摘要：迈克·冈萨雷斯（Mike Gonzalez）是传统基金会（The Heritage Foundation）的“合众为一”高级研究员（Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow）。他专注于研究移民政策、文

一、作者介绍

迈克·冈萨雷斯（Mike Gonzalez）是传统基金会（The Heritage Foundation）的“合众为一”高级研究员（Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow）。他专注于研究移民政策、文化同化及美国社会的多元文化问题，致力于通过历史与现实案例分析，探讨如何在维护美国传统价值观的基础上实现社会和谐与稳定。

二、中文翻译

要点：

1. “由群体构成的国家”实为自相矛盾的说法。

在最好的情况下，这种国家只是一个溃烂的联邦；在最坏的情况下，它将分裂为彼此交战的部落。

2. 平等信念无法替代文化同化。

这一观点假定，不同群体的成员只需信奉平等原则，便可免于抛弃其外来身份（如宗教、语言、习俗等）。然而，缺乏共同纽带的群体无法形成真正的文化，更无法凝聚力量实现共同事业。

3. 确保美国强大的根本在于回归同化理念，并限制不愿融入者的入境。

历史证明，成功的移民政策需以同化为前提。例如，约翰·昆西·亚当斯总统曾要求移民“彻底脱去欧洲的外衣”，而公立学校体系正是为此目的而建立。当前“多样性”政策却通过强化群体差异、制造对立情绪，加速了社会的分裂。

“多样性是我们的力量”是一种显而易见的自相矛盾，稍有常识者立刻能识破其为无稽之谈。但请注意，这是有毒的无稽之谈。正如英国历史学家阿诺德·汤因比所言：“文明死于自杀，而非他杀。”

然而，兜售多样性的人深知这一点。

他们鼓吹多样性，并非因其是社会黏合剂，而是因其恰恰相反。一种由缺乏共同点——既无共同宗教、习惯，更无共同语言——的不和谐群体拼凑而成的文化，根本算不上文化。若缺乏这些纽带将社会凝聚，整个群体既无法自我激励，也无法开展共同事业。

“由群体构成的国家”因而成为自相矛盾的表述。 在最好的情况下，它只是一个溃烂的联邦；在最坏的情况下，它将分裂为彼此交战的部落。

过去的人们理解这一点。这是大众共识的一部分。

在1952年好莱坞经典电影《艾凡赫》的结尾，狮心王理查德命令聚集在他面前的撒克逊人、诺曼人、丹麦人和犹太人以各自群体身份跪下，随后要求他们以“英格兰人”身份站起。无人需要解释此举的深意。

如今，我们建立的制度似乎要求美国人先以群体身份跪下，再以群体身份站起。

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这一有害制度可追溯至20世纪70年代。激进分子通过胁迫官僚机构，迫使后者创建新种族分类。美国行政管理和预算局（OMB）在20世纪70年代炮制了“西班牙裔”“亚裔美国人”等统括性标签，纳入1980年人口普查。此后又陆续增加基于性别、性别认同、性取向等维度的群体划分。

随后，学校推行阻碍同化的多样性政策，进一步固化群体区隔。最终，通过向某些群体灌输“其他群体成员正在压迫你们”的观念，人为制造真实的怨恨。

这与历史实践完全背道而驰。 约翰·昆西·亚当斯总统曾告诫一名考虑移民的德国人：移民必须“彻底脱去欧洲的外衣，永不重披”。对东部德国人、爱尔兰人，以及1848年后西部墨西哥人的同化，正是“公立学校”的目标之一。

多样性拥护者颠覆了这一制度，因为他们厌恶既有的、历经时间沉淀形成的社会。他们深知汤因比正确，却意图加速这种“自杀”。不过，他们的精神导师是德国马克思主义剧作家贝托尔特·布莱希特——其臭名昭著的台词写道：
“某个党棍宣称，人民已失去政府的信任，只能通过加倍努力赢回。若果真如此，政府何不解散人民，另选一群？”

