The Trump versus the “Squad” brouhaha merely affirms what pundits have been saying since Trump’s MAGA movement swept up the American right in 2016: American politics, from here on out, is American nationalism versus multiculturalism.
A drift on the American right toward nationalism, and deeper polarization between multiculturalism and nationalism, seems inexorable.
Trump’s “go back” tweets, and the ensuing chaos, expressed a widely felt frustration on the right — a feeling that led to his election in the first place. That frustration is with the fundamental unfairness of America’s multiculturalist regime.
Multiculturalism declares that America is for “everyone” — except for those, of course, who it pointedly excludes. Those in Trump’s base, in short, are the great excluded. Until Trump came along, they were politically up for grabs, waiting for someone who cared about them and what they care about.
Leftists balk at the “bigotry” of Trump and his supporters. But of course they find Trump supporters racist when nationalism, to them, is vulgar, uncouth, and racist by definition. The left’s labeling everything as “racist” says more about their diversity politics than about the people they constantly slander.
Many on the left now find it incontrovertible that Trump, and all his supporters, are xenophobes. Republican support for Trump went up after his tweets. How could so many Americans be so hateful?
But these charges merely add insult to the injury of the left’s abuse. What about leftist racism and bigotry? Doesn’t that count?
Of course not, interjects the polite, well-educated leftist. It isn’t possible to be bigoted toward certain groups — namely, those that enjoy the institutionalized hegemony of their colonialist ancestors, or whatever middlebrow shibboleths the badly educated are taught by their sociology professors to repeat.
But of course the left is bigoted, toward Christians, toward whites, toward American nationalists. There are two sets of rules, and the American right is chafing under the fundamental asymmetry of this political landscape.
The right is waging a pitched battle. Under the left’s rules of engagement, put in place by cultural enforcers in power, one must always defer to a “person of color” when they’re speaking “their truth.” Humans are apportioned their degree of moral worth based on how oppressed they are.
It’s the job of the “oppressors” to shut up and do what they’re told. The “oppressed” must all think the same way, too. Everyone must agree that America is racist in its very soul, a nation founded on genocide, that all Christians are homophobes, and that all white people are saddled with the original sins of Columbus and Hernando Cortes.
The right is fed up with multiculturalism, its asymmetrical rules, and its deleterious effects. They’re tired of being told that immigrants don’t need to assimilate, learn their language. or even enter the country legally, while they are called the worst names for wanting borders, a decent society, and the rule of law. They are tired of being disparaged by people who express manifest hatred for their nation, but who get a pass because they happen to be a certain race.
The left will never stop accusing proud Americans of racism and xenophobia because multiculturalism asserts that America is sinful at its core and needs to be fundamentally reimagined. America’s history is thought to be racist and in need of total revision. Its future belongs to “everyone” — that is, everyone except who multiculturalism isolates as the enemy.
Anything that belongs to tradition and heritage — American symbols, heroes, religious tradition — must be discarded, or else repurposed. Anyone who contradicts this vision is a “racist,” and the Founders are racists too, except for when their writings can be used to justify open borders. The Bible — rather than a book of wisdom and truth, a cultural touchstone — is a historical source document to be disingenuously cited to support this or that “woke” policy.
Multiculturalism’s god is diversity. It hates the very things that make a country prosper — cultural cohesion, morals, social trust, a national identity — while valuing the very things that lay nations low. In place of fertility and careful stewardship of culture, multiculturalism preaches anti-natalism and cultural suicide.
Nationalism and love of country are equated with xenophobia. Christianity is branded as hateful and homophobic, a relic of the past, and morals are mocked — or else suspected of harboring a secret, malevolent agenda. The rule of law, citizenship, and borders are “racist” and exclusionary, solely because they refer to a distinct nation and people.
Elected officials who encourage immigrants not to assimilate, to defy the law and trample over American sovereignty, who want to abolish the meaning and distinction of citizenship, are lauded as heroes — not because they love America, but because they openly despise it.
Standing against the left’s vicious, resentful, race-obsessed multiculturalism is the “love it or leave it” nationalism of the right: “It doesn’t matter what your skin color is or where you’re from. If you don’t love this country, you can leave.”
But under multiculturalism, it is okay for the left to disparage Americans and their country with impunity, to persecute and slander and abuse anyone who stands in their way. Americans are ordered to simply lie down and take it.
Trump challenged this whole con game, and the left is furious. They’re not angry because Trump is “racist.” They’re mad because he called out the diversity scam. Is it any wonder that his supporters like him more for it?
The American right has boiled in helplessness under these rules for decades. It seems that, finally, as they witness the brazen theft of their country by unscrupulous people who hate their nation, who think it is wicked at its core and needs to be fundamentally reimagined, they are just about fed up.
Until now — that is, until Trump — the left forced its elite ideology on the American public without any pushback. This was a fundamentally non-democratic endeavor. Leftists captured power with a “long march” through the institutions, and through generations of networking, activism, and ceaseless intimidation, they created a new American religion — multiculturalism — to replace and suppress everything that came before circa 1965.
