Worth repeating
“America is more than a country. America is an idea,” former Speaker Kevin McCarthy told an Oxford Union audience in late October. That idea is freedom [timestamp 7:35].
At the New York Times DealBook event last month, McCarthy repeated something else he’d said at Oxford about Americans who are the true caretakers of that idea (Washington Post):
“I became leader when we took the minority, and this was a turning point for me,” McCarthy said, describing having attended the 2019 State of the Union address.
“I’d just become leader and I’m excited and President Trump’s there. And I look over at the Democrats and they stand up. They look like America,” he told Sorkin. “We stand up. We look like the most restrictive country club in America.”
Robert Calhoon once wrote about colonists who supported the Crown during the American Revolution. “Historians’ best estimates,” he wrote, “put the proportion of adult white male loyalists somewhere between 15 and 20 percent,” a figure not far removed from the Republican base. As many as 500,000 colonists among a population of 2.5 million never bought the founders’ “created equal” nonsense. They remained committed to a system of government by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. Powdered wigs supported by loyal subjects also carries echoes today. Even after the Treaty of Paris, most loyalists remained on these shores. Their progeny and like-minded continentals who arrived later are with us still. It is a personality type committed to maintaining the “natural” order.
Colonists who did not support the Revolution or believe in its ideals, people committed to a system of government by hereditary royalty and landed gentry, were known as Royalists. Today they are Republicans. Perhaps it takes one to know one, Kevin.
Here’s McCarthy’s statement [timestamp 3:55]:
Philip Bump draws on Daily Kos data to drive home the point.