“Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” declared Stephen Colbert’s conservative pundit persona. And when reality and conservatives’ need to stoke their base’s anger conflict, reality must yield. If love means never having to say you’re sorry (Real Americans™ never do), freedom means reality is whatever the party (or Donald Trump) says it is.
The Republican and Chinese Communist parties share this in common, writes “man without a party” Max Boot in the Washington Post. Where once Chinese emperors claimed legitimacy from the Mandate of Heaven, the CCP works overtime to ensure history validates its glorious record of undemocratic rule. “What the party seeks to stop, of course, is not the distortion of history but an accurate rendering of it,” Boot writes:
Woe to any person in China who challenges the official version of the past; that is a crime for which you can be sent to prison. The United States is different. We are a free country where nothing is off-limits. We can talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. Can’t we? Yes, we can — but Republicans are doing their level best to change that. How ironic that the GOP, which claims to be the “tough on China” party, wants to make America more like China. As the party of White America, Republicans seek their own political legitimacy from history by trying to minimize the impact of racism.
In the guise of fighting “critical race theory,” Republican legislators in 22 states want to outlaw the teaching of certain interpretations of U.S. history. Such laws have already passed in five states — Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas and Tennessee — while the Florida Board of Education has enacted its own ban. Taken together, this is the most far-reaching assault on academic freedom since the McCarthy era in the 1950s.
These bills are likely unconstitutional, Boot believes. You don’t need a court (or a weatherman) to know they are un-American.
Nonetheless, the GOP’s red-hat shock troops, the armed and unarmed, will cheerfully go along with their Long March towards the unmaking of the American experiment. But like the Village People’s “YMCA,” they’ll need to adapt Lee Greenwood, too.
And I’m proud to be an American
Where at least I’m CCP….
