The Legacy Of Multiculturalism In America

Multiculturalism hasn’t been a success. But it hasn’t been a total disaster, either.

The two faces of American multiculturalism, both which are present concurrently.

Right-wing political realist

Scott Greer

is at it again with more excellent commentary. In this essay, he explains what the radical right got wrong about the future of multiculturalism in America.

Greer’s bottom line up front:

The general thought is that mass immigration and multiculturalism would lead to America turning into a Brazil characterized by Balkanization, a permanent Democratic majority, non-white militancy, worse crime, and greater white racial consciousness. Instead, we’re getting a Brazil with intense slopification, bizarre politics, and extreme atomization.

Here’s what the radical right, and even more mainstream commentators, like the irreplaceable Samuel Huntington, once predicted would become of a multicultural America:

It’s understandable to think that a more diverse America would accelerate cultural Balkanization. All the new immigrants would carve up their own spheres and challenge prevailing American norms. They would stick to their old languages, insist on its usage in their own areas, and refuse to assimilate. Samuel Huntington and others worried we could have at least one Quebec on our hands. They saw the increased Hispanic migration to the Southwest as creating a new cultural zone that would prefer Spanish over English and see itself as distinct from the rest of the country. This territory could potentially split off from the rest of America and rejoin Mexico. Separatism, of one sort or another, would prevail in “Aztlan.”

Huntington wasn’t entirely wrong. As events earlier this summer in Los Angeles demonstrated, there does exist a significant unassimilated class in America, especially among Hispanic/Latinos. However, this group is much smaller in number than originally envisioned, confined to arguably non-American cities like Los Angeles, and don’t constitute a Quebec- or Catalonia-like region with separatist ambitions. If this unassimilated class all came together in one place, maybe they could establish both a unified identity and geographical space necessary for separatism, but not only does it show no sign of happening any time soon, it’s not even really a topic of conversation.

Instead of creating their own nation states-within-the-state, immigrants have, thanks to the hospitality of Americans, sought to take up space already occupied by others [bold mine]:

While immigration has certainly changed much of the country, it’s not quite “Balkanized” the country. One reason is that immigrants are now everywhere. One can encounter Hispanics and Indians in rural Arkansas. They’re too dispersed to form something along the lines of a Spanish or Hindi Quebec. They’re also too inclined to assimilate to America’s modern consumer identity. A person needs to know English so they can understand the latest hit songs, TikTok videos, and sports news. You’re not going to make it far in American society if you can’t speak English well. Lack of fluency condemns someone to the most menial of jobs.Many immigrants stick to speaking their language out in public, but their children know they need to learn the language to get anywhere in America. English remains strong.

As with so much in life, there’s a mix of good news and bad news. It’s nice to know there’s not going to be any real separatist movement in America any time soon. Even in our cities, ethnic neighborhoods might be a thing, but enclaves aren’t. Everyone is welcome everywhere, even in Black neighborhoods, it’s just that sometimes the locals aren’t very friendly. There aren’t “no-go zones” in the U.S. like there are in Britain and France, places where the rule-of-law effectively doesn’t exist. There are just dangerous neighborhoods, and all you really need to do is not go there.

America has a large number of problematic immigrants. But again, they don’t amount to the same kind of constant threat and critical mass like they do in Europe. Part of the reason for this is that we get different kinds of migrants. The other part of it is that we don’t really expect much out of our newcomers. It’s never easy moving to a new country and as Scott Greer says, you can’t make it in America without speaking English.

Aside, from that, America has no real culture. But there are plenty of distractions, plenty of bread and circuses. These have the same impact on foreigners as they do on natives. As long as there’s money to make, money to spend, plenty of goods and services, and plenty of consumers, there’s not a lot of time to cause trouble. America’s prosperity and culture of “slop,” as Greer puts it, does act as a suppressant.

The problem, of course, is that none of it makes America better. It’s not the immigrants’ fault that we lack culture. But the lack of culture was a trade-off made as part of grand bargain made a half-century ago to ensure domestic tranquility in the face of racial discord. Bringing in more foreigners has only exacerbated this trend. Now, it’s impossible to impose any kind of cultural standard. It worked in the sense we all managed to co-exist peacefully, with prosperity shared by most, especially by foreigners.

However, the more America diversified, the more Whites faded from prominence, the more these foreign-origin groups began demanding more. Liberals may applaud Whites being knocked down a peg, but it’s just a fact that they were the only people, conservatives included, who were most committed to the success of the multicultural project. This is because they had the most to lose. Meanwhile, non-White groups had more to gain and are only committed to multiculturalism with respect to how their specific group benefited. It explains why Blacks remain at such odds with all other groups, not just Whites, because as other groups have gained, Blacks are seemingly in a state of never-ending regression. But I digress.

