American Optimism: Bringing It Home.
What can we learn from the optimistic figures of American History, and how can we apply it to today?
Recap
In my last article – American Optimism: Where Did It Go? – we observed several defining moments and figures in American history; The Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, Theodore Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have A Dream speech. We analysed roughly the last 25 years of American politics and the rise of Donald Trump into the figure he is today, and why he will certainly go down in history as a seminal figure in 21st century America.
This time, let us take what we have learned and apply it to the circumstances of today. Once this is well understood, we can create a rational and achievable method of instilling optimism for the future in ourselves and those that come after us.
Leftists
What happens to a house built on sand when the high tides come rolling in? What happens to someone who’s entire identity is built on rocky conceptions of the world when the world directly challenges them? Something fundamental gets washed away.
This is the struggle of the American leftist today, and it is why it seems so many of them seem to be struggling to comprehend the situation they have found themselves in. They are shocked that President Trump could not just return to the White House, but do so with the popular vote. There is one obvious reason for this: for too long, the left wing has had de facto control of the cultural paradigm in this country, but no longer. It has eluded their grasp and now they are the ones playing catch up. This largely has to do with one fundamental flaw the left is struggling to cope with, and that is that identity politics do not work.
It seems that many on the left are hell bent on breaking up the American people into the smallest denominations possible. Christian, atheist, conservative, liberal, white, black, latino, asian, gay, straight, or otherwise, these labels are used to divide us and pit us against one another. Theodore Roosevelt understood this and explained it plainly all the way back in 1915.
“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart 15 feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.”
Here, President Roosevelt is speaking on nationality. While this is contextually different, we can still learn a lot from what he has to say. President Roosevelt is warning of the dangers of breaking the American people into warring interest groups unable to find a singular national identity to unite in. In this same way today, we are divided by the White-American and Black-American, the Gay-American and Straight-American, and so on. These labels are divisive, and purposefully so. The left has focused on this for too long as a divide-and-conquer strategy. The reason President Trump won is in providing a singular identity as an American that could resonate with anyone regardless of skin color or sexual preference that was simultaneously more appealing than any of the fragmented ideologies the left has fomented. It’s all well and good to say that identity politics don’t work, but it’s better to explain why.
“One of the worst things about liberalism is that it strips you of your identity and then tells you that you’re better off for it, but then when your natural longing for it remains, it just sells it back to you in some reduced and degraded form.”
This quote from YouTuber John Doyle of the channel Heck Off Commie! perfectly explains why. The fragmented identities that the left promotes hold no real value. They are caricatures of themselves. If all it means to be a woman is to wear dresses and makeup, pick flowers, and drink Starbucks, then of course anyone can be a woman. If all it means to be a man is to wear flannels and jeans, eat bacon, and chop wood, then of course anyone can be a man. Of course, we understand that there is far more to being a woman or a man than these things. There is something fundamental, if not spiritual, to it. That is why the leftist idea of identity politics in which everyone is broken according to labels does not work. These labels are not interchangeable.
Beyond this, these labels are less important to other people than the left would have you believe. Your average American does not care if you are black or white, or straight or gay. It changes very little. Your average American today actually took the words of Martin Luther King Jr to heart and is far more interested in character. It is time we focus once again on the American identity. In doing so, we may be able to bring over more from the left, pulling them away from the grips of identity politics.
There is a fundamental danger in the focus of identity politics as well. When you install identities in people that are fundamentally flawed and then life pulls the rug out from under them, something fundamentally breaks. This can manifest itself in many ways depending on the person. For many who could not conceive of a world in which President Trump wins, it has manifested in a blind hatred for everything the man and any of his supporters say or do. Elon Musk has faced the brunt of this recently. Some liberals across the country have taken to acts of domestic terrorism, defacing, destroying, and even in some cases, blowing up Tesla cars. Blowing up any car is dangerous, but electric cars present a unique danger, as lithium fires are almost impossible to put out.
How have the politicians on the left reacted to this string of terrorism? Silence. Instead, many of them are applauding Tesla stock crashing. Well, why is it crashing? Because of the terror campaign directed at Tesla. Their applaud of this stock crash is a tacit endorsement of the terrorism, this is hard to deny. Luckily, I believe the average American does understand this. It only serves to further hurt a Democrat party that is already hemorrhaging voters. In fact, the Democrat party today faces its lowest approval rating ever at just 29%, according to CNN. This is cataclysmic news for the Democrats. There is a simple reason for this.
