While many of us were cooking burgers and shooting off fireworks last week to celebrate our nation's founding, other Americans were in a distinctly less joyful mood, or at least finding joy in somewhat less orthodox behavior, hence the following among many similar headlines:
• "Protesters rally downtown for July Fourth boycott: 'That Flag is a Lie.'"
• "Baltimore: Statue of Columbus torn down, tossed into harbor."
• "D.C.: Protesters set fire to flag, chant 'America Was Never Great.'"
• "Colin Kaepernick condemns July Fourth as 'Celebration of White Supremacy.'"
A number of questions thus arise when noting such discordance amid the revelry, including whether there is any point at which criticism of America becomes so excessive as to constitute actual hatred of America and, assuming that there logically must be such a point, what that point would look like in terms of political programs and gestures (such as denouncing the founding altogether).
After all, if you declare America to have been nothing more than a "white supremacist" project from the beginning, as the left is increasingly wont to do, there is reason for an objective observer to wonder whether there can be any room left for even residual affection. As a purely logical matter, it would be supremely illogical to love something that you have deemed hateful.
A curious inverse relationship therefore exists between the expression of grievances over injustices in a democratic society and the actual degree of injustice which exists--genuinely oppressive places don't permit the oppressed to complain about their oppression so easily and loudly, let alone have agents of the state stand by while statues are torn down and tossed into harbors.
A similar relationship exists between the need of the left to depict America in the worst possible terms in order to justify reform and the consequent desirability of actually reforming it--you don't seek to reform something that is defined only by racism, sexism, and bigotry; if America is nothing more than the equivalent of the KKK writ large, then there would be no reason to keep it around even in reformed condition.
In the final, tumultuous years of the Soviet Union's existence (noteworthy for being the other overtly "creedal" national project in human experience), debate developed over whether Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost were capable of reforming the USSR or whether it was beyond salvation and could only be destroyed and rebuilt on a different foundation (the position that Gorbachev's rival Boris Yeltsin took, and which ultimately prevailed in the fall of 1991).
It seems that in at least some respects our hard left has now passed a certain crucial point where, judging by its rhetoric (and, increasingly, also its actions), it no longer believes that reform of America is possible or even desirable, that all that remains is demolition.
The irony creeps in when realizing that, only 30 years or so after our Cold War victory, the values that so many Americans are now denouncing are the same values that Russia's revolutionaries sought to replace Marxism-Leninism with.
Within the left's vehement hostility toward America's founding and its principles and institutions can also be found two contradictions which reveal a lack of intellectual seriousness.
First comes the realization that the most important expression of human freedom of all--the freedom to leave and live elsewhere if one wishes--continues to exist as a solution for such discontent. However bad it might be, and unlike so many other regimes over time, America erects no walls to keep within those citizens dissatisfied with its failures and myriad daily injustices, so just about everyone is free to be done with it if they truly want to be.
Second is the failure to even attempt to explain why so many people (especially so many "people of color") struggle so mightily to come to such an inhumane land in the first place; more precisely, why one of the most contentious issues in American politics exists only because we can't let in all of those who want to move here and be thereafter oppressed (indeed, were America the oppressive place the left claims, logic would suggest that they try mightily to warn people away rather than support ease of entry).
Based on the left's rhetoric, then, we should expect the flow of people to go in the exact opposite direction it actually does--truly awful places don't need immigration policies and don't have debates over immigration because just about everyone wants to leave and no one wants to get in.
A mischievous sort might even try to provide assistance in directing our unhappy woke folk to more congenial places far away from American borders and the hellish reality of life within them; perhaps places with capitals like Pyongyang, Havana, Caracas, or Beijing, especially since the waiting lists for entry would be so short.
Given that we seem to have lots of Americans who don't much like America and lots of people outside America who apparently do, we could perhaps go as far as to suggest something of a voluntary people swap--their genuinely oppressed in return for our fake oppressed.
The former would get to experience glorious freedom, the latter what true oppression consists of.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.