Nathan Glazer
"[4] World War II led to a belief among some of the leftists, including Glazer, that fascism was a greater threat than capitalism and that the United States, as a country that fought the fascists, ought to be viewed more favorably.
"[13] Looking back at the McCarthy era over 40 years later as an interviewee in the film Arguing the World, Glazer reflected on the stance he and some other liberal anticommunists took: "Even at the time and also in retrospect we never managed to figure out a good position, one that was respectable and moral and responsive to all the complicated issues raised...
[4] In 1960, Glazer briefly edited The Committee of Correspondence Newsletter at Harvard, but soon dropped this project and began writing articles about ethnic groups in New York City, and they would eventually be collected and published in 1963 as the book Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, arguably Glazer's most well-known work.
[4] In essence, as one retrospective noted 25 years later, Glazer and Moynihan suggested that "the melting pot metaphor didn't hold water.
[15] Glazer and Moynihan also argued that the "disproportionate presence of Negroes and Puerto Ricans on welfare" was one of the primary racial problems in the city, but they suggested the 1970s could end up being a "decade of optimism" for those two groups.
[4] Along with working on projects that were the prelude of the poverty program, Glazer was also an advocate for historical preservation of buildings and unsuccessfully tried to prevent the demolition of New York City's original Penn Station.
[18] Even in the late 1990s, Glazer continued to condemn the students' "enthusiastic and euphoric rejection of forms and norms," and in 2005, he pointed out that the revolts at Berkeley, Columbia University, and many other campuses were "a disorder that made no sense to those of us who had come from harder circumstances.
"[3][17] One leader of the Free Speech Movement, Jackie Goldberg, reflecting back on 1964 decried, years later, Glazer and his ilk for espousing "an armchair intellectual liberalism" and viewing "protesting" as nothing more than sending a letter to one's congressman.
[3] As the Free Speech Movement raged in Berkeley, Glazer's friends from City College Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol were discussing founding a new journal, which would come to be called The Public Interest when it debuted in 1965.
"[19] Writing in what one commentator deemed a "rueful" tone, he suggested his earlier arguments regarding issues such as affirmative action and the future prospects for African Americans were essentially wrong.
The civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 did not allow blacks to fully integrate into American society, their situation was worse now than it had been 20 years before, and a multicultural curriculum in schools was essentially the result.
[4][20] James Traub, on the other hand, argued, "Glazer is still the neoconservative who wrote The Limits of Social Policy," but his "own logic leaves him with nothing to offer—except the admittedly specious comforts of multiculturalism.
