[Kay S. Hymowitz is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She writes extensively on education and childhood in America.]

These days everyone has a strong opinion about marriage, but no one seems to be sure what it is, exactly. Is it a sacramental union? Is it a public recognition of a committed love relationship? Is it a state scheme for distributing health insurance and tax breaks? Or given what two eminent anthropologists writing recently in support of gay marriage in the Washington Post describe as a"startling diversity of socially approved forms of marriage," is the institution too varied to fit into a single, dictionary-neat meaning?

The anthropologists are right about one thing: human beings have come up with almost as many ways of getting hitched as they have languages to tell mother-in-law jokes. Some cultures allow only monogamous marriage; some accept polygamy. In many cultures, the wife moves into her husband's family's home; in others, the husband moves into the wife's; in still others, they get a mortgage and move into their own two-bedroom ranch in Levittown. Though most cultures give husbands the primary responsibility for providing for the children, some make the wife's brother—the baby's uncle—responsible for providing the food and the bow-and-arrow lessons. Some cultures don't allow divorce; some allow divorce but not remarriage; some allow divorce if husbands fork over most of their life savings to the likes of Raoul Felder; and others let a guy say"I divorce you" three times before booting his wife out the door.

This protean diversity is central to today's marriage debate. If marriage is, as these examples suggest, an eminently malleable social construct, why shouldn't society shape it any way it likes, especially by letting gays marry each other?

But beneath all the diversity, marriage has always had a fundamental, universal core that makes gay marriage a non sequitur: it has always governed property and inheritance rights; it has always been the means of establishing paternity, legitimacy, and the rights and responsibilities of parenthood; and because these goals involve bearing and raising children, it has always involved (at least one) man and woman. What's more, among the"startling diversity" of variations that different cultures have elaborated on this fundamental core, our own culture has produced a specifically American ideal of marriage that is inseparable from our vision of free citizenship and is deeply embedded in our history, politics, economics, and culture. Advocates for gay marriage cite the historical evolution of that ideal—which we might call republican marriage—to bolster their case, arguing that gay unions are a natural extension of America's dedication to civil rights and to individual freedom. But a look at that history is enough to cast serious doubt on the advocates' case.

Strange as it seems, America's founding thinkers were as interested in the subject of marriage as any of Fox TV's bachelorettes. Given the political experiment that they were designing, they had good reason, for they understood the basic sociological truth that familial relations both echo and shape the political order."To the institution of marriage the true origin of society must be traced," James Wilson, a member of the Continental Congress and later a Supreme Court justice, wrote in 1790. Before the Revolutionary War, legal philosophers and statesmen like Wilson filled magazines and speeches with discussions of what kind of marriage would best live up to the principles of the new country. It's not surprising that they zeroed in on one quality in particular: self-government.

The Founders did not sketch their ideas about marriage on a blank slate, of course. They brought to their task a set of traditional Western assumptions about the institution, and these assumptions remained implicit in their new ideal and still resurface in our current discussions. Given that marriage was originally a religious sacrament, the Founders understood that the institution retained, even in their secular republic, an element of spirituality, an assertion that man is something higher than the beasts and more than a merely material being. The ceremony confers a special, human dignity upon our relations. In addition, they understood that marriage is a contract, regulated by the laws and ultimately enforceable by the state, that spells out property relations between the spouses, as well as their inheritance rights and those of their children. Therefore, marriage is intrinsically a government concern....

Wendy McElroy, an HNN blogger, in the Independent Institute (June 30, 2004):

Wal-Mart is facing the largest class action lawsuit ever been brought against a private company. As many as 1.6 million women may join the suit and the possible payout could exceed $1 billion dollars. What are class action lawsuits, and why have they become so prominent in the news?

Class action lawsuits are an aspect of tort law, which addresses harm or loss that is caused either deliberately or through carelessness by the actions of another. A class action suit is brought by one or more plaintiffs on behalf of a larger group that has a common interest, a common harm. For example, if a product is defective and injures a consumer, that consumer can bring suit against the producer on behalf of all consumers similarly injured. After attorneys’ fees, any settlement or court award is divided among those participating in the suit.

In the Wal-Mart case, six women filed the original action in June 2001, claiming that the giant retailer discriminated against women in salaries and promotions. Approximately 1.6 million women who have worked for Wal-Mart since 1998 are eligible to join the suit.

There are several reasons why class action lawsuits have proliferated over the last few decades. Changes in legal procedure have favored the growth.

