https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/english-language-important-america-source-of-social-cohesion/
There’s no substitute as a source of social cohesion
I wouldn’t have thought the importance of the English language in America would be controversial, but our era is full of surprises.
When I was on Morning Joe the other day talking about my book, The Case for Nationalism, the Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson asked, in a skeptical tone, if we should be protecting the status of the English language in our culture.
My emphasis on English was also a bee in the bonnet of Charles King, the book’s reviewer at Foreign Affairs, who said I make “the strangest arguments, which collapse upon the slightest interrogation.” He includes in this category my statement that English is a “pillar of our national identity.”
He further says, accusingly, that one of the things I can’t imagine America without is a dominant role for the English language. In his view, a genuinely inclusive nationalism has to jettison “the idea that liberty is somehow less American if you call it la libertad.”
I never suggested, as you might expect, that saying the word “liberty” in a foreign language somehow negates the value of liberty or makes liberty less American, which would be absurd (I’ll return to all the other preposterous things in the King review at another time). I do, though, spend a lot of time discussing the importance of a common language as a source of social cohesion. Why?