多样性拥护者正试图解散现有人民，另选一群。这并非令进步派公关机器彻夜运转的“替代理论”式臆想。追求多样性者会竭力从单一整体中雕刻出多样性。

当然，在多样性贩子眼中，美国人甚至不构成一个民族。美国只是一个“理念”。

时任总统乔·拜登去年7月退出总统竞选后发表的全国讲话中便使用了这一说辞：

“美国是一个理念，比任何军队更强大，比任何海洋更广阔，比任何独裁者或暴君更有力量。” 他再次口误，将“军队”（army）说成“军械库”（armory），仿佛为了强调退选的紧迫性。“这是世界上最强大的理念。这一理念就是——我们认为这些真理是不言而喻的。”

通过引用《独立宣言》，拜登的撰稿人试图用美国最持久的神话之一支撑其论点：即美国人——这个祖先遍布多国、无国教的民族——仅凭建国文献中的平等信条维系在一起。

这种观点假定，不同群体成员只需共享平等信念，便可免于抛弃其外来身份，也无须参与托克维尔所言“将外国人变为美国人”的集体制度、习惯和公民实践。

“信条国家论”者常引用英国作家G.K.切斯特顿的观点。 他在20世纪20年代写道：“美国是唯一建立在信条上的国家。这一信条以教条式、甚至神学式的清晰表述于《独立宣言》中。” 英国前首相玛格丽特·撒切尔也曾说：“欧洲由历史塑造，美国由哲学缔造。”

更重要的是，这一理念在亚伯拉罕·林肯总统1858年7月10日的芝加哥演讲（史称“电力之绳演讲”）中得到深刻阐释。

我一直认为，林肯有意呼应《加拉太书》中圣保罗的论述——使徒写道，在基督之后，人无需身为犹太人即可成为亚伯拉罕后裔。“你们既属乎基督，就是亚伯拉罕的后裔，是照着应许承受产业的了。”（《加拉太书》3:29，钦定本）

类似地，林肯指出，由于移民潮汹涌，许多人已非独立战争将士的直系后裔。他如此说道：
“他们是从欧洲来的人——德国人、爱尔兰人、法国人、斯堪的纳维亚人——他们自己或祖先来到这里定居，发现自己在各方面与我们平等。若他们通过血缘追溯与那个光荣时代的联系，会发现毫无关联，无法让自己感到属于我们的一部分。但当他们阅读古老的《独立宣言》，看到先辈写下‘我们认为这些真理是不言而喻的，人人生而平等’时，他们感到那种道德情感证明了他们与先辈的关系……他们有权宣称自己与宣言起草者血脉相连、骨肉相依。”

切斯特顿、撒切尔和林肯是正确的。那些引用这些权威论证“美国人不是一个民族而是一个理念”的人，误解了他们的本意。

林肯明确表示，对这些道德情感的信念为移民提供了融入一个已存民族的入口。 美国人是一个民族、一个整体。两部建国文献均以“我们”开篇——《独立宣言》申明这个民族的信念，《宪法》则明确存在“我们美利坚合众国人民”。

林肯并未将美国人视为“德国人、爱尔兰人、法国人或斯堪的纳维亚人”——其观点多样性与分离性构成美国的力量。他提及的那些人不是“世界公民”，而是美国人。圣保罗同样明确：“并不分犹太人、希腊人，自主的、为奴的，或男或女，因为你们在基督耶稣里都成为一了。”

某种神圣的炼金术已施展其魔力，而公民参与、加入共同制度、自然接纳美国习惯，以及至关重要的“脱去旧皮囊”，将完成剩余的转化。

就切斯特顿而言，我们不仅看到“团结的人民”理念，更看到一种需要排除意识形态威胁者的民族观。

切斯特顿在伦敦美国领事馆申请赴美签证后记录下他的观察：“他们递给我一份表格，表面与其他护照办公室的表格无异。但实际上，它与我此生填过的任何表格截然不同。”

表格中的问题包括：“你是无政府主义者吗？”“你实行一夫多妻制吗？”“你是无神论者吗？”

