Columnist on Trump’s nationalism: A welcome ‘response to progressive tribalism’

by WorldTribune Staff, October 25, 2018

In the Left’s lexicon and corporate media studios, nationalism is apparently the new “n-word”, a columnist wrote.

“When President Donald Trump described himself as a ‘nationalist’ at a rally in Texas, it set off a firestorm of criticism,” James S. Robbins wrote for USA Today on Oct. 25.

President Donald Trump’s nationalism ‘is a response to progressive tribalism, which seeks to divide the country into grievance groups and promote a narrative of shame.’ / Reuters

Robbins, a former Washington Times national security editorial writer who earlier served in the George W. Bush administration, noted that the “predictable progressive panic is baseless and tiresome.

“It is a willful misunderstanding of what Trump means when he says nationalist. The president framed the term against ‘globalist,’ which in his words is ‘a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring about the country so much.’ ”

Trump’s nationalism “is also a patriotic appeal for national unity and pride,” Robbins wrote. “It is a response to progressive tribalism, which seeks to divide the country into grievance groups and promote a narrative of shame. Decades of revisionist history and grievance ideology have corrupted the American story.”

Just ask New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who said earlier this year that America “was never that great.”

“CNN’s Jim Acosta pathetically insinuated the president was making a secret appeal to racism. MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace invoked her History Channel-based education to tie in Nazi appeals to German nationalism, while perhaps being unaware that the Nazis also were ardent socialists. Maybe she missed that program.”

Robbins continued: “And woe to any Democrat who forgets that America exists only to be criticized. In Pennsylvania, Allegheny County Democratic Party Executive Director Mark Salvas, a former Marine and veteran, was driven from his position for posting ‘I stand for the flag, I kneel at the cross’ on social media. He failed to realize that on the left, flags are for kneeling or burning and crosses are for tearing down.”

Robbins noted that then-Virginia Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, in the wake of the 2017 violence at Charlottesville, innocently invoked “patriots … Thomas Jefferson and George Washington who brought our country together” as an appeal for unity in the wake of the tragedy. He was immediately slammed by the Left for daring to praise icons of U.S. history who were “seeding white supremacy.”

“To the progressives, the Founders were slavers, the Constitution is racist, and Mount Rushmore should be blown up,” Robbins wrote.

Trump’s “patriotic appeals are controversial only because hating America has become so deeply embedded in progressive thinking,” Robbins wrote. “But part of making America great again is restoring the American story, and with it our sense of destiny, dynamism and optimism. Whether you call it nationalism, patriotism or Americanism, it is our common legacy. We discard it at our peril.”


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