Tea at Trianon: America’s ‘Melting Pot’ Problem

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, August 30, 2024

America’s ‘Melting Pot’ Problem

From Modern Age:

Alexis de Tocqueville was bleakly realistic about America’s multicultural foundations. In a lengthy concluding chapter of the first volume of Democracy in America, he described the country’s situation regarding the ethnic fragmentation present from its outset. Three highly disparate groups with origins, respectively, in Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and North America have been in interaction here all along. And from the start, those interactions have been marked by perceived group differences of interest and conflict over those differences.

Later, when the country first began admitting significant numbers of immigrants of disparate ethnic backgrounds, assimilation to the dominant culture of the founding European groups was vigorously pursued. This assimilation was imperfect, but it achieved some success for about a century. From the mid-1960s onwards, though, the country has largely given up that assimilationist ethic, and conflicts have again become endemic and potentially lethal to the whole national project.

Tocqueville predicted it all. In that chapter in Democracy in America, he offered one solution to the problem of racial and ethnic difference in the United States. The different groups—Europeans, Africans, and indigenous Americans—must sufficiently intermarry and procreate together to make racial distinctions less apparent. Only this could produce enough dissolution of the boundaries separating them to perhaps eventually erode this source of American social disharmony. Tocqueville was not hopeful, though, that such a solution could be achieved.

How much less likely is it now, when the number of groups and the extent of their differences are so much greater? It is true that rates of intermarriage across ethnic and racial boundaries have significantly increased since Tocqueville’s time. Yet the norm is still for the vast majority of members of all groups to marry others in their group. (Read more.)