Jewish World Review Sept. 9, 2003 / 12 Elul, 5763
Dennis Prager
The Dems' counter-revolution
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
At the Democratic presidential candidates' debate in New Mexico
last week, the Democratic Party publicly rejected the motto of our country,
e pluribus unum, "out of many, one." The Democratic Party has declared war
on the centuries-long revolution of coalescing people of every ethnic,
linguistic, racial and religious background into a new, non-ethnic entity
known as American.
For the first time in American history, a major party debate was
conducted in two languages. And to make the Democrats' counter-revolution
official, New Mexico's Democratic governor opened the debate by announcing
that it would be held in two languages in order to embrace multiculturalism.
This is an attempt to undo the American revolutionary idea that one's
ethnicity and bloodline should be of no significance. Far from being
progressive, the Democrats' emphasis on ethnicity (blood) and race is
utterly reactionary and counter-revolutionary.
Few Americans have a problem with candidates of any party
speaking to voters in the voters' native languages. More power to any
American politician who can communicate in more than one language. But this
audience in New Mexico was an English-speaking audience.
The point of making statements in Spanish was to make public the
Democratic Party's counter-revolutionary ideology that Americans should not
continue to be united by English, and that America should no longer
encourage its citizens to embrace a distinctive American culture, identity
and values system. America should rather be a land of many cultures, united
merely by accident of geography.
People who reject the American ideal -- either out of ignorance
(schools no longer teach Americanism) or out of the leftist conviction that
American values (G-d and liberty: meaning Judeo-Christian values along with
personal, political and economic freedom) are not superior to any other --
now run the Democratic Party. No one can imagine any Democratic leader prior
to the 1970s embracing the idea that America should be multicultural. In
large measure, the American ideal has been the attempt to create a society
that is multiethnic but not multicultural.
Americans have always embraced individual private expressions of
different cultures. The Chinese who teaches his children Chinese, the
Armenian who sends his child to an Armenian school, the Jew who makes sure
his child becomes a bar-mitzvah -- all these people are honored by American
society. But the American ideal has always been that no matter how attached
an individual is to his particular culture of origin, every American citizen
will identify as an American, united by one language in the public square.
The same week that the Democratic Party declared war on the
American ideal, it further damaged America by having the largest state in
the union, California, which the Democrats fully control, pass a law
allowing illegal immigrants to obtain a driver's license. The driver's
license is the de facto form of identification in our country. Thanks to the
Democratic Party, now anyone who sneaks into this country from places such
as Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Syria, can go anywhere and board any
airplane just as an American citizen can.
The Democratic Party, for a pot of gold (Latino votes), is
debasing American citizenship. Why become an American citizen if you can get
a free education, free health care and a driver's license (with which you
will be able to then vote) without becoming a citizen? Why identify as an
American when this country officially celebrates your cultural identity at
least as much as it celebrates American cultural identity? Why learn
English, when America will do everything possible to make that language
unnecessary to the vast numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants, legal and
illegal?
Because some readers confuse ideological attacks with personal
ones, the obvious needs to be stated: There are many beautiful Democrats and
there are many repugnant Republicans. But as a party, the Democrats are
damaging this country more than any external enemy or ideology has come
close to doing. If you are a committed leftist or a trial lawyer, it makes
sense to remain a Democrat. If you aren't, for love of country, leave that
party.
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JWR contributor Dennis Prager hosts a national daily radio show based in Los Angeles. He the author of, most recently, "Happiness is a Serious Problem". Click here to comment on this column.
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