by Joe Miller
I’m not much for talking about feelings. When dealing with reason and romanticism, I can usually be found doing reason and appreciating romanticism.
But as I write these words on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, I find myself reliving the feelings I had in the wake of that dreadful day.
There was horror and anger of course. But there was also pride. Terrorists attacked New York and D.C. not because they had particular animus against specific buildings or the thousands of people who worked there. They attacked symbols of America. They weren’t attacking a place so much as they were an idea.
Our country was attacked by those who wanted to turn back the clock, to undo modernity, to return to a world of religious conformity, coercive governments, sharp limits on personal freedom—a world in which half the population is reduced to little better than property.
It makes sense that those longing for a more medieval world would attack America.
Ours is the first – and still the only – country to be grounded in an idea, not in a particular people. We were, as Abraham Lincoln so memorably noted, “a new nation, conceived in liberty.” Ronald Reagan expanded on the theme in his final speech as President.
You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.
That’s not just a Republican sentiment. You can hear it in Bill Clinton’s line, spoken a decade or so after Reagan: “America is not so much a place as a promise.”
Generations of people have embraced that promise. Peter Schramm, the late conservative scholar, emigrated to the U.S. as a child. When young Peter asked his father why they were moving to America specifically, his father replied, “Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place.”
That is a remarkable line. Ours is the only country in the world where a sentence of that sort makes sense.
It is a real irony that Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt chose the anniversary of an attack on the idea of America to reject the very thing that makes America unique.
Schmitt explicitly rejects Clinton’s suggestion that America is a promise. He explicitly rejects the idea that someone can be born American, but in the wrong place. And he implicitly rejects Reagan, dismissing the conservative movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries as collaborators in a liberal plot to redefine America into “a deracinated ideological creed.”
Deracinated is a fancy word. It means “to remove the racial or ethnic characteristics from.”
Schmitt is openly claiming that American ideals cannot be separated from a particular set or racial or ethnic characteristics, that America is by and for those who live in a specific place and who share the race of the founders of the country.
There’s a term for that sort of thing. It’s called blood and soil nationalism. It’s the claim that a nation consists of people bound by racial identity and united within a settlement area.
More than 400,000 Americans of my grandparents’ generation died defending the world from blood and soil nationalists.
There are more things wrong with Schmitt’s argument than I can possibly cover in this column. There’s the fact that if our founding documents really do refer to a specific place, then Missouri is out of luck. It was part of Spain in 1789.
And if those founders meant to cover a specific race of people, then Schmitt doesn’t count, either. His ancestors emigrated to America from Germany fifty years after its founding. He shares no blood with the English founders of this country.
Irony aside, Schmitt’s speech is the most un-American thing I’ve read in a long time.
We declared our independence as a matter of universal rights – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – and the bold assertion that as a consequence of those rights, all people are entitled to choose their own government.
Thomas Jefferson clearly intended those ideals to apply to more than just the thirteen colonies. In an 1821 letter to John Adams, Jefferson wrote, “The flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776, have spread across too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume the engines and all who work them.”
Obviously, we cannot and should not ignore that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—authors of our two most important founding documents—were slaveholders.
But it doesn’t follow from the fact that Jefferson held slaves that his writing “all men are created equal” applies only to white men. We can honor Jefferson’s ideals, even as we acknowledge that he was a deeply flawed man who frequently failed to live up to his own ideals.
I love America. Though it was founded by flawed men, it points the way toward something noble even when we fail to live up to those ideals.
I love America. Though some wish to destroy it to turn the clock back to a world of medieval barbarism, it still stands as a symbol of hope to millions wishing for better lives.
I love America.
It’s shameful that the junior senator from Missouri does not.
