What Is Ali Velshi Talking About?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 01, 2026

 

The author Arthur Krystal had a confession to make. “I did not grow up loving America,” he wrote. That was more a result of indifference than alienation. “I didn’t think about it,” Krystal added in his essay for the New Yorker. “I can’t recall anyone I knew declaring a love for America.”

 

Krystal took his readers on his personal journey through the second half of the 20th century, when he began to take a deeper interest in patriotism as a subject of study. He dwelled on how America’s competing political factions have defined what love of country means to them — often in ways that conflict or that may even be mutually exclusive. And yet, Americans of all political stripes still told a story about themselves that both ends of the partisan spectrum would recognize.

 

Today, however, Americans have fallen out of love with the country of their birth, Krystal wrote. “Wokeness,” its excesses notwithstanding, “helped chill the left’s admiration for the nation.” Donald Trump and his faction express only superficial affection for the nation even as the president “has spent years slandering the country himself.” Krystal summarized his essay with a lament: “Patriotism just isn’t cool anymore.”

 

Krystal did not celebrate that diagnosis. Rather, he saw the fashionable apathy toward the American experiment as thoughtless or self-serving.

 

Over the weekend, MS NOW anchor Ali Velshi proved his point. In a cloying rant that is generating much attention, Velshi confessed to the “deep unease” he feels about celebrating the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, to say nothing of the country’s “so-called democracy.”

 

“In America’s case, anniversaries often gloss over the racial dynamics underlying much of America’s history and politics,” Velshi opined, “because America has never actually fully reckoned with its racist past and its original founding sin of slavery.”

 

What is he talking about? Is Velshi under the impression that America and Americans have studiously avoided confronting — “fully” or otherwise — the country’s racial past and present? “Americans who lived through the last several decades probably remember things a little differently.

 

“If we as a nation continue to ignore the racial reality of our times, tiptoe around it, demagogue it, or flee from it, we’re going to pay an enormous price,” said then–New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley in the immediate aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Indeed, throughout Bill Clinton’s presidency — from John Hope Franklin’s “One America in the 21st Century” commission, a White House initiative on race, to Clinton’s formal apology for American slavery — Democrats sought to lead a national confrontation with America’s historical racism.

 

Clinton’s project failed, as Democrats tacitly conceded by the middle of George W. Bush’s presidency. “If anyone ever doubted that there are two Americas, this disaster and our government’s shameful response to it have made the division clear for all to see,” said Congresswoman Barbara Lee in 2005 amid the inundation of New Orleans. The implication in her remark, one echoed by many other Democrats at the time, is that this majority-black city experienced that tragedy because it was a majority-black city. Bush himself lent credence to that narrative at that year’s National Prayer Breakfast. “As we clear away the debris of a hurricane,” he inveighed, “let us also clear away the legacy of inequality.”

 

Barack Obama’s political accession was criticized in some quarters for being too evasive when it came to racial dynamics in America. That critique contributed to Obama’s decision to address the subject in March 2008 in a speech in which he denounced not only his erstwhile mentor Jeremiah Wright’s pointed attacks on how America had “failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent” but also his white grandmother’s generation’s supposed commitment to racial ignorance.

 

Some of Obama’s supporters thought the “race speech” denouncing Wright was unnecessary. “We have seen a distinct difference in commentary on Rev. Wright from people who have spent time in black churches and those who have not,” the late PBS host Gwen Ifill remarked. Others hailed the speech as a masterstroke. Regardless, Obama failed to shake America out of its supposed avoidance and into the kind of racial reckoning Ali Velshi has in mind.

 

“In things racial,” Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, declared at the outset of Obama’s first term, “we have always been, and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” And that was never going to change, according to The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates. “This is a country too ignorant of itself to grapple with race in any serious way,” he wrote in 2010.

 

Progressives in Obama’s orbit had grown impatient by 2012. In the reckless effort to scuttle Mitt Romney’s presidential prospects, Obama’s backers handled the tender subject of American racism with a child’s disregard. They invented the scourge of “code words” — “dog whistles” that racists alone were supposed to pick up but only the left seemed to hear — in which phrases such as “urban,” “Chicago,” “apartment,” and even “constitution” were said to be leading indicators of racial hostility.

 

As I wrote in early 2015, the crusade by Obama’s allies had the profoundly undesirable effect of persuading Americans that racism was a more pernicious influence in American public life than it had been in decades:

 

On the eve of the racially charged 2012 election cycle, 50 percent of Americans told Gallup pollsters that race relations had “greatly improved,” while another 39 percent said that racial comity had improved “somewhat.” In that same year, 76 percent said “new civil rights laws” were no longer necessary. Only 21 percent disagreed, down dramatically from the 38 percent who supported new civil rights laws as recently as 1993.

 

That was also the year when the Black Lives Matter movement — boosted by racial rioting following the arrest-related deaths of young black men in Baltimore, Md, and Ferguson, Mo. – exploded onto the scene. The remainder of that decade was dominated by racial reckonings of one sort or the other, culminating in civil unrest that typified the summer of 2020.

 

The “racial reckoning” to which seemingly every institution in America committed itself that summer and beyond was also deemed a failure by its supporters. But it didn’t fail because Americans were hostile to a full accounting of American injustices. It failed because those who led the charge lost sight of their own mission.

 

The “reckoning” became a performative spectacle in which voguish anti-racist doctrines (“The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” as Ibram X. Kendi put it) overtook racial rapprochement. To curry favor with the activist class, Democrats, from President Joe Biden on down, routinely violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause in the effort to dispense taxpayer largess based on race.

 

Meanwhile, those activists competed with one another to divine the secret bigotries that even today tarnish banal practices like bird-watching, interior decorating, jogging, and celebrating holidays with your family. And all the while, a quasi-revolutionary cohort meted out violence against the symbols of the American republic — tactics that left-of-center institutionalists mimicked, albeit with a touch more proceduralism than the radicals in the streets might have preferred.

 

If Velshi believes that Americans are allergic to a full accounting of the country’s racial history, he’s just wrong. But maybe that’s not what he means. Perhaps the “full reckoning” he envisions cannot be judged a success unless it produces a consensus on the need to elevate progressives to positions of power. But if that is what Velshi means, then he’s just expressing his dissatisfaction with voters’ failure to consistently endorse Democratic remedies for the historical injustices of which they’re regularly reminded. He’s pretending Americans are ignoring the problem when they’ve merely rejected his preferred solution.

 

The truth is that this country has never stopped reckoning with racism — both the legacy variety and its present iterations. Not that the American people ever get any credit for the exercise. And perhaps they shouldn’t. Like America itself and the pursuit of a “more perfect” Union, there will never be a time when the mission is accomplished. The fact that the nation and its people persist is a testament to the virtue of America as a proposition.

 

“If you’ve got conflicting feelings about America’s upcoming anniversary, you’re not alone,” Velshi said at the conclusion of his monologue. “At least I’m with you on this.” I’m not. Because my patriotism is not conditional. It certainly isn’t based on whether my side is winning a political argument. But I’ve never had much use for being “cool.”