Except this was never done democratically. Americans never voted to let 11 million illegal immigrants into their country. They never voted to send millions of jobs overseas. They never voted for gay marriage or Roe v. Wade. They never voted to have their schools and universities staffed by woke scolds to tell their children what sorry, shameful, racist, misogynist monsters they are. They never voted to have Christianity chased from the public square and relegated to the cultural status of a yoga class.
Everybody has their boiling point, and it seems that in 2016, the American right had just about had it. So they voted for the angry orange man who at least acknowledged how mad they were.
Fast forward to 2020, and the landscape hasn’t changed much — with one exception. The leftists who spent decades spitting on the “bigots” have multiplied their arrogance and their bile.
Before, it was “compassionate immigration reform.” Now, it’s abolish ICE, borders, and citizenship. Before, it was equality for the races. Now, it’s f*** white people. Before, it was “safe, legal, and rare.” Now, it’s infanticide at any time, for any reason. Before, it was “tolerance” and “marriage equality.” Now, it’s a liturgical season of compulsory, ecstatic celebration.
So, yes, nationalism is the future of the American right. It’s Newton’s Third Law of Politics. The American right’s pivot to nationalism is just the logical consequence of nationalism having been suppressed for so long.
National pride is a natural feeling. Human beings weren’t made to hate their country. No amount of political re-education can breed out the love in one’s heart for their homeland, neither can it suppress the human craving for what is true and good.
Leftism seeks to suppress the irrepressible, because it must stifle, at last, our humanity. It must quash curiosity, humor, common sense, virtue, patriotism, and faith.
Americans today are living through a social experiment, now 50 years running at least, accelerating in the last few years, that runs against the grain of human nature and common sense. For masses of people, it seems that the country is simply upside-down. The good and the true are spurned, while the wicked and the false are uplifted.
Late-term abortion is cherished as an inalienable right, as a positive good, while the nuclear family is assailed as a retrograde bastion of bigotry. Genders multiply without warning. Religious feeling is muted and diminished, allowed to exist in an alley of an alley of an alley of the public square and reduced to little more than a spiritualist hobby — tax-free.
Americans are told that they are inferior, less American, than people they have never heard of from halfway across the world, who cannot speak their language and have never set foot in their country. They are told that they are insane for doubting that the American president is a Russian agent.
Their religion is mocked by jackasses on television and in the mass media. The only time their faith is invoked is when it is used as a weapon against them. They are told constantly how privileged and powerful they are, and yet they feel distinctly the opposite.
To add insult to these thousand cuts, they are told that if they dare to complain, if they dare to disobey, then there is no slander too vicious for them. They must be exposed as bigots, racists, and Nazis, and chased from public life, fired from their jobs, and forced to eke out an existence in obscurity, isolation, and shame.
Now, doesn’t that sound reasonable?
Human beings can only take so much nonsense and abuse. The world that the left has created is a massive lie, propped up by relentless propaganda and threats of un-personing to anyone who would pull back the curtain. Masses of Americans are being made to bear witness to evil and plain absurdity. They are being enjoined to celebrate that the world has been turned upside down.
The virtual reality that leftism requires must appear seamless. It must appear that no other world is desirable or even possible. But its principles are too obviously divorced from reality and common sense for people to accept them without the constant threat of reputational harm. The more they protest, the more obvious the cracks in this artificial world appear, the louder the enforcers scream: “Diversity is our strength!”
The left plainly realizes that this is not a recipe for peace, because they are willing war. They realize that what they want is unnatural, that it requires immense suppression and abuse, constant reinforcement of obvious, obtuse falsehoods, just to keep the experiment humming along.
And what have decent Americans done to deserve all this? Is it because their ancestors once owned slaves — which in the case of most, isn’t even true anyway? Or that they think men and women are different, and that to will oneself a different sex doesn’t make it so? That they have certain rights as citizens, and that nations should be sovereign?
Most look around them and they don’t see a country that is filled with racism and hate — except for the hate that is directed at them, from Hollywood actors, from the glossy pages of prestigious newspapers, even their elected officials! They encounter this contempt everywhere they look. It can’t be tuned out; it saturates their culture, assails them from all directions.
It has dawned on the American right that in our multiculturalist regime, they are not treated equally. They can see that the left clearly and manifestly hates their country, their religion, their race, but they are not allowed to push back.
Is it any wonder that the American right is clinging to Trump ever more tenaciously? Trump’s supporters have been called racist so often, for so little, it no longer means anything to them. Now they are being told to abandon the one person who represents them — and that it if they don’t, then they are the lowest of the low — because he singled out four ungrateful narcissists who despise them and their country.
The left isn’t offended by the “racism” of Trump. They’re offended by the audaciousness of people who refuse to play by their rules.
Now the left, more urgently than ever, wants to suppress, shame, and disenfranchise the Right out of existence. The left strategizes in the open how best to do it: abolish the electoral college, perhaps the Senate? Or would it be more expeditious to have an open borders policy and simply import Democratic voters?
Trump’s supporters have wised up to the con game. They realize that the future of the country belongs to “everyone” — except them. The more the left attacks national pride, national sovereignty, citizenship, and immigration restrictions as racist, the more nationalist the right will become.
It seems inevitable that the right, having realized they have nothing to lose, will become more unapologetically nationalist. They understand that the left will keep calling them racists and bigots until they no longer have a country left to defend.
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