McCain the multiculturalist

Mark Krikorian writes at National Review Online:

We all know John McCain is terrible on immigration. For years he held America’s sovereignty and security hostage to amnesty and increased immigration, and his newfound support for “enforcement first” is so insubstantial and transparently insincere that it insults our intelligence. He’s so bad that Americans for Better Immigration ranks his performance in office as the worst of all the presidential candidates—including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama….

But his support for de facto open borders is merely one manifestation of a larger problem—John McCain is a multiculturalist.

Krikorian details McCain’s stands in favor of bilingual education, multiculturalism, and racial preferences. But here’s a couple of things I didn’t know:

McCain also supported the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, which would have established a parallel government for people of Hawaiian ethnic origin. And on the Kennewick Man controversy, he sided with the American Indian tribes against the scientists.

Remember that the tribes sought to seize control of the Kennewick man in order to rebury him so that he could never be studied and this unique fossil would be lost forever. All for the sake of American Indian racial pride.

Krikorian might also have pointed out that McCain attacks the very idea of an American culture. At the Al Smith Dinner in October 2005 he said:

We are a nation of many races, many religious faiths, many points of origin. But our one shared faith is the belief that a nation conceived in an idea—in liberty—will prove stronger, more enduring and better than any nation ordered to exalt the few at the expense of the many or made from a common race or culture or to preserve traditions that have no greater attribute than longevity.

Let’s compress that to its essence:

But our one shared faith is the belief that a nation conceived in an idea will prove better than any nation made from a common culture.

Yet a few months later, in the midst of the debate on the 2006 version of the open borders amnesty act, McCain said to the Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute:

If there was ever such a thing as a noble cause, it is the one we are embarked on now. Anyone who is afraid that somehow our culture will be anything but enriched by fresh blood and culture, in my view, has a distorted view of history and has a pessimistic view of our future.

So, America does not and should not have a culture, and if Americans say they have a culture and care about preserving it, they are xenophobes (indeed, if they even oppose legalizing all illegal aliens they are xenophobes). But Hispanics have “fresh blood and culture” which McCain celebrates and welcomes into America because it will enrich us.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 24, 2008 01:21 PM | Send