The United States Of America No Longer Exists?
It’s a good thing Matt Walsh wasn’t there at the battle of Trenton. He certainly wasn’t there during the battle of Hillary.
When George Washington’s army had dwindled to a mere 2,000 soldiers, down from 25,000 during the summer of 1776, it looked as though the American cause was finished. Think about it: out of nearly three million American colonists, only 2,000 constituted the Continental Army. Their fellow citizens were delinquent in housing them, clothing them, feeding and arming them. The soldiers were cold, sick, lonely and discouraged from months of retreating and surrendering. Washington desperately needed a victory to encourage both the army, and the nation.
“Wait a minute,” Matt might have argued, had he been there. “Is there anything that really unites us? Do we really agree on anything? Should we really go attack those beer drinking Hessians on Christmas Day? Just name one ideal we share. Dare ya.”
Matt just assumes, in another screed too depressing to have been written by a young man, that Americans, during a great crisis have always been united across the board. Surely, throughout history, we were one people, right? Matt laments our absence of ideals:
What ideals? Tell me exactly which ideals unite and define the United States in 2017? I don’t want to hear about what ideals united us in 1776 or 1890 or during WW2. Those days are gone.
Maybe Matt doesn’t really study history. Maybe he missed out on John Adams calculation about only a third of Americans supporting the cause, with the other two thirds either against or neutral. Did he miss Boston Tory pastor Mather Byles who famously criticized the American Revolution by saying, “I would rather be ruled by one tyrant 3,000 miles away than by 3,000 tyrants one mile away?” Maybe Matt missed that bootlegging patriarch of the Kennedy clan, old Joe, who incessantly apologized for Hitler’s Germany, prior to World War II. Maybe he thought everything was just hunky-dory in 1890, the year of the Wounded Knee massacre. Even in the cheery world of Courage, New Hampshire, my territory, I encountered in my research the other day a moping, faithless set of resolutions from the town of Hinsdale, New Hampshire during the year 1775. Far from endorsing the rights of Englishmen, these town fathers were criticizing “patriots,” and advocating that everyone just apply themselves to their farming. Let Boston go it alone, because we don’t have any stake in their fight.
Matt, America has always been divided. We’ve always had to kick faithless bastards up the hill, or into the voting booth, or off to church. Right after our great revolution over taxation, we got in a bad family fight over taxing whiskey. We had trouble defining freedom of expression from the very beginning, and we toyed with Alien and Sedition acts. We’ve put Japanese Americans into internment camps. Janet Reno burned dozens of children alive at Waco. Some Americans were so lukewarm on the civil war they paid other men to fight for them.
Moreover, we’ve always had slightly different versions of the faith. The American Revolution was fought by, and between Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, Quakers, Anglicans, and even a few free-thinking weirdo atheists. You could argue that our freedom of religion itself grew out of our very division. We didn’t want any bishops or cardinals, thank you very much.
Freedom, by definition, is messy, and it can even be tyrannical, when the majority is narrow minded. It gets even worse when the “pure” minority refuses to fight. (Did you hear that last part, Matt?)
I share Matt’s lament about the gay gestapo forcing Christian bakers to violate their conscience, or face fines. I share Matt’s desire for a spiritual revival. I long for a day when more Americans share an appreciation for private property, choice in education, and the rule of law.
But sitting on the sidelines and waiting for John the Baptist to declare his candidacy and unfurl some glittering banner that will unite us all — well that just isn’t helpful. We win battles one victory at a time, and sometimes the victories are small. Matt was so pure in the last election he spent most of his time criticizing a candidate who promised respect for life, lower taxation, and a strengthened American military. Why? Because Matt didn’t trust his “ideals.” Matt didn’t like voting for a casino owner with a divorce record and a reality TV show. Matt wanted to be inspired; he wanted to feel some of that campfire, sing-a-song glow, and it just wasn’t happening for him.
Grow up, Matt. Our job as conservatives is to teach, instruct, and persuade the clueless progressives who inhabit the federal government, Hollywood, and even the church. We actually have a champion for many of our causes in the White House right now. Maybe you missed that? Maybe you would rather complain?
I took a look at the Matt Walsh column (I am not a regular follower of his work) that is the subject of your blog post, and I don’t know that his main premise can be fairly characterized as “Americans during a great
crisis have always been united across the board”, or that he was actually advocating fatalistic conservative passivity.
