This person’s mind is missing several gears and is operated with a hand crank.
Her premise is a call to a more inclusive society through a more reverent nationalism.
She identifies our inability to worship a collective exceptionalist version of America as the reason for our inability to coalesce as a diverse people.
This is insane.
She identifies our inability to worship a collective exceptionalist version of America as the reason for our inability to coalesce as a diverse people.
This is insane.
McArdle is like every other center-right pundit in that her beliefs require ignoring available evidence in favor of a self-nourishing and fictional abstraction.
Nationalism always harnesses a religious reverent patriotism; never in the service of a more diverse inclusion.
By suggesting we achieve a culture that celebrates assimilationist diversity with that harness, McArdle puts a caravan of carts before her already-tired horse.
By suggesting we achieve a culture that celebrates assimilationist diversity with that harness, McArdle puts a caravan of carts before her already-tired horse.
On top of this, it’s clearly a bad-faith argument.
I was about to do a line-by-line look at her thread to examine all the places where she demonstrates that a more inclusive diversity is not her goal at all, but then I came to my senses.
But I will say this:
I was about to do a line-by-line look at her thread to examine all the places where she demonstrates that a more inclusive diversity is not her goal at all, but then I came to my senses.
But I will say this:
You know who reverently embraces patriotism? Immigrants.
Nationalist Americans currently favor harassment and denaturalization and deportation and psychological torture of immigrants.
McArdle would assay the concerns of the latter as equal—at least—to that of the former.
Nationalist Americans currently favor harassment and denaturalization and deportation and psychological torture of immigrants.
McArdle would assay the concerns of the latter as equal—at least—to that of the former.
Let me suggest that an honest pride of country is possible, but it must be earned daily, not just believed in abstractly.
A country that centers the concerns of the latter as equal to that of the former hasn’t earned an honest patriotism.
A country that centers the concerns of the latter as equal to that of the former hasn’t earned an honest patriotism.
A person who insists on their own greatness without doing the hard work necessary to gain and maintain greatness will experience psychological discomfort, which will frequently reveal itself as hostility, and will inevitably be exposed.
So, too, with countries.
So, too, with countries.
Our problem isn’t a lack of symbolic patriotism.
It’s not enough honesty and fortitude to do the work necessary to earn it.
It’s not enough honesty and fortitude to do the work necessary to earn it.
Final thought: McArdle, like so many of her peers, is to her profession of public thinker what America presently is to greatness of inclusion: a fraud.
It’s unsurprising she’d find an impenetrable symbolic coating masking a great emptiness an attractive solution.
It’s unsurprising she’d find an impenetrable symbolic coating masking a great emptiness an attractive solution.
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