Thread by @JewhadiTM

Biden is Wrong: America is a Reality, Not an Idea

The safe space election is here. frontpagemag.com/fpm/273594/bid…

“America is an idea," Joe Biden gravely intoned, as he threw the 21st hat onto the overcrowded hat rack of the Democrat primaries already groaning under the weight of all the trilbys, clown caps and hijabs.

Biden is a compulsive plagiarist and the idea that America is an idea, like his hair, isn’t his own.

It’s also wrong.

America as an idea has lately been bandied about by John Kasich, Senator Chris Coons, Senator Lindsey Graham, and even Bono. Biden not only showed up late to the primaries, but late to the idea of an idea.

America isn’t an idea. It’s a place. The name of our nation comes from a 15th century Italian named Amerigo Vespucci who didn’t visit an ideal, but a real continent. Amerigo’s name doesn’t even represent an ideal.

It means master workman, or, more crudely, boss. A pragmatic name for a pragmatic nation.

Even our national anthem is grounded by being set in the present of an actual battle.

The “rockets” and “bombs”, even the “twilight’s last gleaming”, poetic though it is, are actual realities seen by the author. Its only intangible ideas are “land of the free and home of the brave” and “in God is our trust”.

And the anthem insists on forcing us to see how these convictions played out in reality and at what great cost.

Much of our greatness does come from an idea. It’s not, as Joe Biden claims, “bigger than an ocean”. It’s as small as the individual.

The British Empire that we twice defeated claimed to rule the oceans. America’s pride was that the individual worker, not a king or a president, ruled his nation and himself.

The British had one king. America had millions of kings and queens.

Many nations have had such ideas. What made America unique was not that we had the idea, but that, unlike the rest of the world, we made it a reality.

And we didn’t do it through empty theories, but through a system of representative government backed by hard limitations on that government.

The Amerigo or American became his own boss, not through empty ideals, but through his hard work.

Politicians like Biden who talk about America as an idea like that idea; they just hate the reality. That’s why Biden’s video insists that the 2016 election was an “aberration”. It wasn’t, as Obama liked to tell us, “who we are”.

But the reality of America is that politicians don’t tell us who we are. We tell them who we are. When it works Obama’s way, that idea of America destroys both the reality and the idea.