Victor Davis Hanson writes that making America great again “hinges on remembering what made America ‘great’ in the first place, but also what has threatened to not make America great at various times in our history. The options are not opaque.”
VDH then expands on it:
Each generation must choose whether to unite around an ideal that transcends class, race, and regional divides, or to give in to the more natural state of tribal solidarities and prejudices. There is always a choice whether to abide by the Constitution or to warp it. We are always pondering whether to liberate the American economy or to nationalize it, and whether to honor or be ashamed of our icons of the past. Can an often second-guessing, apologetic, and overly litigious America still feel confident that it can be good enough without having to be perfect?
Every nation’s next generation must decide whether to leave behind a country better than the one it inherited. And sometimes, the resulting choices can reenergize or finally put to rest their collective inheritance.
The biggest choice, however, the one that determines all the rest when it comes to successfully making America great again, is the need for conservatives to learn how to fight the information war. If more of our fellow citizens are not properly informed with the facts — the USA is done for. If our side doesn’t learn how to reach people and make the case passionately and persuasively, we’ve already lost.
Here are two more paragraphs from Hanson’s above-titled article:
In all of these cases, the flawed assumption was that the U.S. Constitution; a free-market tradition of entrepreneurial capitalism; a multiracial people united through the assimilative melting pot; and federalism under the banner of e pluribus unum were either passé or ossified ideas. People thought the days of an America with a booming stock market, an energized manufacturing and industrial sector, plentiful and affordable gas and oil, and a world-dominant tech industry were over.
Yet as 2018 begins, the United States has become the largest producer of gas, oil, and coal in history. Its stock market is at record levels. The economy is growing at a 3 percent rate—and unemployment may dip below 4 percent, even though some commentators have claimed over the last decade that it likely would never fall below 5 percent again. The auto, steel, manufacturing, financial, agricultural, and high-tech industries are ascendant. The world’s aspiring professionals prefer graduate schools in Cambridge (Mass.), Palo Alto, and New York to those in Beijing, Moscow, or Tehran. The health of a society is still judged by age-old criteria such as the quality of its educational institutions, the stability of its constitution, the moral caliber of its citizenry, and the ability to feed, fuel and protect itself—and on these measures, the United States is doing far better than its peers the world over.
Not since the 1980s has there been such a good reason to be optimistic about our country’s future. Unfortunately, optimism alone doesn’t win the information war. We’re still going to have to get out there and fight.
You can read VDH’s entire article here.
