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Richard Bernstein. Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, 367 pages, $25.00.
Reviewed by Linda S. Gottfredson, Professor, University of Delaware, Newark, DE.
Derapage: A French word meaning, roughly, good intentions turned destructive. And thus does Bernstein, a liberal, summarize multiculturalism in America today. Arising in the noble impulses of the civil rights movement, multiculturalism has become dictatorial in the name of virtue. It is a new American Puritanism that swiftly and severely punishes any departure, real or suspected, from its strict codes of thought and behavior concerning race and gender.
Bernstein is a skilled narrator with an acerbic wit and an ability to turn a phrase. He weaves together his story of derapage from two years of observing multicultural training, following particular controversies over political correctness, interviewing the protagonists, examining documents, and delving into the pertinent academic literature. Bernstein also brings to his account an unusually clear-eyed knowledge of cultural differences. The book is suffused with information and insights from his having served, among other stints, as Time's bureau chief in Beijing, The New York Times' bureau chief in France, and the latter's cultural correspondent.
The book's prologue describes how French historians have used the word derapage (literally, a "skid" or a "slide") to describe the moment when the French Revolution "skidded from the enlightened universalism of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen into the rule of the Committee of Public Safety and the Terror." The next four chapters document Bernstein's argument that multiculturalism has similarly become "nobility perverted."
Chapter 1, "Elementary Diversity," describes how programs for "valuing diversity" have become compulsory chapel where people are "told what...is proper to think, to feel, and to believe." We meet trainers with good hearts but little understanding of the cultural differences that they would have us "celebrate," and who imagine a world of diversity "where everybody will have more or less the same ideas, the same philosophy, the same vaguely liberal political convictions."
Chapter 2, "Places of Memory," describes the multiculturalists' transformation of American history into a saga of cultural oppression, American icons (like Christopher Columbus) into symbols of shame, and White European males into the embodiment of iniquity. As even the American...