We know that anti-Americanism has been a growing problem in America’s culture since at least the 1960s, but it took Barack Hussein Obama to make anti-Americanism mainstream throughout America’s educational institutions, pop culture and the mainstream media.
A deeper problem is that this anti-Americanism is deeply entrenched: It won’t disappear or even diminish when Obama leaves office. It is a deep cultural problem embedded in our institutions, which means it is not amenable to a quick political fix. Equally troubling is that our cultural dissolution is not even on the list of top 10 public policy problems that Republicans or conservatives plan to tackle if they win majorities in government in 2014 and 2016.
A French novelist has just won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature for his lifelong study of the effects of the Nazi occupation on French society. The Nazis occupied France for only four years, but the American left has occupied our universities for 40 years. Will some American novelist study the effects of Marxism’s occupation of America’s state universities? Don’t hold your breath: Even the bold and perceptive Tom Wolfe chose sex over politics when he took on the academic culture.
Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Valerie Jarrett did not bring anti-Americanism to our culture, but Obama’s use of the White House as a “bully pulpit” has made it more respectable and more mainstream to constantly harp on our nation’s faults and blemishes than its achievements and virtues.
George Orwell taught us that the first step to control a people is to control the language used by people to debate topics and decide things. Our language colors how we perceive the world, how we see threats to our safety and liberty and how we talk about public issues. Obama and his team tried to change the language of public discourse, and to large part, they have succeeded. For example, news of a “police shooting” used to be the occasion for an internal investigation, whereas now, it means “police violence” and a public riot.
But even more troubling for the direction of our culture is Obama’s endorsement and active support for the redefinition of “American exceptionalism.” To the American left, our exceptionalism is found not in our ideals or our unparalleled achievements but in our exceptional crimes abroad, our exceptional oppression of minorities and our exceptionally excessive worship of capitalism. It’s a stain that can only be bleached away through repentance and rehabilitation, leading to “transformation.”
The leftist “transformation” of our society begins with a transformation of self-image and self-understanding as an oppressive society and not a free society. That requires control of American education, and that transformation is well under way. It is accelerated nicely through the adoption of a national “Common Core” curriculum and the College Board’s redesign of Advanced Placement U.S. history curriculum.
The new AP U.S. history curriculum is designed to lead students to think of American history in broad white-guilt themes. Patriotism is out; sensitivity to world cultures is in. Students will now learn we are a deeply racist nation, that national wealth is derived from exploitation of Third-World nations, and our industrial strength is built on capitalist exploitation of both the environment and helpless workers. Our past is something to be overcome, not celebrated.
To the authors of the College Board’s new AP U.S. history “framework,” the truly progressive way (meaning the morally right way) of understanding our past and our future is to value world citizenship, redistribution of wealth internationally, and “transnational values,” not American values. It goes without saying that in that brave new world, national borders are something to be transcended, not defended.
President Obama’s articulate espousal of that progressive worldview has provided inspiration to a legion of academicians laboring to advance the same worldview in our educational institutions. That worldview has been the conventional wisdom among university faculty and administrators for two or three decades, and dissenters have been purged from college classrooms. Now that orthodoxy and that purge are heading to our K-12 classrooms.
The only question is, will local citizens resist and defeat that takeover? That battle is lot harder when local citizens are fighting the “consensus” voiced not only by the academic establishment but the president of the United States as well.
Media wishing to interview Tom Tancredo, please contact [email protected].
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