0 comment Thursday, November 6, 2014 | admin
Mark Steyn writes about 'Liberty and Loss' at NRO's The Corner.
He takes a gloomy view of the future for America on this Independence Day, and that angers most of the commenters at NRO, who somehow think 'conservatives' must be pollyannas or they are not real 'conservatives.' As Steyn is not waving the flag today, he is not getting the usual praise from the choir.
Steyn is an amusing writer, but it seems to me that he has always been fatalistic, writing flippantly about Europe becoming Eurabia, and yet he has never veered too far outside the PC limits. He barely acknowledges the demographic aspect of the destruction of America, and seems to be one of those who believes everything is ideological and economic in nature, not racial or ethnic.
Perhaps this is why Steyn has always been a favorite of the FReepers and the conventional right. (And he's not even black. Imagine that.)
The most interesting part of Steyn's piece is his quote from Thomas Jefferson:
''In my soon to be imminently forthcoming book, I quote one of the most poignant lines from the Declaration of Independence, one that never made it into the final text � Thomas Jefferson�s parting words to his fellow British subjects across the seas: "We might have been a free and great people together." There is a sense both of regret at the separation yet also of its inevitability.''
And Steyn asks at the end if a 21st century counterpart of Jefferson would say 'we might have stayed a free and great people together.'
Steyn seems not to recognize that when Jefferson wrote his words back in 1776, those words which were not included into the final draft of the Declaration, 'we' (American colonists and the English) were A People, together. We had common ancestry, language, traditions, and religion. The Declaration sundered us from our parent race in England. We have been taught to cheer that, and many Americans today are aggressively celebratory about ''breaking free of the Brits'', notwithstanding that the Founders were ''Brits'' or as they were more likely to say, Englishmen.
Have you all seen the video that's making the rounds, wherein Americans on a beach somewhere are asked on camera what the Fourth of July celebrates: independence from whom? Many of the respondents were clueless.
A shocking number of people have no inkling that America was originally under English rule, being a colony of England. Many Americans are so obtuse today that they cannot understand that the colonists were genetically and culturally English. America did not emerge from nowhere.
We can't know what course things might have taken if our colonist ancestors had not seceded from the home country. But we do know that the course we took somehow led us to this disaster that we now face. Instead of remaining tied to Great Britain, we chose to go independent. So today we are no longer 'a people' but a jumble of many peoples, and there is no commonality between most of us and the post-1965 immigrants, nor even between the founding stock people and the post-1865 immigrant wave. There is therefore no 'one people' anymore, and with no unity amongst ourselves, conflict looks less avoidable every day.
If we were to split this country along political or ideological lines, I would surely have to be in a separate country from the 'proposition nation' cult, whether they are Democrat, Republican, or something else. Let the 'America as an idea' people take their multicultural charges and form their own mix-n-match country somewhere, and leave the rest of us in peace in our own land, which will surely resemble the America of old more than the multicult Empire. My America is a kinship-based one, a blood-based one, not a 'notional nation.'
He takes a gloomy view of the future for America on this Independence Day, and that angers most of the commenters at NRO, who somehow think 'conservatives' must be pollyannas or they are not real 'conservatives.' As Steyn is not waving the flag today, he is not getting the usual praise from the choir.
Steyn is an amusing writer, but it seems to me that he has always been fatalistic, writing flippantly about Europe becoming Eurabia, and yet he has never veered too far outside the PC limits. He barely acknowledges the demographic aspect of the destruction of America, and seems to be one of those who believes everything is ideological and economic in nature, not racial or ethnic.
Perhaps this is why Steyn has always been a favorite of the FReepers and the conventional right. (And he's not even black. Imagine that.)
The most interesting part of Steyn's piece is his quote from Thomas Jefferson:
''In my soon to be imminently forthcoming book, I quote one of the most poignant lines from the Declaration of Independence, one that never made it into the final text � Thomas Jefferson�s parting words to his fellow British subjects across the seas: "We might have been a free and great people together." There is a sense both of regret at the separation yet also of its inevitability.''
And Steyn asks at the end if a 21st century counterpart of Jefferson would say 'we might have stayed a free and great people together.'
Steyn seems not to recognize that when Jefferson wrote his words back in 1776, those words which were not included into the final draft of the Declaration, 'we' (American colonists and the English) were A People, together. We had common ancestry, language, traditions, and religion. The Declaration sundered us from our parent race in England. We have been taught to cheer that, and many Americans today are aggressively celebratory about ''breaking free of the Brits'', notwithstanding that the Founders were ''Brits'' or as they were more likely to say, Englishmen.
Have you all seen the video that's making the rounds, wherein Americans on a beach somewhere are asked on camera what the Fourth of July celebrates: independence from whom? Many of the respondents were clueless.
A shocking number of people have no inkling that America was originally under English rule, being a colony of England. Many Americans are so obtuse today that they cannot understand that the colonists were genetically and culturally English. America did not emerge from nowhere.
We can't know what course things might have taken if our colonist ancestors had not seceded from the home country. But we do know that the course we took somehow led us to this disaster that we now face. Instead of remaining tied to Great Britain, we chose to go independent. So today we are no longer 'a people' but a jumble of many peoples, and there is no commonality between most of us and the post-1965 immigrants, nor even between the founding stock people and the post-1865 immigrant wave. There is therefore no 'one people' anymore, and with no unity amongst ourselves, conflict looks less avoidable every day.
If we were to split this country along political or ideological lines, I would surely have to be in a separate country from the 'proposition nation' cult, whether they are Democrat, Republican, or something else. Let the 'America as an idea' people take their multicultural charges and form their own mix-n-match country somewhere, and leave the rest of us in peace in our own land, which will surely resemble the America of old more than the multicult Empire. My America is a kinship-based one, a blood-based one, not a 'notional nation.'
Labels: American History, Ethnonationalism, Ethnopatriotism, Proposition Nation, Thomas Jefferson