OPINION:
It’s hard to believe it was just four years ago that President Biden was elected with a promise to unite the country. After the misery of COVID-19 deaths and lockdowns and riots in the streets of major cities, Americans wanted to be united by a unifying national purpose.
Alas, it never happened. Instead, Mr. Biden and his allies were drunk with power and swerved the Democratic Party even further to the left. This alienated half the country with a ruinous and unpopular progressive agenda that brought massive debt, rampant inflation, transgender ideology and electric vehicle mandates.
The country was only torn further asunder.
Can President-elect Donald Trump learn from these blunders and be the president who unifies the country by embracing traditional American ideals? To be sure, his “Make America Great Again” agenda has some rough edges. But if presented right, led by a message of hope and not malice, Mr. Trump can deliver an idealistic policy that the vast majority of Americans can embrace.
The way to do this is for Mr. Trump, as our nation approaches its 250th birthday, to strike up the theme of a new American patriotism. This should be a red, white and blue message centered on a renewed appreciation and celebration of American virtue and greatness. What better way to pull the country together? It should be an extension of Ronald Reagan’s message of America being a “shining city on a hill” and a “beacon of freedom” for the rest of the world.
Which we are.
For at least a generation or two, our schools and our universities have denigrated America’s moral standing. We have been lectured that we should be ashamed of our nation’s past and not proud of our founding or our achievements of spreading freedom and free enterprise worldwide.
The hard left magnifies America’s failures — particularly slavery and segregation — not the magnitude of our successes and our virtue. Foreigners who visit the United States have often can’t believe the extent to which our media, entertainment industry and intellectual class obsess over our moral failings.
Mr. Biden was particularly guilty of this when he falsely accused the United States of being a “systemically racist country.”
Wrong, Mr. President.
A strong case can be made that America is today the world’s greatest and perhaps only multiracial success story. The melting pot isn’t just a history book fantasy. It is real. The rapid increase in interracial and intercultural marriages are making racial distinctions almost obsolete. The rapid rise in incomes of Asian, Hispanic and to a lesser extent Black Americans should be celebrated.
Recent polling suggests that our citizens do appreciate American greatness. The only group that doesn’t are the ideologically isolated cultural and “highly educated” elite. The vast majority of Americans of every race and income category — including 58% of Blacks — believe that America is “the greatest country on earth.” But roughly 2 in 3 White liberal elites reject this notion.
Another example: White conservatives and Hispanics soundly reject the idea that America is systemically racist. Six in 10 Black Americans believe that America is racist. But it’s telling that a much larger share (75%) of White liberals believe this.
Is there still racism in America? Of course. But it is not systemic, and the nation is becoming less racially polarized with every passing year.
America’s inventiveness, innovation and technological prowess have propelled the world into the modern age and helped reduce poverty rates by 90% are somehow sinister. Damn those fiends Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.
Fortunately, these are the views of a class of modern intellectuals who have never produced anything, but rather sow the seeds of discontent and division. They certainly have the right to hold these “blame America” ideals, but we don’t have to allow them in our classrooms polluting the minds of our kids.
This is an extension of the Reagan metaphor of America as a shining city on a hill and a beacon of freedom for all the world. It’s more true today than ever, and Mr. Trump will make it all the more true.
• Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
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