The idea of American exceptionalism has been embedded in our collective DNA for generations. It is the faith-based belief that, as Ronald Reagan put it, America is a “shining city on a hill.”
Do modern liberals believe that?
I almost never try to get into the other side's head or ascribe ill motives to those on the left. But I'm having second thoughts after listening to Barack Obama's defense of communism/socialism when he was in Argentina. He advised young people to get behind “what works” economically — as if there is some deep mystery here.
Obama didn't misspeak. The modern left in America really has come to believe that communism, socialism, Marxism and totalitarianism — or other terms for the monopolization of power into the hands of a ruling elite — are superior to free-market capitalism.
The president of the United States is supposed to be the global spokesman for free enterprise. But instead of traveling to Cuba to point out to the world the decades of stagnation, deprivation and dehumanization at the hands of the Castros, and instead of using this moment in history to showcase the triumph of capitalism 90 miles away, Obama praises Cuba's health care and education systems.
He might as well have been praising Mussolini for making the trains run on time. Even more unbelievable: The media applauded.
Can anyone imagine Obama, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders having the gumption or wisdom to tell Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”?
It wasn't so long ago that leading Democrats — JFK, Harry Truman and even the AFL-CIO — were staunch enemies of communism. Today, there is no place for such beliefs within the progressive Democratic Party. If it involves ceding power to the state, the left is all for it — as evidenced by the rise of Sanders.
If you are a leftist, it's not cool to love America. What is much cooler is wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.
We have a $19 trillion national debt that has doubled in the past decade. We have wages flat or falling for most Americans. We have a political class that is actively trying to destroy whole industries — coal production, oil and gas, community banks and so many others.
We have a president (along with the intellectual class) pushing a radical climate change agenda that will cost the middle class millions of jobs — but won't change the global temperature by a hundredth of a degree.
We have the TSA searching the underwear of infants but letting certain adults pass through without inspection because we wouldn't want to be accused of profiling. We have a Justice Department thinking about prosecuting people for questioning the climate change “consensus.”
This is the same crowd that seems to prefer the economic systems in Sweden and Greece and Cuba over America's. They preach human rights, but they don't seem to understand that economic freedom is a core human right.
Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, economics contributor to FreedomWorks and author of “Who's the Fairest of Them All?”
