An Extended Tolkien Analogy

Wretchard, noting the fear with which the DNC is waiting for Wikileaks to drop another hammer on the dying Hillary campaign, compares the situation to an earlier Middle Earth:

Now America could beat Bolshevism the Original Recipe, because they fought these master conspirators asymmetrically. The Cold War proved that.

Then a bunch of "activists" bloated with their own pride, thought they could dispense with America, form an imitation Communist Party and go up against the real thing on their own. The EU, the World Order. All they managed to do, like Saruman was to play into Sauron's hands. They turned DC into a kind of Kremlin on the Potomac, complete with its version of Izvestia and Tass.

"A strong place and wonderful was Isengard, and long it had been beautiful [...]. But Saruman had slowly shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived - for all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child's model or a slave's flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength."

The Bolshevists are showing that they may not have been able to beat America, but they can beat Donna Brazile and Debbie Wasserman. Washington was better before Obama improved it. Now the Dark Lord has come, with his Nazgul Assange.

It's an interesting formulation. I've been thinking about something similar since Hillary Clinton's comments on Friday that half of her opponents were "deplorables," 'racists and xenophobes,' "irredeemable" who were "not America." I think she means people like many of the people who live around here in rural Georgia, many of whom are doubtless racists and xenophobes by her standards and perhaps often even by ordinary standards. These may be deplorable traits, but the people are not: they are probably as good as most people anywhere, as racism and xenophobia are quite common traits among all people worldwide. These traits are to be struggled against, like sins; but they are also very common things, like sins. They may make a man damnable, but not irredeemable.

Yet how odd to say that they are not America, they, who are most obviously America. They're the ones who fly the flag, not just outside their office but outside their homes. They're the ones who would refuse to hyphenate "American" even if asked to do so in order to illuminate their heritage. They're the ones who tear up at the singing of the "Star-Spangled Banner," while Hillary's team debates how vigorously to protest it.

If they're not America, nobody is. To recognize the evils of racism is fair and right, for it has been a terrible evil. To read these people out of America, though, is to render America empty and without content. Without them, there is nothing that is just America, un-hyphenated. America becomes nothing more than a substrate for all the hyphens.

To read them out of America is to make America a blank slate on which anything else might be written. Something new. Something different. But how, then, to avoid the trap that Wretchard identifies? Are they writing something new, like Jefferson and the Founders did? Or are they making a copy of something else? A little copy, a child's model, a slave's flattery?