Good Ideas Are Worth Fighting For

Most nations begin with power.

Throughout history, kings, warlords, dynasties, and autocratic regimes have built nations by seizing thrones, consolidating control, claiming territory, conquering land, and calling it a country. Nations measured themselves by the whims of kings, the ambitions of emperors, the decrees of tyrants, the desires of high priests, or the interests of ruling parties. If the king wanted conquest, conquest became virtue. If the regime demanded obedience, obedience became morality. If the ruler changed his mind, the nation’s conception of justice changed with him. The ruler—not the people—stood at the center of the nation’s existence.

The United States attempted something radically different. Lacking a king, a dynasty, a unifying religion, or even a shared ancestry, it was instead founded on the belief that all people are born with inalienable rights, that governments derive their power from the people, and that our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not gifts from rulers, but birthrights no ruler may take away. Rather than placing its founders on a pedestal, the American experiment placed its founding principles above the founders themselves. More than creating a new government, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights together created a new kind of nation, one measured, in every generation, against the same benchmark and committed to holding everyone—the Founders, the financiers, the factory workers, the frontiersmen, and the farmhands—under the same rule of law.

That benchmark was never meant to describe the world as it was, but the world as it ought to be. Precisely because America so often failed to live up to it, that benchmark became both an indictment of the country’s failures and a blueprint for correcting them. From the destruction and dispossession of Native American peoples and chattel slavery to the Chinese Exclusion Act, the refusal to admit Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, and the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, America’s history contains painful examples of a nation falling short of its own ideals. These dark chapters in American history became profound moral failures only because the country had articulated a higher standard for its own conduct. Without those ideals, they would not have been betrayals. Only ideals this great can produce betrayals this profound.

Unfortunately, these days, too many young Americans are taught far more about the betrayals than about the ideals themselves. Rather than learning American history as the story of a nation struggling—however imperfectly—to live up to its founding principles, many students are taught to understand it primarily through the lens of power, oppression, and dispossession.

America’s institutions are increasingly studied through their failures, while its founding ideals are recast as little more than rhetorical cover for preserving hierarchy and power. The result is an education that teaches students to catalogue America’s betrayals without understanding the benchmark against which those betrayals are judged.

That is exactly what happens on too many college campuses, where students learn a great deal about America’s sins and remarkably little about the ideas that made those sins recognizable as such in the first place. Courses at Harvard, Columbia, UC Berkeley, and other leading universities increasingly invite students to understand the United States through the framework of settler colonialism, teaching them what America failed to be before they learn what it was trying to become. They learn about oppression without first being taught the principles that made opposing oppression possible.

This is the difference between teaching patriotism and teaching legitimacy. Patriotism asks citizens to love their country. Legitimacy asks them to understand why their country came to be in the first place. You don’t have to love your country, but you ought to understand it.

Like all education, its consequences reach far beyond the classroom. Students are taught not merely that America betrayed its ideals, but that those betrayals prove the ideals themselves were always fraudulent. The logic quietly reverses itself: because America often failed, America was never worth striving for in the first place.

Rather than being understood as a nation that repeatedly fell short of a noble standard, the country itself becomes morally suspect. Once a nation’s founding ideals are dismissed as fraudulent, reform gives way to replacement. The problem, in too many seminar rooms, is no longer to be America’s failure to live up to its principles. It is America’s existence itself.

Ideas, of course, rarely remain confined to classrooms. Eventually, they reshape campuses, politics, and society itself.

You can see this most clearly in the vocabulary that has become common in the pro-Hamas campus movement. Emphasizing the illegitimacy of the United States, National Students for Justice in Palestine describes its work as taking place across “occupied Turtle Island,” treating the United States as an illegitimate settler-colonial project whose very legitimacy requires scare quotes. Calling for colleges and universities to sever ties with the “fundamentally immoral economic and political system of the United States,” the organization no longer treats America as a work in progress but as a first draft to be discarded. Similarly, Columbia University Apartheid Divest—the coalition led, at the height of the Columbia protests, by figures such as Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Madhawi—declared its commitment to fighting for the “total eradication of Western civilization.” This is not criticism. It is a rejection of the American idea itself.

This is precisely why American Intellectual Antisemitism—the subject of my forthcoming book—is not merely a Jewish problem. It is, at its core, the anti-Jewish expression of a broader assault on the American idea.

An ideology that teaches students to see Israel as inherently illegitimate will eventually teach them to see America the same way. An ideology that insists Israel’s founding sins can never be redeemed will soon insist the same about America’s. An ideology that denies one democracy’s right to exist rarely stops at one democracy. American Intellectual Antisemitism does not end with Jews. It begins there.

The movements excused by this ideology make the point unmistakable. By supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Iranian regime—all openly hostile to America and Israel—students, faculty, and staff across the country excuse organizations that reject the very liberal values they claim to defend. While condemning the United States for failing to embody its ideals, American Intellectual Antisemitism teaches students to excuse violent movements that reject those ideals simply because they speak the language of liberation. A movement that excuses America’s enemies while condemning America’s imperfections is not trying to repair America. It is trying to replace the moral framework that makes repair possible.

The solution begins where the problem began: education. Pretending America’s betrayals never happened produces propaganda. Pretending its founding ideals never existed produces cynicism. Neither teaches students how to improve their country.

The answer to this ideology is neither blind patriotism nor a denial of America’s many sins. It is to tell the whole truth about America’s ideals, its failures, and the long struggle to bring the country closer to the benchmark it set for itself. Only by teaching America’s failures fully, honestly, and without excuses—alongside the ideals those failures betrayed—can we produce citizens capable of criticism without contempt, patriotism without parochialism, and reform without revolution.

Such education is not a luxury. It is an imperative. The Roman Republic lasted nearly five centuries and disappeared. The Republic of Venice lasted for roughly a thousand years and disappeared. The Byzantine Empire lasted for more than a thousand years and disappeared. The Ottoman Empire lasted for more than six centuries and disappeared. Every civilization looks permanent—until it isn’t. History offers no guarantee that America – and it ideals – will endure.

America’s next 250 years will not be secured by fireworks, slogans, military power, or economic strength alone. They will depend on whether Americans still believe the ideas that made the country worth creating are also worth perfecting. Some ideas deserve to be criticized. Some deserve to be revised. Some deserve to be abandoned. Others are worth defending. America’s founding ideas belong there—in the last category—not because America has lived up to them perfectly, but because without them we lose the very standard that allows us to distinguish justice from power.

Good ideas are worth fighting for.

*