratified community bigotry
by assigning and affirming racial identities, from slavery codes and
laws against interracial marriage to the Chinese Exclusion Act.  By
contrast, "ethnicity" had social more than legal significance.
"Ethnicity" was crystallized in group life: in regions and
neighborhoods, in common occupations, in foreignlanguage newspapers and
urban politics.  Even the Left was rooted disproportionately in
particular ethnic groups--Socialist Germans through World War I, Italian
anarchists in the 1920s, Socialist and Communist Jews during the Great
Depression.  Later, under the label "national origins," ethnicity was
enshrined in immigration quotas.  To identify as Mexican, German, Irish,
Italian, Greek, or Jewish was partly embraced, partly imposed: a matter
of affirming "what one already was."

The longer white ethnics lived in the United States, the more
"American"-assimilated, acculturated--they became.  Inevitably, ethnic
identities slackened---or seemed to.  But racial identity came roaring
to the fore

in the late 1960s.  The trigger, of course, was the civil rights
movement, or rather, the liberationist impulse that came to the fore as
the movement succeeded.  The civil rights revolt against racial
oppression exploded with a pent-up force that no partial legislative
reforms could adequately assuage. The momentum of the movement outran
legislative redress.  The civil rights movement, after all, meant to
redress three centuries of racial oppression--slavery followed by the
semi-serfdom of sharecropping and other inequalities.  The mass
immigration from the South to northern and western cities met with
discrimination, producing steadily denser, younger, poorer, and angrier
ghettos.  Were young blacks, ill-paid, illhoused, ill-treated, now
supposed to feel tranquil because Congress had finally seen fit to ban
white-only drinking fountains?  Neither the Civil Rights Act of 1964 nor
the Voting Rights Act of 1965, nor even Lyndon Johnson's endorsement of
affirmative action, could placate all of them. Growing numbers did not
want to "look white" anymore.  They did not want to take a back seat in
American culture.  There was no more patience for humiliation.  White
riots in the Chicago area against Martin Luther King Jr."s marches for
open housing in the summer of 1966 only confirmed that the prospects for
social integration were not impressive.

But it did not take Malcolm X or Chicago's white rioters to goad a group
of black students in Oakland, California, during the fall of 1963 to
threaten to stop reciting the pledge of allegiance.  (The president of
the Oakland Youth Council declared that, for a Negro, the notion of
"liberty and justice for all is so naive that it is almost facetious.")
There is a nationalist streak that has surfaced periodically in
African-American history since the Civil War, uniting the otherwise
disparate Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, and Elijah Muhammad, and again
it swelled.  Encouraged by African anticolonialist successes,
significant American black leaders now looked abroad for allies, and
then for names, for clothing, and, indeed, for identity.  "I'm from
America," Malcolm X said at the University of Ghana on May 13, 1964,
"but I'm not an American.  !  didn't go there of my own free choice ....
[I] come to this meeting as one of the victims of America, one of the
victims of Americanism, one of the victims of democracy."

"We need allies," he told a rally on December 13, 1964, "and as long as
you and I think that we can only get allies from .  .  .  up on the
Grand Concourse [where Jewish liberals lived] .  .  .  our source of

allies is limited.  But when we realize how large this earth is, and how
many different people there are on it, and how closely they resemble us,
then when we turn to them for some sort of aid, or to form alliances,
then we'll make a little faster progress." In his final phase, after
breaking with the Black Muslims and working his way toward some sort of
transracial idea, Malcolm X founded a grandly titled Organization for
Afro-American Unity whose significance lay not in its size--at his
death, it was little more than a hope--but in its hyphenation.  To call
yourself "Afro-American," Malcolm wrote, was to reject both "American"
and "Negro" --though interestingly, it was not to escape "American"
altogether.

This was a time when cross-racial alliances for civil rights were
proving unmanageable.  In 1964, civil rights workers from the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other groups brought an
elected Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegation to the
Democratic Convention in Atlantic City and demanded to be seated as the
official delegation in place of the official white supremacist regulars,
who had been chosen without the slightest participation by blacks, and
who would not even promise to support the Democratic nominee.  (In the
end, they endorsed Barry Goldwater.)  President Johnson orchestrated a
compromise, supported by liberals, labor unions, and moderate civil
rights leaders, offering the MFDP a token two votes for its leaders,
retaining the official delegation, while pledging to change the rules by
1968.  The MFDP refused the compromise.  The radical position was
immortalized in Fannie Lou Hamer's famous statement that it would be
wrong for the leaders to take seats because "all of us [in the MFDP
delegation] are tired."

Among black activists, the thrust was toward the spirit of go-it-alone.
The militants of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee felt
betrayed by mainstream liberals, lost interest in alliances with whites,
and ended up expelling even radical white organizers.  After Malcolm X
was cut down by an assassin's bullet in February 1965, the pressure
toward a visceral rejection of American identity grew--and grew even
more furiously with that August's Watts riot, as mainstream opinion
called it, or the Watts rebellion, as it was known to the Left.  In this
climate, the "Black Power" proclaimed by SNCC's Stokely Carmichael in
June 1966 was, beneath the militant sound, an ambiguous slogan, partly
advocating a black role in a hypothetically unified Third World
revolution, partly advocating cultural and political pluralism on the
model of America's white ethnic groups.  The high boil of the northern
and western black ghettos after Watts intensified both tendencies.  And
yet, coiled within the plural-ist version, there remained the hope to
redeem America.  Representative of militant writing was this 1968
passage from Julius Lester, then a close associate of Carmichael:

Those who advocate Black Power today .  .  .  are the inheritors of a
proud tradition of resistance to America.  Blacks can see very clearly
that America is a nation built upon inhumanity. The signers of the
Declaration of Independence put down their quills to go home and beat
their slaves ....  To die in the attempt to humanize America is
preferable to being an American as America is now constituted.

America had to be resisted, something done by outsiders; but it also had
to be humanized, something done by those who belong.

Like many in SNCC after the whites were expelled, Lester aligned himself
with the new black-is-beautiful culture of music and natural hair and
political insurgency, all of which he identified with "another language
.  .  .  rhythm .  .  .  'soul." In Africa they speak of negritude ....

It is the recognition of those things uniquely ours which separate us
from the white man." More than a "recognition," it was an intoxication,
the seeming realization of a dream endlessly deferred.  The joy of
kicking away from a white-imposed definition of beauty, of order, of
conduct, was intense.  What could be more exultant than Lester's title,
Look Out, Whitey.t Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama!?  It was
inflammatory in the manner of a cartoon.  Despite the earlier reference
to "humanizing" America, Lester claimed it was pointless to "stir .  . .
the moral conscience of America," because, indeed, "America has no moral
conscience."

"It is clear that America as it now exists must be destroyed.  There is
no other way.  It is impossible to live within this country and not
become a thief or a murderer." As Stokely Carmichael told a Berkeley
crowd in October 1966: "I do not want to be a part of the American pie.
The American pie means raping South Africa, beating Viet Nam, beating
South America,

raping the Philippines, raping every country you've been in.  I don't
want any of your blood money."

If not to America, then to what could blacks belong?  To un- or
anti-America: the wretched of the earth, the global army of
destroyerredeemers.  Lester ends his book by invoking anti-imperialist
identity: "The struggle of blacks in America is inseparable from the
struggle of the Third World." He affirms the brotherhood of
blacks--unlike white Americans, he points out, blacks refer to each
other as brothers.  The other theme is rebirth through uprising.  We
were exploited, therefore we are.  This was the spirit of the most
conspicuous black militants from 1967 on.  In 1967, the same year Lester
wrote his manifesto, the openly armed Black Panther Party seized the
media spotlight by flaunting guns in a protest (against a law banning
the carrying of weapons) at the California state capitol in Sacramento.
The Black Panther Party, in particular, affirmed a revolutionary
identity (variously Cuban, Vietnamese, Algerian, North Korean) without
any root in American history.  Racially, the Panthers were not
separatist--they wanted white allies and devoted a good deal of energy
to cultivating them--but they had no interest in the radical streaks of
American tradition, even in slave revolts, abolitionism, and
Reconstruction.  Politically, they were separatist.  To affirm the
global revolution was a sort of spiritual secession, and an ecstasy as
well.

Another way to affirm a distinct identity was to substitute
African-based customs for those of a white-dominated society and turn
color consciousness from a stigma to a badge of pride.  For centuries,
white society had imposed notions of black inferiority--ideas that most
blacks had internalized.  To shake off that burden was immensely
hard--wrenching, but often exhilarating, like a slave revolt or a prison
break.  Inspired by African anticolonial leaders and by celebrities like
Miriam Makeba, Odetta, Lorraine Hansberry, Abbey Lincoln, and Nina
Simone, all featured on Ebony magazine covers with the kinky hair they
had been born with, a few black women at Howard University as early as
1962 put down the straightening comb and started wearing their hair
naturally.  The new cultural nationalists did not have to read Frantz
Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, first published in English in 1963,
to feel the thrill of breaking from white standards.  Men in civil
rights also came to prefer these kinky "Afros." Black Muslims had
already sundered themselves from their family names, calling them slave
names, and taken up the indeterminate X instead, as if to say that,
having been stripped of identity, they were reinventing themselves. Soon
enough, the X was in turn replaced.  In Los Angeles in 1966, Ronald
McKinley Everett became Maulana Ron Karenga, assumed African robes, took
up the Swahili language, and in December organized the first Kwanzaa
celebration, an invention based on African festivals.  Around that time,
Americans of African descent put on African clothes and declared that
they were no longer Negroes but rather blacks or Afro-Americans, a race
with a history and a wide world to identify with.

Note that all these varieties of militancy and identity refashioning
preceded the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  At the moment
when the life of the unsurpassable orator was snuffed out, his hold on
the black youth of the ghettos was already weak.  Any hope of a mass
integrated nonviolent movement was already fading fast.  The militants
of SNCC had long mocked him as "De Lawd." Yet he was there to mock, to
oppose, to love.  While King lived, he embodied the possibility of a
redemptive struggle across racial lines.  He journeyed to Memphis to
support a strike by black garbage workers--a solidarity that had class
as well as race dimensions.  The Poor People's Campaign to which King
committed himself before he died was unabashedly, deliberately
transracial. Even in eclipse, King was the personification of faith and
possibility: the incarnation of a black leadership that might build
bridges from the movement against segregation to a successor movement
against poverty and the inequality of wealth.

His murder snuffed out whatever leftover belief there was among blacks
that a new America might ever be reborn.  The outpouring of desperate
rage was a measure of just how immense, how irreplaceable a figure King
was.  He was all of thirty-nine at the time he came down from the
mountain to Memphis.  Whatever defeats he would have been dealt over the
next decades--and they would have been many--whatever weariness and
despair he would have felt--and he would have felt much--he would still
have lingered as a unifying presence, as goad and conscience, as a
living link with the America of Paine, Thoreau, Douglass, and Lincoln.
After King, there was only the smoke of what if rising from burned-out
cities.  King alive was the refutation of separatism; King murdered was

its rationale.  James Baldwin had already asked rhetorically: "Do I
really want to be integrated into a burning house?"

3.  The Ethnic Multiplication

The spirit of black cultural assertion deserves credit for tremendous
achievements.  "Black is beautiful," never the path of least resistance,
left an irreversible mark of pride in the lives of black people in the
United States and elsewhere.  The growth of African-American politics,
arts, and intellectual life since the 1960s is indisputable.  Whether
more could have been done to overcome the unequal conditions of blacks
and whites if the civil rights coalition had been sustained against all
odds cannot be known.

But the consequences of the black move toward separate organization
after civil rights were profound and multiple in unintended ways.  For
one thing, black revolutionism spurred the white Left into its own
go-for-broke trajectory.  It would be hard to overestimate the impact of
black rage and estrangement on white radical rage and estrangement in
the later 1960s--when "America" came to seem synonymous with the
devastation of Vietnam.  But more, the black identity movement became
the template for ethnic multiplication.  Especially among intellectuals
of all stripes, distinctness became a new principle of organization
while integration became passe.  By 1969, with Robert Kennedy dead and
Richard Nixon in office, the question of poverty, no less how to
redistribute wealth or how to compose a majority with that in mind, had
melted off everyone's agenda.  Radical organizers of the New Left who
had not so long before hoped to inspire "an interracial movement of the
poor" were moving on to antiwar projects.  Community organizations
ceased to be of interest to them because the project was not to make a
common America but to break up the one that existed.  Identity groups
were where the action was.

America spawned identities in abundance.  The American Indian Movement
seized the former prison island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay on
Thanksgiving Day 1969.  In Northern cities, Puerto Rican groups
organized.  In the West and Southwest, Chicanos were doing the
same--Cesar Chavez's farm workers in California, Reies Tijerina's land
grant

movement in northern New Mexico, an antiwar Chicano Moratorium in Los
Angeles, Chicano intellectuals launching the journal Aztldn.  In
California, young Chinese Americans insisted on their distinct needs as
an interest group.  "Third World Liberation Fronts" began to organize at
state universities late in 1968 and were instrumental in militant
student strikes at San Francisco State College and the University of
California, Berkeley.

Some of the new identity groups took their shape and impetus from the
immigration law of 1965, which eliminated the old Eurocentric quotas,
guaranteeing that Latin Americans, Asians, and Africans would become the
vast majority of the newest ethnics in the years to come.  In some
respects, the new ethnicity of color resembled the traditional urban
ethnicity of the white working class.  The new immigrants and their
children also concentrated in particular neighborhoods.  They tended to
marry within the group.  They clustered in particular occupations.
Family networks helped family members immigrate, find jobs, start
businesses. What was new was the belief in ethnic militancy, the attack
on assimilation, the assertion of pride, the stripping away of deference
to the majority.

Whites en masse were slower to spring to ethnic consciousness.  As late
as the fall of 1965, Nathan Glazer was writing: "For the moment, ethnic
self-assertiveness is in eclipse and even in bad odor." This was, he
wrote, largely because of the national preoccupation with black rights
and poverty.

Until 1969 or 1970, wrote Andrew Greeley, "practically no survey
questionnaires had an ethnic question.  Even [in 1971], the Gallup
organization [did] not routinely ask about ethnicity." But during the
mid-1960s, the black secession from integrated (if black-led)
organizations proved traumatic for white liberals.  It undermined their
raison d'etre. (What, after all, was liberalism without grateful lower
classes to be liberal for?) Meanwhile, in cities and working-class
suburbs, where New Deal liberalism was based on the alliance between the
ethnic (largely Catholic and Jewish) and black votes, black action was
prompting a white counterreaction.  Many of these whites felt pinched,
their economic position tenuous, their neighborhoods declining, crime on
the rise.  They were not getting attention from top officials.
Television did not recognize them-except perhaps as "the backlash."
Envious and vengeful, many retreated to the redoubt of whiteness.

At first this resentment was not delivered in ethnic terms.  It had
other political channels--remnant urban machines like Mayor Daley's in
Chicago or the Wallace vote of 1968.  But within a very few years,
ethnic claims mushroomed.  How deep they ran is a difficult question to
answer. Gunnar Myrdal's impression in 1974 was that the "craving for
historical identity" was not so much "a people's movement" as the
product of "a few well established intellectuals, professors,
writers--mostly, I gather, of a third generation." There was survey
evidence, for what it was worth, that ethnic whites were no more racist
than any others--perhaps less.  In any event, white ethnic groups,
fueled by more than a few intellectuals, did proliferate.  Certainly,
ethnic assertion spread among the educated, the professionals, and the
clergy--with a not-inconsiderable assist from the mass media, which
amplified the sense of a collision between ethnic whites and blacks.

Any combination of white motives was possible.  Resentment and fear
said: if blacks were "getting theirs," the only way to compete for
political and cultural goods--especially in a stagnant or shrinking job
market--was to declare fealty to one's own lineage and fight back.
Rivalry said: if blacks were combining to demand jobs in previously
protected occupations (say, among Italian construction workers or Irish
plumbers), whites had to work to define themselves as an oppressed or
overlooked group, and the language with which one accomplishes that, in
American culture, is the language of ethnicity.  Admiration coupled with
envy said: blacks are becoming adept at feeling whole.  They are ceasing
to look outside themselves for confirmation that they matter.  We can
learn from them.  All these feelings combined to say: look at the pride
that comes from ethnic assertion; and anyway, to be strictly an
unhyphenated American is not enough.  Certainly, the shine had worn off
the old undifferentiated American identity.  America's political,
racial, and cultural seams showed so evidently.  At times, resentment
and admiration of blacks were hard to disentangle.

The ethnic whites were choosing to be ethnic.  They embraced what
Herbert J.  Gans called "symbolic ethnicity." Ethnicity was legitimate
when whiteness as such was not.  If American blacks were identifying
with Africa, why shouldn't American Italians identify with Italy,
American Poles with Poland?  Whiteness had been a gift to European
immigrants , but it was a check that the second and third generations
were reluctant to cash--it reeked of racism.  Ethnicity, on the other
hand, was becoming the common coin of the realm.  It was an approved way
to be a special American.  At a time when an unmodified American
identity was losing its moral and adhesive force, many younger whites
insisted that they had ethnicities too; even that they were ethnic
before they were anything else.

They looked to discarded or superseded values of ethnic solidarity to
oppose the fatuities of suburban and television culture.  Jews whose
fathers had changed their names proudly resumed the names of the
grandfathers--the son of the popular novelist Irving Wallace becoming
David Wallechinsky, for example.  If they had spent part of their
childhoods in urban ethnic enclaves, they stamped those old stomping
grounds, after the fact, with sepia virtue.  If they had grown up
deethnicized in the suburbs, they enjoyed a trip to their grandparents'
old neighborhoods, to Little Italy or the Lower East Side, at least for
a weekend nosh.  They wanted the chicken fat, the kielbasa, the cannoli
that Ozzie and Harriet hadn't served.  Many wanted even more than the
secular signs of ethnicity--they wanted the old-time religion.

In other words, the grandchildren of turn-of-the-century European
immigrants by now felt sure enough of their Americanness that they were
free to revolt against it--symbolically.  Just as a certain affluence
purchased the power to revolt against affluence, so did a certain
security breed a desire to compound one's identity, to be something
other than a generic "American." It was the Jews, among white ethnics,
who insisted on their hyphens first.  Their motives were complex, but
one important element was a recoil--even many radicals recoiled--when
black militants with whom they had worked for civil rights sided with
the Palestinians in the wake of the Six Day War of 1967 and declared
Zionism a central enemy of the "Third World Revolution." Jews felt the
shock spumed lovers feel.  Then, the Jews of New York City, the largest
and most influential single bloc of American Jews, were traumatized by
the black anti-Semitism that surfaced during a prolonged and bitter
teachers' strike in 1968-69, when Jewish teachers found themselves
pitted against black parents.  The teachers, major carriers of prestige
and achievement for the Jewish community, had only recently unionized
after years of subordination by WASP and Irish school officials.  They
were liberal, in

the main.  But from the militant black point of view, they stood in the
way of "community control." Now they heard black activists tell them to
step aside and relinquish the power and legitimacy they had struggled
for.

The insult helped galvanize Jewish identity just as anti-Italian slurs
helped mobilize Italians.  But such ethnic identity was not necessarily,
not altogether, defensive.  It could also be assertive, an affirmation
of peoplehood, a declaration of faith in the virtues of the community.
The established Jewish organizations turned to the cause of Soviet Jews.
Why, they asked, should Jews cultivate black radicals who were, in any
event, rejecting them and damning their national liberation movement,
Zionism, when there were Jews in trouble?  Then too, many Jewish
radicals were already beginning to think and speak of themselves in
reverse order, as radical Jews.  Radical Jewish Unions began to form at
Berkeley and other campuses.

The radical activist Arthur Waskow wrote a radical Passover Haggadah
just after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and held the
first Freedom Seder in 1969.  A national meeting of
Jewish-radicals-cum-radical-Jews followed.  These Jews, deeply
identified with the fight for black rights, now felt the need to
approach that fight as representatives of their own community.  That was
the only way to have standing.

Jews in America had long held to a relatively strong sense of cultural
separateness; what was striking, during the late 1960s and early 1970s,
was that considerable numbers of other whites felt comparable impulses.
"!  think those of us in the ethnic bag can learn from the blacks about
the importance of cultural identity," wrote the prominent Monsignor Geno
Baroni in 1970.

"We are beginning to celebrate our differences instead of insisting that
everybody has to be the same." Emulation was a tangled impulse: it
sublimated a widespread white resentment at being blamed for the racial
oppression of blacks.  But emulation was not the only motive.  A host of
white ethnic Americans found it insufficiently clarifying,
insufficiently forceful, insufficiently "meaningful" to be white.
However much they or their families might have benefited from being
white, they felt enough sympathy with blacks not to want to pride
themselves simply on being members of the ruling race.  Many also felt a
marginality that was scarcely grasped by the label "white." They longed
to belong to more distinct, better-defined and -defended tribes.  They
wanted to recover the histories of their peoples, wanted their children
to be transfixed by those

stories, wanted them taught in the schools.  Bumper stickers and lapel
buttons proclaimed the virtues of Polishhess or declared: "Kiss Me, I'm
Italian." Ethnicity offered pride and victimization, assertion without
the need for defensiveness.

The new white ethnicity was not a simple resumption of the traditional
urban American, largely working class alignments of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.  It did not have many links with the "old
country." The new ethnicity was articulated by upwardly mobile
intellectuals who did not reside in homogeneous neighborhoods.  It did
not require marriage or friendship within the tribe, or work within the
family trade.  It did not accompany political machines.  It was not
passed down from the parents but borrowed from the grandparents.  It was
not so much inherited as chosen; not so much taken for granted as
flaunted.  And no small difference, the new ethnicity was modeled
on--even if at odds with--that of blacks.

"I want to have a history," declared Michael Novak, an antiwar
intellectual and theologian of Slovakian origin, in his pivotal
manifesto, The Rise of the Untocitable Ethnics, published in 1972.  "I
am born of PIGS--those Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs, those
non-English-speaking immigrants numbered so heavily among the workingmen
of this nation."

"In recent months," he wrote in a self-dramatizing chapter called
"Confessions of a White Ethnic,"

"I have experienced .  .  .  a willingness to think about feelings
heretofore shepherded out of sight," a sentiment he likened to the
liberation of women "to give tongue to their pain ....

The PIGS are not silent willingly.  The silence burns like hidden coals
in the chest."

"Where in America," he asked, "is there anywhere a language for voicing
what a Christian Pole in this nation feels?  ....  The recent increase
in Black, Chicano, and Indian consciousness," Novak added, "left other
ethnic groups in a psychologically confused state.  They are unable to
be WASPS; they have lost confidence in being themselves." Black demands,
moreover, burdened the white ethnics far in excess of the likely
rewards.  The children bused to remote schools for the sake of
integration were not the children of the lawyers who won the lawsuits
but the children of hard-hats.  Why pick on them?  Their ancestors were
not slaveown-ers, though they may have been serfs.

Novak was on his way to a neoconservative backlash, but had not yet

arrived.  He lamented the fact that the Left was making a mistake
"conceding] the [white] ethnic voter to the conservative movement," and
leaped to the assumption that "we are, in a word, ineffably ethnic in
our values and our actions." Left-wing intellectuals, WASPS and Jews,
deprived him and his coethnicists of their dignity.  "Why do the
educated classes find it so difficult to want to understand the man who
drives a beer truck, or the fellow with a helmet working on a site
across the street with plumbers and electricians, while their
sensitivities race easily to Mississippi or even Bedford-Stuyvesant?"

There was, however, little proof that the truck driver was brimming with
ethnic sentiment.  In the climate of the early 1970s, he was probably
more likely to be feeling his whiteness--an issue Novak skirted.  He was
also, as Novak did note, feeling his patriotism.  "To ethnics, America
is almost a religion.  The flag alone proves that they are not stupid,
cloddish, dull, but capable of the greatest act men can make: to die for
others.  The flag is not a patriotic symbol only.  It is the symbol of
poor and wretched people who now have jobs and homes and liberties.  It
is a symbol of transcendence.

Many millions proved that they were men, not PIGS, by expressing a
willingness to die beneath those colors ....  'I AM AN AMERICAN!" How
many humiliations were endured until one could say those words and not
be laughed at by nativists." They wrapped themselves in the flag, in
Novak's view, because without it they were naked and cold.

Novak overlooked evidence that, for all their patriotism, the less
educated were more likely to oppose the war than the more educated.  But
even if his "unmeltable ethnics" were more complex than he said, he did
see how unnerving it was for many white ethnics to watch their flag
disgraced-right there on television---on the streets of their own
cities.  No wonder these people were bitter.  No wonder that, in the
1970s, they were ready to contemplate voting Republican, something their
parents and grandparents could scarcely have imagined.  No wonder they
reviled the McCarthy-McGovern side of the Democratic party, which
represented, in their eyes, the alliance of the overeducated and the
undereducated (meaning blacks) against the middle, the plain folks, the
meat-and-potatoes, no-nonsense Americans.  Many of these men felt that
the muscle and bone of their political party was going soft, deserting
the sturdy likes of Hubert Humphrey and Henry (Scoop) Jackson.  And if
their party had made a mistake committing their glory and treasure in
the cause of a bad war, well, that was a bad policy, a policy to be
changed, which is how Americans did things, and since they were nothing
if not loyal, since their families had scratched and clawed to get them
as far as they had gotten, just because their flag had been carried into
the wrong action didn't mean that they were going to turn their backs on
that flag.

In his exaggerations, Novak observed--and furthered--the central paradox
of the so-called ethnic revival: the more ethnic the children of
Slovakian and Hungarian and Italian and Irish immigrants purported to
be, the more American they felt.  Claiming to be unmeltable, they would
melt, they hoped, into the American majority.  An American was someone
who arrived on these shores and worked feverishly to become an American.
In this view, not old-line Mayflower WASPS but immigrants were the true
carriers of Americanism.  What Americans melted into was a country that
knew itself to be touched by God because of the ordeal of melting into
it.

Nationalism through difference, difference through nationalism: this was
yet more fuel for the romance of identities.

4.  The Separatist Impulse

Identity politics based on race spawned identity politics based on
ethnicity. The same model was adopted by the women's and gay liberation
movements in 1968-69.  The spirit of the New Left released long
dammed-up forces of revolt.  Subordination on the basis of sex and
sexuality became the basis for a liberationist sequence: first, the
discovery of common experience and interests; next, an uprising against
a society that had imposed inferior status; finally, the inversion of
that status, so that distinct qualities once pointed to as proof of
inferiority were transvalued into the basis for positive distinction. It
is only this third stage--where the group searches for and cultivates
distinctive customs, qualities, lineages, ways of seeing, or, as they
came to be known, "cultures"--that deserves to be called identity
politics.  The motif of participatory democracy had been: Citizenship
requires direct decision-making.  This was not practical.  What was
practical was identity politics, which affirmed that

the basis for public life is membership in a group that has been
stigmatized, a trustworthy group sufficiently compact for comfort.  In
the view from the universalist rearview mirror, the result was
fragmentation and the sense of an ending.  To forward-looking partisans,
it was a new departure, a route to liberation.

The women's movement that spun away from the New Left was fueled by
ample and legitimate grievances against discrimination.  Women who were
at first rebels within the larger movement soon went their separate way
under the banner of "women's liberation"--in part because many men
dismissed their grievances as laughable or diversionary.  But the
separatist dynamic at work was more than strictly reactive.  It started
with women's pent-up grievances but soon discovered the rapture of
declaring psychic independence from men.  In the revolutionist mood,
they met in "consciousness-raising" groups, felt the exhilaration of
developing a common vocabulary, justified their rage with analogies to
black liberation.  The early activists prided themselves on being young,
despising the conventional family, and bearing a generational animus
against the mothers of the 1950s, whom they saw as victims of men, of
the housewife role, and indeed of "the family" as an institution.  The
young women of the "second wave" burned to transform life in the
bedroom, the kitchen, the nursery, the classroom.  In a time of
apocalyptic ideas about total transformation, they moved their
revolutionary animus from capitalism and imperialism to patriarchy.  In
the revolt against a liberalism they experienced as
paternalistic--perhaps even maternalistic--these radical women also
arrayed themselves against the feminists of their mothers' generation,
who were preoccupied with equality on the job and in wages.

Quickly, gay liberation welled up along similar lines--first, in
selfdefense, against the brutalities of the police and the humiliations
of the closet, then as claimant to a distinct culture founded precisely
on the category, homosexuality, that had been crystallized, demonized,
and repressed.  The closet was full of fear, guilt, and self-loathing,
and the joy of leaving it became the core of a new sensibility.  The new
identity was: gay.  In bohemian neighborhoods, gays developed a
territorial base, with a matrix of bars, associations, publications,
theaters, churches, writers, comedians, professional services, and
eventually political representatives. Gayhess became a sort of ethnicity
with its own codes of recognition,

rituals, parades, sacred days, even its own flag with a rainbow motif.
As with women, the generational divide was reproduced.  So was the
tension between reformers, who opposed discrimination, and
liberationists, who multiplied theories and practices of sexual
identity.  So was separate organization by sex.  So was the
appropriation and inversion of the language of abuse, so that a term
like "flaming faggot" could be repossessed, turned into an affirmation
of pride.

The dynamism and pride of the gay and lesbian worlds were matched, and
then some, by the women's movement.  Just as blacks had seceded from
white society, so did many women try to create a world apart from men.

The point was to become a "woman-identified" woman.  If some of the
early women's liberation theorists sometimes spoke of separatism as a
stage of self-development that would precede the resumption of a
politics with men, this proved little more than a sentimental wish.  The
truth was that there was, in the rhetoric of the time, "no going back"
from a separatism of spirit.  For some women, willed "political
lesbianism" was the logical consequence of going it alone; for others,
there was the more diffuse "women's culture," institutionalized in
journals and newsletters, in popular music and writing, in networks of
bookstores and bars--and eventually in battered women's shelters,
"women's spaces," and university women's studies programs.  Even before
the women's movement settled into the academy, the search was on for a
distinct women's sensibility to catch the electricity that was in the
air.  The search for heretics was also on, with an unftattering
psychology fastened onto those who broke ranks.  It was important not to
be a "queen bee," or "male-identified"--the equivalent of the
"self-hating" label affixed by conservative Jews on Jews of the Left.

In mainstream politics, women's caucuses and groups proved brilliantly
practical.  The reformers were able to convert "personal" grievances
into "political" issues.  They got results.  Laws were made, courts
became more responsive.  Women ascended to leadership in local and state
government, in the nonprofit sector, in many Protestant churches, and to
some degree in the private economy.  With women at work outnumbering
women at home, many discriminations fell by the wayside.  At schools and
universities, women were immensely energized.  In the pro-choice cause
and with respect to other reproductive rights, encapsulated

as "women's issues," they were more successful than not.  The result has
been a vast expansion of rights and a vast change in the social
condition of women, especially in the middle classes.  Outside the lower
depths of poverty--no small exception--American women have been able to
bring about more improvements than in any other quarter-century in
American, or perhaps any other, history.  The global repercussions have
likewise been profound.

The women's movement--like the gay and physically handicapped
movements--has resisted physical abuse and exclusion on every continent,
sometimes with great success.  It has been no easy thing to go public,
to fight against cultural odds, against insults and scorn, often against
physical violence.  The excluded did not inherit the morale with which
to press for the right not to be discriminated against; they had to win
it, against indifference and ridicule.  They had to acquire the right to
speak even against the prejudices of minority communities--thus the
title of Marlon Riggs's film about his life as a gay black man, Tongues
Untied. Interest groups had to organize against discrimination in hiring
and housing, to obtain Braille texts for the blind, signing and captions
for the deaf, and wheelchair access into public and private spaces.
Whatever their rhetorical excesses, these movements for civil rights
will long endure. Whatever their particularist rhetoric, they amount to
unprecedented triumphs for the universalization of the human right to be
different.

The demand for the right to be different opened up space for parallel
developments in the university.  Within academic professions, the civil
rights generation revolted against a scholarship that consigned the
racial caste system to the margins of American history and took male
power for granted.  The new social history of the 1960s was taken to
heart by a new generation of scholars.  Struggle, not paternalistic
generosity, succeeded to some degree in integrating both faculties and
subject matters in established departments.  Historians, sociologists,
anthropologists, psychologists, and literary scholars of women, as of
blacks and other groups, fleshed out the distinct worlds they had to
win--establishing that a population had been suppressed and silenced;
exhuming buried work and exploring the humanity and resistance of the
oppressed; trying to rethink society, history, and culture from the
vantage point of the silenced, and showing that the "flaws" in American
freedom were, in fact, at its core.

Entering faculties in large numbers, how could women and minorities fail
to transform the questions being debated?

From their endeavors flowed--and continue to flow--splendid
achievements.  Spurious wholes were decomposed, exposed as partial and
partisan.  Studies of women and labor, of African Americans and Native
Americans, of immigrants and racism mushroomed.  Two decades on,
histories of the world, of culture, and of literature are still shaking.
The most cosmopolitan practitioners made serious efforts--no easy
matter--to reintegrate the history the new critiques had torn asunder so
that the racial caste system, for example, would no longer be a
"peculiarity" off to the side of American history, an exceptional
sidebar to the main saga of freedom, but a central feature of national
life.  The Houghton Mifflin textbooks, for all their imperfections, are
among the fruits of these efforts.

But years of mainstream recalcitrance also fueled the forces of
separatism and fragmentation.  The arguments for distinct
African-American, Chicano, women's, Asian, and gay--now "queer"--studies
programs were considerable.  Before these programs existed, their
subjects were merrily neglected by mainline departments.  Now history,
sociology, English, and the rest have learned to be more ecumenical--a
net good, not only for the members of minority groups exploring various
histories, conditions, and literatures, but also for everyone else. This
is the deep value of multiculturalism.  The white American is ignorant
(of him or herself, not to mention the larger history) without knowing
the "people of color"; the man, the woman; the heterosexual, the
homosexual; the Western, the non-Western.  The student of any color who
does not read Douglass or Ellison misses the core of American history
and literature as much as the one who omits Hawthorne, Emerson,
Melville, Whitman, or Twain.  Serious multiculturalism is not a
children's party where party favors are passed out to everyone to
"celebrate" his or her "contribution"; it is reintegration into superior
syntheses.

But alongside such integration, academic cultures of separation began to
harden into fortified enclaves.  Why?  For one thing, there was ample
(if often embattled) room for the new programs in sprawling
institutions-"multiversities," Clark Kerr called them--that lacked any
intellectual center, that were used to appealing to a multitude of
constituencies, and

whose modus operandi was to accord new space to interest groups.  It is
convenient to grumble, with Roger Kimball and Richard Bernstein, that
the identity politics of the 1980s and 1990s is nothing but the reckless
politics of the 1960s left to ferment on campus for twenty years.  But
the conservatives, still blinded by the traumas of the late 1960s, miss
a crucial distinction.  The lion's share of the pioneering work of
historical reconstruction was done by scholars who had one foot in the
Old Left or the civil rights and antiwar movements and therefore came to
their specialties bearing something of a universalist or cosmopolitan
bent.  Historians of slavery like Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, Leon
Litwack, Lawrence W.  Levine, and Nathan Irvin Huggins; historians of
women like Gerda Lerner, Mary Ryan, Katherine Kish Sklar, Linda Gordon,
and Ruth Rosen--all had the experience of mass movements before the
separatist secessions and the hardening of identity boundaries.

But it was the late New Left politics of separatist rage, not the early
New Left politics of universalist hope, that nurtured their recruits,
the graduate students and young faculty who subsequently carried what is
either harshly or wishfully called "the politics of the Left" into the
academy and institutionalized (or interred) it there.  Identity politics
became an organizing principle among the academic cohorts who followed,
whose political experience, if any, began in the late 1960s or
thereafter.  Politics for them was the politics of interest
groups--however laced with revolutionary rhetoric.  By the time students
born in the late 1950s and 1960s arrived on campuses, identity politics
had become the norm of the "Left," the tradition of protest.  This
generation had no direct memory of a unified Left.  They had no feeling
for a mass movement connecting campuses with off-campus politics.  As
adults they had never breathed the air of a left-of-center Democratic
government.  Their experience of active politics was segmented, not
unified.  By 1975, the universalist Left was thoroughly
defeated--pulverized, in fact.  Defeat was pervasive, taken for granted.

Cut off from ecumenical political hopes, the partisans of identity
politics became preoccupied with what they might control in their
immediate surroundings--language and imagery.  Thus the singular
influence of literary and cultural studies and the virtually
self-satirizing obsession with rectifying the language of opponents.
Like the rest of American society,

the practitioners of identity politics resorted to ]egalistic regulation
to address social problems.  They had, by now, many laws and
administrative rulings on their side, and a tradition of fighting for
more.  Campaigning against pornography, they took up Puritan crusades
against unholy expression. They promulgated on-campus speech codes and
sought to regulate dating.  Fights over appropriate language, over
symbolic representation in curriculum and cuisine, were to them the core
of "politics." Affirmative action substituted for economic
reconstruction.  The new academic Left tended to mistake strong language
for steady, consequential political engagement.  They spoke confidently,
belligerently, of "disruptions,"

"subversions,"

"ruptures,"

"contestations." The more their political life was confined to the
library, the more their language bristled with aggression.

