Our Soldiers: Modern American Heroes

Observe the comments to my post yesterday, "Soldiers Die For Us: A Tribute to the Fallen":

Soldiers die for a lot of reasons. They die to protect their buddies. They die to expand the empire. They die to protect corporate profits. They die. But they do not die for us. They are not fighting for us. And nothing they are doing in Iraq is helping this country one bit. Their deaths are for nothing. They are not heroes. They are cowardly conquerors...

This kind of troop-bashing sentiment is common among the International ANSWER types. Yet, as Robert Kaplan notes in today's Wall Street Journal, denigration of the military is increasingly common among the transnational elite in America's top insitutions, especially the mass media:

I'm weary of seeing news stories about wounded soldiers and assertions of "support" for the troops mixed with suggestions of the futility of our military efforts in Iraq. Why aren't there more accounts of what the troops actually do? How about narrations of individual battles and skirmishes, of their ever-evolving interactions with Iraqi troops and locals in Baghdad and Anbar province, and of increasingly resourceful "patterning" of terrorist networks that goes on daily in tactical operations centers?

The sad and often unspoken truth of the matter is this: Americans have been conditioned less to understand Iraq's complex military reality than to feel sorry for those who are part of it.

Kaplan reports from the field that U.S. soldiers are looking for respect, not pity: "We are not victims," one battalion commander asserted. "We are privileged." Thus Kaplan continues:

The cult of victimhood in American history first flourished in the aftermath of the 1960s youth rebellion, in which, as University of Chicago Prof. Peter Novick writes, women, blacks, Jews, Native Americans and others fortified their identities with public references to past oppressions. The process was tied to Vietnam, a war in which the photographs of civilian victims "displaced traditional images of heroism." It appears that our troops have been made into the latest victims.

Heroes, according to the ancients, are those who do great deeds that have a lasting claim to our respect. To suffer is not necessarily to be heroic. Obviously, we have such heroes, who are too often ignored. Witness the low-key coverage accorded to winners of the Medal of Honor and of lesser decorations.

The first Medal of Honor in the global war on terror was awarded posthumously to Army Sgt. First Class Paul Ray Smith of Tampa, Fla., who was killed under withering gunfire protecting his wounded comrades outside Baghdad airport in April 2003.

According to LexisNexis, by June 2005, two months after his posthumous award, his stirring story had drawn only 90 media mentions, compared with 4,677 for the supposed Quran abuse at Guantanamo Bay, and 5,159 for the court-martialed Abu Ghraib guard Lynndie England. While the exposure of wrongdoing by American troops is of the highest importance, it can become a tyranny of its own when taken to an extreme.

Media frenzies are ignited when American troops are either the perpetrators of acts resulting in victimhood, or are victims themselves. Meanwhile, individual soldiers daily performing complicated and heroic deeds barely fit within the strictures of news stories as they are presently defined. This is why the sporadic network and cable news features on heroic soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan comes across as so hokey. After all, the last time such reports were considered "news" was during World War II and the Korean War.

In particular, there is Fox News's occasional series on war heroes, whose apparent strangeness is a manifestation of the distance the media has traveled away from the nation-state in the intervening decades. Fox's war coverage is less right-wing than it is simply old-fashioned, antediluvian almost. Fox's commercial success may be less a factor of its ideological base than of something more primal: a yearning among a large segment of the public for a real national media once again--as opposed to an international one. Nationalism means patriotism, and patriotism requires heroes, not victims.

Kaplan's piece is worth reading in whole, but the conclusion is particularly good:

The media is but one example of the slow crumbling of the nation-state at the upper layers of the social crust - a process that because it is so gradual, is also deniable by those in the midst of it. It will take another event on the order of 9/11 or greater to change the direction we are headed. Contrary to popular belief, the events of 9/11--which are perceived as an isolated incident--did not fundamentally change our nation. They merely interrupted an ongoing trend toward the decay of nationalism and the devaluation of heroism.

