In one of his last books, America’s British Culture, Kirk defended the transplanted culture of Britain as “one of humankind’s more successful achievements.” The principle features of our culture, Kirk insisted, are British in origin. Among these inheritances bequeathed by our British ancestors are language and literature, American common and positive law, the American form of representative government and finally the body of moral habits, beliefs, conventions, customs that constitute our moral heritage. This is our legacy, without which the ties which bind Americans together as nation could not long endure. He warned that this common British culture, upon which our moral and political order depends, is now endangered by the rise of what he denounced as ‘the fraud of multiculturalism.” “[A]nimated by envy and hatred,” the ideologues of multiculturalism, detest “the achievements of Anglo-American culture, they propose to substitute for real history and real literature—and even for real natural science—an invented myth that all good came out of Africa and Asia (chiefly Africa).” If they should succeed, Kirk gloomily predicted, American culture would “end in heartache—and in anarchy.”

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