When America Stops Believing in America, the World Notices
The Founders understood that a republic’s strength begins in the settled conviction of its own citizens.
For the last 250 years, America’s greatest export has not been a good or service. It has been a set of promises — that ordinary people can govern themselves under a written constitution; that our rights come from our Creator, not government; and that liberty is worth risking everything to secure.
Dissidents behind the Iron Curtain imported this promise. They smuggled copies of the Declaration of Independence at their own peril. Similarly, Chinese citizens yearning for freedom — from Tiananmen Square to Hong Kong — raised replicas of the Statue of Liberty. The world doesn’t admire America because we claim to be flawless or even because of our military power. It admires us because we hold — and continue to strive for — ideals worthy of admiration.
This is exactly why a recent, veiled transformation of our national institutions carries a consequence that reaches far beyond our borders.
Consider the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It’s mission statement once pledged to explore the “infinite richness and complexity of American history.” However, under its current director, the words “American” and “history” have been replaced by a vow to build a “just and compassionate future.” The director explained the change as helping visitors get out of an “America First mentality.”
Further, the flagship museum on the American story introduces the years spanning Columbus’s arrival through the Declaration of Independence under a single heading: “Unsettling.” And the museum’s own teaching materials instruct that “there is no single American culture, language, or narrative.”
Set aside, for a moment, whether every judgment here is fair. Ask instead how it translates from the outside. Take a foreigner’s point of view.
Nations do not extend trust to a partner that appears to have lost faith in itself. American alliances — NATO, our Pacific partnerships, and the web of agreements that have kept a fragile peace — all rest on a belief that the United States knows what it stands for and will defend it at all costs. When a country’s own premier cultural institution treats its founding ideals as farce rather than imperfect aspirations, trouble abounds. A nation that will not narrate its own story with conviction looks less like a reliable anchor and more like a drifting, fraudulent one.
Beijing and Moscow spend enormous sums arguing that the American model is hypocrisy dressed as principle, that our talk of liberty was always a mask for western exploitation. They could not commission better propaganda than an American museum supplying the same guilty verdict in America’s own voice. Every time an official institution reduces the Founding to a story of theft and oppression, it hands authoritarian propagandists a citation — not from a critic, but from the United States itself.
And the undecided world is watching. Across the world, governments weigh whether to align with Washington or its rivals. Part of what has drawn them toward America’s orbit is the aspirational content of the American idea. Strip this idea of its dignity, and you strip away one of the most powerful reasons anyone had to prefer us over Communist China, Russia, or other neighboring dictatorial powers.
None of this is an argument for a sanitized history. As an historian, I deeply believe that honest reckoning of our past mistakes and shortcomings is a sign of national maturity. Sure, Germany’s unflinching confrontation with its darkest chapters has arguably raised its moral standing, not lowered it. But there is a decisive difference between confronting the flaws inside a story you still affirm and dismantling the story completely. The first says, “we fell short of our ideals, and those ideals still bind us.” The second says, “the ideals were never real.”
A nation that tells its own children that its founding was a fraud — and that there was never anything worth preserving — forfeits any claim to leadership. Why would the rest of the world follow a country that no longer believes in itself? Why invest in, trust, or take its word, when its own people are taught that its guiding principles were lies from the start?
The Founders understood that a republic’s strength begins in the settled conviction of its own citizens. When we broadcast contempt for our own inheritance, we hand our rivals a gift and our allies a reason to look elsewhere. We are giving the world fewer reasons to admire us and more to doubt us — and the American taxpayer is footing the bill for the privilege.
Having just celebrated our nation’s 250th birthday, those entrusted with our history shouldn’t be allowed to tear it apart — they should be replaced immediately.
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I think sometimes that our freedoms work against us when they are turned against us by those who hate America. For example, the lack of vetting Islamists who enter the country, take its welfare and generosity, and use our freedom of religion to institute political change in the guise of religion. There comes a time when those who mistake kindness for weakness need to be shown the door, along with those who undermine our history and traditions to influence a generation or two to hate America. Our welfare, immigration, and education systems need an overhaul. Start with all our museums, which I think Doug Burgham is doing. Did you read about the changes at the president’s house in Philadelphia? We’ve been infiltrated by our enemies for generations and we’re just catching on now.
"When America Stops Believing in America, the World Notices" is one of your best. Mr. Speaker