As Kaplan points out, the notion that there's been a "decay of nationalism" is contested. Yet on the question of the deligimization of state-based heroism, Kaplan's commentary here makes a compelling case to the contrary.

Deconstructing Katie Couric

Peter Wehner, who was previously Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Strategic Initiatives in the Bush administration, has an interesting post up at Contentions, the Commentary Magazine blog.

Wehner takes a look at Katie Couric's remarks yesterday at the National Press Club. Here's the key passage:

The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying “we” when referring to the United States and, even the “shock and awe” of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable. And I remember feeling, when I was anchoring the “Today” show, this inevitable march towards war and kind of feeling like, “Will anybody put the brakes on this?” And is this really being properly challenged by the right people? And I think, at the time, anyone who questioned the administration was considered unpatriotic and it was a very difficult position to be in.

Here's Wehner's response:

There is a lot to unpack in these few sentences. For one thing, Couric’s aversion to using the word “we” when referring to her own country is both weird and revealing. After all, she is part of the United States, a citizen of America, and so she is part of “we.” Hers is an example of a certain journalistic sensibility that feels as if members of the media are compromising their objectivity by referring to their country as if they were a part of it. And I suppose in The World According To Katie, it would be a gross violation of journalistic ethics to hope for America to prevail in a war to depose Saddam Hussein and bring liberty to his broken land. Hence, I suppose, her discomfort with how well the initial stages of the Iraq war went.

This point is worth pausing over. After all, during his reign, Saddam Hussein routinely executed political opponents and political prisoners. Children and young people were tortured to force their parents and relatives to confess to alleged political offenses. Schoolchildren were summarily shot in public—and families of executed children were made to pay for the bullets and coffins used. Human Rights Watch concluded that the Iraqi regime committed the crime of genocide against Iraqi Kurds—and estimates are that more than 300,000 Iraqis were executed during Saddam Hussein’s reign. He was also responsible for invading two nations at a cost of more than a million lives. Imagine hoping that the United States would defeat such a regime quickly, easily, and with a minimum loss of life and damage. The audacity!

As for the “inevitable” march toward war and her “kind of feeling like, ‘Will anybody put the brakes on this?’”: First, the “march” to war was not inevitable—one person on this planet could easily have put the brakes on it. His name was Saddam Hussein. He could have stopped the war at any time, if only he had met the commitments to which he had agreed. It was Saddam Hussein who was in material breach of Security Council Resolution 1441. It was he who had amassed a record of defiance for more than a decade. But for Katie Couric, the responsibility for war rests not with the former dictator of Iraq, but with the President of the United States.

And then there is tossing out the standard talking points that those who questioned the administration were “considered unpatriotic” and “it was a very difficult position to be in.” By whom, in Couric’s imaginary history, were critics of the administration considered “unpatriotic”? This notion is a flimsy urban legend—and yet Katie claims to have been put in a “very difficult position” based on a scenario that never even occurred. What a tower of strength she is.

The virtue of such statements, I suppose, is that it rips away the pretense of objectivity—as if that was even necessary at this stage. It appears as if Katie Couric is a worthy successor to Dan Rather—and her comments, in some ways so utterly typical, also remind us why CBS’s ratings are in the toilet, and deserve to be.

See also Jonah Goldberg's take on Couric's objection to the plural pronoun "we":

A critic might respond that I'm perhaps overly sensitive to this sort of thing and therefore I probably pick up on it too much and think it's a bigger deal than it is. That may in fact be true. Indeed, to some extent I'm sure it is. But just as my sensitivity to this sort of talk says something about me and my views, doesn't Couric's sensitivity say something interesting about her and her views? That she was made uncomfortable by the use of "we" to describe the United States of America during a time of war is really quite revealing, at least to my ears.

From my perspective neither Wehner nor Goldberg are too sensitive in pointing out the cosmopolitan resistance to identifying with America. Couric's positioned herself as part and parcel to the delegitimization of American national identity among the elite multicultural, transnational left.

America's Immigration Charade

The United States is not serious about immigration enforcement, argues Christopher Jencks in his recent article on immigration at the New York Review of Books.

