Matt Yglesias against Land Acknowledgements

Matt Yglesias attended a big "Power to the People" concert last week:

At the climax, everyone came up on stage and the Boss led this whole crowd of musicians in a rousing rendition of Woody Guthrie’s classic leftist folk song “This Land Is Your Land.” Morello made a big deal about how they were going to sing the full version of the song, including the verses suppressed in many schools for their unduly leftist lyrics. (I was raised by weird leftists and taught this song at a very left-wing Ethical Culture day camp, so I had no idea there was any other version!)

Morello, at any rate, interrupted the song at one point to argue that Guthrie knew “that every inch of this land was stolen from the Indigenous people, so this land is actually their land.”

I don’t think this is factually correct about Guthrie’s politics. He and this song have long been a target of Native activists and intellectuals precisely because the rhetorical power of the song comes from denying the stolen land accusation. The point is that the American people (“you and me”) have a collective claim on American prosperity.

Exactly. The basic point of the American leftist tradition is to say that all Americans, just by virtue of being American, have a right to a decent life, and to a share of the nation's growing wealth. If you think that the United States is a fundamentally illegitmate project based on theft, what basis could you possibly have for assigning moral value to American citizenship?

After a long tour through some of the worst sins of Trump and MAGA, Yglesias comes back to this:

Yet to return to Power to the People, I don’t think you can defend American democracy or the rule of law or the basic humane interest in not seeing Medicaid and SNAP slashed while the administration cuts taxes for the rich and loots the Treasury for propaganda ads if you also accept the premise that the whole country is an illegitimate enterprise founded on theft.

It doesn’t make sense logically. It doesn’t work politically. It on some level fuels a kind of cynicism that just enables Trump and his gang of crooks.

We seem to be torn between a group of people who want to tear down the substance of all of our ideals and a group who want to tear down the notion that these ideals are worth having.

If you want to make America better, you MUST believe that America is worthy of being made great. If you start from the premise that this is stolen land, or that the sin of slavery cancels out all the noble ideals of the founding, you have made the nation fundamentally not worth saving, and effectively handed it over the Trump or even worse fascists.