A closer look at the imagined woes of ‘Real Americans’

Recently I was surprised to hear the (Dixie) Chicks on the country oldies station. The group had been banished from country radio since 2003 after saying President George W. Bush made them embarrassed to be Texans. Now that Bush has made President Donald Trump’s unofficial enemies list, the Chicks are evidently forgiven. Meanwhile, most of my friends in Texas are embarrassed, but not because of Bush — the make-believe rancher who’s given up brushclearing to paint portraits.

And more power to him, as the only Republican presidential candidate since 1988 to win an actual national majority. Never mind that Bush was the worst president in living memory, dragging the country into futile wars on false premises and presiding over a banking crisis. Before the roof fell in, he did achieve an actual majority. And a big part of what’s going on in the United States today is that no Republican candidate has much chance of winning a national majority in the foreseeable future. This appears to have made an awful lot of Americans scared half to death.

Seemingly fearful of being relegated to second-class status, many “Real Americans,” as they’re styled on Fox News, appear eager to embrace minority rule. So long as they’re the ones wielding power, that is. Tucker Carlson tells them that Democrats are scheming to “replace” them with aggrieved and undeserving voters of different races. Because they’re gullible and prone to apocalyptic thinking. there has been a succession of what can only be described as “moral panics” over largely imaginary threats such as “Sharia law,” “cancel culture” and “critical race theory.”

Even the stuffiest Republican thinkers can get all worked up over the follies of campus leftists, of which there’s never any shortage. The Washington Post’s George Will wrote a stern column recently about a fracas involving a professor at UCLA, who unwisely engaged a student who worried that having to take a final exam would injure “the mental and physical health of our Black classmates” traumatized by George Floyd’s murder.

The professor replied with mild sarcasm, and the poor dope got suspended from teaching, banned from campus and denounced by spineless administrators. (He’s been reinstated and has filed a lawsuit.)

He should have known better. I’m familiar with humorless campus leftists. My wife and I were once admonished by professorial guests for owning a Merle Haggard album. We thought “Okie from Muskogee” was funny; they thought it a fascist outrage.

And speaking of “cancel culture,” public school teachers and administrators nationwide are being harassed and run out of their jobs for the largely imaginary crime of teaching critical race theory. A Black high school principal in Texas got fired for the sin of writing a letter expressing the anodyne view that “education is the key to stomping out ignorance, hate and systemic racism.” (Also for having posted a Facebook photo, 10 years ago, of himself kissing his white wife.)

In Maryland, a highly successful Black school superintendent was hounded from the district for expressing polite concerns about racial injustice.

Activists calling themselves conservative are besieging school boards, basically arguing that history lessons about slavery and Jim Crow teach white children to be ashamed of their race and country.

In other news, Trumpist Republicans are working to ensure their champion returns to power regardless of voters’ wishes. Never mind that Trump lost the popular vote to Joe Biden by more than 7 million, and lost the Electoral College 306 to 232. With GOP state legislators counting the votes, an identical outcome in 2024 would make Trump a big, big winner.

At least that’s the plan.