Electing Another People
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.
Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
The Solution, Brecht
Leaf through the pages of just about any politically oriented magazine this summer, and you come away with the impression that you are reading the complaints of British officers managing India or the staff of a Roman viceroy in Gaul. There are a great many complaints about how awfully ignorant, dangerous and violent these Americans are. How they don't know what's good for them, even when they're carefully instructed by their betters.
You have to put microchips in their bins that track when they're taken to the curb, just to get them to recycle. And ban trans fats and corn syrup to get them to eat right. They have to be forced to buy health insurance, and then you have to take away their asthma inhalers in order to save the planet from another of those problems we invented in order to control their lives. You have to tax everything in sight, and then tax the taxes, just to get them to turn over the money they insist on hoarding for themselves and their families. Sales taxes, phone taxes, death taxes, boat taxes, archery taxes and vaccine taxes. And somehow no matter how hard we tax them, they still hang on to their money.
It all reads like the commentary of an occupying force, disgusted by the mulish obstinacy of the natives in refusing to see that their way is better. It is the British Raj or the Norman Conquest, a culturally isolated group of invaders who wonder if they can ever bring civilization to the heathens. And yet it is what passes for the official discourage of the American cultural elite. A cultural elite that endeavors to at once express its disgust with America, while insisting that its values are American, and those of the rest of the country are not.
On the Ground Zero Mosque, Barack Hussein Obama and the media have insisted that their attitude is American, and that of the majority of the country is Unamerican. But if most Americans are actually Unamerican, and the country's leading American is a fellow whose church rang to gentle cries of "God Damn America", who fancies that there are 57 states and whose favorite reading material is The Post-American World (by another great American, Fareed Zakaria), then it's clear that being Anti-American is the new definition of American. But then who exactly are those hundreds of millions of people living between the oceans. If they're not to be considered Americans, then who and what are they?
The political and cultural elite insist that they are the real Americans, and that the majority of Americans are Unamerican. The majority of Americans have decided that it is the political elite that is Unamerican. There are legal mechanisms in place for the people to enforce their decision by electing a new government. And while the months roll around, the political elite is scrambling for ways to elect a new American people.
It's not a perfect world, if you happen to be a pensioner trying to buy some ham during Ramadan or get treated by an NHS dentist without having to cover your face if you're a woman. It's not even a great world if you're Tony Blair, and you were driven from office because you thought it was possible to use military force to civilize some of the same folk in Afghanistan, that your own immigration policies were filling up London and Manchester with. British soldiers returned from trying to hold down unruly Muslim provinces in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the jeers and protests of unruly Muslim provinces at home in the UK. Many of them have probably realized that their next service is less likely to be overseas or even across the Irish Sea, but in the very cities where they grew up.
But America's own progressives have been trying to elect a new people for some time now. If they haven't fully succeeded yet, it's only because the unruly natives still insist on reproducing in large enough numbers to stymie the hourly load dropped off at JFK airport. And with regional representation, angry voters can still hold politicians accountable for lost jobs and high taxes, even if the new pols they trade them in for, are no better than the old lot. The program is on track, even if it may take a while to see the matter through.
In the meantime, the political and cultural elite insist on describing the natives as Unamerican. Having appropriated their culture and system of government, the elites have decided that they and not the hoi poloi are the arbiters of "Americaness". Which is convenient as that makes it rather hard to question their patriotism. But what they mean by America, has little to do with the actual country, its traditions, its history, its laws or its people. They may mention those once in a while, the way liberal Supreme Court justices try to reference some random letter or crease in the Constitution, before creating an entire body of law on their own initiative, but they don't care very much for those things. The Constitution means as much to them as the Magna Carta does to Cameron and Clegg. It's an interesting historical document yes, but the EU Constitution is far more relevant, isn't it. Our own overlords similarly regard the globalist mandates of the UN far more seriously than the scribblings of some bewigged plantation owners centuries ago.
There is a growing divide between ordinary Americans and the country's political and cultural elites, who not only have different priorities, but an entirely different sense of identity. Communicating with them would be much like the Saxons trying to explain to the Normans why their way of life matters. The Normans might pretend to listen, if it saves them the trouble of dismembering the malcontents, but they don't particularly care. If aping the customs and manners of the locals is temporarily in their interest, they might do it. But they prefer to impose their own customs and manners on the barbarous natives. Because that is where the gap lies, in a political and cultural elite that fancies itself superior to the people it rules over.
Our new overlords think globally and act locally. They may have been born in America, but they attach no particular significance to that identity. When election seasons force them to play the patriot, they talk about American virtues, in the way that a candidate with national ambitions runs for the Mayor of Pittsburgh, talks about the uniqueness and greatness of Pittsburgh. He is going through a ritual that he does not take seriously, in order to pander to local sentiments about what he considers to be another city. Pittsburgh is just another part of America to him. And to the people who run America, the entire country is just another part of the world, and they wish that the natives would get with the program.
But what kind of people think this way? Local pride is natural to people who live in a place and govern it. But it is not natural, to people who view the world in terms of an emerging empire of bureaucracy, and a global political mandate for change. Such people see themselves as viceroys, stuck in the backwaters of California or Ohio or Washington D.C., dealing with rubes and primitive natives, that don't understand that they have no voice in the coming future.
Since January 2009, these people had become confident that the country was in their hands again. A long eight year nightmare, in which a man who mispronounced common words, snubbed the UN and refused to throw parties in D.C., was running the country, was finally over. The Tea Parties and the Ground Zero Mosque, and their own sinking polls are horrid reminders that they natives still wield some power in this arrangement. While the EU has passed the stage in which a minor event such as an entire country voting against the Lisbon Treaty could upset the applecart. The solution was to go ahead anyway without allowing a referendum. But the United States still insists on holding elections. And while the opposition party hardly has the courage of its convictions, and may tweet one thing and do another, but it still has too many members who think of themselves as Americans, rather than citizens of the world who happened to be born within the geographical confines of the political entity historically known as the United States of America.
And so they insist again, that America is theirs, and that the rebellious natives had better fall in line and behave. Because their ultimate efforts are directed at dissolving the American people, and electing another in their place.
From NY to Jerusalem,
Daniel Greenfield
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