Guest Editorial By Thomas
President Obama’s two tenures were a definite shift in the direction of embracing a multi-ethnic America unrestricted by the requirement of acculturation, much less assimilation for new arrivals. Multiculturalism became defacto federal mandate with emphasis on “bilingual education” in the public school system, and acceptance of Spanish as not the Second Official Language but it could be argued, the first. English took a back seat at the federal and State government level in order to accommodate Spanish – speaking Latinos and Hispanics.
Another shift that seemed to depart from the American Ethos of the old, was President Obama’s focus on affirmative action as defining personal success. The accepted federal nomenclature consisted of defining a man by the color of his skin not by his abilities, content of character and personal responsibility to succeed. Social engineering and artificially created diversity became the norm, which became President Obama’s legacy.
The ordinary majority rebelled arguing that this creation of new American Ethos does not support our constitutional framework and established norms originated by the founding fathers. Embracing Trump, the ordinary majority accepted nativism while rejecting with extreme prejudice multiculturalism in all its forms within the American societal fabric, and the desire to return to the American Ethos of the old Wild West took center stage. President Trump as recently as last night claimed that his administration’s view of American Ethos welcomes legal immigrants. Rhetoric negated by immigrants arriving from “shithole” countries, falsely claiming that legal immigrants collect benefits for the first five years they are not entitled to receive, attempts to revoke the Constitution’s citizenship clause and revoke naturalized citizenship at will. All of which the ordinary majority cheered as well.
It could be advanced that President Obama’s vision of the American Ethos was a progressive one while in contrast President Trump’s a wholly nativist with emphasis on reversal to a static treatment of the American condition.
The question to you, the reader, is this: can those two polar agendas toward the American Ethos described above be in any way reconciled and if so how? Perhaps you can offer a different viewpoint toward the American Ethos.