Does McCain love the US and want to preserve it?

November 01, 2008
Lawrence Auster to Andrew McCarthy:

Andy,

You write:

"McCain, moreover, is an authentic American hero who loves our country as it is and would essentially preserve it." [Italics added.]

Really? The man who said that what makes America great is its putative lack of any heritage or culture inherited from the past? Here's my Number One McCain quote, which I've posted many times, from a speech he gave to the Al Smith Dinner in October 2005:

[O]ur one shared faith is the belief that a nation conceived in an idea--in liberty--will prove stronger, more enduring and better than any nation ... made from a common race culture or to preserve traditions that have no greater attribute than longevity.

The man sees any tradition of a people, whether that people is conceived in ethnic or even just in cultural terms, as a bad, inferior thing. Andy, not that long ago mainstream conservatives and neoconservative were making the preservation and defense of America's common culture one of their main causes. McCain doesn't believe in that. To the extent that we have a common culture, he would want us to get rid of it. For him the highest, supreme value, perhaps the only value, is an "idea of liberty." But if liberty is the unqualified and highest value, then the liberty of other people to come to our country and change it into their image and their culture must be the inevitable result. So McCain's idea of liberty means the extinction of our culture.

And it's not just I who say this. He made the consequences of his attack on our culture explicit when he said to a Hispanic group in May '06, during one of the big immigration debates:

This [is] one of the defining moments in American history that really does define what kind of nation we are.

If there was ever such a thing as a noble cause, it is the one we are embarked on now. Anyone who is afraid that somehow our culture will be anything but enriched by fresh blood and culture, in my view, has a distorted view of history and has a pessimistic view of our future.

So, on one hand, he's against our having a long-lived national heritage based on culture, and on the other hand he looks forward to our country being "refreshed," i.e., transformed into a different culture, by the "blood" and culture of Hispanics. Their invading culture is good and to be welcomed. Our historical culture is trash, consisting of "traditions that have no greater attribute than longevity," and is to be cast aside.

Do you still say that McCain loves our country as it is and would essentially preserve it?

Larry