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How can we defend America from Muslims and globalists, if we define it as nothing but its Constitution?
Two writers at the Wall Street Journal make the astonishing claim—astonishing objectively, not astonishing for the egregious Journal—that “America’s Muslims tend to be role models both as Americans and as Muslims.” Hugh Fitzgerald at Jihad Watch takes the article apart, asking whether someone can be a good American citizen who is formed by and follows
a belief-system that again and again instructs him that he may not take “Jews and Christians for friends” (as the Qur’an so clearly does – see 5:51, 3:28, etc.), and that he must “smite the Unbeliever” wherever he finds him (9:5).It’s a good job by Fitzgerald. However, there is one regrettable, if predictable (because so common) flaw in his piece. He writes:
[T]he main criterion for being a “good citizen” (spare us that “role model” stuff, which is so stuffy, silly, and insufferable) is to believe that the enterprise of America, the American Constitution, the work of the Framers, the work of those who followed upon the Framers, deserves our support, our loyalty, our admiration.While I agree that loyalty and devotion to the Constitution (as well as, what is generally neglected, understanding of the Constitution) is central to what makes an American, I ask Hugh Fitzgerald, is there not something problematic in uncritically defining America as nothing but its Constitution, especially given the fact that the Constitution has been changed by legislating courts into the opposite of what it originally was, and there is the most intense controversy over what the Constitution actually says? Which Constitution must an American love to be a good American? The 1787 Constitution? The 1791 Constitution with the Bill of Rights added? The Constitution of the mid-20th century which turned the Bill of Rights into an infinite grant of power to the Supreme Court over the states rather than a restriction on the power of the Congress? Or the Constitution of today, in which judges have found new provisions invented out of whole cloth (Roe v. Wade), advanced radical, nihilistic notions of freedom undreamed of by any previous generation of Americans (Planned Parenthood v. Casey), elevated race-conscious preferences to a Constitutional principle (Grutter v. Bollinger), and essentially stripped the states of their power to govern their own affairs in areas ranging from school prayer (Engel v. Vitale) to loitering laws (Papachristou v. Jacksonville) to sodomy laws (Lawrence v. Texas)? How does one profess loyalty and love to a governing instrument which, according to today’s notions, has no fixed meaning, but means whatever the judges of the Supreme Court say it means?
Even more fundamentally, how can we love America if it is merely a political project, an “enterprise,” a subscription list to a set of abstract ideas (however they are defined), and not an actual country, nation, and way of life of which we are a part and to which we belong? Sadly, even some of today’s best and most intelligent conservatives remain at bottom liberals who define America as its liberal principles and, whether they realize it or not, are alienated from the actualities of nationhood and peoplehood. What they don’t understand is that if America has lost the love of both its own people and of immigrants, a major reason for that is the reduction of America into nothing but a bare and soulless, yet unbearably loud and bossy, political ideology. There is no hope for an American national and cultural recovery so long as neoconservative slogans remain the only way that American conservatives have of articulating the meaning of America. Indeed, if we reduce America to nothing but its political principles and deny its existence as a distinct historical nation and people, we will eventually lose the political principles as well, and end up in the same place as The Wall Street Journal, seeing America in such unreal, abstract terms that we will think of Muslims as American role models. From the neoconservatives’ redefinition of America to the Wall Street Journal’s deconstruction of it, it is a shorter distance than many people realize. Email entry |