Mind-numbing ignorance. Severe moral confusion. Willfully blinkered (il)logic and (mis)judgment.
If poll results reported this week are confirmed in subsequent surveys, those descriptors above are the most accurate assessment right now of the cast of mind of half the American public. They are poll results we should not readily believe. But if they are accurate, they are results we must dedicate ourselves to reversing via a massive mobilization of reason, perspective, context, conscience, and truth.
The simultaneously depressing and enraging survey by long-established pollsters John and Jim McLaughlin, conducted Feb. 6-10, reports that an equal 46 percent of Americans agreed and disagreed with the jaw droppingly dishonest notion that “America is the source of most of the world’s ills: political, economic and environmental.” Again, these are the reported views not from around the Earth, but from Americans ourselves. Half of us think the United States is a malignant global force. Half.
This view is in direct and empirically obvious conflict with reality. Unless that 46 percent who are American detractors despise the spread of freedom and human rights, and resent the eradication of famine and disease, their moral reasoning is stupendously deficient.
Even if one posits, as the McLaughlins do, that leftist indoctrination from academia and media is causing anti-Americanism to spike especially high, 66 percent, among younger American voters, that’s no excuse. At some point, morally self-sufficient, reasoning adults must be held responsible for their own blindness and failure to avail themselves of readily accessible knowledge.
The litany of U.S. beneficence worldwide should be already familiar. It is indisputable that the successful American experiment in representative self-government inspired dozens of others to emulate it, and that human rights and dignity advanced multifold almost everywhere that inspiration took root. It is indisputable that American entry into World War I broke the stalemate and thus ended the bloodshed that had claimed 40 million lives. It is incontrovertible that American blood and the sweat of Americans’ brow in supplying our allies were the decisive factors in rolling back the tyrannies of imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, ending genocidal horrors unprecedented in human history.
And after the war, the astonishing generosity of America’s Marshall Plan salved the post-war sufferings of tens of millions. Then came the Korean conflict: Nobody who sees the difference between North and South Korea can question the moral imperative behind the U.S.-led action to stop the North’s brutal and unprovoked invasion.
The facts about international Communism are by now undeniable: over 100 million innocents killed and two billion more effectively enslaved and impoverished. Without American leadership, American will, and American goodwill as well, the Communist scourge would still be with us. Instead, hundreds of millions found new freedom and prosperity due to U.S. efforts. Since the fall of communism, literally billions have been lifted out of poverty.
Virtually everywhere American trade has made serious headway, greater prosperity has followed. In all corners of the Earth, American diplomacy has often succeeded in guaranteeing increased peace and freedom where nothing else had done so before.
We brokered peace between Egypt and Israel, and later, in effect, between Israel and Jordan. We averted a civil war in the Philippines in 1986. We used arms and diplomacy to stop slaughter in the Balkans in the 1990s. And, despite the Left’s howls, American efforts succeeded in Latin America too: See Freedom House’s ratings of El Salvador, Panama, and Grenada as “free,” a far cry from 40 years ago.
Finally, don’t forget the U.S.-led nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has helped Planet Earth avoid thermonuclear war.
Meanwhile, American humanitarian assistance, medical missions, and direct foreign aid for civil infrastructure have relieved the sufferings of hundreds of millions of people from malaria, AIDS, other pestilences, and famine. And it is well-established fact that year after year after year, American private citizens collectively are the most generous people on Earth.
Even when we go to war, Americans do not seek territorial gain or subjugate others. But again and again, we have bled and died so that others may be safe and free.
To fail to credit ourselves for our own general beneficence is also to refuse to understand and treasure those aspects of the American culture, character, and constitution that make us the international order’s greatest ever force for good. If we don’t hold dear those traits, we risk losing them, not just on the world stage but here at home, forever.
Attitudes like those in the McLaughlin poll carry the threat of slow-motion civic suicide. It is a threat we must patiently but forcefully repel, with the moral urgency of a people still dedicated to the flourishing of human freedom.
As we said in the Declaration of Independence, so should we now and always cherish and preserve “the rectitude of our intentions.”
