By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
The absence of American flags on the stage and around the auditorium on the first night of the Democratic National Convention did not remain a story for long. Even Fox News couldn’t keep it afloat for more than a day. The Democrats in charge of the convention saw to that. The second night they rounded up flags and placed them where the cameras would be sure to pick them up when the speakers took the stage.
But that does not mean that there is no story here. Either the Democrats simply forgot to adorn the stage with flags on the first night, and quickly made up for their oversight. Or they did not intend to make the American flag a prominent backdrop for their most prominent speakers, including President Obama and Hillary Clinton, and were shamed into correcting that decision by the public reaction.
Either way we are witnessing important dimensions to the transnational liberalism that is central to the political psyche of a sizable number of modern Democrats.
Patriotism is a devotion to the American nation-state; modern liberals, in overwhelming numbers, especially in academic circles, seek the end of the nation-state and the creation of a world government with authority. It is what they mean by “globalism.” Their premise is that individual nations cannot be permitted to possess nuclear weapons; that an international body must be given a monopoly over nuclear weapons to prevent a future nuclear war.
That is not an accusation. It is on the record. Google “world government” along with the names of prominent liberals such as John Dewey, the father of progressive education, Sen. William Fulbright, and John Kennedy’s adviser Walt Whitman Rostow.
Also Bill and Hillary Clinton’s longtime adviser Strobe Talbott, who once wrote, “All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances…they are all artificial and temporary.” He pointed to the then-emerging European Union as a “pioneer” of “supranational” regional cohesion that could “pave the way for globalism.”
This was John Dewey’s hope, as well, when he called for an end to our reliance on “the principle of national sovereignty” and a willingness to submit to an international legislature those “affairs which limited imagination and sense have led us to consider strictly national.”
Whether any international body can be trusted with control over the world’s nuclear weapons is, of course, an important consideration. Many argue that a world government inevitably would become a world dictatorship.
But, even if a formal surrender of our national independence to a world government is not likely in the near future, the point is that the push for a world government engenders in those who promote it the conviction that patriotism is divisive, backward-looking, jingoistic, militaristic, xenophobic, an obstacle to the coming together of all mankind in a global community.
Globalists look with disdain on expressions of American patriotism: the flags at NASCAR races, military flyovers at athletic events, and honor guards at national ceremonies. They see it as jingoistic hoopla.
Whoever designed the flagless setting for the stage on the first night of the Democratic convention is an example of the above frame of mind: They were more comfortable with a milieu that one might find at a Planned Parenthood convention or an ACLU workshop than at a Memorial Day ceremony.
But there is more than one-world aspirations at work in this scenario, something more than a preference for the wisdom of bureaucrats with briefcases and designer suits at the United Nations or the Belgian headquarters of the European Union. There is also a contempt for the traditional pieties and values of the American people, for an older America, for Christian America.
An overstatement? Think back. That contempt was central to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, whose devotees now run our schools and the Democratic Party. It is what led to the use of the term “pigs” for our military and the police by the 1960s radicals. It is what led to the references to the United States as “Amerika.” One of the favored books of that era, written by a man who took great satisfaction in the changes the counterculture was bringing to American life, was titled The Decline of the WASP.
The author, Peter Schrag, understood that it was not the American flag in and of itself that was the problem, but what it represented: WASPS, Christian Americans, the “heirs of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, Honest Abe and General Lee, the builder, tinkerer, woodsman, cowboy, athlete. The muscular Christian” represented in our popular entertainment by “the Lone Ranger, Jack Armstrong, Captain Midnight, frank yet cautious, shrewd yet credulous, positive yet skeptical, confident yet shy…a mixture of ‘history,’ mythology, and fact.”
This is what had to be eliminated to make America amenable to Schrag and the counterculture radicals: “Our boy,” he writes scornfully. “It is hard to find a better description of how the official American wanted his kids to grow up, or how he likes to think of his own childhood. The selective memory, part Boy Scout manual, part English boarding school, part fiction.”
It is why Schrag reveled in the in the “cultural prison break” of the counterculture years, the time when Bill and Hillary Clinton and the people who organized the Democratic National Convention came of age, when Americans “of all descriptions” joined “blacks, Indians” and the “kids” in the “freedom they seemed to have been waiting for all their lives.”
Schrag asked his readers to look “at any issue of the Village Voice or the Berkeley Barb,” the radical newspapers of the time:
“You feel as if you’re in a carnival where the straightest people are rock musicians,” a place filled with “Norman Mailer’s ego and Alexander Portnoy’s mother…the Woodstock Nation and the friends of the Panthers, rebellious nuns and protesting priests, Rat and Screw and…bookstores of the occult, tarot cards, and freaks and hipsters…the pregnant Girl Scout over the motto ‘Be Prepared,’ the pregnant black woman over the slogan ‘Nixon’s the One,’ and copulating rhinoceroses with the injunction ‘Make Love Not War’.” A world where “sex is no longer that grim act of aggression…no longer hedged with puritanical restraint….The cultural offense is calculated: filth becomes a premeditated reproach against the establishment.”
The bottom line: People who harbor the contempt for the “establishment” Schrag is talking about do not surround themselves on a podium with American flags, unless and until they discover that it is necessary to use the flags as props to win the votes of their fellow citizens who have not yet been won over to the joys of the cultural prison break he welcomed with such enthusiasm.
This is the message that sunk in on the second night of the Democratic National Convention: The recognition that there probably are enough Americans who still cling to their guns and religion and what the flag represents to make a difference in a tight election.
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