The president discredits everything he touches. His poisonous form of patriotism is a danger to our civic health.
Donald Trump has a documented history of driving Americans away from the policies he favors. This is both good and bad.
Trump has driven people away from the Republican party, and caused them to reject the label “conservative.” I’m inclined to reject it myself, because in the age of Trump, it has become associated with nativism, racism, ignorance, authoritarianism, contempt, and crackpottery. And while it’s no loss for the nation if protectionism and nativism are discredited, there are other things that Trumpism endangers that would be serious losses.
I worry that Trump is contaminating patriotism itself. His blatantly racist appeals combined with his crude and offensive invocations of “America First” run the risk of associating patriotism with whiteness. His fondness for the Confederacy stains his embrace of the American flag.
What Trump’s fans on the right never seem to grapple with as they ceaselessly invoke the specter of socialism, riots, and gun confiscation, is how much Trump drives the left toward extremism. We are in the midst of a left-wing fever of revisionism about American history. From the 1619 Project to the toppling of statues of anti-slavery heroes, there is a movement afoot that Bari Weiss calls a “mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality.” Some of this predated Trump of course, but he has turbo-charged it.
Trump is a shriveled soul and tends to diminish everything and everyone he touches. As we move out of his orbit, we can begin to recapture some of the grandeur of the nation he has led so miserably. Consider the words of Ronald Reagan in his farewell address in January, 1989, ruminating on what America meant to the world:
I’ve been reflecting on what the past 8 years have meant and mean. And the image that comes to mind like a refrain is a nautical one—a small story about a big ship, and a refugee, and a sailor. It was back in the early ‘80s, at the height of the boat people. And the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea. The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart, and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up, and called out to him. He yelled, ‘Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man.’
We cannot permit American patriotism to be hijacked by yahoos and bigots. As we start to heal from the past four years, we must rescue patriotism from Trumpism.
https://thebulwark.com/donald-trump-ruined-conservatism-dont-let-him-ruin-patriotism/