Should the modern day GOP be asking am I a Republicant?
As the United States celebrated its 250th anniversary, POTUS, the leader of the Republican Party declared in his July 4 speech: “We will always be on top. We will never let our country fall.”
It is a stirring promise. But it raises a fundamental question: How do you preserve American dominance while dismantling many of the economic foundations that made that dominance possible?
What are we doing to make sure it happens? Because American greatness has never been guaranteed. The United States became the world's preeminent economic and technological power not because history ordained it, but because generation after generation built the conditions that made extraordinary prosperity possible.
We invested in education and research. We welcomed ambitious immigrants who helped build companies, laboratories and universities. We developed the world's deepest capital markets. We cultivated entrepreneurship and innovation. We built an enormous network of trading relationships. And, imperfectly but importantly, we developed institutions and a rule of law that gave investors, entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens confidence that tomorrow could be better than today. That is the American advantage. Advantages can be squandered.
History is littered with great powers that assumed their supremacy would last forever. The British Empire did not collapse overnight. Britain's economic and geopolitical dominance eroded as other industrial powers caught up and surpassed it. The Soviet Union possessed nuclear weapons, a massive military and enormous territory. But military power could not compensate indefinitely for an economy that struggled to generate innovation, productivity and prosperity.
Eventually, economic weakness became strategic weakness. That should concern Americans. Because a nation cannot maintain global leadership indefinitely if it undermines the economic engine that powers that leadership.
You cannot simultaneously declare that America must remain the world's dominant economic power while making it difficult for America to attract the world's best talent, or wage a permanent trade war without eventually making American consumers and businesses pay some of the bill, or create economic uncertainty and expect investment to flourish as though uncertainty were free, or weaken confidence in institutions and assume the rest of the world will forever treat American markets as the safest place to put its money, nor confuse military supremacy with national strength.
Economic strength is national security, so is scientific leadership, educational excellence is national security, energy abundance infrastructure, immigration that attracts talented, ambitious people, stable institutions are national security.
America's greatest weapon has never been merely the size of our military. It has been the astonishing ability of the American economy to invent the future.
That is why the most consequential question facing America is not whether China is rising, whether Europe is declining or whether some other country might someday challenge the United States.
The question is much closer to home: Are we still building the America that future generations will inherit?
Our founders did not hand us a finished country. They handed us a work in progress. Then we built highways, universities, laboratories, industries, telecommunications networks and financial institutions. They sent Americans into space. Then created technologies that transformed the planet. Then opened doors to generations of immigrants who became entrepreneurs, scientists, doctors, teachers and citizens. America has never been perfect.
But the remarkable thing about this country is that it has repeatedly demonstrated the capacity to correct itself, reinvent itself and move forward. That is what greatness actually looks like.
Not nostalgia. Adaptation. Not slogans. Investment.
Not pretending America cannot fall. Building a country so resilient that it doesn't.
So when the president says, “We will always be on top,” We want to believe him. But don't believe it because he said it. We want to see the policies that make it possible. Because “We will always be on top” is not a strategy.
It is a hope. And hope, by itself, has never built an economy.
It has never educated a generation, never invented a semiconductor, or founded a company, or never attracted a scientist from halfway around the world, never built a bridge, or balanced a budget and never fought fascists, communists to defend democracy.
People do those things. And institutions make it possible for people to do them.
That is the real American story. So perhaps we need a new word for a political movement that claims to be defending American greatness while risking the very foundations that produced it.
Republican? No. Republicant. A Republicant is someone who says: America must remain on top — while pursuing policies that make staying on top harder.
And perhaps the ultimate antidote to being a Republicant is remarkably simple: Don't tell me America will remain great forever. Show me how we're going to build the America that makes it so.
Because America doesn't need another promise that it will never fall. It needs a generation willing to make sure it doesn't. 250 years got us here. What we do next determines whether America gets to 500.
American global power has never rested on military might alone. It has been built on an extraordinary combination of scientific innovation, world-class universities, high-skilled immigration, entrepreneurship, the rule of law, relatively open trade, deep capital markets and stable monetary institutions.
History offers a warning.
When great powers lose their economic dynamism, their geopolitical dominance eventually becomes harder to sustain. Britain remained a global superpower long after its economic supremacy began to erode, but the decline accelerated over the course of the 20th century. The Soviet Union demonstrated another lesson: military power cannot indefinitely compensate for an economy incapable of generating sustained growth and innovation. Eventually, the system buckled under its own economic weaknesses.
We as Americans now live with a level of material abundance that would have been unimaginable to most of our nation's founders. But prosperity did not happen by accident. It was accumulated over generations through investment in science, education, infrastructure, immigration, commerce and institutions that encouraged people to take risks, build companies and invent the future. This inheritance is not indestructible.
Yet the Republican Party, while controlling the White House and the majority in the House of Representative, the US Senate and the SCOTUS majority is pursuing policies that risk undermining several of those very foundations restricting immigration that supplies critical talent, disrupting global trade through tariffs and uncertainty, weakening institutions, and treating long-established economic relationships as liabilities rather than strategic assets.
The United States of America cannot tariff its way to permanent supremacy. It cannot close itself off from global talent and expect to remain the leader of international innovation.
And we cannot weaken the institutions that created confidence in American markets while demanding that the rest of the world continue to bet on America. “We will always be on top” is not a strategy. It hoping or wishful thinking.
American leadership must be earned by every generation. The United States did not become the world's leading power because Americans were destined to remain on top forever. America became powerful because previous generations built institutions, welcomed talent, invested in knowledge, expanded opportunity and created an economy capable of reinventing itself.
The challenge today is not whether America can remain great. It is whether US citizens will vote for the best candidates wise enough to understand that diversity is what made America great in the first place.
And perhaps that leads to a new definition of political identity: I am a Republicant. Not because I belong to a political party that calls itself Republican.
But because I refuse to be so ideologically committed to preserving American greatness that I help destroy the economic foundations required to sustain it.