From Peter Beinart’s paranoid mind comes “The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump’s Warsaw Speech”. Regarding Trump’s use of the word ‘West’ as a nexus of identity and something to defend:
The West is a racial and religious term. To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white…
Regarding Trump’s inherent repudiation of Obama’s “citizens of the world”, pro-globalism theme:
A direct line connects Trump’s assault on Barack Obama’s citizenship to his speech in Poland. In Trump and Bannon’s view, America is at its core Western: meaning white and Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian). The implication is that anyone in the United States who is not white and Christian may not truly be American but rather than an imposter and a threat.
Poland is largely ethnically homogeneous. So when a Polish president says that being Western is the essence of the nation’s identity, he’s mostly defining Poland in opposition to the nations to its east and south. America is racially, ethnically, and religious diverse. So when Trump says being Western is the essence of America’s identity, he’s in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people. He’s not speaking as the president of the entire United States. He’s speaking as the head of a tribe.
The irony here is that Beinart is correct. To pretend – ala Rod Dreher and Cuckservatism, Inc – that race has nothing to do, absolutely nothing to do, with where and among what people the institutions of the West have taken root, is at a minimum sloppy analysis and quite possibly masochistic madness.
