The United States is the greatest country on earth, and the biggest hindrance to its fulfilling its full potential is those among us who would deny this.
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I have written previously about my general discomfort with the waning patriotism among the American citizenry. Growing up, I always assumed that a shared love of country united all of us.
I grew up in the South where skepticism of all things Yankee still held sway, but I nonetheless assumed that, should I ever go to New York or Boston, I could count on all the people there to love America the same as I did. I expected everyone to agree that America is the greatest country on earth.
Now, I don’t know, and it really is crazy how quickly things have changed.
Politics as a Dividing Line
We used to have a common thread among all of us that transcended partisan politics. Two Presidential candidates in recent memory won forty-nine states—Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan—and another—George H. W. Bush—won forty. Bill Clinton took large swaths of states that are now Republican strongholds.
Today, however, we are incredibly polarized, and I’m not quite sure how it got this way so quickly. The fact nonetheless remains that the United States is the greatest country on earth, and, despite all of its problems, the biggest hindrance to its fulfilling its full potential is those among us who would deny this.
The self-hatred proliferating among many within my generation and the generation coming up behind me is disheartening and disgusting.
That there would be those who despise the most prosperous, most free country to have ever existed in favor of countries and systems that gave rise to some of history’s greatest horrors, tells us everything we need to know about this group of people.
The Greatest Country on Earth
America, however, remains an extraordinary country, the greatest country on earth. And the absurdity of the arguments and statements of those seeking to denigrate the United States is building a backlash that I believe will reinvigorate the conservative movement.
Clintonian triangulation bought liberalism a generation’s worth of legitimacy, which George W. Bush’s lackluster Presidency only exacerbated. The increasing radicalism of the left, however, culminating in outright America hatred, is squandering what is left.
It remains to be seen what will come about this November, but I hope that our country can finally find that equilibrium that will allow us once again to accept our cultural and political differences, bound together again by the same love of this country and the pride in its history and heritage that we once possessed.
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