"You will never take back your country with weakness."
Donald Trump, Jan. 6, 2021
Whose country is this? What kind of country is this?
This is a single question.
During my lifetime America changed from a White Christian nation into a multi-national nation. In my childhood Black Americans were barred from voting in the American South. There were "women's" jobs: Secretary, nurse, schoolteacher. Meanwhile, America continued attracting immigrants, largely from Latin America and Asia. America became a multi-national, multi-cultural nation.
In 1992 Pat Buchanan shocked the GOP by saying we needed a house-to-house culture war to restore the old America. It was fringe thinking then. Not anymore. Sarah Palin signaled the growing backlash against the changing ideas and the new look of America. The election of Barrack Obama accelerated the backlash. A significant number of Americans are demanding we return to an earlier time and notion of America. It is too late to do it with democracy--one person, one vote. There are too many of the "wrong" people here for democracy to reverse America's direction. It requires authoritarianism to take back the country and make America great again.
Herbert Rothschild is a retired professor of English. During his working years he was a political activist on behalf of world peace and civil rights for Black Americans. He is still doing that work, advocating for peace and justice. He lives in Talent, Oregon.
Guest Post by Herb Rothschild
In Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Anne Applebaum concentrates primarily on four nations. Two of them, Poland and Hungary, have already forfeited the democracies they adopted after the end of Soviet control. The other two, England and the United States, in her view are headed in the same direction.
At the heart of these cases, Applebaum says, are the questions, how is the nation defined and who gets to define it? One leading definition is the “native folk”—those who lay claim to being the true countrymen—versus “aliens.” The other leading definition is a distinctive history and character and values that anyone residing within the nation’s borders might come to share and embody.
Even though the U.S. has no “native folk” other than American Indians, Applebaum’s questions are as relevant to what the U.S. is now experiencing as they are to the three European nations. People like me may say to those who stigmatize immigrants at our southern border that we are all immigrants, but that observation has no effect. Somehow, groups find ways to think of themselves as native and others as alien.
Prejudice based on national origin, principally by western and northern Europeans against southern and eastern Europeans as well as those from other continents, was at one time a staple of nativist narratives. That bias was built into the landmark Immigration Act of 1924, which practically slammed shut “the golden door.” But the usual way some Americans have deemed others as alien is race.
Where and when I grew up, Blacks were a very large underclass with no power to define America. But the possibility that they would come to have a say was always on the minds of White Southerners. So, they were denied their voices throughout Dixie by disenfranchisement and economic subordination and legal segregation. Northern and midwestern Whites weren’t as alert to the possibility that peoples of color would challenge their monopoly on defining America, so a much smaller percentage of them used to define the U.S. in terms of race. They mostly thought of America in terms of the ideals enshrined in our founding documents and our history as a land of opportunity and global defender of freedom.
But their monopoly has been broken. With Americans of European ancestry rapidly losing majority status, America as a melting pot has been replaced by America as a collection of peoples who proudly own their racial and ethnic identities and their place in U.S. history. That demographic collectivity can only be bound together by a shared character and values. Even a shared history may no longer be an option, because those hitherto suppressed voices are insisting that we revisit, and revise, the narratives on which White Americans have fed.
In sum, all of America is now facing the choice that the pre-Civil Rights South faced—either we will commit to an identity based on character and values and a chastened history of both embodying and betraying that character and those values, or we will impose by force an identity that is White and Christian and elected by God to lead the world in His paths.
Yes, I have realized this validity for a long time. My white so-called Christian relatives express a lot of fear of these cultural changes. I welcome the changes and hope they are not derailed by the Trump followers.