Disuniting Australia
7th August 2024
In the foreword of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s classic 1991 book The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, he asks, “What happens when people of different ethnicities, origins, speaking different languages and professing different religions, settle in the same geographical locality and live under the same political sovereignty?” He answers his own question by making a dire prediction: “Unless a common purpose binds them together, tribal antagonism will drive them apart. In the century darkly ahead, civilisation faces a critical question: What is it that holds a nation together?” Schlesinger also presciently notes the increase in racial identity politics, which he calls the “cult of ethnicity,” warning that it “exaggerates differences, intensifies resentments and antagonisms, drives even deeper the awful wedges between races and nationalities. The endgame is self-pity and self-ghettoization.”