What Does Our Nation Mean to Us? Rejecting the Culture of Hate

Editor’s Note: This column first appeared in RealClearPolitics.

As we approach this Fourth of July, the United States is consumed by reckless violence, nihilistic silencing, and a systematic assault on the nation’s cultural and political patrimony. The voices of sanity are few, and civic courage is in short supply. The exemplars of such courage in the Anglo-American tradition — Washington, Lincoln, U.S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill — are under assault from angry extremists who topple statues with impunity and demand absolute conformity. Government at every level appears impotent as indignant fanatics rule the streets. We have arrived at the unthinkable: “America’s Jacobin moment,” as an editorial in the Wall Street Journal aptly put it. What has happened to our republic?