In last June’s
presidential debate in New Hampshire, when Wolf Blitzer asked if any of the candidates opposed official English, would they speak up — McCain spoke up, starting with a weasely “I think it’s fine,” then expounding on the language rights of American Indians. Another part of his response was revealing: “Everybody knows that English has to be learned if anyone ever wants to move up the economic ladder. That is obvious.” True enough, but that begs the question: The source of the public appeal of official English is that it asserts not merely a practical reason for newcomers to learn English but a moral obligation
to do so. Throughout his public life McCain has repeatedly rejected the idea of such an obligation.
Multiculturalism is more than language, of course. McCain has also supported racial preferences and racial-identity politics. As Ward Connerly wrote in
NR:
[In 1996], when a number of Republicans and others in Arizona sought to pass a bill in that state’s legislature outlawing race preferences, we were told by several Republican legislators that they had received calls from Sen. John McCain urging them not to support such a measure because — again, as always — it might “send the wrong message.”
Rick Santorum, in
his recent interview with Hugh Hewitt, describes how McCain racialized the immigration issue to his fellow Republican senators:
[McCain] lectured us repeatedly about how xenophobic we were, lectured us, us being the Republican conference, about how wrong we were on this, how we were on the wrong side of history, and that you know, this is important for his . . . because having come from Arizona, knowing the strength of the Hispanic community, that we were going to be seen as racists, and he wasn’t going be part of that, that he was not a racist, and that if we were for tougher borders, it was a racist thing.
He did likewise in opposing Arizona’s Proposition 200 in 2006, which would have required proof of citizenship to register to vote, and legal status to access certain state benefits, saying that it would result in “racial profiling.”
Even on trivial matters, McCain adopts the racial-grievance worldview of the multiculturalists. When speaking to LULAC in 2000, the AP reports him saying this:
I am ashamed when demeaning stereotypes of Hispanic Americans substitute in our popular entertainment . . . for honest and realistic portrayals,” McCain said. “I know that for you to achieve fairer representation in popular media, you will have to achieve a greater representation in the executive suites and boardrooms of corporate media.
That’s not all. McCain also supported the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, which would have established a parallel government for people of Hawaiian ethnic origin. And on the Kennewick Man controversy, he sided with the American Indian tribes against the scientists.
It’s true that McCain has taken liberal stances on other issues — greenhouse emissions, free speech, judges — and those are all bad. But they don’t strike at the coherence of the American nation. We haven’t heard as much this time around about how McCain is the second coming of Theodore Roosevelt, but a comparison is striking. As John Fonte has suggested, McCain has kept TR’s progressivism, which is so unappealing to modern conservatives, but discarded precisely that which made TR attractive — his unapologetic assimilationism. Before anyone ever compares him to TR again, just try to imagine McCain saying this, from one of TR’s letters:
We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, and American nationality, not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.
At almost every opportunity, John McCain has rejected the crucible and chosen the polyglot boarding house.
— Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies
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