by Matthew Boose
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 towards 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 Trump’s election in the first place. That frustration is with the fundamental unfairness of America’s current multiculturalist regime.
Multiculturalism declares that America is for “everyone,” except, of course, for those it pointedly excludes. Trump’s base are the Great Excluded. Until Trump came along, they were up for grabs politically, waiting for someone who cared about them and what they care about.
Leftists balk at the “bigotry” of Trump and his supporters. To them, nationalism is vulgar, uncouth, and racist by definition. They dismiss Trump supporters as racist. The Left’s lazy recourse to labeling everything “racist” says more about diversity politics than about the people leftists 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?
Certainly not, interjects the polite, well-educated leftist. It isn’t possible to be bigoted toward certain groups, namely, those which 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.
Fed Up With Multiculturalism
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 such a person is 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 English, or even enter the country legally, while they are accused with 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 of a certain race.
The Left will never stop accusing proud Americans of racism and xenophobia because multiculturalism asserts that America is sinful at its foundation 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 those who multiculturalism isolates as the enemy.
Anything which 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 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 to 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 despise it openly.
Stop Playing Their Game
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 simply to 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 roughly 1965.
Except this was never done democratically. Americans never voted to let 11 million (some say upwards of 22 million) illegal immigrants into their country. They never voted to send millions of jobs overseas. They never voted for gay marriage or abortion on demand. 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 breaking point, and it seems that in 2016, the American Right had just about had it. So they voted for the angry, Bad Orange Man who at least acknowledged how mad they were.
A New Nationalism Is the Logical Endpoint
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–k 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?
Where the Fight Leads
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 unpersoning 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 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 Great Excluded are 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. 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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Matthew Boose is a staff writer and weekly columnist at the Conservative Institute. His writing has also appeared in the Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter @matt_boose.
An excellent commentary and so true. I cringe when I think what America would be like if Clinton had been elected president. It would have been the last nail in the coffin of our Constitutional Freedoms. To get a glimpse of life under Liberalism you need look no further than California or any of the other blue states that people are fleeing due to high taxes and over regulation.
An issue not touched upon by the author is our right to self defense and the Second Amendment. The majority of Democratic (Liberal/Socialists) presidential candidates are telling the public that if they are elected they will severely restrict our Second Amendment rights, and some will go all the way to mandatory firearms registration. Look at what is happening in New Zealand right now. In the aftermath of a mass shooting the government passed knee jerk legislation outlawing most semi-automatic firearms with a buyback program that pays far less than the firearms worth. It has failed miserably as the majority of Kiwis refuse to turn in their firearms. Good for them! Now the government is working on legislation requiring mandatory registration. You can see the handwriting on the wall. Make no mistake, this is the future of America under the Left.
We as Conservatives, Christians, Deplorables, etc. have been ignored by the political elite, both Democratic and Republican, for too long. With the election of President Trump we now have a fighting chance to gain back the ground we lost over the last twenty years. If the Leftist Democrats take control of the government their retribution will be swift and sever. We must not let that happen or the fabric of our great nation will be torn to shreds by Liberal/Socialist oppression.