Nation Vs State
I wouldn’t necessarily have picked Mike Walsh out as such a sturdy, unflappable optimist, but what the hey, more power to him.
What this all boils down to is simple: across the Western world, there is an ongoing war not only between Left and Right, but more fundamentally between those who believe in the power of the State versus those who defend and cherish the rights and prerogatives and histories of their Nation. For countries begin not as political entities — political entities called States — but as Nations, rising up from a people united by blood, faith, languages, culture, and philosophy. Some leftists refer to America as a “notional” nation, but that is historically untrue: the United States was founded in principle and practice almost exclusively by white Protestant men from the British Isles, sons of the Enlightenment who cherished right reason, Christianity, English culture, and who spoke the English language.
What no one foresaw, however, was a government-induced mass migration from radically different cultures, generally one technologically backward and lacking the hard-won considerations of personal rights that had taken centuries to develop in the West. Mostly homogeneous European countries, now shoehorned into the European Union, became flooded via a movement of peoples on a scale not seen since the late Roman Empire, trailing social instability and, often, violent crime, in their wake.
In opposition has arisen populist-nationalist movements in places such as the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Germany, and now France, where the National Rally has campaigned on an explicit campaign promise of expulsion of its burgeoning radical Muslim minority and closing its border to further immigration from Africa and the Middle East. And even Canada, a definitionally bicultural nation, has had enough of Justin Trudeau’s campaign to destroy the country’s strong national identity. Despite the Left’s insistence, “Nationalism” is not a dirty word.
All of the social changes pushed through by the far left over the past few decades, including expanded abortion, open celebration of exhibitionistic sexual fetishism, decriminalized drug use, weakening national militaries, turning a blind eye to street crime, and the constant propaganda drumbeat of political correctness (as they define it), have finally occasioned a Newtonian reaction, including here in the U.S. Despite their best efforts to criminalize him, Trump is not only leading in the polls but widening his lead as the Biden campaigned has hit a brick wall.
On this Fourth of July, we are in another civil war (dubbed by me more than a decade ago as the Cold Civil War), this one a duel to the death between the Nation and the State. Here, and all across Europe, the Nation must win, regain control over the State and, if necessary, dissolve it. As history shows, it’s easier to disestablish a form of government — the French are on their Fifth Republic in the same amount of time that America has had only one — than it is to kill a nation. But make no mistake: that’s the goal the International Left has set for itself since Lenin was a pup. The tide is now running in our favor; celebrate our national birthday by acting accordingly.
Dan Greenfield, as is his wont, sees the distinctions between the French and American Revolutions clearly and acutely.
The struggle between the French and American revolutions nearly led to civil war in this country. Long before Antifa and BLM, or Bill Ayers and The Weathermen or even anarchists detonating bombs on Wall Street, our Founding Fathers were fighting the start of the 200-year war with the Left. And they understood that what was at stake was the very definition of freedom.
“If the progress of Jacobinism is to be arrested at all, it is by fighting it,” a letter from Abigail Adams quoted. ”And if there be a Nation on Earth capable of going the necessary lengths, and making the proper Sacrifices to stop its course,—it must be one that is already possesed of substantial Liberty, that knows how to appreciate it, & how to distinguish between it, and that Sort of Liberty which France is trying to propogate throughout the World. To every other Nation & people, the french liberty is perhaps equal, if not superiour to their own.”
The leftist cause spread like a virus across Europe and much of the world because they had no defense against it. But thanks to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we did.
The war of ideas between the two revolutions and republics was always going to end here.
America was the only alternative to the Left. And the Declaration of Independence was the wellspring of our sort of liberty. The Fourth of July is the celebration of that liberty, not only from one particular mad king, but from the entire idea of the supremacy of the state.
What initially began as a revolution against a monarchy became a revolution against the Left.
When we watch fireworks burst into the sky above our cities, towns, rivers, lakes and oceans, what makes that display different from those of so many other nations is that our revolution was meant to make us free, not just as a nation, but as individuals pursuing our own destinies.
We did not fight a revolution to build a system that would make us equal by leveling everyone else. This was not a revolution of equity, but of liberty, not a scheme to control others through the state, but to liberate all of us from the state. That unfulfilled revolution is at the heart of the slow civil war in which America finds itself on the 248th anniversary of our fight for freedom.
248 years later the fight goes on.
Which, as our prescient Founding Fathers well knew, it always will do. The struggle between liberty and tyranny—which, ultimately, is really what the Left is, has always been, and will always be all about—is eternal, not ephemeral. That’s simply the nature of the beast.
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