By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, July 07, 2020
If nothing else, President Donald Trump’s July Fourth
speech at Mount Rushmore clarified the battle lines of our culture war.
The New York Times called the speech “dark and
divisive,” while an Associated Press headline declared, “Trump pushes racial
division.” A Washington Post story said the speech “crystallized” the
president’s “unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of
white domination.”
Democratic senator Tammy Duckworth insisted that Trump
“spent all his time talking about dead traitors.”
To be clear — and despite all of this — the media and the
Left didn’t freak out about a speech extolling the valor of Robert E. Lee, the
statesmanship of Jefferson Davis, or the prowess of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
They didn’t scorn a speech pining for Antebellum America or expressing
ambiguity about the Civil War. They didn’t pan a speech that slighted the quest
for justice and civil rights throughout American history.
As a matter of fact, Trump didn’t mention any
Confederates at all. He hailed Abraham Lincoln at length and called the Civil
War “the struggle that saved our union and extinguished the evil of slavery.”
He cited the repulse of Pickett’s charge and quoted the Battle Hymn of the
Republic. He said we must defend “the principles that propelled the abolition
of slavery in America” and “the ideas that were the foundation of the righteous
movement for civil rights.”
It would be difficult to get a more textbook expression
of the American civic religion than the speech at Rushmore. It would be
difficult to get a more wide-ranging appreciation of the warriors, inventors,
adventurers, reformers, entertainers, and athletes who have made the country
what it is. It’d be difficult to get a more affirming account of the greatness
of America and its meaning to the world.
And, yet, the speech was tested and found wanting.
Trump’s attacks on what he called “a new far-left
fascism” and a cultural revolution “designed to overthrow the American
Revolution” were indeed hard-edged, but who can doubt the basic truth of the
claims?
There’s a fear afoot in the land, as a merciless
authoritarian spirit informs a spate of firings and cancellations. The day
before Trump’s speech, a Boeing executive resigned over something he had
written . . . in 1987.
Protestors have targeted commemorations of every single
one of the presidents etched on Mount Rushmore, who the day before yesterday
would have been completely unassailable giants of American history. Vandals
splashed red paint on statues of Washington in New York City, and the
aforementioned Tammy Duckworth said she’s open to having a conversation about
whether statues of the Father of the Country should still stand.
The setting for Trump’s speech is itself now deemed
problematic. A CNN report previewing the event said Trump “will be at Mount
Rushmore, where he’ll be standing in front of a monument of two slave owners
and on land wrestled away from Native Americans.”
There’s no doubt that Trump is a deeply flawed messenger.
Indeed, days after the speech, he, out of nowhere, attacked NASCAR on Twitter
for banning the display of Confederate flags.
But it wasn’t just Trump the messenger who was attacked
in the aftermath of the Mount Rushmore speech; it was the message.
Patriotic sentiments of the sort that have adorned
American oratory for centuries were deemed hateful and divisive. A celebration
of the Founders that once would have been the stuff of schoolbooks and primers
was considered controversial. A defense of the nation’s ideals was waved away.
No, nothing to see here — only hate and division.
Surely, if some other Republican president had given the
Mount Rushmore speech, the pushback wouldn’t have been as intense. But this
isn’t just about Trump. It goes much deeper.
Critics of the speech objected to what they said was its wildly exaggerated account of the stakes in the culture war — and at the same time, they vindicated that account by equating patriotism with white supremacy.
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