Politics & Power Quote by Richard Perle

Perle’s line is built like a policy memo that moonlights as a moral accusation. “Lax multiculturalism” does heavy rhetorical work: it frames cultural pluralism not as a civic bargain but as negligence, a softness that invites danger. The verb “urges” is sly, too. It suggests Americans aren’t simply tolerant; they’re being pressured, socially or politically, into indulging “the unacceptable.” That vagueness is the point. By refusing to specify what’s “unacceptable,” the quote creates a wide target: religious practices, speech, immigration patterns, even dissent. Ambiguity becomes an all-purpose permission slip.

The subtext is a transfer of blame. Instead of terror being primarily an external threat or an intelligence failure, vulnerability is relocated into the domestic sphere: fellow citizens, cultural norms, the policing of boundaries. “War on terror” is invoked as a kind of master argument, the trump card that makes ordinary liberal discomfort feel reckless. Once you accept that framing, multiculturalism stops being a social ideal and becomes a security risk - and security risks demand hard solutions.

Context matters: Perle’s prominence in the post-9/11 defense ecosystem, when the “war on terror” wasn’t just a strategy but a national storyline. In that moment, anxiety about enemy networks blurred into suspicion about internal cohesion. The quote tries to stabilize that blur into doctrine: the real weakness is tolerance. It’s a political move dressed as realism, narrowing the definition of citizenship to cultural conformity while keeping the accused category conveniently expandable.