“Moore’s Speech Matters Because The Sentiments He Expressed Are Being Echoed By Democrats Across The Country,” Says John Kenneth White
Today, John Kenneth White, Professor Emeritus at The Catholic University of America, published an opinion in The Hill highlighting Governor Wes Moore’s Fourth of July Speech on patriotism. White notes that “Moore’s speech matters because the sentiments he expressed are being echoed by Democrats across the country.”
For years, Gov. Moore has been on the forefront of the fight to reclaim patriotism and ensure that ‘no one political party or movement holds a monopoly over service to the country.’
Here’s What Marylanders Are Reading:
This past fourth of July, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) went before the television cameras to deliver an important address about patriotism.
Patriotism, Moore declared, means fighting for values and “the hope of a future even if we will never see it.” Using that standard, he argued that Americans must see the humanity and pain in one another and remember that “God’s grace is not only offered to the saint [but] to the sinner, too.”
In his speech, Moore drew a bright line between patriotism and President Trump’s nationalism. Nationalism, he said, “emboldens people to feel bigger than somebody else — to name the grievance, to find the target, to give people someone to blame.”
Fear is nationalism’s rocket fuel. Faith is what sustains patriotism.
Moore’s speech matters because the sentiments he expressed are being echoed by Democrats across the country. Trump has upended the American compact — namely, the civil religion of the country that affirms the principles of the Declaration of Independence and upholds the U.S. Constitution designed to implement them.
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In reclaiming the flag, Democrats are rejecting Trump’s blood and soil nationalism in favor of a patriotism rooted in the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the adherence to the U.S. Constitution. Echoing John F. Kennedy’s 1960 slogan that it’s a “Time for Greatness,” Democrats are reclaiming the flag and, in Moore’s words, “taking ownership for what America can become.”
Read the full opinion here.
Contact: Carter Elliott, IV [email protected]