RE: 2024 US Presidential Election
August 22, 2024 at 7:07 pm
(This post was last modified: August 22, 2024 at 7:12 pm by Thumpalumpacus.)
(August 22, 2024 at 3:27 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: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.
My great-great-uncle George Wolff stepped off'n the boat from Hamburg and onto the quayside in Galveston TX. He set about putting a life together for himself and his family, including bring his nephew, my grandfather, over. I think he was very early 20s in age.
A little over 12 years from that moment, he stepped back aboard a ship, in olive-drab and puttees, headed for St Nazaire, off to fight the Heer. Thankfully, he had a rear-in-the-gear job, and came back home and demobbed. Went back into bidness, worked to help our family be middle-class (or what passed for it at the time), and died in his own bed.
Why did he leave Germany? Why did he take up arms against Germany? Was it allegiance to a flag, or an ideal? How many Americans of Italian descent might tell the same story from their own families? How many Nisei?
This is not a unique American story. It is in fact much the story of our nation.