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Should New York City Be Re-Named New World City?

January 13, 2025


Recently, President-elect Trump suggested the reasonableness of renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, he suggested it be named Gulf of America. This creative idea reminded me that originally New York was New Netherlands, but was re-named New York when the British took control referring to an area in southern England. Would it be useful or realistic for New York City now to be re-named New World City because of its longstanding openness to worldwide emigration? 

In our time, not only are there many migrants in New York City, but thousands who have not entered legally are filling the city’s hotels and motels, and even being housed in high schools. This global sourcing of population extending beyond normal immigration law and controls suggests a new surge forward under a different and more fluid concept from that of the city’s founding up to our present era.

Allowing thousands upon thousands to come into the country without accountability to the law and supporting them with cell phones, food, lodging, and other necessities projects an image of a change-oriented society. To those who support this process, the idea of lawful entry and reasoned limits on who may or may not be admitted is a formula for stagnation and fixity of mind not consistent with ever-changing realities. The guilt-ridden left devalues consistency and norms of stability for our society. According to the Obamacrats, de-stabilizing our system enables us to be a source of worldwide “hope and change.”  

The Obamacrats repudiate historical realities of our culture which are seen as a fixity of vision regarding immigration, family life, sexual identity, and the granting of opportunity. America as the land of opportunity is portrayed as hypocritical, and the reality is that we as a country are opposed to mass flooding of our shores with immigrants because of our uptight laws and our hypocritical application of Judeo-Christian values. Instead, the USA needs to accept a variety of lifestyles and people with values largely different from the lifestyles and personal choices that have traditionally been valued in our land.

Despite the massive population shifts in the USA at the turn of the 20th century from 1890-1920, until recently there were notably fewer violent, unemployed punks in the street or large-scale anti-Semitic cadres on our campuses chanting for the overthrow of the USA or setting fires or defacing buildings or looting millions of dollars worth of Levi’s, cell phones, headsets, and panties from stores. However, since that earlier surge of new ethnicities, we have seen a shift in thinking from understanding history as based on the leading of Divine Providence – the original vision of our “promised land” -- to seeing history as moving forward under a more dialectical model of social change. 

Dialectical thinking as the basis for understanding the movement of history was strongly emphasized by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. For Hegel, there is in all historical experience a Thesis which is opposed by an Antithesis. The Antithesis negates the Thesis, and the Thesis is then replaced by a Synthesis. The Synthesis becomes the new Thesis, and the march of time and history continues. The path taken is one of continuous progress towards the Absolute. The perfectibility of mankind is implied. 

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel also liked the idea of dialectical progress, but said that this dialectic was more specifically grounded in economics. They believed this dialectic would and should culminate in the classless society called “communism.”  

These Hegelian-Marxist models claiming to explain “change” provide an underlying rationale for affecting political and cultural changes. They are foundational for the radical desire to transform our society into an anti-bourgeois paradise which “paradise” is expanded to include the rejection of Judeo-Christian morality, rejection of the worldwide distinctiveness of male and female, and rejection of the relevance of merit in choosing people for their work. Europe has been more open than the USA to dialectical thinking about the progress of history.

However, the most valid alternative to the dialectical reasoning arising out of Germanic culture is the one found in the English/Protestant tradition. Although Marxists would disparage this tradition as being bourgeois and proposing values opposed both to dialectic and to the proletariat, the English/Protestant tradition rests on Biblical principles of a just social order and governance. It is a progress that is mediated and limited by the purity of our motives, the requirements of conscience, the moral law as revealed in the Old Testament, and through faith in both reason and revelation of the Messiah through the New Testament. 

Faith is the linchpin of this progress since it is a progress supported by Almighty God through His Providential will. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as well as Protestant colonial leaders who preceded them purposely cultivated their spiritual lives through Biblical study and prayer. Further, John Locke, Jonathan Edwards, and William Penn provided the philosophical and theological momentum for the ideal of the USA as a city on a hill. 

The issues that are playing out are in turn reflections of a deeper struggle between communist dialectical thinking and Judeo-Christian morality and belief in Divine Providence as guiding world history. We should not see ourselves as either needing or wanting a New World City.  


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Jeffrey Ludwig is a teacher of history and philosophy and has taught at Harvard, Penn State, Juniata College, and the City University of New York as well as at the secondary school level. He has published numerous articles at americanthinker.com, frontpagemag.com, israelnationalnews.com, and americanchurchmag.com. He also served as pastor of Bible Christian Church in New York City. His latest book is entitled "The Catastrophic Decline of America's Public High Schools." You can get it from Amazon here...