AND THEREFORE THE DEFINITION OF "AMERICAN" IS ... WHAT?

At Breitbart, John Nolte is looking at the problems of America's inner cities and is washing his hands of them, Pontius Pilate-style. There's nothing odd there -- nearly all right-wingers do that. To them, either everything is fine now in the non-white parts of America (which doesn't stop those damn malcontents from grumbling) or everything that is wrong is the grumblers' own damn fault (usually because the grumblers' are on the "liberal plantation," which is the main point of Nolte's rant). Nothing noteworthy here. It's just standard-issue contemporary right-wing invective.

But let's not miss the implication of Nolte's headline:



His argument is that Baltimore is having problems because it's been run by Democrats for decades. But he doesn't say that Baltimore is a problem only for those Americans who are members of that Democratic Party. No: the way he puts it is that if something is the Democrats' problem, it's not a problem for America -- implicitly, because Democrats aren't Americans. According to Nolte, America has no responsibility for, or interest in, what happens in Democratic strongholds, except to shield Americans (an exclusively non-Democratic group) from the work of Democrats (an exclusively non-American group).

Thus, Nolte writes:

Contrary to the emotional blackmail some leftists are attempting to peddle, Baltimore is not America’s problem or shame. That failed city is solely and completely a Democrat problem.... Democrats and their union pals have had carte blanche to inflict their ideas and policies on Baltimore since 1967, the last time there was a Republican Mayor....

Every single member of the Baltimore city council is a Democrat....

Democrats and their never-ending grievance campaigns; their never-ending propaganda that government largess is the answer; their never-ending caves to corrupt unions; their never-ending warehousing of innocent children in failed public schools -- that’s a Democrat problem, not America’s problem.

If I were to argue that illegal border crossings are a Southern and Southwestern problem, not America's problem, or that tornadoes are a heartland problem, not America's problem, it would sound ridiculous -- of course we have to care about these things as a nation because, yes, we are one nation.

But conservatives don't think like that. To them, they're Americans. We Democrats aren't, and the mostly Democratic residents of Baltimore aren't -- at least not until we all regain our senses and become conservative Republicans.

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And I'm ignoring the fact that the makeup of the government of Ferguson, Missouri, at the time of its unrest gives the lie to Nolte's linkage of Democratic governance with unrest.