Andrew Hagen examines multiculturalism:

Think of culture as a meal that you are preparing. Do you take exactly one teaspoon of every item you’ve got in the pantry, and put it into the pot and heat it? Or do you carefully select the ingredients? A culture is a mix of different ingredients, and not just any mix works. [...]

Multiculturalism takes cultures and turns them into mulch. That’s why a good nickname for multiculturalism would be “multure.”

Today, the official policy of the US and other Western countries is multiculturalism. There is no simple definition of multiculturalism, because the various parts of it contradict the other parts. All cultures are equal, and all should be free, except that Christianity and European culture should die. And so on.

— Andrew Hagen: Reverse imperialism: the reality of multiculturalism.

I like reading Andrew Hagen but when he goes into “axioms mode,” his wrestling with terms can be quite, shall we say, fatiguing. There is a big difference between the assimilative nature of America, and the ethos of multiculturalism that works to undermine this. The melting pot model — the very engine of the United States that runs on the fuel that is (since such time ago, legal) immigration — has worked for us until multiculturalism — and its crack-baby daughter, “political correctness” — took hold in this country. If America as a melting pot takes the best of an incoming culture, incorporates it into its own, adds its existing culture to that of the incoming one, and basically assimilates into each other, multiculturalism’s basic tenet is that a culture is too valuable to be “lost” to this assimilation, that culture is beyond value judgment, and that a person who apparently is neither white or black American — and as such is not “American in the first place” — must fight tooth and nail against the creeping vulgarity of American culture, and its vampiric nature.

It is a racist policy, one rooted in the Noble Savage Myth (and, for that alone Rosseau should burn in whatever hell is imaginable for him, which, in my idea would be an America full of Chinese-food–eating people, Asians driving huge SUVs and Sudanese Moslem children who actually weigh heavier than a kitten, free to live without fear of an Arab “brother Moslem” raiding his home to kill them). The melting pot of the United States might teach us that (farm-raised) dog may be a tasty meal; multiculturalism basically would teach that the practice of eating dog has a cultural value that will be forever lost should it be adopted by Americans. While the melting-pot society respects culturally-driven schemas of thought, multiculturalism insists that culturally-driven schemas of thought are more important, and that one has to think a certain way because he is of a certain culture. The melting pot of the United States welcomes heavily draped Moslem women; multiculturalism will condone their honor-murder should they dishonor a male family member.

Fear of multiculturalism must be tempered by reason: its polar opposite is cultural intolerance (not in the “dirty” sense of the word) that leads to isolationism and cultural purism. What would work for a European country does not work for the United States, and vice versa. While France loses its national and cultural identity to a flow of immigrants from nations whose cultures it refuses to judge (and therefore adds everything from the cultures to its own, the United States continues to welcome immigrants that will add to its own. In terms of nation-building, the model that our nation has chosen, and, more relevantly, its success, is a true mystery to almost every other country.

Maybe — and I wax romantic as I end this write-up — the tie that binds all Americans, the one culture that brings us all together, is a love of freedom, and that is a good enough culture to spread around for everyone else. Multiculturalists will find that so vulgar that they would find more appealing the sight of a culturally pure, oppressive regime untouched by American “evil,” than to see them live free. And in that light, they make no sense at all.