{"id":1955,"date":"2018-12-28T15:21:52","date_gmt":"2018-12-28T20:21:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1955"},"modified":"2018-12-28T15:21:52","modified_gmt":"2018-12-28T20:21:52","slug":"systemic-anti-americanism-left-big-conservatism-guilty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2018\/12\/systemic-anti-americanism-left-big-conservatism-guilty.html","title":{"rendered":"Systemic Anti-Americanism: How the Left and Big Conservatism are both Guilty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Living in 21st<\/sup> America, it\u2019s impossible to go a single day without hearing multiple mentions of \u201cracism.\u201d It seems to be the lifeblood of our political-cultural life.<\/p>\n

Because of the ever-increasing rarity of overt instances of white-on-black \u201cracism\u201d (and make no mistakes about it, \u201cracism\u201d is used to refer only to white-on-nonwhite transgressions), the architects and agents of the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC) have had to appeal to what they call \u201cinstitutional\u201d or \u201csystemic\u201d or \u201cstructural\u201d racism.<\/p>\n

The idea here is that even the best-intentioned of whites are either subconsciously<\/em> racist or, at the very least, they subconsciously purvey American institutions which embed \u201cracist\u201d assumptions that impede black success.\u00a0 Eduardo Bonilla, a loyal RIC agent, sums up the gist of this notion in the title of his book<\/a> on this subject: Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. <\/em><\/p>\n

Very rarely, though, do we hear much about patriotism.\u00a0 <\/em>It\u2019s true, of course, that we\u2019ll not infrequently hear politicians refer to the policy proposals of their opponents as \u201cun<\/em>-American.\u201d Yet it\u2019s supposed to be bad form to question another person\u2019s patriotism. Given the ease with which people, particularly leftists, hurl the R-word (as well as many other derogatory terms) at their opponents, the conspicuous paucity of charges of anti-Americanism is more than a bit curious.<\/p>\n

Well, it\u2019s curious on its face. But once we scratch the surface, it\u2019s not hard at all to see why those on the left prefer for the topic of patriotism to go the way of the dinosaur: Given its unequivocal commitment to the fundamental transformation of the Western world, the left has always derived its identity in large measure from its vehement opposition to the national identities that compose that world.<\/p>\n

Thus, the left in America is practically by definition anti-American.\u00a0 Except for when appeals to them prove rhetorically effective and ideologically useful, for the culturally and historically-specific particularities and contingencies that constitute America the left has nothing but contempt.\u00a0 This is not hyperbole. Logically, it\u2019s impossible to draw any other conclusion from the left\u2019s relentless campaign against the allegedly \u201cracist,\u201d \u201csexist,\u201d \u201cclassist,\u201d \u201chomophobic,\u201d and \u201cxenophobic\u201d character of the country.\u00a0 How, we must ask ourselves, can those who tirelessly characterize America in these terms have anything but disdain for an entity that they (supposedly) think is so ugly, so evil?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s be frank: America was founded by<\/em> white people, white Protestant Christians, to be exact, and for <\/em>white people of (mostly) the same description. As early on as 1790, just a short while after the United States Constitution was ratified, the Naturalization Act was passed.\u00a0 This law expressly limited citizenship in the new Republic to \u201cfree white persons of good character.\u201d Until as recently as the 1960s, America remained nearly 90% white.\u00a0 Today, at about 63% of the population, America is still majority white.<\/p>\n

Considering that it is the white, heterosexual, Christian male on whose shoulders the contemporary left lays the burden of all of the world\u2019s problems, there is no way that leftists can, without being blatantly inconsistent, not seethe with disgust and hatred for this bastion of White Supremacy that they have long referred to as \u201cAmeriKKKa.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, there are indeed individual Americans of a leftist bent who will take offense at the charge of anti-Americanism, individuals who insist upon their love for the United States.\u00a0 Such folks are doubtless sincere.\u00a0 Their sincerity, however, goes no distance toward undercutting the anti-American logic of their ideology.<\/p>\n

