Our Country, If We Can Keep It

I love this country because it’s my own.

What it’s all about. Source

Today is Independence Day, the most important of holidays in the United States, and the last thing I want is for you to spend it reading my musings. However, given the significance of this holiday for me, I don’t want it to pass without getting some thoughts off my chest.

So, thank you readers for subscribing and for taking time out of your day to read what I have to say.

Perpetual Foreigner Educates Us On What America Is

Front-runner to become New York City’s next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, had this to say on the anniversary of our founding:

America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home. Happy Independence Day. No Kings in America.

Well, if he says so. I think it speaks volumes that nobody can just speak well of this country without caveating with something like “contradictory” and “unfinished.” Not to mention none of it really means anything - show me a country on this planet that isn’t contradictory in some sense, that’s finished in any meaningful way. It just doesn’t mean what leftists think it means.

The bigger issue here is that Mamdani is a foreigner. Yes, he’s a citizen of this country. But even by civic nationalist standards, Mamdani isn’t an American. The fact he’s running for New York mayor doesn’t bother me, because I don’t live there and New York has always been city of foreigners. But it does trouble me that Mamdani, whose values are boilerplate grievances against the West as a whole, thinks he’s in any position to say what America is and isn’t. And spare me the excuse that it’s his “right.” We all have the right to be wrong. What America is and isn’t is for Americans to decide, not for someone whose understanding of this country is so flawed, so superficial.

By the way - Mamdani suddenly has begun referring to himself as “Zohran Kwame Mamdani.” Kwame is apparently his real middle name, but why all of a sudden has he featured it on his public profile?

Does this have something to do with it?

As he runs for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani has made his identity as a Muslim immigrant of South Asian descent a key part of his appeal.

But as a high school senior in 2009, Mr. Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, claimed another label when he applied to Columbia University. Asked to identify his race, he checked a box that he was “Asian” but also “Black or African American,” according to internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with The New York Times.

Columbia, like many elite universities, used a race-conscious affirmative action admissions program at the time. Reporting that his race was Black or African American in addition to Asian could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and spent his earliest years there.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Mamdani, 33, said he did not consider himself either Black or African American, but rather “an American who was born in Africa.” He said his answers on the college application were an attempt to represent his complex background given the limited choices before him, not to gain an upper hand in the admissions process. (He was not accepted at Columbia.)

This fits into a broader trend on the Left - they take their open-ended attitude towards identity quite literally. Elizabeth Warren famously referred to herself as Native American in official paperwork. Robert O’Rourke refers to himself as “Beto” so he can appeal to Hispanic voters. Now, you have Mamdani identifying as Black or African.

There’s a common thread here: adopting an identity not their own for the purposes of self-advancement. A lot of leftists rushed to Mamdani’s defense, but remember the outrage when Elon Musk identified as African American? That was totally as a joke, too, but boy, did leftists and liberals take it seriously. Meanwhile, Mamdani called himself Black to increase his likelihood of acceptance at Columbia University, but there’s apparently no problem with this. Claiming that being born in Uganda justifies this makes as much sense as calling himself White had he been born in the U.S.

Leftists, Whites especially, fell all over themselves defending or rationalizing Mamdani’s choice, but as Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry says:

The same thing applies to when people like Mamdani refer to themselves as Americans. Like I said a few essays back, people like him are Americans only when they need to be. They become something else when they need to be also, like when applying to universities. The folly of civic nationalism is that everyone needs to agree on the ideas which supposedly form the basis of our shared identity. But what the Mamdanis, Warrens, and O’Rourkes are doing is taking things to a whole different level. They are changing identities the same way one changes their clothes for the sole purpose of self-benefit. If they could gain something out of identifying as a descendant of Nazis, they’d consider doing so.

For now, it’s to their benefit to identify as Americans. Once that benefit goes away, we’re going to see just how much being American means to them. An identity you can take on and cast off at will doesn’t mean much. I think the Mamdanis of the world know it.

