Offer a random person anywhere in the world a thousand dollars, a ticket to the United States, and a green card, but with the catch that the offer is only good for 24 hours. How many takers would there be?
The fact that it’s only a question worth asking with respect to other free-market democracies in the West is revealing. China, Russia, India, Brazil, etc. are places people leave, not where they go. When it comes to civilizational flourishing, it truly is, as renowned historian Niall Ferguson has argued, a matter of the West and the Rest.
Identity politics makes for strange political bedfellows, but one thing on which virtually everyone on the left agrees is that the rise of the West and the United States is largely the story of the ever more effective oppression of the weak by the strong. This “oppression thesis” is powerful because it is simple.
Americans should take pride in the system of liberty our ancestors established that now delivers historically unprecedented levels of peace and prosperity. However, the oppression thesis asserts that past and continuing systemic oppression makes the United States deserving of moral condemnation and unworthy of patriotic attachment.
Given the increasing dominance of the oppression thesis in U.S. K–12 and college education, we should not be surprised that Gallup found large generational disparities in civic pride. Americans 55 and older are more than two and a half times more likely than those between the ages of 18 and 34 to express that they are extremely proud of being American.
Although there is certainly oppression in the story of the United States, too often children and college students are not told of how Americans, not the American government, put an end to a variety of oppressive practices that were often protected by the power of government (e.g., Jim Crow laws, government-sanctioned school segregation).
Such laws and policies were often put in place by elite political power brokers, not ordinary Americans.
But the United States’ story is not one driven solely or even mostly by oppression, because a society cannot raise the level of general prosperity by means of piracy and plunder. Theft builds nothing; it merely rearranges what is already there. It is parasitic, not productive.
Only the gains that arise from cooperation—working together to produce a whole greater than the sum of its parts—can result in more goods and services for the same number of people in society. This is what produced the unprecedented levels of general prosperity into which we were blessed to be born. A system rigged to allow only the fulfillment of ambition through cooperative gains is the real story of the United States.
This truth is best expressed by what we call “the cooperation thesis,” which is the idea that the rise of the West and the United States is largely the story of the rise of ever more effective cooperation made possible by an ever more efficient market system fueled by ever freer people.
The culture and institutions that made up our civil society evolved over time in a way that led to better cooperation in every way. The United States is so extraordinary for the simple reason that we—as individuals and as a society—are the world’s best cooperators and have been so for a long time.
It is well past time for U.S. civic education to embrace the cooperation thesis so that we can finally begin to cultivate the informed patriotism we so desperately need.
