“Diversity Is Strength.” It’s Also…America’s End
By Pat Buchanan
On the Great Seal of the United States, first suggested by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, there was to be emblazoned a new motto: “E Pluribus Unum” – “Out of many, one.”
It was in their unity, not their diversity, that the strength of the colonies resided. So Patrick Henry believed, as he declared, “The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American.”
National identity must supersede state identity for America to survive.
Yet it has lately become fashionable to say that America is great not because she is united, but because she is diverse. It is because America is a multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual nation that she is a great nation. A corollary is that the more diverse America becomes, the better and greater she becomes.
After the Los Angeles riot of 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle was asked by his Japanese hosts if perhaps America did not suffer from too much diversity. “I begged to differ with my hosts,” Quayle retorted. “I explained that our diversity is our strength.”
And so our rulers, marinated in the myths that we “are a nation of immigrants” and “our diversity is our strength,” continue to embrace mass immigration – the more the better. But are the myths true?
America was settled by colonists from the British Isles. In 1789, two centuries after Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, we were 99 percent Protestant. Until the Irish came in 1845, there was almost no immigration. Even during the Great Wave of 1890-1920, the number of immigrants was a fraction of the 38 million here today. And all had come from Europe. By 1960, we were almost 90 percent European and more than 90 percent Christian – of one nationality, American, one language, English, and one culture.
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