E Pluribus Unum

From Jerry Pournelle:

"For many generations the American schools taught American children that our nation was unique. This is no longer taught in our schools; rather the opposite. The unity of American culture is no longer thought to be desirable. Diversity, rather than unity, is now the modern intellectual goal. Among people for whom Sunni and Shiite opposition has meant defiance and death for centuries this is not likely to work. In the United States some customs and practices common and accepted in Islam are not acceptable to American law and are considered barbaric. We are now engaged in a test of whether the principle of e pluribus unum can survive such diversity.

"History shows that the American Melting Pot can work wonders. It has assimilated Irish, Jews, Poles, Sicilians, Goths, Cossacks, Japanese, Chinese, Polynesians, and a large number of Native Americans and freed slaves into the American mixture, and in two world wars proved that assimilation into a political and social culture derived mostly from English protestants could create a unified force capable of nearly any imaginable military goal.

"History has not shown that this can be exported, nor has it shown that it can survive a deliberate attempt to abandon the principle of e pluribus unum. It has worked well to unite a large and diverse land into the most powerful nation in the history of the world. No outside enemy can destroy it; but it can be disassembled from within. It could not be imposed on Iraq, and the victory in Iraq closely following the collapse of the Soviet Union was not a signal that history had ended and there was nothing left but to cheer as liberal democracy encompassed the world. Liberal democracy was known to be unstable in 1787 when the Philadelphia Convention rejected it. It remains unstable in the 21st Century."

I've nothing to add; just read it again. Or go here to read it within its full context.