If America were a company and not a country, we would have long ago dissolved the corporation, split the blanket, and gone our separate ways.
What still holds this disputatious and divided people together?
Consider. In announcing the $900 billion stimulus bill to deal with the pandemic, Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not mention that the gifts for her distressed countrymen and women at Christmas would have been twice as large had she taken President Trump’s offer of $1.8 trillion in October.
Why did the speaker slap that offer away?
“The President only wants his name on a check to go out before Election Day and for the market to go up,” she told House Democrats.
Rather than let Donald Trump take credit, Pelosi stiffed millions of Americans.
Sunday, however, the speaker took time for a statement to hail the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue from Statuary Hall. “Welcome news,” said the speaker. “Congress will continue our work to rid the Capitol of homages to hate.”
Lee had stood in a place of honor in the Capitol for decades. When exactly did the statue of the general become a homage to hate?
Both episodes point up an unpleasant truth.
Our dysfunctional American family agrees upon less and less.
By mid-November, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 52% of Republicans thought Donald Trump had “rightfully won.” Sixty-eight percent of Republicans thought the election was “rigged.” A third of independents, and even 10% of Democrats, agreed.
This month, a Fox poll found that a third of all registered voters believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, with 78% of those who voted for Trump expressing that view.
In the long term, not only is the election of 2020 going to be suspect. Also, belief in one of the sacraments of secular democracy, universal suffrage, is going to suffer.
Moreover, the issues that divide us now go increasingly to the faith of what defines us as a nation and a people.
A slice of our intellectual elite emphatically agrees with the New York Times’ Project 1619, which decrees that the real birth date of this nation was neither 1776 nor 1789, but the year that the first slave ship arrived in Virginia.
To this influential cohort, enslavement of Black people brought from Africa and dispossession and destruction of the indigenous tribes that European settlers found here are the defining events of our history.
And all who participated in these crimes against humanity or refused to condemn them are undeserving of exaltation.
Not only Lee, but Columbus and Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, TR and Wilson are all racist white men whose disgraceful and even criminal conduct disqualifies them from a place of honor in the American pantheon of 2020. All statues of such men need to come down to cleanse us of the stain of having honored them.
Pelosi says that such statues are “homages to hate.”
She may not have thought so five or 10 years ago, but she believes that now.
What has taken place is a mass conversion.
Yet, there is another America that still cherishes the nation these men created. And, as did their fathers, grandfathers and ancestors, these Americans have shown a willingness to fight and die in her defense.
Thus do we Americans disagree on the most fundamental of issues.
Was America, is America, with all its sins and virtues and all its achievements, a country to be cherished, loved and defended? Or is America a country of whose history we should all be ashamed?
Part of America also believes that discovery in the Constitution of a woman’s right to an abortion and a right of homosexuals to marry were major milestones of progress toward a more moral America.
Others see these as long strides away from the Christian country we used to be, a social and moral decline toward the same quiet death that has come to other civilizations and nations that went before us.
In short, we Americans disagree on whether our country is a good and great nation worth defending, or a place that needs a deep cultural cleansing of its sins.
And we have no common code of morality. One side is rooted in modernism and secularism and the other in the teachings of the Old and New Testament, Christian tradition and a natural law written on the human heart that is superior to man-made law.
People who disagree upon such basic beliefs naturally drift apart, as we Americans are doing today.
Political questions arise out of these fundamental differences, and they are not insignificant.
Can a republic as fractured and splintered as ours is — racially, ethnically, politically, culturally, morally — with a population who do not share the same belief about whether their nation is good and great or failed and evil, endure? And for how long?
What successful models from history do we see of nations that took the kind of risks we are taking with our republic?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.” To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM
With a radical Biden administration, with open borders, selling out to the Chinese at our expense and the communists in the school systems, our Country is toast. Venezuela and communism, here we come.
Makes you wonder, what all our dead veterans would say, about giving their LIVES for this nation, TO ONLY SEE THOSE HACKS and traitors in office, KILL it from the inside..
“Makes you wonder, what all our dead veterans would say,”
Good possibility they are now voting Democrat
This is a limited Republic. not a democracy … and to the republic for which it stands.
You may have missed the point. We WERE a republic. The constitutional values and laws of our republic are no longer being followed. We no longer have those values in common which is the only way that a republic can stand.
When you can dump thousands upon thousands of illegal votes into the middle of an election and have that sanctioned by the chief law enforcement officer of the land you are no longer a republic. You are not even a democracy.
Conservatives claim they want to remain a republic but many don’t really know what a republic is.
The ignorant want a democracy and sure as hell don’t know what that is.
There is no way we can continue to claim we are a republic. We were founded as one but any resemblance is gone.
I will amend my comment a bit. Maybe we are still a republic, a BANANA REPUBLIC!!
