Posted on 04/27/2019 6:57:39 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
Biden is Wrong: America is a Reality, Not an Idea
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism
“America is an idea," Joe Biden gravely intoned, as he threw the 21st hat onto the overcrowded hat rack of the Democrat primaries already groaning under the weight of all the trilbys, clown caps and hijabs.
Biden is a compulsive plagiarist and the idea that America is an idea, like his hair, isn’t his own.
It’s also wrong.
America as an idea has lately been bandied about by John Kasich, Senator Chris Coons, Senator Lindsey Graham, and even Bono. Biden not only showed up late to the primaries, but late to the idea of an idea.
America isn’t an idea. It’s a place. The name of our nation comes from a 15th century Italian named Amerigo Vespucci who didn’t visit an ideal, but a real continent. Amerigo’s name doesn’t even represent an ideal. It means master workman, or, more crudely, boss. A pragmatic name for a pragmatic nation.
Even our national anthem is grounded by being set in the present of an actual battle. The “rockets” and “bombs”, even the “twilight’s last gleaming”, poetic though it is, are actual realities seen by the author. Its only intangible ideas are “land of the free and home of the brave” and “in God is our trust”. And the anthem insists on forcing us to see how these convictions played out in reality and at what great cost.
Much of our greatness does come from an idea. It’s not, as Joe Biden claims, “bigger than an ocean”. It’s as small as the individual. The British Empire that we twice defeated claimed to rule the oceans. America’s pride was that the individual worker, not a king or a president, ruled his nation and himself.
The British had one king. America had millions of kings and queens.
Many nations have had such ideas. What made America unique was not that we had the idea, but that, unlike the rest of the world, we made it a reality. And we didn’t do it through empty theories, but through a system of representative government backed by hard limitations on that government.
The Amerigo or American became his own boss, not through empty ideals, but through his hard work.
Politicians like Biden who talk about America as an idea like that idea; they just hate the reality. That’s why Biden’s video insists that the 2016 election was an “aberration”. It wasn’t, as Obama liked to tell us, “who we are”. But the reality of America is that politicians don’t tell us who we are. We tell them who we are. When it works Obama’s way, that idea of America destroys both the reality and the idea.
Since 2016, Democrats and some Republicans have been telling the country that the last election didn’t meet with their expectation for their idea of America. And so they set about trying to restore that idea at the expense of the reality of our system of elections, freedom of speech and the press, attorney-client privilege, the separation of powers, and the entire idea of representative government. That’s their idea.
It’s also Joe Biden’s idea.
There is obviously an idea of America. Just as there is an idea of Joe Biden or of the chair he’s sitting on. But the idea of Joe Biden, a Corvette-driving, woman-groping, foul-mouthed idiot who never met a camera that he wouldn’t wrestle to death with his face, doesn’t preclude the reality of Joe Biden, who doesn’t even own a Corvette. A reality without an idea is bland. An idea without a reality is leftism.
The idea of America is most often invoked by lefties and lefty Republicans because their ideology puts ideas ahead of reality. That’s how you end up with the Green New Deal, a set of ideas in which putting everyone, including Hawaiians, on trains is the perfect solution to a problem that only exists as an idea. It’s also how most lefty economics works and eventually doesn’t work once reality kicks into gear.
Venezuela has an inflation rate that no one can calculate anymore because its finance minister insisted that inflation was only an idea that didn’t exist in real life. Inflation is very real. Venezuela’s money isn’t.
Like the protagonist of the Twilight Zone’s A Stop At Willoughby, when you begin believing in imaginary things, you eventually cease to be real. That’s what happened to so many of the Marxist regimes that once dotted the planet. Most weren’t invaded and overthrown. Their ideas just ran out of reality.
The idea of America, as invoked by Biden, Coons, Graham, and Bono, is also running out of reality. If you doubt that, look toward the border where hordes of migrants are breaking through in unprecedented numbers. The idea of America demands open borders, but the reality requires border security.
Politicians can’t spend enough time talking about the idea of America, but neglect its reality.
The “idea of America”, as Biden puts it, “is stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean.” Talking like this is lots of fun for people who like hearing themselves talk. And the only people more prone to falling in love with their sounds of their own voices than politicians are celebrities. But the “idea of America” is constrained by the existence of America, which is not bigger than an ocean or than Biden’s ego.
The idea and reality of America collided on the campaign trail in the last election when Donald Trump demolished numerous GOP candidates who passionately invoked America as an idea. Joe Biden is on very shaky ground when he tries to resurrect an argument that was soundly rejected by Americans.
