Lawrence Auster on the Origins of Multiculturalism in America

Larry Auster’s psychological interpretations of liberal positions at times remind me of Nietzsche’s genealogical explorations of the origins of morality. Auster tries to open a window into the liberal mind and examine the thought processes that have given rise to the liberal values that rule the Western world.

In The Path to National Suicide, he argues that American elites endorsed ethnic diversity as an end in itself only after the 1965 Immigration Reform Act unexpectedly led to dramatic growth in the Asian and Hispanic populations. Although backers of the 1965 Act had insisted that the reform would not upset the ethnic mix of the country, it did just that, with the Asian population increasing from 900,000 in 1960 to 8 million in 1990, the Hispanic population rising from less than 7 million to 22 million, and whites’ share of the population dropping from 85% in 1960 to 75.9% in 1990 (and down to 63.4% in 2011). By the late 1970s, American elites had discarded all values but humanitarianism and equality; according to Auster, the burgeoning nonwhite populations left the elites with no choice but to declare ethnic diversity the purpose and destiny of America. That is, the elites made diversity into a sacrosanct value as an after-the-fact response to the large nonwhite populations that were unexpectedly created by the 1965 Act. Around this time multiculturalists began disseminating propaganda claiming that the ethnic makeup of the country had always been in flux, and that America had never had a fixed racial and cultural identity. Outside the paleoconservative and alternative Right, these myths are widely accepted, but of course they are belied by the fact that, for the first 350 years of its existence, America drew its population and culture overwhelmingly from Europe.

Auster predicts that, as white Americans begin to grasp that mass Third World immigration has stripped their country of its Anglo-European identity, they will suffer “the same collapse of spirit that occurs to any people when its way of life, its historical identity, is taken away from it.” But the pain will be short lived:

As the clerics of diversity indoctrinate new generations into the Orwellian official history, even the memory of what America once was will be lost.

The Path to National Suicide, An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, is a free download here: http://jtl.org/auster/PNS.pdf