Opinion Tim Walz and JD Vance are having the argument that matters: In his convention speech, Tim Walz articulated a view of America sharply contrasting with JD Vance’s. - "Literally speaking, this is not debatable; America exists, it is a nation and it has a history. But Vance isn’t being literal. He is articulating the central idea that animates all forms of nationalism (including the white variety), as well as the Trump movement. He is arguing that there is such thing as a common American culture, with its own language (English), its own religious ethos (Judeo-Christian) and its own concept of family (heterosexual, with naturally conceived children).
"Of course there’s room for immigration and racial diversity in Vance’s worldview; his own wife is of Indian descent. But in his view of America, the outsider becomes American by adopting a set of cultural norms — living here “on our terms,” as he put it in his speech. In this way, he sees America as no different, really, from France or Russia or any other country with common ethnic heritage. The price of admission is cultural conformity.
What Walz articulates — about as clearly as anyone has in the party since Barack Obama arrived on the scene 20 years ago — is a competing view that says, no, actually America is very much an idea. Alone among nations, we have from the very start been a collection of immigrants and outsiders, bound together not by any common origin or culture, but rather by a common set of laws and values and institutions — what Abraham Lincoln called our 'political religion.' (This is the liberal version of “American Exceptionalism” — the thing that makes us different from everyplace else.)"
No comments:
Post a Comment