The theme of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was Make America Great Again, and this resonated deeply with much of the electorate. Personally, I struggled to understand in what way people thought America had lost its greatness and what his proposals would do to restore it. I admit that with this failure to understand, I often thought the worst of people’s motivations and I want to rectify that. It made me realize that we need a foundational conversation on what it is that makes America great. Please, share your thoughts. How do you define American greatness?
For me, the idea of America is by itself one of the most powerful forces for good in the history of the world. A land where people of varying different faiths and backgrounds came together and mutually agreed to a system of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are core values that we do not compromise, and that are protected by the Bill of Rights. Please review all 10 of them again, as I did just now. We often focus on just a few, and need to remember that all of these rights are most important at the times when our leaders tell us we must abandon them due to fear.
Another core value is that America can be a beacon to people from around the world. America was never just for any one group of people. Anyone who believes in the idea of America and is willing to live up to the responsibility is considered a valuable contributor to our nation. We grow stronger by bringing in people from around the world and incorporating the best of their cultures into our own. There has been resistance to most newcomers from the beginning, but when we look back we see that they have made us better as a nation. Even if we don’t have capacity to take in all comers, we are at our best when we strive to offer the opportunities of America to as many as we can handle.
You may have noticed that I did not mention being number one in the world, whether about having a dominant military or the world’s strongest economy. To me, these characteristics have supported our greatness but are not its foundation. We have faced countless threats to our security over our history and overcome them all. But we only truly damage our place in the world when we succumb to fear and trade off the best of our values in the name of an elusive security. Or place our economic health above our moral health. We should never sacrifice the best of America to the fears of the day.
And that is why we must openly acknowledge and confront the worst of America as well. No nation is perfect, and we do not need to apologize for the fact that we are not. But there are dark times in our past where we have done great harm to those who did not deserve it, and we diminish them as humans if we do not own up to those flaws and vow to learn from them. I can only imagine how my words above must read to a Native American, for example. It would appear that I am dismissive of the fact that much of the foundation of what we have in our country was built by doing great harm to them. We owe it to them to at the very least acknowledge this harm.
It is in looking at when we have failed to live up to our greatness that teaches us how to properly define our values. Examining our periods of moral failure next to our successes gives us a deeper understanding of what the best of this country truly is. I can summarize it by noting that America has been great when we commit to the offering the American dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for everyone. When we let fear drive us to exclude certain groups from that dream is America at its worst.
My letter to the President-elect can now be seen in the context of this view of American greatness. It is not primarily his core policies that disturb me. It is what he says and it is even what he does not say. He uses ambiguity to let his words support the most hateful and divisive ideas of those who do not believe in an inclusive America and would use fear and resentment to marginalize those who are different. And leave us wondering if that is the route he will choose. It is up to all of us to hold him to a higher standard.