The Minorities

There is no majority. If you subtract women, gays, blacks, hispanics, asians, jews, and secularists from the American population, there really isn't much left. So if equality were merely a question of numbers, there wouldn't be a problem. But equality and social justice are not about numbers, they are about power. For centuries a male straight white elite has dominated society's resources and rewards at the expense of every group.

This state of affairs is just wrong. It goes against every decent moral impulse. It is this simple argument, that oppression is wrong, that gives pluralism its tremendous moral force. It is the unassailable justice of the pluralist cause that has made it the most energetic and impassioned element of contemporary liberalism. If populists have the votes and progressives have the plans, pluralists have the passion.

At its core the pluralist message is unassailable: every person should be judged on their own merits, on their own deeds, and they deserve rewards commensurate to their contribution. Everyone deserves a shot at the good life. Arbitrary considerations like gender or race or religion just shouldn't matter. This simple argument seems so consonant with American ideals that for a brief moment it looked like pluralism was going to carry all before it. In the 1960's, pluralists looked invincible.

But pluralism has an achilles heel. In fact, it has more than one. There are two basic constituencies to the pluralist ideology, one dealing with ethnic identity and the other with personal identity. Ethnic minorities want a place at the table next the english, irish, germans, italians, etc. They want a piece of the pie. They don't want their ethnic identity to be a handicap. The identity pluralists, on the other hand, believe in the politics not of group liberation but of personal liberation. They want to topple the very, very old structure of western life and allow women and gays to finally walk tall. They don't just want toleration - they want acceptance.

Both of these type of pluralism have generated intense opposition. Not all of the the opponents to ethnic pluralism are just bigots. Some have a valid (or at least comprehensible) point to make. You see, when the "easy" victories establishing legal and political equality were won, pluralists then turned to the harder tasks of social and economic equality. But this required the redistribution of resources from one group (mainly poor and working class whites) to another. The backlash is certainly understandable, and aws rendered all but inevitable with the stagnation in middle class incomes that hit in the early 1970's.

The second reason for the backlash against ethnic pluralism is that the latter evolved from an integrationist to a multicultural ideal. The former says that the new groups just want to be Americans, the second that they will never be Americans, that America means white and that this is something they can never be. To even try would guarantee only cultural annihilation or continued domination. But this vision paints a picture of an America permanently divided by race, a vision even liberals might balk at.

The politics of personal identity has even more powerful enemies because its ambitions are so much greater. To overturn the social order is to offend everyone who believes in that order. It is to spit in the face of cultural traditionalists, to tell them that their way of life is repugnant and needs to be expunged. You can understand why this might make them a little cranky.

None of this is to say that pluralists aren't right, it is only to say that their moral virtue comes at a terrible political cost. Push to0 hard, too fast and you invite defeat. Go too slow and you allow oppression to continue and foster ever great frustration. The balance is a tricky one. But it is a balance I think can be found.

Ethnic pluralism can abate the backlash by making common cause with working class populists. They have essentially indistinguishable aims, namely economic opportunities. What they need to realize is that the enemy isn't each other but the economic elite. Those a the top are gleefully exploiting them even while they play white and minorities one against the other. And I think that multiculturalism is simply a mistake, an intellectual and political dead end. American culture is not a monolithic white creation, but an adaptable whole that can change even as it absorbs new groups. There is room for everybody. To divide ourselves along largely illusory ethnic and racial lines is only to hand the right one more weapon to use against us, this time one of our own fashioning. No thanks.

It is harder to know what to say about identity pluralism. There really is no justification for cultural traditionalists' treatment of people with vaginas or their loathing for people who have unconventional sex. There are some identity liberals who have been deliberately inflammatory (all straight sex is rape, being a housewife is stupid), and they should certainly cool it. And there are cultural traditionalists who are not really bad people, only profoundly misguided or overly afraid. To those people we need to explain that a happy family life really doesn't rely on the exploitation of women and the oppression of gays. But the sad truth is that a lot of traditionalists are just haters, and there can be no compromise with that sort.

The good news is that I think history is on our side. Increasing intermarriage is blurring ethnic boundaries, the notion of gender equity is becoming more a norm, and younger people just don't hate gays very much. As liberals we can do a lot to hasten these changes, but in the end it is mainly a matter of time.