The Bloomberg Politics Poll has published the results of a survey that asked people which presidential candidate can best recover “America’s lost greatness.” Are we surprised that 72 percent of Americans believe our nation is not as great as it used to be? I am more surprised that 26 percent have managed to sleep through the last fifty years.
Unfortunately, the Bloomberg survey tells us nothing important about candidates’ knowledge of how we lost that greatness. Was it stolen, abandoned or bartered away?
What the poll really tells us is that we are deeply divided over what makes a great nation, and anyone not hypnotized by Obama’s post-constitutional globalism already knows that.
In truth, our greatness was not lost. After being slandered, belittled and undermined by three generations of progressives, it was then decapitated by Obama’s “transformative politics” — with the help of Obama’s ideological soulmates in the media.
Today, patriots feel like strangers in an increasingly strange land, living in a place which barely resembles “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” It is no wonder voters are flocking to a candidate who at least talks about “making America great again.”
And yet, something is missing from the Bloomberg poll and the debate about restoring our greatness. Instead of asking which candidate can restore our greatness, a more illuminating question might be which candidate best understands what makes a country great and how and where we took a wrong turn.
We won’t find our way home unless we know what home looks like.
- Was America’s descent into European-style “social democracy” accidental—or was it planned?
- How and when did we choose to abandon Reagan’s “city on a hill” and become a “global village”?
- When was the national referendum ordering the abandonment of our constitutional separation of powers in favor of government by presidential edict?
- When and where and how did Americans instruct their President to bow before foreign kings and dictators?
The American people never voted for any of this explicitly. But we did elect year after year a Congress that allowed the erosion of the rule of law to the point where even Republican candidates for president shrug when the Supreme Court invents a new law on marriage out of whole cloth.
We should not be surprised that polls consistently show that two-thirds of Americans think we are moving in the wrong direction. What should be alarming is that so few candidates for the highest office in the land can point the way home.
Yes, we are a nation adrift without a compass and without true leadership.
- How else can you explain the re-election in 2012 of Barack Obama, a man whose whole platform and governing agenda has been to reconstruct the America of our fathers and to undermine and sabotage of the Constitution of Washington, Madison and Jefferson.
- It might be said that in 2008, people did not know what Obama was all about. But by 2012 they did, and a majority chose to continue on the path to despotism. To apologize
The path chosen by Barack Obama and the Democrat Party is the road to “small-c- communism”—and the important thing to understand is that they are quite happy with that choice. Like Obama, they are tired of the burden of being an American, of having to apologize for our multitude of sins. They want to be citizens of the world, brothers and sisters to Mother Earth.
The rejection of America as a model for humanity is well underway. The Democrat establishment is now seriously debating the “rebranding” of their annual “Jefferson-Jackson Dinner” because Jefferson owned slaves and the Andrew Jackson presided over the harsh treatment of Native Americans.
You might joke about it, saying, “Wait until they discover the Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor.” But they are serious about cleaning house, and they will find new heroes in the world of Global Political Correctness. Progressives really do see America as guilty of crimes against humanity, and to them, our “greatness” must be abandoned to atone for those crimes.
Our real political divide today is over the meaning of American “greatness.” That is at bottom a divide over the meaning of American uniqueness, the “American Dream,” and the truth of America’s founding principles.
Tom Tancredo is the founder of the Rocky Mountain Foundation and founder and co-chairman of Team America PAC.
Tom represented Colorado’s sixth congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 1999 to 2009, and he is a former presidential candidate.
He is the author of In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America’s Border and Security.
