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?
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.