How progressives have convinced us America is evil — and must be destroyed

Ben Shapiro @ NY Post:

The philosophy of division is a philosophy that derides any notion of American unity as a lie, and bathes that which links us — Abraham Lincoln’s “bonds of affection” and “mystic chords of memory” — in acid, disintegrating our ties and casting us all adrift.

I call this strain of thought “Disintegrationism.”

In order to argue that America’s philosophy is wrongheaded, her culture diseased, and her history evil, Disintegrationists must engage in an extraordinarily selective reading of reality. They must home in, in excruciating detail, on America’s sins, which, in context, would be fine — but rob that history of all context or subsequent history. Exploitation is a feature of every human society, and repeated mistreatment by some groups of other groups is a similarly common feature. What is uncommon — indeed, unprecedented in human history — are prosperity, peace, and freedom.

It is simply undeniable that capitalism, founded on protection of property rights — the ideology of the Founding Fathers — has been uniquely successful in spreading peace and prosperity both domestically and around the globe. Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, the enshrinement of individual rights, and the advent of protection for private property — the roots of capitalism — global GDP has increased exponentially, in shocking fashion. In the year 1 BCE, global GDP amounted to $183 billion; in 1000, global GDP was approximately $210 billion; in 1500, it was still just $431 billion; in 1700, $643 billion; as of 2013, $101 trillion. That is a 15 percent increase in the first millennium, and a 15,700 percent increase from 1700 to present.

It is similarly undeniable that the spread of peace has been a direct result of American hegemony. On a year-by-year basis, international war deaths have decreased precipitously since World War II, from a high of nearly 200 deaths per 100,000 people at the end of that conflict to a low of well below 0.5 deaths per 100,000 people at the turn of the twentieth century. Global life expectancy has doubled since 1900. Furthermore, America has become the most tolerant country on earth. According to the Washington Post, a new Swedish survey found that people from the United Kingdom, America, Canada and Australia, as well as certain Latin American countries, were “most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor.” Other European countries aren’t nearly as tolerant. And none of those countries has ever elected a black man — twice — with more than 65 million votes each time, to serve as the leader of those countries.

Radical left politicians like Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke are dead set to rewrite American history by calling the past racist and misogynist.

Finally, it is perfectly obvious that global freedom has expanded wherever American influence has expanded. According to the Polity Project at the University of Maryland, democracy is actually at a global high, and has been in particularly steep ascent since the death of the Soviet Union — a collapse brought about, of course, by America’s willingness to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” as John F. Kennedy put it in his inaugural address.

The bar for Disintegrationists, then, is high. To surpass it, they must employ a clever, seductive, and deeply vicious strategy.

Disintegrationists offer a subversive but seductive view of America as an evil actor — and have provided an alternative Unionism rooted in intersectional solidarity. Intersectionality, in its original iteration, was perfectly plausible: It suggested that Americans may be targeted based on membership in more than one minority category. So, for example, a black woman might meet discrimination in a different way than a white woman. But intersectionality has now become a rallying cry for Disintegrationists who aver that America is subject to unbending, rigid hierarchies that can be torn down only by uprooting the entire American system.

By convincing Americans that any unexplained disparity is the result of the American system — philosophy, culture, institutions and history — Disintegrationists have a succinct and irrefutable argument in favor of tearing down the system. Any evidence of disparate treatment becomes an argument against Unionism.

This is an emotionally resonant pitch. Traditional Americanism suggests that while our system has never been perfect, it has grown increasingly so — and this means that it should be easier to succeed today, without the obstacles of bigotry that have plagued our history, than ever before. That worldview places an awful responsibility on individuals: If you fail to succeed, you can certainly blame personal disadvantages, but it becomes difficult to blame a miasmatic, existential, systemic, flag-draped boogeyman haunting your dreams. Additional freedom means additional responsibility.

If, however, all disparity can be chalked up to the system, then personal responsibility becomes a secondary concern. Failures are no longer individual, but systemic. In fact, every failure becomes an additional brick in the wall of evidence against America.

Read more