{"id":5295,"date":"2011-11-23T13:08:44","date_gmt":"2011-11-23T18:08:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=5295"},"modified":"2011-11-23T13:10:44","modified_gmt":"2011-11-23T18:10:44","slug":"from-an-fdr-democrat-to-a-reagan-conservative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/5295","title":{"rendered":"From An FDR Democrat To A Reagan Conservative…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…Thank you for reminding me that not everyone who calls themselves a republican is a nativist bigot<\/a> who hates the idea of the United States as a rich and beautiful melting pot. \u00a0 These days, that’s a very hard thing to keep in mind.<\/p>\n

The paranoid nativists warn that we are too culturally chaotic to survive. They are right. America dies over and over again in a thousand different ways, like the cells in your skin. The real test of a culture is not whether it dies, but whether it regenerates itself. What frightens these folks is our nerve-racking dynamism; our accelerating pace of reinvention.<\/p>\n

We are in fact living through the end of white America. That “end” will be just as catastrophic as the end of Puritan American, the end of Colonial America, the end of White, Male Landowner America, the end of New England Whaling America, the end of Slaveholding America, the end of Rural America, the end of Pre-Industrial America, the end of Jim Crow America, the end of Industrial America and all of the other endings America has experienced in her short history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, we can be confident that this ending will be yet another in a jarring series of gateways to an ever freer, richer, and more powerful future<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The real test of a culture is not whether it dies, but whether it regenerates itself.<\/em> Yes. \u00a0 Or as Dylan put it, he who isn’t busy being born is busy dying. \u00a0 What I have always loved about my country is that every day it is busy being born. \u00a0 My great sadness lately has been a nearly overwhelming feeling that the paranoid nativists had finally strangled that. \u00a0 The more conservatives I see standing up to them, the more hopeful I can allow myself to be that it will not happen. \u00a0 Thank you David Frum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…Thank you for reminding me that not everyone who calls themselves a republican is a nativist bigot who hates the idea of the United States as a rich and beautiful melting pot. \u00a0 These days, that’s a very hard thing to keep in mind. The paranoid nativists warn that we are too culturally chaotic to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[78],"class_list":["post-5295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-the-struggle-for-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5295\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}