Quote of the Day

The New Criterion is furious about something spurious:

Do you suppose Angela Merkel, the trenchant German Chancellor, reads The New Criterion? We ask because she seems to share our antipathy toward “multiculturalism,” that spurious doctrine, born in the hothouse of Western universities, that proclaims the glories of “diversity” and egalitarianism but is really a blind for anti-Western, and especially anti-American, animus. “All cultures are equal,” chant the multiculturalists, like characters out of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “but some are more equal than others.” It is one of the great rhetorical ironies of the age that what travels under the name of “multiculturalism” is really a form of mono-cultural animus directed against the dominant culture—our culture, the culture of the West. In essence, as Samuel Huntington noted in his book Who Are We?, multiculturalism is “anti-European civilization. . . .

It is basically an anti-Western ideology.” Multiculturalists claim to be fostering a progressive cultural cosmopolitanism distinguished by superior sensitivity to the downtrodden and dispossessed. In fact, they encourage an orgy of self-flagellating liberal guilt as impotent as it is insatiable. The “sensitivity” of the multiculturalist is an index not of moral refinement but of moral vacuousness...