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. 

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,........

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