Immigration "control" is all a charade, he argues. Unless the federal government is willing to seriously enforce workplace sanctions on employers who hire illegal immigrants, there will aways be demand for foreign workers, and no amount of border enforcement will do the trick in deterring alien newcomers.

Probably the most controversial measure in this year's failed immigration reform bill was the call for blanket amnesty (which supporters called legalization). Jencks notes why the amnesty issue is so important for the future of reform:

One reason legalization arouses such intense opposition among "law and order" advocates is that they see little evidence that the federal government will ever make a serious effort to prevent further illegal immigration in the future. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was supposed to be a compromise that linked amnesty to a crackdown on firms that hired illegal immigrants in the future. But once IRCA passed, the amnesty was implemented while the crackdown never occurred. As a result, the number of illegal immigrants kept growing. This history has sent out a worldwide message: if you are an unskilled worker who dreams of living in America, your best bet is to find a way into the United States, get a job, and wait for a new amnesty.

From this observation, Jencks delves into his analysis of workplace enforcement and border security (the two basic strategies of immigration control). The federal government overwhelmingly stresses border enforcement over employer sanctions because poor illegal migrants compose a weak interest group constituency (where business lobbies generate powerful demands for economic protection). Yet, some of the most perverse problems in immigration are found at the intersection of illegal employment and government economic policies, like taxation and Social Security. Notes Jencks:

Policing the places where immigrants work can...reduce the number of illegal immigrants living in the United States, because it can reduce the number of jobs open to them and thus eliminate a principal reason for coming here. Nonetheless, the United States has never made much effort to reduce employers' willingness to hire illegal immigrants. Only fifteen firms were fined more than $5,000 for employing unauthorized immigrants in 1990, and the number dropped to twelve in 1994, two in 1998, and zero in 2004. The number of hours spent on worksite inspections also fell by more than half between 1999 and 2003. After September 11, 2001, inspections also focused more on airports, nuclear power plants, and other likely terrorist targets. Illegal immigrants who avoided such employers were therefore even less likely than before to be arrested on the job.

Inspections at workplaces did pick up after 2004. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made five times as many worksite arrests in 2006 as in 2004. But even in 2006 ICE made fewer than five thousand worksite arrests, so an illegal worker still had less than one chance in a thousand of getting arrested at work. (Once arrested, those with neither proof of American citizenship nor a valid visa are supposed to be deported, but it is not clear how often this happens.)

Under current law employers have to check a job applicant's documents, but they are not responsible for determining whether those documents are authentic. That seems reasonable. Yet as Peter Salins, a political scientist at the State University of New York, recently pointed out in The New York Times, the federal government could check the authenticity of workers' documents soon after they are hired without even visiting worksites. Informed estimates suggest that roughly seven million people are working in the United States illegally.

About half these men and women are thought to hold regular jobs, while the rest work off the books. To get a regular job workers must give their employer a Social Security number. Employers send these numbers to the Social Security Administration (SSA), so that it can credit workers' retirement accounts with both the worker's and the employer's contribution. When the SSA tries to credit an unauthorized worker's account, the number usually shows up as either nonexistent or belonging to someone with another name.

In 2002, according to Salins, the SSA took the unprecedented step of sending 950,000 letters to employers identifying such "mismatches." Employers and immigrant advocacy groups raised so many objections that the SSA cut back the program. As a result, "no-match" accounts now hold more than $586 billion. Some of these unmatched numbers can be traced to clerical errors, and some arise because people forget to tell the SSA that they have changed their name after a marriage or divorce. But the SSA believes that most unmatched numbers come from illegal immigrants using fake numbers to get work.