The distinct identity groupings on campus, once institutionalized, found
reasons to remain distinct.  They radiated savoir faire and solidarity.
They seemed to offer the satisfactions of intellectual companionship and
political passion at the same time--a heady mixture.  Having struggled
to overcome silences, they developed their own methods of silencing.
They were uncomfortable with self-contradiction and individual
difference.  They closed ranks and protected turf, for their struggle
was never-ending.  Identities, however strenuously declared, remained
embattled, ever in need of shoring up.  Separatism was no longer a stage
on the way to some sort of intellectual and political reconciliation; it
was an institution and an intellectual given.  Difference was vital,
cornmortality moribund. Demands for race and gender blindness and
inclusion tipped toward demands for all-consuming race and gender
consciousness.  Difference was practiced, commonality barely even
thought.

For the participants, the benefits of the pursuit of identity were
manifold: a sense of community, an experience of solidarity, a
prefabricated reservoir of recruits.  Identity groups offered ready-made
acquaintanceship. From the outside, they seemed bonded.  From inside the
identity groups, the world looked whole.  Try telling someone who feels
the hunger for wholeness that this is a totalitarian principle, that he
or she had better get used to the overlap and complexity of attachments.

The result on campus was identity politics--the recognition of a
collective hurt, followed by the mistaking of a group position for a
"culture,"

followed by the mistaking of a "culture" for a politics.  In a world
where other people seemed to have chosen sides, and where, worse, they
approached you---even menaced you---on the assumption that you were what
your identity card proclaimed you to be, it seemed a necessity to find
one's strength among one's people.  From popular culture to government
policy, the world had evidently assigned its memberships.  Identity
politics aimed to turn necessity to virtue.  The demand for the respect
for difference--for what came to be called multiculturalism---often
swerved into the creation of parallel monocultures.  Since the demands
of identity politics were far more winnable in the university than
elsewhere, the struggles of identity groups flourished there.  The
damage was both intellectual and political.  For the recruits, the
fierce pleasures of identity politics outweighed the rigors of
cosmopolitanism.  A political imperative to cut across academic
boundaries and address poverty and inequality in the larger world?  Not
of interest, not sexy.  Identity politics amounted to demobilization
into a cloister.

While the Right was occupying the heights of the political system, the
assemblage of groups identified with the Left were marching on the
English department.  They were seizing power in women's studies,
African-American studies, ethnic studies.  Insurgencies that began in
claims to dignity, recoveries from exclusion and denigration, developed
a hardening of the boundaries.  Isolated, frequently tenuous, scorned by
and hostile to the prevailing university culture, these programs
sustained a good deal of separatist rancor.  The best of these programs
were committed to cosmopolitanism and produced excellent scholarship,
though most of the best scholars found places among reformed departments
in the old-line disciplines.  Frequently, however, the separate programs
nurtured a "culture" of exultation and victimization (exultation through
victimization), a victimization the program felt itself, having to fight
for funds against the hostility of established departments.  They were
consumed with factional disputes so bitter that the more cosmopolitan
faculty frequently withdrew in sadness or disgust to their home
departments.

The appeal of identity politics to an incoming student is easy to
understand. Identity politics is already a tradition in its second
generation, transmitted, modified, and transmitted again,
institutionalized in departments and courses, supported by a critical
mass of faculty and a surrounding, permissive ambivalence, embedded in
living units, jargons, mentors, gurus, conferences, associations,
journals, publishing subfields, bookstore sections, and jokes.  By the
time they arrive on campus, especially an elite, cosmopolitan, private
campus, many students--particularly the political activists--have
already absorbed the spirit of hard-edged identity politics from the
media, secondary school, or home. Awaiting the perplexed is an identity
package--academic studies, perspectivist theory, identity politics,
social networks, "diversity" workshops--a whole world organized around
identity culture.  The newcomer arrives at the university disposed, in a
common formulation, "to learn about herself," rather than to learn about
the world and herself in it.  She finds encouragement.  She finds
exclusive identity groups for partying, dancing, listening to music in a
familiar style.  She finds the Black Sociology Association and the Asian
Business Association.

Protected by the academic superstructure as a relatively cheap
alternative to disruptive protest, the separate programs cultivate a
rapture of marginality.  "Difference feminism" becomes the order of the
day--not so much among feminists in the larger society as in the
protected enclaves of the academy.  Women's lives are said to be stalked
by the fear of rape and sexual harassment; by pornography; by the
tyranny of "compulsory heterosexuality"; by the imposition of
male-dominated logic over "women's ways of knowing." Single-race or
single-ethnicity living units are justified on the basis of the
hostility of dominant whites.  Black students, whether admitted through
affirmative action or not, frequently poorly prepared, feel the glare of
white suspicion, and huddle together in separate groups--leading to yet
more stigmatization.  A fraternity party that turns into a mock "slave
auction," a vicious misogynistic campaign against a feminist
activist--such disgusting incidents are interpreted as proofs of
endangerment.  The presumption is that embattled individuals and
perspectives need official protection within the walls of exclusive
precincts, that otherwise they are weak.

Nourishing separateness, the separatist programs find themselves in turn
vulnerable to protests by internal separatists.  At the University of
Michigan in 1991, a group of women of color walk out of a women's
studies course protesting that "only one-third" of the assignments were
written by women of color.  At the University of California, Davis, a
Native

American graduate student in a seminar on women's history complains that
a book about Italian-American workers does not discuss Native Americans.
A gay English professor at the University of Western Ontario in 1993
creates a course on literature by gays and lesbians, only to have the
lesbians walk out, claiming that he as a male has no right to teach
"their experience." In private, any honest defender of identity politics
acknowledges such "excesses"--an instant before pointing to the ways
they are exaggerated by journalists; and anyway, they are anecdotal, and
haven't right-wing writers and pundits gone overboard exaggerating their
like?

Feminists and leftists are loath to wash their dirty linen in public,
where the enemy may be out collecting data on their domestic habits. But
these incidents of small-mindedness and crude prejudice are legion,
whatever the politics of those who report them.

Sectarianism is the worm in the history of every all-or-nothing
movement. But this is sectarianism with a distinctive and self-consuming
logic.  For identity-based movements, the margin is the place to be.
Within each margin, there are always more margins to carve out.
Postmodernist thought confirms that there is no center; or rather, that
those who claim the center--who claim a common truth or even the
possibility that a common truth is attainable---are false
universalizers, colonizers, hegemonists.  The center, if there is one,
is the malevolent Other.  But this false centerwso the argument goes--is
only a margin in disguise.  The margins are bastions from which to
launch intellectual raids on a center that has no right to be central,
and has, moreover, lost confidence in itself.  Summoning philosophical
allies from Paris, the partisans of difference as a supreme principle
tack together a ramshackle unity based not so much on a universalist
premise or ideal as on a common enemy--the Straight White Male who,
trying to obscure his power and interests, disguises himself as the
human in "humanism." Within the identity groupings, humanism is dead, a
dirty word, a ghost that deserves to be put out of its misery.

The whole edifice of postmodem theorizing is topped by a spire flashing
a single slogan: "Objectivity," in the words of a Berkeley activist, "is
only another word for white male subjectivity." The reverence for
difference ossifies into uniformity.

5.  Culture as Surrogate Politics, Campus as Surrogate World

Accused of politicizing everything, identity politics responds that
politics is already everywhere; that interests dress up as truth but are
only interests; that power is already everywhere and the only question
is who is going to have it.

The slogan of choice derives from the late 1960s' women's movement: "The
personal is political." In origin, this was a rhetorical masterstroke.
That movement's early theorists pointed out that male domination had
entrenched itself precisely by excluding from political discussion key
questions about women's position.  Nobody voted that women should do the
lioness's share of the housework; the sexual division of labor was
simply taken for granted.  In the world of modern capitalism, the
segregation of private and public spheres was the master development
that consolidated the collective rule of men.  To insist that "the
personal is political" meant that a man's home was not his exclusive
castle, because it was a woman's castle as well.  Whatever men did to
women, like whatever whites did to blacks, was not private business; it
deserved to be brought into the open.  The domestic sphere was one of
power relations, and so such questions as who took care of the children,
who got to have orgasms, who cleaned the house, and who had the right to
family property were properly understood as matters of collective
power--properly subject to the actions of social movements and, in the
case of such issues as abortion and domestic abuse, government policy.
This was no mere theoretical flourish; it had great consequence.  In
subsequent decades, the conversion of sexual harassment into a crime and
the growing legal and police sensitivity to spousal abuse followed from
the insistence that "the personal is political."

It was this new understanding--not the French thinker Michel Foucault's
brilliance or his Gallic and gay aura--that accounts for the
post-Sixties academic fascination with the "poststructuralist" theory of
which Foucault remains the most influential representative.  Americans
not normally tempted by the arcana of social or philosophical theory,
least of all the thick and erudite French variety, flocked to Foucault's
lectures in the

1970s and early 1980s in New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, and
elsewhere.  Why was he all the rage and why has he remained so?  Only
partly because he was the Nietzschean lyricist of self-definition,
self-revolt, and self-transcendence, with particular reference to sex;
not solely because he was the all-knowledgeable master perspectivist on
a grand scale.

The other reason why Foucault became a compulsory reference point, if
not compulsory reading, was his insistence with great panache that every
sphere of life--every profession, indeed, every field of knowledge --was
saturated with power.  Knowledge was "power/knowledge." So-called
private relations were, in effect, ministates.  All relations were power
relations.  Culture was governed-or "constituted"--by discourses that
established who and what would be central or marginal, major or minor.
The personal was, in short, political--perhaps so much so as to be
nothing but political.  Language was political.  Clothing was political.
"Lifestyles"--and sexual styles--were political.  Whom one slept with,
and how, was who one was, which in turn was what one believed.  Indeed,
for Foucault, "resistance" was merely another aspect of power, the means
by which all-embracing power knew itself.  In this fundamentally
sadomasochistic world, resistance was swallowed up, doomed.  In a time
of political blockage on the broad scale, this was what the enclaves of
the academic Left wanted to hear.

Then university life could come to feel like a consolation prize.  If
the Right held political power, what did it matter?  This bad deal felt
even better than compensation.  It felt like an opportunity to change
life-immediate, lived life--through direct action.  And so the blurring
of the line between culture and politics perfectly suited the movements
that succeeded the New Left.  They had vernaculars, turfs, sectoral
music, and literature to protect and develop.  There were now enough
women and minorities at the university to feel like communities unto
themselves.  There were conferences to attend, journals to scrutinize,
theoretical tendencies to compete with.  From "the personal is
political" it was an easy glide to "only the personal is really
political"--that is, only what I and people like me experience ought to
he the object of my interest.  There was a swerve, in short, toward
conventional interest-group politics, paralleling the philosophical
swerve from universalism to the denial that any but group-bounded
perspectives were possible.  The universalism of the early women's
movement, which sought for women the rights and powers guaranteed for
all by the Enlightenment, yielded to a preoccupation with the inner life
of feminism and the distinct needs of feminists.

So, too, with people of color, especially blacks--the swerve from civil
rights, emphasizing a universal condition and universalizable rights, to
cultural separatism, emphasizing difference and distinct needs.
Affirmative action proved just successful enough to create a critical
mass of African Americans on campus who felt simultaneously heartened,
challenged, marooned, and embittered.  Having been told they were
nobodies, they were now in a position to insist that they were
somebodies.  Affirmative action helped propel many of them into the
academy, but now they felt intense pressure to justify themselves to
institutions that historically had despised them.  They were never done
proving themselves to a suspicious majority.  They were still the lower
caste in a caste system.  On top of the routine self-doubt stirred up in
a competitive culture, they had special rages to bear.  They had to
strain to prove themselves "the best blacks" when they still couldn't
get taxi drivers (including blacks) to stop or storekeepers to open
their doors.  Whites followed them suspiciously in shops, shot them
startled and hostile looks on the street, ran out of elevators to avoid
being alone with them, and went out of their way to try to prove that
they were inferior.  Suspected of receiving "special treatment," they
knew that even after graduation they would earn less than
whites--considerably less in the case of men.  And then whites lectured
them about the virtues of color blindness!  Whites had the luxury of
fancying themselves nonracial because they belonged to the ruling race.
Who but blacks could feel what they felt?  What was the alternative to
exclusive identity groups?

The dynamic of identity politics is self-confirming.  A people against
whom boundaries were drawn respond by fortifying those very boundaries.
The newcomers gain dignity: they are a "culture." Cultures are not to be
tampered with.  Cultures are entitled to respect, recognition.  By
insisting on culture, one fights the power.  Group secession undercuts
whites' (and others) opportunities to demonstrate openness and
tolerance,

whence they decry balkanization as if shocked, shocked, to discover it
was invented yesterday.* In the university even more than in the larger
society, prepackaged identities multiply.  Group agglomeration comes to
feel automatic.  When everyone else seems to have found a group to eat
with, party with, hang out with, and date, the newcomer feels the
pressure to find one as well--or suffer the discomfort of being
unmoored.  Even students who feel uneasy about the prefabricated
categories feel peer pressure to identify with one--for self-defense and
self-definition.  The group allays what is already an adolescent anxiety
about finding a place.  But the spread of identity-group culture
heightens that anxiety in the first place.

Under these pressures, even the definitive antigroup, the
None-of-the-Aboves, are driven to declare themselves a group.  As we
have seen, for all the profusion of identity politics, interfacial
liaisons have, since the 1960s, produced a fast-growing population that
fits poorly into the standard identity array.  So it is that, in the
Eighties, at the University of California, Berkeley, students of mixed
racial origin founded a Multi-racial Intercultural Student Coalition
(MISC).  They resented having to choose a single race or ethnicity on
application forms--yet knew that "Refuse to State" would disqualify them
from fellowships earmarked for members of specified minority groups.
Regarded with suspicion by the professedly "pure" (although
"pure-blooded" racial types are in fact rare), the mixed-race students
frequently date each other--becoming, in effect, an identity group, even
if the couple are by origins African-Korean or Japanese-Caucasian
Americans.  There is also a logic of fission.  Hyphenations proliferate.
Inside the lesbian group, African-American lesbians feel the need for
group recognition of their "distinct experience," whereupon those whose
lovers are African American decide likewise, and organize separately
from African Americans whose lovers are white .  .  .  and so on.  What
Freud called "the narcissism of small differences" is

* Group self-enclosure was apparently acceptable when it was arranged by
fraternities, sororities, and exclusive clubs, but in the hands of
blacks and other minorities it is suddenly all the rage to denounce
balkanization.

The term was trundled out by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), never known
for courageous fights against racial segregation in housing, schools, or
hiring, when, in 1993, he denounced President Clintoh's Justice
Department nominee Lani Guinier as "an architect of a theor), of racial
preference that if enacted would push America down the road of racial
balkanization."

relentless.  "Diversity" insists that everyone march in lockstep while
proclaiming how different they are.

Self-encapsulation develops apace, especially at institutions with large
minority populations.  At Berkeley in April 1990, a two-day student
strike took place for accelerated race-based hiring and admissions.  In
the days leading up to the strike, the organizers made little effort to
explain their demands, let alone defend them.  I was teaching an
introductory sociology lecture course contrasting the 1960s with the
1980s, and was that day scheduled to screen The Times of Harvey Milk, a
film about the assassinated gay San Francisco politician.  I told the
class instead that I would simply meet with any students who showed up
to discuss the strike issues.  Only about 20 out of some 450 did, though
they were of every racial description.  A group of strikers strode to
the back of the hall and started to shout.  I invited them to join the
discussion.  A black man yelled: "We're dying out there!" This line has
echoed in my mind often since.  I asked him, "How is admitting more
black students and hiring more black faculty going to stop the dying out
there?" There was no response.

Most of the violence of the black ghetto is either a historical
consequence of slavery and poverty--infant mortality, preventable
disease--or the direct result of young black men killing other young
black men in the course of criminal activity.  The desperate economic
condition of the inner cities, exacerbated by the drug trade, bears the
stamp of racial oppression, though if it were not blacks bearing the
burden of unemployment, it would be some other Americans.  Black upward
mobility from, or into, the middle class is much to be desired for its
own sake.  In the meantime, the black poor are left desperate and the
residents demoralized.  Few political campaigns are launched against the
impoverishment of the cities.  No off-campus political coalitions are
asking for student support.  There is little belief that politics can
touch, no less bind, the deep wounds of inequality.  In the hothouse of
the campus, the diversity rhetoric of identity politics shortcircuits
the necessary discussion of what ought to be done about all the dying
out there.  Along the way, it is convenient to accuse a liberal
professor of racism, to campaign against a campus newspaper that
publishes a conservative columnist, to vent anger against a pliant
university administration.

In 1992, the sociology department at Berkeley set out to hire an
assistant professor to teach race and ethnic relations.  The faculty
voted to offer the position to Lo„c Wacquant, a well-qualified young
French scholar who had written several books, published scores of
articles, and collaborated with two distinguished sociologists: Pierre
Boutdieu of the College de France, and William Julius Wilson of the
University of Chicago.  Himself white--one of his competitors was
Japanese American--Wacquant had written his dissertation under Wilson on
the world of black boxers.  To do so, he had joined a black gym and
learned to box.  The normally contentious Berkeley faculty voted
unanimously in his favor.  In doing so, the department overrode strong
objections from many outspoken graduate students (a) that the candidate
did not specialize in race and ethnic relations (though Wacquant had
written a monograph on relations between French colonists and natives in
New Caledonia and many articles on the political economy of the American
black ghetto); (b) that he had applied fifty-nine days late (true, but
the university had never been a stickler for deadlines); (c) that he was
arrogant and a bad listener (never an impediment to faculty hiring); and
(d) that this particular position had for two decades focused on Chicano
studies, and neither of its two previous occupants had gotten tenure,
thereby demonstrating the faculty's contempt for that field.  The
opinion was voiced that the previous holder of the Chicano studies
position, a popular teacher whose tenure case had become mired in
controversy and who had subsequently accepted a position elsewhere, had
run into trouble because he was a self-declared homosexual.  In fact,
this professor's gayhess never played any part in his tenure fight, but
the activists, feeling wounded and convinced that the faculty was
indifferent to their desires, were not inclined to give the faculty the
benefit of the doubt.  They were more impressed that the faculty was
majority white--and unimpressed that it was the most racially integrated
department on campus.

Enraged activist graduate students organized a weeklong boycott of
graduate classes.  This was the students' deepest political investment
in many years.  A rhetoric of justice, inflamed by a general sense of
neglect, was coupled with a legalistic concern about deadlines and a not
very radical preference for academic specialization.  That Wacquant
would be the only member of the department from abroad, knowledgeable
about racial and ethnic relations on several continents, was not a
"diversity" that interested them.

I sat down for lunch during the class boycott with two anti-Wacquant
graduate student activists and pointed out a flock of factual errors,
not to mention tendentious interpretations, in their leaflet.  "There is
no 'truth,'" one of them, a very, intelligent woman, said, "there are
only truth effects." "Truth effects": here was postmodernist nihilism
come home.  She meant that propositions are no more than rhetorical,
"discourse all the way down," judged "true" only arbitrarily.  But why
should there be universities, other than to convey status and take
unemployed youth off the streets, if all they do is hurl around
transient and arbitrary statements?

The university administration had no official view of truth effects. But
it did, of course, hold its procedures to be precious.  Although it was
not in the habit of rejecting departmental hiring decisions because of
late applications, it was afraid of litigation on procedural grounds and
eager to cool out the protest.  Given racial changes in the student
body, the administration feared the prospect of endless volatility:
Asian Americans charging discrimination (there had already been
litigation and a congressional investigation to this effect), African
Americans and Chicano/Latinos angry at their underrepresentation
relative to state population, and whites complaining in both
directions--each activist group at odds with the others as university
funds were shrinking.  Conservative administrators from University of
California President David Gardner on down were aware that state
demographics were ticking away.  Sooner or later, they feared, the
legislature would abandon the university unless it shed the impression
of a white skew.  The Berkeley administration ruled that the sociology
search had to be reopened.* It was.  Wacquant reapplied on

* What was at work at Berkeley was routine bureaucratic timidity and
politicking rather than the sympathy for identity politics that often
plays a part in campus injustice elsewhere.  In one egregious 1993 case,
two students at Vassar College were, on less than five days' notice,
brought up on the charge of harassing a gay activist by leaving a
scurrilous message on his answering machine.  They were prohibited from
bringing their parents or attorneys into the hearing room, and were
testified against by the very administrator who had brought the charges.
They were refused permission to bring forth evidence that the accuser
had previously identified another student as the perpetrator, only to
have withdrawn that charge under the threat of legal action.  They were
refused permission to conduct a voice analysis of a tape that the
administration had already played in living units in an effort to
identify the offender.  One of the students charged, conveniently Arab
American, was found guilty of collusion with the other, a white leftist,
who was himself found guilty of nothing.  Finding

time and the department chose him again.  This time the faculty vote was
less than unanimous, but still overwhelming.  The students, now
fatalistic and distracted by a campaign to defend their interests as
teaching assistants, did not resume their protest.

The point is this: the Wacquant boycott was the main activity of the
activist "Left" during a year when California's state government was
savaging the budget for all levels of education.  Student fees (the
official California euphemism for tuition) had been rising fast, more
than doubling within four years.  As a result, many eligible students of
color, among others, were being deprived of a college education. Against
these cuts, there was virtually no public protest from students at
Berkeley or at any other California campus.  Against cuts in public
schools, the same silence prevailed.  Not until the Republicans seized
the national initiative with the midterm elections of November 1994,
slashing welfare, school aid, and other domestic measures, did campus
identity groups federate around a program of common opposition on issues
reaching off-campus.  But the protest against Wacquant--how sweet it was
to focus on faculty treachery close at hand!  The campaign was
overloaded with symbols; it made for confrontation; it might be winnable
to boot.  The episode was reminiscent of the story of the fool on his
hands and knees searching the sidewalk under a streetlight.

"What are you looking for?" asks a passerby.  "My watch."

"Where did you lose it?  ....  Over there," says the fool, pointing to
the other side of the street.  "Then why are you looking here?" asks the
passerby.  "Because it's dark over there," says the fool.

It's dark over there in the world of devastated and desperate
neighborhoods. Even on campus, fees rise, courses vanish, jobs for
graduates dwindle.  The national political scene is forbidding.  The
public at large has little confidence that problems can be solved by
government action.  Even Americans unpersuaded by Ronald Reagan that
"government is not

himself ostracized, however, the latter dropped out of Vassar and
transferred elsewhere.  In the Vassar case, among others, campus
administrators who support the extreme conduct codes, "diversity"
workshops, and occasional witch hunts of identity politics frequently
draw credentials from the movements of the 1960s, and are therefore
assumed to have been activists themselves.  But in general, these
administrators were peripheral to those far-off campus struggles.  More
to the point is that insofar as they owe their positions to affirmative
action, they are reluctant to offend identity activists.

the solution, government is the problem," lack the faith that anyone
knows what to do about cities, jobs, education, or race relations.  For
all that conservatives argue for good old-fashioned culture, there is no
prospect that "traditional family values" can actually heal a broken
society.  (After all, many blacks believe in parental toughness, and
welfare mothers want jobs, to no avail.)  What is lacking is not so much
values as the means to implement them.

But not until an emergency befell them--not until the Republican
offensive of the spring of 1995-did activists mobilize, on campus or
off, any attractive political force that cut across identity boundaries.
Not that there has been any shortage of students who long to "make a
difference" in the world off campus.  In vast numbers, probably
comparable to the 1960s, volunteers tutor, teach, work in homeless
shelters.  Their numbers are all the more striking given the high
percentage of college students who have to hold down jobs while going to
school.  "Service" is the unheralded youth movement of the 1990s.  But a
politics aimed at changing institutions does not appeal to these
hands-on activists.  The idea of sweeping change seems abstract, futile.
They don't want grand designs, they want palpable results.  The
volunteers have little faith that they, or anyone, can transform the
larger social order.  Many are politically conservative, or indifferent,
and do not look to the government to improve matters.  There is a sharp
divide between them and the practitioners of identity politics.  Yet
both camps implicitly accept the belief that nothing much can be done
about poverty.  Talk about silences!

6.  The Profusion of Identities

Identity politics is not an alien excrescence.  It is as American as the
panoply of pies in the supermarket freezer.  The multiplication of
ethnicities stems from more than three centuries of human imports,
starting with slaves.  The campus centrifuge is the result of a
long-deferred opening up of the professional classes.  So is identity
politics on the national scene, the demand that women and minorities be
represented as such in government positions.  This much excoriated
emphasis is, in one sense, an extension of the normal pluralism of
American politics--the practice of

balancing tickets, for example, between North and South, urban and
rural, Protestants and Catholics.  On top of such rituals, the 1960s
movements popularized identity labels; sociology played a part, too,
popularizing the concepts of "identity,"

"roles,"

"ethnicity"--describing a sense of social life that many people already
intuited, helping make it legitimate and turn it to cant in rapid
sequence.  Who knows how many people would have told interviewers about
their ethnic feelings if the intenTiewers hadn't asked in the first
place?

But the contemporary passion for difference is also the consequence of
unsettled psychological states.  The American pace of change constantly
eats away at identity--and just as reliably kicks up materials for the
manufacture, the stitching together, of new possibilities.  The search
for hard-edged social identities is surely an overcompensation.
Americans have gravitated toward racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and
subcultural distinctions partly to build ramparts against confusion.
They long to locate what T.  S.  Eliot called "a fixed point in the
turning world." In fact, firmness of identity is hard to come by--so
much so that the psychologist Robert Jay Lifton has rightly identified
one of today's dominant psychological types as "protean." Shape-shifting
is normal.  All this diffuseness and flux is unnerving.  An intolerance
for one's own confusion generates a frantic search for hard-and-fast
identity labels.  Beneath the flux, America has developed the
countertendency toward a fundamentalist identity culture.

None of this is new, but in recent decades the pressures on traditional
identities have mounted.  The stabilities that cultivate firm (what
David Riesman called "inner-directed") character have grown feeble.
Old-line churches have lost their hold on religious life, to be replaced
by the more up-to-date.  Partly to find solid ground to rest on, legions
of believers find solace in returning to fundamentals.  They are--and
what is this if not an identity that refuses identity?--"born-again." At
the same time, family ties and gender roles have loosened.
Correspondingly, the churn of identity has grown more rapid.  Increases
in divorce and remarriage, cohabitation and illegitimacy, multiple
parentage, and a growing diversity of ethnic and religious attachments
make for recombinant families.  The forms of personality that develop
within the crucible of the family develop

in more complicated ways.  Children find many--or no--models of
adulthood in their vicinity.  They belong to several families at a time,
each of which makes its demands, requires its negotiations, incites its
rebellions, and none of which makes unrivaled claims.  The unsettling of
American families, in turn, contributes to the disarray of other
traditional fixities.  One fruit of the feminist revolution is that
there are today a larger number of legitimate ways of being female and
male.  The old strict polarities persist-homemaker versus breadwinner,
frail versus muscular, emotional versus rational--but alternatives are
visible.  Many women and men mix and match the dizzying variants of
gender identity.

What is "Americanization" into this churning nation, so multiplic-itous,
baggy, and overall purposeless?  The choices multiply, the vertigo
grows, an0 the market offers an apparently endless array of
choices-Identities Lite.  The "other-directed" personality, predisposed
to rely on peers and the mass media for identity cues, was identified by
David Riesman almost half a century ago, but today this radar-driven
modern, always in search of cues as to the right thing to feel or think,
finds a bewildering variety of others to be directed by.  The media rain
down a storm of styles.

Taste revision is routine.  Thanks to remote control devices, niche
television, Internet chat groups, and specialized magazines, not only do
style choices multiply, so does the ease of knowing what other styles
are available and coasting from one to another.  Media saturation and
the marketing of youth culture institutionalize the cues for
selftransformation into a veritable rebellion industry.  Today's media,
organized

by targeted markets and consumption subcultures, capitalize on identity
boundaries.  Cable television drops black, Spanish-language, and other
ethnically distinct programming schedules into more than 60 percent of
American homes.  Although ethnic marketing campaigns are nothing new, a
considerable distance has been traveled from the "You don't have to be
Jewish to love Levy's" rye bread ads of the Fifties to Gatorade's
"iLleno de Gusto!" in the Nineties.  Half of the Fortune 1000 companies
have ethnic marketing campaigns.  Procter & Gamble puts 5 percent of its
massive advertising budget into ethnic-specific ads.  AT&T advertises in
twenty different languages.  Today it remains true that immigrants want
to assimilate, but the America into which they hope to do so

is not the America of white bread.  It is an America where the
supermarket shelves groan beneath the varieties of bagels, sourdough,
rye, seven-grain, and other mass-produced loaves.  One belongs by being
slightly different, though in a predictable way.

Now, too, there are material incentives for preserving, or claiming, a
version (however lite) of ethnic, racial, or religious identity, many of
which, today, are paradoxical.  Partly because the state legitimizes
labels and allocates resources accordingly, people affirm them.  "Ethnic
pride" develops even where ethnicities have just been invented.  "Asian
American" is a newly devised category, and can therefore hardly be said
to be a "culture" transmitted from generation to generation.  What does
it describe?  Race--a substitute for the widely disliked term
"Oriental"?  If it describes the continent of national origin, should
immigrants from the South Asian subcontinent be classified "Asian
American"?  If the category is cultural, does it make sense to group
third-generation Japanese Americans with Hmong tribesmen, educated
Koreans, and the newly arrived Hong Kong poor?  People sort and resort
themselves, even with respect to claims that, if they are to have any
meaning, must logically be matters of fixed inheritance.  The number of
Americans reporting themselves as "American Indian" or "Native American"
in the census grew by 255 percent between 1960 and 1990--from 552,000 to
1,959,000.  Most of the growth must be among "new Indians," people
choosing--or admitting to-the label.  Between 1980 and 1990, the number
of Cajuns leaped from 30,000 to 600,000, and the number of French
Canadians from 780,000 to 2,200,000, while the number claiming French
ancestry fell from 13 million to 10 million.

If "culture" means anything, it is something that persists.  But how
long must it persist before it qualifies, and who is to say?  Only in a
fast-food setting, in a society that manufactures novelty, can one speak
so casually of "hip-hop culture,"

"rock culture,"

"Asian-American" or "European-American culture." The invention of
identity is easily mocked for its vagaries and inconsistencies.  Yet an
insurgent "culture" may succeed in winning the loyalty of large numbers
of people, and at the start, who knows just how deeply it will reach,
and for how long?  The Deaf movement, barely one generation old, is
representative of the strengths of post-1960s "ethnicization." The
practice of capitalizing Deaf signifies more

than a new respect for the those who cannot hear: it has become a sign
of activism, with a popular base, with heroes and histories.  It
includes a commitment to American Sign Language, an active bilingualism,
a call for representation (marked in 1988 by the successful demand that
the incoming president of Gallaudet University in Washington be a deaf
person).  It extends as far as the rejection of cochlear implants that
are intended to restore a certain degree of hearing.  The claim to a
Deaf culture is, today, no laughing matter.

Are multiculturalism and identity politics nothing more than the
impassioned reinvention of the ethnic- and religion-based local politics
of a bygone era?  Are universities, art museums, textbooks, and
publishers' segmented lists today's equivalents of the working-class
cities, with their foreign-language newspapers and specialized cuisines,
where political tickets had to be balanced among the Irish, the
Italians, and the Jews, and Nelson Rockefeller conspicuously wolfed down
his knishes in Brooklyn on his way to the governor's mansion in Albany?

In certain ways, contemporary identity politics does resemble
traditional pluralism, but there are crucial differences between today's
obsessive elevation of difference and the long-standing ethnic diversity
of the northern and midwestern cities.  The old mixed-ethnic urban slate
was meant to create a working majority in politics; today's cultivation
of cultural difference tends to detract from majoritarian thinking.
Nothing is more responsible for the current impasse than the black-white
divide, which is unlike any other.  White Americans may not be frozen in
their attachment to white supremacy, but the difference that does not
melt is the yawning gulf, in opportunities and neighborhoods, in ways of
life and worldviews, between black and white.

In fact, one result of the ethnic revival was to eclipse the uniqueness
of the African-American experience.  Once ethnicity was everywhere, it
was, in a sense, nowhere, and the black experience was rhetorically
neutralized. This blur was frequently well-meaning but it was also
misleading, even euphemistic.  It obscured the special antagonisms and
discriminations that whites had imposed on blacks for more than three
centuries.  Black-white disparities in social condition remained sui
generis, and they were likely to prove more intractable than any other
racial or ethnic conflicts, past or present.  For many blacks, the idea
of

multiculturalism, then, at first looked like something of a shield.  If
white racism had victimized many besides blacks, it was more
convincingly criticized.  The proliferation of "difference" and the
rhetoric of multiculturalism permitted blacks to deflect the charge that
they sought "special treatment." They could present themselves as one
color in the rainbow.

But considering how important "difference" is supposed to be, this
notion of "people of color" erased too many differences.  In contrast to
that of American-born blacks, in many respects the experience of today's
Asian and Latin American immigrants--even black immigrants from the
Caribbean--is closer to that of European immigrants a century ago.  They
confront discrimination fueled by economic distress.  They cope with
deprecation.  They fight over scarce resources.  But the black-white
racial script, throughout its variations, carries a charge that was
lacking from nineteenth century tensions between, say, the native-born
and the Irish or the Jews.  What degree of racial and ethnic integration
will take place in America from now on is, of course, unknowable.
Because many taboos have broken down since the 1960s, it is even
conceivable that the new Asian and Latin American--and
Caribbean--immigrants and their descendants, over two or three
generations, will succeed in assimilating, promoted socially to the
status of "honorary whites," gaining acceptance within a remelted
majority.  Then the decisive gulf would be black/non-black-not to the
advantage of the majority of the native-born black population.  At a
remove from the desperately poor blacks, a cosmopolitan professional
class may be emerging, racially intermarried, ethnically complex,
respectful of difference but not obsessed by it, half in the white
world, half out, somehow at ease with its self-contradictions--yet a
world away from the ghettos and racial furies that preoccupy the
American black majority.

On campus, today's obsession with difference is distinguished, too, by
the haughtiness of the tribes and the scope of their intellectual
claims.  Many exponents of identity politics are fundamentalists--in the
language of the academy, "essentialists"--and the belief in essential
group differences easily swerves toward a belief in superiority.  In the
hardest version of identity thinking, women are naturally cooperative,
Africans naturally inventive, and so on.  These pure capacities were
once muscled into submission by Western masculine force--so the argument
goes--then sup pressed by rigged institutions, and now need liberating.
Sometimes what is sought is a license to pursue a monoculture.  Only the
members can (or should) learn the language of the club.  Only African
Americans should get jobs teaching African-American studies; conversely,
African Americans should get jobs teaching only African-American
studies.  Men, likewise, have no place in women's studies.  As the
T-shirt slogan had it: "It's a Black Thing, You Wouldn't Understand." As
Sister Souljab rapped: "If my world's black and yours is white/How the
hell could we think alike." Essentialists, when they secede from the
commons, dismantle it.

The cultivation of difference is nothing new, but the sheer profusion of
identities that claim separate political standing today is
unprecedented. And here is perhaps the strangest novelty in the current
situation: that the ensemble of group recognitions should take up so
much of the energy of what passes for the Left.  It is often for good
reason that differences have multiplied, making their claims, exposing
the fraudulence of the universalist claims of the past.  Not everyone is
male, white, hearing, heterosexual.  Very well.  But what is a Left if
it is not, plausibly at least, the voice of a whole people?  For the
Left as for the rest of America, the question is not whether to
recognize the multiplicity of American groups, the variety of American
communities, the disparity of American experiences. Those exist as long
as people think they exist.  The question is one of proportion.  What is
a Left without a commons, even a hypothetical one?  If there is no
people, but only peoples, there is no Left.

The Recoil

1.  The Scarlet Letters

If American culture is centrifugal, and things are falling apart, what
is the center that is not holding?  Presumably some core of
principles--individual rights and opportunities--united by the
affirmation that America, heartland of the West, is home.

There is, in the end, no more coherence in the defense of the center
than in the assertion of essential difference, but there is a common
rhetoric.  The center under bombardment by barbarians is "Western
liberal values,"

"civilization,"

"culture,"

"reason." The tribute to American greatness joins three themes: the
embrace of a canonized American (and Western) history and literature,
the opposition to group rights, and the affirmation of free speech.  The
genius of the attack on "political correctness" in the Nineties was to
fuse the three, polarize opinion against them, and thereby seize the
initiative.

In the polarized view, the center stands for truth long ago arrived at
and agreed on by reasonable men.  The center is bedrock America, which

166

is a "way of life," a "dream," an avatar of morality.  Its history was
long ago collectively understood and engraved in granite, where it must
remain fixed and available for the reverence of future generations. This
history transcends perspectives, particularities, self-interested
passions.  It affirms that the United States of America is the
incarnation of opportunity, transcending gender and race, a guardian of
culture, education, and the arts, resplendent in its unmatched human
achievement.  The mission of cultural institutions is to pass the
heritage on, not trade it away for a mess of multicultural pottage.

This tribute affirms that individuals have more than rights.  Thanks to
this country, Americans have opportunities to realize their powers
according to their merits.  The idea that people should ever be rewarded
(and others, therefore, punished) according to group characteristics
flies in the face of a belief that the market, using objective test
scores, already adjudicates merit.  individuals are already free to
attain what they were meant to attain, and the heavy hand of the State
should not interfere.  By the same token, America's sturdy individuals
need free speech, now under assault from "thought police" decreeing
"watch what you say" in ever-widening circles of patrol.