Scott Greer discusses more, so be sure to read the whole essay. He reiterates that crime has gone down the more America has diversified, though this is an entirely correlative relationship, having more to do with the aging of the population and trends within the Black population. The crime situation is a whole different monster to tackle and the lower crime rates of today don’t imply a safe society, but for now, it’s enough to say that America is a safer society than it once was.

He concludes with this:

The one thing that the prophets of doom did get right is that America would begin to resemble Brazil. There’s much more of a Latin American character to our country now. Our shabby infrastructure, dismal ghettoes, and diverse population convey a Latin American feel. Our politics looks more like it, with right-wing authoritarians facing off against outright socialists. Both sides try to lock up the losers of elections and corruption is more accepted. One can walk around a mall and feel one is Belo Horizonte rather than in Kansas City. America is still far richer than any Latin American country and the state itself is much stronger than any government south of the border. But the changes are noticeable.

Greer comes close to overstating it, but he rights the ship by saying that America is still richer than Latin America and our institutions stronger. Still, his point is correct. Having been to Latin America multiple times, I can tell you we have a long way to fall before we get to be as bad as them. However, we seem to be trying hard in America to get there. Our demographic situation might be worsening, but we’re still mostly White and our culture is still very much Anglo in practice. Still, Latin American influence is strong, especially in places like Southern California, as well as that of Black culture. Despite efforts to remove them from positions of power, it’s the hated Whites who are actually keeping things from completely unraveling. Nobody wants to admit this, of course.

It’s important to point out where even the most astute of commentators like Peter Brimelow, Pat Buchanan, Samuel Huntington, and Jared Taylor got it wrong. It’s even more important to see reality for what it is. Maybe there’s still time for the more nightmarish predictions of Brazil characterized by Balkanization, a permanent Democratic majority, non-white militancy, worse crime, and greater white racial consciousness, as Greer put it, to come true.

But not only do these things take time to develop, they’re currently beyond the visible horizon, confined most to the talkosphere. This doesn’t mean that bad things can’t happen to the country, in the meantime. SHTFs can happen anywhere and at any time, as 2020 proved. It’s just that the manner in which it happens is unique to a society’s circumstances and traits. An SHTF in 2025 America, terrible as it might be, won’t look like an SHTF in 1995 Bosnia.

I’m not shy about saying that the Right has a bias for the worst-case, apocalyptic scenario. It stems from the belief that if things are to get better, terrible things must first happen. The logic is realistic. But real-life isn’t quite as dramatic, and there’s a tendency for things to trend towards the mean. Thinkers like Brimelow, Buchanan, Huntingon, and Taylor had good reason for thinking cultural Balkanization, separatism, and even mass ethnic/racial violence were in our future. Though extreme by mainstream standards, their thinking was still significantly less radical and better-reasoned than that of real extremists.

That was the view from 30 years ago, however. Now that we’re 30 years into their future, our assessment of the situation must change on what’s really happened and is happening today. We should be grateful that these prophecies of doom haven’t materialized, if only because things are bad enough as they are. America is effectively a multinational megacorporation, where anyone with money can literally buy their way into calling themselves an American. There’s not even a veneer of unity any longer, as we’ve become atomized, self-loathing, with politics increasingly becoming the only real remaining form of collective identity. This is obviously very bad with respect to the prospect of civil conflict in our future.

The “slopification” of our culture is something which needs to be talked about, but is also beyond my purview to speak on. For the purposes of this conversation, it’s enough to say that the appeal of American culture, to the extent it even exists, has been its ability to absorb other cultures. But this isn’t really a culture at all if it cannot stand on its own, if it’s so definition-less. The lack of culture is what isolates Americans, what leads to an endless array of intractable social conflict, and the inability to navigate what ought to be straightforward problems to solve. Worse, the lack of pride Americans feel for this country means nobody’s really invested in its fate. They just want to see what they can get out of it while it’s still in one piece.

Both sides are at fault for promoting the culture of slop. At the same time, one side, the Left, clearly indulges it more than the Right, who at least sees America as more than just an economic zone. Nothing unites Americans, yet this culture of slop is, ironically, one thing which kind of does. Everyone just wants a slice of the pie, a cut of prosperity, and their share of the good times while they’re still here. It’s why so many people want to come to the U.S. It’s all that being American means to anyone.

It’s an inherently competitive culture, another reason why it has such a corporate feel to it. Some people might say that competition is a good thing for society. After all, teammates compete with one another so they can be better. But where’s the cooperation? Unity is a hot topic of conversation in America is precisely because it’s so lacking. It’s hard enough getting homogeneous groups to work with one another; why would diverse groups be any easier? Clearly, it isn’t, and it can’t be blamed on White people.

