Moore: Trump should call for new American patriotism
Recent polling suggests that our citizens DO appreciate American greatness. The only group that DOESN'T is the ideologically isolated cultural and "highly educated" elite.
Hard to believe it was just four years ago that Joe Biden was elected with a promise to unite the country. After the misery of COVID-19 deaths and lockdowns and the riots in the streets of major cities, Americans WANTED to be united by a unifying national purpose.
Alas, it never happened. Instead, Biden and his leftist 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 on every issue, from running up massive debts to rampant inflation to electric vehicle mandates.
Can Donald Trump be the president who unifies the country by embracing traditional American ideals? The Make America Great Again agenda has some rough edges for sure, but if presented right, led by a message of hope, not malice, Trump can deliver an idealistic policy that the majority of Americans can embrace.
The way to do this is for Trump, as we approach our 250th birthday, to strike up the theme of a New American Patriotism. This should be a message centered around a renewed appreciation and celebration of American virtue and greatness. What better way to pull the country together? It should be an extension of the Reagan message of America being a “shining city on a hill” and a “beacon of freedom” for the rest of the world.
For at least a generation and maybe 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, not proud of our founding and our achievements of spreading freedom and free enterprise across the planet.
The hard left magnifies America’s failures, not the magnitude of our successes and our virtue. Foreigners who visit the U.S. often can’t believe the extent to which our media, entertainment industry and intellectual class obsess over our moral failings.
A strong case can be made that America is today the world’s greatest and perhaps ONLY successful multiracial success story. The melting pot isn’t just a history-book fantasy. It is real.
Recent polling suggests that our citizens DO appreciate American greatness. The only group that DOESN’T is the ideologically isolated cultural and “highly educated” elite. The vast majority of Americans of every race and income category believe America is “the greatest country on earth.” But many liberal elites reject this notion.
America’s inventiveness, our innovation and our technological prowess, which propelled the world into the modern age and helped reduce poverty rates by 90%, are somehow sinister.
These are views of a class of modern-day intellectuals who never produced anything but instead sow the seeds of discontent and division. They certainly have the right to hold these blame-America-first ideals, but we don’t have to allow them in our classrooms to pollute 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 truer today than ever before.
Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is also an economic advisor to the Trump campaign.
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