UC, Berkeley buzzed with excitement last week in anticipation of a scheduled campus speaking appearance by former President Bill Clinton. For many students, Clinton’s talk seemed to have the allure of a rock concert. Some camped out in front of the University box office the night before the 1,000 free tickets were to be distributed. Quite a few more showed up in the hours just before dawn to ensure their place in line. By the time the box office opened at 10 a.m., thousands of students had gathered at the point of distribution in Lower Sproul Plaza and there formed a long, snaking, seemingly headless line.

For most of those waiting in line, it proved to be a disappointing experience. Just minutes before the box office opened, a large contingent of student senators (most of whom already had free tickets) butted in line and successfully commandeered roughly half of the available seats for their 500 closest friends. This incident predictably led to quite a lot of grumbling in the pages of the student paper over the next few days. More than one letter to the editor darkly predicted that those who had butt in line would be made to pay the price of their tickets in the next election. But the student senators were smarter than that: since every student party had participated in the ticket theft, disgruntled student voters were left with no way to retaliate against errant candidates. As a civics lesson in the abuse of power, the ticket scandal dovetailed nicely with Clinton’s visit.

Clinton’s stop at Berkeley was just the latest in what is shaping up to be something of a tour for the ex-president. The speech he delivered at Berkeley was in most essentials identical to speeches delivered earlier at Georgetown (Nov. 7) and Harvard (Nov. 19). Since Sept. 11, Clinton’s advisers have let it be known that, in the wake of "pardongate" and the terrorist attacks, the ex-president is concerned that future historians may "misjudge" his administration. His response has been to embark on a campaign of public self-rehabilitation, spinning his achievements as president while announcing his "vision" for the coming century. Clinton’s campus speech, one gathers, is the centerpiece of this campaign.

It’s not much of a speech. Clinton has always favored the appearance of intimacy in his public pronouncements, and the Georgetown-Harvard-Berkeley speech is true to form. In the space of just under one hour, Clinton rambles on in a carefully crafted but seemingly casual and off-the-cuff manner about "globalization" and its discontents. According to Clinton, the 1990s witnessed the birth of a "world without walls." This new world is a place of democracy, increasing wealth, economic inter-dependence, the free flow of information and racial and ethnic diversity — all good things from a Clintonian point of view. And yet, as Sept. 11 showed, globalization also has a dark side. Thanks to mass immigration, cultural openness and the increasing availability of technologies of mass destruction, terrorism and other forms of international disruption now menace every corner of the planet. For Clinton, it is both impossible and undesirable to retreat from the move towards a global society. The question thus becomes, how do we protect ourselves from the dark side of globalization while continuing to enjoy its benefits?

Clinton’s speech aspires — and fails — to answer this question. Along the way, he makes three memorable points. They are:

1. Us Bad Europeans. Early on in his remarks at Georgetown, Clinton asked his audience to put the Sept. 11 attacks into historical perspective. "The killing of noncombatants for economic, political or religious reasons," he explained, "has a very long history — as long as organized combat itself." Clinton went on, this is something for which "those of us from various European lineages are not blameless."

On the face of it, this is pretty uncontroversial stuff. And it would have remained that way, too, if Clinton had not followed up by delivering a series of what could only be, under the circumstances, inflammatory examples. Citing the Crusades, the slaughter of Native Americans and the enslavement of black Africans, Clinton explained that Westerners — and, more particularly, Americans — are "still paying the price today" for these crimes. To many in the audience, including at least one reporter from the Washington Times (Joseph Curl, who broke the story the next day), it sounded a lot like Clinton was excusing the terrorist attacks as historical comeuppance.

Over the next few days, the press erupted with the usual partisan recriminations. Conservatives found in Clinton’s remarks further proof of what they’ve long believed: that our 42nd President is a moral idiot bent on turning cultural self-hatred into a virtue. Meanwhile, liberal journalists rushed to Clinton’s defense, explaining that he had in no way sought to excuse the terror attacks and charging the right with cynically mis-reporting the story for ideological gain. It was a tiresome dispute. Clinton did not literally excuse the terrorist attacks and, to that degree, the liberals had a point. On the other hand, you can say something with out saying it literally. Looking over the transcript, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that, in drawing attention to the violence historically visited by Westerners on the "other," Clinton was attempting to deny Americans at least some part of their legitimate indignation (judge for yourself). Clinton, at any rate, seems to have gotten the message. By the time he got to Berkeley, the offending portions of his speech had been discreetly cut.

2. The Third World as Empowerment Zone. Clinton is renowned for his love of policy prescriptions, usually ones involving very large outlays of taxpayer money, so it’s no surprise that there should be a policy prescription at the center of his speech. According to Clinton, the terrorist attacks were bred, at least in part, by resentment of Western wealth. To that degree, we can help avert future attacks by "spreading the benefits and shrinking the burdens" of globalization. His idea, in other words, is to pump a whole lot of money into the stagnant economies of the Southern Hemisphere. This, he points out, can be done in a number of ways: debt reduction schemes, funding for education and health care, environmental clean up programs, and increased consumption of Third World manufactured goods (this last, by the way, won’t hurt Western industries, Clinton says, adding somewhat incongruously that American workers need to be retrained for the information age anyway). Sound ambitious? Well, according to Clinton, "we could do all that and improve our share, we could do all that and spend — more or less — what we would in a year in the [the war in] Afghanistan". Turning the third world into one huge empowerment zone, in other words, is the best way to guarantee America’s security in the long run.

