Word: ethnicity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...whistle is finally being blown on easily the most discouraging, and frequently the most vulgar development within America's intellectual community: the neo-conservative, inherently anti-egalitarian cult of the "new ethnicity." For almost a decade now the movement has slowly, insidiously taken shape among the East Coast intelligentsia--in the halls and seminar rooms of universities like Harvard, and in the pages of prestigious New York intellectual journals like Commentary. Retreating from their former New Deal left-liberalism, political scientists such as Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and social critics such as Commentary editor Norman Podheretz have nurtured...
...Patterson shrugs off the possibility of a negative critical recpetion, since he knows he is breaking new ground. He opens the book by dismissing previous studies of ethnicity as too ahistorical and descriptive. And in his fourth chapter on the "Nature and Classification of Ethnic Groups," he insightfully points out work that merely dwells on "ethnic traits" is not only analytically useless, but by definition inherently conservative. By ending the issue of how the cultural symbols associated with different ethnic groups relate to their socioeconomic position and interest, such studies put up a smokescreen that prevents their readers from realizing...
...critique of American Jewish intellectual reaction only highlights the chief problem that Patterson perceives in the continuing fashionability of ethnic loyalty--that ethnic subcultures are now acting as political interest groups in the increasingly competitive scrap for America's, and the world's, shrinking social and physical resources. Drawing on his classification of ethnicity prototypes, Patterson notes that this politically revolutionary trend is inherent in the nature of what he labels "the revivalist ethnic group." Ruthlessly pursuing his argument, he summarizes the phenomenon by arguing that...
...revivalist ethnic group, while some may sincerely believe in it, is merely a disguise for the conservatism of the economically insecure and the politically opportunistic. It develops when groups, especially the petit bourgeois groups which have achieved a tenuous hold on the lower steps of the good life, feel threatened by those beneath them who are clamoring for a place on the ladder. Politically, it provides a base for charlatans who, lacking all sense of human deceny or commitment to the common good, would place their own personal advancement by means of the monopoly of their own little ethnic turn...
...these vituperative attacks on the dangerous and dysfunctional elements of ethnic chauvinism, Patterson has as much in mind the difficult road ahead for the developing Third World nations as the reactionary pettiness of the current neo-ethnicity movement in the U.S. And he concludes that if the modern world is to see any lasting structural social change toward a more egalitarian world order, it must transcend this historically cyclical pattern of "ethnic revivalism...