The Democrat party of today, the liberals and leftists, are wholly incapable of providing a positive outlook of the future for the United States of America. They do not inspire hope, they have no optimism, and so they have no future. This is deeply unattractive and people left them in droves in 2024. Now, they are hell bent on claiming that America is being destroyed while the President carries out the exact policies he was popularly elected to implement. Time will only tell if this is a strategy that works in their favor, but if history is any indicator, the answer will be a resounding, “NO!”
Republicans
Until recently, Republicans were not so popular. Part of this was a massive hole in their messaging. One of the things that burnt people out on the Republican party for quite some time was the simple phrase, “pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” This sentiment is not ultimately wrong, but telling a population struggling under increased inflation, a poor economy, and stagnant job and wage growth to, “pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” is often received as demeaning. That does not seem to be an unfair takeaway.
It is not the problem that it is somehow bad to value hard work and trying to get ahead, but rather that this messaging is only effective in an economy that allows for upwards mobility. As it was in 2008 and as it is today, upwards mobility is a huge issue. That is why President Obama won in 2008. He understood that most Americans were struggling and acknowledged it. President Trump took this a step further, acknowledging that it was the political machine in this country making it so hard to get ahead and vowing to take it to them if he was elected. This messaging was arguably more effective than President Obama’s.
Instead of telling Americans to pull themselves up, President Trump told Americans that their hard work was valued and explained to them how he would grant them an economy that would also recognize and value that hard work. This messaging overtook the Republican party and largely changed it for the better. That is not to say some Republicans retain their old messaging. In fact, most do, but President Trump has set the tone for the rest of the party whether they choose to follow it or not.
The Republican party also had the benefit of being the other side of the argument from the Democrats and liberals, which as we have established, have largely lost the plot. In this sense, the Republicans have been granted a great opportunity to guide America, so long as they don’t squander it and learn from the mistakes of their rivals. It is incumbent upon the Republicans to provide a better tomorrow and more positive view of this great nation for the people to subscribe to, beyond just the words of President Trump.
Looking Back
One reason the left today is losing is their great lack of reverence for our shared American history. They choose today to demonize America’s past as one which allowed slavery to flourish and spread, racism to prosper and human rights to be ignored. This recalls another quote from President Theodore Roosevelt I shared in my last essay:
“He is a poor American who, looking at this field, does not feel within himself a deeper reverence for the nation’s past and a higher purpose to make the nation’s future rise level to her past.”
While there is truth to the view that slavery and racism are undeniably a large part of America’s past, there is another view of American history. American history has been a gradual struggle for individual rights, granted to an ever expanding number of people. No country fought as hard as the United States of America to end slavery in its borders. No country fought harder to grant rights to all as the United States of America. The reality is, today all Americans have their rights, and racism, sexism and every other -ism are largely relics of the past.
In fact, racism is such a non issue in America, that most hate crimes in this country are discovered to be staged after the fact. The website fakehatecrimes.org does a fantastic job at breaking down just how real this lie is. The idea of racism’s prevalence in America today is just another trick to divide us all along ideological and racial lines that we already discussed. Some people may read this and be angered. I ask you, why are you angry? If I am indeed correct, this should be widely celebrated!
It is time to shed the idea that America is an evil country that must atone for her sins. We are past that, and now we must look towards a future. The real problem today, as I touched on briefly in my last essay, is an ever shrinking middle class.
Yes, the middle class is dying. This is the fact that the tool of identity politics wishes to place a veil over. If we are all too busy fighting amongst ourselves, we may simply allow this to happen uncontested. That is that the political machine wants, and it is exactly what we must not allow to happen. Electing President Trump was only a start to reversing this issue, but it will take a united America not fighting over the petty squabbles of Tesla stock and microaggressions to tackle this issue. We must elect an entire new class of politicians that are truly willing to put America and Americans first. This is imperative if we want to have a country that extends beyond the next generation or two.
Beyond this, it will take a generation of men and women dedicated to building systems in this country to outlast them, that benefit future generations more than it will ever benefit them. This is the type of quality that built this nation, the type of quality that largely went out the window with many of the boomer generation, and the type of quality it is now incumbent upon us to find within ourselves.
“There is an obligation to one’s ancestors and, as a result, one’s descendants to pass on in as good as or better condition than one received…”
If this is the case with a family estate, it is certainly the case with a nation. Just because previous generations have failed to do so for us, does not mean we then should forsake the future generations. We must expel those whose philosophy is one of extraction for personal gain rather than enhancement for the future. If we can do this, unite our country in a common American identity that is reverent of its past and optimistic of its future, then we will be able to pass something truly wonderful to those who come after us.
Thanks for reading! Next up, we will be talking about another one of America’s foundational principles: Pragmatism. If you enjoyed this read, go check out some of my other work, and subscribe so you don’t miss what I have coming up next!