Progressives have become the most divisive force in America

Richard Porter:
It’s glaringly obvious that the left believes “nation” is a synonym for another six-letter word: racist. And that “nationalist” is nothing but shorthand for “white nationalist.”

This is startling to those of us on the right -- but it is not a new or sudden development. It’s a product of the left’s reassessment over the last 50 years of our national history and our ideals. The implications of this development are immense. It’s one thing to disagree about trade policy, environmental regulation or government’s role in health care. It’s more profound, and disturbing, to realize that liberals no longer share with conservatives a common belief in our unifying creed: the ideas we hold in common that define us as a country.

The United States of America is both a geographic place and a nation. It is composed of 330 million individual human beings living in a variety of configurations in tens of thousands of communities across 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Nationhood, as we understand the concept today, was a new idea in the 18th century. America was a land in which governance would be premised on common principles, not blood or tribe or status. In our case, the Big Idea is respect for each individual human being. This is the moral and intellectual justification for individual liberty and a government based on the consent of the people.

Around the world, other people pledged fealty to their family, their tribe, their god or their leader in lands governed by patriarchs, tribal chieftains, monarchs, or clerics. Here, our loyalty is to the unifying idea that animates our nation: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Not long ago, every American kid’s school day started with these words. On the right, these words still evoke the exceptional promise of America — a nation, as Abraham Lincoln reminded us, brought forth on this continent by our forefathers, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all human beings are created equal.

On the right, we still celebrate these words and the ideals they capture. But self-styled “progressives” view the ideals animating the United States through the lens of what our forefathers practiced, not what they preached: namely, the subjugation of women and enslavement of Africans. To those on the left, pride in our nation’s history and ideals are a hollow harkening back to an age of European white male supremacy.
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Today’s progressives don’t hear any of that. The whole American experiment is tainted in their depiction. Hence, Kate McKinnon and the good people at NBC felt comfortable broadcasting a sketch last Saturday night smugly portraying a devout Christian conservative woman at Fox News as a racist. Of course she is! Who but a racist misogynist would wish to conserve ideas promulgated by men who practiced racism and misogyny? And only a racist would seek to maintain and enforce our nation’s border against those pledging or seeking to disregard it.

What to do? Can we have a nation in the absence of a common history or a consensus around a unifying ideal? What are these United States of America when so many erstwhile citizens believe “nation” is itself a racist concept? I don’t know what the “progressive” alternative is -- a global confederation of tribes and communities? Can celebrating some differences while disparaging others ever unify us? Is having differences really all we have in common?
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When liberals hear nationalism and think racism, you know they are the ones who have gone off the track that has united us for over 2300 years.  It makes you wonder if any progressives think this country is worth fighting to defend.  Many of them certainly do not want to defend our borders.  They seek to divide us only ethnic and other lines and not unite us in celebration of what was created by imperfect men.

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