[StBernard] There Are Two Irreconcilable Americas

[Westley Annis]

There Are Two Irreconcilable Americas
by Dennis Prager

It is time to confront the unhappy fact about our country: 
There are now two Americas. Not a rich one and a poor one; 
economic status plays little role in this division.

There is a red one and a blue one.

For most of my life I have believed, in what I now regard 
as wishful thinking, that the right and left wings have 
essentially the same vision for America, that it's only 
about ways to get there in which the two sides differ. 
Right and left share the same ends, I thought.

That is not the case. For the most part, right and left 
differ in their visions of America and that is why they 
differ on policies.

Right and the left do not want the same America.

The left wants America to look as much like Western 
European countries as possible. The left wants Europe's 
quasi-pacifism, cradle-to-grave socialism, egalitarianism 
and secularism in America. The right wants none of those 
values to dominate America.

The left wants America not only to have a secular govern-
ment, but to have a secular society. The left feels that 
if people want to be religious, they should do so at home 
and in their houses of prayer, but never try to inject 
their religious values into society. The right wants 
America to continue to be what it has always been -- a 
Judeo-Christian society with a largely secular government 
(that is not indifferent to religion). These opposing 
visions explain, for example, their opposite views con-
cerning nondenominational prayer in school.

The left prefers to identify as citizens of the world. 
The left fears nationalism in general (this has been true 
for the European left since World War I), and since the 
1960s, the American left has come to fear American 
nationalism in particular. On the other side, the right 
identifies first as citizens of America.

The left therefore regards the notion of American except-
ionalism as chauvinism; the United Nations and world 
opinion are regarded as better arbiters of what is good 
than is America. The right has a low opinion of the U.N.'s 
moral compass and of world opinion, both of which it sees 
as having a much poorer record of stopping genocide and 
other evils than America has.

The left is ambivalent about and often hostile to overt 
displays of American patriotism. That is why, for example, 
one is far more likely to find American flags displayed 
in Orange County, Calif., on national holidays than in 
liberal neighborhoods in West Los Angeles, Manhattan or 
San Francisco.

The left subscribes to the French Revolution, whose 
guiding principles were "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." 
The right subscribes to the American formula, "Life, 
Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." The French/Euro-
pean notion of equality is not mentioned. The right 
rejects the French Revolution and does not hold Western 
Europe as a model. The left does. That alone makes right 
and left irreconcilable.

The left envisions an egalitarian society. The right does 
not. The left values equality above other values because 
it yearns for an America in which all people have similar 
amounts of material possessions. This is what propels 
the left to advocate laws that would force employers to 
pay women the same wages they pay men not only for the 
same job but for "comparable" jobs (as if that is object-
ively ascertainable). The right values equality in opport-
unity and strongly believes that all people are created 
equal, but the right values liberty, a man-woman based 
family and other values above equality.

The left wants a world -- and therefore an America -- 
devoid of nuclear weapons. The right wants America to have 
the best nuclear weapons. The right trusts American might 
more than universal disarmament.

The left wants to redefine marriage to include same-sex 
couples for the first time in history. The right wants 
gays to have equal rights, but to keep marriage defined 
as man-woman. This, too, constitutes an irreconcilable
divide.

For these and other reasons, calls for a unity among 
Americans that transcends left and right are either 
naive or disingenuous. America will be united only when 
one of them prevails over the other. The left knows this. 
Most on the right do not.