The American creed’s war on America

This was posted at a Fox News Forum discussion on making English the official language of the U.S.:

“No. This is America. This is not a white, English speaking America. Go back to England if that’s what you want. America was not created for only one kind of race or culture, but for everyone who wanted to be free [emphasis added]. I would never sign a law that would undermine the very thing that our brave soldiers have fought and died defending.”—Gabe (Rome, GA)

Sen. McCain would say the same—in fact, he has said the same, as discussed at VFR last fall:

We are a nation of many races, many religious faiths, many points of origin. But our one shared faith is the belief that a nation conceived in an idea—in liberty—will prove stronger, more enduring and better than any nation ordered to exalt the few at the expense of the many or made from a common race or culture [emphassis added] or to preserve traditions that have no greater attribute than longevity.

[To compress this into its essence: “Our one shared faith is the belief that a nation conceived in an idea—in liberty—will prove better than any nation made from a common culture.”]

What have I been saying from the start? That the American creed, because it makes freedom and equality our highest principles, and leaves cultural traditions and values mostly unstated (with rare exceptions such as Jay’s hymn to American ethnocultural commonality in Federalist No. 2), progressively strips away the concrete elements of our national culture—our very being as a people—until only the freedom and equality are left. Thus Sen. McCain and the commenter at Fox explicitly attack, in the name of American freedom, any distinctive American culture, identity, or even sovereignty (since, as the commenter says, America belongs equally to all freedom-loving people in the world), just as Peggy Noonan derides any special devotion to an actual, physical country as chauvinistic “mud.” This is the nihilistic—but entirely logical—endpoint of liberalism. American mainstream liberalism now blatantly seeks our destruction as a people and a culture. The battle lines are drawn.

As an expression of the non-nation that the American creed seeks to construct on the ruins of America, here is a new globalist anthem by Paul Cella, “My Proposition, Tis of Thee.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 19, 2006 02:39 PM | Send