Finally, if we’re all effectively just employees in the world’s biggest megacorporation, what use is loyalty? If our value to this country is purely in economic terms, if we can just be replaced at will by foreigners once we outlive our usefulness, exactly what do we owe our loyalty and patriotism to? What are our troops risking their lives for?

There’s a lot of different strings you could pull on this topic, clearly. I’m beginning to drift away from the focus of this piece, however, so I’ll come full circle by laying out my bottom line: Multiculturalism hasn’t been a success. But it hasn’t been a total disaster, either. It’s because it hasn’t been a total disaster that the long-anticipated backlash against multiculturalism seemingly never materializes. It’s also because of cultural changes which have led us to refuse to see any downsides to multiculturalism or to view them as worth its benefits.

Multiculturalism is destined for failure. But that failure may end not in Balkanization, race wars, and separatism, not in our lifetimes, anyway. It’ll end the way a broken, dysfunctional household does, where despite things clearly not working out, we refuse to split up, because everyone thinks the country belongs to them, including the illegal alien who crossed the border five minutes ago.

Honestly, I’m not sure that’s any better an outcome.

The Need For Collapse

I mentioned earlier that what astute thinkers like Pat Buchanan and Samuel Huntington said about the future of multiculturalism in America might be extreme by normative standards, but hardly extreme in an objective sense. For truly extremist views, you’d have to read books like The Turner Diaries, authored by the late William Luther Pierce, a neo-Nazi.

I’ll let you learn on your own time what Pierce’s vision of the future was, but I bring this up because many of the narratives of what the future holds for multiculturalism are ideologically driven, and determined not by fact, but our of psychological necessity. It’s an argument I once made and I still stand by it.

It’s not just my argument, either. I’ve mentioned the name “Kaiser Bauch” many times on this blog; for anyone hearing that name for the first time, he’s a Czechia-based YouTuber who made excellent videos over the years explaining demographic trends throughout the world and their impact on politics, among other issues. He chose to all but end his YouTube channel a few months ago, instead moving most of his work to Substack. As an avid fan of his, I’ll miss watching his videos quite a bit.

Anyway, Kaiser Bauch recently brought on a guest writer to his Substack who wrote an essay about what they call “Red Dawn Syndrome,” the belief that “doomerism,” whether about multiculturalism or the coming collapse of our society, is little more than a coping mechanism. It’s what allows those supremely dissatisfied with the status quo to have some hope for the future. People need to be able to believe things will get better someday, after all, otherwise, they lose the will to live.

The essay is paywalled, as Kaiser Bauch’s Substack is subscriber-only. I don’t want to give too much of it away, but I do want to share these paragraphs from it:

This narrative is the cathartic belief that any day now, society will fall apart–and whatever comes next will be an improvement. Such beliefs are not exclusive to the right, though they do seem to be more popular to it at the present moment in time.

These views are more popular on the Right currently because we live in a leftist world. The Left has more incentive to maintain the status quo because they’re the greater beneficiaries of it. That’s not to say the Right doesn’t benefit at all, but not only are they not running our institutions, they’ve been constantly backed into a corner. The right-wing populist wave which began almost a decade ago now is the most serious challenge to the status quo to date. The deepening conflict between the two sides has only exacerbated hopes and dreams of collapse or some other calamitous outcome.

More:

Reading this compelled me to explore the psychological origins of the collapse narrative. This essay will argue that this mindset is not only unrealistic but also stems from a form of culturally Christian spiritual anxiety. It is a powerful cope, one which allows any advocate of any political persuasion, left or right, to imagine the better world that may arise from the ashes of the current malaise. What advocates of these narratives of disaster and doom ignore is that if any such a disruptive collapse ever occurred, most of those fantasizing about possibility would be the first to complain about the horrific reality.

A lot of people would read that as a form of “blackpilling,” meant to demoralize and disempower. This is just being realistic. The chaos wrought by collapse is nothing to look forward to, never unfolding in a narrative-like Hollywood fashion where the good guys win in the end. Many on the Right think they’d thrive in a more chaotic environment because of their greater willingness to effectively employ violence and the fact that the stronger survive when the rules of nature apply. The problem, of course, is that strength isn’t exclusive to the Right, there are lots of strong people out there, and that what comes after collapse isn’t necessarily an ideological struggle.

This is important:

Regardless, both of these groups who daydream about the possibility of the downfall of everything have never lived in conditions where they could not access a Coca-Cola, or other minor comforts provided by modernity, within 24 hours. It is easy to clamour for mass suffering and pain when one has no real experience of what moderate discomfort, let alone widespread poverty and misery, actually entails.

