Quote:But in the contrasting rhetoric of Walz and Vance, in particular, we get a much sharper sense of what’s really being litigated in this election: two sharply contrasting views of what being American actually means.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...kswL9G27HE
The most important passage in Vance’s convention speech last month was the one where he described the country as something physical, rather than an abstraction. “America is not just an idea,” Vance said. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is in short, a nation.”…
What Walz articulates — about as clearly as anyone has in the party since Barack Obama arrived on the scene 20 years ago — is a competing view that says, no, actually America is very much an idea. Alone among nations, we have from the very start been a collection of immigrants and outsiders, bound together not by any common origin or culture, but rather by a common set of laws and values and institutions — what Abraham Lincoln called our “political religion.”….
The difference between ethnic and civic nationalism could not be more simply described.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!