The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society examines the international dimension and the lessons of one polyglot country after another tearing itself apart or on the brink of doing so: among them the former Yugoslavia, Nigeria, even Canada. Closer to home, he finds troubling new evidence that multiculturalism gone awry here in the United States threatens to do the same."The genius of America lies in its capacity to forge a single nation from peoples of remarkably diverse racial, religious, and ethnic origins. It has done so because democratic principles provide both the philosophical bond of union and practical experience in civic participation. The American Creed envisages a nation composed of individuals making their own choices and accountable to themselves, not a nation based on inviolable ethnic communities. The Constitution turns on individual rights, not on group rights. Law, in order to rectify past wrongs, has from time to time acknowledged the claims of groups; but this is the exception, not the rule" (p. 134).
The traditional "genius of America" is today threatened by proliferating hosts of "minorities" seeking special status in order to secure an elite sense of group identity. Rather than maintaining the historic American endeavor to engender a "new race," unique to this continent, many hyphenated Americans now seek to break down the national identity into exclusionary ethnic communities.
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