July Fourth is liberals least favorite holiday. If you doubt me, just think it through: the day celebrates America. When was the last time you heard a liberal do that?
My own personal litmus test is, naturally, Twitter. It’s not so much that I hang out on Twitter that day; contrary to some opinions I actually do have a life. It’s just that when I do check in briefly throughout the day of celebrating our independence, the liberals I follow, both nationally and locally, are few and far between on Twitter that day. There is, of course, a reason for this.
Speaking broadly, liberals are most comfortable finding fault with America. They pretend conservatives think America is without fault. The first point is but a truism while the latter point is demonstrably wrong, but that doesn’t stop liberals from thinking they elevate themselves by putting this country down. To the contrary, it’s a badge of pride, the original virtue signaling.
I used to be a liberal. I know of what I speak. When in law school, I invited Eleanor Smeal of the National Organization of Women to lecture on campus. The campus was the Catholic University of America. You won’t believe what happened next.
Whenever anyone asks me when I became a conservative, or, at a minimum, stopped being a liberal, I reply, honestly, “When I started to think for myself.” I’m not being facile, it’s the truth. Not the “my truth” that allows a white male to proclaim he’s a black, lesbian, quadriplegic, but that truth that can be ascertained by facts, or at least lived experience as opposed to psychosis.
Liberalism depends on people internalizing received orthodoxies. To question those orthodoxies is secular heresy. When you understand that, you begin to appreciate how dangerous diversity of opinion is to them, to their cause, to their lockstop. Infantilizing young adults on college campuses takes this to a new and pathological level, to be sure, but the result is born of the same fear: legitimate and not superficial diversity.
Much has been written about the Left’s “long march” on American institutions after the juvenile cultural spasm of the 1960’s. It’s a commonplace observation now that the left has captured our educational system. Add to that popular culture. The media was always in its grasp, if in fact not of it. I’m inclined toward the latter view.
So here we are on the cusp of the Fourth of July in Minnesota. What do we see? A Republican establishment that squandered its legislative majority: higher spending, targeted tax cuts instead of general ones across the board, school choice abandoned, tax cuts for Big Tobacco, unconscionable bonding in a nonbonding year, and a Republican Senate full of self-professed Christians that took no action on the female genital mutilation bill, which passed the Republican-led House by a vote of 124-4.
I’m reminded of what the author Annie Dillard once wrote: “What a pity, that so soon after Christ came the Christians.”
But not even the dumbest Republicans in the nation can get me down on the Fourth of July. We survive and prosper despite, not because, of them. It has been ever thus since 1776.
This includes liberals, who are quick to praise imported backward cultures and customs because it makes them feel edgy, avant garde if you will. This is just another manifestation of what Maajid Nawaz calls “the regressive left” and the left in Minnesota is nothing if not regressive.
A recent Pew Center Research poll confirms the instinctive: “About four-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (41%) say the U.S. stands above other countries, compared with 19% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.” American exceptionalism mostly doesn’t exist on the left and hasn’t for some time.
Disparaging the average American as they do, the left has encountered disastrous electoral consequences running on this program of self-loathing. Voters are dismissed as insufficiently sophisticated to hate their own freedom and civilizational accomplishments. Media allies of the left follow suit by name calling in an attempt to shame and shut them down. But political correctness received a death blow from the campaign of Donald Trump, freeing all of us to simply laugh and move along unaffected.
July Fourth is great because America is, well, great again. America is always worth celebrating, always worth defending. That we now have a president in office who genuinely believes that and acts upon it only makes things that much better.
Happy Independence Day to everyone, even, as Trump would say, the haters.
John Gilmore
John Gilmore is an author, freelance writer & former opinion columnist for Alpha News. He blogs at minnesotaconservatives.org & is @Shabbosgoy on Twitter
