Down with America

Among the things progressive Americans are not down with is… America. Or so it seems. These citizens of the world, members of the international cosmopolitan elite, believe that nationality is a relic, a vestige of the bad old days before they reached true atheistic enlightenment.

They are certainly not down with celebrating the birth of a nation that they believe to be an imperialist, capitalist, colonialist, racist warmonger… the source of all the world’s evils, a nation full of war criminals, deserving all of the humiliation that it gets.

They cheered when Michelle Obama declared that, until the Democratic Party nominated her husband for the presidency, she had not been proud of her country. It must count as one of the most appalling statements ever made by anyone involved in American politics. And yet, liberal America shrugged and elected a man whose wife, and presumably himself, were suffering a severe patriotism deficit. Whatever Barack was learning in the two decades he spent at the feet of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I wager that it was patriotism.

Having begun his tenure with an apology tour, Barack Obama has never sought to shore up American patriotism. He has realigned America’s diplomatic relationships and undermined American pride by befriending America’s enemies and showing contempt for America’s traditional allies.

Obama’s first instinct, on hearing about a terrorist attack, has been to turn his wrath against his fellow Americans, to exculpate himself and to exonerate the killers by blaming Americans who are exercising their constitutional rights. To his mind murdered Americans are an occasion to engage in a divisive struggle about gun control. And a culture war against white Christian Republicans. The only time gun control is not the issue is when blacks kill blacks, like, in Chicago.

As it is written in Matthew, 12:25:

Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.

Not only are the terrorists in San Bernardino and Orlando forgiven their depravities, but they become warriors for social justice in one fight that does matter to Obama: the fight against the Second Amendment.

One reason why Obama refuses to blame Islamic terrorists for Islamic terrorism is that he does not want to unite the country in a fight against a common enemy. You see, he has no quarrel with Islam; he has no problem with peoples who count among the oppressed rising up against their white oppressors. He does not want Americans to stand strong and proud, united behind a fearless leader. He does not care to see a united America engage in a battle against the forces of evil, forces that want to destroy Western civilization.

There’s nothing exceptional about America, quoth President Obama. Thus, nothing you should feel proud about, nothing to feel patriotic about, nothing that demands your loyalty.

Recently, the voters of Great Britain decided to reclaim their national identity. As Daniel Hannan noted, more Brits voted for Brexit than have ever voted for anything in the history of British elections. So, naturally, the elites are in the highest dudgeon, trying to undo the vote and to do everything they can to recover their power and influence and their cosmopolitan visions.

Of course, cosmopolitanism, the notion that we all belong to the same species and thus are all the same, is something of a misnomer. The elites who traffic in it are really just selling the latest brand of snake oil. As I and others have pointed out, they have been captured and captivated by the Platonic vision of a class of guardians or philosopher kinds who see most clearly, who know what is best for everyone, and who make the rules by edict. In some contexts they are bureaucrats. In others they are behavioral economists.

Citizen of the world, meet your new masters.

And yet, being a citizen of the world or being a citizen of Europe does not really mean anything to anyone else. In the midst of the Brexit debate one wise soul pointed out that no one considers himself a citizen of Europe. Pride does not attach to global groupings. It attaches to nations. People are proud to be British. They were afraid that Brussels bureaucrats and an invasion of unassimilable peoples would make their national identity meaningless.

One understands that people on the right have been known to turn national pride into jingoism. And yet, when the forces that repudiate their nation and its history, that do not even want that history to be taught in school, succeed, the reaction will very likely be strong and aggressive.

We are living in the Age of Obama. Whether or not Obama embraces all of the swill that counts as serious thinking among the illiterati his policies are too close to it for comfort. While the radical left on college campuses is involved in an orgy of America hatred, a systematic attempt to undermine what it calls white privilege, those who want to fight back, who want to assert their pride and patriotism feel increasingly marginalized and silenced. Lest we forget, America was founded by white males who earned their privilege. It is profoundly ignorant to compare Alexander Hamilton to Tupac Shakur.

Why does it matter? It matters because it forms the basis of your psychological well being. No man is an island, the poet said. And community always precedes the individual, the philosopher said. Your self-esteem, your self-respect, you confidence and morale are not uniquely yours. They are not merely a set of beliefs you acquire by doing some half-assed therapy.

