Democrats want to know why Republicans are making patriotism partisan. Perhaps it is because the Democratic Party and its liberal activists have rejected it.
On Sunday, Jazmine Ulloa wrote for the New York Times about how the phrase “the American dream” became a “partisan battlefield.” In this opinion piece disguised as reporting, we are told that “critics say” that the phrase is being “distorted,” in particular by nonwhite Republicans running for office.
For decades, politicians from both parties have used the phrase, including former Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. But those pesky black and Hispanic Republicans keep using the phrase wrong, Ulloa tells us through the filter of her hand-picked “experts.” According to Ulloa, “historians and other scholars warn that some Republicans are distorting a defining American idea and turning it into an exclusionary political message.”
“The Republican Party is using it as a dog whistle,” she quotes some random professor as saying. “They are saying here is the potential of what you can have, if we can exclude others from ‘stealing it’ from you.” Ulloa also bemoans that Republicans turned the American flag into “an emblem of the right” and then approvingly notes that minority Democrats are also warning about the end of the American dream.
This is as embarrassing and partisan a “Republicans bad, Democrats good” piece you’ll ever find in print, but even then, Ulloa manages to miss the point. Because it isn’t Republicans who turned “the American dream” into a partisan rhetorical tool. It was Democrats. Ulloa herself highlights the “reluctance by some Democrats to emphasize the phrase.”
And why wouldn’t Democrats be reluctant to use it? Prominent figures and activists in the party claim that America is systemically racist and built on land stolen from Native Americans. In her own piece, Ulloa claims that “economic and racial barriers” make achieving the American dream impossible for many. Ulloa works for the same outlet that falsely claimed the United States was founded to protect slavery. Why would anyone who believes those things believe in the “American dream?”
Republicans did not turn the American dream, or the American flag, into partisan tools. Democrats did that by abandoning them. They rejected the premise that America is good or that ordinary people can succeed through hard work and determination. They reject the idea that the principles of liberty and justice belong to everyone.
The New York Times can whine about it all it wants, but its own employees helped fuel Democrats’ abandonment of these ideas, which always represented “the American dream.”
