‘Freedom’, warned Ronald Reagan, ‘is never more than one generation away from extinction.’ Almost 32 years to the day after Reagan left the White House, it is clear what he meant.
Today the ideas of liberty — which are the essence of American exceptionalism — are under attack.
A radical New Left is in the ascendant. Today in Congress sit representatives intent on imposing ruinous tax rates on America. An administrative state has arisen that risks stifling innovation. On university campuses across the country, young Americans are taught to despise their country’s past, belittle her present and despair for her future.
Being a Brit, I am often in awe of the American achievement. It is not just that America rose from being a collection of 13 British colonies to becoming the greatest republic the world has ever known. Despite today accounting for a mere 4 percent of the global population, the US economy is the world’s largest and most innovative. America leads the way in everything from developing vaccines against Covid to the science of super computing and space travel.
Over and above such material accomplishment, are America’s moral achievements. American exceptionalism has not only elevated the United States. By extension it has helped lift the cause of humankind.
Twice in the past century, America intervened to help save the world from militarism and Nazism. It was American resolve during the Cold War that overcame the threat of Communism. Can you imagine what the world might look like today if on any of those occasions the anti-American side had prevailed?
Following the defeat of Soviet communism, the past thirty years has witnessed the greatest increase in global prosperity in any period in human history. This global progress is underwritten by American leadership.
As you read this, millions of people around the world are benefiting from a GPS navigation system developed by the US — and offered to the rest of the world at no cost. Technology developed by Apple and others right here in the United States has put into the pockets of millions of people across the planet more computing power than NASA had the day they landed a man on the moon. Bill Gates has ploughed billions into eradicating malaria in Africa, doing more than any government ever managed to improve the lives of Africans.
The one thing that most surprises me about American exceptionalism is the refusal of America’s elites to see it.
Instead of taking pride in America’s past, millions of Americans have been taught to despise their own country. To be sure, America has not always lived up to the founding ideals of liberty. But that is no reason to reject the founding principles as the ‘woke’ left insist.
Far from appreciating what makes America so exceptional, many seem to think it is a badge of intellectual sophistication to repudiate anything that sets America apart. “Woke” ideas are flaunted by those seeking to signal their supposed superiority.
Those of us who believe that the United States is one of the greatest forces for good in the world have a fight on our hands. The battle for freedom, which many of us assumed had been won a generation ago when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, needs to be fought and won again.
I believe that the best way to win the fight for freedom in America is to take the initiative at the state level, in places like Mississippi. This is why I have taken on the job of President & CEO at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
It is at the state level, not in DC, that the best public policy ideas seem to emanate. In the 1990s, Wisconsin showed the way with welfare reforms. It was local states that pioneered Charter Schools, and more recently, it has been southern states, like Florida and Louisiana that have led the way on school choice. Taxes have been not just cut, but abolished, within various states much more often than ever seems to happen in DC.
Over the next few years, it will be in places like Mississippi that an alternative to the big-government-knows-best approach must be developed.
One lesson I learned from the Brexit campaign in Britain is that big change is possible. For years, those of us who wanted to re-establish Britain as a self-governing country were told we were wasting our time. There was, it was often explained to me, no point in trying to change things that had long ago been settled.
Today in America the progressives want you to believe that there is something inevitable about the relentless growth of big government and the socialisation of the American way of life.
The constant erosion of American exceptionalism is only unstoppable if you choose not to help stop it. Do nothing, and in the words of Ronald Reagan, we really will “spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like to once live in the United States where men were free.” Act now and this is a fight we can win — American exceptionalism can endure.
Douglas Carswell is the new President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. He co-founded the Vote Leave campaign that won the Brexit referendum.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.