A comprehensive study from the Rand Institute for Justice entitled “Class Action Dilemmas, Pursuing Public Goals for Private Gains” explains one such change. “[T]he current controversy over class action roared to life in 1966 when Rule 23, the procedural rule that provides for class actions in federal courts, was significantly revised. . . . Whereas previously, all individuals seeking money damages with a class action lawsuit needed to sign on affirmatively (‘opt in’), now those whom the plaintiffs claimed to represent would be deemed part of the lawsuit unless they explicitly withdrew (‘opted out’).”

In an instant, the scope of lawsuits and the financial liability of defendants “multiplied many times over.” (Rule 23 has been subsequently amended, largely to increase the role of judges in every aspect of class action suits.)

In short, class action suits became tremendously more profitable, especially for lawyers whose contingency fees sometimes exceeded the money paid out to successful plaintiffs. Contingency fees are commonly viewed as a necessary device by which poor plaintiffs can access the court system. In 1971, the Florida Supreme Court stated, “It is irrefutable that the poor and the least fortunate in our society enjoy access to our courts, in part, because of the existence of the contingency fee.”

But the excesses of contingency fees have become infamous, leading critics to label class action suits as “jackpot justice” for lawyers. One critic is Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who has spoken out against “out-of-control class action lawsuits and outrageous contingency fees, which have turned some lawyers into ‘overnight millionaires.’”

Robert Bork, in the WSJ (July 12, 2004):

The Supreme Court has just endorsed lawsuits against American and foreign individuals and corporations under a supposed "human rights" component of the "law of nations," two amorphous and shifting concepts that give little warning of what conduct may result in liability for damages. Although the Court gave assurances that there will be stringent rules to control the more adventurous lower courts, those assurances are highly dubious and the results promise to be anything but happy.

The center of controversy is the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) which provides that "The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States." No legislative history exists and, as a prominent judge once remarked, "this old but little used section is a kind of legal Lohengrin. . . . No one seems to know whence it came."

When I first sat on a case involving the ATS, my thought was that it must be a modern excrescence, but then I saw that it was enacted in 1789 and made sense at the time. It slumbered peacefully for 200 years until a federal appeals court in Filartiga v. Pena-Irala resurrected the statute in 1980 by awarding damages to Paraguayans for the torture-murder of a Paraguayan in Paraguay by a Paraguayan official. Though that seemed remote from any conceivable interest of the U.S., the court, as Jeremy Rabkin wrote, "cheered on by a host of international law scholars, insisted that 'customary international law' has greatly expanded and now incorporates an international law of human rights." That raises the question of whether Congress's 1789 understanding of what it intended to enact can properly be amended by judges to mean something else. The answer should be a resounding no.

One thing is certain: In 1789, the law of nations had nothing to do with human rights. According to Blackstone, with whom Americans were very familiar, the principal offenses were infringements of the rights of ambassadors, violations of safe conduct, and piracy (included because the offense took place on the high seas beyond the reach of any nation's laws). The ATS may also have been designed to deal with prize law, which allowed private vessels having a marque, or license, to capture enemy ships. The law of nations, in other words, was just that, a law about relations between sovereignties. It would have been preposterous for a small, weak nation clinging to the Atlantic seaboard to have given jurisdiction to its courts to entertain, for example, human-rights suits by Britons against the British crown for actions taken in Britain. Rather than soothing foreign nations by protecting their emissaries, such tort actions would have inflamed them. Yet that is what our courts are doing now, and under the same statute. There is no justification for that result....

... Today, it is common to hear Westerners, who have read a few polemical articles and imagine themselves great experts on Islam, calling for "an Islamic Reformation," and an "Islamic Luther." Other such are horrified to hear the argument, which is quite widespread among informed non-Muslim scholars as well as Muslims, that Islam already has a movement comparable to the Reformation, and had its Luther, or better, its John Calvin, in the form of Wahhabism and its founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. That is, the Islamic Reformation exists in the ultraextremist cult that is the state sect in Saudi Arabia and the inspirer of al-Qaida. Wahhabis themselves are quite pleased by the comparison. Is this really so difficult to understand?

