John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration.
Though I’m half-Irish, I’m 100% Anglophile. That comes not just from growing up on BBC dramas rebroadcast on PBS. Nor even from reading the complete works of Evelyn Waugh in high school, of C.S. Lewis in college, or of Tolkien over a lifetime. Anyone who loves what’s unique and good in America is in fact showing gratitude for the best of the British tradition, minus most of the worst. The American Revolution amounted to a fight for the basic truths about human nature encoded in that tradition, against corrupt institutions and power-hungry politicians who threatened it. For in-depth explanations of our debt to Britain, see Daniel Hannan’s Inventing Freedom and Russell Kirk’s Roots of American Order. Or go visit Canada. Then visit Mexico.
We owe the United Kingdom the same filial piety we do to our grandparents, though they live far away and wouldn’t welcome our interference. Allow them their autonomy, respect their choices, but you still wouldn’t want to see them march off a cliff. Or join up with Scientology. Or decide in their 70s to surgically alter their “genders.”
A Narrow Escape, Like Dunkirk
That’s what almost happened to Britain this week. The nation narrowly avoided lopping off its vital members and becoming a Frankenstein monster. It’s hard to convey to Americans quite how insane the British left has gone. Except, of course, to those who live in enclaves like Portland, San Francisco, New York City, or those who work in universities. The anti-Trump “resistance” has not quite dared in most places to plumb the depths of the faction that dominates the British Labour Party, and most of that nation’s media. Not quite. (Give it five years or so.) ….