The demographic shift has brought a hotly contested linguistic shift, as well, fought by those who believe that the old American model of assimilation can still be made to work in California's circumstances, against multiculturalists who reject assimilation. California is not the whole nation, and states such as Iowa have experienced little ethnic change since their original settlement. California, however, is a symbol of the national change produced by the very large and predominantly non-white immigration that has occurred since the 1970s, affecting the country's biggest cities and such other states as Florida, Texas, New York and Illinois. Norman Podhoretz, a New York editor, polemicist and autobiographer, once said he found the Civil War as remote and irrelevant as the War of the Roses. But Podhoretz's previously expressed indifference to events that happened in the United States before his family arrived.
Ethnicity is connected to culture because personal history makes national history.
America as it exists has been created by means of successful and often ruthless assimilation of its immigrants. This means ethnic change is accompanied by deep cultural change, and by a loss of that moral solidarity produced by successful assimilation.