H. W. Crocker III at American Greatness makes an important point about making American great again (MAGA) in our culture — and education is key:
To win the culture war we need to recapture the imagination of this country, especially its young people, reminding them what it means—and what it meant—to be an American.
Here is the article’s opening:
Christopher Columbus was an immigrant, but it hasn’t done him much good in the eyes of the Left. The Left in this case prefers someone like Elizabeth Warren, who can claim to be as much as 1/1024th “Native American.” Big whoop.
Perhaps the Left is consumed by massive anti-Italian prejudice—blaming pasta production and winemaking for releasing greenhouse gases, or something. More likely the Left hates Columbus because he planted a cross in the New World. He was a Catholic and a representative of Western Civilization, so the Left—all those white liberals—would rather that Warren’s distant ancestors had chopped off Columbus’s head and torn out his heart, because liberalism, as James Burnham reminded us long ago, is the ideology of Western suicide.
Burnham made his point by looking at maps showing the spread of Western influence, and then its retreat. Liberalism, he argued, was the emollient force that justified and vindicated the decline (and eventual suicide) of the West.
What Burnham saw globally we can see locally in the Left’s unending attacks not just on Columbus but on traditional American history and heroes.
Beyond the ritualistic incantations of “racism” and “genocide,” the Left sees American expansion—geopolitical and cultural—as bad, (and points to Andrew Jackson and George Armstrong Custer as among its chief villains) and American retreat as good. Obsessed by race and sex and “white male privilege” the Left gauges American retreat in largely racial terms—the “browning” of America—made even more exciting by the overthrow of “heteronormativism” with LGBTQ et al. education in elementary school. After all, there’s not much point in importing brown people if they stay Christian (and thus descendants of Columbus’s imperialism).
Read more: American Greatness
