America Needs a Better National Story
To defeat authoritarians, we must unite around a narrative
In the past weeks, Americans have watched a host of Democratic candidates vie for their party’s presidential nomination on CNN. For now, their task is to attract primary voters, but they also know that should they be chosen to face off against Donald Trump in the general election, they will have to think more about how to draw in independents, moderates, and anti-Trump conservatives.
These candidates can build a new centrist consensus in domestic politics and foreign affairs by recognizing that liberals, moderates, and anti-Trumpers have a common interest in defending and strengthening liberal democracy at home and abroad. To build this consensus, the candidates will need three things: a villain, a story, and a purpose.
Let’s start with the villain. While terrorism remains a serious menace, the greatest ongoing threat to the liberal democratic order is the revival of authoritarianism.
Large autocracies like Russia and China and smaller ones like Hungary aim to limit U.S. power and undermine liberal norms, alliances, and institutions. As Robert Kagan recently noted, they attack democracy and individual rights, not just in practice but on principle, claiming the superiority of race, faith, and nationality. They actively seek to empower the extremes and subvert trust in the political systems of established democracies. They have an American ally in President Trump, who, like other authoritarians, appeals to many people’s sense that globalization and cultural change has eroded their traditions, communities, and economic prospects.
Is there a national story that can unite a new vital center to respond to this menace without distorting U.S. history? As Jill Lepore recently argued in a brilliant essay, if historians do not provide a coherent national narrative, then “charlatans, stooges, and tyrants” will — in ways that reinforce blood-and-soil chauvinism.
What National Story?
The new national story should center on the radical nature of liberal ideas in comparative global and historical perspective. The idea of a government accountable to the people and devoted to the protection of delineated individual rights, regardless of race, gender, class, and creed, is a radical break from the norm in world history. At no point in the American past has this dream been realized, but the effort to expand the circle of equality has made steady gains.
This is a story around which a broader political consensus can form without smothering disagreement or masking dark chapters of our history. It conveys to Americans the dramatic fragility of progress and the ever-present tendency to relapse into tribalism, cynicism, and selfishness. It creates a never-finished project that each generation hands to the next. Most importantly, it gives liberals a reason to embrace something they usually eschew: patriotic pride in a nation devoted not to a territory, a deity, or a tribe, but to a set of ideas.
Americans should not doubt the need for a revived national story, as the poles of the major parties have rejected the U.S. role as member and protector of the liberal international order. The Trumpian right fears being cheated by allies, opposes any restraints on U.S. power, and sympathizes with the world’s reactionary strongmen. Too much of the left shows more interest in restraining U.S. “imperialism” than responding to the new authoritarians. They see little to defend in liberal capitalism, and they prefer fragmented narratives of U.S. history over any coherent thread.
The new consensus, in contrast, would recognize itself as not merely a mushy middle ground between the poles, but the champion of a set of historically radical ideas and a remarkably successful international system that has restrained conflict and set the ground for the spread of democracy and prosperity. It would further acknowledge the genuine threat that Putin, Trump, and their global ilk pose to these ideals, on the level of both geopolitics and ideas. It isn’t simply that the American public needs a villain to unite against — although that always helps. It’s that the villains are really out there.
What Purpose?
Now for the hard part: the purpose. The raison d’etre of U.S. foreign policy in the next decade should be weathering an era of worldwide reaction against liberalism, openness, and globalization. There are deep structural forces compelling this wave forward, so holding the line among the established democracies may be the best the United States can achieve.
Of course to some extent, the mistakes and excesses of liberalism have propelled the wave on. Liberal theorists and politicians on both sides of the spectrum anticipated that the open flow of ideas, goods, and people would foment greater wealth, understanding, and freedom. They assumed global agreement on ideas about human rights and democracy that could be fulfilled by removing nasty leaders like Saddam Hussein. Instead, there were economic shifts that devastated communities and increased inequality, cross-cultural conflict and resentment, costly wars, and eye-watering death tolls.
Realizing the innate radicalism of liberal ideas is as important for correcting these errors in foreign policy as it is for creating domestic consensus. The liberal values of individual rights, equality, transparency, and accountability are anathema to regimes like Russia and China, as well as legions of ordinary people around the world. When the United States presses these ideas through force or even through symbolic acts, like support for Ukrainian protestors in 2013–2014, it challenges the survival and legitimacy of these regimes. After all, Putin witnessed the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet superpower under pressure from liberal reformers championed by the West. He has retaliated with a variety of effective, mostly non-military tools for which the United States has not yet developed adequate defenses.
As the leader of an international liberal order, the United States can greatly affect the calculations of the authoritarians, restrain their influence, and create conditions for democratic change. But by pushing these ideas too eagerly, it creates a cycle of conflict that erodes the alliance system and the domestic consensus behind an active international agenda. Better to take the advice of George Kennan, who in a 1951 essay wrote that the United States, given the weakness of liberalism in Russian history, should “let them be Russians” rather than demand that they accept American ideas as a prerequisite for peace. This approach could be called “ideological retrenchment.” It is vital for balancing the revival of centrist politics at home, and the defense of liberal democracy abroad.