What I took him to be saying – and whether he said it or not, the insight I gleaned from the piece – is that it is no longer possible to honestly claim that there are certain fundamental values which define America,
and which Americans generally subscribe to, even as they hold a wide range of views on how those values should be honored or implemented in specific situations. This is a rare but not unprecedented circumstance in American history.
For almost two centuries, it was still possible for American colonists to subordinate their profound political differences and their very real grievances to their identity as British subjects, until one day they couldn’t do it anymore. And after ninety years of trying to maintain a union in which the North and the South no longer held common economic and moral interests, we had a civil war.
What I think Walsh is suggesting is that we have very rapidly moved from a situation where liberals and conservatives shared (or at least were forced to pay lip service to) common premises – such as that
abortion is a tragic and morally problematic act that should be as rare as possible, that traditional marriage is an essential element of society, or that one’s personal religious convictions should not be subject to government coercion – to one of open cultural warfare, where it is no longer possible to maintain the pretense of a pluralistic goodwill, and where legitimate differences of opinion are reflexively dismissed as intractable hate and bigotry.
I think that’s about right, and that the most accurate description of the political situation in America today is the we have two factions – roughly speaking, “conservatives” and “progressives” (which is not the same as Republicans and Democrats) – who are engaged in a “cold” civil war. And if it really is a civil war, there is no point trying to end it by appealing to common values. One side either has to defeat the other, or they have to split apart.
Of course, the distinction between ordinary political turmoil and a civil war is not precise, and it may well be that President Trump is up to the task of restoring coherence to America’s civic culture. But maybe he is not, at which point conservatives may be forced to contemplate the extent to which we will maintain a formal political unity with progressives who despise our most fundamental beliefs and actively seek to crush them.
I don’t think liberals and conservatives, (or their antecedents in history) _ever_ really shared a completely common vision for the country. The same forces that made the Revolution itself difficult to fight wound up creating strange exceptions like the 3/5ths of a person rule, which is still borrowed (inappropriately now that the price has been paid), by social justice warriors and the BLM movement. Throughout most of the 20th century, Americans simmered hotly beneath the surface about the wisdom of trade unions, the role of religion in public life, the role of America in policing the world. There’s a reason why conventional wisdom, in American life, has included the command: “never discuss religion or politics.” At your average summer July 4th party, try debating minimum wage or English only instruction in school and see how much unity you find.
I think the portion of the country that understands America as a “city on a hill” is actually now, and always has been, a minority. Fortunately, it’s a very strong minority, and our founders established the electoral college in order to restrain the excesses of misguided majorities. We even have a system that can withstand purist bloggers in their thirties who are too holy to participate in the process.
No one (certainly not me, and presumably not even Matt Walsh) claims that Americans ever really shared a completely common vison for the country; it is indisputable that we have always been divided on issues large and small; obviously so, as we have had a brutal civil war and dozens of other serious political crises. The question Walsh posed (or if he didn’t, I
will) is not whether the vision is “completely” common, but whether it is still common at all, or at least to the extent that it makes sense to speak ofAmerica as one country instead of two.
That’s a provocative question, but I don’t think it is entirely unreasonable. It is not unheard of for the dominant party in a pluralistic democracy to decide that it no longer wishes to respect the rights of the minority, and that tyranny is a much more appealing option. California is very close to that point, if we have not crossed it already. I think you would be hard pressed to find a single right which you hold dear – the private ownership of guns, homeschooling, the uncensored publication of this blog, the maintenance of gender-specific restroom facilities, the right to choose what sort of marriage ceremonies can be performed on your premises – that you are likely to still possess in this state a decade from now.
I don’t know anything about Matt Walsh’s politics – I will assume that you have fairly characterized him as an immature purist – but at least in California, where the likes of Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi are being denounced as reactionaries by the hard Left, I don’t see how there can be any viable political solution for conservatives. And as users of social media are finding out, the government does not have a monopoly on the tools of oppression. We are either going to have to submit or leave; and although the United States will almost certainly remain one nation in a formal sense, the end result may well be a self-segregated red-state and blue-state America.
I would love to be argued out of this prediction, because I don’t ever want to leave California. How do you think this will turn out in the next decade or so?
I think with respect to California, you’re probably right, but the article is about the United States after all, and a people who properly had enough unity to see Donald Trump as a proper response to our disunity. With respect to California, the only hope is Donald Trump appointing me territorial governor while we reconstruct.
With dictatorial powers. Your first step should be to disband the state legislature.
Great point, James Patrick Riley!