Read the whole thing. Jencks provides a balanced picture on the tradeoffs to businesses versus the country under a regime of tougher workplace regulation. But overall, the article is a penetrating analysis of the long-shot odds of achieving real reform in the foreseeable future:

The federal government's policy of opposing illegal immigration while refusing to enforce laws against hiring illegal immigrants has had huge costs. It has exacerbated popular distrust of the federal government (as indeed it should have). It has also increased hostility to foreigners, especially Mexicans, who are all suspected of having entered the country illegally. To many Americans Washington's failure to control illegal immigration, like its failure to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is just another example of how out of touch, duplicitous, and incompetent federal officials really are. In the short run such views are good for Republicans who want to discredit government and cut federal spending. In the long run, however, extreme distrust of government also precludes sensible policies that even conservatives should favor.

Regulars here will recall that I backed the Bush administration on reform, even with my concerns that the legislation would reward lawbreaking (see here and here). Yet, Jencks' article is having me rethink my position a bit. Legalization makes little sense when one examines immigration from the lense of interest group politics. As much as I support business, it's unhelpful to keep hammering away at tougher "border enforcement" without stringent controls against the employment of illegal aliens on the job.

A Reminder of the Immigrant Gang Plague

A street vendor and a newborn baby were killed Sunday in a vicious immigrant gang shooting in the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles. Here's the background, from the Los Angeles Times:

The signs of progress are hard to miss in the streets around MacArthur Park.

A few aging buildings have been reborn as luxury lofts, new restaurants and an art gallery have opened, and a renovated band shell has brought concerts and family festivals to the park.

There's less graffiti on the walls, more police on the streets and crime is down significantly compared with a decade ago. Gone are the chalk lines on the sidewalks where gang members once marked their turf.

But the teeming neighborhood of mostly Mexican and Central American immigrants remains mired in poverty and urban crowding. The streets are filled with people day and night -- residents, shoppers, street vendors, drug dealers, transients and people selling fake IDs to illegal immigrants. And gang members, despite aggressive crackdowns, remain a powerful force in the district about two miles west of downtown L.A.

Los Angeles prosecutors on Tuesday charged a reputed gang member, Luis Silva, 19, for his alleged role in the shooting at an outdoor marketplace Saturday night on the corner of 6th Street and Burlington Avenue, injuring a vendor and killing a newborn. In the criminal complaint against Silva, he was charged with murder, attempted murder and extortion. An arraignment is scheduled for Oct. 2, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said members of the 18th Street gang tried to extort money from outdoor vendors Sept. 1. One vendor refused to pay. The gang members returned Saturday and opened fire, they said. A law enforcement source said the assailants were seeking $50 from the vendor they allegedly shot.

The shooting, residents and police say, is a reminder of the continuing pull of gangs, who prey on immigrants, many of whom are here illegally and therefore are reluctant to report crimes.

Read the whole thing. This is another brutal reminder of the new urban underclass developing in the nation's immigrant communities. See Heather MacDonald's "The Immigrant Gang Plague" for a full discussion of this growing threat.

There's been more attention to immigrant crime in recent months, in the aftermath of the Newark schoolyard murders, where the main suspect is illegal alien Jose Carranza. See also Michelle Malkin on immigrant crime and illegal alien sanctuary cities. Plus, see this Washington Post story on illegal alien crime and deportation.

Moral Relativism Died With Daniel Pearl

Judea Pearl, the father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, has a powerful essay up today at the Guardian. Pearl argues against the moral relativism of "The Mighty Heart," the Angelina Jolie motion picture which tells the story of the younger Pearl's life and murder.

The film draws comparisons between the murderous al Qaeda henchmen who killed Daniel Pearl and American detention policies at Guantanamo:

Drawing a comparison between Danny's murder and the detention of suspects in Guantánamo is precisely what the killers wanted, as expressed in both their emails and the murder video. Indeed, following an advance screening of A Mighty Heart in Los Angeles, a representative of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said: "We need to end the culture of bombs, torture, occupation, and violence. This is the message to take from the film."

Yet the message that angry youngsters are hearing from such blanket generalisation is predictable: all forms of violence are equally evil; therefore, as long as one persists, others should not be ruled out. This is precisely the logic used by Mohammed Siddique Khan, one of the London suicide bombers, in his video. "Your democratically elected government," he told his fellow Britons, "continues to perpetrate atrocities against my people ... [We] will not stop."