In principle, canon, opportunity, and free speech ought to be mutually
detachable.  Mixes and matches ought to be eminently debatable.  It is
logically possible, for example, to support a common curriculum that is
both Western and non-Western; to support affirmative action in student
admissions but disapprove it for faculties or the Supreme Court; and to
oppose restrictions on campus speech but encourage students to conduct
themselves with decorum.  The charge of "political correctness,"
however, rests on the presumption that there are only two sides.  (So
does the standard multiculturalist defense.)  Charges of "political
correctness" were, and still are, flung about with alacrity, and often
enough denied with equally unheeding ferocity.  Both sides agree on
polarization.

The counteroffensive against the redoubts of the academic Left began in
the fall and winter of 1990-91, when magazine and newspaper readers were
suddenly regaled with reports of an epidemic raging through academia.
Although the academic curriculum and its jargon are not generally of
broad journalistic interest, nor admissions schemes, nor restrictions on
student life--sexual conduct codes passed without press

attention for decades--suddenly these were all of burning interest.  The
editorial pack, ever eager to sniff out trends by sampling each others'
noses, went into full panic.  Within a few months, waves of moral alarm
were rolling from the 3,'eu, York Times ("The Palsing Hegemony of the
Politically Correct: Academia's New Orthodoxy") to U.S.  5eu's & World
Report and Time, and.  not least, cover stories in "Newsweek CThough!
Police"), ;„eu' brk ("Are You Politically Correct?"), The Sew Republic,
and The Atlantic, which featured a long excerpt from Dinesh D'Souza's
book Illiberal Education.

"Tenured radicals are trying to turn campuses into authoritarian
ministates," read the pull-quote in a George Will Newsweek column.
President Bush, not normally concerned with campus trends m' the fate of
free speech but knowing a no-risk issue when he saw it, contributed a
University of Michigan commencement speech on May 4, 1991, deploring
"the new intolerance" sweeping the universities and denouncing what he
called "the boring politics of division and derision." Ridicule,
indignation, and uproar rippled outward through talk shows and news
reports, and flowed through millions of eddies and inlets of private
conversation into the great sea of opinion and mood where popular
sentiment forms.  The maxim that the power of the media is not
necessarily to tell us what to think but the power to tell us what to
think about, was thunderously confirmed.  PC suddenly stood for
something other than Personal Computers.  A popular phrase was born.

Among the periodicals in the NEXIS database, the term "politically
correct" and its variants appeared 7 times in 1988, 15 times in 1989, 66
times in 1990, 1,553 times in 1991, 2,672 times in 1992, and 4,643 times
in 1993.  For that matter, no symposium of left-wing academics.
especially in literature.  history.  or cultural studies, lacked its
counterattacks on reactionaries who, we were told, cloaked their own
orthodoxy (even racism or sexism) hy pretending that the textbooks and
universities that once excluded people of color and women had, in that
more bucolic time, been protected pastures of freedom--at least until
barbarians of the 1960s aimed their mortars and bazookas at the
ivy-covered ivory tower.  In 1993, television's Comedy Central began a
weekly series, Politically Incorrect: Jackie Mason called his one-man
Broadway show Jackie Mason, Politically Incorrect.  In 1994.  a comic
Hollywood version of Wes-levan University.  PCU, was released.  and in
1994-95.  Politically Correct

Bedtime Stories by James Finn Garner was on the best-seller list.  Even
mockery was, in turn, a move in the accusatory game--fodder for
countercharges.  Whether the topic was textbooks, museum shows, sexual
harassment, hate speech, or racial and sexual representation in
Congress, the president's Cabinet, symphony orchestras, or university
faculties, the topic of political correctness became an obsession and a
maelstrom--easier to enter than to leave.

Properly speaking, the phrase "politically correct" was recycled; the
term had been around since the 1930s.  Correct was a Stalinist relic. In
a milieu where certain texts (the "science" of Marxism-Leninism), a
certain nation (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), and above all
a certain man (Stalin) or, for dissenters within the tradition, men
(Lenin and Trotsky) were held to have cracked the code of history and to
have come into possession of knowledge of how the world was to move
forward, correct was a certificate.  Correct transcended right.  It
conveyed historical certitude, arithmetical precision.  The term
presumed that an entire selfconsistent rational system of thought was at
stake.  To be correct was to be stamped with the prestige of that system
and assured of victory.  Per contra, to be stamped incorrect was to be
consigned to outer darkness.

Correct and incorrect came back into vogue for the New Left of the late
1960s: a sign that smug rigidity, a priori dismissiveness, and
metaphysical fantasy had entered a movement that had begun in an
exploratory temper, eager to find new language for new circumstances. In
the 1970s, the term indicated--according to the user's pleasure--either
strict adherence to the political line of one's "tendency" or a certain
ironic distance.  In the twilight of political certitudes and
all-encompassing political visions, the term was ready-made for mockery,
even self-mockery, as by the Polish emigre ex- and anti-Communist
philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, who once entitled an essay, "My Correct
Views About Everything." By the late 1980s, indeed, the term was used
mainly tongue-in-cheek.  As Richard Bernstein (but not his headline
writer) noted in the New York Times article that touched off the 1990-91
media frenzy, "the term 'politically correct,' with its suggestion of
Stalinist orthodoxy, is spoken more with irony than with reverence .  .
.  the terms ['p.c." and 'p.c.p.,' or 'politically correct person'] are
not used in utter seriousness." Yet the stampede was on.

If the key to the art of demagogy is oversimplification, the crusade
against PC was a master exhibit.  It suited ideologues of the Right to
brandish the term relentlessly, collapsing affirmative action,
curriculum revision, and speech regulation codes into a uniform enemy,
lumping together nonsensical "Afrocentrism" with serious scholarship,
and referring darkly to a "new McCarthyism." The exposes were of uneven
merit, but they were brandished indiscriminately, the anecdotes
recycled, acquiring instant canonical standing.  Ideologues drew the
line and demanded to know of wafflers, Which side are you on?

The campus climate of the time was, of course, not nearly as suffocating
as it was made to sound.  Especially at elite institutions, it was
frequently arbitrary., fatuous, conformist, and wrong-headed, but rarely
punitive.  PC did not, in fact, haul miscreants up before congressional
committees, fire or flunk nonconformists, pillory them in the press, or
take their passports away.  It did not force economics departments to
hire, or retain, Marxists, nor require of business majors that they
study labor history.  Conformism there was--unpleasant, stifling,
inimical to the high ideal of the free pursuit of knowledge.  This
climate, where it existed, was well worth criticizing, as it always is
when students, professors, or anyone else conforms.  Conformism,
small-mindedness, abuses of power--these are, indeed, common features of
American university life.

In 1960, to take a tiny example, a freshman composition instructor at
Harvard assigned his students to write an assessment of a C.  S.  Lewis
essay arguing that pain is an instrument of God's will.  Considering
this notion outlandish, one student wrote a parody.  The instructor, a
Jesuit, graded it a D and warned the student that any more of this sort
of thing would get him in serious trouble.  The student was barely
seventeen, and not inclined to explore just what sort of trouble the man
in the collar meant.  Later on in the 1960s, students were thrown out of
universities for refusing to attend chapel or to enroll in compulsory
ROTC.  In 1965 the president of the University of Tulsa refused
permission to a speaker from Students for a Democratic Society to
lecture against the war on campus property.  I was the freshman who
parodied Lewis, and the speaker whose talk in Tulsa had to be moved to a
coffeehouse off campus.  Newspapers did not fill with denunciations of
the tyrannical atmosphere of the universities.

PC was a propaganda slogan from the beginning, a compound of facts and
distortions meant to strangle curiosity.  By flinging about the scarlet
letters, the accuser arranged for a melodramatic confrontation: freedom
against slavery.  Exuding a love of liberty, he was spared the need to
be clear, while pooh-poohing any idea to the left of the current center
of gravity of the Republican party, and, moreover, appealing
(self-righteously!) to the reasonable person's hatred of
self-righteousness.  The distinguished English professor Wayne Booth
wrote in a February..  14, 1994, letter to the editor of the Chicago
Tribune:

May I suggest that you reprogram your computers?  Instead of supplying
the PC expressions when thought fails, program them to ring bells and
flash the following whenever any of

these expressions is typed in: "PHRASE OUTWORN AND MEANINGLESS! CANNOT
CONTINUE UNTIL YOU CHOOSE FROM THE FOELOWING

THE SYNONYM CLOSEST TO THE VIRTUE YOU WANT TO MOCK:

(1) decency; (2) legality; (3) moral or ethical standards; (4) justice,
fairness, equality of opportunity; (5) tact, courtesy, concern about
hurting people's feelings unnecessarily; (6) generosity; (7) kindness;
(8) courage in defending the underdog; (9) anti-bigotry; (10)
anti-racism; (11) anti-anti-Semitism; (12) anti-fascism; (13)
anti-sexism; (14) refusal to kneel to mammon; (15) sympathetic support
for the jobless, the homeless, the impoverished, or the abused; (16)
preservation of an environment in which human life might survive; (17)
openness to the possibility that certain popular right-wing dogmas just
might be erroneous.

PLACE YOUR CURSOR ON THE NUMBER OF THE VIRTUE YOU ARE OPPOSED TO, PRESS
THE 'ENTER' KEY AND THEN GIVE YOUR REASONS OR START OVER."

After years of anti-PC blasts and countermobilizations, crusaders might
have been expected to take some satisfaction that the worst had been
averted.  But the enragds among the conservatives kept up their
insistence that everything of value remained at risk, that the war was
total, the stakes absolute.  The sense of extremity rivaled that of
left-wing

absolutists invoking the class struggle in the final battle against
exploitation.  As partisans of identity politics girded their loins for
the combat against white men and their works, so did men of flame and
brimstone invoke the war against barbarism.  Hilton Kramer, a trenchant
art critic when he is not earagd-in-chief of the right-wing culture
monthly The New Criterion, warned in 1993 that the "political
correctness movement" had achieved "a decisive victory .  .  .  in the
realm of education, culture, and the arts."

"For a brief moment around 1990," wrote Roger Kimball, managing editor
of this same manual of cultural resistance and author of Tenured
Radicals: How Politics Has Corrnpted Our Higher Education (1990).  "the
'long march through the institutions' for which sixties radicals
agitated seemed to be complete with the more or less total capitulation
of most American universities and cultural organizations to the forces
of political correctuess." Kimball, whose book was one of the first to
lend legitimacy to mainstream journalistic exposes of PC, went on to say
that "the takeover of the universities and organizations like the Modern
Language Association and the American Council of Learned Societies was
only the first step."

Pause a moment on these words: more or less total capitulation; most
American universities and cultural organizations; takeover.  It was in
1993 that Kimball published these words, three years after his own book
and Dinesh D'Souza's best-seller had sounded their alarms against the PC
onslaught.  Apparently all opposition was in vain, for according to
Kim-[)all, "over the last couple of years political correctness has
evolved from a sporadic expression of left-leaning self-righteousness
into a dogma of orthodoxy that is widely accepted, and widely enforced,
by America's cultural elite."

"That was stage one," Kimball added, and as if that were not bad enough,
"stage two, the penetration of political correctness into public policy,
is now underway." Stage two was inaugurated by the Clinton
administration, whose nominations of former University of Wisconsin
chancellor Donna Shalala (as secretary of health and human services) and
former University of Pennsylvania president Sheldon Hackney (as director
of the National Endowment for the Humanities) apparently outweighed his
notvery-PC nominations of corporate lawyer Zoe Baird for attorney
general and loophole sustainer Lloyd Bentsen for secretary of the
treasury.  Kimball concluded by invoking the choice between appeasement

and military preparedness, citing Churchill's statement in 1938 "that
the British people had before them the choice of shame or war.  He
feared that they would choose shame--and have war nevertheless.  He was
right."

So, to the sound of martial music, have the exaggerations charged
onward.  For all their genuflections toward reason, humanism, and
liberality in a disinterested search for truth, Roger Kimball, Dinesh
D'Souza, and many of their journalistic derivatives were, at the very
least, sloppy and amateurish.  D'Souza's flying tour of campus
atrocities was especially breathless.  His polemical method was to
gather incendiary quotes and haste them together.  The more arrogant the
professor and the more ignorant the student, the more typical D'Souza
found their quotes.  Since arrogant professors and ignorant students are
not (and have never been) in short supply, this was not difficult.
D'Souza's version of Stanford University's curriculum reform, for
example, was woefully wrongheaded.  In 1987-88, there had taken place a
faculty debate over replacing the required freshman Western Culture
course, a proposal declared by Secretary of Education William Bennett to
be "a proposal to 'drop the West."" Like the old requirement, the new
one, Culture, Institutions, Values, or CIV, offered students eight
alternative choices.  In one of the eight, the reading list included l,
Rigoberta Menchd, by the Guatemalan Indian woman who was shortly to win
the Nobel Peace Prize.  D'Souza declared arbitrarily that this, one of
more than forty assigned texts in the course, was "perhaps the text
which best reveals the premises underlying the new Stanford curriculum,"
and devoted two pages to trashing it.  What he devoted no pages to
mentioning was that all eight courses assigned the Old and New
Testaments, Freud, Marx, Shakespeare, and Aristotle; that seven assigned
Augustine, Virginia WooIf, and Rousseau; six, Descartes, Machiavelli,
Aquinas, and Plato; five, Euripides, Dante, Luther. Montaigne, and
Homer.  Nor did D'Souza mention that only about fifty of Stanford's
1,500 freshmen were taking the particular course that inspired his
loathing.

One might well want to argue in favor of core curricula--this author
would-yet only the tendentious critic would fail to note that these are
relatively rare and recent creations in America.  Stanford's hoary.
Western Civ program, begun in the late 1930s, had been dropped in the
late 1960s, only to be reinstated (renamed Western Culture) in the late
1970s.

Harvard had only one required course, in composition, when I went there
in the early 1960s.  (For breadth, students chose, as at Stanford, from
among a list of approved courses.)  It is not muhieulturalism but the
shopping mall university, full of electives, ushered in at Harvard in
the late nineteenth century that demoted an earlier generation of
classics.  One might also argue vociferously--as again this author
has--against the instant elevation of popular fiction to classic status,
or against the propensity to downgrade literature in favor of "cultural
studies" of ephemera.  But have the barbarians actually seized the
ramparts?  D'Souza, to bolster his proclamation that universities are
"expelling Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and other 'white males' from
their required reading list," quoted the chairman of the English
department at Pennsylvania State University to the effect that "Alice
Walker's The Color Purple is taught in more English departments today
than all of Shakespeare's plays combined." The literary scholar Gerald
Graff, author of a magisterial account of the history of his profession,
decided to count

the texts assigned in Northwestern University's English department from
the fall of 1986, when Alice Walker's novel was first assigned in a
course, to the spring of 1990.  Over this four-year period I located two
courses in which The Color Purple was taught, while I found eight
courses that required at least six plays by Shakespeare and eight that
required at least two. Shakespeare's dominance became even more visibly
one-sided when I totaled the number of students in these courses .  ·
for every reading of Walker there were approximately eighty-three
readings of Shakespeare.

Graff cited national surveys of university literature syllabi to the
same effect.  In nineteenth-century American literature, the canon is
still dominated by Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, and Emerson.  In
British literature, it is Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy,
and Thackeray.

Of those works recently added to the American list, the one most
frequently assigned was Harriet Beecher Stowe, and she "was listed by
only 15 percent of the teachers surveyed."

Nor did D'Souza remind his readers that canons are not engraved in

granite; nor that it took a bitter struggle before the above-mentioned
"classics" replaced the Greeks and Latins a century, ago; nor that one
of those notorious white men of todav's canon, good gay Wait Whitman,
had to elbow aside John Greenleaf whittier and James Russell Lowell a
generation later.  One could write a book as long as D'Souza's composed
entirely of refutations and qualifications.  1,ike an Afrocentrist who
claims that Plato was black but still doesn't get around to reading him,
D'Souza claims Plato for his side but shows himself innocent of the
Socratic method.

He worships at the shrine of histrex but is innocent of facts.

According to the right-wing correctors of left-wing political
correctness, it was not bad enough that ill-conceived ideas and an
intolerant atmosphere prevailed in certain departments of certain
institutions of higher learning, or that there was a rash of censorious
outbursts on many campuses.  The claim had to be made that reason and
civilization were being utterly overwhelmed by superannuated tenured
radicals and their administrative puppets.  It did not slow the
exponents of cultural war when Jonathan Wiener, Louis Menand, Gerald
(}raft, Russell Jacoby, and others handily exposed and refuted many of
the wilder excesses of the anti-PC corpus.  Nothing seemed to shake lhe
canonical standing of their most immoderate claims.  The same horror
stories circulated, unexamined and unrevised, from one right-wing pundit
to another.  Let one group of Stanford students chant "Hey, hey, ho, ho,
Western Cuhure's got to go," and the echo reverberated for years.

One reason why the campaign against PC had legs--more legs than a
caterpillar--is that identity politics and attendant censorioushess were
real.  Though many on the Left were reluctant to admit it in public,
many true stories could be compiled to plug the holes left by D'Souza's
sloppy research.  Professor Leonard Jeffries of the City College of New
York plugged a lot of holes all by himself.  This know-nothing seemed to
have been sent directly from Central Casting to kindle indignation. Here
was the chairman of City College's Department of Black Studies holding
his position--a position normally held at the pleasure of the
administration-for twenty years in a row while teaching that whites are
"ice people" and })lacks "sun people," and specializing in anti-Semitic
smirks. Here was a tenured professor who had never produced any relevant
scholarship, but in 1989 was considered a significant enough figure to
be

appointed a consultant to an official task force by the New York State
superintendent of education, where he delivered himself of the view that
the dominance of "the European-American monocultural perspective"
explained why "large numbers of children of non-European descent are not
doing as well as expected."

It might be noted that, however egregious, Jeffries did not appeal to
many students--his black studies program attracted fewer' than ten
majors on a campus of 12,000 undergraduates.  But beyond Jeffries, in
any event, there was no shortage of material to warrant censure of the
censorious American university.  Richard Bernstein of the ,'Yew York
Times, a far better reporter than D'Souza, compiled many serious cases
in his 1994 book, Dictatorship of Virtue--cases that in their
prosecutorial absurdity indeed deserved to become canonical: among
others, the University of Pennsylvania bringing charges against a
student charged with racism for yelling "water buffalo," a translation
of a Hebrew swearword, at some noisy black students.

Bemstein's rhetoric was extravagant: he took his title from the French
Revolution, opened with an epigraph from Robespierre, and peppered his
text with references to Stalinism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Still, he had a lot of goods, and by now, almost no one denies it.  The
question is what to make of them.

By 1994, independent-minded opponents of the trendfly "correct" were
acknowledging that the alarm had been excessively piercing.  The
prolific critic Robert Alter', himself an adversary of fashionable
literary theoD,, wrote (in the same collection including Kimball and
Kramer) that while illiberalism does "constitute a real threat to the
variety and freedom and complex pleasures of intellectual life on the
campuses ....  my guess is that its scope and gravity have been
exaggerated by most conservative reactions and in the popular media."
Even the anti-PC National Association of Scholars was divided, with some
convinced that the Left-PCfeminist-muhiculturalist "monolith" (Kramer's
word) had swept all reason and culture before it, others that the worst
dogmatism associated with "political correctness" had been fought to a
stand-off.  It was as if the Cold War dispute between a rollback
"forward strategy" and a long-view deterrenee had been recapitulated,
this time as farce.

In the meantime, long overdue, a range of neither/nor positions was
emerging.  The independent Left critic Morris Dickstein spoke of "a
resurgence of liberal thought, rejecting both intimidation of the left
and the hysteria of traditionalists," and ticked off.  as exponents,
John Searle, Frederick Crews, Irving Howe, C.  Vann Woodward, Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., David Bromwich, Robert Hughes, John Higham, and this
writer. Eventually, a higher order of debate, with clarifying potential,
emerged in anthologies edited by Paul Berman, Patricia Aufderheide, and
Michael Berube and CaD Nelson, and in articles by Barbara Epstein, Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., and David A.  Hollinger--no fault of theirs that many
of their judicious writings appeared in small-circulation academic
journals.  In 1994 the range of neithednors was extended by Russell
Jacoby's Dogmatic Wisdom, which chastised the Right for a prosetutorial
zeal that stopped short of rising in righteous indignation against the
dramatic threat to higher education from economic impoverishment; and by
Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, feminists who offered in Pr(fessing
Feminism a devastating and knowledgeable critique of many women's
studies programs.

But in wild disproportion to the actual strength of the wounded Mte
noire, much of the Right continued to emit a high pitch of horror and
fervor.  The fear of encirclement was apparently undiminished.
Either/ors continued to sound as if the rebuttals (and frequent
refutations) had never been uttered.

How shall we understand this inconsolable fen'or, and its success in
setting the terms of the debate?

2.  The Selectivity of Media Obsessions

The alarmism of Roger Kimball, Hilton Kramer, and Irving Kristol makes
an easy target.  Here are the 1990s' equivalents of the most lurid John
Birch rhetoric, now that it will no longer do to draw a map showing red
arrows slashing across the Iron Curtain into the Free World.  But if
ridicule or the brandishing of counterevidence affords the pleasures of
aggressive indignation and wounded rectitude, it does not necessarily
clarify.  The question is not simply whether the panic was misguided but
why it mounted so quickly throughout the media.

Any assessment of the genesis of the PC panic must start with two
general observations.  First, media panics are imperfect guides to the

truth.  Second, some things are true even if Dinesh D'Souza says them.
The alarmists offered an interpretation for a widespread feeling, but
did not invent the feeling.  One explanation for the chorus of
condemnation is that many would-be thought police were at work (though
usually without the power to crack heads).  But truth is neither
necessary.  nor sufficient for a media crusade.  This is only rarely
because journalists are indifferent to truth.

Sometimes truth is difficult to establish; in particular, when
government propaganda goes to work.  Certain obsessions begin with half-
or quarter-truths and inflate them--the "missing children" campaign of
the mid-1980s, which, in full hysteria down to its milk-carton portraits
and President Pteagan's claim that there were "well over a million
children who disappear every year," neglected to note that, according to
FBI statistics, of the 30,000 American children missing in mid-1985, the
grand total abducted by strangers was exactly 67, while about 1,500 had
been snatched by a parent in a custody dispute, and the remainder, the
vast majority, were runaways in flight from domestic abuse.  Some
crusades start with almost no truth--for example, the "Afrieanized
killer bees" periodically making their way northward over the Texas
border to plunge America into a public health crisis.  While maladies
like chronic fatigue syndrome and Lyme disease balloon overnight into
cover stories, other facts and dangers take years to rise to the
threshold of media awareness--AIDS, for example, or breast cancer for
many years, or, lately, prostate cancer.

Regardless of justifications, all media alarms share certain elements.
Part of the explanation for the PC obsession is that there was, in
conventional journalistic terms, "a good story." There were actual
facts.  There were delights of combat and expos& with public values at
stake.  Journalists like conflict for the same reason dramatists and
sports fans do.  It catches the attention of their superiors, as it does
that of their colleagues, that of their viewers and readers, and their
own.  In PC, journalists and editors, who don't ordinarily scrutinize
topics for their deeper significance, found plenty of practical elements
for a juicy continuing story: good guys and bad guys; an aura of menace;
a promise of moral melodrama; an apparently ever-replenishable source of
follow-up stories.  Then too, once they have found their scandals,
journalists like them simple.  They do not like them comparative or
overly mitigated.  Comparisons end

up in sidebars, if anywhere, but not in the headlines or the lead in the
evening news.  The news comes down with a clang of absolute factuality:

THIS HAPPEN'ED.  Perspective comes trailing afterward, if at all.
Anyway,

one woman's perspective is another woman's extenuation.  The easiest
thing to do is to graff the latest round of facts, or claims, onto the
previous round, and leave it at that.

Consider the controversy over race-based admissions at Berkeley, one of
Dinesh D'Souza's horror stories.  The charge was that affirmative action
was excluding thousands of worthy white and Asian candidates.  Scarcely
any students, or faculty, for that matter, understood the
administration's actual policy.  For its part, the administration did a
poor job explaining itself--as if they scarcely understood their own
policy.  Not surprisingly, journalists, too, were frequently content to
remain ignorant.  One of D'Souza's points was that many blacks and
Latinos were being admitted to Berkeley with grade-point averages lower
than those of whites and Asians-many of whom were being turned away with
4.0 averages.  But hardly any protesters understood that there were so
many California high school graduates with 4.0 grade-point averages
(more than 5,800 out of the 21,300 who applied to Berkeley) that in
1989, even were there no affirmative action at all, 2,300 4.0s would
have had to be turned away.  (With affirmative action, the number
actually turned away was about 2,800.)  Hardly any understood that in a
most Californian euphemism, high school students got bonus grade-point
credit for doing well in college preparatory courses, so that a 4.0
average did not mean that a student had gotten straight As.

Hardly any students or faculty, let alone journalists, knew that alumni
"legacies" and athletic and special-skill admissions accounted for more
exceptions to the "objective standards only" norm than affirmative
action, so that in 1989, 24 percent of white students were admitted to
Berkeley on criteria other than academic scores--still a much lower
percentage than in the case of blacks and Hispanics, but not negligible
either.  Nor was it a staple of PC exposes that at Harvard, as late as
1988, preferences for children of alumni accounted for more admissions
than all the African American, Mexican American, Native American, and
Puerto Rican registrants combined.  Alumni preferences were a tradition;
affirmative action was news.

PC was a good story, but not all good stories cross the threshold of

media attention to stand exposed in the floodlights and stay there.  The
world is brimming with potential subjects for media frenzy.  The savings
and loan banking scandal, replete with bad guys and consequences
amounting to more than $150 billion, took years to get into the
spotlight. (The details were many and hard to grasp.  Since Republicans
and Democrats shared the trough and the blame, the scandal lacked the
drama of partisan confrontation.)  Gay-bashing, at this writing, is not
a crime that catches much attention in a nation that ostensibly quivers
with the fear of crime.  Many good subjects are eligible for a media
furor, but few are chosen.  So press obsessions can never t)e taken
entirely at face value.  An obsession cannot be altogether explained by
the reality of its subject. Logically, it cannot be that reports of bad
news simply mirror bad facts in the world, for the media have limited
space, limited time, limited personnel, and at any given moment there
are too many bad facts.  One need not be a conspiracy buff to conclude
that media institutions are selective. Even if the criterion for
newsworthiness is actual or potential impact, there is a surfeit of
possibilities, and the question is, Impact on whom'? Media institutions
have to select.

Theatrical, continuous conflict helps make the story..  This is one
reason why Stanford proved enthralling to the media in 1988, when the
Western Civilization curriculum was revamped into a multicultural
substitute, and not ten years earlier, when Western Civ was installed in
the first place.  All the better when a party to the conflict or a
victim of the crime carries prestige--Stanford or the Ivy League
universities are newsworthy, just as the notorious rape of the Central
Park jogger, a white investment banker, in 1989 received hundreds of
times more attention than all the contemporaneous, brutal rapes
committed around New York City that year put together.  On principle and
on professional grounds, the press is prone to stand up against
violations of freedom of speech--thus.  campus speech codes made a
compelling target for expos6s.  Furthermore, to break out, a story has
to catch the fancy of editors, which is most likely to happen where
national media have flung their news net--at Columbia or Stanford, not
at San Diego State or Texas A&M.  Of course, once the story is certified
at a high journalistic level--a New York Times story being the most
important certificate of significance--the momentum can grow.  It helps
when experts stand at the ready for consultation.  (Recall

Roger Kimball, quoted in Richard Bernstein's original PC story in the
Times.)  Then subsequent incidents are ripe to be recognized as part of
a pattern.  An individual story' makes most sense when it rhymes with an
established story, when it comes with its own preaffixed label, and can
be recognized as a chapter in an ongoing plot.

Of course, editors based in the Northeast will say that their audience
cares about Columbia more than Texas A&M, and they are doubtless right.
But what they do not say, what perhaps doesn't rise to consciousness, is
that they feel the travails of Stanford and Harvard and Duke in a
distinctive way.  Disproportionately, they are alumni of these schools.
They read their alma maters' magazines and keep in touch with gossip.
Indeed, they may have a more intimate stake.  It happens, for example,
that Newsweek's editor in chief, Maynard Parker, the man responsible for
putting the 1990 "Thought Police" story' on the magazine's cover, became
a member of the board of directors of Stanford's Alumni Association the
following year.

Arguably, his attachment to the university was not decisive in Parker's
thinking, which was little if any different from that of other editors
not similarly placed, but was not irrelevant either, for such a link to
university power bespeaks an established view of the world and a special
disposition to worry about PC tendencies at elite universities.  Other
top Newsweek editors, though not all, agreed that "Thought Police" would
make a smashing cover for newsstand sales, which, while only a small
percentage of total circulation, impress advertisers, and mark how well
the magazine is doing against the competition.

Beyond personal connections and the pleasures of reporting properly
located combat, journalists leaped into the PC story because, like it or
not, they are ertgagd--though not usually in the deliberate ideological
way charged by many media critics.  One need not be a radical relativist
to note that, like all social groups, journalists have a social position
to defend.  Their institutions require that they make objectivity
claims.  The belief that a true picture of the world is possible is
their occupational raison d'etre.

Therefore, whatever mixture of superior and inferior feelings they
harbor toward universities, journalists have a stake in the legitimacy
of the sorts of activities that go on there.  To the degree that the
university loses face, or devalues the disinterested pursuit of
knowledge, their own credentials are devalued.  It was, after all, these
institutions of

higher learning that first certified them as adepts of information--as
knowers.  It is also both compelling and handy to defend the ideal of
objectivity against its degradation by obscurantist professors who clot
their writing with jargon and, with great flourishes, trumpet
impenetrable translations of dubious French phrases.  The journalists
get to defend the ideal of transparent prose coupled with the ideal of
objective standards.  In the populist mood, all the educated classes are
under suspicion together for "elitism." When they defend the ideal of
objectivity--and yes, "Western Culture"--they defend some Platonic idea
of themselves.

3.  The Right Turn

But how, in particular, did the PC recoil begin?  Media panics
frequently start with, or get a significant boost from, the
preoccupations of powerful groups who talk up certain social problems so
vociferously, in the right journals, at the right resorts and the right
dinner parties, as to land them on the journalistic agenda.  In the case
of the anti-PC panic, journalistic fascination, while sincere, also got
a boost from the well-heeled right wing.

Respectable experts, as I have mentioned, help certify the legitimacy of
a story.  The issuance of a "report" from a think tank or a quotable
figure with a book to his or her credit probably doesn't send a reporter
running to write a story, but does help recommend it to an editor or a
producer, and does move the story along.  The prominent expert partisans
who certified that PC was a menace--Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and
Dinesh D'Souza in particular--were supported by the John M.  Olin
Foundation.  It did not hurt their cause that many in the media were
receptive to certain complaints from the Right.

This receptivity predictably belonged to the recoil against the
movements of the 1960s.  How could the palpable breakdown of authority
in the 1960s, and the centrifugal identity motion that followed, fail to
generate a countermovement, a conservative consolidation?  With
dialectical elegance, a new radicalism aroused a new conservatism.  Only
then could Political Correctness become a usable demonology in the eyes
of politicians and the press.  To begin with, the potential for a
protracted crusade

against the wrong ideas has always been latent in America.  The locus
classicus of right-wing laments about the subversive university was the
1951 book that put William F.  Buckley, Jr., on the national map, God
and Man at Yale.  The lament was reinvigorated during the Nixon years in
a popular reaction against militant student movements, a reaction that
this time had large-scale academic support at a time when the
university, replete with "radiclibs" and "nattering nabobs of
negativism," seemed to have gone over to the enemy.

The political Right, reflecting on its loss of control in American
culture, reasonably enough determined that the universities and the
media, culture's two main institutional conduits, ought to be singled
out for counteraction.  The business class agreed.  By the early 1970s,
leaders of major corporations thought that, having lost control of the
wellsprings of ideas, they needed to invest in reclamation.  In their
view, only ideological bias could explain the disrepute in which
business was held.  "Destructive," "misinformed,"

"slanted,"

"anti-establishment," determined to "tear .  .  .  down our system":
these are among the terms hurled at the media, intellectuals, and
universities by prominent executives of multinational corporations
during 1974-75.  Neoconservatives supplied the theory, identifying the
media and the universities as nests of a knowledge class that had no
stake in business (or national) success and whose naysaying was
subsidized outside the market.

By the late 1970s, the business-sponsored ideological rally was revving
up for action.  The temperature of the rhetoric mounted.  In 1978, in
the view of former Secretary of the Treasury (under Presidents Nixon and
Ford) William E.  Simon, "What is happening in this country is a
fundamental assault on America's culture and its historic identity." But
the newly energized conservatives were not armchair grumblers.  These
were practical men (and some women).  Explaining why he had assumed the
presidency of the John M.  Olin Foundation in 1976, Simon declared that
business was obliged to put its money where its interests were.  He
called for "nothing less than a massive and unprecedented mobilization
of the moral, intellectual and financial resources which reside in those
.  .  .  who are concerned that our traditional free enterprise system,
which offers the greatest scope for the exercise of our freedom, is in
dire and perhaps ultimate peril." This "crusade" would mobilize "those
who see a

successful United States as the real 'last best hope of mankind."" Simon
concluded with three points:

1.  Funds generated by business ··· must rush by mul-timillions to the
aid of liberty .  ·· [and] funnel desperately needed funds to scholars,
social scientists, writers and journalists who understand the
relationship between political and economic liberty .  ·· [and whose
work would] dissent from a dominant soeialist-statist-collectivist
orthodoxy which prevails in much of the media, in most of our large
universities, among many of our politicians and, tragically, among not a
few of our top business executives ....

2.  Business must cease the mindless subsidizing of coN-leges and
universities whose departments of economies, government, politics and
history are hostile to capitalism and whose faculties will not hire
scholars whose views are otherwise ....

3.  Finally, business money must flow away from the media which serve as
megaphones for anticapitalist opinion and to media which are either
pro-freedom or, if not necessarily "pro-business," at least
professionally capable of a fair and accurate treatment of procapitalist
ideas, values and arguments.

Thundering that "the only thing that can save the Republican Party .  .
· is a counterintelligentsia," Simon was no lone crusader flogging a
crank cause.  He was one of the more forthright and better-placed of the
right-wing publicists who, through passion, organization, and not least,
money, helped undermine the liberal-labor welfare state consensus.  A
palcoconservative free enterpriser, Simon and his cobelievers welded a
common front with ex-leftist neoconservatives like Irving Kristol,
Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Decter.  In 1978, Simon and Kristol founded
the Institute for Educational Affairs (in 1990 renamed the Madison
Center for Educational Affairs), which proceeded to fund some sixty
right-wing and sometimes scurrilous campus papers, one of them the
Dartmouth Review, where Dinesh D'Souza cut his journalistic eyeteeth.

Struggle language like Simon's anticipated the rightward shift in the
media-and nudged it on.  Corporate funding from AT&T legitimized public
television's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, featuring circumscribed policy
talk that rarely departed from the assumptions of Washington
think-tanks.

Right-wing foundations helped launch ideological auto-da-fes like The
McLaughlin Group onto the airwaves.  Partly as a result of the prestige
bought by canny investment, the public intellectual atmosphere changed.

Commentary' was now read widely in Washington, as was the Sun Myung
Moon-sponsored Washington Times and its magazine supplement, Insight.
The American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and more
specialized right-wing think-tanks churned out op-ed pieces and briefing
papers, which reporters felt obliged to pore over. George Will became
ubiquitous in magazines, newspapers, and television.  'Fed Turner gave
Patrick Buchanan a daily slot on CNN's Crossfire. When Ronald Reagan
came to office, he was known to read---4or at least consult--the
right-wing Human Events and Conservative Digest, and if these were still
considered slightly kooky tastes, they were so only by comparison with
what instantly became the more respectable journals on the Right.

And then, of course, Reagan's election certified that the Right was not
to be considered marginal.  Their ship had come in.  Reagan had the
charm and ideological wherewithal to widen his political base beyond
"movement conservatives," while his 51 percent of the vote looked like a
landslide against Jimmy Carter's 41 percent, confirming a rightward
ideological turn whose thoroughness was touted by the mainstream media.
The urgency of the culture war against the barbarians progressed by fits
and starts during the Reagan years.  William Bennett banged bully
pulpits in Washington at the National Endowment for the Humanities and
the Department of Education.  It was Bennett who, in 1988, converted the
revamping of the freshman year humanities requirement at Stanford
University into a national cause celebre, declaring that "for a moment,
a great university was brought low by the very forces which modern
universities came into being to oppose--ignorance, irrationality and
intimidation." It was during these late months of the Reagan
administration that the National Association of Scholars was founded to
fight left-wing academics, and a turgid, quirky, demanding, obscure, and
frequently obscurantist book by a political theorist named Allan Bloom
soared onto the bestseller list with its blanket assault on student
activism, relativism.  German philosophy, and rock 'n' roll.

