Monday, March 05, 2018

Condi Rice - A House Divided


Abraham Lincoln quote scripture when he warned that the slavery debate imperiled America. "A house divided against itself cannot stand." At the time, a couple of years before the Civil War, Lincoln wrongly assumed the union wouldn't fracture. He got that one wrong. America, north and south, had to fight the most bloody war in its history to preserve the union.

Fast forward about a hundred and fifty years. Now it's Condoleeza Rice, former Bush national security advisor and secretary of state, echoing Lincoln's warning.

"We are a country divided," the Stanford University Professor told CNN's Fareed Zakaria on his show GPS.

"We are a country that has lost a sense of common purpose. We've lost the sense of common narrative, and no country can hold together without that -- but particularly one like the United States, in which we're not united by ethnicity or nationality or religion," she added.

Rice argued that what traditionally unites US citizens, regardless of social class, ethnicity or religion, is a singular aspiration: "You can come from humble circumstances and do great things."

"People feel a prisoner of their class," she said, adding that in previous decades, there was still a feeling that "you could always make it to the top, even if you started at a housing project, maybe you would be the CEO of a company one day."








 

4 comments:

Trailblazer said...

Coming from a born again liar; I find her approach a bit rich!!
It's amazing how the perpetrators of our present state of world events are taking the high ground!

TB

Northern PoV said...

Condi and many others mistook the effects a rising tide that lifts all boats (created by progressive policies ala FDRs new deal) and tied them to the myth of the "American Dream".

Anonymous said...

Trailblazer, it's a bit like an arsonist complaining about how the smoke in the neighbour is making their kid's asthma worse.

Cap

Trailblazer said...

@ Mound.
Arsonist; I like that, good comment.

TB