An excellent Fourth of July meditation. Thank you.

However, I think it is important to say more about the weakness of the melting pot analogy. The goal is not to create a homogeneous people with a single loyalty, but a people with a primary loyalty to America – particularly to the founding American texts and the values that underly them. These texts give and protect our rights as individuals. As individuals we are free to associate and establish secondary loyalties to church, town, state, region, social class, job, ethnic group, homeland, bowling team. Such secondary loyalties are natural and the founders spent much of their time and intellectual effort figuring out how to turn such factions into a positive force. They were largely successful in that effort to our lasting benefit.

The great failure of the multiculturalists is that they refuse to understand and honor the first two links in this process. They ignore individuals and the texts that give them freedom and power and elevate the status of groups. The result is a game of pure power politics in which groups can win by whatever means is at hand: money, technology, or a willingness to commit violent acts. The most ironic part of the whole business is that the elite social groups who champion these ideas are pathetically bad at power politics. They are beset by gridlock (congress) or pushed into irrelevance (humanities and social science faculties) whenever they come to power. The strong possibility of their violent end in Europe is terrible to contemplate.