Democracy and despotism in a digital age.
Sen. Rubio remarks on the State of the Union address
President Trump’s State of the Union address was a welcome reminder that life exists outside of Washington for millions of Americans too busy with life to pass their time hooked to the tumult of partisan politics.
After watching the deterioration of our national unity and rapid politicization of every aspect of their lives, Americans have tuned out. They are tired of talking heads treating national politics as a game divorced from actual issues facing our country.
Instead, Americans are worried about how expensive it is to raise a family, visit the doctor, and pay for college. They are worried about threats from China, Iran, terrorists, despotic regimes in our own hemisphere, and now the Wuhan coronavirus.
Throughout our history, the American Dream has been sustained by the ability of working Americans to raise families and build strong communities together. Yet many Americans today are worried about—and impacted every day by—the decades-long collapse of stable, dignified work, which has allowed previous generations to give back.
In the real world, this is what people are talking about. They’re right to be concerned.
Americans want solutions without their nation embracing socialism—a set of ideas that have eroded freedoms and evaporated national prosperity in every country where they have been tried.
The Democratic Party is currently amidst a radical, dangerous turn to the left, waging a war on our nation’s institutions and running an inquisition against any people or ideas they deem insufficiently “woke.”
Thankfully, the President has rejected this false choice and taken important steps to revive America’s economic engine. In his State of the Union, he painted a different path for our nation’s future by speaking to real-life concerns about family, work, and communities. It is time we focus on what matters to the American people.
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Suggested reading
In 2010, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla reintroduced the notion of "the ruling class" back into American popular discourse. In 2017, he described contemporary American politics as a "cold civil war." Now he applies the "logic of revolution" to our current political scene.
Claremont Institute Senior Fellow John Marini is one of the few experts on American Government who understood the rise of Trump from the beginning of the 2016 election cycle. Now he looks to the fundamental question that Trump's presidency raises: is the legitimacy of our political system based on the authority of the American people and the American nation-state, or the authority of experts and their technical knowledge in the service of "progress"?
