[City Journal] Managing Diversity

A new book makes the case against multiculturalism based on the world’s record of ethnic violence.

Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire: Multiculturalism in the World’s Past and America’s Future. By Jens Heycke. Encounter Books; 345 pages; $29.99.

As right-wing books go, immigration is a doomsday topic. But for a niche of libertarian broadsides signing its praises on narrowly economic terms, pessimism about the scale and pace of migration into America has indeed become a conservative mantra. In 2018, Reihan Salam put the choice facing the country in the starkest terms yet: Melting Pot or Civil War? (2018). This negative slant of the literature is hardly exclusive to us. In 2009 and 2016, respectively — a timespan that saw migration into Europe accelerate in the havoc of Syria’s civil war — Christopher Caldwell and Douglas Murray both launched their bestselling careers with similarly despairing titles about the old continent’s “revolution” and its “strange death”, hewing to a tradition of migratory doom-and-gloom going back to Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech. In France, Renaud Camus first toyed with his “great replacement” theory in the early 2010s, raising a specter — that French natives were being supplanted in their own soil — that was invoked in the last presidential election even by the center-right candidate, Valérie Pécresse. Mere days before the 2015 spate of terror attacks on Paris, Michel Houellebecq fictionalized an Islamist takeover of France electorally in Soumission (2015).

Continue reading the entire book review at City Journal here.