The idea of America, and there is more than one, can be soaring and visionary. But it must be built on a reality. When the idea of America loses touch with the real needs of the national body, then, like a fanatic starving to death to attain enlightenment, the physical country begins to wither and die.
America is an idea only to the extent that it is a reality. When it ceases to be a reality because we run out of people, money and future, then the idea dies with it. And even if it didn’t, what good would it be?
We had an idea of Rome, of Greece and of Egypt. But an idea without a people to inhabit it is mere myth. An idea of America without any Americans would be Camelot. A painted mockery of a vanished past. It might entertain or uplift some future people. But those people would not be us.
They would not be Americans.
And the question of whether there will even be Americans is what the 2020 election will be about.
Biden’s campaign launch video depicts the idea of America as endangered. Trump ran on the reality of America being endangered.
The most obsessive Trump haters view him as an attack on an idea while his supporters fear that their reality is in peril. Trump delivered the reality of economic benefits, but his opponents claim that he threatens their idea of America as an evil nation, born in genocide, redeemed by the right side of history. Biden is invoking that promise to return to Obama’s right side of history, JFK’s Camelot, and William Morris’ Nowhere, sacrificing our reality and our future to someone else’s idea of an idea.
Trump is making America stronger. Biden is promising to make Americans feel better. One has built his campaign on the real world and the other has announced a campaign based on hurt feelings.
The safe space election is here.
Both men understand their bases and their impulses. Trump promises a return to a booming and powerful nation. Biden frightens aging lefty Boomers with the specter of the pre-civil rights era.
In 2020, Americans will choose between reality and an idea.
Trump has become the candidate of reality. The reality of an economic boom, of military victory and domestic security. Biden has emerged to campaign as the candidate of an idea. If only he had one.
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Biden’s “idea” of America is sick, and warped.
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Louis Foxwell
America is an idea that continues to become a reality, and if the left would shut up and move to Venezuela or Russia, would become more of a reality much faster.
America “the Proposition Nation” was a bit of poisonous idiocy popularized by neoconservative intellectuals back during Dubya’s push for amnesty.
The idea diminishes the value of American cultural inheritance and it is often used as a reason to push for mass immigration- since according to them America is nothing more than an idea anyway.
Biden is Wrong: America is a Reality, Not an Idea
FrontPage Magazine ^ | 4/26/19 | Daniel Greenfield
“America is an idea,” Joe Biden gravely intoned, as he threw the 21st hat onto the overcrowded hat rack of the Democrat primaries already groaning under the weight of all the trilbys, clown caps and hijabs.
Biden is a compulsive plagiarist and the idea that America is an idea, like his hair, isn’t his own.
It’s also wrong.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3745085/posts
Thank you for the post. It was well-written.
America’s “idea” was much more in agreement with its reality when we used coins with images of ideals, like “Liberty”, on them. The “kings” and “queens” the author spoke of guided America to preeminence because they were looking for simple government from Government consistent with these ideals. They were not looking for “safety nets” from reality. Their Vote was worth something, and so the nation that it helped create was, too.
Today’s voter has sold Liberty for “safety nets”, and wears the invisible chains of slavery. Their Vote is worth nothing.
To say that America is an “idea” is gobbledygook. It is as meaningless as someone saying this is not “American values.” They are sound bites in which people fill in their own meaning. There is no such thing as “American values.” People have values and those values differ. It is why we have blue and red states. The “idea” is found in the Declaration of Independence. But that is not the idea of almost all of “progressives.” In fact, liberals loathe the Declaration of Independence.
Biden is obsessed with promoting Romantic ideals without understanding the pragmatic means to achieve them. Trump is focused on pragmatic solutions to satisfy real needs reflecting Utilitarian ideals.
America, under what Madison called a "benign" government influence, became a place of individual freedom, creativity, productivity, and plenty--enough to share with the world.
Other places, under the spell of these ideas current ideas of "socialism" and Utopia, have come and gone, or, if they exist, they are miserable places where tyrannical clowns squelch creativity among the citizens, destroy productivity, produce poverty and gloom, and look to other countries to sustain their people, while the leaders soak up all that the citizens produce.
Yet, in America, the beneficiaries of the Founders' system of free people and limited government prattle on and on about how they're going to "fight" for the little people whose votes they covet!
Enough already!
As others have pointed out on the thread the idea of "proposition nation" is one beloved by the neo-cons. Now, I wouldn't call Greenfield a neo-con exactly, but still he is a Jewish intellectual on the right. He shares a background with them. His boss, David Horowitz, was a renowned neo-conservative before falling out with them.
