Read Dov Fischer’s “So Where Do They Come From?“, and then these related posts (if you haven’t already done so):
Tag: Americanism
Anti-Americanism
As I say in “Americanism … from the Left,”
the left holds an unbounded view of Americanism: Everyone who wants to be an American, and to enjoy the privileges attaching thereto, should be considered one. How else could leftists — the enemies of the Constitution, the common defense, justice, and private property — claim to be my fellow citizens?
What a laughable claim. Leftists are no more American than their heroes, from Stalin and Mao to Castro and Chavez.
Now comes Olen Steinhauer, a novelist who is associated with Austin, Texas — a.k.a., the San Francisco of Texas — to affirm my observation. In a review of John le Carré’s latest outpouring, A Delicate Truth, Steinhauer writes about a character whose
appearance among the sophisticates of the Foreign Ministry is like a slap in the face, and while she’s ushered offstage quickly, you’d be forgiven for seeing in her caricature evidence of the accusation leveled at le Carré regularly these days: anti-Americanism.
Having lived in Europe for the last decade, I’m particular about how to use that label. To me, “anti-American” means just that: to be contemptuous of Americans, one and all. I’ve met those people. Blinded by their ignorance, they’re to be scorned. But then there is John le Carré, whose January 2003 argument against the Iraq war, printed in The Times of London, was called “The United States of America Has Gone Mad.” He made his ire plain: he was against the foreign policy of an American administration he despised. If this is what qualifies him, then half of our own population is anti-American.
This passage reveals Steinhauer as a sophist of the first order. Anyone who has read very much of le Carré’s oeuvre (as I have) knows that there is much more to his anti-Americanism than his dislike of a particular administration’s foreign policy. Anyone who knows American politics (as I do) knows that much of the opposition to G.W. Bush’s foreign policy was reflexive opposition to a president who was perceived as a defender of traditional American values. To be blunt about it, Bush’s greatest sin (in the left’s view of things) was to attack America’s enemies instead of “understanding” them and “respecting” their (twisted) values.
Based on the evidence of the last presidential election, it is not unreasonable to say that half of our own population is anti-American.
Americanism … from the Left
The surviving Boston Marathon bomber is not an enemy combatant, according to the White House, because he is an American citizen. Ah so! All that a terrorist must do to be accorded his Miranda rights is to slip behind the veil of citizenship. He will then be treated like a common criminal (murderers being no more than common criminals in the left’s taxonomy of crime) and afforded the luxury of years of trials and appeals before he receives anything remotely resembling justice. He certainly will not be subjected to interrogation of the kind that could reveal other terrorists and terrorist plots.
This is of a piece with the left’s embrace of illegal (oops!) undocumented immigrants, who — in the left’s view — are just Americans who happen to be citizens of other countries. Not to mention that they are also prospective voters who will help the left to sustain and expand the welfare state upon which illegal immigrants feed.
It seems that the left holds an unbounded view of Americanism: Everyone who wants to be an American, and to enjoy the privileges attaching thereto, should be considered one. How else could leftists — the enemies of the Constitution, the common defense, justice, and private property — claim to be my fellow citizens?
What a laughable claim. Leftists are no more American than their heroes, from Stalin and Mao to Castro and Chavez.
Politics and Prosperity 