From The Story of American Freedom by Eric Foner (2001)

In the aftermath of the civil rights movement, the celebration of difference and demands for group recognition emanated from aggrieved minorities- racial, cultural, and sexual. In the 1990s conservatives-and many liberals as well-decried "identity politics" and "multiculturalism" for undermining a common sense of American identity and assuming that one's race or "culture" determines one's destiny. Yet, simultaneously, one wing of conservatism developed an "identity politics" of its own, based on the old presumption that the world is divided into permanent racial groups who inhabit distinct places on a spectrum from superior to inferior. Conservative foundations funded and conservative journals praised The Bell Curve, a 1994 bestseller by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein that sought to demonstrate scientifically the innate intellectual inferiority of non-whites. Peter Brimelow, a naturalized citizen born 'in England, argued in Alien Nation (1995) that non-white immigration posed a threat to the country's historical cultural identity. Rejecting the civic definition of American nationality, Brimelow insist- of American nationality, Brimelow insisted that a nation is "an ethno-cultural community,' and that any successful. culture must possess a "link by blood" These books probably inspired a feeling of d6ji vu among readers with a knowledge of history. Murray and Herrnstein recalled World War I-era eugenicists 'in their elevation of IQ scores to measures of inborn group intelligence. And Brimelow echoed turn-of-the-century theorists who invoked differential birth rates to "prove" that real Americans-that is, whites-were in danger of being overwhelmed by lesser races. Brimelow even blamed recent immigrants for the fact that Southern California "is being paved over," al though red-blooded white citizens had long since accomplished this themselves

Brimelow's screed split conservative ranks, with some repudiating his crude racism and insisting that immigrants contributed to economic growth and the preservation of "family values." The difference reflected a wider disagreement over whether freedom itself could still be deemed a universal value. In the euphoria at the close of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyarna had proclaimed "the end of history" and the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy among all nations, cultures, and peoples-the long-anticipated universalization of American values. By the mid-1990s, many conservatives seemed both more pessimistic and more parochial. Samuel P Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (i996) depicted a post-Cold War world in which civilizations grounded in divergent cultural and racial identities battled for supremacy. For Huntington, freedom was the product of specific historical, cultural, and racial circumstances, not a universal entitlements view which, although he did not make the point explicitly, recalled the heritage of "British liberty" of the eighteenth century and the racialized Anglo-Saxonism of the nineteenth. He rejected the "relevance of Western culture" for the rest of the world, a remarkable departure from the universalist view of freedom dating back to the American Revolution, which had been so powerfully reinforced by World War II and the Cold War.'

As the century drew to a close, freedom remained both a source of contention and a crucial point of self-definition for individuals and society at large. Asked in a public opinion survey, "What are you proudest of about America?" 69 percent answered, "freedom. In the late 1990s, a search of the Internet for sites associated with freedom yielded striking evidence of how fully the word had come to be associated with the free market and hostility to government. Aside from companies using freedom to market their wares (the Freedom software company, for example), the largest number of sites were those of antigovernment libertarians, groups promoting the sanctity of private property and the ideology of free trade, and armed patriot and militia organizations. Civil liberties, too, were well represented, at sites offering information on the First Amendment, religious freedom, and the, Communications Decency Act.' It remained to be seen whether an understanding of freedom grounded in access to the consumer marketplace and a series of negations- of government, of social citizenship, of restraints on individual self-definition, of a common public culture--could provide an adequate language for comprehending the world of the twenty-first century.

Americans have sometimes believed they enjoy the greatest freedom of all- freedom from history. No people can escape being bound, to some extent, by their past. But if history teaches anything, it is that the definitions of freedom and of the community entitled to enjoy it are never fixed or final. We may not have it in our power, as Thomas Paine proclaimed in 1776, "to begin the world over again' "" But we can decide for ourselves what freedom is. No one can predict the ultimate fate of current understandings of freedom, or whether alternative traditions now in eclipse---freedom as economic security, freedom as active participation in democratic governance, freedom as social justice for those long disadvantaged-will be rediscovered and reconfigured to meet the challenges of the new century. All one can hope is that in the future, the better angels of our nature (to borrow Lincoln’s words) will reclaim their place in the forever unfinished story of American freedom.