No one cares to mention it, but high self-esteem comes to those who belong to a great and successful nation. When your team wins, you feel pride. When your nation succeeds, you feel pride. When your president feels pride and loyalty to your nation you feel that your daily activities are not just forms of individual self-fulfillment. They have a larger purpose; they belong in a larger context. This will motivate you to worker harder to excel.

You cannot be confident in your own efforts if you believe you are part of an organized criminal conspiracy that oppresses the non-white peoples of the earth. You cannot feel good about yourself if you believe that you are a racist pig whose successes have come about at the expense of other less advantaged people.

One of the more appalling instances of this form of intellectual depravity has been occurring at an elite New York City private school, the Bank Street School. Parents pay tons of money for their children to learn that they are racists pigs who profit from white privilege. And that they ought to feel guilty about having successful parents who can send their children to such a school. Obviously, the children have been traumatized. The school is guilty of child abuse. Parents ought to remove their children immediately, lest they themselves be enablers.

You think I’m kidding? Check out the story in the New York Post:

An elite Manhattan school is teaching white students as young as 6 that they’re born racist and should feel guilty benefiting from “white privilege,” while heaping praise and cupcakes on their black peers.

Administrators at the Bank Street School for Children on the Upper West Side claim it’s a novel approach to fighting discrimination, and that several other private New York schools are doing it, but even liberal parents aren’t buying it.

They complain the K-8 school of 430 kids is separating whites in classes where they’re made to feel awful about their “whiteness,” and all the “kids of color” in other rooms where they’re taught to feel proud about their race and are rewarded with treats and other privileges.

Note what is going on. Children are not taught to be proud of their country. They are being taught to feel proud of their race. Could Jeremiah Wright put it any more clearly?

The Post continues:

“Ever since Ferguson, the school has been increasing anti-white propaganda in its curriculum,” said a parent who requested anonymity because he has children currently enrolled in the school.

Ferguson? You mean the place where a black teenager attacked a white police officer and tried to grab his gun. The place where the police officer defended himself and killed the black teenager. You might recall that the police officer was completely exonerated.

Bank Street has created a “dedicated space” in the school for “kids of color,” where they’re “embraced” by minority instructors and encouraged to “voice their feelings” and “share experiences about being a kid of color,” according to school presentation slides obtained by The Post.

Meanwhile, white kids are herded into separate classrooms and taught to raise their “awareness of the prevalence of Whiteness and privilege,” challenge “notions of colorblindness (and) assumptions of ‘normal,’ ‘good,’ and ‘American’” and “understand and own European ancestry and see the tie to privilege.”

The same slides point out that a number of leading private schools across the country also have segregated students by “race-based affinity groups.” It lists several in New York, including Riverdale Country School, Brooklyn Friends School, The Cathedral School, The Calhoun School, Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School.

Under Bank Street’s “Racial Justice and Advocacy” curriculum, parents say, teachers push white kids to grapple with America’s history of racism. Then they indoctrinate them into thinking “systemic racism” still exists, and that they’re part of the problem and must hold themselves accountable even for acts of racism committed by others.

“One hundred percent of the curriculum is what whites have done to other races,” said another Bank Street parent. “They offer nothing that would balance the story.”

Added the parent, who also asked to go unnamed: “Any questions they can’t answer they rationalize under the pretense of ‘institutional racism,’ which is never really defined.”

The program, these parents say, deliberately instills in white children a strong sense of guilt about their race. Some kids come home in tears, saying, “I’m a bad person.”

They say white kids are being brainwashed into thinking any success they achieve is unearned. Indeed, a young white girl is seen confessing on a Bank Street video: “I feel guilty for having a privilege I don’t deserve.”

As I have often remarked, a goodly part of responsibility for this child abuse rests also with parents who keep their children in the schools. They ought to do what parents and alumni of the University of Missouri did: to remove their children from the school and to cease all donations. If they do not, they are enablers and co-conspirators. Better to take effective action than to whine about it all. It’s difficult when your own children have to suffer for your progressive beliefs.