Where Bloom was ornery and idiosyncratic, lesser conservative intellects
set out to break down his assault into a set of distinct issues in
higher education, and then to clump those issues into an indivisible
amalgam called Political Correctness.  This campaign came during the
damp, declining presidency of George Bush, when the right wing,
distrustful of Bush, feeling that (whatever his protestations) he was
not quite their man, were in need of a focus of evil to concentrate
their minds and their resources.  The change in political climate from
Reagan's years to Bush's helps account for the timing of the PC panic.

Bush began his successor regime in an ideological disarray brought about
by a collapse of enemies.  He no longer had the Cold War as a magnetic
force to line up supporters into a solid front.  Within his first year
in office, the Right's intellectual map dissolved.  "Movement
conservatives" found the situation anticlimactic at best.  What were
conservatives going to do without identifiable barbarians?  They looked
homeward. and found new barbarians among the superannuated old
barbarians, for it was not lost on them that what they labeled the PC
forces had roots in the 1960s Left--the very amalgam of minorities that
had triggered the "silent majority" reaction in the first place, helping
resurrect the Republicans and converting them into a majority party
under Richard Nixon.  The crusade to correct PC promised to hold
together the disparate sectors of the Right.  Even the victorious long
march of the Right through the institutions of politics had failed to
roll back the feminist, gay, and multicultural movements that had indeed
acquired niches in the institutions of image and word. Conservatives
accurately observed that, having taken the White House, they still had
not taken back Harvard, Hollywood, the Modem Language Association, or
the National Endowment for the Arts.  Just after the Gulf War, George
Will could write with a straight face that as Bennett's successor at the
National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, "secretary, of
domestic defense," faced enemies who were more dangerous in the long run
than the adversaries her husband, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney,
confronted abroad.

The media panic was encouraged by another background factor--the

weakening of the universities.  Universities made journalistic targets
partly because they were already losing public respect.  Declining in
wealth, universities also declined in prestige.  There were
scandals-misappropriations of government funds and episodes of sexual
harassment-and although there might have been just as many or more
academic scandals left unexposed during the decades preceding 1990,
journalists were now primed for the hunt.

The sense that the university was vulnerable was driven by the dominant
ideology of the Reagan years and accelerated during the waning of the
Cold war.  For decades after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the
world's first satellite, in 1957, and the Eisenhower administration
sounded the educational alarm and began pouring government money into
efforts to ensure that Johnny read and multiplied with little Ivan's
facility, scholarship had been justified as a contribution to national
defense.  Big science education would mean a bigger bang.  Fellowships
that the federal government would never have dreamed of justifying in
the name of knowledge were now justified by their contribution to The
National Defense--hence the enactment in 1958 of the National Defense
Education Act, one of the major sources of stipends for a generation of
graduate students.  But by the time of Reagan's presidency, the shine
was off federal spending. Reagan's cuts in university funding, in fact,
predated the end of the Cold War.  Between 1981 and 1986, federal
funding for higher education plunged by 14 percent in real dollars.
Moreover, during the Reagan and Bush years, the federal government
shifted the burden for public programs to the states, absorbing funds
from their own education budgets. State budget cuts, worsened by
recession, were disproportionately leveled at higher education.  In
Illinois, for example, university spending fell from 23.5 percent of
state funds in 1968 to 18.3 percent in 1990; in Colorado, from 23.5
percent in 1982 to 19.2 percent in 1992.  Between 1980 and 1989,
spending for higher education at all levels of government plunged by
24.3 percent in constant dollars.

At the same time, an aging population of taxpayers was losing sympathy
for public schools.  The elderly were not only growing as a percentage
of the population, they made up an even larger proportion of the voters
and a higher proportion still of those who vote in off-year elections on
university bond issues in states like California, which submit such
votes

to the public.  The elderly were increasingly willing to dispense with
public funds for schools that they thought inessential or worse.  Let
the young fend for themselves!

Inside the academy, scarcitv inflamed faculty turf fights and fueled the
intensity of PC and anti-PC crusades.  Student fees increased
dramatically. So did student debt.  In the early 1990s, about half of
enrolled university students held jobs while attending classes. Students
wondered whether, after graduation, they would be able to live in a
house half the size of the one they grew up in.  The dominant tone was
anxiety.  ldentitv politics was one way to crystallize this anxiety and
shape it into a worldview.  For many a white male (and not only him),
the more attractive receptacle was the conservative counterforce.
Conservatives apparently cared for his freedom, while liberals, in the
name of diversity, counseled discretion that he could easily mistake ibr
self-censorship.  He grew less likely to care about racist.  sexist, or
homophobic harassment, and cared more about being the victim of
stereotyping himself.  If he had started out with a tolerant
disposition, he was dismayed to find that integration had become the
goal that dared not speak its outdated name (except, curiously, in parts
of the Deep South).  He encountered cliquishness--though it would not
have occurred to him that a living unit where students spoke Italian was
cliquish.  He was caught between his individualism, which wanted to be
color-blind, and his social liberalism, which acknowledged a history of
racial oppression.  If he was not conflicted, he got the idea that
everyone else got to speak bitterness but himself.  If he was aggressive
or self-pitying enough, he would complain anyway.  He was ready to have
conservatives name his malaise: victim of PC.

Feeling chilled in the 1990s, he was not interested in being reminded
that he was warm compared to, say, his parents.  If he came from the
working or middle classes, he resented the imputation that his life was
a breeze and that he was not deserving.  If he had friends of color in
high school, he resented their receiving fellowships to which he was not
entitled.  If women, or blacks, or gays had their afflictions, well,
then, in a world of interest groups, he felt that he had his, too.  If
the world was divided up by identity cards, he, too, would learn to
define his discomfort as a stigma, identify with it, wear it with pride.
His card would say that he believed in color blindness and individual
rights, that he was free from responsibility for the sins of his (or
anyone else's) ancestors.

4.  Another Dubious Battle

Late in 1994, three years after Oakland's school board voted against his
textbooks, UCLA's Gary Nash was back in the news along with Charlotte
Crabtree, who had helped write the California history-social science
framework.  Nash and Crabtree had supervised the development and
publication of a set of national history "standards"--a compilation of
topics, concepts, ideas, arguments, and facts that every American
student ought to learn.  Now the charge was that the standards "make it
sound as if everything in America is wrong and gritn," were "politically
correct to a fare-theewell,"

"really out of balance," the "politicized" products of an "academic
establishment" that tended "to save [its] unqualified admiration for
people, places and events that are politically correct."

The critic leading the charge was Lynne Cheney, formerly President
Bush's chairman (her preferred locution) of the National Endowment for
the Humanities, now feeling "fiimfiammed," as she said, because she had
helped launch the project in the first place.  In 1992, her National
Endowment for the Humanities had given Nash and Crabtree's National
Center for History in the Schools at UCLA a grant--supplemented by the
Department of Education--to develop national standards for the first
time in American history.  In contrast with a country like France, which
holds students accountable for a standard curriculum--it used to be said
that at any given moment you could tell exactly what subject students
were studying anywhere in the country--the United States had never
promoted a national body of knowledge.  To the contrary: states' rights
made such a notion anathema.  But with American students doing poorly in
cross-national competition, Cheney and other Republicans, as well as
Democrats, had come to think that common historical knowledge was too
important to leave to the states and localities.  At the least, there
should be available a set of common standards on the basis of which new
textbooks could be commissioned and curricula worked up at the local
level.

The standards would be optional, not mandatory, but at the same time,
with their national imprimatur, they would be widely regarded as
exemplary.

An elaborate structure was set up to ensure that the writers of the
standards would consult many interested parties.  Teachers and state
curriculum officials would be heard from.  as well as academic
historians. Since Nash and Crabtree were known to be sympathetic to
multiculturalism, Cheney insisted that historians of a less
multicuhuralist bent be added to the council of thirty-one scholars and
teachers that would have the responsibility of approving the standards
that would emerge through the consultative process.  The council now
included, among historians of the United States, Emory's Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese, a member of the National Association of Scholars and a
frequent critic of PC, and Columbids Kenneth Jackson, who.  with Arthur
M.  Schlesinger.  Jr., had dissented from the Afrocentrist Leonard
Jeffries's views during the New York State history revision a few years
earlier.  The council also included several distinguished practitioners
of world history who were far from trend-setting New Left alumni, among
them Bernard Lewis of Princeton.  a trenchant critic of Edward Said's
critique of "Orientalism," Akira Irive of Harvard, and William McNeill,
emeritus of the University of Chicago.  Cheney also insisted on adding
two nonhistorians: Gilbert Sewall, a professional critic of
multiculturalist textbooks, and David Battint, a conservative teacher
from Cairo, New York.

Two years later, the standards were ready, in the form of three volumes
--one covering all history for kindergarten through the fourth grade.
and one each for U.S.  history and world history through the eighth
grade.  But six days before the books' official release, and two weeks
before the midterm elections, Cheney let loose with a Wall Street
Journal op-ed tirade crying foul.  Her own earlier judgment was at
stake.  She had been impressed, she wrote, with earlier work from Nash
and Crabtree's center, which emphasized "individual greatness,"

"conveyled] the notion that wealth has sometimes had positive cultural
consequences in this country," and was "honest about the failings of the
U.S., but .  .  .  also regularly manage[d] a tone of affirmation." Not
so the new standards, which. Cheney wrote, gave George Washington "only
a fleeting appearance and .  .  .  never described [him] as our first
president"; considered "the

foundings of the Sierra Club and the National Organization for Women . .
.  noteworthy, but [not] the first gathering of the U.S.  Congress";
never mentioned the Constitution; mentioned McCarthy or McCarthyism
nineteen times and the Ku Klux Klan seventeen times; mentioned Harriet
Tubman of the underground railroad six times but "two white males who
were contemporaries of Tubman, Ulysses S.  Grant and robert E.  Lee,"
one and zero times, respectively: and Paul levered, Alexander Graham
Bell, J.P.  Morgan, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, and the
Wright brothers not at all.  "Students are encouraged to consider Aztec
'architecture, skills, labor systems, and agriculture,'" Cheney wrote.
"But not the practice of human sacrifice."

"They would sacrifice 10,000 people at a time," Cheney told a reporter.
"If it had happened in the United States, I guarantee it would have been
included in the standards." Cheney quoted two unnamed members of the
National Council for History Standards.  charging that "the 1992
presidential election [had[ unleashed the forces of political
correctness" and that in its wake the American Historical Association
"had become particularly aggressive in its opposition to 'privileging'
the West" and "threatened to boycott the proceedings if Western
civilization was given any emphasis."

If Cheney felt "flimflammed," Nash once again felt blind sighted.  He
thought two years of consultations had produced a "consensus." There had
been no tremendous controversy about the U.S.  history standards,
although with respect to world history, there had indeed been what Nash
called "a significant controversy on how much to stress western
civilization as against world civilization." ....  The process was as
reasonable as one might expect something like this to be in our
fractious time," one historian member of the council, Morton Keller of
Brandeis, who describes himself as "a moderate (that is to say, a
liberal who was only mildly mugged by radicalism)," wrote to me later.
"I was deeply impressed with the good will exhibited by scores of
organizations and their representatives toward the project at every
stage of the standards' writing, and by the seriousness and thoroughness
with which the actual writing (including the review of various drafts)
was undertaken," wrote another, Akira Irive of Harvard.

"Some were more multiculturalist than others (I, for one, argued for a
more forthrightly Western orientation) ....  It is of necessity a
compromise document as far as ideological orientation is concerned, but
in achieving a compromise, we never sacrificed, distorted, or
misrepresented historical data." In the end, only Sewall and Battini
opposed the standards.

The rest of the onslaught was not long in coming.  "A classic of
political correctness," declaimed Charles Krauthammer in his syndicated
column.  "Where is Plymouth Rock ...  ?" wrote LynNell Hancock in
Newsweek.  "What happened to the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria?
John Smith and Miles Standish, too?" The standards were products of "a
secret group" and should be "flushed down the toilet," said Rush
Limbaugh.  In U.S.  News & World Report, John Leo, a syndicated
columnist specializing in culture wars who likes to style himself "Two
Steps Ahead of the Thought Police," found "the usual multicultural
excesses" among these "sour and negative" standards "written from the
countercul-tural perspective by oppression-minded people who trashed the
clean's office in the 1960s (or wished they had)," with "no uprising or
rebellion .

.  .  unmentioned" in a book whose "story line:' was "the gradual rise
of more and more rebellions against the selfish and hypocritical ruling
white elites."

John Leo began by mocking the notion that children should "examine the
lives of individuals who were in the forefront of the struggle for
independence, such as Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, Mercy Otis Warren and
Ebenezer Mcintosh." Warren, a playwright, was the obligatory token
woman, but four historians he phoned had never heard of Mcintosh.  The
fifth, however, told him that "Mcintosh was a brawling street lout of
the 1760s who whipped up anti-British mobs and sacked the homes of
various colonial officials." When I told Nash I hadn't heard of Mcintosh
either, he enlightened me: a leader of the Boston Tea Party, which
surely has a more heroic ring in the most traditional of textbooks than
"brawling street lout." In the Wall Street Journal, Albert Shanker,
president of the American Federation of Teachers, was quoted as calling
the world history. standards "a travesty, a caricature of what these
things should be--sort of a cheap-shot, leftist point-of-view of
history.  ....  Everything that is European or American, or that has to
do with white people is evil and oppressive, while Genghis Khan is a
nice sweet guy, just bringing his culture to other places." In fact, as
Nash wrote the Journal, the book

asked students to "assess the career of Chinggis Khan as a conqueror and
military innovator in the context of Mongol society," to "describe the
destructive Mongol conquests of 1206-1279 and assess their effects on
peoples of China, Southeast Asia, Russia, and Southwest Asia," and to
"debate the concept of the 'Pax Mongollea,'" asking, "Is it worth the
cost of terror to have an enforced peace?" Nash's letter was never
published.

As usual, accusations circled the world in a flash while refutations
lumbered along behind.  In a press release, interviews, and radio and
television appearances, Nash and others scored points against Cheney's
attacks.  For United States history., the book proposed thirty-one areas
for students to master, and in each case gave examples of facts that
students should learn.  Five of the thirty-one did indeed address the
creation, compromises, provisions, and ratification of the Constitution.
Three did indeed deal with major issues of the first Congress.  White
males were still the vast majority of individuals named in the standards
(Washington was mentioned four times, once in a caption referring to his
inauguration), but few names were mentioned among the standards proper,
for the standards were conceptual--they were guidelines for teachers,
not a history text.  Most concerned causality and interpretation, not
facts, while it was precisely the facts, names, and dates that the
critics wanted to see.  While Robert E.  Lee was not, in fact, named the
U.S.  history book said that students should be expected to "evaluate
how political, military and diplomatic leadership affected the outcome
of the Civil War," and, wrote Nash, "teachers and textbook writers
certainly know what that standard means." Indeed, most of the names that
Cheney wanted to see appeared in examples scattered throughout the U.S.
history.  book.  Although Alexander Graham Bell was not mentioned,
Robert Fulton, Eli Whitney, Samuel Morse, John Deere, and Cyrus
McCormick were.  Bell, Edison, Einstein, and Salk duly put in
appearances in the K through 4 and world history books.  In any event,
as Nash underscored when I spoke to him, the point of the standards was
not to itemize inventors but to propose questions about the social
effects of their inventions.  About the Aztecs, Nash's view was that
"it's absurd to say that [children] ought to know about African tribal
warfare and Aztec human sacrifice (unless we focused as well on capital
punishment for minor theft in England, legalized wife-beating,

medieval torture, etc.)," all neglected as well.  "Cheney argues that
Aztec culture was organized around human sacrifice.  That's not my
reading of anthropological accounts."

Project codirector Charlotte Crabtree maintained, somewhat defensively,
resorting to conventional textbook boilerplate, that "the standards
strongly affirm the strengths of the nation's peoples---of all its
peoples, in all their diversity; of the political and economic systems
they have created; and of the progress that has been made toward
bringing all our citizens the benefits of the nation's economic
opportunities, civil liberties, and constitutional protections." The
books' discussions of the Ku Klux Klan (thirteen of the references
appeared in one two-page section) and McCarthyism (all nineteen
references appeared in another two-page section) were meant to be civics
lessons, she argued, "alerting] students to .  .  .  assaults .  .  .
and demonstrating] ...  the strength of the democratic system to protect
itself, provided concerned and vigilant citizens use the power of its
institutions--free press, due process, and representative government--to
turn back the assaults against them.  These triumphs over the grim
episodes in our history, are powerful case studies, ennobling and
inspiring to students, and an essential part of a sound education for
active citizenship."

Here, the UCLA group was reaching.  In truth, although Cheney surrounded
her argument with a bodyguard of errors, she had a real argument. The
topics and questions did not carry the triumphalist tone long associated
with history textbooks.  They directed attention to social conflict more
than to social consensus.  They invited arguments, not
celebra-tionasking students to make the cases for and against slavery,
for example, or to explore Mexican as well as American views of the
Alamo.  The standards did place African Americans and Native Americans
at the center of American history, amt John Leo was right that, in the
process, white ethnics more or less disappeared.  The standards were
skeptical about the achievements of capitalism and skeptical of its
myths.  Although the section on industrialization included a quote from
Andrew Carnegie's Wealth, students were indeed invited to debate whether
business leaders were "captains of industry" or "robber barons," and (as
Lynne Cheney pointed out) to conduct a mock trial of John D. Rockefeller
for "unethical and amoral business practices," but were not invited to
debate whether

"labor leaders" were "bosses," or to conduct a mock trial of Jimmy Hoffa
for unethical conduct.  Rather, they were to be asked "how many of the
great business leaders of the late 19th century." fit the Horatio Alger
model" and invited to "contrast the romantic depiction of life in the
West with the reality."

Yet the standards were not a catechism, though Cheney sometimes
addressed them as if that was what they were.  (Newsweek at one point
called them a "text," though most articles did accurately refer to
"standards" and "documents.") They were recommendations for textbooks,
suggestions to curriculum writers and teachers.  Moreover, the questions
the standards raised and the emphases they chose were, in fact, the
questions and emphases favored by the mainstream of the history
profession over the past quarter of a century.  "While the standards do
reflect some of the objectionable conventional historiographical wisdom
of our time," in the view of the self-proclaimed moderate historian
Morton Keller, they also included "so much of what is positive about
American historiography in recent decades--a new social and cultural
history that for all its radical politicization has greatly expanded our
sense of the American past."

Gary Nash's widen quoted claim that the standards amounted to "nothing
short of a new American revolution in history education" was really
making two points, neglected by almost all the critics.  First,
traditionally, American history was mainly the history of power, and
power was white, male, and elite.  (What else would it have been?) But
the new standards carried a sense that history.  was also the struggle
against power. They emphasized social history and social
movements--though not indiscriminately, for they made a much larger
place for feminists than for evangelical Protestants.  Cheney was wrong
to say, "This book is just the sad and the bad," but the standards did
carD, a sense that history was significantly, if not essentially, the
struggle against the sad and the bad. Second, the standards aimed to
teach students not simply what to know but how to think about history.
Indeed, they took a position on how to attempt that awesome task.  "The
study of history," the U.S.  history standards volume said, "involves
much more than the passive absorption of facts, dates, names, and
places.  Real historical understanding requires students to think
through cause-and-effect relationships, to reach sound

historical interpretations, and to conduct historical inquiries and
research leading to the knowledge on which informed decisions in
contemporary, life can be based." Toward this end, the book proposed to
help students become competent in assessing the experiences of "those
who were there,"

"to consider multiple perspectives .  .  .  and multiple causes; to
challenge arguments of historical inevitability; to compare and evaluate
competing historical explanations .  .  .  ; to judge [the] credibility
and authority [of documents} .  .  .  ; to analyze the various interests
and points of view of people caught up in these situations." Using
flow-charts and the usual high-minded pedagogical jargon, the standards
proposed, for example, that "to demonstrate their understanding of the
causes of the Revolution," students should be held responsible for three
topics: The Causes of the American Revolution, The hieas and Interests
Involved in Forging the Revolutionary Movement, The Reasons for the
American Victory.  Not exactly a purge of white males, but neither was
it names-dates-and-places history, or an exaltation of Founding Fathers.

The new standards were not an honor roll of heroes--rather, they implied
an honor roll so expanded as to burst out of the precincts of any
pantheon.

They were indeed, as charged, relatively light on traditional heroes and
strong on abolitionists, feminists, unionists, and Native American
chiefs.

Mainly, they were not trying to inspire greatness but to question how
much the greatness of individuals matters--something historians have
been doing for more than a centup'.  They wanted students to be critics
and historians, not worshippets in the pantheon.  They were, in short,
trying to teach a (lower-case) democratic history--and to develop it,
moreover, by a democratic process.  This is where Lynne Cheney's
objections, and those of the columnists in her wake, were coherent.  The
generalizing of reverence to raucous elements and ordinary people was
not the reverence conservatives have in mind.  But not just
conservatives would be offended by the new standards.  The offense was
against a traditional conception of how to educate the young in
(lower-case) republican virtue.  Lynne Cheney wanted a republican
history--schooling in the virtues of traditional republican leadership.
The problem was that American history was inexplicable if it were
nothing but a tour of the pantheon. Where was the emphasis to lie:
reverence or explanation?

Democrats (also lower-case) are generalizers.  If the Declaration of

Independence held that "all men are created equal," then the Seneca
Falls Declaration of Sentiments of 1848 held that "all men and women are
created equal." But democrats, too, carry a contradiction--the same
contradiction, or at least tension, carried by all postmodernizations of
history.  The tendency of multiple identities and perspectives is to
multiply boundlessly.

The result is vertigo.  Textbooks fall apart.  Traditionalists want to
shore up the former center.  Radical perspectivists resent any center at
all.  From the logic of their point of view, it is never possible to be
polycentric enough.  To try to create a commons athwart these currents
is a perilous project indeed.  A progressive democratic multiculturalist
like Gary Nash was bound to be whipsawed--attacked by California's
extreme perspectivists and Washington's traditionalists alike.

I have taught American university students for a quarter of a century,
most of them from among the top one-eighth of California high school
graduates, and I have run into a good number who do not know the
difference between an assertion and an argument; who purport never to
have heard that there is a difference; who think that an opinion is a
fact, perhaps expressed a bit more vehemently; who do not know how to
make a case for or against a historical, philosophical, or sociological
proposition.  I once asked a class of upper-division Berkeley students,
not for credit (or discredit), in what year World War I ended.  The
answers ranged from 1898 to 1939.  I would be thrilled to meet students
who could achieve what the National Standards propose be taught in
grades 7 and 8, let alone 9 through 12.  In "History Hijacked," Charles
Krauthammer demanded: "How can [students] discuss anything without first
having mastered dates, facts, places and events?  History, like
journalism, has to start with who did what when." Fair enough, but if
Krauthammer had begun with who wrote what on what page, before filing
his column, he would have found on page 21 of the U.S.  history,
standards book that students of grades 5 and 6 ought to be able to
"calculate calendar time, determining the onset, duration, and ending
dates of historical events or developments."

Fortunately, the vast majority of the overseeing council of thirty-one,
including several historians who had been less than thrilled by all the
standards, successfully resisted the logic of polarization.  Morton
Keller wrote:

I don't think Lynne Cheney is dead wrong in her criticism.  I do think
that she has dwelt on some of the standards' questionable features, and
slighted some of their more admirable ones ....  I agree that the
standards should give students a greater appreciation of how remarkable
some of the achievements of the nation's history have been.  But I worry
less than she does about this because the celebration of those
achievements is deeply embedded in our culture, and I do not think that
they are in danger of being overwhelmed by these standards.

Princeton's Theodore K.  Rabb, the only European history specialist on
the standards council, wrote in the Washington Post that while he had
objected to "reducing the West to about 40 percent" of the world history
standards-"in other countries," he pointed out, "such diminution of the
central influences in a nation's heritage would be unthinkable"--the
standards were defensible as "sets of recommendations from which
[teachers could] select the topics that arouse their own and their
students' interests," and that they amounted to "a serious effort to
remedy the shortcomings of history education." Harvard's Akira Iriye,
who had also wanted "a more forthrightly Western orientation," said more
bluntly: "Those who condemn the [standards] project simply don't know
what they are talking about or don't care to find out what is really in
the text."

In this category were numbered the majority of the U.S.  Senate, which,
in January 1995, in the wake of the Republicans' midterm sweep,
stampeded into a vote of 99 to 1 to condemn the new standards.  The one
holdout wanted an outright prohibition against expending a penny of
government money to distribute the books.  Liberals, voting to condemn,
thought they were avoiding the worst.  Thus during the glorious hundred
days of the Republican Congress's "Contract with America," when the tone
of the nation's discourse was being sounded by Rush Limbaugh, did
politicians whose grasp of American history is feeble by any standards,
new or old, stand up for piety.  Thus do the culture wars rage on in a
nation with a soured soul.

Thus do dubious battles resist truces, let alone peace.

Here is the unacknowledged truth of the nation's identity crisis.  The

publicists and scholars who obsess about political correctness, and the
politicians who seize the opportunities they open up, are frozen into
their own correctness.  They are the faction against factions.  They
feel victimized by those they accuse of cultivating victimization.
Deploring hypersensitivity, they are hypersensitive to every slight
directed at white men. Humorlessly, they decry the humorlessness of
feminists and minorities.  Those who charge distortion, distort.
Advocates of the unum that holds together the pluribus are not
themselves disinterested.  True enough, not all Republicans believe that
Patrick Buchanan was cultivating common ground when he told the 1992
convention: "There is a religious war going on in this country, a
cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold
War itself, for this is a war for the soul of America." But in the thick
of the culture war, the movement that purports to wish to shore up the
American center is itself a centrifugal force.

Where We're Coming From

1.  Blinded Identities

How men and women think is not simply a function of what they have seen
or felt in their own lives.  Nor is their form of thought a genetic
shadow cast by their parents or grandparents.  People think within the
intellectual and cultural currents that surround them--currents with
histories, even if the sources cannot be seen from downstream.  Even
dissenters are soaked in the currents that they believe themselves to be
swimming against.  To paraphrase Marx, men and women think, but not in a
language or concepts or even emotions utterly of their own making.  To
paraphrase Marshall Berman paraphrasing Trotsky, you may not be
interested in philosophy, but philosophy is interested in you.

It is no small contribution to the triumph of identity politics that a
form of intellectual parochialism has triumphed, a style of thinking
that its detractors call relativism and its proponents, more clumsily,
call perspectivism or standpoint theory.  For all the specialization of
culture today, the premise of much thinking in universities and popular
lore alike is that how you see is a function of who you are--that is,
where you stand

200

or, in clunkier language, your "subject position," the two nouns
constituting an unacknowledged gesture toward an objective grid that
prescribes where you stand whether or not you know it.

Everywhere, the automatic first question is, "Where are you coming
from?" leading frequently to the conversation-stopping "We know where
you're coming from." Although alarmists of the cultural Right, claiming
to speak for a single morality, trace this form of thinking variously to
English empiricism, American anthropology, German Marxism, or French
deconstruction, the academy has no monopoly on the decline of the claim
to truth.  Perspectivists crop up everywhere, from op-ed pages to the
Grand Ole Oprah of daytime talk shows in which Klansmen and
Afrocen-trists, anorexics and abusers, rapists and rape victims all get
their hearings.  In a culture saturated by therapeutic talk, where even
the president "feels your pain," a sign of "caring" is the assurance: "I
know where you're coming from."

There are said to be no privileged positions from which to know
anything.

Our discussion, or "discourse," is fatally limited to our language, our
"interpretive community," our vantage point--by which is usually meant
our race, ethnicity, gender.  There is no fixed, stable meaning for the
very terms with which, imperfectly, we strive to know.  There is,
instead, a veritable orgy of "discourses" and "knowledges," each of
which--except perhaps that of the speaker--is limited by its "silences."
What there isn't is truth.  There are only stories.

Of course, so pure a relativism is brittle.  After all, human beings cry
out to know what is true, not just "true for them," and right, not just
"right for them." They may take a walk on the wild side to sample the
daily freakshow in the National Enquirer or on A Current Affair, but
they surely wish and expect, once the remote control has transported
them to the next sideshow, to confirm the rightness and stability of
their moral system, not to challenge it.  In practice, the partisans of
fundamental group difference do not experience all stories as equivalent
and equally arbitrary.  They rank their own stories higher than those of
others.  Often what this means is that the story that, according to
them, deserves to be "privileged" is either the one told from the
victims' point of view or the one that casts the underdog group in the
most flattering moral light.  The critics of the Houghton Mifflin
textbooks spoke of truth, claiming that they had it (or, with a summer
of research, could get it) and that Gary

Nash didn't.  To the challengers' ears, Father Junfpero Serra's view
that the California missions saved souls was not worth hearing; only the
view of the "mission Indians" was.  To the challengers' eyes, the
Iroquois Confederation was the model for the federal system of
government enshrined in the Constitution--although the evidence that the
Iroquois system decisively influenced the writers of the Constitution is
mixed.

Truth remains the Holy Grail.  Beneath the smoky "instability" of
postmodernism, virtually everyone claims to be telling it like it is.
Every,one strives to make sense of the world and not just of his or her
personal state of mind or tribe.  The most passionate critic of "male"
science believes that she should step out of the way of an oncoming bus,
whether or not she believes in the Cartesian mind-body split.  The most
passionately separatist member of the Nation of Islam cites authorities
and documents, presents a caricature of evidence to blame the Jews--not
the Christians, not the Muslims, but the Jews--for slavery.  He claims
that it is true, not just "a story," that significant numbers of Jews
profited from the slave trade.

But the perspectivist attack is not to be dismissed as an insult with a
pedigree, a self-serving cover for the blind assertion of self-interest.

However eager it is to be "transgressire" and "subversive," however much
it claims to be a departure from false Enlightenment promises of a
universal knowledge accessible to and true for all humanity, standpoint
theory is a creature of the Enlightenment.  Those who deplore false
universals still address arguments to a wide variety of human beings
whom they presume have the power to reason.  They propound what they
claim are true, or truish, universals--not least of which is the
insistence, across the board, that all knowledge, not just that of their
group, is local, limited to the territory where their standpoint
prevails.  Those who defend the proposition that different groups have
fundamentally different views of the world and cannot understand one
another are unlikely to protest that the enterprise is futile when a
publisher offers to translate their books into other languages.

At conferences in recent years, when I have argued against the excesses
of identity politics, I have heard something like this:

"What he says is easy to say, therefore easy to discount.  It follows
directly from his social position.  In fact, it is not the,' an author,
who speaks, it is his 'subject position." It is his objective social
interest who 'speaks him." Face it: His is the cried de coeur of a white
male, heterosexual to boot, and no longer young.  It expresses nothing
other than the lament of his caste, which needless to say feels
threatened.  With reason--it has lost some of its power and resents it.
Moreover, this particular white male heterosexual experiences a
particular loss.  He mourns the loss of a Left that can no longer
be--that would have given him an honorable, even central place to stand.
Once, he and his generational gendermates could with confidence have
presented themselves as the Left, feeling themselves justified in their
life-choices, for they did well by doing good.  They felt secure in a
lineage, for were they not the good sons who would in the course of
events inherit the family business, that business being, in this case, a
political tendency?  Imagine their chagrin and disturbance to find that
they had been swept aside, that the mantle of liberation had itself been
liberated by young upstarts, exposing erstwhile radicals as nothing but
nostalgic conservateurs.t To be sure, like all interested parties, the
author casts his views in the shape of disinterested observations.  He
purports to reason his way to his conclusions.  Well, this is ever the
way in which the powerful claim a mantle of justification--choosing
which arguments to accentuate and which to neglect.  In fact, his
reasons are post hoc.  His conclusions came first.  His arguments amount
to nothing more than rhetorical gestures."

These are not trivial objections.  They make a point eminently worth
making: all thought begins with persons, and all persons are
situated--in times, places, societies, cultures.  That is to say, all
thought begins within boundaries.  The subject and tenor of thought are
frequently (though not always and not totally) predictable from the
origins of thinkers.  Blacks are more likely than whites to doubt the
promise of America; women more likely than men to care about children
and fear rape; Jews more likely than Buddhists to study the Holocaust.
Human beings neither live in a state of nature nor give birth to
themselves, but encounter the world through categories passed on via
nations, classes, castes, generations, eras, genders, occupations,
races, and so on.* We are interested parties- * 1 deliberately avoid the
academic boilerplate terms "constitute" and "construct." These
drastically overused jargon items began as useful correctives to the
individualist assumption that individuals are

persons with angles of vision, persons to whom certain questions,
points, and facts occur nonrandomly because of our life experiences,
psychic makeups, and solidarities.  It is in the nature of the human
situation that our interests are inevitably accompanied by blind spots,
by--to use the jargon--"silences,"

"erasures,"

"exclusions," and "repressions." Knowing this, we make assumptions about
the validity of what is said from our knowledge of who is speaking.  We
consider the itemizing of "context" a necessary part of the full
understanding of human beings.

But just how deeply and unalterably are we mired in our limited selves
and meager understandings?  And how are we to know in advance just how
deeply we are mired?  Historians of life and literature worry the
question to death these days, and biographers are frequently locked in a
death-grip with their subjects, and are preoccupied with that fact.
Knowing how the world looked to the dead would seem to be even more
difficult than knowing how the world looks to a living member of another
group---though why it should automatically be easier for a Navajo living

sole producers of their destinies, but quickly' eurdled into
clichd-misleading clichd at that.  Through automatic recourse, these
terms and their equivalents lend themselves to routine overstatement.
Take these observations of the influential historian Joan W.  Scott:
"{D]ifference and the salience of different identities are produced by
discrimination." And: "[Dlifferences are created in power
relationships...".  Difference has to do with something that's vital to
the sense of self of an individual or a group, and it constitutes a
power relationship with a set of interests and problems that are not
easilx resolved or given over by the notion of universalism." Leave
aside the questions of what produces discrimination, what is a group's
"sense of sell" and where it comes from.  If the first sentence in
Scott's second quotation means that differences are reducible to power
relationships, it is demonstrably false.  (Russians perceive that
Africans are "different," but nnt because they necessarily have any
power over the Africans, or because the Africans necessarily have any
power over them.)  If the first clause of the last sentence means that
difference automatically creates a power relationship, it is
demonstrably false.  (The Kurds and the Tutsi are different, but they
have vei?" little if any relationship at all.)  If it means that
difference creates nothing but a power relationship, it is also
demonstrably false.  (If I like the raps of Sister Souljab, it is not
because she has the power to compel me to buy her compact disc.)  If it
means that there are no power relationships without difference, it is
tautological.  (I cannot exercise power over myself-except insofar as
one part of myself is "different" from another part of myself.)  The
unexamined use of these terms presumes that life experience amounts to
nothing but the language and institutions of the milieu.

Likewise, to say that identities (for example, v,,oman or homosexual)
are "constructed" in history catches the truth that labels shift and
categories come and go but is frequently stretched so far as to presume
that they are constructed out of thin air.  We may construct a house,
but it helps if we bring bricks, lumber, labor, plans, and so on to the
site.  Habits are not changed at will.  Dennis Wrong has pointed out the
overuse of "constructed," and attributed it, in my view correctly, to
the resounding success of sociology in popularizing concepts like those
of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's Social Construction of Reality.

at the end of the twentieth century, say, than it would be for a
sensitive white man to recover the experience of a Seminole living at
the end of the eighteenth century is not altogether clear; nor is it
clear how anyone could know.  Even in the present, the difficulties of
reaching into the lives of sociological or anthropological subjects are
daunting.  Yet a moment's reflection also suggests the limits of
epistemological doubt, especially when it is so firmly embraced as to
become doctrine.  Difficulty is in the human condition, but what of
that?  The question is not whether we start with perspectives---of
course we do--but where we go with (and from) them.

So many difficult matters, so crudely brushed over by the perspectivist
ad hominem!  Perspective may lead to falsity or to truth, may be
conducive to some truths and not to others.  Perspective may be
conducive to accurate observations or distorted inferences, may lead to
promising notions or idiotic ideas, but to evaluate the observations,
inferences, or ideas, we need to do more than inquire into their
origins.  Whoever brings forth an argument, discussions, arguments,
analyses, and reasoning need to take place.

This is easiest to see in the realm of science, where truth-seeking, in
principle, overrides all other considerations.  The science that
cheaters do is no less bad if their motives are good or, for that
matter, if they are kind in their private lives.  To know whether the
science is good or bad requires a perspective different from all other
perspectives: a commitment to truth-seeking above all else.  Of course,
it can be argued that the problem is simple in the case of hard science;
among scientific practitioners, there is a strong consensus--even if
honored in the breach--as to what constitutes legitimate scientific work
and what incompetence or fraud.  Still, even when we turn to ideas about
society, not nature, there is no reasonable way to maintain that the
worth of an idea is exhausted by the identities of its exponents.  All
ideas about cause and effect, and all moral judgments, include factual
claims that have to be assessed apart from their source.  The question
of whether Junfpero Serra enslaved the Mission Indians is rationally
debatable by Mexicans, California Indians, or Ethiopians.  The claim
that Auschwitz was not a death camp for deliberate genocide is false
even if the person making the claim happens to be Jewish.  Not even the
most relativist of cultural anthropologists or the most

multiculturalist of literary critics could rationally maintain that
social position determines value in a one-to-one fashion.

Anyway, just how firm is "women's" or "the Latino" or "the
African-American" or "the Jewish" perspective?  Not only are there
class, regional, age, political, and plain individual differences among
the different, but people of every description change their
perspectives.

