The Post-American Liberal Culture

Daniel Greenfield takes on NPR.

Even as an NPR associate was admitting that it had marginalized itself by targeting a liberal culture elite (which she generously estimated at 11 percent of the country), David Brooks was making the case that America needs PBS to provide it with a common culture. So which is it. Is public broadcasting the realm of a liberal culture elite or a defining common ground for what being an American means?

Liberals have over time successfully redefined liberal values as American values. Their cultural revisionism has worked so well that even for many conservatives, it is hard to tell one from the other. Particularly on immigration, tolerance, education and foreign affairs-- among many others. Their cultural programming stopped trying to assimilate immigrants around the 1970's, but has redoubled its efforts to assimilate Americans. And over and over again they have been successful. Wildly so. America is a country of conservative values, which becomes unrecognizable every generation.

Public broadcasting does not represent a common culture, but a culture of consensus. It reflects a liberal worldview. And liberals have a great deal of trouble articulating what America is. Ask a liberal what America should be, and he'll chew your ear off. Ask him what's wrong with America, and he'll offer you a reading list. But ask him what America is-- besides a massive social service center or a collection of war crimes and corporations, and he'll have no real answer.

The liberal worldview is post-national and multicultural. If 19th and early 20th century liberals could articulate the 'Union' as the defining point of America, by the 21st century the "Union" has given way to the "United Nations" as the ideal. Global federalism replacing national federalism. Bigger and bigger forms of government which have no room for American exceptionalism or nationalism. Where Mark Twain could favorably compare American democracy to the national institutions of Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the modern day liberal avoids such dangerous ground.

Liberalism has embraced relativism, trapping it in a feedback loop of reflexive national self-criticism. Talk about the status of women in the Muslim world, and a liberal interjects by pointing out unequal salary levels in America. Mention genocide in the Sudan and he talks about Native Americans. Summon outrage over some a beam in the Third World, and the liberal finds a mote in your eye. There's a protective ideological short circuit in that thinking, a governor that cuts in to defend against dangerous ideas with an irrelevant counterattack.

Soviet citizens were trained to respond to all criticisms of human rights in the USSR by shouting, "But Negroes are being lynched in Alabama." One had nothing to do with the other. The chief function of such responses is to immediately deflect dangerous ideas before they can be considered. Liberals invert the Soviet practice by replying to any criticism of non-Western countries with, "But Negroes are being lynched in Alabama." Less a criticism than a magic totem phrase that keeps them from making value judgments. A "What right do you have to judge" invocation that completely fails to address the problem, but instead silences the entire discussion.

As the UN has replaced the American Union as the most moral form of liberal government, so too multiculturalism has replaced American culture. Once liberals decided that America was no longer the world's beacon of freedom, its lady with the golden torch holding open a doorway for exiles, its culture ceased to have any value. The E Pluribus Unum was no longer the American experiment, but the global one without need of any country. H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come had eclipsed Jefferson, Paine and Twain in their imagination. Their burning vision was no longer of a country that would be a model to the world, a shining city on a hill, a new Jerusalem-- but of an age of global revolution and international brotherhood. The American exceptionalism that they had embraced in the fevers of 1776 and 1861 was tossed aside. Now their mandate had become the Brotherhood of Man.

The rest here.