Maybe so. But if closing the gap between the West and the rest is a good idea, it’s not for any of the reasons Clinton gives. Basically what Clinton is trying to do is link a huge Third World development scheme (a "new Marshall Plan") to the War on Terror. The problem is, there is no such link. If Sept. 11 is any guide, giving everyone 12 years of schooling and regular access to health care would not have stopped the terrorists — they had 12 years of schooling and regular access to health care. Those who carried out the Sept. 11 suicide attacks were well-educated (some having attended school in the West), well-off (there aren’t many desperately poor Saudis), and well-traveled (they had a pretty good idea who they were blowing up and why they were doing it). Whatever prevents the next Mohammed Atta from flying a passenger jet into a famous American landmark, it’s a safe bet it won’t be growing up in a Clintonian empowerment zone. Investing in the Third World might be a good idea but not for these reasons.

3. Can’t We All Just Get Along? But the most salient moments in Clinton’s speech come towards the end. According to Clinton, Sept. 11 was an expression, not just of southern resentment of northern wealth, but also of identity politics gone bad. In making this point, Clinton contrasts two views of truth, that of the terrorists and that of the rest of us. While the terrorists believe they have the whole truth and that "if you share their truths your life has value and if you don’t you’re a legitimate target," most of us, according to Clinton:

Have a different view of that, most of us believe that nobody’s got the whole truth … therefore most of us believe that community is not just everybody that thinks alike but everybody who accepts certain rules: everybody counts, everybody has a role to play, we’d all be better if we helped each other.

These two views of truth, Clinton continues, correspond to two radically opposed world views. Those who hold the terrorists view of truth endorse an "ethic that says, ‘hey, we like our differences, we like who we are, we like the color of our skin, the way we pursue our faith, we like what’s about us that’s different.’" The rest of us, meanwhile, believe in an "ethic of interdependence" which puts our "common humanity" before all more particular, cultural differences. Sept. 11, in this sense, was what happens when one ethic and theory of truth comes up against the other:

For all the explosion of democracy and diversity and the triumph of freedom and the relegation of communism to history’s cellar, we have also seen a dramatic rise of identity politics rooted in race, religion, tribe, and ethnicity in the ways that have very negative manifestations on the part of people who don’t buy the idea of our common humanity.

This is pretty surprising stuff coming from the mouth of Bill Clinton. More so than any other major political figure of the last decade, Clinton has led the drive for "diversity," or the view that "race, religion, tribe and ethnicity" are the principal sources of individual identity and should take precedence in civic life over most other considerations. It’s a theme which ran through his entire tenure as president, from his first moves to establish a "cabinet that looks like America" to his support of affirmative action and other preferential programs to his invention of the ill-starred Committee on Race Relations. While president, Clinton took every opportunity to remind Americans, not of how much they have in common, but of how little. The Clinton ‘90s, in short, was the decade of identity politics.

So does Clinton’s characterization of the Sept. 11 attacks as identity politics gone bad signal a change of heart? Did the spectacle of Muslim hijackers ramming planes loaded with innocent civilians into buildings loaded with innocent civilians make him think twice about the benefits of cultural diversity? Well, no. As a matter of fact, Clinton’s Berkeley remarks are just the latest expression of what has long been a central irony of the liberal world view: for all his talk of celebrating difference and embracing diversity, Clinton has never really taken the idea of cultural difference seriously and still doesn’t.

Allow me to explain: Clinton is what academic philosophers like to call a "pluralist." Starting from a radical skepticism with regards to the idea of truth — usually expressed as the belief that "truth" is a cultural production and that no truth holds for all cultures — pluralists conclude that the highest value of political life should be a respect for cultural difference. After all, if nobody has the truth about the way the world really is then no one should be entitled to enforce his view of the way the world is on those who don’t share it.

This pretty picture has seduced more than a few otherwise intelligent minds. But it suffers from two fatal defects. The first is that, while pluralism pretends to be somehow above the fray of cultural competition, it in fact aspires to be a culture in its own right. After all, the central tenet of pluralism — that no culture has a unique claim on truth — is itself a unique claim on truth, an assertion of the way the world really is which is supposed to be independent of the cultural context in which it is made (the same goes for Clinton’s idea of "common humanity"). Those who are not themselves pluralists are thus rightly suspicious of pluralism’s aims: what pluralism seeks to do is destroy the foundations of particular historical cultures and replace them with its own.

Most pluralists, it is true, do not realize that this is what they are demanding. But this, in turn, is only because, for all their talk of "difference" and "cultural identity," they don’t take the idea of cultural difference seriously. I once attended a conference at which an eminent philosopher of pluralism was asked the obvious question, how does a pluralist act when confronted with someone who rejects pluralism and insists on the unique truth of his own culture? Nazis, for instance, or Serbian nationalists or Muslim terrorists? Should the pluralist respect their differences, too? After many attempts to avoid the question, the philosopher burst out in annoyance: "you just kill them all." So much for tolerance. The point here is that, when it comes to negotiating cultural difference in the real world, pluralists end up being just as narrow and intolerant as anyone else; pluralism works, to the degree that it ever does, only once people are in some measure already pluralists. And, as a strategy for coping with cultural conflict, that doesn’t get you very far.

But if Sept. 11 has taught us anything, it’s the degree to which cultural difference runs deep: sometimes we just can’t get along. And this, it seems to me, is a realization which Bill Clinton can’t afford. Clinton has spent the past ten years promoting cultural difference at home and abroad. In so doing, he has behaved as if difference were no more dangerous than ethnic cuisine, a basically superfluous ornament to our "common humanity." It now appears that cultural difference might not be such an innocent thing after all. No wonder then that, when he speaks on the subject, Clinton can think of nothing better to do than repeat the time-worn clichés of his administration. Fortunately for the rest of us, we no longer need to listen.