The slow, slow fading of the color line is one of the most important long-term trends in America’s self-understanding–the inexorable expansion of who gets to be part of the American folk community. Once, Irish Catholics, Italians, and Czechs couldn’t take part in the Jacksonian tradition. Now they’re the heart and soul of it. Hispanics are now headed in that direction.
RTWT
(Hat tip: James McCormick)
It’s a great country.
It is a great country isn’t it? And isn’t it nice to say that without any qualification or throat-clearing to show you are well read and a right-thinker (we are a great country, but, what about our history of x or y?) Just a simple expression of love for a very, very nice place.
It is a great country. We are lucky to be here. That is a verifiable fact. People vote with their feet. They want to be here, they want to move here, they want their children to grow up here. They are not rushing for the exits.
Every human being, let alone every long-lasting human institution, such as a country, has a mixed history, good and bad, very good and very bad. You judge it, as we lawyers say, no the totality of the circumstances.
On that standard, America is a great country. And as W.R. Mead points out, the majority of people, at some level, know this and want to preserver and protect what we have here. That is all to the good.
Our habitual use of the word “white” to lump together all Americans of primarily european descent counts as one of histories great but unsung achievements.
As late as WWII, europeans of all stripes regularly viewed Europeans of different nationalities as belonging to different races entirely. Worse, the concept of race at that time was closer to our modern concept of sub-species. The idea that Europeans could live together in a collective polity was unthinkable. Yet, during the same period in America all these sub-species and ancient enemies lived together in piece and eventually fused into one conceptual group.
The very fact that many in America today complain about “White” people doing this or that is a stunning achievement in peaceful integration unsurpassed in human history.