Calvin believed that a community of the elect had been chosen by God and made up the Calvinist congregation. Before the arrival of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the Hanafi-Sunni Muslims of the Ottoman empire believed (as Hanafi-Sunnis still believe) that Allah would judge individuals on their faith, and that salvation could not be claimed in this life. Is Calvinism, with its insistence on its adherents' election, so easily distinguished from Wahhabism, with exactly the same fanatical belief in its acolytes' own goodness? Both produced iconoclasm and theocracy. Is it not fascinating that the followers of Calvin and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab both fostered the rejection of pleasure, song and dance, decoration of sacred buildings, and spiritual culture beyond simple prayer?

We are told incessantly that without "our Protestant heritage" Americans would not be free. Have Americans really become so thoroughly indoctrinated in this simplistic and bigoted a view of our history, according to which every liberty is due to the influence of "Anglo-Saxonism" and "the Protestant ethic," as to have forgotten that decades before Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was slaying Sufis in Arabia, Puritan Massachusetts hanged a Catholic woman as a witch? (Look up the case of Ann "Goody" Glover on google, if you don't believe me.)

Or that Roger Williams had to flee Puritan Massachusetts to shelter among the Narragansett Indians, on his way to found an oasis of religious liberty in Rhode Island? Or that Catholics were deprived of rights in nearly all the early Anglo-American colonies, except for Maryland? Can we today imagine Boston without a Catholic archdiocese? Yet there was no Catholic bishop in Boston until 1808. Early America happened to be a place where adherents of the Roman Catholic church, libeled for generations as subservient to the Pope -- a slander whose echo we hear subtly repeated today, in discussions about the suitability of Catholic political candidates -- were in truth courageous heroes of religious liberty.

In New England, with the exception of Rhode Island, the Congregational Churches long enjoyed an absolute monopoly on faith, and in most of the southern colonies, the Church of England had the same status. New Hampshire permitted nobody but Protestants to hold office or teach school until 1877, 14 years after the Emancipation Proclamation ended the slavery of Blacks! The Carolinas, by contrast, have the honor of proclaiming freedom of religion to "Jews, heathen, and dissenters," beginning in 1669, under the original colonial charter written by John Locke, although it was not ratified. England itself, worshipped as the mother of our liberties, denied full rights to Catholics until 1829!

Americans have lately been perturbed by the arguments of Samuel Huntington, according to whom, "There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society," a dream that can be shared only by those who "dream in English." No place in this scheme for the Catholics of Maryland, to begin with. But how does this impend on the question of the future of Islam?

Every presidential ticket is a snapshot of a party, a particular political moment, a particular political need.

Often, it shows politicians scrambling to pull together various regions or ideological wings of a party, like Franklin D. Roosevelt paired with the conservative Texan John Nance Garner, the speaker of the House, in 1932. Sometimes, the politicians are trying to reflect (and capitalize on) a major social or demographic change - notably Walter F. Mondale, hoping to galvanize his decidedly uphill campaign by naming a woman, Geraldine A. Ferraro, as his running-mate in 1984.

So what does a John Kerry-John Edwards ticket tell you? Forget, for a moment, the obvious attempt at regional balance, or the tactical advantage of adding a skilled campaigner to the ticket. In deeper ways, the selection of Edwards signals the extent to which this campaign will revolve around class - more specifically, which party represents the aspirations, values and economic interests of hard-working middle America.

There is an obvious paradox here; Mr. Edwards is the fourth white male millionaire to join the national tickets. Three of them went to Yale, and two (Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush) are descendants of old and patrician New England families.

But Kevin Phillips, the political historian and Bush critic, notes that there are class differences even among the millionaires. To begin with, as is now widely known, Mr. Edwards is the son of a millworker, the first generation in his family to go to college (and it was not Yale). He made his own fortune, and he did it as a trial lawyer."Edwards is a member of one of the relatively few professions where you can make a lot of money blasting the avarice of big corporations," Mr. Phillips said.

"Republicans worry about him going up and down the Ohio Valley, and winning over a lot of people just like he won small-town juries in the border states," Mr. Phillips added. (Atticus Finch with an attitude.)

With the help of Mr. Edwards's full-throated economic populism, his up-by-the-bootstraps biography and his case against the"two Americas," Democrats hope to strengthen their connection with white working- and middle-class voters. Mr. Kerry has already laid down some detailed policy prescriptions to ease what he describes as the"middle-class squeeze," from a major program to expand health insurance coverage and hold down its costs, to new assistance with college tuition....

