I’m going to have to start this post with three preemptive apologies.
First, I’m sorry to revive a thread that’s fallen off the first page of the politics forum. We can get back to panicking about Obama shortly. It took me some time to think about why I felt this man's video is so wrong.
Second, I may come across as patriotic to the point of ethnocentrism to foreign posters. There are many other fine countries in the world, and my country has flaws, but I love it.
Third, despite my liberal bias I don’t mean to slight the role of conservatism in American History, which arguably helped give us the stability and separation of powers which makes this country stable and lasting, in contrast to the tendencies of liberal politics to use government as a force for social change, a dynamic opposition we have sometimes suffered from, but by which we have often benefited.
This man who spouts demagoguery while calling himself Thomas Paine disgraces the British pamphleteer who helped shape our country. Paine was a profoundly liberal man for his time. For example, he advocated wealth sharing that is left of center even today. But, I want to focus on how wrong he is about what makes America great when he pours water into wine as an analogy for the “damage” multiculturalism does to America. Look at the Second Continental Congress. Set aside for the moment, if you can, the fact that these were all wealthy white men who did little to address the wrongs against black people and women. Compare the society they were born into to the society they made by their mutual consent. Diverse colonies, Quaker, Catholic, Protestant, and strictly business-like, sent these men to work together. They even included atheists, a word which until that age was a slur against people who did not believe in your own faith. They were a more varied and productive group of politicians than had ever met peacefully for a common purpose in Europe until that time. Non-English speaking Germans joined with Washington and fought Hessian mercenaries valiantly. Catholics and Protestants shed blood together, inspirited chiefly by the words of an atheist who appealed to the common spirit of fraternity, and our noblest shared desires.
While it would take centuries for these ideals to be applied to all Americans, regardless of their sex or the color of their skin, and whatever political arguments they fell into, these men were consummate multiculturalists. This multiculturalism did not dilute or unravel us, but built a better country than they could have expected. They built the land of E pluribus unum of which I am proud to be a citizen.