Indeed, to ride and guide and temper and live these changes is one of
the great adventures of modernity.  The onslaught of economic,
organizational, and technological change inexorably erodes the very
ground on which one's parents walked.  Surely no culture has undermined
the stabilities of tradition more consistently than America's.  Perhaps
the firmest American tradition is the undermining of
tradition--regardless of color.  Long before the throwaway styles of the
mall world, American culture was a culture of self-invention--even if
the conquerors believed that to create themselves they had to destroy
those who stood in their way.  Americans have recreated themselves often
enough--from Cravecoeur to Alcoholics Anonymous and "born again"
Christianity--to puncture any belief in unyielding "identity."

To cultivate perspectives and shake them up is one thing schools are
for, and sometimes they succeed.  Fresh experience undermines and
reworks what young people take for granted.  Under pressure from events
and books, movies and speeches, conversations and courses, many rethink
themselves and their relations to the world.  They mature, regress, move
sideways.  They open themselves to thoughts that they hadn't thought
before--including thoughts about "who they are." Religious and political
renewals also challenge the rigidities of identity politics.

Indeed, the possibility of a radical change in perspective is the very
premise of that central element in religions and political systems, the
narrative of conversion.  Abraham, Paul, Mohammad, Augustine, the
Buddha--for

each, there is the moment of truth when scales fall from the hero's eyes
and he rethinks, reinterprets, shucks the old skin, and takes on a new
identity.

So, too, for heroes of identity politics like Malcolm X.  It is
precisely the brand-new identity that followers are inspired to take on,
and precisely this identity that the exponents of identity politics want
to cultivate.  If identity were a fixture of human life, why bother
fighting so

hard over what is to be in the textbook or who is to control the reading
list in women's studies?  If some people at some times change their
perspectives, who is to say in advance who will and who won't, and when
or why?

Moreover, interested parties have compound, multiple identities and,
accordingly, interests.  This, too, is part of what it means to be
modern: to be complicated.  Identities overlap within the scope of a
single human life. We--Americans in particular--are populated by more
than a single cate-gou'. Leon Wieseltier has said it well: "The American
achievement is not the multicultural society, it is the multicultural
individual.  And the multicultural individual is what the tribalists and
the traditionalists (they are not always the same people) fear. Identity
is a promise of singleness, but this is a false promise.  Many things
are possible in America, but the singleness of identity is not one of
them." Perspectives grow in the crosshatched zones where memberships
intersect.  The purity of "subject positions" exists only in the
geometry, of theorists.  We are not only but also.

Then is the freedom to choose from among one's identities, to develop
new ones, to combine and recombine them as one likes, a privilege of
straight whites whose identities are not punishable by bigots?  To
varying degrees, yes, but the fact that skin color and sexual
orientation are privileges does not make the freedom to be oneself, or
oneselves, less valuable.  To the contrary.  Many people suffer because
their identities are despised, but that is an argument for increasing
their chances for satisfaction, not an argument for restricting identity
to the current array.

If some people have less freedom to choose identities--which is
certainly the case--that is a good argument for fighting discrimination
and supporting their right to more freedom.

At any given time, in any given situation, one or another of my
identities may come to the fore and the others recede.  Even within a
given group, there is no one-to-one relation between membership and
perspective. Subidentities, too, blur and shift.  By none of my
identities am I "determined" in the sense of "compelled." I am shaped,
no doubt.  Disposed, perhaps.  Limited, definitely.  Completed, no.  I
disagree with other Jews, middle-aged folks, and old New Leftists about,
for example, what should be done in Bosnia or Israel.  If my
membership/s my perspective, how can such disagreements be possible?  If
I change my views on the

Palestinians, or how to respond to Louis Farrakhan, have I crossed a
line and ceased to be a Jew?  (Some of the essentialist Jews in the
organizations that regard themselves as "the Jewish community" might say
so.) Identity, love it or leave it--this is the pseudo-logic of loyalty
oaths, bullying at worst, absurd at best.

Just what is a "group" anyway?  Exactly who authenticates an authentic
identity?  Who is entitled to issue membership cards?  Boundaries shift
in time and space.  Resemblance is relative to the culture and the
purpose of classification.  To a passerby or a census-taker, I am white.
To an antiSemite, I am simply a Jew.  To a German Jew, I may be one of
the Ostjuden; to Sephardim, an Ashkenazi Jew; to an Israeli Jew,
American; to a religious Jew, secular; to a right-wing Zionist, an
apostate, or no Jew at all.  Advocates of identity politics will insist
that the issue is not simply the elusiveness of categories or the
American tradition of self-naming, but oppression and persecution.
Hasn't history already done its detestable and irreversible work,
stamping inferiority on dark-skinned peoples, enslaving them in the name
of that classification?  Without doubt, the group identities that have
lasted longest and cut deepest are the ones that persecution has
engraved.  Once engraved, they stay engraved--that has been the reality.
Thus has it been for centuries in the West, where white supremacy is the
main lie that has rationalized detestation, enslavement, and slaughter,
not to mention the ingenious variety of discriminations to which human
beings are prone.  Often the persecuted revolt by converting the mark of
their subordination into a badge of pride.

But what follows from these categories once they are imposed?  Identity
is no guide to accuracy, to good judgment or political strategy.  Race
(or gender, or sexual preference, or disability) is far from an
adequate, let alone complete, guide to the world, since all identity is
a blindness as well as a way of seeing.  A map colored strictly by
gender (or race, or religion) does not account for the complexity of the
world, does not allow anyone to navigate a society that is, by any
definition, multiple, replete with perspectives.

Today's popular line of argument to the effect that people can only
comprehend people like themselves does not convince.  In fact, across
boundaries, at least in complicated societies, people are always
translating differences into mutually intelligible terms and reasoning
about the good.  Whatever relativists may say about the impossibility of
John Doe grasping what Jane Roe means, John can translate from Jane's
speech into terms that John understands, while Jane does the equivalent
for John.  If there is not to be irresolvable conflict, then people have
to agree to limit the severity of their differences--even while pounding
the table and claiming the uniqueness of their communities.  They have
to share a framework in which differences exist amid what does not
differ--the common element, the shared ways of seeing and rules of the
road that decree that, for example, whatever one's social origin, it is
reasonable, in the United States, to drive on the right side of the
highway.  If the value of thought were determined in a one-to-one
fashion by the identity group, then there would be no way to adjudicate
disputes but to cede--or secede.  Not only would differences within the
group be impossible, so would change.

In a more or less democratic society, it is an observable fact and a
general good that people of all identities and perspectives go to the
trouble of trying to persuade others to side with them.  That is what
happened in the California textbook dispute.  The groups who opposed the
Houghton Mifflin series did not restrict their advocacy to people who
resembled them on the premise that resemblance automatically causes
perspective.  They could not afford to.  They had to raise their voices
over their ghetto walls.  The most fervent advocate of identity politics
makes appeals intended to reach beyond the boundaries of the
foreordained identity group; makes a pass, at least, at a more generally
accessible truth; appeals to a common reason; holds certain truths to be
self-evident.  Even to speak to the group, the advocate of identity
politics routinely has recourse to evidence, deductive logic, claims of
rights--assumptions and techniques drawn from the despised apparatus of
the ("white male") Enlightenment he purports to negate.  He may believe
that there is no legitimate way to argue his way over the walls of
self-interest--that only might, in the end, makes right--but it ill
behooves him to say so.

Partisans of cultural politics think they are resisting the uniformity,
the dizzying anonymity, of American life.  They refuse to be unmoored,
adrift in the swirls and malls of contemporary existence, overpowered by

the unbearable lightness of advertising, television, movies, video
games. Sooner than remain rootless and disembodied, gnawed at by endless
propaganda, they will remain loyal to traditions and ancestors, will
find a place to stand in the company of the community, the group, the
tribe.  If identity is both the starting point and the end point of all
intellectual dispute, they need not tarry anywhere in that difficult,
rugged, sometimes impassable territory where arguments are made, points
weighed, counters considered, contradictions faced, and where honest
disputants have to consider the possibility of learning something that
might change their minds.

2.  The Shadowed Enlightenment

The Enlightenment has had a bad century.  Any graduate student with an
ear to the ground can tick off a list of the philosophical
pallbearers--Nietzsche, Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno, Heidegger,
Foucault, Der-rida, Lyotard--in different permutations and combinations
depending on the department in which he or she is enrolled.  The
Enlightenment has come in for a pounding not only in the theory seminars
of the academy but at the mall and the health food store, in the
astrology columns and on the afternoon talk shows.  Plenty of Americans
may not be interested in philosophy, but philosophy is interested in
them.

The lineage of perspectivism begins with reactionaries, nationalists,
and romantics, the likes of Burke, de Maistre, and Herder mocking the
pretensions of the Enlightenment.  The critical spirit praised by
Enlightenment philosophes could be--and was--turned against them.  In
fits and starts, and then with a rush at the end of the nineteenth
century, the claims of reason were weakened, morality relativized,
language peeled away from the heart of things.  The philosophical
unfounding father of the trend was Nietzsche, the patron saint of
today's irrationalists, insisting that reason and so-called civilized
morality have a less than enlightened history--that they are the
products of enslavement and repression.  The sociologist Max Weber,
himself a partisan of objective knowledge that was not reducible to the
world view of the knower, tracked the inexorable

triumph of a broken version of reason, instrumental reason, or
"rationalization," with which bureaucracies promoted efficient means and
not

moral ends, forging bars for an "iron cage" that locked up modern
humanity. Anthropologists demonstrated that cultures existed, in the
plural, that they had their logic, that they "worked." The American
pragmatists Charles Peirce, William James, and others, opened still
other doubts about the scope and generalizability of reason.  From a
different direction.  so did the Viennese philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein in his exploration of the fluidity of language.  ("We never
arrive at fundamental propositions in the course of our investigation,"
said Wittgenstein in 1930.  "We don't get to the bottom of things, but
reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further
questions.") The German Martin Heidegger, on his way to embracing
Hitler, pronounced the technological form of reason a form of
estrangement from Being.  From a Marxist angle, during World War II Max
Horkheimer and T.  W.  Adorno declared the Enlightenment
"self-destructive," "totalitarian,"

"patriarchal"--hell-bent on undermining the promise of its own
achievements.  Science itself, in the view of these disabused emigres
from Nazi terror, enshrined abstract reason, which "liquidated" the very
individuality the Enlightenment claimed to be liberating.  "Even the
deductive form of science," they wrote, "reflects hierarchy and
coercion."

Half a century ago, then, a philosophical setting was already in place
for perspectivism.  The academy was already primed for the revolt
against universalist faith.  Those who thought they were building the
edifice of knowledge on firm foundations were told that they were
actually constructing a dungeon.  Then the street came into the seminar
room.  Present-day quandaries concerning multiculturalism and identity
arrived in the library, the museum, the school board meeting not only
through the force of argument, or the contradictions inherent in the
Enlightenment, but through blacks in Watts, feminists in Atlantic City,
and gays at Stonewall. The black, feminist, and gay movements demanded
to be present wherever goods were allocated, textbooks written, teachers
hired, plays performed.  They formulated demands in the Enlightenment
language of universal rights and, once they got inside, changed the
look, the literal coloration, of intellectual life.  They brought new
blood to perspectivism

because they brought perspectives.  They jolted institutions with
identity politics because they brought unacknowledged, unfamiliar
identities with them--and brought them into universities so populous
that it was easy to mistake them for the world.

The premise of mass higher education, moreover, was that knowledge
mattered deeply.  And yet, it came to be argued, the society that
resulted was destructive, the order disorderly, the knowledge poisonous!
Deep reason seemed futile.  Deformed and deforming instrumental reason
was evidently in charge, personified by the likes of Robert S.  McNamara
and Henry Kissinger.

Confronted with the Establishment's claim that America was the
incarnation of goodness hand-in-hand with reason, the revolted doubted
both.  Loathing what "the best and the brightest" of purportedly
enlightened America were doing in Vietnam, they looked for a way of
recasting the good and the bright, rethinking not only America but
thought itself.

The 1960s were more than action, they were thought--and the thought
whose time had evidently come, the most heady thought, was deep doubt
about the foundations of knowledge itself.  Even before French
anti-foundationalists like Michel Foucault and Jacques Den'ida were
imported onto these shores, there was a homegrown revolt brewing against
the received idea of knowledge at its most unassailable: science itself.
If objective knowledge was possible, surely the proof was in science!
But Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a short book
that could be read by the resolutely nonexpert, made a powerful case for
the idea that science was not a simple matter of producing pictures of
the world "out there," outside history, each more accurate than the
last, but rather was a human creation that took place in history, a
succession of discontinuous, flexible, temporary, changeable ensembles
of theories, methods, and instruments.  This most influential
twentieth-century American work in the history' of ideas was first
published for specialists to little fanfare in 1962, but its reputation
grew until the word it introduced, "paradigm," became the stuff of New
Yorker cartoons.

Oversimplified versions of Kuhn's idea swept the social sciences and
humanities in the 1970s.  Reworking materials that had seemed the very
bedrock of received wisdom about the onward march of knowledge, Kuhn
calmly undermined universalist reason at its apparent strong point.  New

facts, all by themselves, Kuhn argued, did not change scientific theory.
It was, rather, new theories that led scientists to look for new facts
in new places, to understand even the old facts differently, and thus to
produce "revolutions" in knowledge.  Kuhn's idea of scientific
revolutions caught fire among people who would otherwise not have been
much interested in the history or philosophy of science.  This was
dizzying, mind-bending.  If science was not a direct report from the
world "out there," then it was freed to become a creature of, well,
perspectives.  Forget objective knowledge: it was perspectives,
theories, "discourses," all the way down.  If this were so £or ideas
about nature, would it not be all the more assuredly true for ideas
about society?  Never mind Kuhn's protestations that he had never meant
that all knowledge was always a trumped-up rationalization wheeled out
by interested parties.

Intellectual doubt joined political despair.  Just as Enlightenment
faith in universal reason was collapsing, this very faith was taking a
bad rap for social catastrophe.  The mood and the argument sounded like
this: Look at the twentieth century!  Need anything more be said than
those dreadful words, twentieth century'?  Civilization, ever more
rational in its means, has become ever more conquistadorial in its
conduct, more deadly in its consequences.  A whole civilization can
chant along with Ahab: "All my means are sane, but my end is mad." Can
it be an accident that the century of inoculations, sanitation, and mass
production is also the century of extermination camps, Gulags, and the
bombing of whole cities? Does the connection not speak for itself?.  As
the Polish-Jewish-English sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has argued, it was
precisely the triumph of industrialized reason--smoothly running trains,
elaborate record-keeping, mass-produced lethal chemicals--that made
organized, barbaric mass murder possible.  Auschwitz has to be counted
not as a gaping hole in the Enlightenment, but as part of its built-in
potential.  And if mechanized genocide is still extraordinary, the
mechanized devastation of the environment is routine.  The same science
that created the steam engine and the automobile presides over the
pulverization of nature--pollution, desertification, ozone depletion,
global warming--all on a grand scale.  Once humanity has learned to
measure the rain forest in board feet, we are on our way to destroying
it.  The apparatus of mass production, owing no obligation to nature, or
to weaker societies, undermines both.  Is it not

self-evident, then, that the Enlightenment is the theme song of imperial
conquest, destruction and self-destruction?*

No, it is not.  Indeed, the immense gravitational field of the
Enlightenment is not so casually escaped, even by its critics.  Those
postmodernists who propose to discard the Enlightenment as an
excrescence of male, imperialist, racist, Western ideology are blind to
their own situation.  For all their insistence that ideas belong to
particular historical moments, they take for granted the historical
ground they walk on.  They fail, or refuse, to recognize that their
preoccupation with multiculturalism, identities, perspectives,
incommensurable world views, and so forth would be unimaginable were it
not for the widespread acceptance of Enlightenment principles: the worth
of all individuals, their right to dignity, and to a social order that
satisfies it."{' The debate about the knowability of reality would not
be taking place on such a large scale were there not a public education
system that admits tens of millions of people to the possibility of a
conversation about such topics.  For that matter, those who worry that
the industrial system directed by imperial male egos is destroying the
world through global warming gleefully brandish the measurements
gathered by scientists who surely believe that what they are measuring
is actually "out there" and not simply a "construction" of imperial
egos.

Even the ideals of perspectivism and its political equivalent,
selfdetermination, are the still uncompleted, indeed uncompletable
unfolding of one of the Enlightenment's major potentials.  That ideas
carry the

* The most common form of this argument today is so-called standpoint
feminism, the idea that so-called objectivity and so-called emancipation
are nothing but the trappings of the imperial masculine ego at work,
consuming, obliterating, or paving over everything in its path.  In this
view, patriarchy's rage to rule is the inevitable consequence of the
Cartesian illusion that the mind is separate from the body and hovers in
free space, like God's eye, treating the world as an object.  At the
root of male supremacy and ecological disaster alike lies the false
assumption that the world has no life of its own but exists for the
pleasure and conquest of the (white, Western, heterosexist) male ego.

' The most cogent defense to date of the politics of difference, that of
the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, traces it to Rousseau's
emphasis on personal authenticity and Herder's insistence that "each
person has his own measure." Then, "the politics of difference grows
organically out of the politics of universal dignity." But the principle
of universal human rights also imposes a caution: one tribo's dignity
must not infringe on that of another tribe.  That is, universalist
principle restricts the prerogatives of a culture, however much it
prides itself on its right to recognition.  On this most universalist
ground, the Confederacy did not have the right to secede from the Union
in 1861 and take the slaves along, and Croatians were bound to make room
for the rights of Serbs when they seceded from the former Yugoslavia in
1992.

marks of experience, that individuals have the right to be
individual--these are offshoots of the value placed by Enlightenment
thinkers on the critical life.  The Enlightenment did not propose to
reduce thought to a diagram, it was--it continues to be--a force-field
of ideas encouraging people to discover the world, and themselves in it.
A humane respect for difference, an understanding that one aspect of the
human condition is to live in a distinct milieu, an acknowledgment of
the limits of what anyone can know--these remain the basis for common
human rights.  The Enlightenment's enduring ideal of universal rights,
once extended logically, guarantees the right to be different--although
it is also a reminder that human beings have good reason not to differ
about one elementary right: the right to be who one wishes to be.

The Enlightenment is not to be discarded because Voltaire was
anti-Semitic or Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Jefferson racist, but rather
further enlightened--for it equips us with the tools with which to
refute the antiSemitism of a Voltaire and the racism of the others.
(Jefferson in particular promoted a useful First Amendment.)  In none of
these cases was bigotry at the core of the man's intellectual system; it
reflected the routine white prejudice of the time.  The Enlightenment is
self-correcting.

The corrective to darkness is more light.  Far from ramming a partial
ideal of reason down the throats of the unenlightened, the Enlightenment
at its best proposes conversation among individuals and groups as an
important source of insight into our common condition.  It is from the
much-maligned Enlightenment that the idea emerges that we must all, in
the philosopher Richard Rorty's words, "lend an ear to the specialists
in particularity." But lending an ear does not mean turning one's face
from the Enlightenment.  The fact that Jefferson owned slaves and
cavalierly presided over the refusal to enfranchise women does not
justify any particular view that happened to be held by a slave or a
woman.

No, the Enlightenment is not so easily shrugged off.  Even Horkheimer
and Adorno did not believe that the Enlightenment ought to be junked,
but rather that it needed to be bolstered against its worst
propensities.  In the time of the war against fascism, they did not want
"consideration of the destructive aspect of progress .  .  .  left to
its enemies." Today's identity theorists are properly skeptical toward
imposed, imperial, arbitrary, unwarranted universalizations.  They
pursue what one feminist theorist,

Lata Mani, calls the "revolt of the particular against that masquerading
as the general." But where did they get their skepticism?  How do they
justify their revolt?  Why does it seem legitimate to them?  Not on
Confucian or Islamic or Aztec grounds.  Not as an inevitable consequence
of the human condition.  The revolt rests precisely on the
Enlightenment's taste for human equality and diversity, its ideal of
self-determination, its objection to arbitrary power.  The business of
the Enlightenment was, indeed, to enlarge the scope of the differences
that deserved respect--and challenge.  Where there was respect for
others, there was bound to be selfquestioning and all the
transformations spawned by self-questioning.  The Enlightenment erected
great structures of thought but also manufactured the acid to dissolve
them.  It was self-reinforcing and self-devouring.  It was a philosophy
for leaving home, not least one's ideological home, wherever that was.
To hate absolutism was also to hate the absolutist claims of one's
nation, tribe, family.  For precisely that reason, the Enlightenment is
not to be disposed of with a wave of the moment's identity cards.

If the Enlightenment is intrinsically incomplete--indeed, intrinsically
incapable of being completed--what then?  Does it follow, as Richard
Rorty writes, that "the vocabulary of Enlightenment rationalism,
although it was essential to the beginnings of liberal democracy, has
become an impediment to the preservation and progress of democratic
societies"?  Should the whole project of trying to know and attain the
general good be junked?  One might just as well discard the right to the
pursuit of happiness because people remain unhappy.  Why does the
vocabulary of "differences,"

"identities," and "stories" stand a better chance of helping preserve
democracy or the mutual respect that is its underpinning?  Rorty, the
most articulate exponent of present-day skeptical pragmatism, has
claimed that, in the real world, people act in the name of their
particular tribes; that when they have acted altruistically, for example
to rescue Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, they have "usually" given
parochial reasons for doing so---that the Jew was "a fellow Milanese, or
a fellow Jutlander, or a fellow member of the same union or profession,
or a fellow bocce player, or a fellow parent of small children." But the
political theorist Norman Geras examined some eighty accounts of
Gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust.  Only one failed to
mention universal

moral obligations.  Even those who saved their friends cited
universalist motives as well.  The rescuers spoke of defending "human
dignity," of helping "a persecuted human being," of helping "because a
human being ought to help another," of "our human duty to open our home
.  .  .  and our hearts to anyone who suffers."

The question is how to cultivate the spirit of solidarity across the
lines of differencessolidarity with "anyone who suffers." For surely
that spirit cannot be expected to generate spontaneously inside
fortified groups, each preoccupied with refining its differences from
other groups.  And yet that is precisely where the emphasis has been
placed.  "There is no transcendence of cultural, religious, and national
particularity," writes the political theorist Michael Walzer, another
lucid proponent of what may be called a soft version of multicultural
politics.  "There is no 'higher' social formation than the local group,
no historically necessary universalism beyond the newly articulated
universe of difference." The most that distinct identity groups may
expect, Walzer argues, is to haste together commonalities for a time,
using arguments that are "secular, pragmatic, inconclusive," differing
"even in the schemes we devise for incorporating difference." To think
otherwise is a rationalist or metaphysical illusion--or worse, a
violation of democracy, for as long as large groups insist on organized
respect for their distinct identities, "there is today no democratic way
of opposing the politics of difference." In a culture of centrifugal
motion, Walzer maintains that "our only stable and common commitment" is
to "principles of government," and hopes that "stronger organizations,
capable of collecting resources and delivering real benefits to their
members, will move these groups, gradually, toward a democratically
inclusive politics," where "religious and ethnic activists begin by
defending the interests of their own community and end up in political
coalitions, fighting for a place on 'balanced' tickets, and talking (at
least) about the common good."

I share the goal, but the hope needs a great deal of help.  To develop a
political majority requires more than occasional coalitions knitted
together by overlapping interests.  It requires also, and urgently, a
culture of commonality.  If groups spend Monday through Saturday turned
inward, separately cultivating their differences, consolidating their
internal unities, practicing cordiality to the exclusivists in their
midst, it will not do

for them to gather together on Sunday morning to speak of commonalities.
To be active citizens of the whole, they must also spend time Monday
through Saturday fraternizing across the lines, cultivating cultural
hybrids, criticizing the narrowness of the tribe, working up ideas that
people "unlike" themselves might share.  One may respect the democratic
rights of distinct groups to organize as they choose and still argue
vigorously against the aggrandizement of difference.

The Enlightenment accepts the paradox that we are, in Rorty's words, at
once "connoisseurs of diversity and Enlightenment rationalists," and
refuses to dissolve the paradox on the cheap, either by annihilating the
partisans of the wrong positions or by giving up the aspiration to
better thinking and clearer sight.  The Enlightenment says human beings
are born and die, and in between, they seek to live.  As for the rest,
human nature is what human beings make of themselves.  The Enlightenment
obliges all of us to recognize that everyone sees the world through a
prism-and that a prism is also a prison, a perspective is also a limit.

The bearers of all identity cards need to know more than where they're
coming from; they need to know where to go, and where others are coming
from and want to go.  Toward this end, it helps all of us to listen, to
know that we, all of us, are capable of reason, respect, insight, but
also of unreason, cruelty, error.  It does not help to sneer at
universal rights and capacities as if all general statements about the
human condition amounted to nothing other than glossy masks over the
skull called power.

The enlightened democrat believes in an open universalism, not the
hand-me-down sort.  The enlightened democrat believes in pursuing the
common good, not taking it on faith.  The enlightened democrat has a
different faith: that particular thoughts and experiences can be
accessible to those whose thoughts and experiences are different.  The
work of the democrat is to find points of contact, to sympathize, to
explain, to reciprocate and to appeal to reciprocity.  The democrat
believes that translation is feasible-perhaps only "up to a point," but
when all is said and done, up to that point, which cannot be known in
advance.

In other words, the Enlightenment is best understood as an aspiration,
an invitation, a commitment to a process that seriously aims to bring
about understandings that do not yet exist.  It is not a Hall of Fame or
a pantheon or an archive of preserved knowledge about how human beings

ought to live.  It is available only in a loose-leaf edition.  The point
is not to celebrate the achievements of some accomplished Enlightenment,
as if its Declaration of Independence and EncyclopYdie, its Federalist
papers and Constitutional debates established once and for all the
master list of what there was to be enlightened about and who was worth
hearing on the subject.  We don't need resurrection, we need sensible
conversation.  The golden years of the Enlightenment do not lie in some
distant past, when Indians were slaughtered and Africans enslaved in the
name of the higher virtues of Western civilization.  If we are lucky,
the golden years remain to be lived.

IV.


The Poignancy of

Multiculturalism

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

--WILlAAM BLAKE, The Marriage of

Heaven and Hell

The Fate of the

Commons

Identity politics confronts a world in flux and commands it to stop.
Because the flux is not going to stop, neither will identity politics.
Many varieties will rise, flourish, fall, give way to others, some more
strident, others (one can hope) more temperate.  Today, some cultural
fundamentalists defend the formulas of "multiculturalism" as solutions
to the riddles of national identity in a world where the powers of any
nation or state are steadily being eroded.  Other fundamentalists,
probably more numerous, claim that multiculturalism, racial preferences,
and the like are instruments of an elite of usurpers from Harvard and
Hollywood who are uncivilizing a formerly robust nation.  The apparent
opposites are twins.

What frightens both is the flimsiness of a culture where everything is
in motion and authority has perpetually to prove itself, where
marginality is no longer always so marginal and the fragments of
identity are on sale everywhere from the university to the mall.  In the
minds of all fundamentalists, porousness makes for corrosiveness.  A
porous society is an impure society.  The impulse is to purge
impurities, to wall off the stranger.

223

Today, these currents are at work almost everywhere to one degree or
another.  The stability of communities is undermined by the expatriation
of capital, the migration of peoples, and the bombardment of images.
Never before have hope, greed, and fear had so many channels through
which to rush so fast.  Jet planes transport immigrants overnight from
Seoul to Los Angeles, while back in Seoul, engineers clone computers
from Silicon Valley, taking the jobs of workers in San Josd, and the
computers they build in Kuala Lureput move capital instantly from Los
Angeles to Tokyo.  By contrast, the Korean engineer's brother in Los
Angeles has no reason to phone the black man in Compton, a direct-dial
telephone call away.  In the not so United States, ethnic enclaves
coexist in blissful or not so blissful ignorance.  They are most aware
of each other at points of friction.  The collisions are widely
reported, filmed, videotaped.  They become lore.  Over time, they
congeal into history.

The collisions and suspicions feel all the more intense within a dynamic
of economic decline.  Under pressure from globalization, the
nation-state loses its will and capacity to remedy what the conservative
economist Joseph Sehumpeter called the "creative destruction" that the
unbridled market brings.  Such controls as Western societies succeeded
in imposing on capital's license during a century of reform have
weakened. Growth is wildly uneven, inequality is immense, anxiety is
endemic.  The state, as a result, is continually urged to do more but
deprived of the means to do so.  When Americans think of the res
publica, the public sector, they tend to think of unsafe streets and bad
schools.  It is mostly the private sector that they associate with
efficiency--Federal Express, not the hapless U.S.  Postal Service.
Public schools graduate semiliterates while parents with no particular
affection for Catholicism send their children to parochial schools.
Public buses are infrequent and overloaded while limousines glide by.
Observing the state's incapacity, resentful of those worse off than
themselves, people blame the government, refuse to vote, hate taxes,
doubt democratic institutions.  Political parties are hollow shells for
the convenience of contributors.  People withdraw from public life
altogether.

In these circumstances, decline mocks the notion of a common human
condition of shared rights and mutual obligations.  For an entire
generation now, the majority of Americans have been losing ground.  In
income and wealth, they have been losing not only relative to the very
rich, but in absolute terms as well.  The shrinkage of real per capita
income that began in the early 1970s has now continued for more than two
decades.  Average real wages fell by 18.8 percent between 1973 and 1994.
While the wealthiest onefifth of the population improved its economic
position during the 1980s, the rest of the middle class--to which the
majority of Americans feel they belong--plunged into insecurity.  The
upper reaches of unionized manufacturing jobs were riddled by plant
closures, demands for givebacks, and--in that contemporary
euphemism---corporate "down-sizing." Total household income also
declined, especially in families headed by women.  The percentage of
full-time workers who earn what the Commerce Department defines as less
than a living wage ($13,091 in 1992) rose from 12 percent in 1979 to 16
percent in 1992.  Since 1973, the number of American children living in
poverty has increased by half, to 22 percent of the total.

The gulf in opportunities widened accordingly.  If higher education is
the embodiment of the American dream, the price of access is soaring.
For all the hue and cry about imperiled canons, unfair affirmative
action, and the horrors of political correctness, the question left in
the shadows is: Who can afford the price of admission?  The popular
imagination has not been seized by the growing polarization between
those who benefit from higher education and those who do not.  In 1979,
the student from the top quarter of American families had four times the
chance of earning a B.A.  degree by the age of 24 as a student in the
bottom quarter.  In 1994, a student from the top quarter had nineteen
times the chance.  This is class division with a vengeance, but it is
the subject of no national debates, no newsmagazine covers, no
congressional resolutions, no political campaigns.

Growing inequality erodes social solidarity.  Yet the majority who have
lost ground, and whose children stand to lose still more in the future,
do not imagine themselves a majority.  They have little collective
imagination, no shared institutions, no political party, no common
church, no unified school system, no one big union.  Affirmative action
for racial minorities has to some degree retinted the class gulf without
changing its depth.  No significant political counterforce insists on
reducing the staggering inequality that has come to be accepted as
normal in a country where the average chief executive officer in a large
corporation collects 149 times the pay of the average factory worker. By
and large, those who deplore the lack of a common history and curriculum
do not object to these staggering disproportions.  They are willing to
live comfortably in a society where the rich and poor are equally free
to read their Shakespeare in the gutter.

The impersonal mobility of capital, the pell-mell pace of technological
change, and probusiness state policy all have combined to undermine what
might otherwise have been a significant instrument of cross-racial,
crossethnic, cross-gender, cross-regional solidarity: the union.  In the
United States, where forty years ago almost one in four American workers
belonged to unions, fewer than one in six does today.  Management-union
relations have regressed to their condition of the 1920s.  Among the
majority who work, the experience of class solidarity is at its lowest
ebb in three-quarters of a century.  Even many workers see unions as
nothing more than bureaucracies that pursue "special interests." But far
more than a spontaneous onrush of individualism is at work.  Unions are
also undermined by the other special interests.  "Strong organizations
and group affinities based on sex, sexual preference, racial and ethnic
ties, religion, physical handicap, and the like .  .  .  have severely
compromised the status of trade unions," the economist Michael J.  Piore
writes.  "Federal labor policy .  .  .  has substituted legislative
remedies to the particular grievances of .  .  .

groups (the handicapped, the aged, the racial minorities) for collective
bargaining, and in the process has encouraged people to define their
grievances and to organize in this way." No idle bystanders to social
trends, many companies encourage the growth of particularist
organizations in the workplace--one example is the anti-union Digital
Equipment Corporation, which cultivates groups of women, blacks, and
gays, to the point of buying a corporate page in the program of the
Boston Gay Rights parade.

The paradox is that as investment, communication, organization,
migration, and trade become more intensely global, the reality that
people experience, the one that comforts them and fills them with
feelings of membership, becomes even more stubbornly local--all the more
so because competing claims of commonality feel hopelessly abstract and
re mote.  The upheavals that once undermined traditional attachments end
up generating pressure to reinvent--the oxymoron is deliberate--new
traditional attachments.  The globalizing current kicks up a backwash.
People feel some deep, only half-understood desire simply to belong to
some zone, any zone protected from the dominant power, and some way to
differentiate themselves from the mass into which they fear they will
disappear.  The solidarity they trust is the one closest at hand: the
one defined by people who look or speak like themselves.  Here is the
promise--however elusive it may proveof roots, security, and, not least,
prospects for advancement.  Here is a dignified place in life.

But today, the identity obsession is not just practiced by history's
most beleaguered people.  American culture in the late twentieth century
is a very stewpot of separate identities.  Not only blacks and feminists
and gays declare that their dignity rests on their distinctness, but so
in various ways do white Southern Baptists, Florida Jews, Oregon
skinheads, Louisiana Cajuns, Brooklyn Lubavitchers, California Sikhs,
Wyoming ranchers, the residents of gated communities in Orange County,
and "militias" at war with the U.S.  government.  The difference is that
the people who like their America white and well-armed purport to speak
in the name of "normal Americans." They are proud to proclaim that they
have "traditional values" on their side.  Their particularity is
frequently camouflaged, at least for now, as universality.

It is the identity obsessions, all of them, each fueling the others,
that give the question of muhicuhuralism its charge and its venom.  If
multicuhuralism were nothing more than an acknowledgment of certain
facts about the different ways in which people live, whom they like,
what languages they speak, there would still be practical controversies,
but they need not have bunched up and ignited a culture war or an
identity panic.  Why shouldn't a population have bilingual schools, to
ease their way through the difficult transition to English?  It does no
harm to the larger community to hire bilingual police or ambulance
drivers to save the lives of Vietnamese or Dominican immigrants.  It
cannot but encourage the learning of American history as something more
than a pageant if that history is more than a chronicle of selected
great men.  It cannot hurt parochial Americans' capacity to live more
fully in the world to know that Western civilization, for all its
achievements, is hardly alone.

There is no necessary contradiction between a recognition of difference
and the affirmation of common rights.  To the contrary: it is in the
universalist grain to protect women from genital mutilation; to defend
gay men and women against being assaulted because of whom they love; to
oppose racial discrimination in hiring, housing, lending, even in the
meting out of the death penalty.  A commitment to commonality should
forthrightly entail an opposition to class bias in school expenditures
and university admissions.

None of these commitments requires severe identity politics.  To the
contrary: they are far more easily dismissed if couched as the demands
of groups enraptured by how different they are from the general run of
humanity.

Uneasy with the actual variety of American lives, many Americans signal
their "normality" by shuddering at the very thought of multiculturalism.
In fact, it is sometimes hard to tell who uses the term more
insistently, those who embrace the phenomenon, whatever exactly they
mean by it, or those who find it deplorable.  The word is bague, a
malange of fact and value, current precisely because it is vague enough
to serve so many interests.  Partisans may use the term to defend the
recognition of difference, or to resist policies and ideas imposed by
conquerors, or to defend cosmopolitanism--the interest and pleasure that
each may take in the profusion of humanity.  The purists of identity
politics use it to defend endless fission, a heap of monocultures.  On
the other side, multiculturalism and its demonic twin, "political
correctness," serve conservatives as names for a potpourri of things
they detest--including an irritating insistence on the rights of
minorities.

Yet in many ways, the jargon of multiculturalism, whether as angel or
bogeyman, evades the central wound in American history.  America's
national history is short, as histories go, but it is thick with
slaughter and misery, and none of the consequences are more biting, more
disturbing, than today's conflicts between whites and blacks.  The crime
of slavery has shaped America's destiny so thoroughly that it might
almost be said that the answer to "Who Are We?" is: We are a people who
tried to live "half slave and half free." For all the complexities of
today's identity quarrels, race is the origin or at least the template
for most of them, and the concept of "race," the way most people use it,
usually means the most profound either/or: black or white.

The core of our current predicament is that for centuries, in a culture
that affirmed the rights of the individual, American blacks were subject
to slavery--"social death," as the sociologist Orlando Patterson has
called it-and that slavery was followed by more than 125 years of
frequently violent discrimination.  The forms of that discrimination
have changed, and in many cases diminished, thanks to a civil rights
movement that won the support of a majority.  But history is stamped on
the skin, a remark or a flash of anger away.  The present is always
rekindling the flammable past.  In the thinking of many blacks--but not
only blacks--the difference between slavery and immigration is
fundamental, and the consequences for present-day generations equally
fundamental.  To be white, when all is said and done, is to have the
privilege of being not black. Compared to this difference--"as different
as black and white"---other differences, well, pale.  Blacks made more
than "contributions" to American history.  There is a strong case to be
made that slavery is central to the whole history of American
prosperity.  After such knowledge, what redemption'?  Why should the
descendants of slaves have to make compromises, pitch in, help form
majorities?

