The decline of patriotism displayed by Democrats after 9/11 has metastasized.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were the most momentous and vicious assaults on our homeland in its history. The primary targets––the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon–– were chosen in order to inflict the maximum spectacular carnage on innocent people, and to achieve the greatest symbolic resonance of hatred against our global power.
The People’s immediate reactions were an outpouring of righteous anger and patriotic passion––from flying flags to enlisting in the military services. But it wasn’t enough to prevent in a few years the widespread return of oikophobia, the hatred of our country, its political order, history, mores, and fellow citizens; or restore our traditional oikophilia, the patriotic pride and love for all those defining goods of America that had been brutally attacked by terrorists.
Despite the various rationalizations promulgated by Osama bin Laden and his Islamic jihadist propagandists, America was attacked not for our alleged geopolitical sins, but for what we are: a multiethnic, self-governing, liberal democracy that maximizes freedom and autonomy under law for the greatest number of people––a way of life and a suite of ideals whose obvious global success and power, symbolized by the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, incite the envy and hatred of all those cultures that subordinate individual freedom and worth, to the power and privilege of economic, political, or religious elites, and so ensure their own societies’ dysfunctions and tyranny.
On 9/11, many patriotic Americans, including even liberals, displayed their grief and patriotism at a level we hadn’t seen since the brief celebrations of Ronald Reagan’s dismantling of the Soviet Union, and kicking communism’s biggest power into the rubbish-bin of history.
But soon such patriotism was conspicuous by its absence, especially among the elite intellectuals in the academy and media, who refused to take a stand to protect and defend those defining core ideas, and to condemn and punish those who had attacked them or aided the attackers. Instead, many engaged in irrational, unfounded, ignorant, irrelevant, and at times bizarre criticism of the United States that in effect rationalized and confirmed Al Qaeda’s own justifications for mass murder.
Moreover, the progressives and leftists Democrats and activists leveraged the subsequent Wars on Terror, and the military actions taken by the Bush administration––legally sanctioned by passage of the Joint Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)––to instead deploy the antiwar movements that had been so successful in turning the Vietnam War into a defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
In 2002, Nation magazine, the oldest and most influential leftist periodical in America, trotted out the usual anti-American leftist suspects, communist myth-history, and moral relativism, along with question-beggin clichés like “imperialism” and “colonialism.” Another writer blamed “U.S. missiles smashing into Palestinian homes,” as well as other “historical wrongs and injustices that lie behind the firestorms.” Still another hoped that “our nation’s suffering could open our eyes to the rest of the world’s pain.” The U.S., thundered another, is the “world’s leading rogue state.”
By October of 2002, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators had swarmed the country with rallies and protests that gave succor to the murderers. As David Horowitz wrote in Unholy Alliance, “Spokesmen denounced America as a ‘rogue state’ and a ‘terrorist state,’ likened the president to Adolf Hitler, equated the CIA with al Qaeda, described America’s purpose as ‘blood for oil,’ and called for ‘revolution.’”
In March, the month when the second Gulf War began, Democrat Howard Dean exploited the anti-war ferment and “galvanized his long-shot campaign for the Democratic nomination for president by attacking the war in Iraq,” Horowitz wrote. Dean also got “further traction by the numerous anti-war protests, ‘sit-ins,’ ‘rallies,’ ‘teach-ins’ across America and the world, many of them organized by ANSWER, which added the “reflexive anti-Americanism of the international left,” with its Marxist clichés about “imperialism” and “colonialism” and the evils of capitalism.” --->READ MORE HERE
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