December 31, 2023

There are many ways to describe the multiple ills that are plaguing America. For starters, there’s a general sense that culturally and politically, we’re in decline; a sense that our core is being corroded.

Chronic and pervasive political bias has poisoned the pillars of our culture, from the media to academia to Hollywood, leading to a national crisis of trust. The search for objective truth has been replaced with the search for convenient narratives that help one crush the “other side.”

“The politics that have been failing us for the past several years are the result of a culture that has been failing us for the past several decades,” Bret Stephens argued this year in Sapir. “Eventually, the accumulating effects of a degraded educational system and the vulgarization of nearly every aspect of culture are bound to have consequences.”

Amidst this degradation, what I found most troubling is a rising tide of anti-Americanism.

The perception of America has been reframed from a nation whose arc of history bends towards justice to a hopeless endeavor that is irredeemably and systemically racist. White students are taught that they are oppressors because of the color of their skin. The grand ideal of a colorblind society has been replaced by a post-modern attempt to cure racism by adding more racism, or, as race guru Ibram X. Kendi puts it, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

The biggest sin in this unbrave new world is the failure to meet the “equity” of racial quotas, which can only be “remedied” by the blunt and counterproductive instrument of adding more race discrimination.

Kendi would have been laughed out of any meeting with Martin Luther King Jr had he shared his race-obsessed ideas with our civil rights hero, whose iconic message inspired a generation:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

What was extraordinary about MLK, and what has been lost today, is his unifying faith in the ideals of his country. King didn’t fight America’s ills by crushing the nation’s self-esteem but by doing the reverse. “You’re better than that,” he told us, and many of us listened.

Who wants to listen today to self-righteous scolds who keep telling us that America is irredeemably tainted? Who ignore progress because it undermines their anti-America narrative? Who dress themselves in the clothes of justice but achieve the opposite?

King fought the worst of America by bringing out the best in America. No wonder he’s gone out of fashion.

The net effect of this relentless America bashing, not surprisingly, is a tragic loss of pride in our country, that one indispensable ingredient that sustains successful nations.

According to the latest Gallup survey, the percent of Americans who are “extremely proud” of their country has gone from 70 percent in 2003 to 39 percent today. These numbers are lowest among young Democrats: a stunningly low 12 percent of Democrats aged 18—34 are extremely proud of their country (for Republicans in that age group, the number is 42 percent).

It’s a sign of how politically poisoned we’ve become that much of the country now associates patriotism with a political tribe they can’t stand: the MAGA crowd. It’s as if our political affiliations are stopping us from expressing love of country. Because we despise the politics of those who display the U.S. flag, we won’t be caught dead doing the same thing.

“Lurking behind the critique of patriotism is the longing for an unattainable moral purity in politics,“ Brookings Senior Fellow William Galston wrote in 2018. “As long as we have multiple communities, and as long as evil endures, citizens will face choices they would rather avoid, and patriotism will be a necessary virtue.”

One way of reviving that virtue would be to bring back to our schools and colleges and our cultural institutions, on a voluntary basis, the Pledge of Allegiance— yes, that corny pledge that makes the trendy crowd roll their eyes.

Consumed as we are by snark and cynicism, we could use an innocent reminder that we live in an exceptional country that much of the world would love to enter.

Consumed as we are by snark and cynicism, we could use an innocent reminder that we live in an exceptional country that much of the world would love to enter; a country that is far from perfect but has a built-in corrective mechanism that requires all of us to chip in and help create that “more perfect union.”

So, given that our divisions are expected to only worsen in 2024, this is my New Year Resolution for the country I love– that we revive our common pledge to the ideals that have sustained our nation through thick and thin since it was written in 1892:

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

If we all share the same words, maybe eventually they will bring us closer together. We can disagree on everything, but pride and love of country ought to be a sacred bond. As a grateful immigrant to these shores, you’ll never have to twist my arm.

Happy New Year.