But the brutal fact is that the descendants of the Africans seized and
shipped to America have no practical choice but to remain here--here
where their ancestors were chained, sold, and lynched, where they too,
regardless of achievement, are often despised, belittled, or feared, and
where they have still, against all odds, struggled to make such homes as
it is possible for the descendants of such a history to make.  The past
was murderous, but the survivors live in the present.  Democracy is
precisely that system in which people have the chance to overcome the
past, to "drive their carts and their plows over the bones of the dead,"
in William Blake's words, with the least violence to the living or to
those yet to live.  The calculus of a people's suffering is a poor basis
for organizing a society in real time.  This is a political truth as
well as a comment on the practical difficulty of calculating, no less
securing, reparations.  Minorities at war with majorities generally
lose.  Their prospects for protection and advancement rest on common
interests and moral appeals to majorities, not on evanescent "rainbows,"
self-segregating "unities," phantom "people of color." Misrecognition of
the actual situation is unforgiving.

What, then, are the risks of the go-it-alone mood that identity politics
encourages?  The hardening of difference today, the periodic showdowns,
the cutthroat competition, evoke the nightmarish images that fill the
daily news.  Tribalism rampant has led to steady carnage in Bosnia and
the civil war firestorms burning throughout the borderlands of the
former Soviet Union.  We properly fear what might be waiting in the
wings from racial and ethnic conflict.  If "ethnic cleansing" could
arise in a Europe that was supposed to have learned to say Never again
to mass slaughter, after the war after the war to end all wars, then
metaphorically at least, Bosnia stands as some desperate dead end point
of no return.  "Balkanization" is a metaphor with a built-in unhappy
ending.  It is also a reminder of the futility of using history as a
basis for endless recrimination.  There, Orthodox Serbs are still trying
to punish Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians for the losses of
centuries past.  This revival of the wars of religion is a grave defeat
for the cosmopolitan credo that when different people coexist, mix,
intermarry, their familiarity with one another makes life more rewarding
for all.

But appalling as it is, Bosnia is not the nightmare America has to
fear--not in the foreseeable future.  A scenario of the war of all
tribes against all other tribes is not in the cards here.  Despite the
inflamed metaphors of the day, America is not "coming apart at the
seams." American civic life has been spared the worst by democratic
institutions that have lasted--institutions that were, to say the least,
thin in Tito's Yugoslavia and nonexistent in the Soviet Union.  It is
Canada, and perhaps Mexico, but not the United States, that flirts with
dissolution.

But the more likely prospect facing the United States is nothing to crow
over, either.  It is more of the same soft apocalypse to which Americans
have apparently grown inured: more inequality, more punishment of the
poor, more demoralization and pathology among them, the slow (or not-so
slow) further breakdown of civic solidarities.  A necessary if not
sufficient condition for the reversal of these tendencies is the
emergence of a vital Left, but this is precisely what is thwarted by the
obsession with group difference.  It is not that such a Left would
automatically know what to do; rather, that taking seriously the need to
compose a majority, it might at least begin to ask the right questions.
Without the revitalization of the Left, however, the breakdown of the
commons will most likely continue to be administered by "conservatives"
who conserve nothing; who combine buccaneer laissez-faire with a
mystique of unattainable "family values" to create a voting majority
that federates much of the anxious middle class, mainly men, mainly
whites, with the rich, all joined in the collective satisfaction of not
being black or poor.

So the cultivation of separate identities is myopic for the Left above
all.

Instead of thinking deeply about how to produce majorities, leftists
tend to list minorities as if they might simply gravitate to each other
by magic.  In truth, on the Left and among multiculturalists,
majoritarian thinking is frowned on as a sign of accommodation.*
Leftists have too long been comfortable as minorities, too quick to
flatter themselves as "cultures of resistance." This is, in part,
because university culture is hospitable to minoritarian recklessness
and identity obsessions; in part because present economic conditions
divide more than unite; in part because, like it or not, leftist
professionals benefited disproportionately, if unwillingly, from
Reagan's flush years.  With tenure or its equivalent, with children in
private schools, their worlds are decoupled from the worlds of their
putative allies in the working classes.

But minoritarian thinking is also a generational heritage, an unwitting,
authentically tragic extension of the born-to-lose protest spirit of the
late 1960s.  Then, a New Left that had begun as a movement with majority
support, in civil rights, became--had to become--a minority pitted
against the Vietnam War.  To contribute even to a left-of-center
Democratic majority at the moment of civil rights triumph, in the
mid-1960s, would have amounted, in Staughton Lynd's words, to "coalition
with the Marines." The separatisms that followed Black Power spawned a
growing satisfaction with minority status.  Charged with the spirit of
blunt confrontation, these separatisms were ill-prepared for, and
heedless of, inevitable backlash.

It was in the wake of a revolution of rising expectations that
affirmative action, set-asides, token representation, race-based
political districts,

* Or there are attempts to finesse the problem away.  Feminists, for
example, are prone to claim that they are already intrinsically
majoritarian because women compose, after all, a majority--as if women
thought or acted as a unified bloc.  Then there are the leftists who
brush away defeats by claiming to speak for the nonvoting majority--as
if nonvoters retain moral title to the nation, as a sort of consolation
prize.

and other racial preferences came to loom so large in the agenda of
liberals and the Left.  But these segments of the Johnson and Nixon
domestic programs presupposed a certain abundance.  who got seated at
the table and in what order mattered less if the table was piled high.
As prosperity receded, however, so did the constituency for affirmative
action. Such programs and the rhetoric that attended them became wedges
into the already dwindling constituency of the Democratic Party.
Polarization was foreordained.  As Yale law professor Stephen L.  Carter
argued in a complex book, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby,
whose most subtle and constructive contribution was missed by reviewers
of evet.w stripe, there remains a strong ease for affirmative action in
school admissions (though not university tenure) and hiring (but not the
higher reaches).  But the higher the position, the weaker the arguments,
until by the time a president (George Bush) nominates to the Supreme
Court a man of minimal achievements (Clarence Thomas) and calls him "the
best man for the job," the arguments for racial preference break down
altogether.  Many forms of affirmative action can be defended on grounds
of fairness, though some cannot, but even the best are most convincing
when they do not invite the less comfortable to pay the steepest price.
It is, again, a matter of proportion.  The argument is overloaded on
both sides. Many advocates of affirmative action and race-based
districts exaggerate what they have accomplished for the worst-off
blacks, while opponents inflate the damage done to their sides.

There are many reasons why the least comfortable white men in particular
feel insecure, hut one that swells up to huge symbolic proportions is
the feeling of indignity provoked by the sense that there is, for them,
no particular benefit in restraining their resentment--or voting
Democratic. What is at stake, in practical political terms, is large and
immediate.  Out of the election wreckage of November 1994.  one clump of
statistics stuck out like an assault rifle.  Fifty-four percent of males
voted for House Republicans, as against 46 percent who voted for
Democrats.  Wonten voted in exactly the opposite proportions.  "h was,"
wrote Richard Morin and Barbara Vobejda in the Washington Post, "the
largest gap since gender differences were first reported on exit polls
in 1982." The numbers were still more skewed for white males.  Sixtv-two
percent voted Republican. Speaker Tom Foley lost his Washington district
despite carrying a majority of women because he got only 45 percent of
the male vote (almost all white).  George W.  Bush took two-thirds of
the white male vote against Ann Richards in the race for governor of
Texas and won.  Despite exceptions, the overall pattern was clear.  As
white men went, so went the nation,* in no small part because the white
men who came out to vote were disproportionately the most splenetic.
These were the men who in a cynical, spiteful time had not given up on
politics.  They thought they could make the proverbial difference.  And
they did.

The Republican tilt of white men is the most potent form of identity
politics in our time: a huddling of men who resent (and exaggerate)
their relative decline not only in parts of the labor market but at
home, in the bedroom and the kitchen, and in the culture.  Their fear
and loathing is, in part, a panic against the relative gains of women
and minorities in an economy that people experience as a zero-sum game,
in which the benefits accruing to one group seem to amount to
subtractions from another. Talk about identity politics!  These white
men, claiming they deserve colorblind treatment, identify with their
brethren more than their wives or sisters, or minorities.  But economic
jitters are only one force behind the conspicuous loathing of Bill
Clinton and Democrats of all factions.  Symbols are fuel.  The rage of
dispossession has been at work, seething, for example, in the savage
assaults on Hillary Rodham Clinton and the frenzy directed against
Clinton's partial acceptance of gays in the military.

Then, too, victories are won not by census figures and questionnaires
but by turnout.  It was the Clinton-haters who came out to vote, while
an extraordinary number of Democrats voted their alienation and
disgruntle-ment, and stayed home.  The white men most fundamentalist in
their Protestantism and most dedicated to the National Rifle Association
came out to vote because their antagonism to illegal immigrants, welfare
moth * Only once in thirty years has the white male presidential
plurality failed to predict the winner.  In 1976, Gerald Ford rook only
51 percent of the white male vote against Jimmy Carter and lost--his
white males weren't a big enough majority to compensate for Republican
losses among blacks.  In 1980, Ronald Reagan picked up 59 percent of
white males, a majority that grew in 1984 to an astounding 67 percent.
In 1988, George Bush picked up 63 percent, against Michael Dukakis, and
in 1992, 41 percent against Bill Clinton's 37 percent, the remainder
going to Ross Peror.  Thanks to Perot, in other words, Bush was the
first Republican candidate to lose the majority of white males since
Barry Goldwater.

ers, and beneficiaries of affirmative action outweighed anything
Democrats offered.  In general, those who benefit most from
government-sponsored privileges--the old, the cattle-grazers, and the
house-rich--vote most, while the unemployed, the poor, the young,
minorities, and industrial workers vote least.  (The proportion of
blue-collar workers who vote in presidential elections declined by
one-third between 1960 and 1988.) Those who most resent taxes vote to
punish those beneath them.  Suburban homeowners refuse to pay taxes for
the urban schools from which they have withdrawn their children.  The
groups who need government most have seceded from politics, feeling that
politics has seceded from them.*

A Left that was serious about winning political power and reducing the
inequality of wealth and income would stop lainbasting all white men,
and would take it as elementary.  to reduce frictions among white men,
blacks, white women, and His.  panics.  Could it be more obvious that
the Left and the Democrats alike are helpless unless they offer all
these constituencies something they benefit from in common?  At the same
time, a Left is not a Left unless it defends the scapegoated poor, tries
to deliver them (along with the not-so-poor) training, decent jobs, and
provision for children, acknowledging that the present welfare state is
not kind to the poor.  But multiculturalism by itself does not
contribute to that political revival.

The most insistent multiculturalists do not seem to recognize that there
is no Left, there is only more panic, unless a plausible hope emerges
for a greater equality of means.  The right to a job, education, medical
care, housing, retraining over the course of a lifetime--these are the
bare elements of an economic citizenship that ought to be universal.

* Perhaps voter registration reforms will bring substantially more
Democrats to the polls, perhaps not.  But even if they eventually
overcome active opposition from Republican politicians and foot-dragging
on the part of local Democrats who were perfectly content with the
status quo, there remains a self-defeating culture of disgust among
traditional Democratic voters.

Their reflex belongs to the secessionist mind-set.  Why bother voting,
secessionists feel, if politics is hopelessly disappointing?  According
to the census, whites voted at a rate of about 45 percent, blacks at
about 35 percent, Hispanics at about 30 percent.  Of those Americans
earning $50,000 per annum or more, 61 percent voted (a slight increase
from the 59.2 percent who voted in the previous off-year election in
1990), while of those earning between $5,000 and $10,000 per annum, only
23.3 percent voted (down from 30.9 percent in 1990).  In California,
Hispanics constitute about 27 percent of the population, but in the
crucial 1994 vote, where Proposition 187 punished illegal immigrants and
their children, they constituted only 14 percent of eligible voters and
only 8 percent of the state vote.

Yet today, virtually unopposed, the market is trumpeted as the sole
source of economic growth and the undisputed marker of social health. No
one proclaims the virtues of the unbridled market more strenuously than
those who benefit from tax breaks and acceptable subsidies.  Utopian
capitalists, the most potent purists left in the world, proclaim that
the market delivers precisely the goods that need delivery and rewards
the right winners; as for the rest--well, too bad for the losers.  But
the market is compatible with immense inequality and social chaos.
Corporate secession across borders bleeds away the nation's capacity to
bring its citizens together.  An unbridled market generates mass panic
and beckons gangsterism, theocracy, and authoritarian crackdowns.  It
fuels fantasies of a "moral community" surrounded by fortifications, of
a smug "West" permanently embattled, closed, and unreconstructed.

Of popular movements that actually exist, the ecology movement alone on
the Left has serious potential for crossing the identity trenches.
Freedom needs a commons that remains green.  Most Americans understand
that the so-called conservatives have no interest in conserving the
earth. But even here, commonality politics does not emerge
automatically.

Environmentalists who enjoy professional life cannot afford to forget
that the dangers to public health from headlong industrial development
fall disproportionately on the working classes, whose factories are
frequently vile, whose neighborhoods are more likely to be the sites of
toxic dumps and poisoned air than the neighborhoods of the better-off,
and whose jobs may be at risk if logging is stopped or automakers are
ever forced to shift from gasoline to energy sources that would not
further heat up the atmosphere.

But let there be no illusions.  All left-of-center forces in the world
today are chastened if not demoralized, and for good reason.  For a
generation, throughout the industrial world, most socialist and social
democratic parties, and the groupings of intellectuals around them, have
lost ground.  This is not only, perhaps not even mainly, because of the
shadow of the Gulag and the sordid record of the former command
economies of the East.

It is largely because the various Lefts start with a built-in
disadvantage.

They operate on a national scale while corporations and capital flows
are transnational.  The Left wants to mobilize in behalf of democracy
and equality, while capital, the least democratic institution of

all, slips through the mesh.  In power, social democracies end up
presiding over mass unemployment.

It is this mobilization for equality and against arbitrary power that is
the Left's main business--if there is to be a Left.  Just how can a
democratic society regulate the demons of technology.  and the strains
of competition? How can multinational corporations be brought under
democratic control without resorting to the heavy hand of the state?  In
the United States, though, the mind-set of identity politics--including
the panic against political correctness--aborts the necessary
discussion.  Cultivating unity within minority groups, the obsession
with difference stands in the way of asking the right questions.

To recognize diversity, more than diversity is needed.  The commons is
needed.  To affirm the rights of minorities, majorities must be formed.
Democracy is more than a license to celebrate (and exaggerate)
differences. It cannot afford to live in the past--anyone's past.  It is
a political system of mutual reliance and common moral obligations.
Mutuality needs tending.  If multiculturalism is not tempered by a stake
in the commons, then centrifugal energy overwhelms any commitment to a
larger good.  This is where multiculturalism as a faith has proved a
trap even---or especially--for people in the name of whom the partisans
of identity politics purport to speak.  Affirming the virtues of the
margins, identity politics has left the centers of power uncontested. No
wonder the threatened partisans of "normality" have seized the
offensive.

The dialogue today .is inflamed and incoherent in part because the
symbolic stakes are overloaded on every side.  There is a lot of fantasy
in circulation.  The melting pot never melted as thoroughly as Henry
Ford would have liked; the golden years were mighty white.  And the
monocultures of Afrocentrists and goddess-worshippers, however foolish,
are far less prevalent than their advocates wish or their antagonists
fear.  But if the Right magnifies the multiculturalist menace, identity
partisans inflate the claims they make for multiculturalism.  All suffer
from a severe lack of proportion.  Most of all, while critics of
identity politics are looting society, the politics of identity is
silent on the deepest sources of social misery: the devastation of
cities, the draining of resources away from the public and into the
private hands of the few.  It does not organize to reduce the sickening
inequality between rich and poor.  Instead, in effect,

it struggles to change the color of inequality.  In this setting, the
obsession with cultural identity at the expense of political citizenship
distracts what must be the natural constituencies of a Left if there is
to be one: the poor, those fearful of being poor, intellectuals with
sympathies for the excluded.

Make no mistake--the path of commonality offers no utopian destination.
It offers, in fact, difficulties galore.  Majorities come and go; they
are not easy to stitch together under the best of circumstances.  A
diversity ,of customs and rages is here to stay--and nowhere more than
in amazingly profuse, polychrome, polyglot America.  Plainly people are
motivated by loyalties to clan, religion, race.  Meanwhile, capital
moves across frontiers at the speed of light as labor lumbers along at a
human pace.  Capital can always threaten to take off for lower-wage
pastures and bring national reformers to their knees.  At the same time,
the nation-states that people expect to protect them against the flux
may be obsolescent in an age of global markets, but they haven't gotten
the news.  They exist.  They have weight.  They wave flags; they recruit
armies; they build monuments; people are willing to kill and die for
their symbols.  By contrast, commonality offers--what?  The discredited
red flag?  The blue banner of UN bureaucracy? The green flag is fine, as
far as it goes, and so is the flag of human rights, but neither stirs
enough human hearts.

Still, we will not see what lies on the other side of the politics of
identity unless, unflinchingly, without illusions, we look, look again,
and are willing to go on looking.  For too long, too many Americans have
busied themselves digging trenches to fortify their cultural borders,
lining their trenches with insulation.  Enough bunkers!  Enough of the
perfection of differences!  We ought to be building bridges.

Acknowledgments

I began this book on sabbatical leave from the department of sociology
at the University of California, Berkeley.  The French-American
Foundation made it possible for me to finish in Paris, as the 1994-95
holder of the Chair in American Civilization at the lcole des Hautes
ltudes en Sciences Sociales.

There, under the aegis of the Centre d'ltudes Nord-Americaines, I
benefited from the hospitality of Jean Heifer and Franq;ois Weil, and
from discussions with them and with Sophie Body-Gendrot, Marianne
Debouzy, Nelcya Delanoi, Denis Lacorne, Dominique Schnap-per, Alain
Touraine, Sylvia Ullmo, and Michel Wieviorka.

I am grateful to many.  For chapter 1, I had the benefit of interviews
with David Anderson, Yasmin Anwar, Richard Arum, Carol Chinn, Harry
Chotiner, Toni Cook, Fred Ellis, Kitty Epstein, Allen Graubard, Sheila
Jordan, Jan Malvin, Gary Nash, Pedro Noguera, Meredith Story, Renee
Swayne, Steven Weinberg, and Shelley Weintraub.  Jan Malvin and Gary
Nash gave me the use of many documents and tapes.  For the fourth part
of chapter 6, I thank Akira Iriye, Morton Keller, Albert Shanker, David
Vigilante, and again Gary Nash for their letters.

239

Over many years of wrestling with the conundrums of culture and
politics, I have benefited from conversations and correspondence with
Marshall Berman, Kenneth Cmiel, Troy Duster, Richard Flacks, Maurice
Isserman, Jeremy Lamer, Robert Jay Lifton, Ruth Rosen, and Richard
Zinman.

Useful tips and facts came from Richard Alba, Frederick Douzet, Steven
Lukes, Michael Norman, Thomas Piazza, and Mary C. Waters.  Eric Alterman
rescued the book at one of many bat{ moments.  Jon Kannegaard suggested
I upgrade a subtitle into the title.  I have stood on the shoulders of
many writers, most acknowledged in notes, but in particular wish to
single out two predecessors: Robert Hughes for Culture of Complaint and
Bussell Jacoby for Dogmatic Wisdom.

Earlier drafts or sections were read and criticized by David Biale,
Norman Birnbaum, Shana Cohen, Barbara Epstein, Herbert J.  Gans, Adam
Hochschild, Arlie Hochschild, Jerome Karabel, Michael Kazin, Richard
Bothstein, and John Torpey, all of whom helped and all of whom I cannot
have satisfied, although not for lack of trying.

Earlier versions of parts of this book appeared in Contention, Dissent,
Harper's, the New York Observer, and World Policy Journal, and in the
books Higher Education Under Fire, ed.  Michael Brub and Cary Nelson
(London: Routledge, 1994) and A New Moment in the Americas, ed.  Robert
S.  Leiken (New Brunswick, N J: Transaction Publishers, 1994).  I am
grateful to the respective editors for permission to reprint.

Jennifer Fosket and especially Marco Calavita helped greatly with
fact-checking, the latter thanks to the good offices of the Department
of Culture and Communication of the School of Education at New York
University.

Master editor Tom Engelhardt once again posed a few thousand imperative
and difficult questions, of which I hope to have done justice to a few.
Master editor Sara Bershtel then, with great finesse, pressed me to make
more sense.  Assistant editor Riva Hoeherman helped.  My agent, Ellen
Levine, was grand.

Fletcher Haulley, Justin Haulley, and Shoshana Haulley, whether they
knew it or not, provided distraction and forbearance.

Laurel Cook helped, and helped, and sublimely helped again.

Notes

Epigraphs

Page ix.

Frederick Douglass: Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (London:
Collier

Macmillan, 1892), p.  154.

Part I.

Plato: Philebus, Section 17A, in John Peters's free translation, in turn
paraphrasing Paul Ricoeur.

Part II.

Henry James: The American Scene, edited and with an introduction by John
F.

Sears (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), p.  92.

Patrick Buchanan: Speech to the Republican National Convention, Houston,

Texas, 1992.

Part III.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Joel Porte, ed., Emerson in His Journals
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p.  305.  The entry
dates from April 17, 1843.

Part IV.

William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (New York: Oxford
University

Press, 1975 [1790]), p.  7.

241

1.  A

7


Dubious Battle in Oakland

Colmnbus Day of 1992: Unless otherwise attributed, information in this
chapter is drawn from my interviews with David Anderson (September 14,
1993), Yasmin Anwar (October 10, 1992), Richard Arum (December 18,
1992), Carol Chinn (November 5, 1992), Harp' Chotiner (January 18,
1993), Toni Cook (December 16, 1992), Fred Ellis and Kitty Epstein
(December 9, 1992), Allen Graubard (October 18, 1992), Sheila Jordan
(January 23, 1993, and September 21, 1993), Jan Malvin (October 27,
1992), Gary Nash (February 4, 1993), Pedro Noguera (October 12, 1992),
Meredith Story (May 22, 1993), Renee Swayne (February 1, 1993), Steven
Weinberg (January 29, 1993), and Shelley Weintraub (October 24, 1992,
August 22, 1994, and March 3, 1995).

8 "Understanding Eurocentrism": Gary B.  Nash et al., A More Perfect
Union (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), p.  28.

"could be very damaging": David L.  Kirp, "The Battle of the Books,"

San Francisco Examiner, Image Magazine, February 24, 1991, pp.  17-19.

9 eighty-five single-spaced pages: The document is untitled.  Berkeley,
California: Communities United against Racism in Education, 1990, pp. 1,
47.

CURE pointed to .  .  .  "people to fear": CURE document, pp.  9, 12,
13, 16, 24, 49, 2.

10 CURE and other .  .  .  "imagine being enslaved": CURE document, pp.
2, 4, 7, 16, 26, 47, 8, 9, 14, 17, 81.

African-American woman: Kirp, "Battle of the Books," p.  19.

12 the authors plausibly defended: Gary B.  Nash, "General Observations
and Executive Summary of Issues Relevant to Multiculturalism in Houghton
Mifflin Social Studies," n.  p., n.  d.  [1990].  Kindly made available
to me by Gary Nash. pictures of Mohammed: Robert Reinhold, "Class
Struggle," The New York Times Magazine, September 29, 1991, p.  46.

As for the Jewish objections: "Modifications to the Text, A Message of
Ancient Days, Which Were Requested by the Jewish Community But Not Made
by the Publishers, Houghton Mifflin," bound with "Listing of Changes of
Concern to Jewish Community Made by Houghton Mifflin in the Text, A
Message of Ancient Days," n.  p., n.  d.  [1990].  Kindly made available
to me by Jan Malvin.

13 Between 1969 and 1994: Peter Schrag, "California's Elected Anarchy,"
Harper's, November 1994, p.  56.

That framework: California State Department of Education, History-Social
Science Framework for California Public Schools (Sacramento: California
State Department of Education, 1988), p.  6.

14 which lacked a history series: Reinhold, "Class Struggle," p.  28.

15 Nash's books included: Gary B.  Nash, Red, White, and Black: The
Peoples of Early America, 2nd ed.  (Englewood Cliffs.  N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1974), p.  2.

16 a student body: U.S.  Bureau of the Census, San Francisco-Oakland,

1990.  Data kindly furnished to me by Frd6rick Douzet.

17 "sheer Euroccntric arrogance": Jacqueline Frost, "School Boards Told
to Reject 'Racist' Books," Oakland Tribune, March 19, 1991, p.  A12.  "a
bone" .

.  .  "dark-skinned": Gary B.  Nash et al., A Message of Ancient Days
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), pp.  97-98.

20 Frances FitzGerald: America Re'ised: HistoQ' Textbooks in the
Tuentieth Century' (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), passim.

Houghton Mifflin's eighth-grade book: Gary B.  Nash et al., A .Iore
Perfect Union (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), pp.  4, 10, 18, 26, 27.

26 At the sixth-grade level: Although the state had not approved the
Scholastic book, the board was able to get a waiver to use it.

28 "positive materials": Dr.  Mary Hoover and Dr.  Kitty Kelly Epstein,
"Should Bay Area Schools Adopt Social Studies Series Textbooks?  NO:
History of 90% of Oakland Students Is Distorted," Oakland Tribune, June
2, 1991.

29 in 1989 .  .  .  12 percent of whites: Edward N.  Wolff, Top Heavy: A
Study' of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America (New York:
Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995), pp.  7, 17.

46 percent of black children: U.S.  Bureau of the Census, Housing and
Household Economic Statistics Division, "Poverty and Wealth," 1994. life
expectancy gap: Alan L.  Otten, "Life Expectancy Gap Widens Between
Races," Wall Street Journal, August 12, 1994, p.  B1. males in
Bangladesh: Colin McCord, M.D., and Harold P.  Freeman, M.D., "Excess
Mortality in Harlem," New England Journal of Medicine, Vol.

322, No.  3 (January 18, 1990), p.  174.

30 John U.  Ogbu: "Understanding Cultural Diversity and Learning,"
Educational Researcher, Vol.  21, No.  8 (November 1992), pp.  6-7.  See
also John U.  Ogbu, "Minority Status and Schooling in Plural Societies,"
Comparative Education Review, Vol.  27, No.  2 (June 1983), pp.  168-90;
"Variability in Minority School Performance: A Problem in Search of an
Explanation," Anthropology' and Education Quarterly', Vol.  18, No.  4
(1987), pp.  312-34. community college .  .  .  134 percent: Marco
Calavita, telephone interview with Joni Finney, Associate Director,
California Higher Education Policy Center, San Jose, March 31, 1995.

32 Two years after: For a partial substitute, fourth-grade classes were
using a sequence of three lesson plans, each good for six weeks,
including one on

33

34

the California Indians, put together by Shelley Weintraub and other
teachers with the help of a group at the University of California,
Berkeley.  This was all the substitute curriculum they had time to
produce under the waiver provision of the state law.  Telephone
interdew, Shelley Weintraub, August 2, 1994.  See also Dexter Waugh,
"Oakland Teachers Make History," San Francisco Examiner, October 22,
1993.

who declined: U.S.  Bureau of the Census, San Francisco-Oakland, 1990.
Data kindly furnished to me by Fr6d6rick Douzet. Scan Wilentz: "Sense
and Sensitivity," The New Republic, October 31, 1994, p.  46.

Prodigious Amalgam"

Allan Bloom: Quoted in William J.  Bennett, "Why the West?" an address
at Stanford University, April 18, 1988.

"victory enlture": Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture (New York:
Basic Books, 1995).

41 a school board in Florida: "School Board Will Recognize Other
Cultures, but as Inferior," New York Times, May 13, 1994, p.  A16.

42 "Who are we?": Subsequently, this sort of thing seems to have become
a newsmagazine staple.  For example, Newsweek's feature story on July
10, 1995, pp.  18-23, was headlined, "What is an American?"

moderate Republicans: "America-First Policy Is Rejected," New York
Times, October 7, 1994, p.  A28. can only be attained: Molefi Kete
Asante at the University of Iowa, answer to audience question, March 29,
1994.

43 Tocqueville: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York:
Vintage, 1954), Vol.  I, chapter 12.

"democracy of nationalities": The phrase is Horace M.  Kallen's. Kal-len
added that these nationalities would "cooperate] voluntarily and
autonomously through common institutions," and that "the common language
of [America's] great tradition would be English." Horace M. Kullen,
Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and
Liveright, 1924), pp.  123-24.

44 All these factors combined: Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins
of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1967), p.  51.

Aanerican nation is never: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:

Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso,
1983), p.  193.

"unAmerican": Oxford English Dictionary (1971), pp.  3467-68.  The
reference is to Morris Birkbeck, Notes on a Journey in America (New
York:

44

45

46

A.M.  Kelley, 1971 [1818]): "Ninety marble capitals have been imported
at

vast cost from Italy and shew how unAmerican is the whole plan" (p. 29).

Congress rejected a petition: Arthur Mann, The One and the Many:
Reflections on the American Identity' (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.  1979), p.  152, citing Marcus Hansen, The Immigrant in American
Histor)' (1940), p.  132.

Jonathan Boucher: Quoted in Henry F.  May, The Enlightenment in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p.  3.  On Boucher's defense
of inequality, see Bailyn, Ideological Origins, pp.  314-18.

Native American Party: "Declaration of Principles of the Native American
Convention, Assembled at Philadelphia, July 4, 1845," in Stanley
Feldstein and Lawrence Costello, eds., The Ordeal of Assimilation: A
Documentary' Histor)' of the White Working Class (New York:' Anchor
Books, 1974), pp. 147, 151, 152.

fear lest national integrity: Still the classic source is John Higham,
Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New
York: Atheneurn, 1963).

less than 2 percent: Mann, The One and the Many, p.  150.

"composite nationality": Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in
American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1962 [1920]), p.
27.

"not a nation": Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage (New York:
1849), p. 214, quoted in Mann, The One and the Many, p.  54.

Marx's hypothetical revolutionaries: Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Bru-maire
of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963 [1852]), p.
18.

John Quincy Adams: Quoted in Moses Rischin, ed., Immigration and the
American Tradition (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), p.  4.

Emerson: Emerson in His Journals, sel.  and ed.  by Joel Porte
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p.  347.

Israel Zangwilh Quoted in Mann, The One and the Many, pp.  99, 100, 114.
Herbert J. Gans points out that Zangwill was thinking of Americans of
European origin alone, and that eventually he got his wish in the form
of today's category of "European Americans." (Personal communication,
September 26, 1994.)

Langston Hughes: "Let America Be Again," in Arnold Rampersad and David
Roessel, eds., The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Knopf,
1994), pp.  189-91.

Walter Lippmann: "National Purpose," in John K.  Jessup et al., The
National Purpose (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960), p.  125.

46 Ronald Reagan: I saw Ronald Reagan deliver this line on television
but cannot locate the original.

Is there a Spanish: When I made this point in a lecture in Paris
(November 3, 1994) by asking whether, in particular, there was a French
dream, the sociologist Alain Touraine responded that there was indeed a
French dream-the Cartesian model of universal reason.  I take his point.
But as I didn't have the wit to point out at the moment, this French
dream does not announce itself by that name.  To call it a "dream" would
be to diminish it, to render it airy.

48 who disliked authority: Bailyn, Ideological Origins, chapter 3.
republican idea: Gordon S.  Wood, The Creation of the American Republic,
1776-1787 (New York: Norton, 1969).

49 cheap land: I am indebted to the historian Barbara Epstein for making
this point.  (Personal communication, September 18, 1994.) fierce
utopian streak: These figures were not marginal in their time.  When the
Scottish utopian Robert Owen visited the United States in 1825 to
purchase land for an experiment in rational living (the result: New
Harmony, Indiana), he gave a triumphal speech on February 25 to a throng
in the House of Representatives that included the president of the
United States, James Monroe, President-elect John Quincy Adams, House
Speaker Henry Clay, numerous members of Congress, Supreme Court
Justices, and Cabinet members.

Owen addressed them thus: "If the leading men of these States,
forgetting every little and unworthy party and sectarian distinction,
will now cordially unite, they may, with ease, break asunder the bonds
of ignorance, superstition, and prejudice, and by this acting they could
not fail to dispel error, and to give and secure mental freedom and
happiness to the world.  To effect this change the greater ever yet made
in human affairs, no sacrifice on their parts will be necessary.  If
they possess, as I trust they do, sufficient moral courage to will this
deed, and without delay to express that will openly and decisively to
the world, then will mental slavery soon cease everywhere, and the
victory over ignorance and poverty, and sin, and misery will be
achieved." Quoted in Michael Harrington, Socialism (New York: Saturday
Review Press, 1970), pp.  111-12. Edward Everett Hale's: The Man Without
a Country, 2nd ed.  (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1897), p.  7.  In a
foreword to the 1897 edition (p.  iv), Hale writes of his patriotic
intention to criticize anyone who would dare renounce his nationality.
He adds: "The Civil War has taught its lesson so well that the average
American of the year 1896 hardly understands that any such lesson was
ever needed.  The United States is a nation, now" (p.  in).

50 school textbooks: Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American

Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1964), chapters 4 and 5.

Alien Act .  .  .  ideological grounds: William Preston, Aliens and
Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1963), pp.  22-30.

51 after the Civil War: Leah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to
Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp.  480-81. See,
for example, Edward Everett Hale's assertion of 1897 in note above.
"Prior to 1917": Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics
of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), p.  1. lnnnigrants clustered: John Bodnar, The
Transplanted." A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington,
Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp.  120-30, 175-89.

Cincinnati: Bodnar, The Transplanted, p.  119.

William Steinway: Bodnar, The Transplanted, p.  141.

52 "Under the inroads": John Higham, "Integrating America: The Problem
of Assimilation in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of American Ethnic
History, Vol.  I, No.  1 (Fall 1981), pp.  19-20.

heightened attacks .  .  .  purification crusades: Higham, op.  cit.  On
alcohol, see Joseph Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the
American Temperance Movement, 2nd ed.  (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1986), and Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion (New York:
Basic Books, 1995), chapter 4.  On prostitution, see Ruth Rosen, The
Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1982).

New York City harbored: George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban
Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York:
Basic Books, 1994).

Benjamin Harrison: It was not, however, until 1898, one day after the
United States declared war on Spain, that New York State decided that
students must recite the pledge daily.  Other states followed suit.
David R.  Man waring, Render Unto Caesar: The Flag-Salute Controversy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp.  2if.

53 Lincoln: The Lincoln Memorial, dedicated in 1922, was yet another
postWorld War I monumentalization of national order, unity, and justice
fused and frozen into the martyr figure of Lincoln.

Frederick Jackson Turner: Turner wrote these words in 1893.  Quoted in
Mann, The One and the Many, p.  118.

"Star-Spangled Banner": The anthem came to baseball during the 1918
World Series.  It caught on, and was then played on the opening day

of subsequent seasons.  It was not, however, made an official national
anthem until declared so by Herbert Hoover and Congress in 1931.  Only
after 1945 was it played before every game.  See Benjamin GRader,
Baseball: A History of America's Game (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1992), p.  156.

54 In 1916, Wilson: Higham, Strangers in the Land, p.  199.

Theodore Roosevelt: Mann, The One and the Many, pp.  112, 158, 118.
Randolph Bourne: "Trans-national America," in History' of a Literary
Radical, ed.  Van Wyck Brooks (New York: B.  W.  Huebsch, 1920), pp.
266-99.

Free speech and antiwar advocates: Higham, Strangers in the Land, pp.
217-22; Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, pp.  88-151.

55 Theodore Roosevelt: Mann, The One and the Many, p.  100.

Henry Ford: Werner Soilors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in
American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp.  89-91.
"Ask anyone of them what nationality he is," wrote a contributor to the
company paper, Ford Times, in an article called "The Making of New
Americans" in November 1916, "and the reply will come quickly,
'American!" 'Polish-American?" you might ask.  'No, American,' would be
the answer.  For they are taught in the Ford school that the hyphen is a
minus sign." universalist-feminist Jew: Mann, The One and the Many, pp.
102-16. national origin principle: Mann, The One and the Many, pp.
132-34.

56 John Dewey: "Nationalizing Education," quoted in Soilors, Beyond
Ethnicity, p.  88.

"House I Live In": Music by Earl Robinson, lyrics by "Lewis Allen," the
pseudonym of Abel Meeropol, who later adopted the sons of Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg.  Sinatra's 1945 recording accompanied an Academy
Award-winning short film of the same name, in which Sinatra breaks up a
fight caused by ethnic scapegoating.  (Information courtesy of Richard
Flacks.)

Working Class melted: The apotheosis of the "common man" had roots in
Gompers' American Federation of Labor as far back as the 1890s.  See
Michael Kazin, Populist Persuasion, p.  55.

"If you like America": New Masses back cover, XXIX (Sept.  27, 1938), as
quoted in Paul Buhle, Marxism in the USA (London: Verso, 1987), p.  179.

