Wouldn’t it be fascinating, actually tremendously heartening, if the man who was supposedly our most divisive politician was the man who ultimately brought our broken country together—former President Donald J. Trump?
The United States is often, justifiably, criticized for having been built to some degree by slavery. It wasn’t alone in that, and it still exists in some places, but the United States fought its most painful war to abolish the practice. Years later, it enacted the Civil Rights Act, enshrining equality in our laws. Racism was diminishing.
Consequently, for as long as I have been alive, which is the entire post-World War II era, it has been assumed that minorities voted Democratic, whether to their advantage or not.
So I was gladdened to see, watching on television, the throng of racially mixed Americans gathered in one of my childhood haunts from Yankee Stadium to the Zoo to Van Cortlandt Park—the borough of the Bronx.
No less than one of the most reactionary forces in our culture—identity politics—was under attack in the massive show of support from that mixed-race crowd given former President Trump at his surprisingly large rally in Crotona Park in the southern part of the borough.
I used the term reactionary quite deliberately because it was and probably still is the most supreme insult that one could give anyone leaning left. It signified that they were behind the times, retrograde.
And much of the left has been that since they reversed the color-blind, character-based idealism of Dr. Martin Luther King in favor of the reactionary (that word again) dictums of critical race theory and so-called anti-racism that are themselves racist to the core. The latter two assert the primacy of race over character, something that is senseless to anyone who honestly observes actual human behavior in even slightly moral terms.
Those dicta have worked to preserve or even extend racism, rather than destroy it, for reasons of power and profit. In order for society to progress, for the American Idea or, if you prefer, the American Dream, to be preserved or obtained, identity politics must be eliminated.
I don’t mean that people should lose their identities, small “i.” Mexican Americans should still celebrate Cinco de Mayo, Irish Americans, St. Patrick’s Day, and so forth, but that shouldn’t be their complete Identities (capital I deliberate).
They are citizens of a country whose founding documents proclaim that we are all “created equal,” no matter race, religion, ethnicity, and all the rest. Often this was and still is hard to fulfill, but that makes it all the more worthy as a goal.
During President Trump’s Bronx speech, he did the opposite of what has become conventional and offered to join New York Democratic Party officials, the state governor, and the city mayor in an effort to Make New York Great Again (MNYGA).
This was, in part, good politics, reaching across the aisle in a radically divided country, something that the former president has been loath to do but seems to be doing now. He should keep it up.
Yes, his Bronx rally had obvious electoral motives, trying to flip New York or at least make enough in-roads to force his opposition to devote more time and money to a state that they normally win without effort. But as I am trying to indicate, more than electoral politics is involved. It is the soul of our nation.
Soul of the nation sounds a bit like pompous rhetoric, I admit, but I submit that we should concentrate on that as this election goes forward. I know of very few of our fellow citizens who have not suffered on the most personal levels from the degree to which our society is riven. Families and friendships have broken apart across the country.