John Kerry thinks he knows the Australian accent pretty well."Oz-TRY-le-an," he says with emphasis as we meet mid-air aboard his Boeing 757, modestly emblazoned"John Kerry President". Half an hour earlier we'd raced out of Denver, Colorado, our police motorcade ablaze in blue and red. Now we should be heading south for New Mexico, where more voters wait to be wooed. But instead of another stop on the trail Kerry hopes will end at the White House on November 2, the jet's nose suddenly points east to Washington DC, where the Republicans are planning an ambush in the Congress.

It's been a long day for the 60-year-old Democrat and his growing entourage. He left Nantucket on the north-east coast at 6am, reached the Rocky Mountains by mid-morning, and now, after a day's campaigning, he's due in the nation's capital at 2am. Total distance: about 6300 kilometres.

After a few hours' sleep, Kerry will be stalking the ornate corridors of the Capitol, making a rare return to his Senate duties to vote on a bill vital to one of his key constituencies - Vietnam War veterans. All the time he's thinking - about money, policies, a vice-president. Clearly, he has a lot going on. For the moment, though, he looks relaxed as he wanders out from his curtained compartment.

An aide introduces us."Oz-TRY-le-an," Kerry says. But when I suggest he picked up the accent on an R&R trip to Australia during the Vietnam War, there is no response. Instead, he heads back to his compartment.

It's a strange moment: Kerry has given a firm handshake, smiled, registered my nationality, made a mild joke about it, and then completely switched off. He hasn't been unfriendly. He hasn't been aloof - the most common criticism of him. He's just tuned in for a second, then disconnected. He knows I can't win him a single vote.

Backtrack 18 months to an icy Washington evening in January 2003 - a night for indoors, for politics and plots. At the White House, George W. Bush is mulling over a speech that will set the US on course for war in Iraq. Across town at a swank city hotel, six men attack him relentlessly as they begin manoeuvring for his job. One of them towers above the rest, still slim at six foot four (193cm), still good for the odd ice hockey game or a scoot across the waves on his windsurfer. Big-headed with a thicket of greying hair and a lantern jaw, he has a slightly melancholy look. His voice is deep, his tone serious. The message is clear: I'm presidential material - just look at my initials. JFK.

This is John Forbes Kerry, the widely travelled, well-educated son of a diplomat; Kerry, the decorated war hero whose anti-Vietnam campaign rattled the Nixon White House; Kerry, the four-term Massachusetts Senator who speaks French and specialises in foreign policy; Kerry, the guy who married one of America's richest women....

John Edwards can't get the high-beam smile off his face.

Picked this week as putative Democratic candidate John Kerry's running mate, his joy at the notion of becoming U.S. vice-president fairly leaps off the TV screen.

But has the junior senator from North Carolina thought it through?

He's important now. Some say his open-faced affability is, in fact, crucial if Kerry's so-far plodding campaign is ever to catch fire. But if the Democrats win Nov. 2, what then?

Will Edwards step in to the second most important job in the land, a heartbeat away from the presidency? Or, having served his purpose, will he be at a political dead end?

The first American vice-president, John Adams, called the job"the most insignificant office ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." Rather more succinct was one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's three vice-presidents, John Nance Garner, who bitterly remarked that it"isn't worth a pitcher of warm spit."

That's been the case more often than not.

It's widely acknowledged that a vice-president has a far more significant role before the election, not after, hence the term, running mate.

He's expected to broaden the appeal of the main contender, not overshadow it because it's the top of the ticket that people vote for, analysts say, not the bottom. And Kerry's choice of a running mate is textbook. Edwards' blue-collar southern roots and trial-lawyer speechifying will counterpoint the Massachusetts senator's own blue-blood East Coast dispassion.

U.S. President George W. Bush also needed a counterpoint when he chose Dick Cheney in 2000, and almost certainly will do so again next month. Cheney, secretary of defence in George H.W. Bush's administration and ultimate Washington insider, added ballast to Bush's inexperience at the federal level.

Presidential historian Allan Lichtman notes it's a myth that running mates are picked to balance the ticket geographically or to deliver a key state or region. It rarely happens because it rarely works."Only Lyndon Johnson did that, back in 1960, when he was credited with winning Texas for John F. Kennedy."

Traditionally, once past the inauguration, vice-presidents are more or less sidelined, limited to attending the funerals of foreign dignitaries, playing host to less important White House visitors and chairing the occasional commission. Indeed, the role has only two officially mandated duties. The first is to serve as president of the Senate, though the V-P may vote only when there is a tie. Someone else actually runs it on a day-to-day basis.

