Rachel Maddow Reading the House Resolution to Condemn Trump's Racisit Remarks

Trump may make America great again afterwards all -- when nosotros show how out of step he is

Jul xix, 2019

It did not hit me until the U.Southward. House of Representatives voted to condemn President Donald Trump's racist tweets on Tuesday. Trump actually is making America great again.

Huh?

The New York Times did the country the favor of publishing the text of the House resolution that condemned the president. Rachel Maddow read the entire thing to open her show the night of the vote. It is a remarkable certificate, citing central points in American history going all the way dorsum to the Founders and filled with quotes, including from Franklin Roosevelt ("Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you lot and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists"), through John Kennedy  ("The contribution of immigrants tin can be seen in every aspect of our national life. We come across information technology in religion, in politics, in concern, in the arts, in education, fifty-fifty in athletics and amusement. There is no function of our nation that has non been touched past our immigrant background. Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life"), finishing with the patron saint of pre-Trump Republicanism, Ronald Reagan ("one of the most important sources of America's greatness: we lead the world because, unique amongst nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world, and by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation").

The resolution is, in short, a civics lesson. It teaches that being an American is not about blood and soil, simply virtually adherence to a set up of ideas. It demonstrates the bewitchery of optimistic leaders. It reminds usa about our history, near who we truly are. It instructs us on the necessity of tolerance and respect amid variety. Information technology teaches us, in short, why America is peachy.

Civics went out of fashion at some point before I attended high school. We had something called "social studies" and it was neither especially interesting nor really instructive. It near definitely was vague. During my school-age years, I learned most of what I knew from books my parents brought me and from our annual summertime vacations to Philadelphia and Valley Forge, Williamsburg and Monticello, Washington, D.C., and Gettysburg, Lexington and Concur and Plymouth. I was 10 years erstwhile when the movie "1776" came out, and while it was non the virtually sophisticated rendering of the 2nd Continental Congress, I learned all the songs by center. I can still recall Ken Howard as Thomas Jefferson singing to John Adams, "You're obnoxious and disliked, that cannot exist denied," and think of it when visiting certain conservative websites.

Then, I got to college in 1980, the same year Howard Zinn'south A People's History of the United States was published. That book was not, in fact, a work of history, simply a work of propaganda. Still, it came to define the outlook of way as well many Americans of the left. Four years later, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a lifelong Democrat, stood at the rostrum of the Republican National Convention and gave a thunderous speech nigh the "Arraign America Offset" Democrats. It was a caricature, but not entirely so.

Years later, when I worked on a congressional campaign and attended dozens of town committee meetings, peopled with the most agile Democrats in their town, the vast bulk of those local activists did not fit the "Blame America First" typology Kirkpatrick had outlined. But I do recall that the loudest of the town commission members were thoroughly imbued with Zinnism.

How disastrous was the perception of Democrats as somehow incapable of recognizing American goodness and greatness? Since Zinn published his tome, two Democrats take reached the White Business firm, one with assistance from an economical recession and Ross Perot, and the other in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Trump is giving the Democrats the chance to finally shed the perception that they are all Zinnites. If but nosotros tin convince them to stop putting the words religious liberty in scare quotes, we will really exist making progress.

I am non equally gloomy as Todd Purdum, who, writing at The Atlantic, concludes that America's political system does non know how to grapple with someone similar Trump. In one sense, that is true: Nancy Pelosi had to break a House rule to speak the truth about Trump'south racism. (Kudos to Purdum for unearthing Jefferson's comments nearly the need for the kind of rule Pelosi broke, comments that completely vitiated the GOP rationales for attacking the speaker.) There are other examples of Trump's condone for democratic norms showing our organisation was more than fragile than first thought.

The House resolution demonstrated just how out of step the incumbent president is with what has truly fabricated America groovy, and the degree to which there was once widespread consensus virtually at least some of the sources of that greatness. Trump's presidency is an opportunity for the Democrats to shed, not their criticism of our lodge to be sure, but their reflexive, knee joint-jerk Zinnism.

And if the Democrats can requite themselves — and the more than half the country that does non approve of the president — a series of civics lessons in the next year and a half, I remember their eventual nominee will have an fifty-fifty improve shot at non merely defeating Trump, just of defeating him soundly. And and so she will be in a position to really atomic number 82 the country forward.

How will the Republicans rediscover their connection with the traditional narrative of American greatness and values, and distance themselves from their extremes? Skillful luck with that. Watching the crowd at Trump'south North Carolina rally dirge, "Transport her back" at the mention of the name of Rep. Ilhan Omar was creepy and scary. I hope — how I hope — that for nearly people there, attention a Trump rally is like attending a professional person wrestling match, that the people know information technology is not real, that this is a staged confrontation between essentially fictional villains and heroes.

Problem is that this is not a wrestling match and Trump is not Blob Hogan. The vast powers of the presidency are in the hands of a narcissist with fascistic tendencies. Irony is that he is putting a con job on his fans, convincing them that the Ilhan Omars of the world are the problem, while he and his fat-cat friends continue to rob the American people of opportunity and encourage them to carelessness any shred of decency.

If the GOP has to wander in the wilderness a bit in the post-Trump era, so exist information technology. It is critical that the Democrats have a positive vision of the hereafter to communicate to the electorate. Otherwise, the entire campaign will be zippo just swapping epithets almost race and gender, and I am not so certain that Trump would lose that fight.

[Michael Sean Winters covers the nexus of religion and politics for NCR.]

Editor's note:  Don't miss out on Michael Sean Winters' latest. Sign upwards and nosotros'll let you know when he publishes new Distinctly Catholic columns.

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Source: https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/distinctly-catholic/trump-may-make-america-great-again-after-all-when-we-show-how-out