In his "Happy Warrior" backpage column in National Review (subscription required), Mark Steyn writes that multiculturalism has had exactly the opposite impact on culture from its presumed original intentions:

There used to be an entire category of songs written in “franglais” — “Darling, je vous aime beaucoup / Je ne sais pas what to do,” etc. A lot of foreign songs were convincingly anglicized but many more retained their Continental character and still became monster hits: “La Vie En Rose,” “C’est Si Bon,” “Volare,” “Granada” . . . Their foreignness was their appeal.

All gone now. The allegedly bland white-bread picket-fence Ozzie-and-Harriet 1950s were a non-stop fiesta of diversity compared with the dreary parochialism of American entertainment today. After 30 years of immersion in the virtues of multiculturalism, U.S. popular culture has never been more unicultural. If MGM remade Grand Hotel, they’d set it in Cleveland.

In other words, if “multiculturalism” is intended to impart any facts about other cultures — the capital city of Malaysia; the principal exports of South Africa, apart from Charlize Theron — or even a vague interest in other cultures, then clearly it’s a spectacular failure. So obviously that can’t have been the objective.

To the academy, it was a way of intellectually dignifying what would otherwise be regarded as their psychologically unhealthy cultural self-loathing, and in that sense it’s been spectacularly successful (Ward Churchill et al.). To the political Left, it was embraced as a philosophical escape-hatch from the election results: If all your ideas are unpopular with the majority of people within your jurisdiction, then it makes sense to argue that they’re so universal they need to be introduced transnationally — hence the chatter about U.N.-imposed anti-smoking bans, U.N.-imposed gun control, and no doubt U.N. taxes sooner or later. Few of us would willingly be ruled by an unaccountable, unremovable, unrepresentative club of elite bossy-boots, but multiculturalism gives the racket an appealing fig leaf: One reason it polls better than it should is that if you say “U.N.” to folks they don’t think of Kofi Annan and the Sudanese member of the Human Rights Commission but Audrey Hepburn at a UNESCO gala surrounded by children of many lands — a multicultural rather than a geopolitical image.

But saddest of all are those who drank so much of the multiculti Perrier they began to believe it. For three decades, most Westerners trumpeted as a virtue what was, in fact, a profound weakness. In bragging about the numbers of Sikhs and Muslims, Africans and Arabs adding hitherto unprecedented vibrancy to the restaurant scene in Malmö and Winnipeg, Western governments made multiculturalism an indispensable part of their sense of their own goodness. In reality, Canada and western Europe needed immigrants because of their own terrible combination of unsustainable welfare systems and deathbed demographics. As China and India follow South Korea and Taiwan, and Iraq and Ukraine follow China and India, immigrants will stop coming. One day soon, Europeans may well become the emigrants, deciding there are better opportunities in India and Taiwan: The present trickle out of Holland could become a continent-wide version of American cities’ “white flight.”

Multiculturalism is a meaningless pose for Hollywood, a lucrative fraud for the American academy, a sleight of hand for the political Left. But for much of the advanced world it’s a suicide cult. It would make a great movie — if only there were any bankable foreigners to put in it.

Update: While Mark Steyn traverses the failures of multiculturalism, John O'Sullivan writes that multiculturalism and England's left may be heading towards a schism.