PA Bill Number: HB829
Title: In preliminary provisions, further providing for definitions;
Description: An Act amending the act of April 12, 1951 (P.L.90, No.21), known as the Liquor Code, in preliminary provisions, further providing for definitions;
Last Action: Signed in House
Last Action Date: Jul 3, 2024
American: The Identity Group for the Rest of Us :: 10/26/2018
There’s prattle in the news about the President’s claim that he’s a nationalist, as if that word means to Donald Trump what it means to the hand-wringing academics and left-wing pundits who wait breathlessly for evidence that he’s the fascist monster they need him to be.
I’m pretty sure that, for President Trump, “nationalist” and “America first” and “make America great again” are all much the same, merely anodyne — in a sane world — calls for a sense of national identity, enthusiasm, and patriotism. Further, I suspect that the President uses them because he has an intuitive sense that they appeal to a large number of Americans whom the Democratic Party ignores.
The Democrats are obsessed with identity, so much so that creating and politicizing identity groups has essentially subsumed the party’s platform and become its most coherent political strategy. Creating group identity is a prerequisite to asserting group victimhood, the latter necessary if you’re going to use resentment and outrage as the key to your get out the vote strategy.
But everyone can’t be a victim; someone has to be the privileged oppressor. I suppose we’re fortunate that the Democratic left has chosen a large, relatively secure demographic — white people and, most specifically, white men — to play the role of universal villain. In other times and places, less robust scapegoats have been used: Jews, for example.
One might expect that those Americans forced by popular culture to wear the arm band of the oppressor, of the unconscious micro-aggressor, of the bigot-whether-we-know-it-or-not, of the privileged, would eventually sanction the identity label thrust upon us by our accusers if only as an act of self-defense. We see a little bit of that kind of ugliness in the misanthropic fringes of the right, in the handful of unstable outliers and losers who welcome any excuse to rally proudly around their lack of pigmentation. But the vast majority of us, who lack any plausible victim status and who must, in the righteous illogic of the left, therefore be oppressors, have not become white supremacists or anything of the sort.
What I think many of us have done is assert an identity that we actually do share, a real and meaningful identity that wasn’t invented in a hyperactive humanities department or leftist salon. We’ve embraced our identity as Americans.
I have always been proud to be an American, but I nonetheless am aware of an increasing desire, in recent years, to assert my American identity. At the same time and, I think, not coincidentally, we’ve all witnessed an increasing tendency on the left to condemn America and anything that might be considered uniquely or especially American. I think the idea that there might be a single identity group that could contain us all is offensive to the left. It is certainly not useful to them, in that it discourages the kind of internecine strife that justifies the left’s outrage and fuels its turnout machine.
If we choose to see, as I do, the 2016 election as, at least in part, a push-back by the innocent and frustrated accused against their glib and self-righteous accusers, then we should take comfort from the fact that the right did not call into being the very thing the left pretends it is, a mob of angry white men bent on securing their mystical privilege.
Rather, the right chose to embrace an inclusive label, one that every one of us can claim equally. If you want evidence that racism and sexism and all the rest are the peculiar obsession of the left, consider that the left makes its groups ever smaller, more numerous, and more exclusive, while the right clings — and is criticized for that — to the most inclusive yet meaningful label available to us all: American.
https://ricochet.com/566064/american-the-identity-group-for-the-rest-of-us/