And when you have literally MILLIONS Of kids being brainwashed into seeing communism as good, and others FULLY PUSHING for these destructive policies, WE can’t as a nation, stay together, with that much separation….
What else did you expect when you ran God the founding father out of the very houses of government he built with the hands of men he inspired, then ran fathers out of the families to redefine just what a family and a government is supposed to be. We are no longer a nation where THE PEOPLE are served by the politicians we elect, but THE PEOPLE have to serve them and look the other way as they enrich themselves with the power and wealth and reputation/resources that rightfully belong to THE PEOPLE. This nation is dividing between the Creator producer class and the Consumer entitlement class and may soon end up diving into two separate nations by land mass, because the two cannot live together in the same house. In the old days the derelict prodigal son/daughter would be tossed out at a certain age like an eagle kicking its baby from the nest to learn to fly on its own or perish. Nature is not so dumb as she seems and seldom abides a fool. Neither should we. The Eagle has been replaced by the vulture in America by half the people of this nation. Anyone who celebrates 1619, the date slavery was introduced, as the real birth date of our nation, rather than the beginning of the slavery infectious destructive pandemic, has sawdust for brains.
“may soon end up diving into two separate nations by land mass, because the two cannot live together in the same house.”
Won’t happen, they cannot live without us and they know it and why they keep trying to force us to their will, so they can have control over us to do for them what they cannot do for themselves
It is what every spoilt child does to passive and permissive parents, who believe they are powerless to rule over their own children
Spare the rod spoil the child. Is not just something which is good for the child but the parent too. If one loves their child it hurts them as must as it hurts the child but they know the child will suffer a life time of misery and pain without it.
Just wait until your father gets home is what is missing in the home
Now, instead of them getting a spanking, we are facing living on our knees before them or shooting them, but as long as it was always something in the future it was a hard lesson which was easy to ignore, until it is today.
I often say, the start of society’s downfall, was when we banned spanking kids.
One-third of all women have had an abortion
In any given year 70% and some years, 80% of all divorces are filed by the wife
The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world
“Give me good mothers, I will give you a good nation.” – Napoleon
As bad as is abortion, what is worse is women who are unfit mothers having the choice of raising children.
There has never been a society which was more technologically advanced than the stone age, that raised children by the mother alone
There is not a species of animals in the animal kingdom that the female will allow the male to participate in the rearing of the offspring which does not derive some benefit from having the male involved.
As long as the government can stand in as a surrogate dad, mothers will have no need for the real one.
This army of darkness has been rising for at least the last fifty years
In 1934 JD Unwin wrote in his book “Sex and Culture” no civilization has ever existed beyond one generation which abandoned strict monogamy
Where do we see the greatest abandonment of strict monogamy? In places where individuals have the greatest degree of anonymity, and face the least demand upon them from societal norms.
Cities.
Look at any presidential election map, you don’t see blue states, you see states with small areas which are blue but where the majority of the population lives. Norms of societal behavior come from knowing who is your neighbor
Indeed, there are two competing versions of America. Day by day they are less and less compatible.
While living in Texas, I was told that Texas retained the right to form it’s own nation again &/or split into as many as 5 states.
I have never even visited New York and see no attraction there.
My last visit to California was in 1965. I was at Disneyland the day of the Watts riots.
Let NY, CA, and other liberal states peaceably separate from TX and other conservative states to create two sovereign nations who may or may not be allies.
I have no more affinity to the liberal states than to the nations on other continents.
When, not if, the new liberal nation becomes bankrupt, the conservative nation must NOT offer “foreign aid” to save them from their own stupidity.
There is no need for a hateful divorce, just a negotiated annulment.
They will not let you go any more than the liberals in the time of the Civil War could let the South go
I believe slavery is a heinous crime because it forces others to your will, but then we fought a war to do exactly that, all the while pretending it was to free the slaves, when what it really did is make everyone a slave to the government
The government could not let them go because the South paid 75% of ALL revenue to the government in which 75% was spent in the North
They fight to control you today so you can do for them what they cannot do for themselves and the ONLY way you will be free is if you stand and fight, not run away
THEY WILL never willingly let us ‘go;. THEY REQUIRE TOO much of the taxes they STEAL from us to ever do so.
“A slice of our intellectual elite emphatically agrees with the New York Times’ Project 1619.”
That would be the incurable cancerous slice promoting that distortion of history to affect the dissolution of the republic.
We are watching the beginning of the end for the U.S.. You have illegal immigrants who refuse to learn or speak out language. The criminals want to defund the police. Now crime is up in New York ,Chicago and Atlanta. Democrats refuse to condemn violence, but claim trump is racist for not condemning violence. Democrats claim The riots were started by trumpets and white supremacist. But we all saw the riots in tv. Oops I mean mostly peaceful protest???