Don't Think MultiCulti is Dead

Everyone is nodding approvingly at British Prime Minister David Cameron's attack on multiculturalism at Munich. Douglas Murray points sensibly to the double standard in multiculturalism.

In Britain, for instance, this meant that if you were a white English girl born into a white English family and your family decided to marry you against your will to a randy old pervert, the state would intervene. But if you had the misfortune to be born into an "Asian-background" family and the same happened, then the state would look the other way.

Now that the great and the good agree that "something must be done" about extreme Islamism, the tolerance for non-Western cultural practices seems like folly.

But let's not be in a hurry to declare multiculturalism dead. Look for the next version of the cultural attack on democratic capitalism to rise out of the ashes of multiculturalism.

It is important to understand that the cultural double standard is a constant on the left. It is the Schwerpunkt of their war on democratic capitalism. It started in the 19th century when the left declared that, because the working class was exploited, they couldn't be expected to conform to middle-class morality and culture. The working class had its own authentic culture and we ought to respect it.

Notice how this political program works for the left on several levels.

1. By rallying to the support of the working class, in the middle of its struggle out of rural indigence, the left earns the grateful support of the working class.
2. It discourages the working class from adopting the culture and mores of the competent, disciplined, rule-following middle class. This keeps the working class in a kind of working-class cultural and economic ghetto, and thus easily led by the left.
3. It supports the main left-wing narrative of exploitation. If the working class is confined in a ghetto, that proves the left's assertion that the working class is deprived of a fair participation in the capitalist economy and therefore the government should have the power to loot the private sector to pay reparations to the exploited working class.

And so on. The same strategy works for any group that the left defines as marginalized and exploited. But it is a cruel and unjust strategy. The mores and the rules of middle-class democratic capitalism are not a cunning trick to keep the middle class in power and evil corporations profitable. They are the culture that has made the world what it is today, where ordinary people can apply themselves to serving other people economically and make a decent living out of it. On the margins, of course, some people by innovation jolt the economy into the stunning leaps from horsepower to steam power to gasoline power to nuclear power. That is what gets us from a $3 per person per day economy to a $100 per person per day economy.

For the past generation the left has been playing their game with the Moslems that are immigrating in their millions out of hopelessness in their native countries to the vibrant economy in the West. They are encouraging the Moslems to believe that they can have their pre-modern traditional culture and their western wealth as well, just as they encouraged the working class a century ago.

But there is no way for the immigrants to the city to have their cake and eat it too. Sooner or later they must submit to the culture and the rules of democratic capitalism if they want to make it in the city.

And no left-wing lies will change that.