America faces a two-front ideological battle: one at home, one abroad. Victory or defeat on either front will influence the outcome in the other such that any loss is calamitous.
Across the battlefield abroad sits the Chinese Communist Party, waging information warfare dedicated to convincing the world that America is immoral and incompetent to its core. Other authoritarians such as Russia parrot its assertions. This is part of the CCP’s strategy to weaken the United States and replace us as the strong horse and bend international institutions to its will. America’s willingness to stand as a model of individual freedom, self-determination, and prospering free enterprise to other countries has been its asset and a cornerstone of the US-led order. To attempt to draw smaller satellite countries into its orbit, China seeks to convince them that Uncle Sam has nothing to offer anymore but wokeness, weakness, and decline.
The message is well timed: Americans are fighting among themselves about whether this country and the global order it leads is worth defending. The woke Left doesn’t seem to think so. This is one of the premises of progressive identity politics. During the Black Lives Matter summer of protests and violent rioting, activists destroyed businesses and monuments. Liberal hosts on cable outlets excused the lawless destruction as morally acceptable due to its “righteous” cause.
Elites who hold to this revolutionary framework tell us that math is racist, that the natural family and gender binary are oppressive and bigoted. Even the Smithsonian Institution published a explaining how systemically racist, patriarchal, and oppressive the nation is. (The institute apologized after pushback.) Vice President Kamala Harris is routinely incoherent lectures about the superiority of a government that engineers equitable outcomes rather than political and economic liberty — an argument lapped up by the CCP. Whatever President Joe Biden’s personal beliefs about the virtue of America, as the head of the Democratic Party, he has mostly advanced the overwhelmingly radical progressivism that has pervaded the Democratic establishment. On Day One in the Oval Office, he signed an “advancing racial equity,” undergirded by the ideas pervasive on the Left that America is an unjust country by design. His most senior Cabinet officials promote the same message.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield the US in a speech as systemically racist. When the UN Human Rights Council concluded that the death of George Floyd in police custody demanded that the US be for human rights abuses, Secretary of State Antony Blinken the investigation as something we owed to the world. And when the Chinese delegation, representatives of a government running concentration camps, berated Blinken for American racism and human rights abuses, Blinken agreed that “yes, we have work to do.” CCP propaganda seized on Blinken’s equivocation, splashing across its a narrative of the “US’ double standards in human rights.”
This problem is not contained to the Left.
Former President Donald Trump routinely draws a moral equivalence between the US and authoritarian countries. He recently did so with a necessary US partner, Saudi Arabia, saying that when it comes to human rights abuses, “We have human rights issues in this country, too.” In response to a question about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutality in 2017, , “You think our country’s so innocent?”
Rather than embracing the view that America was right to seek to contain communist invaders during the Cold War, Trump the Soviets were right to invade Afghanistan. And when pressed on the North Korean regime’s atrocities, Trump , “Yeah, but so have a lot of other people done some really bad things… I mean, I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done.”
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s been common to hear a version of this on the more pro-withdrawal Right, along with insinuations, and sometimes outright accusations, that America is to blame for that war, too, because NATO provoked Moscow or that the defense of Ukraine is about cultivating woke allies.
It’s true that even Trump’s most stridently populist disciples, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL), don’t go so far as to argue that America is historically bad. But that segment of the Right’s myopic focus on troubles at home in the context of Trump’s claims of moral equivalencies with our enemies makes the temptation greater for his defenders to endorse a simple withdrawal from commitments abroad under the deadly misconception that America’s moral authority has been corrupted. This completely misses how futile addressing wokeness at home will be if the CCP has the US under its thumb.
Leading up to his election as president, Trump’s coolness toward American exceptionalism may have seemed less egregious to some who appreciated that Trump's virtue was his willingness to take risks and shake up a sleepy GOP. And he did that well. He made pivotal, overdue decisions to withdraw the US from treaties and organizations that served to weaken us rather than advantage us. This included the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty, the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris Climate Accords, the UN Commission on Human Rights, and the World Health Organization.
But now is the time to reassert US influence.
repeatedly shows that the people do not believe the nation is systemically racist or morally equal to human rights-abusing authoritarian countries. And rising politicians on the Right are, almost universally, thematically tapping into the fundamental principles of American exceptionalism. And it should be no surprise that when the much-predicted “red wave” never materialized in the midterm elections, the Republicans who did win tended to come not from the Trump stable of candidates but from those who seek to turn the country away from routine self-flagellation. This crop of leaders acknowledges the battle at home over America’s national identity without acting as though that battle has already been lost. They tap into, rather than recoil from, expressions of American virtue.
As newly reelected Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has : “Yes, we’re against CRT. We’re against distorting American history…We need to be teaching kids what it means to be an American. We need to teach them about the founding principles of our country — why the Constitution is structured the way it is, why our Bill of Rights are like they are. We need to teach them that in the American system, our rights come from God, not from the government.”
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who is on a mission to root out woke indoctrination in our military academies and recently published a in defense of American strength, pride, and honor, put it this way: “Our military’s strength depends on the unity of our troops and the knowledge that America is a noble nation worth fighting for. Critical race theory teaches that race is a person’s most important characteristic and that America is an evil, oppressive place. That idea may be fashionable in left-wing circles and college classrooms, but it has no place in our military.”
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction, has spoken and written at length about the racism he has faced and still faces. And yet, he : “America is a good place. I believe in the goodness of this nation. And if we sell that, because it’s true, America will be far better off tomorrow than it is today.”
Virginia Gov. won his 2021 race on a platform of rebuking anti-American indoctrination and encouraging American excellence. “We are on the side of patriotism, God-given liberties, and the limitless opportunities that can lift up all Americans.”
Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), the popular leader of the conservative Republican Study Committee, how we can expect the next generation of Americans “to raise their right hand and take an oath, knowing that they might pay the ultimate sacrifice, when at the same time we’re telling them that America is evil, that America is racist, that America is not worth fighting for. It doesn’t work.”
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who worked to correct the State Department’s erroneous conflation of radical woke policies with American values, during the unveiling of the Commission on Unalienable Rights that “America is fundamentally good” and “has much to offer the world because our founders recognized the existence of God-given unalienable rights and designed a durable system to protect them.”
All of which is to say that the message and momentum are with the GOP’s forward-looking figures who want to reclaim institutions and build a strong and proud America at a critical time in this new cold war with the CCP. The GOP of the recent past did some necessary work in getting out of, or reworking, bad deals and exposing and clarifying the work left undone. The party of the future must outcompete the CCP, and this requires building stronger international partnerships and leading effective organizations uncorrupted by nations and groups that oppose us. We need a foreign policy enabled by a strong military and economy that enables us to act on terms most conducive to our interests while unabashedly promoting our long-standing, classic principles.
To do this, we need greater moral clarity, not confusion, and for leaders boldly to push policies informed by moral distinctions and to offer a vision of a good and right America. It has the advantage of being true.