Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

STEPHEN MOORE: Here’s How Trump Could Get America Back In Touch With Its Patriotic Roots

(Screen Capture/CSPAN)

Hard to believe it was just four years ago that President 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 transgenderism to electric vehicle mandates.

The country was only further torn asunder.

Can President-elect Donald Trump learn from these blunders and 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 vast 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 red-white-and-blue 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.

Which we are.

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 — particularly slavery and segregation — not the magnitude of our successes and our virtue. Foreigners who visit the United States often can’t believe the extent to which our media, entertainment industry and intellectual class obsess over our moral failings.

Biden was particularly guilty of this, when he falsely accused the United States of being a systemically racist country.

Wrong, Joe.

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 is making racial distinctions almost obsolete. The rapid rise in incomes of Asians, Hispanics and, to a lesser extent, Blacks should be celebrated.

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 white liberal elites reject this notion.

Another example: White conservatives and Hispanics soundly reject the idea that America is systemically racist. According to Pew Research Center, “about six-in-ten Black adults say racism” is a problem in America today. But it is telling that many white liberals also believe this.

Is there still racism in America? Of course, yes. But it is not “systemic,” and the nation is becoming less racially polarized with every passing year.

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. Damn those fiends Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

Fortunately, these are views of a class of modern-day intellectuals who never produced anything but instead sow the seeds of miscontent 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, and Trumpnomics will make it all the more true.

Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.