Even a has-been politician resorting to outright demagogy
can point to matters of interest.
Rudolph Giuliani, one-time mayor of New York, told a group of conservatives that he doesn’t think that President Obama loves America, which invites us to consider what America he is talking about.
I wrote previously about the America that I think Mr.
Giuliani is talking about: the America I grew up in, which was run by white
men, largely Protestant though not so much as formerly, with a civic religion
of American exceptionalism.*
The problem is that that America is fading. There are an
estimated six million to seven millions Muslims living in the United States. They’re
here, and here to stay. (By comparison, there are about 1.8 million
Episcopalians.) There are about 19 million people of Asian descent. And there
are about 54 million Hispanics. We have to find some way to accommodate the
millions of Hispanics who are here illegally, because it would require an
expensive police state to deport them all, and ruinously expensive to the
farmers, hospitals, hotels, and restaurants that depend on their labor. They’re
here to stay.
So as influential as the old white male culture continues to
be, its dominance is threatened, and that explains some of the fevered
imaginings about President Obama, that he is a secret Muslim, that he is not a
native-born American,** that he is a Communist, that he is alien to us. Barack
Obama, who continued many of the financial and national-security policies of
George W. Bush, whose health care bill is a direct descendent of a Heritage
Foundation proposal and an program enacted by a Republican governor of
Massachusetts, who has been so cautiously conservative a Democrat as to set
progressive teeth on edge every day.
But he does represent a changing demographic, that secular,
multicultural society that conservatives, particularly white evangelical
Christian conservatives, despise.
If I were a conservative, I would hesitate to suggest that the
president of the United States hates America. But I am a hopeless East Coast
media establishment liberal, so I’ll point out that the things that some
conservatives fulminate about in this new America, the secularism, the
tolerance, the gay marriage, the findings of science, are the same things that
the Islamic State despises.
I’m OK with them. It’s my country, too.
*I was denounced by a couple of former classmates on
Facebook, one so intemperately that I took the unusual step of unfriending him,
though several former classmates wrote that I was spot on.
**Another former classmate posted a link on Facebook today
proving that the president was born in Kenya, which goes to show that the
thoroughly traditional education we received in Fleming County, Kentucky, half
a century ago did not necessarily immunize us against gullibility and nonsense.