A Vision

Reading Twitter has become one of my favorite pastimes. It is rather wonderful just how much information it is possible to impart even under the limit of 140 characters.

This morning, one of my regular posters, @fedupjeff who, as you may be able to tell from his moniker, is fed up, posted a link to a DailyCaller interview of Reid Buckley. Reid is the brother of the late William F. Buckley, Jr. and has written a new book titled The Idiocy of Assent in which he expresses some rather troubling thoughts on the future of the conservative movement in particular and of the United States in general.

Here’s a snippet of an answer about the dark future for conservatives whom he calls a “base that is bit by bit disappearing”:

Number one, the American public is almost incredibly ignorant [about] the founding of the Republic. Number two, there is a paganization in our culture. And number three, we have to absorb a whole bunch of Hispanics and also Asians, who in all their history, going back before the middle ages, have never experienced free government or the notion of a republic. That takes a huge change in their native reflexes, and it requires acculturation which is not done by the immigration services.

My wife was born in Spain, raised in Spain, she’s now an American citizen. And I can tell you, the instructions she got to become an American citizen were incredibly superficial — none of the major philosophical questions that brought up our republic.

She doesn’t really have much understanding of the structure of the government. And why should she? Nobody is really giving that kind of instruction any more.

H’m. As one who arrived on the shores of the United States more than a decade ago, I can attest to this fact. I was lucky enough to have been born an American by birth, and it was all too easy for me to take the road much travelled and affix my lips to the American teat while ignoring the rich philosophical history that created this exemplary singular nation.

In fact, I did start down that path until—as I’ve written about in the past—I read Shelby Steele’s wonderful book. This is not the way many Americans, especially those born here see America today and much the poorer we are and will be for it!