Stacy McCain:
On Sunday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” former ABC “World News’ anchor Sam Donaldson accused President Donald Trump’s supporters of having a “fixation” on returning America to a “white Christian country.”
Donaldson said, “The Trump rallies are Trump’s strong supporters. I mean, ‘lock her up,’ all the things he says, all the vicious, mean things he says, they love it. There are these people in this country. They’re good Americans otherwise. They’ll probably give you the shirt off their back, they’ll help you if you need it, but they have this fixation. They want to return this country to the white Christian country that they believe it should be again. They don’t want the diversity, and they follow him for this, but they’re not the country. We are a diverse people, we are good and strong because of that, and we’re going to come back to that. I assure you.”
Let me say this: I like Sam Donaldson. He was not born to the moneyed blueblood Eastern elite. He is the son of a West Texas farmer and got his education at a second-tier state college (now UTEP) before joining the Army where he served as an artillery captain. So he is not like some of these young punks with their Ivy League degrees and arrogant sense of entitlement. What then explains Donaldson’s attitude? I blame two things: Partisanship and generational blindness.
Sam is a Texas Democrat, plain and simple. He was born and raised in an era when there was no such thing as a Republican in Texas, and in that sense resembles Dan Rather — a native of Wharton, Texas, three years older than Donaldson — and also his late ABC colleague, Cokie Roberts, the daughter of Louisiana Democrat Hale Boggs. To such people, the offspring of New Deal Democrats, and themselves old enough to recall the JFK “Camelot” era, the Democrats are and always will be the natural rulers of America. They instinctively act as cheerleaders for the Democrats the way I cheer for the Alabama Crimson Tide, expressing a sense of inherited loyalty, as it were. No fact or argument can dissuade them from this partisanship, because it is inherently irrational.
The other factor is that a rich old white guy like Donaldson cannot be made to understand what “diversity” means in practical terms for the young white person from less privileged circumstances. While his own four children are probably doing all right for themselves, it is the offspring of the white working and middle classes who are watching their communities and life prospects destroyed in the name of “diversity.”
What would Sam Donaldson say to the young white person in Minnesota, for example, who cannot go to downtown Minneapolis for fear of being assaulted by Somali street gangs? It’s impossible to make many people of Donaldson’s generation come to grips with such problems, or to make them understand that these problems are a result of policy decisions which could easily be amended or reversed without harming any lawful immigrant. It is only because our current crazy-quilt pattern of immigration laws act as perverse incentives — a magnet for illegal immigration — that we have the problems we now have, and most elders in both political parties are blind to the scope and nature of the situation.
Sam Donaldson’s accusation that Trump’s supporters are merely nostalgic reactionaries is typical of a certain class of people who, for various reasons, refuse to consider the possibility that America is now facing problems without precedence in our history, the solution of which will require us to alter or abandon our established pattern of politics.
Trump does not represent a return to some beloved status quo ante, but rather an attempt to shake off the legacy of what, for lack of a better term, I call Bushism — a go-along-to-get-along attitude of “bipartisan compromise” that makes Republicans not the opponents of Democrats, but rather their accomplices. In an age when Democrats are beholden to the likes of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, conservatives can no longer imagine that we are dealing with people of good will, who want the best for America’s future. Today’s Democrats hate America and want to destroy it, so that they can preside over the wreckage and ruin.
It's also obvious that Democrats like Donaldson hate Christians. Otherwise, why pick out Christianity along with "whiteness" to impugn.
Does it strike anyone else as strange that an old white guy should disparage his own past, his own race and the culture that he grew up in and made him rich and famous? Yet here we are and Donaldson is not unique. In fact, he is easily identified as part of a movement of white Liberals who want to tear the past down and being in the future that doesn't seem to be working for people who are not as well-off.
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