It didn’t get the engagement I’d anticipated, but many essays ago, I shared commentary from Shahib Bolsen, who argued that a revolution would never happen in America because Americans are much too comfortable and would never sacrifice comfort in the pursuit of drastic political change. He’s not wrong. Not only that, but most Americans, including those afflicted by Red Dawn Syndrome, aren’t even interested in learning about what a collapse is really like.

When they do learn by reading from the experiences of people like Selco Begovic, survivor of the Bosnian War, they learn all the wrong lessons. They try to overlay the unique circumstances of his experience onto their world, imagining what it’d be like to stare down a rocket-propelled grenade being shot at them by leftist radicals or hanging them from lampposts. They overestimate their own propensity for violence while underestimating that of others. Talking about it is one thing, doing it is another.

Here’s something Selco once said in his book SHTF Survival Stories: Memories From the Balkan War:

It takes some guts and serious weapons to stand up to 10,15 or 20 armed guys, who are mostly drunk or high. Sometimes if people did not resist everything ended with just a few punches, a broken rib, or similar. They could just take what was interesting for them and leave.

On the other hand, they could also rape, kill, or torture.

You think you’re ready for that? You’re not.

Back to Kaiser Bauch’s guest writer:

More importantly, fantasists of collapse from every corner of the political spectrum ignore that their beliefs remain a form of coping with modernity. The certainty that doom is looming around the corner acts as a sedative, requiring little action on the part of the advocates. What’s worse is that particularly those on the right who spend time, money, and energy on activism and attempting to draft policy seem to have realized by now many of their efforts are rather ineffective. The default setting of the average Westerner is to be a vaguely small-l liberal coded individual. This is the most common opinion people hold; it is comforting to imagine that such people will be jolted into waking up by disasters, but ignores the reality that disasters may never come and even if they did there’s no reason to believe folks would abandon liberal socialization and values in the face of a major crisis.

This is another way of saying that banking on a backlash is a losing game. Look at Europe - despite enormous pressure, despite all sorts of evidence showing the failure of mass immigration, millions still hold onto liberal values, including multiculturalism. Only in France has a substantial backlash occurred. Everywhere else, it’s stillborn. People’s minds eventually change, but they change very slowly, often when it’s too late to do anything about the problem.

The U.S. is in nowhere near as bad a shape as Europe, so we’re likely even further away from a backlash. Trump is a reaction, but he remains as unpopular as ever, meaning most Americans aren’t ready to wipe the slate clean, despite it being necessary to do so. It’s difficult for the Right to accept this, but today’s “Silent Majority” is left-leaning and liberal. When President Richard Nixon uttered the phrase, it was 1969. 1969 was 56 years ago.

I think those who envisioned a bleak future for multiculturalism in America did so because they had the wisdom and historical knowledge to see where it inevitably goes. At the same time, some of the more apocalyptic predictions were borne from a need to feel as though justice would be rendered, that the Left would be discredited resoundingly so, and history would let it be known. But if history, true history, isn’t a morality play, that’s because the world rarely, if ever, permits a decisive, righteous finish.

In conclusion, that collapse is a cope doesn’t mean that everything will just work itself out. Nothing ever really does. Everything isn’t alright; even the liberals would agree on that point. Bad things will happen to this country. They happen all the time, actually, and many more bad things will continue happening to this country. It’s just that we’re better at moving on from them than we think and we do adapt to new realities. This is an important aspect of the author’s point; many of these collapse narratives are based on the idea that we’re just going to sit back and do nothing about it.

This is the wrong way to think about our problems. When we get inside our vehicles and hit the road, we’re always on a collision course with something. It’s just that we do something called turning, speeding up, slowing down, which averts collision. Driving the ship of state isn’t the same as driving a car, but the point remains: the people in charge may not be doing the right things, but they’re going to do something because that’s what keeps them in charge.

One day, it really will be too late and their attempts to avert collision will be in vain. But they’ll at least manage to prevent a total meltdown. If we’re going to compare the coming cataclysms of the Fourth Turning to a nuclear disaster, in the case of the U.S., think Three Mile Island, not Chernobyl.

What’s The Fate Of Multiculturalism?

What are your thoughts on Scott Greer’s commentary? Do you agree that disastrous predictions of multiculturalism’s future from the past haven’t panned out? Do you also agree that multiculturalism is still a failure, even if it doesn’t end with the country crumbling in a heap of anger? Do you agree with Kaiser Bauch’s guest writer about the reality of collapse narratives?

Talk it over in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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