57 Leon Samson: Toward a United Front: A Philosophy for American Workers
(New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933), p.  16.

one of whose forebears: Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 4,
p.

2.

In his best-selling: James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1931), p.  viii.  Adams forswears formal authorship of
the phrase, affirming that the dream is a "concept" that is "generally
considered as being 'typically American'" (pp.  vii-viii).  In any
event, only after the publication of Adams's book does the phrase begin
to circulate in the speeches of politicians and the titles of plays and
novels.  I am grateful to Michael Norman for uncovering the source of
this phrase and referring me to Anthony Brandt's summary "The American
Dream," American Heritage, April-May 1981, pp.  24-25, and other
references.

58 "ugly sears": Adams, Epic, pp.  404-5.

Adams concluded: Adams, pp.  416-17.

Mary Antin wrote: They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of
Immigration (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), pp.  138-39, quoted in
Soi-lors, Beyond Ethnicity, p.  64.

59 twoness: W.  E.  B.  Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York:
Every-man's Library [Knopf], 1993), p.  9. another American tradition:
Werner Soilors (Beyond Ethnicity, p.  168) makes this point, citing
James Weldon Johnson's novel, Autobiography of an ExColored Man (1912),
and Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levin-sky (1917).

The contemporary classic in this genre is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

"DON'T SPEAK": This poster was on exhibit at the Italo-American Museum
of San Francisco in 1994.

60 multiethnic platoons: Jeanine Basinger, The World War H Combat Film:
Anatomy of a Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp.
51-53, 56, 61.

'We are a mongrel": Basinger, p.  51. dark-skinned members: Basinger,
pp.  57-58, 75.  Basinger points out: "The minorities almost always die,
and die most horribly" (p.  75).

Phna Indian Ira Hayes: Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall, two Jima:
Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1991), pp.  99, 101.

Restrictions on Chinese: John W.  Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and
Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986). the rare Italian:
Evidence of the confinement and deportation of a few suspicious Italians
was on display at the Italo-American Museum of San Francisco in 1994.

61 middle-class individualists: I borrow the term from Herbert J. Gans's
underappreciated Middle-Class Individualism (New York: Free Press,
1988).

61 Nathan Glazer has written: "Beyond the Melting Pot Twenty Years
After," Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol.  I, No.  1 (Fall 1981),
p.  47.

62 Servicemen's Readjustment Act: Kenneth T.  Jackson, Crabgrass
Frontier: The Suburbaniation of the United States (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985), p.  233.

63 available only to the very rich: Jackson, p.  243.

Levittown's tract houses: Jackson, p.  235.

As early as the 1820s: Stuart M.  Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle
Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.  242.

Wait Whitman: Editorial in the Brooklyn Daily News, cited in Blumin, p.
1. the term "middle-class": Blumin, pp.  275, 287, 291. more Americans
identified: Mary R.  Jackman and Robert W.  Jackman, Class Awareness in
the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p.
18; James A.  Davis and Tom W.  Smith, General Social Surveys,
1972-1986: Cumulative Codebook (Storrs, Conn.: NORC-Roper Center, 1986),
question 184, p.  218, cited in Gans, Middle-Class Individualism, p.
174, n.  13.

64 The small screen: These paragraphs on television draw on Todd Gitlin,
"Looking Through the Screen," in Gitlin, ed., Watching Television (New
York: Pantheon, 1987), p.  3, and "Flat and Happy," Wilson Quarterly,
Autumn 1993, pp.  47-55.

66 David Sarnoff: "Turn the Cold War Tide in America's Favor," in John
K. Jessup et al., The National Purpose, p.  51.

the editor of the report: John K.  Jessup, "A Noble Framework for a
Great Debate," in The National Purpose, p.  8.

69 America as a civilization: This was the title of a 1957 book by the
liberal pundit Max Lerner.

Oglesby refused: "Trapped in a System," November 27, 1965, in Mas-simo
Teodori, The New Left: A Documentary History (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), pp.  183-87.

Jerry Rubin: Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the
Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1980), p.  171.

'q don't like the sight": W.  A.  Swanberg, Norman Thomas, The Last
Idealist (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976), p.  486.

70 By the fall of 1968: Gitlin, Whole World, p.  174.

As late as 1967: Tom Wells, The War Within: America's Battle Over
Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp.  135-37.
Thomas was one of the few political elders who had welcomed the New Left

at all.  When, in 1962, the social-democratic parent organization of
Students for a Democratic Society, the League for Industrial Democracy,
had cracked down on SDS for ideological unreliability, Thomas had taken
the side of SDS.  That this self-same socialist dignitary could in 1965
be naive about where responsibility lay for the Vietnam War was the sort
of revelation that fed the estrangement of young radicals.  Some were
shocked. Others, especially red diaper babies, had their
dyed-in-the-wool suspicions confirmed--that the partisans of
"even-numbered internationals," the so-cialdemocratic Second and
Trotskyist Fourth, were only too willing to surrender to American
foreign policy.

72 the projects usually less: On SDS community organizing projects, see
Todd Gitlin and Nanci Hollander, Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (New
York: Harper & Row, 1970); Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random
House, 1973), pp.  95-115, 131-50; Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The
Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New
Left (New York: Knopf, 1979), pp.  126-55; James Miller, "Democracy Is
in the Streets" (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp.  208-17.  On
attempts to organize working-class youth against the draft, see Michael
Kazin, The Populist Persuasion (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p.  213.
On New Left antiwar work in the military, and GI dissent generally, see
David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: The American Military Today (Garden
City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975); Terry H.  Anderson, "The GI Movement
and the Response from the Brass," and David Cortright, "GI Resistance
During the Vietnam War," in Melvin Small and William D.  Hoover, eds.,
Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1992), pp.  93-128; and Terry H.  Anderson,
The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995),
pp.  166-67, 229-30, 319-22, 332, 376-77. left to the imagination: This
paragraph is influenced by Michael Kazin's argument in The Populist
Persuasion, chapter 8.

73 its first trade deficit: John B.  Judis, "Why Your Wages Keep
Falling," The New Republic, February 14, 1994, p.  26. insolent chariot:
The phrase comes from John Keats, The Insolent Chariots (Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1958).

74 Reagan denounced: Lou Cannon, Reagan (New York: Perigee, 1984), pp.

212-15.

according to his own pollster (footnote): Cannon, Reagan, p.  272.

76 "The time has come": A Time for Choosing: The Speeches of Ronald
Reagan, 1961-1982 (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1983), pp.  184-85.  The
date of the speech was February 6, 1977.

Reagan brought together: On the making of Reagan's conservative
infrastructure , see Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the
Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power
(New York: Times Books, 1986).

78 "the kind of men and women": A Time for Choosing, p.  232.  This was
a favorite citation of Reagan's.  He repeated it in his celebrated 1983
"evil empire" speech to the National Association of Evangelicals (below,
p.  79) -though not in his 1982 "crusade for freedom" Westminster
speech, perhaps having been informed that Paine was, to Tory eyes, both
a renegade and a revolutionary.

sprayed that famous Teflon: During his first month in office, for
example, the total number of times Reagan was criticized by anyone, from
any point of view, on the front page of the New York Times or the
Washington Post was-two; and one of these came from his right, in the
person of Jack Kemp complaining that Reagan wasn't planning to cut taxes
on the rich.  the press that attributed to Reagan: Elliot King and
Michael Schud-son, "The Myth of the Great Communicator," Columbia
Journalism Review, November-December 1987, pp.  37-39.

"probably one of the most hnportant .  .  .  imperfect world": Reagan, A
Time for Choosing, pp.  107, 120, 119.

79 "an evil empire": Reagan, A Time for Choosing, pp.  179, 178.

two out of three white men: "Portrait of the Electorate," New York
Times, November 5, 1992, p.  B9.

81 "There is no": Irving Kristol, "My Cold War," The National Interest,
Spring 1993, p.  144.

82 As prosperity seeped away: This paragraph parallels the argument of
Thomas Byrne Edsall, with Mary D.  Edsall, in Chain Reaction: The Impact
of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton,
1991).

3.  The Fragmentation of the Idea of the Left

84 Joseph de Maistre: Considdrations sur la France, 2nd ed.  (London;
Bale, 1797), p.  102, translated by K.  Anthony Appiah, "Identity,
Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social
Reproduction," in Charles Taylor et al., Multiculturalism: Examining the
Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann, papered.  (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1994), p.  150.

85 difference against a backdrop: This distinction is one of shadings,
not absolutes, for differences are always thought and felt against a
background of what does not differ, and commonalities are always thought
and felt in relation to differences.  Still, the shadings matter.  When
people feel their differences more strongly than they feel their
commonalities, it matters

little whether philosophers think their commonalities should weigh more
heavily. exhaustion of that core belief: At this writing, Latin America
may be the exceptional continent.  The decline of military regimes and
the recent experience of economic growth have given democratic ideas a
boost.  Latin American intellectuals from the moderate Right through the
social-democratic Left share an enthusiasm for the future that their
North American colleagues can only envy. already clear in 1945: Ferenc
Feh6r, The French Revolution and the

Birth of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p.
2. 87 seating arrangements: James H.  Billington, Fire in the Minds of
Men:

Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 27.

88 "politics of recognition": Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and "The
Politics of Recognition" (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press,
1992). Even Mazzini: Quoted in Mitchell Cohen, "Rooted Cosmopolitanism,"
Dissent, Fall 1992, p.  480.  Italics in the original.

89 Marx dripped scorn: For this point I am indebted to Marshall Bernnan.

90 Germany's "True" Socialists: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
"Communist Manifesto," in Robert C.  Tuckered., The Marx-Engels Reader
(New York: Norton, 1972), p.  356.

"species being": Marx, "Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844:
Selections," in Tuckered., Marx-Engels Reader, pp.  52-103.

"entire sections .  .  .  disappeared]": Marx and Engels, "Communist
Manifesto," pp.  34344.

"constantly revolutionizing .  .  .  image": Marx and Engels, "Communist
Manifesto," pp.  338-39.

91 denationalized: The term is James H.  Billington's.  Fire, p.  275.
"national differences .  .  .  vanishing": Marx and Engels, "Communist
Manifesto," p.  350.

"point out .  .  .  nationality": Marx and Engels, "Communist
Manifesto," p.

346.

92 "radical chains": Karl Marx, "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
Right: Introduction," in Tuckered., Marx-Engels Reader, p.  22.

95 "a cry of grief .  .  .  malaise": tmile Durkheim, Socialism and
SaintSimon (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1958), p.  7.

"The current Marxism": Michael Brub6, "Pop Goes the Academy," Village
Voice Literary' Supplement, April 1992, p.  11.  For a general critique
of this tendency, see Todd Gitlin, "The Anti-Political Populism of
Cultural Studies," in Marjorie Ferguson and Peter Golding, eds, Beyond
Cultural Studies (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, forthcoming).

97 principle was tailored: Significantly, one of the first pamphlets
defending

98

99

100

the radical potential of the student movement was Carl Davidson's "On
Student Syndicalism" (Chicago: Students for a Democratic Society, 1966).
The point about the student movement's relative independence of leaders
was made by Irving Louis Horowitz and William Friedland in The Knowledge
Factory: Student Power and Academic Politics in America (Chicago:
Aldine, 1970), pp.  79-80.

"Student as Nigger": Originally published in the Los Angeles Free Press,
1967.  Reprinted in Jerry.  Farber, The Student as Nigger: Essays and
Stories (New York: Pocket Books, 1972).

socialism would take: I cannot find an exact source for this much-cited
bon mot attributed to Wilde by Michael Walzer in Obligations: Essays on
Disobedience, War, and Citizenship (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1970), p.  230.  Neither could Walzer, when I asked him.  Such is
a supreme reputation for wit that it does not suffer when mere
documentation is wanting.

structure of feeling: This term is Raymond Williams's.  See Marxism and
Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp.  128-35.
Donald L.  Horowitz: "Ethnic Identity," in Nathan Glazer and Daniel P.
Moynihan, eds., Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1975), p.  137.

4.  The Coloring of America?

107 non-Hispanic whites: Mary C.  Waters, "The Social Construction of
Race and Ethnicity: Some Examples from Demography," unpublished paper
presented at American Diversity: A Demographic Challenge for the
Twenty-First Century, Center for Social and Demographic Analysis
Conference, Albany, New York (April 1994), p.  22, citing U.S.  Bureau
of the Census, Population Projections of the United States by Age, Sex,
Race, and Hispanic Origin: 1992 to 2050, Current Population Reports,
P25-1092 (1992). By the early years: Sam Roberts, Who We Are (New York:
Times Books, 1993), p.  63.  Roberts's figures are drawn from the 1990
census. 57 percent of American adult women: Roberts, p.  178.

108 Between 1950 and 1970 .  .  .  3.0 percent: 1970 figures from U.S.
Bureau of the Census, "USA Statistics in Brief: 1988," n.p.; 1990
figures from Paul R.  Campbell, Population Projections for States, by
Age, Race, and Sex: 1993 to 2020, U.S.  Bureau of the Census, Current
Population Reports, P25-1111 (1994), Appendix A, Table A-1.  Nineteen
seventy was the first year the Census Bureau counted the category called
"Hispanic." In 1960 .  .  .  women: U.S.  Bureau of the Census, School
Enrollment--Social and Economic Characteristics of Students (1993).

109

interracial couples: Waters, "Social Construction of Race and
Ethnicity," p.

18.

Kwame Anthony Appiah (footnote): Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's
House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), chapter 2, "Illusions of Race."

births of mixed-race babies: USA Today, December 11, 1992, cited in
Waters, "Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity," p.  18. "The nmnber
of children": Lawrence Wright, "One Drop of Blood," New Yorker, July 25,
1994, p.  49.

in 1986, outside the South .  .  .  4.2 percent: In 1986, among
marriages by Southern black women, only 1.7 percent were to white men.
Of course, a large number of blacks do not marry.  Still, these figures,
gathered by a Dutch demographer from marriage license data in 33 states,
included about half of all marriages formed between 1968 and 1986 and
defy the conventional wisdom to such a degree as to command attention.
Matthijs Kalmijn, "Trends in Black/White Intermarriage," Social Forces,
Vol.  72, No.

1 (September 1993), p.  124.  Thanks to Richard Alba for calling this
article to my attention.

of "mixed blood" to start with: The U.S.  Census asks people to
categorize themselves by both race and ethnicity.  In 1980, nearly 7.4
million Americans gave either their race or their ethnicity as "American
Indian." Of them, 84 percent mentioned Indian ancestry, or "ethnicity,"
but recorded their "race" as something other than Indian.  Keep in mind,
too, that many of the 16 percent, or roughly 1.2 million, who recorded
themselves as "Indian" in race, cannot presume that their ancestors in
perpetuity were "pure bloods." Purity of blood is a racist fantasy, not
a human fact.  Terry P. Wilson, "Blood Quantum: Native American Mixed
Bloods," in Maria P.  P.  Rooted., Racially' Mixed People in America
(Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1992), p.  124, citing
research by C.  M.  Snipp, "Who Are American Indians?  Some Observations
about the Perils and Pitfalls of Data for Race and Ethnicity,"
Population Research and Policy Review 5 (1986), p.

249.

Some of these statistics: Time, Fall 1993, "The New Face of America,"
pp.  2, 64-65.  Despite Time's well-intentioned cover prose, a headline
writer slipped from interethnic grace by writing, on an interior page,
this subhead: "For all the talk of cultural separatism, the races that
make up the U.S.  are now crossbreeding at unprecedented rates." Italics
mine.

By the year 2000: This is the Census Bureau's middle-range projection.
U.S.

Bureau of the Census, Population Projections of the U.S.  by Age, Sex,
Race and Hispanic Origin, 1993-2050 (1993).  The Census Bureau
projections cited in this chapter presuppose the annual number (not
percentage) of immigrants is fixed at the 1990 level.

According to the Census Bureau .  .  .  67 percent: Campbell, Population
Projections, Table 3, Table A-1, p.  23.  Note that "Hispanic" is not a
racial category.  Not all Hispanics are white.  This is why the
percentages add up to more than 100 percent.  For simplicity's sake, I
have omitted the small numbers (about 1,500,000 in 1990, less than 1
percent of the population) of those classifying themselves Native
Americans, a category that includes American Indians, Inuits (Eskimo),
and Aleutian Islanders.

110 Hispanic population should surpass: Robert Pear, "New Look at the
U.S.

in 2050: Bigger, Older and Less White," .New York Times, national
edition, December 4, 1992, pp.  A1, A10. non-Hispanic white population:
Ibid.

According to census .  .  .  the year 2029: Campbell, Population
Projections, Table 3, Series A. decline, by 2050: Waters, "Social
Construction of Race and Ethnicity," p.

22, citing U.S.  Bureau of the Census, Population Projections of the
United States by Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origins: 1992 to 2050,
Current Population Reports, P25-1092 (1992).

Contrary to popular mystique: Campbell, Population Projections, Table 2,
Series A, pp.  5-7. descendants of new immigrants: Pear, op.  cit.

Whites are already a minority: Roberts, Who We Are, p.  100.

111 less than 1 percent: Roberts, Who We Are, p.  101. California and
Texas: Roberts, Who We Are, p.  80. only 57.2 percent: U.S.  Bureau of
the Census, 1990 Census of the Population: General Population
Characteristics: California (1992).  Somewhat less heterogeneous are the
three next largest states: Texas, New York, and Florida.  Still,
California, Texas, New York, and Florida, the four most populous states,
together account for 31 percent of the U.S.  population, 27 percent of
the electoral college, and 28 percent of the vote--although nonwhites
are fatuously underrepresented on the registration rolls and in the
voting booths.  (U.S.  Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the
United States: 1994.)

"one drop of blood": Paul R.  Spickard, "The Illogic of American Racial
Categories," in Rooted., Racially' Mixed People in America, p.  15.
Spickard points out that even here, the black ancestor could not be
defined biologically, but only socially--it was a question of how he or
she was regarded.

112 Alonso and Waters performed: William Alonso and Mary C.  Waters,
"The Future Composition of the American Population: An Illustrative
Projection," paper presented at the 1993 winter meetings of the American
Statistical Association, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, p.  15.

claimed Irish origin: Michael Hout and Joshua Goldstein, "How 4.5
Million Irish Immigrants Became 50 Million Irish-Americans: Demographic
and Subjective Aspects of the Ethnic Composition of White Americans,"
American Sociological Review, Vol.  59 (February 1994), pp.  64-82.

113 "Almost no White American extended family": Paul R.  Spickard,
"Pacific Islander Americans and Multiethnicity: A Vision of America's
Future," paper presented at the Social Science History Association
Annual Meeting, Baltimore, Maryland, 1993, quoted in Waters, "Social
Construction of Race and Ethnicity," p.  25.

1990 student meeting: Paul Rogat Loeb, Generation at the Crossroads:
Apathy and Action on the American Campus (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1994), chapter 15, p.  199.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p.  122. racial makeup of New York
City: Telephone interview, Deborah Meier, July 17, 1994.

The actual figures: U.S.  Bureau of the Census, 1990 Census of the
Population: General Population Characteristics: New York (1992).

114 Roy Wilkins: Wilkins went on, writing about Stokely Carmichael: "You
can face a lion one way when you have real artillery, but if you have a
powder puff, you have to handle yourself differently--if you want to
keep your people alive.  For all Stokely's reckless talk of guns and
power back then, I still don't think he could tell the difference
between a pistol and a powder puff." Roy Wilkins, with Tom Mathews,
Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins (New York: Da Capo, 1994
[1982]), p.  317. what automatically follows: The same point can be made
about "Asian Americans," a category that ropes together, in Cynthia L.
Nakashima's words, "middle-class third- and fourth-generation Japanese
Americans, wealthy immigrants from Taiwan, and welfare-dependent
Southeast Asian refugees."

("An Invisible Monster: The Creation and Denial of Mixed-Race People in
America," in Rooted., Racially Mixed People in America, p.  175.)

origin was given as Hispanic: Roberts, Who We Are, p.  80.

115 radicals who claim: Professor Carlos Muaoz, Jr., of the Chicano
Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley, at a
Stanford University conference around 1990.  Mufioz proposed "Latino" as
a label of choice, though of course "Latino" sustains the European
reference of "Hispanic." There are no semantic solutions to the
conundrums of complex identity.

Mexican-American assistant principal: Personal communication, Richard
Rothstein, September 27, 1994.

Chicanos criticized: Harold Meyerson, "Fractured City," The New Re
public, May 25, 1992, p.  24.

1994 midterm election: "Times Poll: A Look at the Electorate," Los
Angeles Times, November 11, 1994, p.  A5.  The pro-187 figures for other
populations were whites, 63 percent; blacks, 47 percent; Asians, 47
percent.

Their ethnicity is .  .  .  an "option": Mary C.  Waters, Ethnic
Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990).

116 Korean-American shopkeeper: The jury rejected the prosecutors'
charge of second-degree murder as well as a lesser charge of involuntary
manslaughter.  The verdict in this case was delivered the same day as
highvisibility testimony in the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings,
which may partly explain its relatively limited publicity.  The verdict
ended up on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, but less
conspicuously than the Thomas-Hill story.  Andrea Ford and Tracy
Wilkinson, "Grocer Is Convicted in Teen Killing," Los Angeles Times,
October 12, 1991, p.  A1. In the wake: Joel Kotkin and David Friedman,
The Los Angeles Riots: Causes, Myths and Solutions (Washington, D.C.:
Progressive Policy Institute, 1993); Mario-Rosario Jackson et al., "An
Analysis of Selected Responses to the Los Angeles Civil Unrest of 1992,"
Contention, Vol.  3, No.  3 (1994), pp.  3-21.

In San Francisco: Michael Harris and William Cooney, "S.F.  and NAACP
Settle Suit," San Francisco Chronicle, December 31, 1982, p.  A1;
Nanette Asimov, "Lowell High Fails Desegregation Test," San Francisco
Chronicle, September 9, 1993, p.  A15; "Clone Lowell High, Education
Panel Says," San Francisco Chronicle, December 22, 1993; Debra J.
Saunders, "Clipping Children's Wings," San Francisco Chronicle, July 18,
1994, p.  A19.

117 Compton: The population was 51 percent Latino, but there were no
Latinos on the city council, and while 78 percent of city employees were
black, only 11 percent were Latino.  Patrick J.  McDonnell, "As Change
Overtakes Compton, So Do Tensions," Los Angeles Times, August 21, 1994,
p.  A1, and Emily Adams, "Compton Mayor Offers Plans to Ease Tensions,"
Los Angeles Times, September 8, 1994, p.  B3.

Theodore Roosevelt: Cited in Alonso and Waters, p.  15.

Tom Buchanan: F.  Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Catsby (New York:
Scribner's, 1925), p.  13.  Expressing some combination of sympathy and
annoyance, or perhaps simply changing the subject, the tennis star
Jordan Baker chimes in: "You ought to live in California"--in 1925,
California is synonymous with a white bastion!

whites are less than half as likely: Catherine Whitaker, Black Victims
(Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1990), cited in Andrew Hacker, Two
Nations (New York: Scribner's, 1992), p.  47.

On television news: Robert M.  Entman, "African Americans According to
TV News," Media Studies Journal, Summer 1994, pp.  31-32.

118 Black and Hispanic enrollments: Ruth Sidel, Battling Bias: The
Struggle for Identity and Community on College Campuses (New York:
Viking, 1994), pp.  37-38.

blacks whose unemployment rates: Hacker, Two Nations, p.  103.

In 1990, 12.1 percent: Money Income of Households, Families, and Persons
in the United States, Series P-60, No.  174 (Bureau of the Census,
1991), cited in Hacker, Two Nations, p.  98. blacks are 0.1 percent:
"The Corporate Elite," Business Week (November 25, 1991), cited in
Hacker, Two Nations, p.  108.

4.5 percent of college teachers .  .  .  3.6 percent of engineers:
Hacker, Two Nations, pp.  111, 113, citing census figures. in 1983 .  .
.  twenty to one: Edward N.  Wolff, Top Heavy: A Study' of the
Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America (New York: Twentieth Century
Fund, 1995), p.  2.

120 Newsweek's March 29, 1993: The following is adapted from Todd
Git-lin, "Commentary," New York Observer, April 12, 1993, p.  4.

121 Business Week: "White, Male, and Worried," Business Week, January
31, 1994.

122 a high school in Anaheim: Louis Freedberg, "School Club for the New
Outsiders," San Francisco Chronicle, January 15, 1992, p.  A1. whites
were 42 percent: Office of Student Research, University of California,
Berkeley, in Troy Duster et al., The Diversity Project: Final Report
(Berkeley: Institute for the Study of Social Change, 1991), p.  2.

123 29 percent of a national sample: Joe R.  Feagin and Hernan Vera,
White Racism: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 1995), p.  137, citing
the National Opinion Research Center's 1990 General Social Survey.

Whites who said they supported antidiscrimination laws: Feagin and Vera,
White Racism, citing Howard Schuman, Charlotte Steeh, and Lawrence Bobo,
Racial Attitudes in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1985), pp.  86-125.

In 1989: Paul M.  Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scar of Race
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp.  102-104.
According to Piazza (personal communication, December 23, 1994), there
was no significant difference between men and women.

when Sniderman: Sniderman and Piazza, The Scar of Race, chapter 6. 124
the bloc accountable: Todd Gitlin, "Republicans Told White Guys: You

Can Get It Up Agaim" New York Observer, November 28, 1994, p.  4.  See
chapter 8. a victhn like the victhns: See Feagin and Vera, White Racism,
p.  146. "potential rapist": Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge,
Professing Feminism (New York: New Republic/Basic Books, 1994), pp.
130-31. sometimes exaggerated: For an example of a most-likely
fabricated story of racist abuse that inflamed opinion on one campus,
see Loeb, Generation at the Crossroads, pp.  179-85, 2046. verbal
viciousness and violence: Feagin and Vera, White Racism, pp.  34 43;
Ruth Sidel, Battling Bias, pp.  5-7, 57-60, 82-87.  Statistics on these
matters are difficult to evaluate.  Sidel, like others, cites reports by
the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence (pp.  7-8)
maintaining that some 800,000 to one million college students, not all
of them members of racial minorities, have suffered "ethnoviolence," or
racist abuse, usually verbal, at least once.  In Dictatorship of Virtue:
Malticulruralism and the Battle for America's Future (New York: Knopf,
1994, pp. 203-10), Richard Bernstein argues that such incidents, while
"certainly unfortunate ....  [do] not at all prove that ethnoviolence is
dramatically on the rise" (p.  205).  Fair enough.  There are indeed
cases in which public argument against affirmative action is wrongly
taken as prima facie evidence of "racism"--a view especially hard to
sustain when large numbers of black Americans are themselves opposed to
affirmative action.  The serious problem not to be talked away consists
of outspokenly racist attacks, which may or may not be on the rise, but
in any event should not have to turn to lynching before being taken
seriously.  "Scattered incidents" and "sporadic" violence (pp.  204,
205) are easier to dismiss by those who are not tagged members of the
target group.

"If you want to go": Troy Duster et al., The Diversity Project: Final

Report (Berkeley: Institute for the Study of Social Change, 1991), p.
37. 125 "Being white": Diversity Project, p.  53.

5.

Marching on the English Department While the Right Took the White House

127 Erik H.  Erikson: Erik H.  Erikson, Identity, Youth and Crisis (New
York: Norton, 1968), p.  224.

As Erikson wrote: Erikson, Identity, Youth and Crisis, p.  42. Erikson
warned: Erikson, Identity, Youth and Crisis, p.  24.

128 "Ethnicity" was crystallized: Herbert J.  Gans, "Symbolic Ethnicity:
The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America," Ethnic and Racial
Studies, Vol.  2, No.  1 (January 1979), p.  8.

129 Oakland Youth Council: Nat Hentoff, The New Equality (New York:
Viking, 1965), p.  49.

"I'm from America": .lalcolm X Talks to Young People: Speeches in the
U.S., Britain, and Africa (New York: Pathfinder, 1993), p.  11.

"We need allies": Malcolm X, in George Breitman, ed., The Last Year of
Malcolm X: The Et, olution of a Revolutionary (New York: Merit
Publishers, 1967), p.  43.

130 To call yourself "Afro-American": Basic Unity Program, Organization
of Afro-American Unity, in Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X, p. 121.
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party: Anne Romaine, "'We Come from a
Distance' (The story of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Through
the Convention of 1965), An Oral History," Charlottesville, Virginia,
privately printed, 1969; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days
of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), pp.  151-62.

131 cultural and political pluralism: The pluralist meaning was the one
articulated in Stokely Carmichael and Charles V.  Hamilton, Black Power:
The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967).
Those who advocate: Julius Lester, Look Out, Whitey!  Black Pouter's
(ion' Get Yotr Mama!  (New York: Grove, 1969 [1968]), p.  x. "another
language": Lester, p.  91. it was pointless: Lester, p.  91. "It is
clear": Lester, p.  137.

Stokely Carmichael: Quoted in Lester, pp.  132-33.

132 "The struggle of blacks": Lester, p.  139.

openly armed Black Panther Party: Soon, Lester himself was writing
perceptively and courageously that the Panthers were orchestrators of
media events and not the deeply based organizers they purported to be.
SNCC and the Panthers were briefly joined, then divorced when the
Panthers resorted to gunplay.  See Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC
and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1981), pp.  278-96, and Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of
the Panther (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994), pp.  159-63.

Inspired .  .  .  kinky "Afros": Maxine Leeds, "'Black Is Beautiful':
Personal Transformation and Political Change," Ph.D.  dissertation,
Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, 1995,
chapter 4.

133 Maularia Ron Karenga: Personal communication, Maxine Leeds, May 20,
1995, citing research by Waldo Martin; William L.  Van Deburg, New Day
in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p.  172.

134 James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1993 [1963]),
p.

94.  Italics in original.

135 Nathan Glazer: "The Peoples of America," in Ethnic Dilemmas,
1964-1983 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p.  20.
(Originally published in The Nation, September 20, 1965.)

"practically no survey": Andrew Greeley, "The Rediscovery of Ethnicity,"
Antioch Review, Vol.  31, No.  3 (Fall 1971), p.  351.

136 Gunnar Myrdal's impression: "The Case against Romantic Ethnicity,"
Center Magazine 7 (July-August 1974), p.  28; cited in Arthur Mann, The
One and the Many: Reflections on the American Identity (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1979), p.  38.

survey evidence: David Colburn and George E.  Pozzetta, "Race,
Ethnicity, and the Evolution of Political Legitimacy," in David Farher,
ed., The Sixties, From Memory' to History' (Chapel Hill, N.C.:
University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p.  131.

white ethnic groups: Rudolph J.  Vecoli, "The Coming of Age of the
Italian Americans," Ethnicity 5 (1978), pp.  137-38; John F.  Stack,
"Ethnicity, Racism, and Busing in Boston: The Boston Irish and School
Desegregation," Ethnicity 6 (1979), pp.  21-28; Colburn and Pozzetta,
"Race, Ethnicity, and the Evolution of Political Legitimacy," pp.
131-37.  Herbert J.  Guns: "Symbolic Ethnicity."

137 sided with the Palestinians: Jonathan Kaplan, Broken Alliance: The
Turbulent Times between Blacks and Jews in America (New York: New
American Library, 1989), pp.  76 if., 198 if.

138 Radical Jewish Unions: Interview, David Biale, August 23, 1994, and
David Biale, quoted in Sara Bershtel and Allen Graubard, Saving
Remnants: Feeling Jewish in America (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp.
245-46.

radical activist Arthur Waskow: Jewish Bulletin, March 25, 1994, p.  33.

"those of us in the ethnic bag": Baroni, "I'm a Pig Too," Washingtonian
Magazine, July 1970, quoted in Mann, The One and the Many, p.  34.

139 The new ethnicity was articulated: Gans, "Symbolic Ethnicity," pp. 5
if. "I want to have": Michael Novak, The Rise of the Untocitable
Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (New York: Macmillan,
1972), p.  71.  "I atn born of PIGS": Novak, p.  53.

"In recent months": Novak, p.  53.  Around 1975, a high school classmate
of mine who had become a sociologist spoke to me of similar anger: h/s
grandfather, his Sicilian grandfather, had spent time in prison for no
crime at all, had been poor all his life, but there was no legitimate
sanction to be Sicilian, let alone to demand reparations for America's
bad treatment.  When we knew each other in high school, in the late
1950s, it had never occurred to me that he had an "ethnicity" at all.

"Where in Annerica": Novak, p.  53.

"The recent increase": Novak, pp.  7-8.

Their ancestors were not slaveowners: Novak.  p.  60.

140 the Left was making a mistake: Novak.  p.  14.

"we are, in a word": Novak, p.  xvi.

"Why do the educated classes": Novak, p.  58.

"To ethnics, America is almost": Novak, p.  65.

Novak overlooked evidence: Howard Schuman, "Two Sources of Antiwar
Sentimeut in America," American Jornal of Sociology, Vol.  78, No.  3
(November 1972), p.  517.

142 many ncn dismissed: „ew Left Notes, July 10, 1967; Kirkpatrick Sale,
SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), pp.  36253n.; Sara Evans, Personal
Politics (New York: Vintage, 1980), pp.  190-92. generational animus: I
owe this point to an unpublished manuscript by Ruth Rosen. gay
liberation welled up: See, among other works.  Martin Duberman,
Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993).

144 unprecedented triumphs: There is a tremendous literature on the
consequences of the women's and gay movements, but see in particular
Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America Since
1960 (New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1992); Eric Marcus,
Making History': The Struggle Jbr Gay' and Lesbian Equal Rights,
1945-1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); and Paul Berman, "Democracy
and

Homosexuality," The New Republic, December 20, 1993, pp.  17-35.

145 racial caste system: For example, the historian Peter H.  Wood
observed that of 407 articles published in the prestigious William and
Mary' Quarterly between 1960 and 1976, a mere 26, or 6.4 percent,
directly concerned blacks, racism, or slavery.  More articles discussed
slavery in Massachusetts than in Virginia.  Peter H.  Wood, "'1 Did the
Best I Could for My Day': The Study of Early Black History during the
Second Reconstruction, 1960-1976," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd
Series, XXXV (April 1978), pp.  185-225.  See also the discussion in
Nathan Irvin Hug-gins, "The Deforming Mirror of Truth," introduction to
the revised edition, Black Odyssey (New York: Pantheon, 1990), pp.
xxxiii-xxxiv.

Clark Kerr: Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1963).

146 Roger Kimball and Richard Bernstein: Roger Kimball, Tenured
Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York:
HarperCollins, 1991), pp.  xv, 166-67; Richard Bernstein, Dictatorship
of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future (New
York: Knopf, 1994), p.  6.

148

149

150

153

separatist rancor: A compelling treatment of women's studies programs is
Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism (New York: New
Republic/Basic Books, 1994).  Patai and Koertge have had the courage to
put on paper what many other feminists have been saying sotto ,oce about
women's studies for years.

University of Michigan: Andrea Press, personal communication, December
1991.

Native American graduate student: Ruth Rosen, personal communication,
April 1992.

gay English professor: Reported on the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, January 1994. a Berkeley activist: Sumi Cho, panel
discussion, American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, July
1991.

"best blacks": Stephen L.  Carter, Reflections of an Affirmative Action
Baby (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp.  47-69. taxi drivers: Ellis
Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995),
p.  55.

storekeepers to open their doors: It has been widely reported that
jewelers refuse to buzz in young black men.  In The Alchemy of Race and
Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), law professor
Patricia J.  Williams recounts having seen a sweater she liked in a Soho
store window on a Saturday afternoon, only to be refused admittance by
the white store clerk, who claimed the store was closed, although
several white shoppers were going about their shopping (pp.  44-45).

startled and hostile: Brent Staples, Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black
and White (New York: Pantheon, 1994), pp.  202-3. ran out of elevators:
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p.  135.

went out of their way: Sometimes inferiority claims were based on test
scores, as in the case of the Georgetown University law student who
rifled admissions files to show that black law school admittees had
lower grades and test scores than whites.  ("Georgetown Reprimands
Author of Article," New York Times, May 21, 1991, p.  A14.)  In 1994,
pseudoscientific genetic claims were back in fashion, with Charles
Murray and Richard J.  Herrn-stein's atrociously argued and roundly
refuted The Bell Curve (New York: Free Press) on the best-seller list.

earn less than whites: Black men earned 72 percent as much as white men
in 1989.  For women, the ratio was 92 percent.  But the improvement
slackened after the 1960s.  For men, the ratio rose by only 3.6 percent
between 1969 and 1989 (the period when affirmative action was said to
have done them so much good), while for women, it rose 12.2 percent.  In

1989, black college graduates were 2.24 times as likely to be unemployed
as white college graduates.  Andrew Hacker, Two Nations (New York:
Scribner's, 1992), pp.  101, 104, citing census reports.

154 peer pressure: White, black, Latino, and Asian students report these
pressures in Troy Duster et al., The Diversity Project: Final Report
(Berkeley: Institute for the Study of Social Change, 1991).

Regarded with suspicion: See also Terry Wilson, "Blood Quantum: Native
American Mixed Bloods," in Maria P.  P.  Rooted., Racially Mixed People
in America (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1992), p.  114.
This suspicion runs rife through the racially obsessive history of the
United States, marked not only by state laws against miscegenation,
designed to fortify and preserve "white purity," but by comparable
barriers erected by racial and ethnic minorities, including Japanese
Americans, Jews, and others.  See Paul R.  Spickard, "The Illogic of
American Racial Categories," in Rooted., Racially' Mixed People, pp.
15-16, 20-21.

