Andy Caldwell
I surely miss the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.” One particular cartoon I saved featured Calvin stating that, “I am writing a fund-raising letter. The secret to getting donations is to depict everyone who disagrees with you as the enemy. Then you explain how they’re systematically working to destroy everything you hold dear. It is a war of values! Rational discussion is hopeless! Our only hope is well-funded antagonism, so we need your money to keep up the fight.”
Hobbes responds, “How cynically unconstructive.”
Calvin replies, “Enmity sells.”
There you have the perfect synopsis of politics in America today. Truth be told, both the left and the right can serve to promote such cynicism, albeit I am of the opinion that the progressive movement has perfected the same as an art form, a religion and as a political strategy.
Along those lines, Paul Krause, writing for American Thinker, wrote a piece titled “Antifa and the Collectivist Way of War,” which had this to say: “We are told that there is a war on women. We are told that there is a war against minorities. We are told that there is a war on gays, lesbians, and the rest of the imaginary rainbow. We are told that there is a war on poor people. We are told that there is a war on decency and civility. There is a war on everything, according to the Left. And they use this prop of war to front themselves as champions of the “new freedom,” which is, in reality, a front for further collectivist control.”
Mr. Krause goes on to say, “The new liberal, who is a Bolshevik in all but name, fronts himself as a champion of engineered liberty, which is to say he controls what freedoms the population will be allowed to have. Collectivism thrives on war. In fact, it needs war. Collectivism demands the mobilization of people to advance its aims. It is necessary for collectivists to always have an existential threat which allows for the perpetuation of mobilized society.”
So, what happened to the principle of “E Pluribus Unum” and the phenomenon of the American melting pot? Unfortunately, they were replaced by the campaign for multiculturalism, which gave birth to identity politics and the victim class.
Daniel Greenfield, writing for Frontpage Magazine, argues all this came about by no accident; instead, it was the product of a cynical political strategy, that of identity politics, which promotes the politics of tribalism. That is, America has become a fractured country whose inhabitants now identify as members of warring tribes, fueled and fed by indoctrination involving tolerance, white privilege and racial consciousness.
Our nation’s only hope? An appeal to national unity based on our history and our common values, which the left would have us believe is a trick by the elites to protect the status quo of — you guessed it — white privilege.
The truth is, nationalism is healthy if it is promoted as a form of patriotism and loyalty to our country, and it can serve as the antidote to the acrimony of division and the poison of racism, including false charges of racism, which the left likes to hurl every chance it gets.
There is no denying that the left in America seeks to consolidate its power by way of dividing the body politic. Morever, the most radical elements of the movement would not only divide our country, they would eliminate it altogether. “No borders, No walls, No USA at all” is the slogan that says it all. Of course, they are rejecting not only our nation, but the concepts, fruits and history of Western Civilization as a whole, despite the fact that nothing worthwhile is capable of replacing the same.
