Dwight D. Murphey on the multicultural threat to the West (1987)

So the future, as always, is problematical. The issue as framed for the future becomes one of whether Europe and America will continue to lead or even to exist as such. In part this is question of whether the majority within the West has become so effete and so immobilized by the existence of the alienated intellectual culture within it that it is prepared to see itself displaced and its influence seep away. From all appearances, the current American majority, which rarely asserts its own prerogatives in either ideology or politics, is willing to acquiesce in this transformation. 

Stated another way, the new struggle that today's "multiculturalism" poses will be about whether America and Europe are to dissolve into the Third World, or whether all of mankind will rise to a new level under the leadership of positive forces that will include, as one of their primary ingredients, the heritage of the West. There will be very little "heritage of the West" involved in it if the alienated intellectual culture - the driving force behind "liberalism in contemporary America" - has its way.

~ Dwight D. Murphey, Liberalism in Contemporary America (1987), p. 301

Dwight D. Murphey on progressivism and the civil rights movement from the early 1900s to 1930s

[Modern] liberals in the United States did not provide conspicuous leadership to a movement for racial and ethnic equality until the issue came to life during and after World War II.  Most Americans will be amazed to hear that it was the Progressives who were most instrumental in establishing the Jim Crow system in the South; they did so after the Populist movement created a fear of the potentially corrupting effects of a movement that would combine blacks and poor whites.  Theodore Roosevelt is reputed to have made an embarrassingly bigoted comment about Negroes at the time of the Brownsville Affair.  Woodrow Wilson originally wanted to include blacks in his administration, but backed off when this led to criticism from his Southern supporters.  Franklin Roosevelt did not make civil rights legislation for blacks a significant part of the New Deal. 

During all those years the many liberals connected with the liberal journals as editors and writers, while favorable to Negroes and horrified by lynchings, made no move to make "civil rights" a priority issue.  As we look back from the ethos of the 1980s and '90s, we tend to think, racial, ethnic and sexual equality have held a place in the pantheon of liberal philosophy from the beginning.  But that is just not so.

~ Dwight D. Murphey, Liberalism in Contemporary America, p. 19