Obama is NOT who we are as Americans, Not even close!

Obama Negativa | The Weekly Standard

DEC 15, 2014, VOL. 20, NO. 14 • BY ANDREW FERGUSON

That’s just who he is.

And who we truly are is often obscured, in national life as in personal life, beneath layers of self-deception, pretense, and misunderstanding. The politician and his codependent audience, like therapist and patient, have penetrated America’s true self and returned to deliver the news to everyone else. This makes it a perfect trope for a certain kind of rhetoric, in which unexceptional, even banal, sentiments (“hope,” “change”) are cast as moral insights that transcend the “false choice” that befuddles a politician’s opponents. 

“Who we are” serves other purposes. It allows the president’s followers to absorb the jingoism of less sophisticated people—all those vulgar crowds chanting USA! USA!—and refine it into the moral vanity they more highly prize. (Self-flattery is who they are.) Democrats have been bedeviled for decades by the canard that they are somehow less patriotic than conservatives. “Who we are” allows them to turn the tables, so long as who we are is Democrats. If, for example, you think that 99 weeks of unemployment insurance payments is about all we can afford, then you’re not just wrong, you’re un-American. You’re not who we are. It’s super-patriotism for the passive-aggressive. If we still had a House Committee on Un-American Activities we could rename it the House Committee on Activities of People Who Are Not Who We Are as Americans. 

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