Danny's tragedy demands an end to this logic. There can be no comparison between those who take pride in the killing of an unarmed journalist and those who vow to end such acts. Moral relativism died with Daniel Pearl, in Karachi, on January 31 2002.

My son had the courage to examine all sides. He was a genuine listener and a champion of dialogue. Yet he also had principles and red lines. He was tolerant but not mindlessly so. I hope viewers of A Mighty Heart will remember this.

Melanie Phillips has a post up on this story on her page, where she notes:

The doctrine of moral equivalence, the default position of the secular west, is the core reason why the west is losing the battle to defend itself against the terrorist and cultural jihad. Equivalence is actually a misleading word in this context, since the notion that violence begets violence and both are equally culpable is not just noxious in itself by failing to acknowledge the moral difference between an act of aggression and an act of self-defence against that aggression; it immediately morphs into a justification of that original act of aggression. It is therefore not only amoral but suicidal. And yet it is the knee-jerk posture of so many western intellectuals and media darlings.

I have not seen the film, although I plan to do so, out of respect for the Pearl family, and despite my disgust of the moral relativism of other recent movies I've seen, like "Letters From Iwo Jima."

Celebrating Our Constitution

Tomorrow is the 220th anniversary of the signing of the United States Constitution.

I lecture on the Constitution every semester, and I remind students that the U.S. Constitution is the oldest written constitution in the world today. I remain amazed when discussing the system of checks against tyranny our founders bequeathed to the nation. I recognize, too, that as imperfect a document it was when drafted, the Constitution's essential beauty has been its considerable flexibility to remedy the flaws which attended its birth.

Ed Williams reminds us of the significance of September 17 in an essay in today's Charlotte Observer:

The Declaration of Independence is often thought of as our nation's founding document. It wasn't.

The declaration united the 13 colonies to fight for independence from Great Britain. It expressed some deeply meaningful thoughts (and a good deal of propaganda), but it said nothing about how the colonies would work together after independence.

The declaration was a stirring speech. It was not a binding contract.

Tomorrow our nation celebrates the 220th anniversary of the signing of the document that answered those questions: The Constitution of the United States. It was -- and is today -- the operating manual for our nation.

Read the rest. We have a lot to celebrate.

Classroom Indoctrination

Mark Bauerlein put up a brief but penetrating essay yesterday at RealClearPolitics on feminist theory and classroom indoctrination. Check it out:

"Reclaim Your Rights as a Liberal Educator." That's the title of a short essay in this month's Academe, organ of the American Association of University Professors. The phrase has all the imagination of a slogan unfurled at countless marches, but what it lacks in wit it makes up for in fortitude of the uniquely academic kind. Author Julie Kilmer, women's studies and religion professor at Olivet College, sounds the standard "they're-out-to-get-us" call and rallies her brethren to take back the classroom. We have, too, a vicious aggressor: conservative student groups that confront professors of perceived liberal bias, and they form a national network out to undermine the faculty, who come off as vulnerable and innocent professionals. While the professors uphold "freedom of inquiry to examine the worth of controversial ideas" and "teach college students to use analytical thinking in the development of new ideas," groups such as Students for Academic Freedom do their best to subvert the process. Worst of all, they "encourage students to bring complaints against faculty to administrators." To Kilmer, they are no better than spies, and they prompt her to wonder, "Each time a student is resistant to feminist theories and ideas, should I ask if he or she has been placed in my class to question my teaching? How is my teaching affected if I enter the classroom each day asking, 'Is today the day I will be called to the president's office?"

Bauerlein suggests that the seige mentality among radical feminists is an overreaction arising out of a deep ideology of victimization. Contrary to the mindset of feminist theorists, the balance of power has not shifted to students (many of whom are feared as potential "plants" installed by college administrators to intimidate classroom teaching activists):

Professor Kilmer worries that a student who "is resistant to feminist theories and ideas" may sit in her class as a "plant," someone to incriminate her and send her upstairs for punishment. That's how she interprets uncongenial students, and it's an astounding conversion. In her class, any student who contests feminist notions falls under a cloud of suspicion. The ordinary run of skeptics, obstructionists, gadflies, wiseacres, and sulkers that show up in almost every undergraduate classroom is recast as an ideological cadre. If a student in a marketing class were to dispute the morality of the whole endeavor, no doubt liberal professors would salute him as a noble dissenter. But when he criticizes feminism, he violates a trust. He doesn't just pose intellectual disagreement. He transgresses classroom protocol.

