We pride ourselves in being a multicultural society. But we are not sure what that means exactly. We can all agree that it means that in our geographic space we have groupings which comprise various ethnic, racial and religious etc "cultural" backgrounds.

The idea, is fuzzy. At times we are suppose to be a "melting pot" so that all these various groups melt together into some harmonious Ueberculture. At other times we seem to think that every cultural grouping should be allowed to pursue and maintain its own identity and interests, The latter idea envisions America as a country that really has no defining culture or interests but is some sort of confederation of disparate cultures co-existing in some sort of equilibrium of interests.

The truth of the matter is that there are those groups who strive to assimilate to a weakly conceived American Culture, and there are those elements who strive to maintain their cultural individuality.

Of the latter type, to some degree or another, these groups are really at odds with "being American" in the inclusive (melting pot) sense. They seek to further their own group interest in a multicultural environment which--to some extent, at least officially--extols integration into some dimly perceived American fold.

So there is AIPAC, The Black Congressional Caucus, the KKK, etc.

These groups are not all equally successful in manipulating the American body polity to their advantage.

Some are very successful and exert considerable (to their numbers) influence on our body politic others are rather weak.

The problem with the idea of multiculturalism in the exclusive sense as opposed to multiculturalism is the melting pot sense is that the former results in some groups exercising disproportionate influence on issues that affect the future of our nation as a whole.

The downside to the melting pot idea is that it requires people to give up their particular cultural heritage to a large extent for the sake of an emergent "American culture".

As an example of the absurdities of cultural exclusivity consider Richardson's comment about why he did not turn against Gonzales sooner. His reply to that questions was "he is Hispanic".

If that's the end result of multicultural exclusiveness, I say let's start indoctrination into an American culture as soon as possible.

Because this has been an ongoing thread in many discussions on this site, I want to try to give my position on why Francis Fukuyama is way off the mark in his social/political analysis.

Modern Liberal Democracy has deep roots. We can go back to Aristotle's discourse on Natural Law and Man in a State of Nature. From there we might jump to Hobbes' Leviathan which adds to these ideas, the idea of Social Contract. From thence we can move to Locke and his democratic interpretation of Hobbes's Leviathan. All this Francis Fukuyama details in his writing. But then, finding the resulting bourgeoise state unsatisfying, he taps into a different tradition: the German Idealism of Hegel. Fukuyama's antipathy to the British empiricist tradition--its lack of a noble goal for humanity--results in his embracing of Hegelian dialectic. So in this sense Fukuyama accepts the Marxist critique of classic liberalism.

However, the grafting of a "Weltgeist" to what is essentially an empiricist view is unnatural and probably unwarranted to most social/political philosophers of an empirical bent. The very idea that there is some "end point" in human history, nay that there is any external reason at all to human existence is alien to current thinking ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC. That in short, is what I find artificial (and dangerous) in Fukayama's analysis. It is a fairy tale.