As Righteous A Revolution As Any

Writing for City Journal in 2012, its former editor-in-chief, Myron Magnet, reminds us all that most revolutions aren’t like America’s:

Why was the American Revolution, of all great revolutions, the only successful one, resulting in two centuries and more of unexampled freedom and prosperity? The French Revolution, by contrast, illuminated by America’s example and Enlightenment thought, began in blissful optimism but collapsed into a blood-soaked tyranny much worse than the monarchy it deposed. It spawned a military dictatorship that convulsed Europe and roiled half the globe for over a decade with wars of grandiose imperial aggression that slew at least 3 million. And the result of 25 years of turmoil? The Bourbon monarchy, minus the Enlightenment of its earlier incarnation, settled comfortably back down on its throne.

The Russian Revolution switched one despotism for another; and a century later, after the millions of deaths from its purges, slave camps, and intentionally inflicted famines, Russia remains a despotism, without rights or justice. We all get only one life: imagine someone born under the billowing flags of the new Soviet Union in 1917, who had to live that whole single life without the freedom so much as to speak the truth of the squalid, oppressive reality he saw in front of his own eyes. One single life—and what you can make of the one you have depends so much on what others have done to mold the time and place in which you live.

So why was the American Revolution so tame, at least by comparison? Why didn’t it lead to years upon years of tremendous bloodshed and tyranny? None of this is to suggest the American Revolution wasn’t violent, nor that the years following it weren’t full of retribution and vindictiveness - there was plenty - but it was still a far cry from the insane body counts France and Russia racked up.

Here’s why, according to Magnet:

A key reason the revolution succeeded was its strictly limited scope. The Founders sought only liberty, not equality or fraternity. They aimed to make a political revolution, not a social or an economic one. Their Lockean social-contract political philosophy taught them that the preservation of individual liberty was the goal of politics. Its basis was the surrender of a portion of man’s original, natural freedom to a government that would protect the large remainder of it better than any individual could do on his own—the freedom to make your own fate and think your own thoughts without fear of bodily harm, unjust imprisonment, or robbery. The Founders’ study of history taught them that the British constitution under which they had lived—“originally and essentially free,” as Boston preacher Jonathan Mayhew described it—was the ideal embodiment of such a contract. It was “the most perfect combination of human powers in society,” John Adams wrote in 1766, “for the preservation of liberty and the production of happiness”—until George III began to violate it. So Americans didn’t take up arms to create a new world order according to some abstract theory. They sought only to restore the political liberty they had actually experienced for 150 years, and they constructed their new government to preserve it.

Long story short, the American Revolution wasn’t a revolution, not really. It didn’t seek to establish a new sociopolitical order. It didn’t try to re-write the rules. If anything, it was a reactionary revolt, and attempt at re-establishing what had been up until recently. Breaking away from Britain, establishing a new country, it was all a means to that end. It wasn’t about creating a new normal, it was about restoring what had been normal.

It reminded me what Dr. David Betz has been saying, about how the coming civil war in the West will be triggered by what he calls a “peasant revolt.” What motivates a peasant revolt isn’t ideology or a desire to create a new order. Instead, it’s motivated by a feeling the rules of the game have changed without their consent, a sense that the social contract has been violated. This is quite different from thinking that wholesale changes are necessary, which cannot be achieved without tremendous amounts of violence and brow-beating. It’s also much more difficult to convince people to try something new than to go back to the way things used to be.

We should all be thankful that the Founders only wanted to preserve what they had. We should be thankful they weren’t motivated by resentment towards people they felt had something they wanted, that our revolution wasn’t about vengeance. Had the American Revolution been driven by ideology or vengeance, who knows if America would still be here today?

We should also all be thankful that there are Americans out there who want only to keep their country. Our culture today considers these people dangerous, but our culture is defined by the same people who seek to impose a new order on America.

As history has proven, these are actually the most dangerous people of all.

Illegals Are More American Than You. Deal With It.

Earlier today, I tweeted:

On this Independence Day, never forget that Juan who will cross the border illegally a second from now and abuela who has lived here illegally for 20 years after being told to leave are both more American than Washington and your ancestors who arrived in 1700.

