Copilot and Photoshop representation of President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office
America, my friends, is almost 250 years old. In the recorded history of mankind, that is but a tiny blimp on the radar screen of civilizations. There are nations on this planet that have existed for thousands of years. But in that brief moment, America has emerged as the single greatest example of democracy known to man. We have built the world’s largest economy, created incredible wealth, pioneered breakthrough medical discoveries, created flight, put men on the moon, and begun the exploration of the universe and distant planets. Our discoveries, particularly those in science and medicine, have benefited all of humankind around the globe. And, in our 250 years of existence, we have engineered the world’s greatest standard of living and have become the shining beacon of freedom that people aspire to.
Dissenters Among Us
And yet people are living among us who say we are an evil nation. Far too many professors and educators at our esteemed universities, colleges, high schools, and yes, even elementary schools, teach our children that our country is evil and, in doing so, denigrate the principles upon which our nation was created. It is a disgusting, selfish, ungrateful, and perverse view of who and what we are. These people ignore the fact that (before President Biden) over one million people per year legally immigrated into our country…each and every year! If we were such an evil place, why do so many people from all over the world want to come and live here? Many who complain about America suggest that capitalism and the free enterprise system have “failed us’ and need to be replaced with socialism. Socialism has never worked in any nation that has tried it throughout history. Makes one wonder whether it is socialism that is the focus, or the quest for abject power and control over the means of production and the lives of our citizens, because, at the end of the day, that is what socialism is — a precursor to communism. I am afraid it is the latter.
This Much is Wisdom
Nature is ultimately unchangeable, and humans are not God. Totalitarianism will never win in the end—but it can win long enough to destroy a civilization like ours. Like a cancer, it grows and envelops vital organs until they shut down, and death ensues. That is what is ultimately at stake in the fight we find ourselves in today. It is not difficult to clearly see the totalitarian impulse among powerful forces in our politics and culture. We can see it in the rise and imposition of “lying, pomposity, smugness, and group-think” ( to paraphrase former Fox TV Commentator Tucker Carlson).
We can see it by the indefensible and incoherent controls imposed on businesses and our daily lives by power-hungry politicians like Governor Kathy Hochul of New York, would-be Mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey, and Governor Gavin Newsome of California, Governor Walsh of Minnesota, and Pritzker of Illinois, among others. And we can see it in the increasing attempts to rewrite our history and the despicable efforts to indoctrinate our children with lessons like those contained in the “1619 Project”.
“An informed patriotism is what we want,” Ronald Reagan said toward the end of his Farewell Address as President in January 1989. “Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world?”
Reagan’s Warning
“Those of us who are over 35 (then) or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought at Guadalcanal or Tarawa or in Korea or the jungles of Vietnam, or the family who lost someone on the beaches of Normandy, the Chosin Reservoir, or Hue City in Vietnam. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies then celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties.”
But How Things Have Changed
Younger parents today are unsure whether fostering a sense of pride in America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create popular culture, well-grounded patriotism seems to be no longer the style. We have got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. Freedom is fragile; it needs protection, and it requires that people give back to society as much or more than they take from it, a lesson we can learn from the failures of the Roman Empire and the Athenian democracy.
America, My Friends, is Advanced Citizenship.
So, we have got to get back to teaching history based not on what is in fashion or what we would like it to be, but what it actually is, and what is important, like why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, last year, on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who had fought on Omaha Beach. . . . [S]he said, “we will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.” Well, let us help her keep her word. If we forget what they did on June 6, 1944, ultimately, we will not know who we are. President Reagan said…I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.”
President Ronald Reagan said these words almost forty years ago. They are prescient.
Here is another example of the erosion of the American spirit.
“American schoolchildren today learn two things about Thomas Jefferson: First, that he wrote the Declaration of Independence and, second, that he was a slaveholder. This is a stunted and dishonest teaching about Jefferson who just might be the brightest and most intelligent man ever to sit as President of the United States.
What do our schoolchildren not learn? They do not learn what Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” he wrote in those notes, regarding the contest between the master and the slave. “The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.” If schoolchildren learned that, they would see that Jefferson was a complicated man, like most of us.
They do not learn that when our nation first expanded, it was into the Northwest Territory, and that slavery was forbidden in that territory. They do not learn that the land in that territory was ceded to the federal government from Virginia, or that it was on the motion of Thomas Jefferson that the condition of the gift was that slavery in that land be eternally forbidden. If schoolchildren learned that, they would come to see Jefferson as a human being who inherited things and did things himself that were terrible, but who regretted those things and then fought against them. And they would learn, by the way, that on the scale of human achievement, Jefferson ranks very high. There is just no question about that, if for no other reason than that he was a prime agent in founding the first republic dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
The astounding thing, after all, is not that some of our Founders were slaveholders. There was a lot of slavery back then, as there had been for all of recorded time. Indeed, Slavery exists today in 2025! The media just does not write about it because it does not fit their narrative. The astounding thing—the miracle, even, one might say—is that these very slaveholders led the American Revolution, defeated the greatest military on earth, and founded a Republic based on principles designed to abnegate slavery. Our sons and daughters need to learn these things from the time they set foot in the classroom. But such teaching no longer is fashionable in today’s “modern classroom.” This needs to change.
To present young people with a full and honest account of our nation’s history is to invest them with the spirit of freedom. It is to teach them something more than why our country deserves their love, although that is a good in itself. It is to teach them that the people in the past, even the great ones, were human and had to struggle. They made mistakes and were not perfect. And by teaching them that, we prepare them to struggle with the problems and evils in and around them. Teaching them instead that the past was simply wicked and that now they are able to see so perfectly the right, we do them a disservice and fit them to be slavish, incapable of developing sympathy for others or worse, capably undergoing trials on their own. The great author, playwright and historian John Dos Pasos once called out the hubris of today’s youth as “….that idiot delusion of the exceptional now!” We cannot change the past; but we can certainly learn from it.
Depriving the young of the spirit of freedom will deprive us all of our country. It could deprive us, finally, of our humanity itself. This cannot be allowed to continue. It must be stopped.”
President Ronald Reagan
I am reminded of a speech given by Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady,” at Hillsdale College. Speaking about ancient Athens, widely regarded as the cradle of democracy, Mrs. Thatcher reminded us all just how fragile freedom really is.
“In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”
We would do well to remember such words.
