Part I of a Two-Part Essay
Before the “polarization” and the “fractured republic” reality made it impossible to ignore our present condition, Jean Bethke Elshtain was sounding the alarm in the 1990s. In one of her books, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, she writes:
As these overlapping associations of social life disappear or are stripped of legitimacy, a political and ethical wilderness spreads. People roam the prairie fixing on objects or policies or persons to excoriate or to celebrate, at least for a time, until some other enthusiasm or scandal sweeps over them. If we have lost the sturdiness and patience to sustain our society over the long haul, then our democracy, as a social world and a culture, is in trouble.
She was prescient. Today we are all familiar with this behavior she describes, as for many, America has become “de-Americanized” in recent generations, but I want to believe there is a remnant that is ready to renew and rebuild.
Re-Americanizing America will not happen only by purging and clearing. Enforcing our borders, deporting illegal aliens, reforming the current broken immigration system, prosecuting the people who have defrauded the American polis, protecting the American family from the machinations of those who want to harm it—foreign and domestic—are all necessary but not sufficient for the revivification of America.
Read the full essay at Providence Magazine.