The Left has gone to great lengths to tear down the American Identity and its Myths. By foisting identity politics into the center of the culture and openly destroying all the historical icons; The Founding Fathers, various heroes and even the institution of the family; they’ve snapped the bonds that united the people living here. Now this was done intentionally to encourage strife between people based on race, sex and sexuality.
And to a very great extent they’ve been wildly successful. I can attest to that personally. They’ve managed to make patriotic allegiance to the current regime in Washington look like a sad joke. And they’ve drained the joy out of sports, fraternal organizations and even the Boy Scouts. Even many mainline Christian denominations have been infected with woke hatred for what this country used to be.
Wildly successful.
So, all that’s true. They’ve smashed the culture down to the ground. But at the same time, that means we’re free to build from the ground up. We can keep whatever we want from the old. We can toss out whatever no longer suits us and we can add in whatever helps us to build a new identity and new myths.
And I’m sure it’s already happening. When the Left rejects the Fourth of July and embraces instead “Juneteenth,” it allows us to take ownership of the Fourth and make it what we want it to be. Maybe it can have a double meaning. It looks back to the original founding of the country but now it can also stand for a new declaration of independence. We can declare ourselves independent of the coercive guilt that the Left tried to force on us. We can begin to build our own organizations and platforms and companies that serve our needs. Eventually we’ll build a new political party that will replace the Republican Party too.
But most important we’ll create new myths to replace the old ones that have been shown to be obsolete. These things will be the hardest of all to replace. The hardest one to lose was the myth that all Americans were brothers. That despite all of our differences and squabbles when the chips were down, we would all band together to fix problems and strive to make America the shining city on the hill where our children would inherit a better and richer world than we had. But the Left has burned that dream in the streets of the George Floyd insurrection. We are not one nation and the Left is not under God and liberty and justice is not for all but only for the favored ones that the regime elects.
So that’s what we’ll have to do. We’ll make our own rules and our own ways of working with each other and against those who hate us. And we’ll come up with stories that explain how things work in the new world we now live in.
Maybe it won’t be a single new identity. The days of a single culture or even a couple of cultures may give way to a host of different identities. I could see the Hispanic people dominating the Southwest and the Northeast remaining as the old New England identity mixed with a hodge-podge of things added. The Old South might rise again. But what won’t happen is a return to what was. You have to believe in a myth to keep it alive and the old American myth is as dead as a dodo. And no amount of flag waving or exhortations for God to bless America can bring it back. The Left buried it and they’ll have to live with the consequences.