THIS would have been a GREAT topic to explore last night, but the lib media definitely doesn't want to wade into this one, much less allow GOP candidates of diverse descent to intelligently discuss and debate a substantive issue among one another before a captivated citizenry...
As George Washington told his fellow countrymen in his Farewell Address, before any other political identity, they should first and foremost consider themselves Americans. It's time to abandon the hyphens.A half-forgotten exchange of letters between two titans of the Republican party, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, contains an urgent lesson for the presidential candidates who will debate at the Reagan Library on Wednesday: Tell the country that you will be the president of all Americans, and will represent no one group in particular.
This message-in-a-bottle from Ike and the Gipper comes straight from the 1960s, but it holds important lessons for our own time. ...
At the time of the Eisenhower-Reagan exchange, today’s noxious mix of identity politics, adversarial multiculturalism, and political correctness was only in its infancy. It was just then coming into fashion on campuses and in the circles of the New Left run by cultural Marxists like Herbert Marcuse.
Building on the theories of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, the New Left argued that─even more than class─America was divided along racial, ethnic, and gender lines into a dominant group (white males) and “marginalized” groups (ethnic, racial, linguistic, and sexual minorities). The goal of politics should be first to “de-legitimize” the ideas of the American system and second, to transfer power from the dominant group to the “oppressed” groups, they argued.
Today, this perverse form of Balkanization, which places Americans into various identity group boxes in employment, education, law, and culture pervades the academy, government, media, and political life. It is even codified in the official U.S. Census.
Yet almost 50 years ago, Eisenhower and Reagan immediately and instinctively knew that this embryonic identity politics was a direct challenge to the universalism that America stands for. Beneath their smiles and Midwestern amiability, Ike and the Gipper revealed a deep understanding and sophistication of what political philosophers would call “regime maintenance.” That is, the ideas and values are necessary to sustain the American way of life.
Without using sociological terminology, Eisenhower and Reagan knew that an emphasis on one’s race, ethnicity, and gender group highlighted his “ascribed status,” i.e. what a person was born into, rather than the “achieved status” that an American earns as an individual. They knew that there was something “old world” and frankly un-American about emphasizing birth status and dividing our citizens into competing ethnic, racial, and gender groups.
In other words, five decades ago, they understood identity politics for what it was: an attempt to de-legitimize American constitutional democracy.
We need to reverse the myths and lies coming from the Obama administration and both parties when it comes to illegal immigration. We’re tired of hearing the same platitudes over and over again about immigrants coming to America to love: high incarceration rates and violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants beg to differ. This is why RINOs aren’t resonating with Conservatives: they refuse to take a hard stance on illegal immigration and continue to destroy us from within. ~ ML, 9/16/15
