Lawrence Auster, View from the Right blogger, has a long essay in Front Page Magazine on the failure of liberals and conservatives to recognize multiculturalism as their enemy.

Since multiculturalism claims to stand for the sanctity and worth of each culture, the discovery that its real tendency is to dismantle the existing European-based culture of the United States should have instantly discredited it. Yet it has not—not even among conservatives. A leading reason for this failure is that modern conservatives are themselves ethnicity-blind, democratic universalists. Their conservatism consists in seeing multiculturalism as an attack on their universalist tenets. They fail to understand multiculturalism as an attack on a particular culture and people, namely their own, because as universalists they either have no allegiance to that particular culture and people or their allegiance is defensive and weak. Thus the typical conservative today will say that multiculturalism is bad because "it divides us into different groups"—which is of course true. But he rarely says that multiculturalism is bad because "it is destroying our culture"—America's historic culture and civilization—since that would imply that he was defending a particular culture rather than a universalist idea. Because conservatives are unwilling to defend the very thing that multiculturalism is seeking to destroy, they are unable to identify the nature of multiculturalism and to oppose it effectively.

It is certainly the case that neoconservaties are universalists and highly ideological. In fact, neoconservatives are not really conservatives. They just decided they no longer fit on the political Left and included the word "conservative" in their name because that is what most (though not all) people on the Right call themselves. This has led to a lot of confusion which has benefitted the neocons as they have tried to co-op the rest of the Right to their causes.

Leaving aside the complex question of whether and under what conditions Western culture includes non-Westerners, the more immediate concern to us here is that Western culture is the culture of Westerners. Gates wants to include other cultures within Western culture so that the resulting hodgepodge will belong equally to everyone in the world. But—and this is the point overlooked both by the multiculturalists and their conservative universalist opponents—that means taking Western culture away from Westerners. The debate becomes a debate between the global multiculturalists on the left, and the global universalists on the so-called right, with no one standing up for the historical Western culture.

The universalist denial of the importance of cultural differences is a major (though not only) cause of splits on the Right between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives. The neoconservatives favor Open Borders and an aggressive military foreign policy aimed at spreading democracy. By contrast, the paleoconservatives are more interested in preserving our own culture and do not think there is a large set of universal values that we can convert the whole world to believe.

For the multiculturalists, Western individuality is nothing but a mask of illegitimate dominance, which must be stripped away. But for Westerners, Western individuality is an integral aspect of their being. Therefore to get rid of Western individuality (so as to include non-individualistic, non-Western cultures) is to destroy the very essence of Western people. Conservative critics of multiculturalism never grasp this fact, because, as universalists, the notion of a particularist Western essence is alien to them.

My only beef with Auster is that, contrary to his assertion (which is perhaps a necessary simplification and so this is more a quibble), there are conservative critics of multiculturalism who grasp that it is an enemy ideology. Granted, these conservatives have been marginalized by the neocons. But they exist. Granted, the paleos are nearly invisible in the mainstream media and even the neoconservatives pile on attacking their character labelling them racists and all sorts of other dirty words. But Auster ought to give a nod in their direction since they exist. I even suspect that in wake of the Iraq debacle and George W. Bush's idiotic immigration proposal their ranks are growing.

In the second part of his article Auster sees the fragmentation of political systems.

In every field one can think of, ranging from student groups to professional associations to legislative bodies, the former mainstream organization has been "quota-ized" via minority representation so that it no longer represents or can represent the traditional American majority culture, but only the idea of "diversity," while at the same time each of the minority groups has been granted the right to a separate and exclusive sub-organization to represent its racial interests. There is the Congressional Black Caucus that speaks for blacks as blacks, but no Congressional White Caucus that speaks for whites as whites; the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials that speaks for Hispanics as Hispanics, but no association of white elected officials that speaks for the interests of whites as whites; an Hispanic Journalists' Association, but no European-American Journalists' Association; black policeman's organizations, but no white policeman's organizations; an infinite number of nonwhite student organizations, but no white students organizations. And, of course, any attempt to create white-oriented organizations is stopped in its tracks by the same mainstream institutions that officially promote the development of non-white organizations.

...

