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Ringside Seats at the Fight for America’s Soul
When will the phoney war end?
I’m sure I’m not alone in waiting for the Nats to put some serious daylight between themselves and the not-fit-to-run-a-Girl-Guide-bake-sale group of timeservers we currently call our government.
Their pitch to voters at the moment seems to be ‘we will do the same, but do it more competently’.
Well, yes I would expect so but aren’t we owed a little more? Like a choice on policy? Presumably, this will come at the postponed campaign launch, whenever they get round to holding it. When they do, Collins needs to be on the 6 o’clock news saying something like (call this my elevator pitch for National Party speechwriter)
If you vote for us, New Zealand, no more lockdowns, no mandatory masks, and no bloody COVID Card (Oh yes, you know that’s next). And we promise we won’t tax you to hell and back, screw the economy by greenie virtue signalling, introduce freedom-crushing hate speech laws, or ever, ever, use the truly vomit-worthy phrase, ‘Team of 5 million’. Nighty night.
You know where to reach me, Judith.
In the meantime, it is with envy that we political junkies observe the presidential election of our American cousins.
“This is the most important election in the history of our country. At no time before have voters faced a clearer choice between two parties, two visions, two philosophies, or two agendas.”
The Don, in his nomination acceptance speech. For once, this serial exaggerator, a man who spouts more self-applied superlatives than Muhammad Ali after a title fight, was not exaggerating.
2020 is the year that America fell apart. This election is between those who rejoice in its demolition and want to finish the job and those who would like to put it back together.
And we get to watch it all on TV.
Unlike us, America is a proposition nation. It is founded on a set of ideas, not on racial or ethnic identity. These ideas, codified in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, can be summed up as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as “inalienable”: that is, natural to all human beings and not granted by the government. Compare how our government has recently treated us – like kindy kids who it ‘allows’ to leave the house once St Jacinda deems it’s safe – and you’ll see the difference.
The trouble is these propositions are something in which a significant and growing number of American activists and radicals no longer believe.
There have always been savage domestic critics of the American experiment. Some – African Americans and Native Americans principally – have had sound grounds for complaint. Others – the Weather Underground of the 60s, Jane Fonda – have been more the result of American success than failure: spoilt rich kids acting out oedipal hatreds. The most effective dissenters have used the promises of the propositions America was founded on to highlight the hypocrisy of American reality, as Martin Luther King Jr did when he referred to the founding documents as a “check” that had yet to be honoured.
But the new breed of activists aren’t trying to cash this check, they’re ripping it up.
The tragedy for America is that one of their two main political parties has made an alliance with these political vandals. Democrat Presidential hopeful Joe Biden may act like an escapee from a home for the bewildered but he’s the lipstick on the pig of left-wing crazy. His folksy appeal is Trojan-horsing in a radical agenda. You need only look at the Democrat response to last week’s riots in Kenosha over the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
Before the facts were known, Biden tweeted out: “Once again, a Black man — Jacob Blake — was shot by the police. In front of his children. It makes me sick.”
Little inconvenient facts like the man had an arrest warrant out on him for sexual assault and a knife was found in the car that he was reaching into when he was shot. Biden’s VP pick Kamala Harris lamented likewise that “yet another black man shot by police…shot seven times in the back, in broad day light”, as if police should wait till night time and give armed suspects a chance to turn around before shooting them. What betrays just how far the Democrats have moved from the concerns of ordinary Americans is the language used. Biden, sounding like an albino Malcom X, denounced “systematic racism”. Harris has talked favourably about the idea of monetary reparations for black Americans. Neither Democrat has strongly denounced the burning and looting that BLM protests have often devolved into. So much for trying to appeal to the security-conscious soccer moms of Middle America.
Mainstream Democrat policy and extremist rhetoric are now indistinguishable. The massive state expansionism of the Green New Deal, open borders (effectively), the abolition of the Electoral College are all championed by large sections of the party. If only a tenth of what is being talked about gets enacted, the Biden-Harris ticket is a ticket to radical change.
The party conventions made these clashing views of America plain. The Democrats harped on systematic racism, pandemic panic porn and the supposed fascism and ‘darkness’ of Trump. The Republicans put law and order and boasts of Trump’s pre-COVID economic success centre stage. Everything wrong with America vs everything right. The choice of speakers too, contrasted. The Democrats invited celebrities to bag Trump on national TV. The Republicans invited successful minority politicians (including a Democrat) to tell their personal stories. Former UN ambassador and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott were among the most prominent. Scott spoke movingly of how his family had gone from “cotton to Congress in one lifetime” countering the Democrat narrative of stalled racial progress.
Perhaps there is an alternative universe where Barack Obama, the first black American president, was a Republican. In his inaugural speech he gave black Americans the message of hope that black congressional candidate Burgess Owens gave in his RNC speech last week.
“Anything is possible in America.”
In that universe, if the message got through, there’d be no BLM, no riots and probably no Trump.
In ours though, Obama didn’t say it. Not because it isn’t true (look where he ended up) but because his party just doesn’t believe it.
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