Article by Robert Spencer in "PJMedia":
Today is the day we ostensibly
remember the American presidents, and as it comes around this year we
all know that to say “America First” is racist, anti-Semitic, and evil
in all kinds of other ways, and that the best U.S. presidents have been
those who were most respected around the world, in places such as
Communist China, the socialist European Union, and the Islamic Republic
of Iran.
Don’t we?
Well,
there are still a few dissenters among us. While roughly half of the
American population today thinks that the current occupant of the White
House is one of the worst presidents in history, an active danger to the
nation, there is still that pesky other half, which refuses to bow to
our socialist, internationalist moral superiors and regards president
Trump as an unparalleled champion of the American people, a true
defender of the common man in a way that has not been seen in Washington
for many, many decades.
On
this President's Day, it’s worthwhile to ask the question: what exactly
is wrong with being America First? If the president of the United
States doesn’t put America first, exactly which country should
he put first? Or should he put some nebulous idea of “global interests”
first, with those interests being defined not by Americans, but by the
likes of China, the EU, and Iran?
In
Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address on January 20, 2017, he declared:
“From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this
moment on, it’s going to be America First…. We will seek friendship and
goodwill with the nations of the world -- but we do so with the
understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own
interests first.” In response, neoconservative (and now Democrat)
elitist William Kristol tweeted: “I’ll be unembarrassedly old-fashioned
here: It is profoundly depressing and vulgar to hear an American
president proclaim ‘America First.’”
Profoundly
depressing and vulgar for the chief executive of a nation to put the
interests of that nation before other considerations? Really? Throughout
the history of the United States, most Americans would have found
Kristol’s statement somewhere between baffling and treasonous. Yet
Trump’s statement that “it is the right of all nations to put their own
interests first” primarily, rather than those of the world at large, has
been out of fashion since World War II, and in many ways since World
War I. It has been mislabeled, derided, and dismissed as “Isolationism,”
a fear or unwillingness to engage with the wider world, even as it is
becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent.
But
to be America First does not necessarily mean that America will
withdraw from the world; it only means that in dealing with the world,
American presidents will be looking out primarily for the good of
Americans. The term America First has also been associated, quite
unfairly, with racism and anti-Semitism. The founding principles of the
Republic, notably the proposition that, as the Declaration of
Independence puts it, “all men are created equal, and endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights,” shows that putting America
First has nothing to do with such petty and irrational hatreds.
In
fact, the Founding Fathers and every president up until Woodrow Wilson
took for granted that the president of the United States should put his
nation first and would have thought it strange in the extreme that this
idea should even be controversial.
Indeed,
this is the oldest criterion of all for judging the success and failure
of various presidents: were they good for America and Americans, or
were they not? This should still be the primary way that the success or
failure of presidents is judged. It is the guiding criterion that George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Founding Fathers who were
not presidents such as Alexander Hamilton would likely use when judging
the occupants of the White House up to the present day.
The
president’s most important job is clear from the oath that every
president recites in order to assume office, and it isn’t to provide
health care for illegal aliens, or to make sure that Somalia isn’t riven
by civil war, or to make sure America is “diverse.” It is simply this:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the
office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my
ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United
States.”
So what makes a
great president? One who preserved, protected, and defended the
Constitution of the United States. Or to put it even more simply, a
great president is one who puts America first. That’s the criterion I used in my forthcoming book, Rating America's Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster.
Today
there is more reason to revisit and embrace the “America First”
principle than there has been in a century. Socialism and nationalism
have found favor among some Americans since before the First World War.
Nowadays, however, although the entire Democratic Party is embracing
socialism, it is still massively discredited as a political philosophy.
Its sister ideology, internationalism, is facing more opposition today
than it has since before World War II.
Accordingly,
it’s time the assumptions of the likes of William Kristol and the
modern historians who rate presidents were challenged. This is all the
more important to do in light of the fact that several generations of
American children have now been raised to despise the Founding Fathers
as racist slave owners, and to consider American history to be one long
record of racism, imperialism, and oppression.
Americans
need to recover an appreciation of their history, and for the heroes of
that history. Ranking the presidents on an America-First standard
reveals that Donald Trump, who was rated the worst president ever in one
recent survey and the third-worst in another, is actually, after just
three years in office, one of the greatest presidents the United States
ever had, if not the very best. And Barack Obama, who is rated in the
top twenty in four polls and in the top ten in another, is actually the
most damaging and disastrous president this nation has ever had.
This
is not simply my political or personal preference. This is the
inevitable result if one examines the U.S. presidents while holding in
mind the descriptions of Executive power in The Federalist Papers, the nature of the presidency as explained in the Constitution, and the like.
If
George Washington or Thomas Jefferson were alive today, I don’t think
it terribly hubristic to say that they would largely agree with my
evaluations. After all, I’m using the criteria they formulated.