Before I start criticizing anyone, let me start with this: I appreciate any Republican who stands up to criticize this sorry excuse for a president. Two such anti-Trump Republicans are the NYT’s Ross Douthat and David Brooks. My appreciation for their efforts notwithstanding, they both managed to mangle the same topic in recent columns—American national identity.
In a piece titled “Who Are We?” Douthat put the back of his hand to his forehead (just do it and you’ll see what I mean) and lamented that liberalism has crafted a narrative of the American story too focused on oppression, one that ignores the traditionally understood elements—the “heroic founders-and-settlers narrative” of which it once consisted. He recognizes that that traditional story “stopped making as much sense” and that we needed to “correct” it. Douthat’s no extremist on this, he’s not running around waving a red #MAGA cap. He says we need a “unifying story” that includes both heroism and “the truth about what befell blacks and Indians and others” in order to “bury Trumpism (as opposed to just beating Trump).” Clearly, Douthat supports that goal, so I take his call as a sincere one.
Similarly, just this week, David Brooks called for the revival of something we’ve “lost,” namely our “unifying American story.” This, he says, is the Exodus story, a “narrative that unites us around a common multigenerational project, that gives an overarching sense of meaning and purpose to our history.” He cited Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Reinhold Niebuhr and Langston Hughes (“America never was America to me/And yet I swear this oath—/America will be!”) as all having embraced this narrative.
Brooks blamed the loss of our common story on “radical secularists [who] expunged biblical categories and patriotic celebrations from schools,” and closed by calling out for “somebody who can tell us what our goal is, and offer an ideal vision of what the country and the world should be.” Like Douthat, he also wants to bury Trumpism, and slammed “the jingoistic chauvinists who measure Americanness by blood and want to create a Fortress America keeping the enemy out.” Good on him.
Here’s the thing, gentlemen. Both of you have just described the exact narrative of our history and our national identity that Barack Obama has spent the last dozen years preaching on the national stage.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2nUXH5k
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