Showing posts with label ourselves and our posterity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ourselves and our posterity. Show all posts

Friday, June 18, 2021

Run for your lives: It's Charles Murray who is having the identity crisis, not America

Identity crisis: how the politics of race will wreck America:

The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return.

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What's unnatural is Murray's perennial insistence that America was not a real nation where Englishmen revolted because they were denied their "chartered rights", who hoped to secure that nation "to ourselves and our posterity" as our Constitution says. Whether one believes their claim was legitimate or not is irrelevant to the history. An America populated as a nation by Englishmen who made that argument is a fact and shows they were a nation in their own minds, and nothing the left libertarians can say will ever change that, try as they may.

That opening sentence simply begs the question. You are asked to believe something else, that the first Americans didn't actually behave as a tribe whose members were loyal to each other and didn't already have a long history together before 1776. Which of course is ridiculous.

The violence done to this original American idea by libertarians, Lincoln and his worshippers, liberals, leftists, and other assorted lunatics is what is unnatural. It's they who have the identity crisis. They don't fit in here because our institutions survive from the founding and constantly remind them that they are misfits. They represent the foreign element, and usually are the main advocates for increasing the foreign element.

Instead give me millions upon millions of Italian Americans like Antonin Scalia who bowed to America as an Anglo Saxon nation, instead of this horde of harpies for every heresy.

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Rush Limbaugh dead at 70, FOX obituary includes famous "preamble to the Constitution" blunder from CPAC 2009

Rush Limbaugh, conservative talk radio pioneer, dead at 70 :

"We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, Freedom and the pursuit of happiness."

The mistake is fairly typical, both of Rush, and of Rush's audience the Baby Boom for whom basic knowledge of civics had long been in decline. For Rush, and for them, conservatism was always more aspirational than actual, often conflating present perspectives with historical realities.

An example is the Straussians who in our time explicitly argued for the unity of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, giving Thomas Jefferson's more revolutionary, Enlightenment-tinged views in the former too much sway over the interpretation of the latter.

The irony of that fusionism was always that Jefferson sought for the United States "to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them", not the "exceptional" American position touted by Limbaugh as an heir of America's post-war position of global domination.

The Constitution's preamble expressed a matter-of-factly self-interested goal, "to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity", a country of Americans, by Americans, and for Americans, not a nation of immigrants, by immigrants, and for immigrants, not a nation of heroes marching forth in search of monsters to destroy. America's founding was above all modest, which is perhaps the surest indicator of its inherent conservatism.

If Rush Limbaugh slaughtered the important details on a regular basis, what made the show so enjoyable was the entertainment, which largely came from the sheer pleasure Rush derived from doing it and communicating it, "having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have". If nothing else, Rush Limbaugh was a conservative of enjoyment, and who doesn't want to be around people having a good time? It is one reason for Rush's tremendous success in a career spanning more than three decades.

Students of conservatism might think this a whimsy, not to be taken seriously, but no less a figure than Russell Kirk devoted a chapter to such conservatism in his "The Conservative Mind". Rush himself, from time to time, in his own non-academic way had observed how liberals are not funny and don't have fun, and in this he was on to something. Generally speaking conservatives possess contentment to a far greater degree than do liberals, derived from a judiciously formed view of the self as sinners saved by grace. It is a freeing thing which allows people to accept things as they are, even as God accepts sinners as they are.

Of course in the post-war there has been a tremendous amount for Americans to enjoy, to the point that we have become completely distracted by this. One may rightly say we have overdone it, and that enjoyment has frankly become conservatives' Achilles' heel. It has produced a myriad of problems, not the least of which has been a failure to reproduce, inattention to religion, and a proclivity for the easy politics of the executive where we look for one man to save us. As America was not built by Protestants enjoying religious entertainments and all-you-can-eat brunches on Sundays, it will not be recovered, if that is still possible, but by serious, religious people who work hard, deny themselves, and save.

Rush Limbaugh was an optimist about America because he still believed there were enough individual Americans remaining who exemplified the old virtues. America's future will depend on Rush having been right.

Saturday, April 27, 2019

Apparently it's news to some alien peoples that Great Britain provided 68.7% of the US population's ancestry in 1790

Ancestry for 19.3% was black, the 12% balance other European (German, Dutch, French, Swedish).

Tuesday, July 3, 2018

America is for ourselves and for our posterity, not for the whole world

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.


Monday, July 10, 2017

John O'Sullivan still refuses to accept the meaning of "ourselves and our Posterity"


Notice that Ronald Reagan did not say that the great civil ideas of the West were the property of those Notre Dame graduates who were descended from the Founding Fathers and their generation. Nor did he say that they were the property of white Anglophone Protestants who had fetched up on these shores in the meantime — since that would have excluded the son of an Irish Catholic father like himself. Nor that the children of black slaves or other non-white migrants were excluded from that same moral and intellectual Western inheritance which the black former slave and passionate reader, Frederick Douglass, so cherished and claimed as his own.

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

AEI is full of crap: This country was formed for "ourselves and our posterity", not for the sake of ideas, or hordes of future immigrants

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.