"An act of pure evil," said President Trump of the
atrocity in Las Vegas, invoking our ancient faith: "Scripture teaches us
the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in
spirit."
"Our
unity cannot be shattered by evil. Our bonds cannot be broken by
violence," Trump went on in his most presidential moment, "and though
we feel such great anger at the senseless murder of our fellow citizens, it is
love that defines us today and always will. Forever."
Uplifting
words. But are they true?
Or
will this massacre be like the Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter of 20
children in Newtown, Connecticut, or Charleston massacre of black churchgoers
by Dylan Roof — uniting us briefly in "sadness, shock and grief" only
to divide us again and, more deeply, in our endless war over guns.
"In
memory of the fallen, I have directed that our great flag be flown at
half-staff," said the president. As he spoke, the mind went back to yesterday
afternoon where the NFL was roiled anew by athletes earning seven-figure
salaries "taking a knee" in disrespect of that flag.
Also
on Sunday, cable TV was given over to charges that Trump, attending a golf
tournament in New Jersey, cared nothing about the suffering of "people of
color" in Puerto Rico.
And
we just closed out a summer where monuments honoring the explorers and
missionaries who discovered the New World and the men who made the America we
have been blessed to inherit have, along with those of Confederate soldiers,
been desecrated and dragged down.
Only
the 1960s, with Vietnam and the great cultural revolution, and the War Between
the States from 1861-1865, rival this as a time of national disunity and civil
discord.
To
understand what is happening to us, we should look to Europe, where the
disintegration appears more advanced.
Sunday,
4,000 national police, sent by Madrid, used violence to break up a referendum
called by the regional government of Catalonia on secession. Nine in 10 of those
able to cast a ballot voted to secede from Spain.
Televised
pictures from Barcelona of police clubbing and dragging voters away from the
polls, injuring hundreds, may make this a Selma moment in the history of
Europe.
This
is the first of the specters haunting Europe: the desire of ethnic minorities
like Catalans in Spain and Scots in Britain to break free of the mother country
and create new nations, as the Norwegians did in 1905 and the Irish did in
1921.
The
second is the desire of growing millions of Europeans to overthrow the
transnational regime that has been raised above them, the EU.
The
English succeeded with Brexit in 2016. Today, almost every country in Europe
has an anti-EU party like the National Front in France, which won 35 percent of
the presidential vote in 2017.
Beyond
the tribal call of ethnic solidarity is a growing resentment in Northern Europe
at having to bail out the chronic deficits of the South, and in Southern Europe
at the austerity imposed by the North.
The
German elections underlined a new threat to European unity. The ruling
coalition of Angela Merkel's CDU and SPD suffered major losses. The
Bavarian-based sister party of the CDU, the CSU, was itself shaken.
Angela
Merkel as the new "leader of the West" in the time of Trump is an
idea that has come and gone. She is a diminished figure.
Some
13 percent of the votes went to Alternative for Germany, a far-right party
that, for the first time, will enter the Bundestag. In states of the former
East Germany, the AfD ran second or even first.
What
produced this right turn in Germany is what produced it in Hungary and Poland:
migration from Africa and the Middle East that is creating socially and
culturally indigestible enclaves in and around the great cities of Europe.
Europeans,
like Trumpians, want their borders secured and closed to the masses of the
Third World.
Germans
are weary of 70 years of wearing sackcloth and ashes.
Race,
tribe, borders, culture, history — issues of identity — are tearing at the
seams of the EU and pulling apart nations.
We
Americans may celebrate our multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual,
multicultural diversity as our greatest attribute. But the acrimony and the
divisions among us seem greater than ever before in our lifetimes.
Blacks,
Hispanics, feminists, Native Americans, LGBT — all core constituencies of the
Democratic Party — seem endlessly aggrieved with their stations in American
life.
In
the Republican Party, there is now a vast cohort of populist and nationalists
who agree with Merle Haggard, "If you're runnin' down my country, man,
You're walkin' on the fightin' side of me."
A
massacre of Americans like that in Las Vegas may bring us together briefly. But
what holds us together when issues of race, religion, ethnicity, culture,
history and politics — our cherished diversity itself — appear to be pulling us
ever further apart?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the
author of a new book, "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and
Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
