[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
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.”
None of these banal charges had anything to do with al Qaeda’s orthodox jihadist motives, or Hussein’s pursuit of WMDs, or the occupation of Kuwait. But “worse yet were the expressions of support for the enemy” that murdered 2977 innocent fellow citizens, and “disregard for the protesters’ fellow citizens who soon would be fighting in Iraq and dying in Iraq”––the textbook meaning of oikophobia that has come to dominate the Democrat Party.
Howard Dean’s rapid success and his supporters fueled by protestors, enhanced his polls. As a result, the Democrat establishment began ceding their responsibility for policy and support for the war to their radical left wing. Mainstream senators like John Kerry and John Edwards, candidates for the presidential nomination race, joined the antiwar movement––even though they had voted for the AUMF, the Second Gulf War, and earlier the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 that Democrat President Clinton had previously made part of American foreign policy. As the Wall Street Journal wrote, “As Mr. Dean climbed the polls by denouncing the war, he made opposition to it a party litmus test.” Sound familiar to the Biden administration?
Familiar too was the media’s abandonment of their professional responsibilities to report the facts and leave ideological prejudices on the op-ed page. One shameless example of bias came from CNN’s Peter Arnett, who told Iraqi television that “our reports of civilian casualties here are going back to the United States. It helps those who oppose the war.” But the low point of the Dems’ oikophobia after 9/11 came in June 2004 with the enthusiastic presence of Democrat leaders including Al Gore, Barbara Boxer, Tom Harkin, and Tom Daschle at the premier of Michael Moore’s libelous anti-American “documentary” Fahrenheit 9-11.
Moore’s myopic, radical left oikophobia was obvious in his despicable comment that same month lauding the terrorists who were murdering Americas and their fellow Iraqis: “The Iraqis who have risen against the occupiers are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow––and they will win.” Even Worse, the Democrat useful idiots included Jimmy Carter and Vice-President Al Gore, who were spear-heading the attack on George Bush, invited Moore to the Democrat National Convention––and Carter had Moore sit next to him, as the mainstream media provided the publicity. No doubt the Nazi German-American Bund made similar statements in 1941.
The decline of patriotism displayed by Democrats after 9/11 has metastasized through policies that dismiss the rights and well-being of their fellow citizens by opening our borders to unvetted illegal aliens who injure untold number of Americans, with multiple murders, deaths from lethal drugs like fentanyl, and the civic disorder––plus the billions of taxpayer dollars and welfare doled out to illegal aliens at the expense of citizens. This violation of patriotism, one principle of which is “charity begins at home,” endangers the solidarity and mutual loyalty based on fealty to political structures and rights that create our national identity to which we pay the homage of patriotism.
For as historian Michael Burleigh has put the question, “Can any nation survive without a consensus of values that transcend special interests, and which are non-negotiable in the sense of ‘Here we stand’? Can a nation state survive that is only a legal political shell, or a ‘market state’ for discrete ethnic or religious communities that share little by way of common values other than the use of the same currency? Can a society survive that is not the object of commitment to the core values or a focus for the fundamental identities of all its members.”
Given how vital patriotism is for our survival, the turn against it by significant numbers of Democrats and “woke” leftists––in a Gallup question from June regarding Pride in Being an American by political party, 92% of Republicans agreed, compared to 32% of Democrats, down from 87% in 2001––who knows if this oikophobia would have increased even more if Donald Trump had not been elected and so far, successfully began the restoration of our Republic.