Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, The

The civil rights and black power movements spurred various reactions among white Americans, including the resurgence of pride in ethnic roots among European Americans. Michael Novak's book The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (1972) not only described this revival but also encouraged it as an antidote to many of the problems Novak perceived with the crisis of liberalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Novak proposed a “new ethnic politics” that challenged not only the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment by replacing the model of assimilation with a culturally pluralistic paradigm but also attempted to thwart the technocratic, neoliberal excesses of the Democratic Party.

Novak sensed that elite liberals were pulling away from the working-class base of the New Deal coalition and replacing it with an alliance among middle-class professionals, student activists, and racial minorities. According to Novak, this was an unsustainable marriage. Although he admitted that the liberal elites had been more receptive to black claims to full citizenship in the short run, an alliance of white ethnics and blacks would prove more durable and fruitful. He charged that middle-class liberals abhorred the gritty business of exercising power and were unwilling to actually put any of their own advantages on the line to achieve social change, especially when it came to racial integration. Novak acknowledged the visceral tensions between African Americans and the white working class but argued that they did not need to love each other, but could join together out of mutual respect, or even mutual need.

The book expressed the grievances of an increasingly hard-pressed working class. According to Novak, white ethnics believed they were losing clout as part of the New Deal coalition. They considered themselves cut out of Great Society–era social programs. Perception mattered here more than reality, as white ethnics believed that the liberal agenda was “for blacks only.” Likewise, intellectuals extended a great deal of sympathy to nonwhite cultures but appeared to chastise working-class whites as hidebound. The New Left, Novak claimed, had condemned white ethnics while glorifying racial minorities.

Though Novak's argument was disjointed and polemical, he did diagnose a serious deficiency in liberal politics. As historians argued, many liberals lost interest in economic inequality, believing the country had solved its conflicts between capital and labor. The fight for diversity was necessary, but too often it was framed as a battle for individual rights and did not address the structural economic difficulties facing the working class.