Long Live the Nations
Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 9/2/18
Is denialism a word? If not, let’s make it one, defining it as the
mental state of those who absolutely cannot (will not?) accept a verifiable
reality.
Denialism is a condition marked by an
irrational refusal to accept the reality of a historical event such as, say, a
presidential election. Those afflicted with this condition, the deniers, are
off the rails, seemingly beyond help. Their condition leads to blindness,
obstinacy, and incurable anger.
One example of this
affliction is former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. Bill Clinton’s former cabinet member declared
this week that the Trump presidency should be annulled. Asserting that Robert Mueller’s findings could
prove Trump colluded with the Russians to win the election, Reich went on to
argue that such findings would further prove that Trump’s presidency “was
therefore not authorized under the U.S. Constitution.”
Such a leap of logic
and such hazy words are the reason God made lawyers. Lawyers, since they traffic in hazy English,
could probably understand Reich’s logic and explain how annulment would be
effectuated, but for us simple lay people it’s clear that Mr. Reich and many
other deniers cannot accept the fact that Donald Trump was elected President. Twenty-two months after that election, Reich
and other Trump-haters are still shaking their heads, protesting, crying, hurling
epithets toward Pennsylvania Avenue, and plotting.
My
question is what do Reich and others who are similarly afflicted think of those
who put Trump in office? We know the
answer. Those who put Trump in office
are the unwashed, the non-college graduates, working folks, people of faith,
neo-Confederates, Southerners and mid-landers, non-readers, NASCAR fans, and
closet segregationists. You might call
them deplorables.
Oh
yeah, they’re also America First types and “nativists,” or nationalists.
This
last designation – nationalists – to whom the media is unwilling to grant
personhood, is the reason Trump won and deniers lost. As in Europe, so is there in America a
nationalist/populist insurgency, a sentiment that rejects globalism and argues
for sovereign nations. On the rise
across the globe, nationalism is actually a simple cry for localism, for a
place in the sun where people of like values, traditions, and customs can live,
work, and raise their families.
When
John Kerry was running for president, his wife Theresa Heinz declared she was a
globalist. When George W. Bush and
Barack Obama were serving as president, they governed as globalists. “We’re a global economy,” they both
preached. “Those jobs are not coming
back.”
Well,
jobs do come back when different leaders with different policies prevail. Nationalism is the reason Britain broke from
the European Union. It is the political
force that has been felt in Italy, France, Austria, India, and Japan. Under-represented and unnoticed for too long,
the world’s deplorables are speaking out.
What
was communism other than the forceful gathering up of small European nations
and placing them into a “union” of Soviets?
Communism ran roughshod over small nation states with their own languages,
borders, and culture.
If there was ever a fake nation, it was
Yugoslavia, a post-World War I concoction of six republics with five languages,
three religions and two alphabets. Wish
my Italian sister-in-law could tell you about it. As the joke goes, there was never but one
Yugoslav and that was Tito, the Yugoslavian dictator. When Tito died in 1980, Yugoslavia died with
him as at least six nations began to re-assert their cultural identity.
Donald Trump’s rise to
power, like Britain’s exit from the EU, was brought about by a renewed spirit
of nationalism. Like it or not, the cry,
“Build the Wall,” is no different from the cry of the Balkan states who wished
to establish anew just who they were.
Democrat, Republican,
and media elites are nervous.
Deplorables actually scare them.
Poor students of history, the elites seem not to know that nationalism
freed the Soviet Union satellites from Russian domination thirty years
ago. Deplorables believe nationalism
will free them from lost jobs, open borders, lawless illegal aliens, and bad
trade deals.
There’s hope. The U.S. and Mexico have reached a deal on
trade. What happened to the trade war?
Those deplorables (the
normals) are smart. Unlike the deniers,
they understand the meaning of nation, community, and culture. They know that nationalism is not at odds
with free markets and that it has often nourished resistance to tyranny.
How interesting. If the
near future belongs to nationalists, it automatically belongs to the deplorables
who understand manual labor and geo-politics as well.
Who would have thunk
it?
Roger Hines
8/29/18
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