By Rich Lowry
Monday, July 19, 2021
The NFL has a new national anthem, or at
least a rival to the old one.
According to reports last week, the NFL
will play “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” commonly referred to as the black national
anthem, before every game this year.
This is more than woke virtue-signaling,
although it is assuredly that.
The NFL has been such a battlefield for
the cultural struggle over the national anthem and protests because it long ago
eclipsed baseball as the national pastime. Heretofore, as one would expect of
such a thoroughly American sport, the league had identified itself with a
robust patriotism (pre-game flyovers, gigantic American flags unfurled on the
field, tributes to servicemembers . . . ).
That the NFL has swung drastically the
other way is a sign that a new national identity is emerging to supplant the
old. This new American identity is, of course, getting pushed by every lever of
elite culture. It is defined by “anti-racism” instead of the American creed,
Black Lives Matter instead of, say, the American Legion or Veterans of Foreign
Wars, and new rituals, holidays, and heroes instead of ones that have been long
established and, to this point, uncontroversial.
The national anthem? It will now compete
with the black national anthem and, by implication, risks becoming the “white”
national anthem.
Juneteenth is worthy of commemoration but
is being set up as a competitor holiday to July 4.
1776, that most iconic year, is under
pressure from 1619.
Statues of American legends such as the
celebrated explorers Lewis and Clark, and Roger Clark, “Conqueror of the Old
Northwest,” were removed in a single day in Charlottesville, Va., the latest instance of a
remorseless iconoclasm sweeping the land.
And so on.
Why does it matter? A nation is to a large
extent defined by its symbols and associations, the holidays, rituals, heroes,
and history — the mystic chords of memory — that constitute its collective
self-understanding. This is how a nation tells itself what it is and what its
priorities should be.
As the 20th-century liberal historian
Arthur Schlesinger explained with regard to accounts of the past in particular,
“as the means of defining national identity, history becomes a means of shaping
history.”
When the late Samuel Huntington published
his classic book — Who Are We? — in 2004, his warnings about
the potential rise of Hispanic separatism in the American Southwest seemed
overly dire. But now his words about the creation of a new national identity
seem — typically of Huntington — quite prescient. “The greatest surprise,” he
wrote, “might be if the United States in 2025 is still the country it was in
2000 rather than a very different country (or countries) with very different
conceptions of itself and its identity than it had a quarter century earlier.”
In discussing the roots of identity,
Huntington notes that people inevitably define their identities in opposition
to an “other.” He quotes the French novelist André Malraux stating it starkly,
“Oh, what a relief to fight, to fight enemies who defend themselves, enemies
who are awake.”
The British famously defined themselves in
opposition to their continental enemies. The historian Linda Colley writes,
“Time and time again, war with France brought Britons, whether they hailed from
Wells or Scotland or England, into confrontation with an obviously hostile
Other and encouraged them to define themselves collectively against it. They
defined themselves as Protestants struggling for survival against the world’s
foremost Catholic power.”
The “other” in the case of our new
national identity isn’t foreign powers or alien practices, but American
traditions themselves; everything that doesn’t fit into a new “anti-racist”
narrative of the country must be denigrated and cast aside.
New ceremonies, catch-phrases, and heroes
will replace the allegedly inadequate, sinful ones of yore. The NFL, which not
too long ago represented a consensus American patriotism, is now part of the
vanguard of this hostile redefinition of what American is and should be.
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