Is it possible that progressives have gone completely insane? “Their new position is that it is immoral to restrict any kind of immigration, from any country, in any amount, for any reason ever,” Tucker Carlson said recently on his Fox News show.
But Progressives haven’t lost their minds. They haven’t gone further out on the left-wing of American politics. In fact they haven’t changed at all. They’re simply being honest about what they believe, always have believed, and now cannot believe that the rest of America disagrees.
When Donald Trump became our 45th president, Progressives found “patriotism” in the foxhole. The public has been informed, by the same people who built their careers deconstructing Americanism, that the #Resist movement is akin to our foundational rebellion, against the closest thing to George III this country has ever produced—or so we are told.
Americans were presented with a Muslim woman draped in an American flag hijab, to remind them of what real progress in the West looks like—even as women in the Middle East burn veils in their struggle for liberty. It might not be a coincidence that wherever Islamic regimes establish themselves, the first thing enforced is the dress code.
Illegal immigrants were used as props and placed before the cameras, characterized as the embodiments of civic virtue. “America is a nation of immigrants,” and we must accept an endless inflow of such “immigrants,” even as they partner with Democrats in an attempt to hold ransom the pay for over 2 million American troops and healthcare for 9 million children, in exchange for their citizenship.
Little by little, the façade crumbled, and the patrioteering subsided. Progressives who insisted they were for America gradually resumed chanting the good Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s favorite hymnal, “God damn America!” That’s Obama’s old pastor, by the way. Rev. Wright does a wonderful job of candidly summarizing how the political left views, and always had viewed this nation:
[The United States] government lied about their belief that all men were created equal. The truth is they believed that all white men were created equal. The truth is they did not even believe that white women were created equal, in creation nor civilization.
No, the founding fathers did not lie. They believed, in accordance with the precepts of natural law in which our nation’s principles are rooted, that all men are equal in the sense of their creation in the image of the God, and unlike any other species, humans are equipped with the faculty to reason as much. This fact makes us boundlessly precious in our being, and it means that we are meant, therefore, to govern ourselves without asking leave of any expert who, by his nature, is somehow supposed to be our natural and sovereign superior. But it certainly does not mean we are equal in the contemporary progressive sense, complete with wealth redistribution and endlessly reductive egalitarianism.
It might come as a surprise to some that the “white men” in Rev. Wright’s scintillating sermon purchased slaves from African slavers, who enslaved their African kinsmen. This customarily took place in breezy little coastal slave markets and made African slavers immensely wealthy. Indeed, the greed of African slavers was such that, “[w]hen France and Britain outlawed slavery in their territories in the early 19th Century, African chiefs who had grown rich and powerful off the slave trade sent protest delegations to Paris and London,” Martin Henry writes for the Jamaica Gleaner. Finally, to quote Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson:
[America] is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protections of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all of those of Africa.
It is not for nothing that when Muhammed Ali returned from his first visit to Africa and a reporter asked him what he thought of it, Ali replied, “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat.”
The principles enshrined in our Constitution also provided the framework for early women’s rights advocates, and they have always been compatible with women’s rights on the basis that sex is not a prerequisite for individual or political rights in our Constitution. In fact, women voted in America, as early as 1790, long before they voted anywhere else. By 1913, women were voting in nine states. The 19th Amendment was not ratified in spite of American foundational principles; it was realized because of this nation’s principles. For a taste of real women’s inequality, take a trip to one of many Islamic nations—and be sure to pack a veil.
“Trump’s America is a shithole country,” Danielle Campoamor writes for Newsweek. To the contrary, Trump’s America is America; it’s struggling to be itself once more, or at least it offers us a chance to reaffirm the real America, against the pernicious narrative that has marched through our institutions since the 1960s under the guise of progress.
The march for progress today finds itself characterized by the “liberating tolerance” called for by Brandeis sociologist Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 book, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, wherein Marcuse demands tolerance for all things from the left, and intolerance for all things coming from the right. When the progressives and those aligned with them call for “progress” or “tolerance,” this is what they mean.
I have become a firm believer that Trump Derangement Syndrome is a misnomer, because I think TDS is more of a truth serum than Mad Cow disease. It has revealed what progressives—and progressively tendentious “conservatives”—want America to become, that is, a geographical expression utterly divorced from the foundational principles of the nation it once was.