We, the People Affirm American Greatness

In the recent presidential election, one seemingly obvious aspect of President-(re)elect Donald Trump’s victorious campaign was often buried beneath the regime media’s breathless denunciations of his person and his supporters: namely, it was an optimistic appeal—and challenge—to the American people.

The Harris campaign and her “progressive” supporters peddled a dire message that their loss would spell the end of “our democracy.” This was wry, indeed, from the Democrat Party that jettisoned incumbent President Joe Biden and for all intents and purposes installed Vice President Harris as their “new” presidential nominee. By deed, if not word (for obvious reasons), the Democrats sought to save “our democracy” by destroying it, including the weaponization of government against the citizenry, et al.

Thus, it should have proven no surprise that the Democrat presidential campaign was tantamount to a demand to perpetuate their empowerment of an unelected, unaccountable, bureaucratic elite (a.k.a., the “Administrative State”) to rule the nation with minimal interference from the citizenry.

Should the Harris-Walz ticket and their fellow Democrats be electorally defeated, the ensuing end of what they perversely deemed “democracy” would turn America into a fascistic hellscape. In a lack of self-awareness for the ages, the party whose greatest president warned that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” ran a presidential campaign premised upon fear.

While it proved somewhat successful with the Democrat base, it failed with the majority of the electorate. Why? Because on election day, courage trumped fear. The American character prevailed.

Patent in Mr. Trump and the MAGA/GOP-Populist slogan is both hope and a challenge. The hope is that “Make America Great Again” means we can make America great again.

Once, the conservative philosopher Russell Kirk asked the question: “Is it conceivable that American civilization, and in general what we call ‘Western civilization,’ may recover from the Time of Troubles that commenced in 1914…and in the twenty-first century enter upon an Augustan age of peace and restored order?”

Despite the momentous difficulties besetting our free people in this dangerous age, they have answered with a resounding “Yes!”

Importantly, too, in answering this question in the affirmative, the American people were fully cognizant of Mr. Trump’s challenge. It is not the government that makes America great. It is We, the People.

It is to the eternal credit of the sovereign citizens of our bastion of liberty, equality, and pluralism that they have embraced his challenge to perpetuate and improve our nation’s revolutionary experiment in self-government.

While daunting to some, as at other times when they have been confronted by momentous challenges, the American people have seized the freedom required to surmount them. It is as Edmund Burke noted:

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed… The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties… Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities, which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

There is no better recent image of a scene that has engaged the heart than the picture of an assassin-wounded Donald Trump raising a fist in the air and vowing to continue to “Fight!” Doubtless, having witnessed it, sound minds of the republic were raised and animated and accepted Mr. Trump’s challenge to “make America great again.”

Sure, as they have since the 1770s, the craven cynics will superciliously cackle about how only rule by “our betters” can make life bearable. How it is an inviting “mobocracy” to believe We, the people, can make America great again.

In many ways, these recalcitrant, duplicitous skeptics who bemoan the death of their false democracy while loathing the true democracy within our constitutional republic remain opposed to actual self-government as they proffer a trick question.

In reality, America has always been great, though the government has often been far from it. For as once more affirmed in the 2024 election, so long as the genius and gumption of We, the People, endure, America will always be great.

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An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional district from 2003-2012 and served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars and a Monday co-host of the “John Batchelor Radio Show,” among sundry media appearances.