The second is to succeed if the president dies or resigns, as in 1974 when Gerald Ford took over from the disgraced Richard Nixon. Nine of the 46 U.S. vice-presidents have replaced their boss before the end of his term, a fact that apparently enticed Johnson to sign on with Kennedy.

"Lots of presidents die in office," he noted in graceless foreshadowing,"so why not?"

The vice-president does attend cabinet meetings and sits on the National Security Council, the president's chief advisory panel on foreign relations and national defence policies.

That's only because of Harry Truman; as Roosevelt's third V-P, he was kept so far out of the loop that he knew nothing about testing of the atomic bomb. When he took office on FDR's death in 1945, with war in the Pacific still raging, Truman vowed no vice-president would ever be so ill-prepared again....

Senator John Kerry's political advisers plan to dispatch his new running mate, Senator John Edwards, to rural areas in critical states across the Midwest and the West, in the belief that Mr. Edwards could be an unusually powerful advocate for the ticket in regions viewed as President Bush's stronghold.

For all the attention to Mr. Edwards's Southern roots, Mr. Kerry's aides said that his strongest appeal was likely to be among rural and independent voters, two of the most vital segments of the electorate this year, because of his upbringing in a small North Carolina town and his political identity as a Southern Democrat. Mr. Kerry's aides and some outside analysts said he could be a strong presence in a dozen battleground states outside the South, from Ohio to Oregon.

''From looking at how he performed in the primaries, it is clear he did well with the rural vote," Steve Elmendorf, Mr. Kerry's deputy campaign manager, said."We're going to send Edwards into rural states and Southern states because we think he can help us close the gap there."

The Democrats' emerging plan for Mr. Edwards comes at a time when Democratic and even some Republican officials suggest that Mr. Kerry's vice-presidential selection has the potential of being the most politically significant choice since another Massachusetts Democrat, John F. Kennedy, turned to another Southerner, Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1960. Many experts say the choice of Johnson pushed Texas into the Democrats' column and ensured Kennedy's victory.

Although Mr. Edwards is likely to sway a relatively small number of votes, Democrats and Republicans noted that the contest was likely to be determined by a sliver of voters in a handful of states, and said that Mr. Edwards appeared particularly strong among those voters the White House and Mr. Kerry's campaign had seen as pivotal to the outcome in November.

"I think it's going to help him," Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster, said of Mr. Kerry's choice of Mr. Edwards."The picture of him and all the kids and the rest of it.

"He appeals to the Southern moderates, who in the past may have voted for the Republicans," Mr. Fabrizio added."He's got a populist message, so it can go to union members; a sizable number of union members might have voted for George Bush. I think Edwards is appealing to female voters."

Mr. Bush's aides said they did not believe Mr. Edwards would make a significant difference, arguing that voters end up making their decisions in presidential elections based on the top of the ticket....

Some years ago the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer declared that"we are all multiculturalists now." One's initial response to such an unwanted announcement is to say:"What do you mean, 'we'?" Yet, even if"we" do not subscribe to that sentiment, it cannot be denied that over the last twenty years multiculturalism has become the ruling idea of America, incarnated in every area of society ranging from educational curricula to the quasi-official establishment of foreign languages, to mandated racial proportionality schemes in private employment and university admissions, to the constant invocations by our political, business, and intellectual elites of"diversity" as the highest American value. How, so quickly and effortlessly, did this alien belief system take over our country? In this article, I look at multiculturalism as an ideology that has advanced itself by means of a set of propositions. My intent is to examine the false arguments of the multiculturalists themselves, and to see how they have used these arguments to fool an all-too-willing American majority to go along with them.

The Fraud of Inclusion

The first principle of multiculturalism is the equality of all cultures. According to its proponents, America is an assemblage of racially or ethnically defined subcultures, all of which have equal value and none of which can claim a privileged position.

It follows from this that the main goal of multiculturalism is inclusion. Multiculturalists argue that minority and non-Western cultures have been unjustly excluded in the past from full participation in our culture, and that in order to correct this historic wrong we must now include them on an equal basis. In other words, these minority cultures must be regarded as having the same public importance as America's historic majority culture. Moreover, we are told, this equal and public inclusion of different cultures does not threaten our culture, but"enriches" it. By this reasoning, if we became (say) an officially bilingual society, with Spanish appearing alongside English on every cereal box and street sign in the land (as is done with the two languages of Canada), our culture would not be harmed in the slightest. We would only be including something we once excluded. We would have become something more, not less. What could be more positive? How could any decent person object?

