Americans want America First

OPINION:

In recent months, the American people have signaled their desire for America First policies to help turn our country around. Throughout the nation, our citizens have previously seen the positive results of America First policies and the contrast they provide with the failed efforts of the radical left. Today, even in states known for radical left policies, support for America First policies is gaining powerful momentum.

This raises a question: When the expected results arrive, will the principal driver of events be those left losses or right wins? To put it differently, will American voters have, first and foremost, made a positive choice for America First governance or a negative one against the far progressive rule? The proximate motivations of voters confronted with the array of disastrous Biden-era policies — from skyrocketing crime to lost wars to ruinous inflation and beyond — strongly suggest that the latter motivation will have prevailed.

This takes nothing from the probable victors, who at least possess the virtue of presenting an alternative — and now have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to vindicate their win in full by governing with the actual interests of Americans in mind. That seems like a simple principle by which to abide, but the fact that it requires stating illuminates the extent to which the concerns of ordinary Americans are unheard of and unmet in Washington, D.C., today. The first step to changing that comes on Tuesday.

The good news is that the next step is already mapped out, poll-tested, and ready to go. It’s called the America First Agenda, and we at the America First Policy Institute have been crafting and honing it for precisely this moment. In doing so, we are conscious of our own role and place in the policy process. Henry Kissinger, in his memoirs, has a line in which he accuses (with justification!) speechwriters of being frustrated principals, eager to impose their own views upon the speakers for whom they write. There is a similar phenomenon in the arena of policy institutions, for whom lawmakers are merely instruments for their views and aspirations. At the America First Policy Institute, we are deeply conscious of it — and so we ask ourselves, constantly, not just what Americans need but what they want. The former is our true north, and the latter is the rudder that steers us there.

The America First Agenda addresses in full both the needs and wants of Americans now — and that’s why the incoming officeholders, in states and Washington, D.C., alike, are well-advised to pursue it.

Fortunately, the Agenda is not just popular — nearly all of it is plain common sense. Among its precepts is the proposition that Americans deserve a flourishing economy, undergirded by sound money that doesn’t inflate away our savings and investments. That economy should be shaped and employed in the service of the American people at large: Our workers, our producers, our entrepreneurs, our creators, and our dreamers. Market efficiency is insufficient as an end in itself. What we ought to be asking is whether our economy yields lives of dignity and respect for every American who chooses to work.

From this emerges a series of related priorities encompassing our economy and, more broadly, our civics. They include the imperative to ensure that our energy is affordable, abundant, and American. We deeply believe that parents, not ideological fanatics in the education bureaucracy, ought to control the education of their own children. Finally, the communities in which Americans live and work — and in which their children play and are educated — should be safe, well-policed, and free of crime.

All this constitutes a constellation of the policy ends that, together, put the American Dream within reach for everyone — not just the well-connected and well-off.

Achieving all this necessarily entails tremendous reform of the way in which the United States is governed now. Americans are conscious of the need for that reform: That’s why, for example, election integrity reform is so popular. The ordinary American understands that we have to make it easy to vote — and hard to cheat. Similarly, the stewardship of American security needs to change in its focus and priorities. Efforts in unending wars in marginal theaters of no enduring strategic importance to the United States should take a back seat to an intense focus on the twin threats of communist China and Mexican cartels. At home, the actual governance of the United States requires a reset — with the “swamp” drained, bureaucratic power curtailed, and the rights of Americans respected in full.

All this is a necessarily partial description of a comprehensive and deeply detailed agenda. It is a tremendous departure from the status quo in governance, but that does not mean it is radical. Radicalism is what we’ve seen imposed upon us for years now. This agenda is not radical: It is a restoration. It is what America needs and wants, alike and in full. I am confident that America First policymakers can begin the work of implementing this agenda when the American people give them the opportunity to do so.

• Brooke Rollins is the President and CEO of the America First Policy Institute. She previously served as Assistant to President Donald J. Trump and Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.