With his usual flair for hyperbole ... Donald Trump last week tweet-blasted the so-called “Squad” of female freshman Congressmen “of color” for slandering America as racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and numerous other empty epithets. Though Trump was careless for suggesting, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”––since only one, Ilhan Omar, was born abroad––his sentiment is still valid, and has been shared for decades by millions of Americans angry over their homeland being demonized by immigrants and fellow citizens alike.
This sentiment was memorably captured by country singer Merle Haggard in his hit “Fightin’ Side of Me.” Released in December 1969, the song expressed the anger of the “Silent Majority” that had just put Richard Nixon in the White House. And the lyrics identified who Americans were angry at: the free, comfortable New Leftists, college students, bougie hippies, and liberal elite fellow-travelers who burned the American Flag, slandered our soldiers as baby-killers, and called their country “AmeriKKKa.” Haggard especially targeted the antiwar activists who insulted our troops even as they were fighting and dying, and who “love our milk and honey” but “preach about some other way of livin’.” Sound familiar?
But it was one line in the chorus that summed up many Americans’ attitude: “If you don’t love it leave it.” This blunt phrase became that era’s ultimate “trigger” of leftist spluttering rage and hysterical spouting of the same question-begging epithets that today inundate the rhetoric of progressive politicians and pundits––exactly the response to Trump’s later suggestion to the “Squad,” “If you’re not happy here, then you can leave.” And like today, for self-proclaimed sophisticated cosmopolitans who fancied themselves too smart for patriotism, such a déclassé love of country was fit only for the xenophobic deplorables clinging to their guns and religion.
As usual, the common sense of the masses is smarter than the received wisdom of the credentialed elite. Haggard’s line “they love our milk and honey” exposed the moral idiocy of American anti-Americanism: its hypocrisy and shameless ingratitude. So too some immigrants...
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