A conversation from first principles
“On the Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation” was President Joe Biden’s topic on September 1, 2022 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” he warned, and warned again:
MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.
They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.
MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.
They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.
And, oh, the pearl-clutching afterwards! Biden was being un-nice, mean, partisan. How dare he? The man-child leading MAGA called it “the most vicious, hateful, and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president.” (Takes one to know one, as any schoolyard bully knows.) “[J]ust eight weeks before midterm elections,” The Washington Post Editorial Board scolded, “Mr. Biden was wrong to conflate upholding the rule of law with his own partisan agenda.” Pundits questioned his political judgment to address the elephant in the room rather than campaign on bland-but-safe kitchen-table issues.
Two months later, the over-hyped, midterm “red wave” flattened to a ripple. Cause and effect? Maybe. Maybe not. But Biden’s “mistake” in campaigining on the soul of America may indeed have been an inflection point, “one of those moments that determine the shape of everything that’s to come after.”
But America’s short attention span means we are too easily distracted from America’s first principles, says Anand Giridharadas, by “Whac-A-Mole crises ginned up by fascists.” By which he means the hysteria over immigration. Sometimes it takes a son of immigrants to appreciate what makes this country worth fighting for (The Ink):
We shouldn’t be having a defensive conversation about immigration that starts with the story of border chaos.
We should have our own conversation from first principles: This is an extraordinary country. It’s extraordinary for many reasons. Among the reasons it is extraordinary: it is a country built of the world, from the world, from every part of the world.
I have had the fortune, as a journalist, as a foreign correspondent, to visit dozens of countries. And I’ve enjoyed all these countries I’ve been to, but I’ve actually never been to any other country that truly aspired to be a country made of the world.
When you’re in France — there are immigrants in France, but it is not like the United States. It is not a country made of the world. It is a country centered on Frenchness.
A lot of countries in the world — people may not know this — don’t even have birthright citizenship. If you live there, if you’re born there, even if your parents are from there, you still don’t necessarily become a citizen.
Eric Liu, a friend of mine, a Chinese-American, wrote in a memoir called A Chinaman’s Chance about how his family’s been in China thousands and thousands of years. His parents left, came to America. He said if he wanted to go back and become Chinese, he couldn’t. 5,000 years of loyal living in China, one or two generations in the United States.
Becoming Chinese is not a thing. Becoming Indian is not a thing. Becoming American is something that we do to a million people every year. We’ve done it under Republicans, under Democrats.
My family came here 47 years ago. I think we’ve had a pretty good run of contribution to this country — perhaps except my own.
So I think we need to not just react to Whac-A-Mole crises ginned up by fascists, but actually own this notion that our blood is better with the blood of many people in it. Our country is better when more people are here.
We have built everything we can because we have every kind of idea, every kind of contribution mixing together, and people who don’t have a heart, people who are miserly, or people who are cynically trying to raise money off of hatred don’t belong in the American story.
Conservatives by their nature resist change. But they are fine with it, grudgingly, if there is a buck to make from it. Their red line is cultural change that threatens a status quo that preserves white, male Christians atop the American social pyramid. For all our “created equal” chest-thumping, yes, we still have castes here, as Isabel Wilkerson argues. Some of us aspire for America to be better than that. Others are just fine with it, especially if there is a buck to make from it. Abolitionism was one of those inflection points where change happened against their resistance. We are at another of those points today.
It is helpful to have Giridharadas around to remind us who we aspire to be. In the streaming age, his bandwidth is narrower than Neil Diamond‘s and Neil Sedaka’s back in the day, but his message is as strong.
Conservatives never back down; they double down. It’s a debating style the left has never embraced, but should. We hem and haw when challenged. We justify and present facts. I looks and feels weak to conservatives who value strength and strong conviction, like Giridharadas’. Punch back.
I’m reminded of a Roy Blount Jr. tale of reading in The New York Times that a southern folk remedy of eating kaolin clay (a main ingredient on Pepto) as a stomach ache remedy was on the wane. Naturally, some New York sophisticate asked if Blount ate dirt:
At that point there were two tacks I could take. I could say, “Well, I know there are some folks down south who like to chew on clay, but I never ate any myself and neither did any of my relatives or friends, and in point of fact I never even saw anybody eat dirt.”
The response to that tack would have been a knowing look. “Here is a man who comes from people who eat dirt and he thinks he is better than they are.” She would be thinking I couldn’t handle stigma. Or that I was inauthentic. Southern and inauthentic: the worst of both worlds.
So I took the second tack. “Hell, yes, we eat dirt,” I said. “And if you never ate any blackened red dirt, you don’t know what’s good. I understand you people up here eat raw fish.”
“And eat cold soup,” I once heard Blount add.
“Hell, yes, I support immigration” is not the answer Whac-A-Mole fascists expect. Try it out. See above for the punch combination that follows.
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