Matthew Parris is Wrong: America Is Much More Than Just a ‘Moral Idea’ – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Over at that other Spectator, the one published in the U.K., one of their regular writers, Matthew Parris, recently published an article provocatively titled, “America is a moral idea or it is nothing.” Reflecting on a recent train trip across the western U.S., beginning in Denver and ending in Los Angeles, Parris notes the great diversity he encountered even in that limited slice of our country. But Parris, if his online biography is any guide, is an urban sophisticate, and, unsurprisingly, however, his trip almost completely avoids what his British and American counterparts treat as “flyover country” — the South and the Midwest.

Parris attempts to illustrate his point with a simple metaphor. He likens America to a great wooden barrel, the staves representing the disparate regions of the country, the metal hoops the shared values that bind them. To make his point about America, he insists on the primacy of the hoops, writing, “if the hoop stays strong, tight, and in place, the construction is formidable. Loosen that steel belt, and the staves fall into useless clutter.”

Even as a metaphor, his point fails utterly. The barrel staves must fit together, even before the hoops are applied. Barrel making demands that the staves are bent into a bonded shape even before hoops can be fitted, and no amount of metal can succeed when the staves fail to properly align. A barrel, necessarily, consists of both staves and hoops, but by any reckoning, the staves are what make the barrel. And, taking Parris’s metaphor to its logical conclusion, without the staves, all that’s left are useless metal rings.

What Parris actually seems to be saying is that all that keeps the various regions of the U.S. together is a set of ideas, in his take, moral ideas. In his words, “The central hoop of the American barrel … is the moral idea of America. Dislodge the idea, and the rest will not hold.” And thus his conclusion, “America is a moral idea or it is nothing.” He locates the “moral idea” of America rather broadly, suggesting that, while it does feel like “one nation, one people, one country,” that unity comes from a belief in “America the good,” a need to believe that their country is on the side of “Right.”

Tellingly, Parris fails to define either “good” or “right” in any meaningful way. One suspects that he has in mind the notion, popular among progressives of a certain superficial stripe, that the United States is merely a collection of ideas, a high-sounding political and social philosophy that just happens to have a people attached. From Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama, as our own Nate Hochman has persuasively argued, it’s all about abstraction, about an academic spin on our founding documents, about an insistent claim that the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution or Marbury vs. Madison or the Gettysburg Address only mean what the left wants them to mean. (RELATED: ‘All America Lies at the End of the Wilderness Road’)

In Hochman’s telling, America is neither a superficial neoconservative idea, nor the left’s evermore fantastical and frightening dream of what the country should become — and would become if they were given free rein to impose their vision. Like all abstractions, it is infinitely malleable and ready-made to serve the modern progressive’s dictatorial whims. Hochman reminds us that we are much more than this, a place, a people, a shared history. Our bonds, instead, go far beyond Michelle Obama’s belated discovery of American goodness in the moment when her husband was elected president. (RELATED: The Left’s Heaven is Actually Hell)

Our homeland is just that, a homeland, much more than just an idea, even a good and honorable idea. My own earliest European ancestors arrived in the 1680s as indentured servants, working as field hands on a Maryland tobacco plantation. They weren’t much concerned with the philosophy of John Locke, but rather with making a place for themselves and their children. When their descendants went to war in 1776 in the 5th Maryland Regiment of the Continental Line, their purpose was shaped by a century of hard work building a life worth defending.

Much the same could and should be said of most Americans in the four centuries since the founding era began. The details of time and place might vary, and Americans, certainly, developed a pride in themselves, and a pride in being American, one that transcended European backgrounds or regional interests. Our founding fathers may have articulated our self-image in high-sounding philosophical terms, but our quest to rule ourselves began in the belief that, as Americans, we simply deserved the right to act in our own best interests. (RELATED: Europe Is No Longer Worth Defending)

But this, too, is scarcely unique. Most modern countries, no matter their Gothic cathedrals or Roman roads, are similarly constructed by shared — and mostly recent — experience, and most of them also have an idea of themselves embodying a “moral idea.” Vladimir Putin certainly thinks that of Russia, so, too, does Volodymyr Zelenskyy. So, too, do Macron, or Meloni, or Merz, or Merkel, and so, too, do the peoples they represent. So, frighteningly, does Xi Jinping, so enamored of the superiority of China’s “moral idea” that he seems quite willing to impose it around the world.

We might not share these other nations’ moral self-image, and sometimes we should reject their values outright, but Parris is surely wrong in suggesting such unifying concepts are uniquely American. Garibaldi would have found his conception ridiculous, and so, too, would have Bismarck. As he himself admits, referencing U.K. Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s conception of the U.K. Labour party as a “moral crusade,” this idea surfaces almost everywhere, sometimes ridiculously. Hark, for example, at Ursula von der Leyen’s repetitious pronouncements regarding the moral purpose of the European Union.

Following Hochman’s lead, I’ve also written previously about the falsity of the “America as a mere moral idea” canard. I suggested that, while “conservatives should fight to reclaim our aspirational documents” from progressivist spin, we should also never lose sight of the fact that ours is not simply a battle of competing political philosophies, much less political ideologies dressed up as moral imperatives. Viewed from this perspective, I think it becomes clear what Parris is really on about. He gives the game away in the final paragraph of his essay, where he condemns what he describes as the “amorality that infects Donald Trump and Trumpism,” describing it as “profoundly un-American.” Absent any greater substance, Parris leaves us to conclude that America’s sole moral purpose resides in simply rejecting Donald Trump and all of his works.

This, frankly, is arrant nonsense. Whether you like Trump or not, he is deeply connected to the day-to-day lives of ordinary Americans, in their daily aspirations for themselves and their children. Should there be any doubt about Parris’s purpose, in another and more recent essay, he argued outright that Trump might simply be a madman. Trump, clearly, is not Parris’s kind of American, which makes him both a moral reprobate and crazy to boot.

One can disagree with Trump about this policy or that, but Parris’s supposed “moral idea” is an insult to both the intelligence and the moral values of the ordinary Americans who elected him. What Trump rejects is not the “moral idea” of America, but rather its perversion at the hands of the globalist — and in the U.S., bicoastal — progressive elites, with whom Parris seems to share a common bond. Whether its gas pipelines or revived factories, men stealing trophies by pretending to be women, or even the size and flow rate of shower heads, Trump’s “moral idea” is simple and completely American: Stop bossing us around, stop taking our lives and livelihoods from us, stop treating us like deplorables. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: And ‘Showerers’ Across the Fruited Plain Rejoiced)

No one expresses this aspect of the American spirit more bluntly and succinctly than H.L. Mencken, who famously opined that “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.” We’ve suffered for many years now from the domination of those who not only want to run our lives, but insist that it’s for our own good. These aren’t, despite the assertions of Matthew Parris, the hoops that hold the American barrel together. They are instead the termites eating away at the barrel itself.

READ MORE from James H. McGee:

Rough Men, Strong Women: The 1923 Finale

Old McDonald Wants the Bomb, E-I-E-I-O

Look Back in Anger: The October 7 Commission Report

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A soon-to-be-published sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges across the globe. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.