To begin to answer that question, let us imagine a scenario in which a Western cultural group—say a large population of Italian Catholics—moved en masse into a Moslem country and demanded that the host society drop all public observance of its majority religion and redefine itself as a multicultural state. When the Moslems react in fear and outrage, the Catholics answer:"What are you so uptight about, brothers? In challenging Islam's past exclusionary practices, we're not threatening your religion and way of life, we're enriching them." Of course, as even the multiculturalists would admit, such"enrichment" would change Islam into something totally unacceptable to the Moslem majority. By the same logic, if the U.S. Congress were required to conduct all its proceedings in Chinese or Spanish alongside English, that would obviously not"enrich" America's political tradition, but radically disrupt and change it. To say that a majority culture must"include" alien traditions on an equal basis in order to prove its own moral legitimacy is to say that the majority culture, as a majority culture, is not legitimate and has no right to exist.

Since multiculturalism claims to stand for the sanctity and worth of each culture, the discovery that its real tendency is to dismantle the existing European-based culture of the United States should have instantly discredited it. Yet it has not—not even among conservatives. A leading reason for this failure is that modern conservatives are themselves ethnicity-blind, democratic universalists. Their conservatism consists in seeing multiculturalism as an attack on their universalist tenets. They fail to understand multiculturalism as an attack on a particular culture and people, namely their own, because as universalists they either have no allegiance to that particular culture and people or their allegiance is defensive and weak. Thus the typical conservative today will say that multiculturalism is bad because"it divides us into different groups"—which is of course true. But he rarely says that multiculturalism is bad because"it is destroying our culture"—America's historic culture and civilization—since that would imply that he was defending a particular culture rather than a universalist idea. Because conservatives are unwilling to defend the very thing that multiculturalism is seeking to destroy, they are unable to identify the nature of multiculturalism and to oppose it effectively.

Several caveats are in order before proceeding with a discussion, which will inevitably incite the multicultural left and invite its characteristically unscrupulous attacks. When I speak of America's"dominant Western culture," or of its"majority culture and people," these are not intended as code words for whites. Individuals of non-European ancestry are and can be full members of America's majority Western culture. At the same time, it is a historical fact that America’s defining political culture is Anglo-Saxon and Protestant in origin and character. A Japanese-American can become an American by embracing this culture—this culture shaped by Anglo-Saxon and Protestant traditions—as his own. (And I write this as a non-Anglo-Saxon Jew.) The same is true for individuals of any ethnic or racial group.

In this article I refer occasionally to whites as well as to generic conservatives, mainly because whites, as the American majority population and the historic ethnic core of the dominant culture, are the particular targets of multicultural propaganda. Whites as a group are never spoken of today except in negative terms. This is the case even as liberal white elites worship at the altar of blacks as a group, of Moslems as a group, of Mexicans as a group, and so on. Many whites have so absorbed today's anti-white attitudes that they consider it"racist" even to think of themselves as whites or to speak of whites as a category at all. Not only does this represent a malignant double standard, in which nonwhites are empowered in their anti-white racism while their white targets are silenced, it doesn't even make sense. How can we speak intelligently about the fateful issues of multiculturalism and national identity if we are not even allowed to mention one of the main parties (though most of its members decline to think of themselves as a party) to those controversies?

My occasional use of the present tense to portray the respective sides of the diversity debate should not be taken to suggest that any meaningful debate on that topic is still going on, at least in mainstream venues. As has been increasingly evident since the mid-1990s, the multiculturalists have pretty well won their war against America's former dominant culture, in the sense of supplanting it as the prevailing national idea. Multiculturalist agendas and the rhetoric of diversity inform the key institutions and official expressions of American society. It is now an unquestioned credo both in the schools and among the elites that the central purpose of our society is the inclusion of other peoples and cultures, rather than the preservation, flourishing, and enhancement of our own people and culture. Multiculturalism is embraced in the highest precincts of the establishment right as well as the left. Thus George W. Bush, casting aside Ronald Reagan's belief in immigration with assimilation, has celebrated the growth of unassimilated foreign languages and cultures in this country, while his closest aide, Condoleezza Rice, who ten years ago told radio host Bob Grant that she was a Republican because Republicans treated her as an individual instead of as a black, now supports minority racial preferences in college admissions and throws around diversity rhetoric with the best of them....