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“表面看，”切斯特顿写道，“这相当古怪。” 他造访过的其他国家“不探究我的思想……不禁绝我持有某种理论”。

但这是美国。正如切斯特顿等人所理解的，美国是例外的。事实上，美国制度只能以此方式运作。美国人可自由思考，但要求入境特权的外国人则另当别论。

切斯特顿断言，宪法“当然谴责无政府主义，并通过暗示谴责无神论，因其明确将造物主列为平等权利的终极来源。”

“无人期待现代政治制度逻辑严密地应用此类教条，” 他写道，但美国在20世纪20年代已通过另辟蹊径成就自身。

切斯特顿提及的签证表格第四个问题是：“你是否支持以暴力颠覆美国政府？” 这一问题进一步揭示，为何“多样性是我们的力量”等陈词滥调对生存构成威胁。

它让我们更贴近当下议题——例如政府寻求引渡的巴勒斯坦抗议者马哈茂德·哈利勒案，以及国务卿马可·鲁比奥所称已撤销的300余份滥用学生签证制造混乱者的签证。

“我不在乎你参与什么运动，”鲁比奥表示，“世上哪个国家会允许外人来此制造混乱？我们发放签证是让你来求学获学位，而非成为撕裂大学校园的社会活动家。”

确保美国保持强大的方法，是回归同化理念，限制那些渴望加入这个已存国家并愿脱去旧皮囊者的入境。

三、英文原文

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1、A nation of groups is thus an oxymoron. In the best of times, it will be a festering federation. In the worst, it will dissolve into warring tribes.

2、The idea, it seems, is that members of the different groups can share a belief in equality and are then exempt from casting off their foreign skin.

3、The way to ensure that America remains strong is to return to the idea of assimilation, and limiting entry to those who want to join this existent nation.

That “diversity is our strength” is one of those obvious contradictions that people with common sense instantly recognize as hooey. It is poisonous hooey, mind you. As the British historian Arnold Toynbee said, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

But the people selling diversity know that.

They champion diversity not because it is a societal bonding agent but because it is the opposite. A culture made up of discordant groups with little in common—neither religion, habits, nor, especially, language—is no culture. Without these sinews tying it together, a body cannot rouse itself and undertake common endeavors.

A nation of groups is thus an oxymoron. In the best of times, it will be a festering federation. In the worst, it will dissolve into warring tribes.

People used to get this. It was part of our popular understanding.

Toward the end of the 1952 Hollywood classic Ivanhoe, King Richard the Lionheart asks those assembled before him to kneel as Saxons, Normans, Danes, and Jews and then commands them to rise as “Englishmen.” Nobody had to explain why.

Today, we have set up a system in which we seemingly ask Americans to kneel and then rise as members of groups.

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This baleful system dates to the 1970s. Activists intimidated the bureaucracy into creating new racial groups, which the Office of Management and Budget did in the 1970s, crafting umbrella clusters such as “Hispanics” or “Asian Americans” to include in the 1980 census. To these were later added groups based on sex, gender, sexual preferences, etc.

Then, these groups were kept apart by pursuing a diversity policy in the schools that deters assimilation. Finally, you instill actual grievances into the members of some groups by teaching them that members of others are oppressing them.

This is the opposite of how things had been done. President John Quincy Adams once reminded a German contemplating immigration that immigrants “must cast off the European skin, never to resume it.” Assimilation—of Germans, Irish, etc., in the East and of Mexicans in the West after 1848—was one of the purposes of the “common schools.”

The diversity crowd upended that system because it did not like the society that existed, the one that had grown over time. They know that Toynbee was right, and they wanted to assist with the suicide. Ultimately, though, their poet laureate is the German Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose infamous line went:

“Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government’s confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?”

The diversity crowd wants to dissolve the people and elect another. This is not the fevered “replacement theory” that keeps the progressive PR engines running past midnight. Those seeking diversity will work hard enough to carve it out of a monolith.

Of course, Americans, to the diversity mongers, don’t even constitute a nation. America, instead, is an “idea.”