Behold the transformation. An ideology has become a measure of responsibility. A partisan belief is professional etiquette. A controversial outlook is an academic norm. Political bias suffuses the principles of scattered disciplines. Advocacy stands as normal and proper pedagogy. That's the sleight-of-hand, and it activates in far too many decisions in curriculum, grading, hiring, and promotion. I remember a committee meeting to discuss hiring a 19th-century literature specialist when one person announced, "We can only consider people who do race." For her, "doing race" wasn't a political or ideological preference. It was a disciplinary prerequisite.

Read the whole thing. Bauerlein goes further to suggest that classroom indoctrination is the ultimate form of politically correctness. Critical thinking - as demonstrated by the critical dissection and rejection of such radical paradigms - is heresy. If you're not in with the hip pedagogy, you're a problem, a troublemaker, a non-comformist. You're out!

More Californians Renouncing English at Home

Today's Los Angeles Times reports on data from the Census Bureau indicating that 43 percent of those in California, and 53 percent in Los Angeles County, speak a language other than English at home:

Bienvenidos. Huan ying. Dobro pozhalovat.

In California, "welcome" is more of an international affair than ever -- with nearly 43% of residents speaking a language other than English at home, according to data released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau. The trend was even more pronounced in Los Angeles, where more than 53% of residents speak another language at home.

Spanish is by far the most common, but Californians also converse in Korean, Thai, Russian, Hmong, Armenian and dozens of other languages.

The census numbers are likely to fuel a decades-long debate in California over immigrants continuing to use their native tongue. There have been battles over bilingual education, foreign-language ballots and English-only restrictions on business signs.

While immigration is the driving force for the state's linguistic diversity, experts said people often speak another language out of choice rather than necessity.

Some do so to get ahead professionally, while others want to maintain connections with their homelands.

The article provides this interesting example of the trend:

Yadira Quezada, 30, speaks mostly English at work, where she coordinates an after-school program for elementary students in Los Angeles.

But at home, she speaks only Spanish. She and her husband are fluent in English, but they don't want their four sons to lose their Spanish or to sound like "gringos" when they speak it.

There may be advantages to such practices, although the article notes unfavorable trends associated with insufficient language assimilation:

The downside is that many people who speak other languages at home are not proficient in English -- making them more likely to earn low wages and live in poor neighborhoods....

Among people living below the poverty line, 56% speak a language other than English in the home, compared with 41% for those above the poverty line, according to the census report.

"Isolation is problematic," said Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, chairman of UCLA's Department of Asian American Studies. "While it reflects the strong ties to the home country, it also suggests that folks in this situation are inherently more cut off from society and less able to participate and take advantage of opportunities here."

And the isolation is also felt by some English speakers living in areas where foreign languages are prevalent. Dental office administrator Mia Bonavita, 39, recently moved from San Diego to Monterey Park, where business at many stores is done in Chinese. Bonavita says the language barrier is difficult.

"I feel like an outsider," she said. "It's difficult to get to know your neighbors."

The linguistic diversity also affects the schools, where educators struggle to meet students' needs.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, there are more than 265,000 English learners who speak 91 languages. The district has a special translation unit, but must rely on parents and community members for some languages.

Southern California has numerous ethnic enclaves where speaking English is not a necessity, including parts of the San Gabriel Valley, Little Saigon, East L.A. and Koreatown. And some residents there say the lack of English hasn't diminished their lives.

I've written much on immigration issues and cultural assimilation.

My main concerns - amid our recent national immigration debate - have focused on illegal immigration (border lawlessness and the entitlement culture of immigrant rights activists) and threats from multiculturalism to the maintenance of a common national identity.

