Monika Bauerlein is the CEO of Mother Jones. In the December 2024 edition of the magazine, Bauerlein wrote a "To Our Readers" column that doesn't appear to be available online. Bauerlein titled her column, "The Kingdom And The Power." In her column, Bauerlein took exception to the following statement by JD Vance, our next vice-president in waiting:
America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.
Bauerlein's quarrel with what might seem a rather unexceptional statement is outlined as follows:
Despite the bland, stump-speech-bot language, these words signal an idea profoundly at odds with what America has sought to be - an idea that many conservatives are now embracing as the nation's future. It is the idea of nationalism, which at its core means that a country's identity is rooted in a specific group of people. That is indeed how many countries around the world define themselves. But America, historically, has aspired to something different....
The Declaration of Independence, in fact, does make a claim that the nation just being born was not one directed at the protection and advancement of any specific group of people - and thus, presumably, was intended to exclude all others. The Declaration proclaims what it says is a "self-evident" truth, that "all persons are created equal, [and] that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [and] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The purpose of government - ANY government, if we follow The Declaration - is to "secure these rights," and to secure them for everyone. In essence, The Declaration indicates that the United States began with the idea that it was part of - perhaps the beginning of - an understanding that all governments should be dedicated to protecting the rights of all persons.
Today, the difference between the idea propounded in The Declaration and the kind of "Christian Nationalism" discussed by Bauerlein, and that has been advanced by the Republican Party in the last election, is, essentially, at issue.
Let us not lose sight of what is most important about the United States of America - the idea upon which the nation was founded, and which the nation has pursued (albeit with many failures along the way) for what is getting close to 250 years. I am, truly, sorry that Bauerlein's column is not easily obtainable online. It's worth reading.
On the other hand, you don't actually need to read Bauerlein's column to get the point. Just read The Declaration of Independence (and maybe Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, as a follow up). The Gettysburg Address is where Lincoln raises the question "whether ... any nation so conceived ... can long endure."
We answered that question once, in the Civil War. Let's address that question again, right now - and give the same answer that Lincoln gave, and that the nation gave, back then:
Let us, once again, "highly resolve that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
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