Nor does their intellectual confusion exculpate them from their responsibility for purveying anti-Americanism.<\/p>\n

The illogic of the leftist who genuinely proclaims his love for America no more defeats the allegation of anti-Americanism than does the genuineness of the white person who insists on his commitment to racial equality relieve him <\/em>of responsibility for (supposedly) promoting \u201cracism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, \u201cinstitutional racism\u201d is a fiction invented by RIC whose staying power owes to its enormous profitability: RIC needs to perpetuate this Big Lie.<\/p>\n

Yet institutional anti-Americanism<\/em> is all too real.<\/p>\n

The ideas constitutive of leftist ideology are indeed anti-American: The cardinal leftist principle or ideal of Equality, i.e. the ideal of a more or less equal distribution of substantive or material satisfactions, leftists labor inexhaustibly to make a reality. \u00a0Yet it is precisely a condition of this sort that the decentralized, Constitutional character of American government precludes.\u00a0 To put it more exactly, the American government, with its wide diffusion of power and authority, is antithetical to the sort of government whose existence is necessary to realize the Egalitarian fantasies of the left.<\/p>\n

And, of course, the racial obsessions of the current left also render impossible any love for a country that the left insists is and has always been a bastion of White Supremacy.<\/p>\n

But anti-Americanism is also promoted by way of other particularly popular terms and expressions that have become associated with \u201cpatriotism\u201d and that are typically used by the conservative movement, what I call Big Conservatism, or the Big Con.<\/p>\n

What all of these expressions share in common, and what makes them anti-American, is that they unequivocally deny the historical character of the country.<\/p>\n

For example, Big Conservatives are at least as given, and, truth be told, probably much more prone than are their Democrat liberal counterparts, to characterize America as a \u201cNation of Immigrants.\u201d \u00a0Yet if this was a historically accurate characterization, then one would have expected for earlier generations of Americans, and certainly those members of the Founding generation, to have viewed it as such.\u00a0 They did no such thing.<\/p>\n

In fact, anyone remotely familiar with American history can recognize the Nation of Immigrants line for the whopper of a Lie that it is.<\/p>\n

Only if there is already an existent social order is it possible for anyone to immigrate to it. To put it another way, the logic of the concept of \u201cimmigrant\u201d logically presupposes both an established society to which the immigrant immigrates and, importantly, the concept of \u201cnative\u201d or \u201cindigenous,\u201d i.e. of the non-immigrant.<\/p>\n

America was established by those who settled<\/em> it.\u00a0 There was no America before specific people at a specific time decided to tame the vast wilderness that would become the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.\u00a0 Those people were all white, all British, and, at the time of the War of Independence\u2014about 170 years after the first settlers made a home for themselves in Virginia\u2014they were at least 80 percent English and 98% Protestant Christian.<\/p>\n

To repeat, there was no America until white, British Protestants created it.<\/p>\n

Thus, the term of \u201cNative-American,\u201d designed to refer to those who were formerly described as \u201cIndian,\u201d are patent misnomers. Yet the movers and shakers of the Big Con use it just as frequently as do \u201cPolitically Correct\u201d liberal leftist Democrats.<\/p>\n

And Big Cons also have long endorsed the notions of \u201cthe Melting Pot\u201d and \u201cE Pluribus Unum,\u201d both variations of the Nation of Immigrants Lie.\u00a0 Yet America was never meant to be a melting pot with ingredients from all over the globe, and \u201cE Pluribus Unum,\u201d every American from more honest generations would\u2019ve insisted, refers, not to a single nation composed of immigrants, but the formation of the 13 original colonies into a single country.<\/p>\n

According to another anti-American fiction promoted by the Big Con, America was founded upon \u201cJudeo<\/em>-Christian\u201d principles or values.\u00a0 It\u2019s true, of course, that Christianity spun out of Judaism, and that some of the fundamental metaphysical assumptions of the latter were transmitted to the former.\u00a0 This, however, does not justify, at least not from any remotely historical perspective, the nomenclature of \u201cJudeo-Christian\u201d when referencing the founding of America.\u00a0 To repeat what has already been repeated more than once above, America was founded almost exclusively by Christians.\u00a0 That in some abstract sense the \u201cprinciples\u201d that are read from the founding are embodied by both Judaism and Christianity no more warrants describing it as \u201cJudeo-Christian\u201d than does the fact that some of these same principles are affirmed by Muslims<\/em> warrants characterizing America as having been founded upon Judeo-Christian-Islamic <\/em>principles.<\/p>\n