Proposition nationalism says that anyone who believes in certain propositions can be an American. Originally one might have said belief in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, being inspired by the Declaration, believing in individual rights granted by God, belief in self-reliance and other 19th century sorts of ideas.
But that becomes more and more tenuous as even the actual citizens don't agree on those things: some favor self-reliance still, many vote for nanny state socialism. Some believe in armed civilians, many others don't.
If America took "propositon nationalism" at all seriously we'd make every citizen take a test and an oath at age 18 to become a citizen.
Proposition Nationalism is sometimes called Civic Nationalism, and it's surrounded by two other ideologies. On one side "globalism" that says that at the root we are all citizens of one world, and that things will work better if we tear down national boundaries. Most Globalists are leftists, but there is Libertarian-right version of this, and it has a long history in America going back at least as far as Albert J. Nock's famous "Our Enemy, the State".
And then on the other side you have the ethno-nationalists. They say that any real nation has to be based on a majority group with a shared heritage, language and culture. Their view of America is that it was founded as an Anglo-Protestant nation and is properly thought of as the nation of their progeny (for whom the Declaration tells us it was established). Many entho-naitonalists believe that the extension of the "Americanism" to involve later further flung ethnic groups from Europe was already problematical, and the idea of further extending it to masses of 3rd world people is disastrous. Irish, Catholics, Italians, Jews, and "Eastern Europeans" are thought to have been the first wave of unhappy extension of the ethno-state by many of these people.
The most famous exposition of this outlook in popular culture was in Spielberg's "Gangs of New York". While he did a pretty good job of showing both sides, his sympathies were clearly with the Irish, and not the nativist "know-nothing" gang of Bill the Butcher.
Greenfield is smart enough to know that the opposite of proposition nationalism is ethno-nationalism, but he doesn't want to go there. Instead he pushes the peas around on his plate. That's unlike him. But he's in a tough position. If he conterposes propostion nationalism with ethno-nationalism he is extolling a nation that many other ethno-nationalists would argue he's not really a part of.
Greenfield writes about Israel alot, and this same argument is playing out there, only much more strongly. The advocates of ethno-nationalism in the USA are a small and almost universally reviled minority. The Alt-Right, for instance. In Israel the ethno-nationalists are a serious voting block with a lot of political power. They tend to be "on the right" in Israeli politics, and they insist that Israel is a Jewish nation, and tend to have a biological view of Judiasm.
In the last several years their views have been codified into law. For instance, this article explains the current governments view on ethno-nationalism: "Netanyahu Says Israel Is 'Nation-State Of The Jewish People And Them Alone'". There is lots of opposition to these ideas, mostly from what is called the Israeli left, which wants a more "proposition nation" sort of definition of nationality for Israel.
Just like in the USA the "Nation for Jews and Jews Alone" is quite inconvenient. Israel has a large Arab population who are not Jews, but are certainly considered citizens today. How do they feel reading Netanyahu's statement and seeing it actually turned into law, and seeing that DNA tests are being used to determine citizenship? Probably a lot like a black American feels hearing the ideas of the America-as-ethnostate proponents: somewhere on a continuum between unhappy and absolutely furious.
Still, we have the example of the American Indians to remind us that the state of our progeny will not necessarily by a happy one in a minority-America, and any realistic evaluation of immigration and voting trends has to lead one to acknowledge that the propositions themselves are doomed by the ongoing ethnic reformation of America as Latino and minority-majority country.
These are really tough issues, I feel like Greenfield dodged them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_1988_presidential_campaign
from link:
He {Joe Biden} ran for President of the United States in the 1988 ... in September 1987, newspaper stories stated he had plagiarized a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock.
Other allegations of past law school plagiarism and exaggerating his academic record soon followed. Biden withdrew from the race later that month.
In 2018 democrats ran on ‘heath care’ - - then when they got to DC they ‘governed’ on endless investigations into Trump.
A well done essay/post.
An American politician uttered something about America being nothing more than ideals, dismissing the idea of it having anything to do with the people who created it, nor their children. See if you can guess who said it, and when:
“America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests, and teach us what it means to be citizens. Every child must be taught these principles. Every citizen must uphold them. And every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American.”
Sounds like Reagan. This is based on the American culture, not a set of abstract ideas.
It’s from Dubya’s first inaugural. Actually he was a major promoter of the Proposition Nation nonsense. It’s why he was utterly indifferent to what would happen when you flood the country with immigrants from countries having cultures incompatible with America’s culture. California is a monument to his thinking. Or lack of it.
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