Then-President Joe Biden used this line last July when he addressed the country after dropping out of the presidential race.

“America is an idea, stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant,” he said, mangling his lines again and mispronouncing “army” as “armory,” as if to underscore the urgency to drop out. “It’s the most powerful idea in the world. That idea is that we hold these truths to be self-evident.”

By citing the declaration, whoever wrote Biden’s speech was trying to anchor his point with one of our most enduring myths: that Americans, a people with ancestors in many different lands, and who have no established religion, are held together only by the equality creed in the founding documents.

The idea, it seems, is that members of the different groups can share a belief in equality and are then exempt from casting off their foreign skin and can eschew the collective institutions, habits, and civic engagement that Alexis de Tocqueville said turned foreigners into Americans.

The British writer G.K. Chesterton is sometimes cited by those making the “credal nation” argument. He wrote in the 1920s that America is “the only nation in the world founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.” Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, too, said, “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”

More importantly, it was an idea that President Abraham Lincoln expounded upon in his July 10, 1858, speech in Chicago, one of his most memorable and known in fact as “the electric cord speech.”

I have always believed that Lincoln was purposely channeling St. Paul in Galatians when the apostle wrote that, after Christ, one no longer had to be Jewish to be a descendant of Abraham. “And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise,” Galatians 3:29 (KJV).

Similarly, Lincoln noted that many people were no longer directly descended from the men who fought in the Revolution, immigration having been so heavy at midcentury. Here’s what he said:

“They are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence, they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men … and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that declaration.”

Chesterton, Thatcher, and Lincoln were right. Those who cite these authorities to argue that Americans constitute not a nation but an idea are missing their point.

Lincoln was clearly stating that belief in those moral sentiments gave immigrants an entry into a nation that already existed. Americans were a people, a unit. Both founding documents happen to begin with the word “we,” the declaration expressing what views that nation held and the Constitution making clear that there existed a “We the People of the United States.”

Lincoln was not seeing these Americans as “German, Irish, French, or Scandinavian” whose diversity of views and separateness constituted America’s strength. The men he referred to were not “citizens of the world” but Americans. St. Paul was also clear: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Some sacred alchemy had worked its magic, and then civic participation, membership in common institutions, the natural adoption of the habits of the American nation, and, very importantly, casting off the old skin, would take care of the rest.

In the case of Chesterton, we have not just the idea of a united people but a people who needed to keep out those whose ideological views represented a threat to the bonds that held the American people together.

Chesterton wrote his ideas down after going to the American Consulate in London to obtain a visa to travel to America. There, “They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all appearances like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices. But in reality, it was very different from any form I had ever filled up in my life.”

Chesterton tells us that “one of the questions on the paper was, ‘Are you an anarchist?’” The form also asked such questions as, “Are you a polygamist?” and “Are you an atheist?”

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“Superficially,” Chesterton wrote, “this is rather a queer business.” Other countries he had visited “did not inquire into my thoughts. … They did not forbid me to hold a theory.”

But this was America, and as Chesterton and others have understood, America is exceptional. In fact, the American system could not function otherwise. Americans were free to think what they wanted, but foreigners requesting the privilege of entry were another matter.

The Constitution, Chesterton averred, “certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived.”

“Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas,” Chesterton wrote, but America had become what it had become already in the 1920s by dancing to a different tune.

The fourth question in the visa form that Chesterton cited was, “Are you in favour of subverting the government of the United States by force?” This goes even further in helping us understand why such banalities as “diversity is our strength” are dangerous to survival.

It brings us even closer to such contemporary matters as the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian protester the administration seeks to extradite, and the more than 300 visas that Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he’s already revoked among people abusing their student status to create havoc here.

“I don’t care what movement you’re involved in,” Rubio said. “Why would any country in the world allow people to come and disrupt? We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.”

The way to ensure that America remains strong is to return to the idea of assimilation, and limiting entry to those who want to join this existent nation, and cast off their old skin.

来源：非 常道