This, though, gets us to the heart of the problem, to that which is the most anti-American of all Big Lies purveyed by the Big Con.<\/p>\n

This is the Big Lie of \u201cAmerican Exceptionalism.\u201d\u00a0 Given the ease with which the language of American Exceptionalism flies from the lips of Big Conservatives, one would think that this terminology lends itself to more than one meaning.\u00a0 This being said, American Exceptionalists always imply that America is exceptional <\/em>inasmuch as it is the only country in all of human history to have ever been founded upon principles <\/em>or ideals <\/em>or values. <\/em><\/p>\n

This, though, is anti-American because it is radically ahistorical.<\/p>\n

Principles, ideals, values, comprehensively, propositions<\/em>\u2014this is the stuff of thin gruel.\u00a0 Propositions are inherently abstract and general, i.e. they easily conceal the demographic-specific contingencies constitutive of America as it historically existed while conveying an air of plausibility. The 18th<\/sup> century Scottish philosopher David Hume puts the point well:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is easy for a false hypothesis to maintain some appearance of truth,\u201d Hume said, as long as \u201cit keeps wholly in generals\u201d and \u201cmakes use of undefined terms [.]\u201d\u00a0 He added that \u201cideas, especially abstract ones, are naturally faint and obscure: the mind has but a slender hold of them: they are apt to be confounded with other resembling ideas; and when we have often employed any term, though without a distinct meaning, we are apt to imagine it has a determinate idea annexed to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Big Conservatives, in employing the terminology of American Exceptionalism, terminology with unmistakably positive connotations, mean to suggest that they are doing nothing more or less than affirming the singular greatness of the country. American Exceptionalism is meant to imply that anyone who doesn\u2019t affirm the \u201cexceptional\u201d nature of America is less than fully patriotic.<\/p>\n

The reality, though, is that this doctrine\u2014and it is <\/em>an ideological doctrine\u2014is designed to obscure the ethnic, racial, and religious particularities of the American founding. It is designed to veil the founding\u2019s historically and culturally-specific character.<\/p>\n

As such, it is anti-American.<\/p>\n

Note, I do not mean to ascribe malevolent or unpatriotic motives to those who belong to the Big Con.\u00a0 Some may very well know what they are doing.\u00a0 Others, particularly those in the rank and file of the conservative movement, doubtless do not. The point that I\u2019ve been trying to make here is that intentions aside, this sort of anti-Americanism is systemic. <\/em>It\u2019s anti-Americanism without anti-Americans, to paraphrase Bonilla.<\/p>\n

Yet it\u2019s precisely because ideas do indeed have consequences and that Big Conservatism, relying as it does upon key terms and phrases that are, functionally, of a piece with those of the left in facilitating the fundamental transformation of America, that it\u2019s imperative for those of us on the right to call out the Big Con at every available opportunity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Living in 21st America, it\u2019s impossible to go a single day without hearing multiple mentions of \u201cracism.\u201d It seems to be the lifeblood of our political-cultural life. Because of the ever-increasing rarity of overt instances of white-on-black \u201cracism\u201d (and make no mistakes about it, \u201cracism\u201d is used to refer only to white-on-nonwhite transgressions), the architects…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nSystemic Anti-Americanism: How the Left and Big Conservatism are both Guilty<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2018\/12\/systemic-anti-americanism-left-big-conservatism-guilty.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Systemic Anti-Americanism: How the Left and Big Conservatism are both Guilty\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Living in 21st America, it\u2019s impossible to go a single day without hearing multiple mentions of \u201cracism.\u201d It seems to be the lifeblood of our political-cultural life. 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