When pro-Hamas rioters on Wednesday ripped down and burned the American flag outside Union Station in Washington, D.C., and defaced nearby monuments with antisemitic, Islamic terrorist graffiti, they unintentionally made a case for what Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance said at the RNC last week: that America isn't just an idea, but a place and a people with a shared history and a common future.
We've become accustomed to thinking and speaking about America as if it's merely an idea, nothing more than an abstract proposition divorced from a particular people's history and culture.
One might charitably call this the Ellis Islander view of America, that anyone from anywhere in the world can come here and become an American because we aren't defined by ethnicity or tribe or ancestry, but by creed.
What happens when we misapprehend the nature of America's creed is that we slip into the Ellis Islander view of America and begin to suppose that anyone from any culture or religion can come here and become American without changing anything about their customs, beliefs, or behaviors.
America as a melting pot doesn't mean we all become people from nowhere, with no past and no culture.
Our leaders, especially on the left, have for decades rejected the idea that America is anything more than an abstraction, or that we need a certain amount of cultural and civic homogeneity for our experiment in self-government to work.
The multicultural, Ellis Islander view of America she espouses is largely responsible for the violence and hate she claims to deplore.
https://thefederalist.com/2024/07/26/pro-hamas-rioters-in-d-c-vindicate-j-d-vances-view-of-america/
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