Merkel Says German Multiculturalism Has Failed

No surprise here.
   "Multiculturalism" is one of the bad ideas from the paleo-PC era. In fact, it's one of their better bad ideas in that it comes in various forms and degrees, and some of those are good. Nobody thinks that immigrants should entirely abandon their entire culture when they come here (or go to Germany).  Notoriously, though rather superficially, there's the food thing. But immigrants are and should be expected to accept the basic outlines and fundamental tenets of the culture. Immigrants who, en masse, reject the idea of liberal constitutional democracy are going to have a bad time here--for good reasons. There are and must be limits to our pluralism.
   Strong versions of multiculturalism are blueprints for disaster, of course. There's no reason to think that we could live peacefully and side-by-side with, say, an extremely large minority that rejected the basic tenets of Western civilization, e.g. rejecting the ideas of reason, tolerance and secular government. There's simply no reason to think that has any hope of working.
   No one voted on multiculturalism. It's not an official policy nor any such thing. As with the neo-PCs, the paleo-PCs merely screeched until everyone was cowed into going along with it.
   And, of course, they motte-and-bailey it: they promote radical versions of multiculturalism, but retreat to more modest versions (e.g. about food) when challenged.
   And it's no secret that the PC left hates Western culture and seeks its destruction. They don't exactly play that close to the vest. If you're not familiar with their quasi-philosophical, semi-official position on that, I suggest that you become familiar with it.  And that's exactly what stronger versions of multiculturalism aim at. The strategy is to convince Western nations that they are obligated to take in masses of people from alien and often hostile cultures. They're not allowed to seek assimilation, but the new cultures must be treated as co-equal...or, actually, superior. Because that's how this sector of the left works: talk of equality is always just a way station toward a new hierarchy. And we're obligated to keep taking in more and more such immigrants until we "look like the world"--i.e., the members of the old culture are in the minority. We're encouraged to believe that assimilation will happen anyway, and that we'll magically remain a liberal Western democracy. But that's not the aim, and it's not the likely outcome of strong multiculturalism.
   So in a way, Merkel is wrong: in Germany, strong multiculturalism is succeeding--this is what it was meant to do all along.