It’s July 4 weekend, and we’re all watching the fireworks together: my partner and I, and a few hundred strangers. And it occurs to me: What I love about America is not what the loudest America-lovers love. In fact, I have a sense that it’s the opposite.
I love the threads of American multiculturalism, the promises that it sets forth – and can’t keep – of an identity constituted not by race or religion but by allegiance to certain ideals, among them social equality, freedom to do what you want if you’re not harming others, and the rule of law. Like all ideals, these have not yet been attained. But they measure our shortfall; they tell us where to navigate.
Jews and leftists such as Jay Michaelson love America as a leftist ideal of multiculturalism. They don’t particularly care for the actual nation.
Nations are not ideas. They are composed of a particular people and a particular tie to a particular part of the earth.
Can you imagine saying to your spouse? “I love the threads of your many identities and lovers, the promises that it sets forth – and can’t keep – of an identity constituted not by race or religion but by allegiance to certain ideals, among them social equality, freedom to do what you want if you’re not harming others, and the rule of law. Like all ideals, these have not yet been attained. But they measure our shortfall; they tell us where to navigate.”
How do you think she’d respond?
Surprisingly, Jay Michaelson does not push for the Jewish state of Israel to be an ideal of multiculturalism.
Wanting your country to be multicultural is like wanting your wife to take many lovers. Normal people expect their spouse to be monogamous and to have certain set identities such as wife, mother, and a member of a particular religion and a particular national allegiance.
The greatness of America lies in its promise of a better future, a future closer to its own ideals. We have progressed unevenly in the direction of greatness, but the overall trajectory is unmistakable. In the past lie only lesser iterations of this greatness, with promises broken to Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, women, LGBTs.
This is not a love of country based in reality. The more diverse a country gets, the more weak and divided it often becomes.
Donald Trump’s white supremacist supporters despise these groups – including Jews – because they see, correctly, how the hegemony of white protestant men has decreased as the voices of everyone else have been amplified. Where they err is in deeming this change a diminution in America’s greatness, rather than a hesitant step toward it.
Their America is a place of their own cultural primacy. But the great America is a place where there is no cultural primacy.
When the fireworks explode, I am celebrating religious liberty, which enabled my Jewish ancestors to settle here and maintain their identities – not the Christian Nation. When the kids behind me are shouting with joy, I am celebrating their diverse accents and appearances – not resenting them. When we honor those who have given their lives for this country, I honor their sacrifices and resolve never to support the needless loss of life.
Is this patriotism?
Moral psychologists point out that liberals like me tend to value norms of freedom, fairness, and equality more than norms of group identity, authority, and loyalty. That means that liberals tend not to be “patriots” when patriotism is defined as waving the flag, chanting “my country right or wrong,” or believing that America’s greatness has anything to do with its previously dominant language, ethnicity, or culture.
Comments at Forward.com:
* Short translation – As soon as we get rid of the culture that made this country great then we can really make this country great.
* You and your partner continue to support “multicultural” immigration policies that bring in annually hundreds of thousands of Jew hating, Gay Hating, Female enslaving Islams. See how that works out for you and the liberals in 25 years. Fool.
* George Orwell wrote a fine essay back in 1941, “Wells, Hitler and the World State”. There, he- among other things- describes liberals like Michaelson. It seems that not much has changed.
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All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr. Wells says; but the sensible men have no power and, in too many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two years more, whereas for the common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr. Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood. Before you can even talk of world reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to eliminate Hitler, which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to ‘enlightened’ and hedonistic people. What has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the S.S. men patrolling the London streets at this moment. Similarly, why are the Russians fighting like tigers against the German invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal of Utopian Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the ‘sacred soil of the Fatherland’, etc. etc.), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly altered from. The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions — racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war — which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.
