We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally, racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others' throats.There's much more; I recommend reading the whole column, as well as his excellent Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed are Tearing America Apart.
One half of America sees abortion as the annual slaughter of a million unborn. The other half regards the right-to-life movement as tyrannical and sexist.
Proponents of gay marriage see its adversaries as homophobic bigots. Opponents see its champions as seeking to elevate unnatural and immoral relationships to the sacred state of traditional marriage.
The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?
Yet, today, Mexican-Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a skirmish in a French-Mexican war about which most Americans know nothing, which took place the same year as two of the bloodiest battles of our own Civil War: Antietam and Fredericksburg.
Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.
To my mind, for a nation to remain to united, to remain a nation, there has to be something that most people within it hold in common. The United States used to have that. As John Jay wrote in Federalist No. 2, we were, emphasis mine:
...one united people--a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs...I have seen people from widely disparate backgrounds come together and function beautifully, pulling together in perfect harmony, all confessing one another to be brothers of a sort. Those who haven't experienced it will laugh to hear it, but that was my experience of the United States Marine Corps. People from all racial and economic backgrounds came together, and they worked together beautifully, in my opinion, because they all had something in common, a powerful idea, the idea of the United States as a place where liberty was held in high esteem.
I am firmly convinced to this minute that, as diverse as this country is, it is yet possible for it to be united by a powerful idea. Having the same ancestors and the same customs is not as important as having the same important idea. And there are powerful ideas available: the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the idea of God-given unalienable rights. But the church in this country has, for the most part, forgotten how to do apologetics and evangelism, we have failed to make the case for man's rights having their origin in the will of God, and our failure in this is likely to usher in a decades-long period where the idea of rights given by God, rights not granted by man and therefore not legitimately denied by man, is on the decline.
I'm very much afraid that the United States, if it survives the next few decades at all, will be quite unrecognizable.
For a somewhat different take on Mr. Buchanan's column, see this post over at Oklahoma Lefty
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