"Victor Davis Hanson describes the growing conflation of mere residency with American citizenship in Democrat-run cities and states, which is another stealthy way of undermining the American demos that necessarily forms the basis for self-government." https://t.co/TIhZJd2Jga
— The American Conservative (@amconmag) September 16, 2020
AmConMag
“A nation is a creation of time and events,” Piereson writes, “and cannot be ordered in place at once,” which at least partly explains the wisdom of the Founders when they refrained from affirming the largely Protestant, English-descending cultural mainstream that prevailed in their midst. Piereson credits Lincoln—more popularly celebrated for saving the union by reasserting the principles of the Founding against the seceded Confederacy—with opening a period of cultural nation-forming that would see the American people gradually cohere around a culturally substantive expression of nationhood all the way until 1945. At just the time of the Civil War, Lincoln in fact began replacing in his speeches the term union—connoting a loose association of states with little in the way of a national bloodstream—with the term nation.
A Yankee Whiggish view of American history.
Hidden in the book’s argument is counsel for Trump to adopt one narrative ahead of November—Democrats want to end the American nation and its sovereignty as we know it. It sure doesn’t mean that a vote for Trump will magically reunite an increasingly tribalized and racialized nation, but it does mean resisting our present trend towards these gloomy scenarios. In Piereson’s brilliant summation of all these problems, America is “evolving into a multi-national, multi-cultural, multilingual state lacking the cultural underpinnings of a common culture, language, religion or nationality that we commonly associate with the nation-state.” Have conservatives realized that November is about stopping that?
Trump winning the election and serving a second term will not put an end to the divisions brought about by identity politics. So what's the professional conservatives' back-up plan.
Encounter Books: Who Rules? Sovereignty, Nationalism and the Fate of Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Roger Kimball
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