Orrin Hatch (footnote): Quoted in Kathleen Quinn, "Author of Her Own
Defeat: Lani's Lesson for Academia," Lingua Franca, September/October
1993, p.  58.

155 black poor are left desperate: In The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner
City, the Underclass and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), William Julius Wilson has argued, controversially, that
the upward mobility of the black middle classes had the unintended
consequence of abandoning the black ghettos to social disintegration.
(See especially pp.  55-57, 109-15, and 143-44.)  For criticisms, see
reviews by Adolph Reed, Jr., in The Nation, February 6, 1988, pp.
167-71, and

Christopher Jencks in The New Republic, June 13, 1988, pp.  23-32.

157 one egregious 1993 case (footnote): I interviewed the parents of one
of these students, Richard Wolff and Harriet Fraad-Wolff, on January 18,
1994.

See also Richard P6rez-Pefia, "Private Colleges Are Criticized for Their
Brand of Justice," New York Times, June 1, 1994, p.  B22, and Sarah
Kerr, "Droit de Vassar," Lingua Franca, Vol.  4, No.  5 (July-August
1994), pp.

32-39.

158 these administrators (footnote): See Alan Wolfe, "The New Class
Comes Home," Partisan Review, Fall 1993, pp.  729-37.) more than
doubling: See figures cited in chapter 1, page 30.

160 sociology played a part: Dennis H.  Wrong, "The Influence of
Sociological Ideas on American Culture," in Herbert J.  Gans, ed.,
Sociology in America (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1990),
pp.  19-30.  Robert Jay Lifton: The Protean Self." Human Resilience in
an Age of Fragmentation (New York: Basic Books, 1993).  Even the ethnic
identities affirmed with such sureness by college students shift, melt,
and reform as

one ages.  Clarence Thomas is far from the only conservative middle-aged
African American who went through a collegiate phase in which he admired
Malcolm X.

161 David Riesman: The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1950).

revision is routine: Orrin E.  Klapp, Collective Search for Identity
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969), pp.  15-19, 74.

Half of the Fortune: Time, "New Face of America," Fall 1993, "It's a
Mass Market No More," pp.  80-81.

162 "American Indian" .  .  · 10 million: Karl Eschbach, "Changing
Identification among American Indians and Alaska Natives," Demography,
Vol.

30, No.  4 (November 1993); Nampeo R.  McKenney and Arthur R. Crewce,
"Measurement of Ethnicity in the United States: Experiences of the U.S.
Census Bureau," paper presented at the Joint Canada-United States
Conference on the Measurement of Ethnicity, April 1-3, 1992, Ottawa,
Canada, p.  189.  Both are cited in Mary C.  Waters, "The Social
Construction of Race and Ethnicity: Some Examples from Demography,"
unpublished paper presented at American Diversity: A Demographic
Challenge for the Twenty-First Century, Center for Social and
Demographic Analysis Conference, Albany, New York (April 1994), pp. 7-8.
capitalizing Deaf: Andrew Solomon, "Defiantly Deaf," New York Tmes
Magazine, August 28, 1994, pp.  38-45, 62, 65-68.

163 the yawning gulf: Herbert J.  Gads, "Second Generation Decline:
Scenarios for the Economic and Ethnic Futures of the Post-1965 American
Immigrants," Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol.  15, No.  2 (April 1990),
pp. 173-92.

164 naturally cooperative: See Patai and Koertge, Professing Feminism,
chapter 7. Africans naturally inventive: Professor Molefi Kete Asante of
Temple University, a leading "Afrocentrist" and editor of the Journal of
Black Studies, writes that he wishes to "present the African as subject
rather than object" ("Multiculturalism: An Exchange," The American
Scholar, Spring 1991, p.  270).  But he also believes that the Arabs who
invaded northern Africa more than a millennium ago are not "real"
Africans (lecture, University of Iowa, March 29, 1994).  That is, only
blacks of "Negroid" features qualify as the founders of geometry,
philosophy, and so on.  If the Greeks produced anything of value, it is
because they were "really" Africans.  This poses for Dr.  Asante a
problem he does not seem to have faced: If Plato was black, why not read
him?  But what is most astounding about Asante's jerry-built cosmology
and race-based idea of "knowledge" is that serious university professors
fear to ask embarrassing questions of him.  The fear of being considered
"racist" cows them.

165 Sister Souljah: Quoted in Gregory Stephens, "Sister Souljah and the
issue of black racism," In These Times, August 5-August 18, 1992, p. 18.

6.  The Recoil

166 "Western liberal values" .  .  .  "culture": Roger Kimball, Tenured
Radicals, paperback ed.  (New York: HarperCollins 1991), pp.  192, 206.
"reason": John Searle, presentation to National Association of Scholars,
San Francisco, May 1993.

167 "thought police .  .  .  watch what you say":/Vewsweek, December 24,
1990, cover.

168 "Tenured radicals": George Will, "Curdled Politics on Campus,"
Newsweek, May 6, 1991.  The pull-quote is only slightly compressed from
Will's own words.

NEXIS database: Democratic Culture, Vol.  3, No.  1 (Spring 1994), p. 2.
In his critical review of Richard Bernstein's Dictatorship of Virtue in
the New York Times (October 28, 1994, p.  C27), Nicholas Lemann gives
different figures for "politically correct" and "political correctness":
seven appearances in 1981, 5,007 in 1992.  (Actually, Lemann gives seven
for 1991, but this is almost certainly a typographical error, since
Lemann means to counterpose these figures to Bernstein's own figures on
the boom in references to "multiculturalism" between 1981 and 1992.)

Jackie Mason: Comedy Central proceeded to file suit against Mason,
charging: "People could get confused.  It tends to dilute the fights to
the name that we've built up and spent a lot of money on."

"Newsclips," Democratic Culture, Vol.  3, No.  1 (Spring 1994), p.  14.

169 Richard Bernstein: "The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct,"
New York Times, News of the Week in Review, October 28, 1990.

170 rarely punitive: The gravest case of the punishment of a faculty
member, the two-year suspension without pay of tenured University of New
Hampshire professor J.  Donald Silva because of charges that he had
leveled sexual innuendoes, ended with his reinstatement by a federal
judge and a settlement in which the university agreed to pay damages,
back salary, and legal fees.  See Richard Bernstein, Dictatorship of
Virtue, pp.  98-106, and "University to Reinstate a Professor," New York
Times, December 4, 1994, p.

35.  The most serious case I know of a "politically correct" witch hunt
against students concerns two Vassar students unjustly punished by a
malign combination of student finger-pointing and an inquisitorial
administration. (See above, p.  157-58, footnote.)

171 freedom against slavery: Brent Staples wrote in an editorial note in
the

New York Times ("Politically Correct: False Slogan," April 17, 1991)
that the slogan "seeks to reduce all differences of opinion to a single
one: the difference between liberals and conservatives."

172 Hilton Kramer: "Confronting the Monoliths" Partisan Review, Vol. LX,
No.  4 (1993), pp.  569-71.

Roger Kimbalh "From Farce to Tragedy," Partisan Review, Vol.  LX, No.  4
(1993), p.  568.  Kimball's was one of the more hysterical contributions
to Partisan's by no means unanimous issue, "The Politics of Political
Correctness."

"over the last couple of years": Kimball, p.  565.

173 citing Churchill's statement: Kimball, p.  569.

D'Souza ' s flying tour: Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The
Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free Press, 1991).

Stanford University's: The best reportorial critique is Fran Smith, "The
Big PC Monster on Campus," West Magazine (of the San Josff Mercury
News), October 17, 1993, pp.  20-24.

"perhaps the text which best": D'Souza, pp.  71-73. all eight courses
assigned: The complete list of assigned authors for the 1988-89 school
year is reproduced as an appendix to Denis Lacorne, "Des Coups de Canon
dans le Vide?  La 'Civilisation Occidentale' dans les Universit(s
Am6ricaines," Vingtidme Sidcle (Paris), No.  43 (July-Septem-her 1994),
pp.  16-17.

174 One might also argue: See Todd Gitlin, "The Anti-Political Populism
of Cultural Studies" among other contributions to Marjorie Ferguson and
Peter Golding, eds., Beyond Cultural Studies (Thousand Oaks, Calif.:
Sage Publications, forthcoming).

D'Souza, to bolster: D'Souza, pp.  20, 68.  The quote, from Christopher
Clausen, originally appeared in Clausen's "It Is Not Elitist to Place
Major Literature at the Center of the English Curriculum" (Chronicle of
Higher Education, January 13, 1988, p.  A52).  D'Souza plucked it from a
widely cited Wall Street Journal article (by David Brooks, February 2,
1988) deliciously, if predictably, entitled "From Western Lit to
Westerns as Lit." Gerald Graff: Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching
the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: Norton,
1992), p.  21. national surveys: Graff, pp.  23-24.

175 bitter struggle: Graff, p.  24.

Walt Whitman: Leo Marx, address to the convention of the American
Studies Association, New Orleans, November 1, 1990. excesses of the
anti-PC: For general critiques of D'Souza, see Todd Gitlin, "An
Intolerance of the New Intolerance," Los Angeles Times Book Review,
April 14, 1991, pp.  2, 19, from which I have borrowed some

phrases; Louis Menand, "Illiberalisms," New Yorker, May 20, 1991, pp.
101-107; Russell Jacoby, Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert
Education and Distract America (New York: Doubleday, 1994), pp.  8, 9,
11, 21-22, 25, 33, 36, 42, 47, 104.  On Harvard University in
particular, see Jonathan Wiener, "What Happened at Harvard," The Nation,
September 30, 1991, pp.  384418.  On the University of Michigan, see a
leaflet distributed at an Ann Arbor conference unfortunately called "The
PC FrameUp," November 1991.

Leonard Jeffries: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America
(Knoxville, Tenn.: Whittle, 1991), pp.  33-34, 63; James Traub, City on
a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College (Reading, Mass.:
AddisonWesley, 1994), pp.  232-71.

176 "about half a dozen": Jonathan Wiener, "School Daze," The Nation,
November 7, 1994, p.  526.

Richard Bernstein: Dictatorship of Virtue, pp.  83-85.

Robert Alter: "The Persistence of Reading," Partisan Review, Vol.  60,
No.  4 (1993), p.  512.

Morris Dickstein: "Correcting PC," Partisan Review, Vol.  60, No.  4
(1993), p.  547.

177 Paul Berman: Debating P.C.  (New York: Dell, 1992).

Patricia Aufderheide: Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding (St.

Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1992).

Michael Brubfi and Cary Nelson: Higher Education Under Fire (New York:
Routledge, 1995).

Barbara Epstein: "Political Correctness and Collective Powerlessness,"
Socialist Review, Vol.  21, No.  3-4 (July-December 1991), pp.  13-35.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: "Multiculturalism and Its Discontents,"
Contention, Vol.

2, No.  1 (Fall 1992), pp.  69-77.

David A.  Hollinger: "Postethnic America," Contention, Vol.  2, No.  1
(Fall 1992), pp.  80-96, subsequently reworked and expanded into a book
of the same name, published by Basic Books in 1995.

178 "missing children": Nina Eliasoph, "Drive-In Morality, Child Abuse,
and the Media," Socialist Review, Vol.  16, No.  6 (November-December
1986), pp.

7-8, citing the Denver Post of May 15, 1985.

179 Dinesh D'Souza's: Illiberal Education, chapter 2.

so many California high school: Troy Duster et al., The Diversity
Project: Final Report (Berkeley: Institute for the Study of Social
Change, 1991), p.

3. bonus grade-point credit: Jerome Karabel, personal communication,
August 20, 1994.

24 percent of white students: Duster et al., Diversity Project, p.  4.

Harvard: Jerome Karabel and David Karen, "Go to Harvard, Give Your Kid a
Break," New York Times, op-ed page, December 8, 1990.

180 news net: The term is used by Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Stud)' in

the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), pp.  21-25.
181 Maynard Parker: Interview, Jerry Adler, November 9, 1992.

Other top Newsweek editors: Interview, Jerry.  Adler, November 9, 1992.

183 protracted crusade: The canonical study is still Richard
Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf,
1963). "Destructive" .  .  ·1974-75: Leonard Silk and David Vogel,
Ethics and Profits (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), chapter 4.  The
quotations are from pp.  109, 111, 112, 118.

Neoconservatives: Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are
Changing America's Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); B.
BmceBriggs, ed., The New Class?  (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction
Books, 1979).

"What is happening": William E.  Simon, A Time for Truth (New York:
Reader's Digest Press, 1978), p.  44.

"nothing less .  .  .  mankind' ": Simon, pp.  229-30.

184 "Funds generated .  .  .  arguments": Simon, pp.  230, 231,232. "the
only thing .  .  .  counterintelligentsia": Simon, p.  238. right-wing
publicists: Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the CounterEstablishment:
From Conservative Ideology to Political Power (New York: Times Books,
1986).

In 1978, Simon and Kristoh Sara Diamond, "The Funding of the NAS," in
Patricia Aufderheide, ed., Beyond PC, p.  89.

185 "for a moment .  .  .  intimidation": Quoted in Fran Smith, West,
October 17, 1993.

186 George Will: "In this low-visibility, high-intensity war, Lynne
Cheney is secretary of domestic defense.  The foreign adversaries her
husband, Dick, must keep at bay are less dangerous, in the long run,
than the domestic forces with which she must deal.  Those forces are
fighting against the conservation of the common culture that is the
nation's social cement." "Literary Politics," Newsweek, April 22, 1991,
p.  72.  In 1992, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in
considerable detail that Lynne Cheney had "politicized the agency's
grant system" by systematically heeding conservative objections to
research grant proposals that they considered outrd, even when peer
reviews were strongly supportive.  (Stephen Burd, "Chairman of
Humanities Fund Has Politicized Grants Process, Critics Charge,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 22, 1992, pp.  A1, A32-A33.)  No
prominent national coverage resulted.

187 Between 1981 and 1986: Ernest Benjamin, "A Faculty Response to

the Fiscal Crisis: From Defense to Offense," in Michael Bdrubd and Carv
Nelson, eds., Higher Education Under Fire, p.  54. during the Reagan and
Rush years: Paul Lauter, "'Political CoTect-hess' and the Attack on
American Colleges," in Bdrub6 and Nelson, eds., Higher Education Under
Fire.  p.  84.

lu Illinois .  .  .  in 1992: Lauter, "'Political Correctness,'" pp.
75-76.  188 About half: Benjamin, "Faculty Response," p.  59.

spoke Italian: This example, Casa Italiano, exists at Berkeley.

If he came from: Ruth Sidel, Battling Bias: The Struggle for Identity
and Community on College Camproses (New York: Viking, 1994), pp. 124-29.
If he had friends: This could be true for women, too, of course.  The
editor of the conservative Berkeley Review said publicly that it was
such an experience that had turned her against affirmative action.

189 "make it sound": Lynne V.  Cheney quoted by Associated Press, "Plan
to Teach U.S.  History Is Said to Slight White Males," :Yew York Times,
October 26, 1994, p.  B]2.

"politically correct": Cheney on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, quoted in
"A Blueprint of History for American Students," editorial, San Francisco
Chronicle, October 29, 1994.

"really out of balance": Cheney quoted by Guy Gugliotta, "Up in Arms
About the 'American Experience,'" Washington Post, October 28, 1994, p.
A4.

"politicized" products: Lynne V.  Cheney, "The End of History," Wall
Street Journal, October 20, 1994.

"flimflammed": Cheney quoted in Gugliotta, "Up in Arms."

190 She had been impressed .  .  .  "human sacrifice": Cheney, "End of
History."

191 "They would sacrifice": Cheney quoted in Gugliotta, "Up in Arms."
Cheney quoted .  .  .  "any emphasis": Cheney, "End of History."
"consensus": Except where otherwise noted, all quotations from Nash in
the following discussion are from my telephone interview, November 13,
1994.

"The process was as reasonable": Morton Keller, personal communication,
December 12, 1994.

"I was deeply impressed": Akira Iriye, personal communication, January
3, 1995.

192 "A classic": Charles Krauthammer, "History Hijacked," Washington
Post, November 4, 1994, p.  25.

"Where is Plymouth Rock .  .  .  ?": LynNell Hancock with Nina Archer
Biddle, "Red, White--and Blue," Newsweek, November 7, 1994.  p.  54.  In
fact, the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth on page 58.  Perhaps Hancock

was upset about the absence of the rock proper.  Daunting, that rock,
its actual dimensions never mentioned in the tales of the landing.
Anyone reared on the old unreconstructed textbooks, impressed by the
saga of the landing, courts disappointment on beholding the actual
modest stone officially marked off Plymouth beach.

Rush Limbaugh: Quoted in Gugliotta, "Up in Arms."

John Leo .  .  ·"colonial officials": "The Hijacking of American
History," U.S.  News and World Report, November 14, 1994.  See Leo's Two
Steps Ahead of the Thought Police (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994). In
the Wall Street Journal: Shanker quoted in Gary Putka, "Historians
Propose Curriculum Tilted Away from West," Wall Street Journal, November
11, 1994.

At the time he made this comment, Shanker had seen only the penultimate
version of the World History Standards--because, he says (personal
communication, May 4, 1995), the UCLA group's "strategy was to freeze
out people who disagreed with them," and hence they did not send an
advance copy of the final document to the president of the American
Federation of Teachers.  Shanker's comments on the U.S.  standards in
his weekly Sunday New York Times column (November 6, 1994) were more
measured than his early newspaper quotes.  The standards, he wrote here,
were "substantive and demanding," included "more social history" in "an
attempt to correct previous distortions," namely the dominance of
political history in earlier textbooks, and the "invisibility" of groups
"that did not play major roles in politics."

"A good first draft of an extremely difficult assignment," Shanker
concluded here, calling for "knowledgeable historians to critique and
rework the standards to provide the balance that is lacking." the book
asked students: National Center for History in the Schools, National
Standards for World History: Exploring Paths to the Present, Grades
5-12, Expanded Edition (Los Angeles: National Center for History in the
Schools, 1994), pp.  146-47.  Italics in the original.

193 Washington was mentioned: National Center for History in the
Schools, National Standards for United States History: Exploring the
American Experience Grades 5-12, Expanded Edition (Los Angeles: National
Center for History in the Schools, 1994), pp.  76, 79, 85, 88.

Robert Fulton .  .  · Cyrus McCormick: National Center for History in
the Schools, National Standards for United States History, p.  101. Bell
.  .  .  Salk: National Center for History in the Schools, National
Standards for World History, p.  262 (Einstein, Edison); National Center
for History in the Schools, National Standards for History for Grades
K-4: Expanding Children's World in Time and Space (Los Angeles: National
Center for History in the Schools, 1994), pp.  51 (Salk), 64 (Bell).

"it's absurd to say": Gary B.  Nash, personal communication, December
28, 1994.

194 Project codirector .  .  .  "citizenship": National Center for
History in the Schools, "Fact Sheet," November 1, 1994, p.  2. According
to Nash (personal communication, December 28, 1994), Crabtree wrote this
statement and he edited it.

thirteen of the references: National Center for History in the Schools,
National Standards for United States History, pp.  178-79. all nineteen
references: National Center for History in the Schools, National
Standards for United States History, pp.  214-15. make the cases .  .  .
Alamo: National Center for History in the Schools, National Standards
for United States History, pp.  100, 115.  Leo was right: "Hijacking."

Andrew Carnegie's Wealth: National Center for History in the Schools,
National Standards for United States History, p.  136.

195 conduct a mock trial: National Center for History in the Schools,
National Standards for United States History, p.  44.

"the Horatio Alger model": National Center for History in the Schools,
National Standards for United States History, pp.  139, 143. not a
catechism: At least one supporter of the standards, however, seemed more
extravagant than Cheney.  Mabel Lake Murray, a member of the National
Alliance of Black School Educators who served on one of the consulting
panels, was quoted in Newsweek: "Black children have been brainwashed
since they started school in America to celebrate white heroes, concepts
and values.  What needs to happen now is a reverse brainwashing."
LynNell Hancock, "Red, White--And Blue," p.  57.

"While the standards do reflect": Morton Keller, personal communication,
December 12, 1994.

"a new American revolution": UCLA News press release, "National
Standards for United States History, Produced by UCLA Center, to Bring
'Revolution to History Education,'" October 26, 1994, p.  1.  The quote
turned up in the October 27 Los Angeles Times editorial, "Now a History
for the Rest of Us," in Guy Gugliotta, "Up in Arms," Washington Post,
October 28, 1994, p.  A4, and in Hugh Dellios, "Battle over History May
Itself Prove Historic," Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1994, p.  1.

"the sad and the bad": Cheney quoted in Hancock, "Red, White--And Blue,"
p.  57.

"The study of history": National Center for History in the Schools,
National Standards for United States History, p.  7.

196 "to consider multiple perspectives": The only pundit to strike a
glancing blow at this aspect of the standards was Charles Krauthammer,
but he

did it ham-handedly.  Krauthammer wrote in his syndicated column that
the question was not just what but how to teach.  Deeper than
"ideological slant" was that "the larger project of the new history is
to collapse the distinction between fact and opinion ....  In the new
history, there are no facts independent of ideology and power, no
history that is not political ....  Its purpose is to empower students
against...  elites by teaching them their own counter-narrative, heavy
on McCarthy, light on Edison." Krauthammer was tendentious in claiming
that Nash proposed to substitute mock trials and debates for the
teaching of facts, or that he worshipped opinion.  Krauthammer, in
short, had his facts wrong.  But he did approximate a fact: Nash did not
propose to teach facts in the old-fashioned way.  The Causes of the
American Revolution: National Center for History in the Schools,
National Standards for United States History: p.  9.  not just
conservatives: See, for example, John Patrick Diggins's critique of the
new standards, arguing that "the study of history cannot be separated
from the study of outstanding leaders" and that the great Westerners
should be studied because they are precisely the embodiments of the
virtues of free inquiry.  ("Historical Blindness," New York Times,
November 19, 1994), p.  23.

197 Morton Keller: Personal communication, December 12, 1994.

198 Theodore K.  Rabb: Rabb added that another newspaper had rejected
his article "because it did not have enough 'red meat' and refused to
make a partisan case."

"Whose History?  Where Critics of the New Standards Flunk Out,"
Washington Post, Outlook Section, December 11, 1994, p.  C5.  Akira
Iriye: Personal communication, January 3, 1995.

7.  Where We're Coming From

200 To paraphrase Marx: "Men make their own history, but they do not
make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances
chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered,
given, and transmitted from the past." Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth
Bru-maire of Louis Bonaparte," in Lewis Feuer, ed., Basic Writings on
Politics and Philosophy: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Garden City,
N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1959), p.

320.

To paraphrase Marshall Berman: The Politics of Authenticity: Radical
Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society (New York: Atheneurn,
1970), p.  325: "You may not be interested in politics, but politics is
interested in you." Trotsky: "You may not be interested in the
dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you."

201 "interpretive connnunity: Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This
Class? The Authority of lnterpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1980), pp.  13-14.  See also his There's No
Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994).

There are only stories: For example: "[Social science is not very
different from interpretation.  It is basically the telling of stories."
Michael J. Piore, Beyond Individualism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1995), p.  175, citing John S.  Nelson, Allen Mcgill,
and Donald N.  McClos-key, eds., The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences:
Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).

Iroquois Confederation: The strong form of the evidence, sometimes
exaggerated, is presented in Donald Grinde Jr., "Iroquois Political
Theory and the Roots of American Democracy," pp.  227-80 of Oren Lyons
et al., Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations, and
the U.S. Constitution (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 1992).  See
also the review by Rodney A.  Smolla, "Last in War, Peace and the
Supreme Court," New York Times Book Review, April 11, 1993, p.  22.

caricature of evidence: In the current climate, it is apparently
necessary to add that the claim is laughable.  An excellent refutation
is David Brion Davis, "The Slave Trade and the Jews," New York Review of
Books, December 22, 1994, pp.  14--16.

Those who deplore false universals: The artful Richard Rorty is the
bestknown philosopher to espouse this point of view.  See the brilliant
critique of his approach by Norman Geras, "Language, Truth, and
Justice," New Left Review, No.  209 (January/February 1995), pp. 110-35.
A widely cited feminist compendium of this epistemology is Elizabeth
Kamarck Minnich, Transforming Knowledge (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1990).

Historians: See Peter Novick's study, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity
Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 1988).

biographers: See Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted
Hughes (New York: Knopf, 1994).  Malcolm's fine judgment on the
blind-nesses of the biographers of Sylvia Plath is unfortunately not
matched in her more notorious likening of journalists to criminals in
The Journalist and the Murderer (New York: Knopf, 1990).

curdled into clich (footnote): Open a collection of leading feminist
criticism, like Conflicts in Feminism, edited by Marianne Hirsch and
Evelyn Fox Keller, (New York: Routledge, 1990), for example, and you see
these terms everywhere.  Here, a prominent feminist literary theorist,
Elizabeth Abel, refers to "the roles of race and class in a diversified
construction of

205

2O7

subjectivity." There, the influential feminist film theorist Teresa de
Lauretis writes: "Most feminists .  .  .  agree that women are made, not
born, that gender is not an innate feature (as sex may be) but a
sociocultural construction ....  "(Teresa de Lauretis, "Upping the Anti
[sic] in Feminist Theory.," pp.  256-57.)

Joan W.  Scott (footnote): "Multiculturalism and the Politics of
Identity," in Micheline R.  Malson, Jean F.  O'Barr, Sara Westphal-Uhl,
and Mary Wyer, eds., Feminist Theory in Practice and Process (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), p.  7.

"[D]ffferences are created" (footnote): Joan W.  Scott, in Michael
B(r-ub6 and Cary Nelson, eds., Higher Education Under Fire: Politics,
Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (New York: Routledge, 1995),
p.  321.

Dennis Wrong (footnote): "The Influence of Sociological Ideas on
American Culture," in Herbert J.  Guns, ed., Sociology in America
(Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1990), pp.  19-30.

hard science: Which is not to say that hard science has been immune to
perspectivist attacks.  Far from it.  The anti-objectivist spirit has
been riding high since the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions.  For defenses of scientific methods against
recent radical--including feminist--attacks, see Susan Haack, "Knowledge
and Propaganda: Reflections of an Old Feminist," in Partisan Review,
Fall 1993, pp.  556-64; Paul R.  Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher
Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), valuable despite its
exaggerations; and Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism
(New York: Basic Books, 1994), chapter 6.

populated by more than: I am staying out of the argument as to whether
this compound self is modern or postmodern.  Postmodernists argue that,
amid the flux and surfeit of selves, there is no fixed central
self---that the self is inhabited, "saturated," by a whole population of
"ghost" selves arising from the multiple roles we play, the multiple
images that envelop us, and so forth.  (Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated
Self) Modernists think that there is a central self---a sun, as it were,
around which the planetary subidentities revolve (Anthony Giddens,
Modernity and Self-Identity).  I am inclined toward the modernists, but
for purposes of my argument, it doesn't matter.

Leon Wieseltier: "Against Identity," The :Yew Republic, November 28,
1994, p.  30. "determined" in the sense: This reading of "determination"
is borrowed from Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977), pp.  83-89.

208 absurd at best: An example of the latter.  In 1989, a measure was
proposed at the University of California, Santa Cruz, requiring that any
faculty member dating a student notify the head of the department and
take him-or herself off any committee holding any power over the
student.  A female professor objected to the sweeping nature of the
policy and proposed, instead, that the relationship only be reported
when the professor held that power over the student before the dating
began.  Said another female professor to her: "You're a white male!" The
unintended comedy bespeaks the dead-end logic of "essentialism."

209 Whatever relativists may say: This point is well put in Dan Sperber,
"Apparently Irrational Beliefs," in Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes,
eds., Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), p.
161.  it ill behooves him: Not so fast: the Nietzschean mood, at least
in graduate schools of English, is such that the renowned
antifoundationalist English Professor Stanley Fish is eager to say so.
Which raises the question, Why go to the trouble?  If might suffices to
make right, why go to the trouble of trying to persuade?  The cynical
answer is that the academy is a place where victories are won not by
mobilizing tanks but by mobilizing arguments; when in the academy, fake
it the way other academics do.

211 "We never .  .  .  further questions": Wittgenstein's Lectures:
Cambridge, 1930-1932, ed.  Desmond Lee (London: Blackwell, 1980), quoted
in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free
Press, 1990), p.  301.

Max Horkheimer and T.  W.  Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment,
translated by John Cumming (New York: Seabury, 1972 [1944]), pp.  xiii,
24, 4, 13, 21.

212 Thomas Kuhn's: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962).

213 Kuhn's protestations: Kuhn, "Afterword," in Paul Horwich, ed., World
Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1993), pp.  311-41.

Zygmunt Barnnan: Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1989).

measure the rain forest: Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment, p.  xiv.

214 unfolding of one of the Enlightenment's: The political theorist
Sheldon Wolin has pointed out that the critics identify the
Enlightenment with its German wing, which was weak, to put it mildly, on
liberal politics and democratic potential, and strong on the totalist
potential of Reason.  The

American Enlightenment, by contrast, drew heavily from the Scottish
Enlightenment and was strong on individual rights.  Wolin, "Democracy in
the Discourse of Postmodernism," Social Research, Vol.  57, No.  1
(Spring 1990), p.  13.  See also Jtirgen Habermas, The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity, translated by Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).

Charles Taylor (footnote): Multiculturalism and "The Politics of
Recognition" (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp.
30, 38-39.

215 basis for common hmnan rights: The founding father of perspectivism,
Michel de Montaigne, made this point in the sixteenth century in the
course of respecting the "difference" of cannibals.  "We call contrary
to nature what happens contrary to custom; nothing is anything but
according to nature, whatever it may be.  Let this universal and natural
reason drive out of us the error and astonishment that novelty brings
us."

"Of a Monstrous Child," from The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne,
translated by Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958),
p.  539 (my emphasis).  In his interesting book, Cosmopolis (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990), Stephen Toulmin invites attention
to the tradition of Montaigne as an alternative to the tradition of
Descartes, which, in abstracting the mind from the body, clamps a single
standard for truth over the wild multiplicity of the world.

Voltaire was anti-Semitic: See, for example, Peter Gay, The
Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Science of Freedom (New York:
Norton, 1969), p.  391.

Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Jefferson: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Can-ohs:
Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp.

60-61.

Jefferson in particular: In Paris, noting the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen, Jefferson urged Madison to propose a Bill of Rights
to the American Constitution--in order that the United States preserve
its reputation as the avant-garde of liberty.  See Gordon S.  Wood, "The
Origins of the American Bill of Rights," The Tocqueville Review, Vol.
XIV, No.  1 1993), pp.  41-42.

Richard Rorty's words: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge,

Mass: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.  207.

Horkheimer and Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment, p.  xiii.

216 Lata Mani: "Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of
Multinational Reception," Feminist Review, 35 (Summer 1990), p.  26.
Mani also writes: "Claims to universality and objectivity have been
shown to be the alibis of a largely masculinist, heterosexist, and white
Western

217

218

subject" (p.  25).  Hundreds of other examples from recent briefs for
identity politics could be offered. as Richard Rorty writes:
Contingency; Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), p.  44.

Norman Geras: "Richard Rorty and the Righteous among the Nations,"
Socialist Register 1994 (London: Merlin Press, 1994), pp.  32-59.  The
quotation from Rorty's essay "Solidarity" appears on p.  33.

Michael Walzer: What It Means to Be an American (New York: Marsilio,
1992), pp.  7-8.

Walzer maintains: "Multiculturalism and Individualism," Dissent, Spring
1994, pp.  185, 190-91.

"connoisseurs of diversity": Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth,
p.

207.

8.  The Fate of the Commons

225 Average real wages: U.S.  Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor
Statistics, Current Employment Statistics Survey, 1995.

percentage of.full-time workers: U.S.  Bureau of the Census, The
Earnings Ladder (revised), June 1994.

Since 1973: Richard J.  Barnet, "Lords of the Global Economy," The
Nation, December 19, 1994, p.  754. In 1979 .  .  .  nineteen times: New
York Times, National Edition, May 4, 1994, p.  A15, citing Thomas G.
Mortenson, a higher education policy analyst.

This is class division: For further examples of the widening class
breach in higher education, see Russell Jacoby, Dogmatic Wisdom (New
York: Doubleday, 1994).

226 average chief executive officer: Barnet, "Lords of the Global
Economy," p.  754. almost one in four: The precise figure in 1955 was
24.7 percent.  U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Directory of National Unions and Employees Associations, 1979 (September
1980).

fewer than one in six: The precise figure in 1994 was 15.5 percent. U.S.
Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and
Earnings, January 1995.

Even many workers: But note, too, that many others who would join unions
if permitted are defeated, or at least discouraged, by unfavorable
government policies--rules kept unfavorable, for the most part, because
of the dwindling political power of unions.  Commission on the Future of
LaborManagement Relations, Fact Finding Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Department of Labor and U.S.  Department of Commerce, 1994), p.  77,

one source alluded to by Richard Rothstein in his L.  A.  Weekly column
for September 2-8, 1994.  I am grateful to Richard Rothstein for the
reference. "Strong organizations" .  .  .  Gay Rights parade: Michael J.
Piore, Beyond Individualism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1995), pp.  19-20.  Piore cites a historical precedent (p.  146): "In
mass production industries, the racial and ethnic distribution of jobs
and organization of tasks was used as a deliberate managerial tactic to
divide the labor force and forestall class identification and union
organization." See also L.  A.  Kauffman, "The Diversity Game: Corporate
America Toys with Identity Politics," Village Voice, August 31, 1993,
pp.  29-33.

228 none of the consequences: Americans whose origins lie in Mexico---or
Vietnam or Korea--stir up panic and paranoia in considerable part
because their appearance is superimposed on the old white purism.

229 Orlando Patterson: Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

slavery is central: Two recent compilations from within an enormous
literature are Barbara L.  Solow and Stanley L.  Engerman, eds., British
Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Barbara L.
Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge,
Eng.: W.  E.  B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research/Cambridge
University Press, 1991).  In the latter, Franklin Knight writes:
"Without African slaves and the transatlantic slave trade, the potential
economic value of the Americas could never have been realized, since
neither Portugal nor Spain had the reserves of labor necessary to
develop their new possessions" (p.

72).

230 cosmopolitan credo: A fine evocation of cosmopolitanism appears in
Michel Feher's "The Schisms of '67: On Certain Restructurings of the
American Left, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Multiculturalist
Constellation," in Paul Berman, ed., Blacks and Jews (New York:
Delacorte Press, 1994), pp.  275if.

231 Stanghton Lynd's words: "Coalition Politics or Nonviolent
Revolution?" Liberation, June/July 1965, p.  19.

232 wedges into the already dwindling: Thomas Byrne Edsall, with Mary D.
Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on
American Politics (New York: Norton, 1991).  See also William Julius
Wilson's convincing defense of "race-neutral" programs: "Race-Neutral
Programs and the Democratic Coalition," The American Prospect, Spring
1990, and a good sampling of other relevant arguments in Nicolaus Mills,
ed., Debating Affirmative Action (New York: Delta, 1994).

Stephen L.  Carter: Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby (New York:
Basic Books, 1991), pp.  88-90.

Out of the election wreckage: The following paragraphs draw on my
column, "Republicans Told White Guys: You Can Get It Up Again," New York
Observer, November 28, 1994, p.  4.

Richard Morin and Barbara Vobejda: "'94 May Be the Year of The Man,"
Washington Post, November 10, 1994, pp.  A27, A33. Sixty-two percent:
Richard L.  Berke, "Defections Among Men to G.O.P.  Helped Insure Rout
of Democrats," New York Times, November 11, 1994, p.  A1.

233 Despite exceptions: In the California Senate race, Michael
Huffington took 59 percent of white male votes but still lost narrowly
to Democrat Dianne Feinstein.  In Maryland, Republican Ellen Sauerbrey
took 63 percent of white males and still lost narrowly to Democrat
Parris Glendening.  In 1976 .  .  .  Perot (footnote): "Portrait of the
Electorate," New York Times, November 5, 1992, p.  B9.

234 proportion of blue-collar workers: J.  E.  Leighley and J.  Naylor,
"Socioeconomic Class Bias in Turnout 1964-1988: The Voters Remain the
Same," American Political Science Review, Vol.  86, No.  3 (September
1992), pp.  725-36, cited in Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short
Twentieth Century', 1914-1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), p.  581.

According to the census (footnote): U.S.  Bureau of the Census, Voting
and Registration in the Election of 1994 (June 1995).  The actual
figures reported by the census, based on a survey of 60,000 households,
were, respectively, 50.1 percent, 38.9 percent, and 34.0 percent.  But
these are claims to have voted, and they are inflated.  If the total
population had voted in these percentages, the total turnout would have
been somewhat more than 10 percent higher than in fact it was.  I have
therefore reduced the reported numbers by 10 percent.

Of those Americans earning $50,000 (footnote): Associated Press,
"Low-Income Voters' Turnout Fell in 1994, Census Reports," New York
Times, June 11, 1995.

Hispanics constitute (footnote): Efrain Hernandez and Richard Simon,
"Despite Gains, Latino Voters Still Lack Clout," Los Angeles Times,
December 4, 1994, pp.  A1, A39-40.

235 Corporate secession: See David A.  Hollinger, Postethnic America
(New York: Basic Books, 1995), p.  149.