Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s 1991 book on multiculturalism and nationalism (It's more interesting than you might think)

I’ve been looking through some retrospectives on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. I’ve been mostly thinking of it in its Enlightenment context (With all the ambiguity that comes with that!)

In the process, I took a look at Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s 1991 book, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. (1)

That year 1991 was part of a particular transition time, when Reaganite neoliberal thought combined with Christian-nationalist social conservatism was dominant in American politics. But it was also the period when the Warsaw Pact was disappearing into history’s rearview mirror, and then the Soviet Union itself. (Spoiler: results were mixed!)

Dramatic changes in politics were taking place and the Western countries were looking for liberal-democratic approaches with a fresh eye. At least nominally, with some misfires like “the end of history” idea that was famously applied to the moment. More wars and rampant oligarchic abuses changed that tone soon enough.

One of the trends of the time was “multiculturalism,” which for people who are now Trumpistas was a horror vision that threatened their cherished goal of America as a white Christian homeland, in which African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, and uppity wimmin all knew their assigned places in the social hierarchy.

Along with the increasing popularity of Rush Limbaugh, who used the term “feminazi” to describe those uppity wimmin – truly one of the weirdest rightwing concepts ever – many good conservatives started weeping over “political correctness.” That was yet another schizophrenic rightwing concept by which they meant ideas like equal protection of the law with which they disagreed, So conservatives were bragging about being politically INcorrect, meaning to them being right about political issues, i.e., politically correct from their own viewpoint.

Yes, that whole schtick was demented. But that’s the direction the Republicans went, a direction that wound up with the Orange Anomaly in the White House.

And that weird conservative trend is still with us, thanks to a crackpot narrative popularized by William Lind, which said that a group of German Jewish Marxists (the Frankfurt School) who invented something called Cultural Marxism (they didn’t) that spawned Postmodernism (it didn’t) that created Political Correctness (it didn’t) which spawned Critical Race Theory (it didn’t) that morphed into DEI and Wokeism, which stills seems to be the current Trumpista term. Because Asleepism is the Trump Cult’s preferred state of mind among voters and citizens.

This strange conspiracy theory was analyzed just recently. by Patrick Iber:

In this telling, the movements for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay liberation are not responding to real forms of discrimination. Instead, the cultural shifts that have taken place since the 1960s can be dismissed as the influence of radical foreign Marxists who have undermined the foundational unities of American life through their control of cultural institutions. It is poor intellectual history, but powerful pseudo-history. It frees the believer from considering the demands of people facing oppression as legitimate and justifies the destruction of knowledge-producing institutions. For the right, it replaces hard questions with obfuscation, using obscurity to create a false sense of clarity. [my emphasis] (2)

Schlesinger was never part of that kind of crackpot thinking. But in his Disuniting period, he was particularly irritated by some instances of what he considered to be sloppy history-writing by some historians who indulged in an ethno-nationalist approach to history. John Henrik Clarke, Asa Hillard, Leonard Jeffries, and Maulana Karenga were four historians who he particularly criticized on those grounds. As he put it in Disuniting:

Cultural pluralism is not the issue. Nor is the teaching of Afro-American or African history the issue; of course these are legitimate subjects. The issue is the kind of history that the New York task force, the Portland Baseline essayists, and other Afrocentric ideologues propose for American children. The issue is the teaching of bad history under whatever ethnic banner. [my emphasis]

He also cites several major black scholars who contributed solid historical accounts of race-related issues: W. M. Brewer, John Hope Franklin, Rayford W. Logan, Alruthius Taylor, Charles Wesley, Carter G. Woodson. Franklin’s textbook From Slavery to Freedom went through many editions and is one of the most important contributions to African-American history.

Schlesinger did have a very pro-democracy, New Deal/Great Society liberal who was opposed to the kind of racial discrimination and xenophobic politics that are central to Trumpist attitudes and ideology – to the extent that a “Trumpist ideology” can be said to exist. Massive corruption and illegal diversion of public funds don’t really count as an ideology. Schlesinger was very much a liberal Cold Warrior, though he became critical of ill-conceived imperial wars and the authoritarianism of the “imperial Presidency.”

He is known especially for his books on John and Robert Kennedy and for his early book, The Age of Jackson (1945). It focused in particular on the Jacksonian reform era as a predecessor of the New Deal. He later expressed regret that he had not dealt with Jackson’s Indian policy in that work. I’m a bit cranky in today’s terms by insisting that the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democratic movements were an important part of the development of what we know today as democracy. Because history involves processes. By today’s standards, America in 1900 could be considered a democracy because black citizens and women did not have the right to vote nationally. But the US was radically more democratic in 1900 than it was a century earlier.

In his 1991 book, Schlesinger praised the work of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), neither of whom could be considered conservatives on racial issues and democracy in American history.

Notes:

(1) 1991 edition from The Larger Agenda Series. Knoxville: Whitttle Direct Books. See also: the 1992 edition at the Internet Archive: <https://archive.org/details/disunitingofamer00arth>

(2) Iber, Patrick (2026): Dissent 73:2 Summer 2026, 101-108. <https://dissentmagazine.org/article/cultural-marxism-conspiracy-frankfurt-school/>