On the latter, I agree with Samuel Huntington, when he writes about the "Hispanic challenge":

The extent and nature of this [late-20th century] immigration differ fundamentally from those of previous immigration, and the assimilation successes of the past are unlikely to be duplicated with the contemporary flood of immigrants from Latin America. This reality poses a fundamental question: Will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture? By ignoring this question, Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish).

I have tremendous respect for ethnic diveristy (and I live it daily in my classrooms and neighborhoods).

Yet, I remain convinced - like Huntington - that America's many strengths are rooted in the nation's Anglo-Protestant cultural heritage. That heritage is a powerful glue binding our disparate ethnic enclaves into one society, but at some point a fabric frays, and the binds that hold together may fail.

The Downside of Diversity

This Boston Globe article takes a look at the recent research of Robert Putnam, who has found that communities can be adversely impacted by profound levels of ethnic diversity:

IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings....

The study comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues. The study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation's social fabric. But with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, the real question may yet lie ahead: how to handle the unsettling social changes that Putnam's research predicts....

The study is part of a fascinating new portrait of diversity emerging from recent scholarship. Diversity, it shows, makes us uncomfortable -- but discomfort, it turns out, isn't always a bad thing. Unease with differences helps explain why teams of engineers from different cultures may be ideally suited to solve a vexing problem. Culture clashes can produce a dynamic give-and-take, generating a solution that may have eluded a group of people with more similar backgrounds and approaches. At the same time, though, Putnam's work adds to a growing body of research indicating that more diverse populations seem to extend themselves less on behalf of collective needs and goals.

Read the whole thing.

This story is interesting in that Putnam's findings - that greater diversity leads to social malaise - have created a quandary for him. He's been the most important social scientist leading the revival of the civic culture school of social capital research. Yet, at the same time his own findings on detrimental diversity go against his previous arguments on the social benefits of greater civic connections:

Putnam claims the US has experienced a pronounced decline in "social capital," a term he helped popularize. Social capital refers to the social networks -- whether friendships or religious congregations or neighborhood associations -- that he says are key indicators of civic well-being. When social capital is high, says Putnam, communities are better places to live. Neighborhoods are safer; people are healthier; and more citizens vote.

The results of his new study come from a survey Putnam directed among residents in 41 US communities, including Boston. Residents were sorted into the four principal categories used by the US Census: black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. They were asked how much they trusted their neighbors and those of each racial category, and questioned about a long list of civic attitudes and practices, including their views on local government, their involvement in community projects, and their friendships. What emerged in more diverse communities was a bleak picture of civic desolation, affecting everything from political engagement to the state of social ties.

Putnam knew he had provocative findings on his hands. He worried about coming under some of the same liberal attacks that greeted Daniel Patrick Moynihan's landmark 1965 report on the social costs associated with the breakdown of the black family. There is always the risk of being pilloried as the bearer of "an inconvenient truth," says Putnam.

Putnam reportedly "kicked the tires" on his research before publication, hesitant to distribute evidence that posed a key challenge to his career work. That might explain why he sent his manuscript to an obscure journal, Scandinavian Political Studies. I don't think I've ever read a scholarly article published in that journal! And I'm sure a scholar of Putnam's stature would have been accepted for publication at even a second-tier scholary press in the states!

In any case, additional research could clarify Putnam's downside of diversity thesis by using time-series analysis to map the longevity of detrimental diversity. That is, how long lasting is the phenomenon of social malaise arising under high rates of ethnic diversity? At what point do groups tend to lose their original ethic identities and merge under a dominant American one?

Such a study would have to hold constant the rates of immigration across time periods. One criticism of the current wave of immigration is that Latin American immigrants have greater geographical contiguity to their original homelands, and there is there more periodic repatriation and less language assimilation, which results in more lasting segmentation of social groupings. If that phenomenon holds throughout 21st-century American history, Putnam's most recent findings could have very serious implications for the continued unity and viability of the American polity.