Clearly, I’m being sarcastic. I’m also satirizing what the Left claims to believe. If anyone from any part of the world can come to America and be American, if nobody can be more American than any other, then what I said has to be true out of logical consistency.

Of course, nobody really believes this. Leftists and liberals often remind nationalistic non-Whites and immigrants that they’ll never be truly American because they’re not White, they or their parents are from a foreign country, etc. The same way Mamdani called himself Black when he thought it’d benefit him to do so, they’ll believe anyone can become American just by coming here when it allows them to convey a narrative.

It’s also an attitude borne out of envy and grievance, the “Everyone’s A Winner” mentality applied to nationhood. If even one person is denied the opportunity to become American, then it must be denied to all. Obviously, this is an untenable stance - do people who are never going to have a chance to own a home, like me, have a justification to burn down houses? Actually, some on the Left might agree with that sentiment, as long as it’s not their house being burned down.

Still, they’ll say it, because it not only justifies letting the whole world into the country, but because some part of them believes it, too. You can be a true American, you can believe in the ideas and motivations this country was founded upon (1776 values, not today’s values), your ancestors could’ve come to this country in the 17th century. None of it matters in a time when America is a “nation of immigrants,” when civic nationalism is the only permissible form of nationhood, when the country is little more than an international airport (by the way, airports don’t let anyone just come or stay).

In today’s fading America, the person who showed up just now is more American than anyone else. That’s the message recent events are sending us. Not even the Founders and the revolutionaries can lay claim to the country; we were nothing without foreigners and we’ll be nothing once the foreigners leave. Never mind foreigners come here because America offers them something they can’t find back in their native lands. America exists for the benefit of everyone except its own, and when the benefits can no longer be provisioned, it’s meant to be replaced.

With what, I don’t know. I do know the replace-ists and replacers aren’t the type to build something great.

We Are Who We Are

Let’s close on something positive. If someone asked why anyone loves America, why anyone thinks it’s the best country in the world, most would probably say something like “freedom.” The reality is, patriotism in America, to the extent it exists, is cosmetic, commercialized, what friend and historian Nicole Williams described as “little flags made in China that appear to be American flags, eagles, maybe a little Lee Greenwood, and that’s the extent of what it means to be an American. Maybe throw around some words like ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty.’”

Freedom and liberty are certainly wonderful things. America wouldn’t be the same place without them. But they’re not why I love this country. You won’t see me decked out in red, white, and blue. You won’t see my social media feeds packed with super-patriotic displays of warplanes, horses, fast cars, none of that. That’s not what my patriotism looks like, and again, not why I love this country. Instead, I love America because, well, it’s my country. Is that really all there is to it?

A lot of people, today especially, think that there’s no way to love something you never chose for yourself. I certainly didn’t choose to be American. A lot of people also think that if being American is a privilege, it’s nothing to be proud of, because it wasn’t earned. I saw a widely-propagated post on social media a few weeks ago saying just that, using it as an argument against deporting illegal immigrants. We didn’t earn it, so we can’t reserve it for ourselves. Left unsaid is why being an American became a privilege. It wasn’t through illegal immigration, that’s for certain.

This obsession over “choice,” assessing value to something based on whether one had a hand in it or not, is simply not a sensible way of looking at the world. We are all creatures of circumstance as much as we are choice. In fact, we may have less choice in life than we imagine. If you’re lucky enough to be born with great, loving parents, does that mean you shouldn’t value your parents? Not even most cynical leftist would make that argument about their own parents.

So I’ll be frank: I love this country because it’s my own. I love this country my family is here, my friends are here, my people are here, we share a language, a history, and yes, we share a culture. The community depicted in the photograph leading this post is what I love and aspire to. Children of all races dancing as their national ancestors, the colonists, did, that’s what I love. That’s what’s American to me.

We are who we are, and we don’t need to explain ourselves to anyone. We can always say “no,” too.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about that. Happy Independence Day, everyone!

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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