If minority groups do not need to give up any aspect of their culture, as Ravitch and others have suggested, then it is hard to see why they shouldn't have their own systems of justice as well. Such an alternative system is already being practiced by black juries who refuse to convict their fellow blacks regardless of the evidence. Depending on the ethnic identity of the parties in a given case, there could be an African tribal council one day (complete with "enstoolment" ceremonies and ritual bows to ancestors), a Communist Chinese-style inquisition hearing the next day, a Mexican village-style gathering the next day, then an Iranian-style revolutionary tribunal presided over by a Mullah, then a trial with a black judge and jury getting revenge against the racist police. When things like this start happening, will the liberal believers in a pluralist civic culture—having encouraged non-Westerners to keep their language, dress, and folkways—cry out: "But this is not what I meant, not what I meant at all"?

That is not far-fetched. Ontario province in Canada has authorized the use of Sharia law in civil arbitrations. Of course the result will be the pressuring of Muslim women by their families to submit to Sharia court arbitration. In Canada this is the logical outcome of years of compromises with French Canadians (who may yet secede from Canada to form their own country) and native tribes as possessors of unique legally protected cultures. Increase (whether through teaching or immigration or both) the numbers of people who think of themselves as distinct enough to deserve special legal status and representation and the result will be rising levels of inter-group hostility and eventual break-up of a polity.

There is a conflict between group rights and individual rights and differences in cultures translate into incompatible desires for how to order society.

If there are no important differences between Western and other cultures, then no hard choices between Western and other cultures are necessary. When a niece of mine was in college she said to me: "Western culture is good, but others are good, too." Her point was that we should welcome all cultures and fear none. Like my niece, the typical moderate liberal cannot understand that certain differences may be irreconcilable. Confronted with dichotomies as old as the hills, the moderate innocently asks: "Why can't we have both? Why can't we have Western culture and multiculturalism? Why can't we have excellence and diversity?" When his wishful thinking collides with reality, he must resort to further evasions. Jim Bowman writing in the Chicago Tribune complained that advanced courses in the Oak Park elementary schools were being dropped because those classes tended to be all-white, which went against the school's goal of racial diversity in every classroom. "A good thing, diversity, is used as a club to bash another good thing, gifted or advanced classes." The schools, Bowman writes, "have elevated racial diversity (our civic religion) from a legitimate, permeating element to an illegitimate, all-encompassing one."(14) But what is the difference between a "permeating" element and an "all-encompassing" one? Somehow Bowman imagines that the drive to establish proportional racial diversity in every niche of society is suddenly going to be abandoned when it threatens something he likes, such as advanced academic classes. Unable to grasp the radical essence of his own ideas, the moderate liberal always ends up believing that he can eat his civilization and have it.

This is where we are today. Moderate liberals think multiculturalism is not their enemy. Neoconservatives believe they can convert the world to their own universal culture by invading the world while simultaneously letting the world immigrate in massive numbers. They are both very wrong.

Auster agrees with Samuel P. Huntington on the importance of culture alongside creed.

Thus the multicultural ideology has advanced and entrenched itself through a variety of false and deceptive arguments, even as the leading spokesmen and ordinary members of the former mainstream culture have either actively subscribed to it or have failed, time after time, to understand what it was about and to confront it effectively. This failure is evidenced by the remarkable fact that while grassroots and Beltway activists have successfully organized themselves over the years to oppose such progressive innovations as Whole Language Learning, bilingualism, and the promotion of homosexuality in the schools, no activist organizations have come into being to fight multiculturalism as such.

And the reason the defenders of our culture, the so-called conservatives, have failed to oppose multiculturalism is that they themselves subscribe to radically liberal ideas that, without their realizing it, have for all intents and purposes defined our culture out of existence. To use Samuel Huntington's terms, today's conservatives define America almost exclusively in terms of its liberal, universalist creed rather than in terms of its historical, Anglo-Protestant culture; or, if they do claim to see America as a culture, they reductively define that culture as nothing more than the set of behavioral values needed to maintain a productive economy. Since modern conservatives see America in creedal rather than in cultural terms, when the culture began to be attacked,—through the subversion of classic works of literature, for example, or through the inclusion of cultural standards and perspectives wholly incompatible with our traditional values and sense of nationhood—many conservatives barely noticed or cared that this was happening.

Auster's lengthy essay is worth reading in full.