A Self-Defeating Chauvinism Is Emasculating Americans.
Siófok, Hungary, February 28th, 2025.
Salaroche

The term Chauvinism originally came from the obsessive patriotism shown by Nicholas Chauvin, a soldier in Napoleon’s army who, in the face of Napoleon’s terminal loses at war, obstinately refused to accept defeat.

It isn’t clear whether Nicolas Chauvin actually existed or is just a fictitious character conceived as a composite of various soldiers who showed such mistaken, obstinate behavior, but the term is now widely recognized and is even applied to other kinds of excessive personal or group beliefs in their own invincibility or superiority.

In general, people who believe in the greatness of their own country even when their countries are utterly wrong, fall into the category of “chauvinists”. Along those lines, Americans who, like mistaken conservative New York Times’ columnist Bret Stephens, believe that the United States can never become a dictatorship because the country’s history and democratic traditions are too deeply ingrained in the American psyche (see here) also fall in the category of chauvinists.

In the current American political context, Chauvinism is the self-defeating, nationalist prejudice that blinds people to the existing weaknesses, faults, shortcomings and even failures of the United States to a degree where they fail to realize the dangerous, imminent threats currently facing the country and, therefore, fail to react in its defense.

“Other Democratic nations can be in danger of becoming autocracies”, they think, “but never MY country. Never the United States. America is way too resilient to ever become a dictatorship”. Blind chauvinists.

When prominent Democrats like James Carville literally suggest to their fellow Democrats to “rollover and play dead” and to do a “strategic political retreat” (see here), meaning to do nothing in the face of the ongoing dismantling of the American government by the current administration, they’re just wrongly assuming that the American Democratic and Constitutional systems are by themselves strong and resilient enough to repel the authoritarian power-grab they are currently subjected to.

In Carville’s mistaken view, American Democracy is like a living organism that has its own immunity system protecting it against any viral domestic enemies and that, therefore, it doesn’t need any defensive intervention from the part of any pro-Democracy Americans.

Carville's shameless call for the Democrats to surrender is just plain Chauvinism of the wrongest kind, the kind that wrongly assumes the everlasting invincibility of the American Democratic State, which is only a wishful-thinking mirage.

States are not immovable structures cast in indestructible matter. They’re only fragile conceptual constructs as vulnerable to decay and corruption as the people that make them work are. And the American State is in NO way an exception to that statement.

The complacent, misplaced chauvinist impulse currently motivating non-Maga Americans into inaction couldn’t be more mistaken. Only time will tell how serious and irreparable the consequences of such grave mistake will be.

The cartoon I chose to show here again has a message that is perhaps more applicable to the American reality today than when it was first published in April of 2022. To see the cartoon, please click here.

Salaroche