printDid I just hear John Boehner say that America was an idea more than a country? The representative from Ohio took the gavel, today, Wednesday, becoming the 61st speaker of the House of Representatives. Toward the end of his address, Boehner repeated the preposterous notion of America as a propositional nation.
The call to think about the US as an idea—rather than real flesh-and-blood communities animated by shared language, history and heroes—is the call of statism at its purist. For a rootless deracinated people are the most pliable, most miserable, and, thus, easier to control.
Faith in the propositional nation presupposes endless immigration. For, after all, this country is presumed to have had no particular requisite characteristics at its founding. And if early Americans had certain characteristics, these are taken to have played no role in the system of individual liberties America’s apparently amorphous founders established.
I gave up on Boehner after watching him weep on TV. Unlike most inhabitants of this country, I don’t get a warm fuzzy when a leader weeps. I guess it doesn’t surprise me that a weeper would support the propositional nation and could be adverse to closing the doors.
I think he said that
more than a country, America is an idea….which is different from saying
that it is an idea more than a country.
The first statement is patriotic. The second is almost derogatory.
My suspicion is that for anybody to be the speaker of the house, he must be an expansionist statist like the rest…like any other mafia, the government wouldn’t let a moral person get to any position of real power.