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considers incompatible with the universalist aspirations of traditional
progressive politics. (The European right, perhaps remembering Joseph de
Maistre's remark that in his life he had met Frenchmen, Italians, and
Russians, "mais quant
a
l'homme, je declare ne I'avoir rencontre de rna
vie," seems rather less disturbed by the new ethnic particularism.) The
reason it is difficult to put the issue in right-left terms, though, is that
European intellectuals see it instead in light of the long-standing cultural
struggle between Europe and America. In their view, the real culture
war is a transatlantic one over the nature of democracy, and they are
right.
In recent decades Europeans were the more aggressive party in this
skirmish as they tried to erect economic barriers against a democratic
popular culture they mistakenly considered to be a uniquely American
product and weapon. But today Americans are the cultural protection–
ists, defending their shores against the undemocratic ideas allegedly pro–
fessed in, or implied by, the works of "dead" Europeans. (Nothing, it
seems, is less democratic than the voice of the dead.) This cultural war is
not a nationalistic one; it is, as it were, cultural. It pits a once-aristo–
cratic Old World accustomed to making distinctions when thinking
about itself and others - distinctions between "high" and "low," "us"
and "them" - and an incorrigibly democratic New World suspicious of
distinctions in any form. Europeans believe that most other cultures make
these very same distinctions, that they offer a key to understanding
"them," and that they might have something to teach us; Americans do
not. Europeans do not believe that political democracy is incompatible
with intellectual or aesthetic hierarchy; Americans do. Americans believe
passionately in the simplicity and universality of the democratic project,
therefore in the impossibility of wanting to live outside it or limit its
scope. Hence our passionate romanticization of the "other" that surrep–
titiously turns "them" into embryonic democrats . Hence, too, our pas–
sionate demonization of those who defend a cultural hierarchy at home
as enemies of democracy itself. No wonder Europeans have concluded
that our multiculturalism is nothing of the sort, that it is only a new,
sinister form of puritanical democratic boosterism. Multiculturalism is an
Americanism.
In many respects, the Europeans' objections to American multicul–
turalism echo those made stateside by our conservatives and neoconser–
vatives. The difference is that, having said
A,
culturally aristocratic
European intellectuals are willing to say
B.
If Americans succeed in level–
ing relevant distinctions in literature and the arts in the name of democ–
racy, perhaps that means that democracy (or at least its American variant)
has certain built-in limits. Q.E.D. But American conservatives and neo-
