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.”
