Teddy Roosevelt saw this mob coming

I think it is a pity that the Traveling Racism Outrage Mob (TROM) has it in for Teddy Roosevelt. I agree with President Trump who, when he heard the news, tweeted ‘Ridiculous, don’t do it!’ Quite right…

Teddy Roosevelt also had a deep social-political message that our generation, especially paid-up members of TROM, should rediscover. ‘The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.’

He was thinking of the habit of calling recent immigrants Italian-American or Irish-Americans or German-Americans. He was dead set against this practice of coining ‘hyphenated Americans’. He would not have been surprised to discover that the lowly hyphen was a potent weapon in the divisive armory of multiculturalism and identity politics. When we speak of an African-American or Mexican-American or Asian-American these days, the aim is not descriptive but deconstructive. There is a polemical edge to it, a provocation. The hyphen does not mean ‘American, but hailing at some point in the past from someplace else.’ It means ‘only provisionally American: my allegiance is divided at best.’