There’s a disclaimer many of us have been conditioned to utter, quite reflexively, and it’s something that has got to stop. When preparing a defense of the United States (against, lamentably, other “Americans”), we may preface it with, “Well, I know our country isn’t perfect” or, as pundit Tucker Carlson said while debating a bigoted lawyer last month, “I don’t deny…that this country is flawed….” Actually, our perspective is flawed.

To gain some perspective, imagine you were giving a speech about your mother and opened with, “Now, we know my mother has flaws, but….” Sound good?

Consider the message sent. Since we’re all imperfect, it’s a given your mother has flaws and, therefore, it isn’t something you’d normally even think to mention. Thus, the very act of mentioning it involves the implication that your mother isn’t just saddled with the usual imperfections — but that she’s uniquely flawed. It’s not something you do unless she’s a somewhat horrible person.

Or you’re a horrible child — or a horribly brainwashed one.

Statue of Thomas Jefferson at the College of William & Mary

Of course, if America were uniquely flawed, it would follow that there are a host of nations better. If we know of one, we may want to consider moving there. If we don’t, we should stop parroting that stupid disclaimer. Russians don’t do it. Chinese don’t do it. Japanese don’t do it. Not even Sudanese, Iranians or North Koreans do it.

In fact, while there’s no nation without sin, can you think of one beyond the waning West whose citizens feel compelled to issue self-flagellating we’re-so-flawed utterances? So why do many Americans, despite occupying history’s greatest nation, feel such a compulsion? What are they comparing America to? Heaven?

Speaking of the spirit world, many cultures would engage in ancestor worship. We engage in ancestor condemnation. Just recently, while defending Columbus Day against Indigenous Peoples Day dunderheads, a quite well-meaning commentator wrote that there “are 364 other days in the year on which we could acknowledge the sins of our ancestors….”

Sorry, but I don’t do ancestors. First, I’ll consider condemning our forebears when other groups and nations begin condemning theirs. Second, I’m no more responsible for their trespasses than I am for their triumphs. (Speaking of which, when I start getting royalty checks for all the inventions and innovations birthed by history’s great white men, I’ll consider offering reparations.) Lastly, I have no interest in continually “acknowledging” my ancestors’ sins — I have enough problems with my own.

This brings us to another aspect of this matter, one well illustrated by another comment Tucker Carlson made: that our country “is deeply flawed on questions of race.”

Actually, no, it’s not. As in the 1990s Rwandan genocide, racial/ethnic/tribal/religious conflicts elsewhere often have resulted in massive bloodshed. In contrast, it’s hard to think of a nation in which so many disparate peoples get along as well as in the U.S. (though the Left is trying feverishly to change that). The point is that in all this talk about “our flaws,” we’re not even talking about “our” flaws.

We’re talking about the flaws of people long dead (that is, when the flaws aren’t wholly imaginary).

In other words, we’re fighting yesterday’s battles — harping on our ancestors’ sins in an infinite loop — and ignoring today’s.

As to this, if a man seeing a therapist fixated constantly on his late father’s faults, wouldn’t the therapist point out that, not only is he living in the past, but that incessantly focusing on another’s flaws can be a way of avoiding having to confront your own?

Leftists haven’t the foggiest idea what our “flaws” are for the simple reason that, being moral relativists/nihilists (not believing in Truth, absolute by definition), they have no standard of perfection to use as a yardstick. And if you have no objective standard of right, you can’t know what’s wrong — not any more than you could identify unhealthful foods without believing in and knowing the rules of human nutrition.

We do have real flaws, today, now, things such as confusion over marriage, sex and the sexes (“transgender” agenda); the mainstreaming of perversion; decadent entertainment; rampant vulgarity; racial demagoguery; profligate spending; leftist propaganda everywhere; and, what lies at the heart of it all, moral relativism. But it’s easier to talk about those dastardly dead white males — they’re not around to defend themselves.  

One of the great victories of the Left is that it has woven so many of its suppositions so seamlessly into the culture that even good people accept them, unknowingly, unthinkingly. Thus will we utter, cowed and callow, “Look, I know our country has flaws….”

The irony is that if we could purge so-called leftism from the hearts and minds of Americans, most of our flaws would be gone overnight.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com