I have never considered myself a patriotic individual. When I look at the United States I understand that it is a country just like any other. I’ve never felt that the country was created by divine providence or that it has only succeeded due to some mystical “city on the hill” element. I try to see Americans and our nation in the same light that I would shine on any other country. Credit must be given where credit is due however and as I scan the internet and even the TeenInk.com page itself, I see page after page tearing into the United States, but my question is, is this really the credit that America is due? Before I go any further, I must add that in no way, does any of the following arguments condone the notion that America is a perfect country or beyond respite for some of its actions, however, sometimes people go a bit too far with historical revisionism.

The problem that I am referring to seems to mainly rear up from the extensive branches of the neo-left in America. These new-age leftists rely almost entirely upon the notion that everything the United States has ever done was bad for everybody except rich white men. This regressive left of sorts, calls for cultural relativism, where we don’t judge another culture on the tenets of our own, and yet in the same breath they forget cultural relativism over time. They judge past figures on the scales of today and turn honorable people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington into nothing more than selfish slave-owners who created a nation only for their own benefit. In reality, while these two men truly were slave-owners who created a new nation to escape taxes, they also spent their entire lives divining how to create a nation that brought together individual freedom and liberty and established the first Democratic Republic of the modern era.

Throughout the internet, I see these same people post article after article about how bad the United States in even now. They discuss how corrupt the government is, how racist our people are, how sexist our men are, and how greedy our capitalists are. They complain that our system isn’t democratic enough and yet they also beg the Republican party to stop Trump from winning. They look at us and demand to know why our nation is not perfect. They compare our schools to Finland, our democracy to Canada, our poorest people to the Sheiks of Dubai. They look at everything that our ancestors have done for us and that we have done for posterity and find flaws in it. If they had lived fifty to seventy-five years ago, they would have begged for the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany to deliver the coup de-grace to our nation for the reason that it was no better than they were.

It seems that this kind of view is a new introduction to the left and I sincerely hope that it fades away as quickly as it came on. 100 years ago, the progressives of the day were nationalistic and rightly so. They had swept to the presidency and set in place reforms that protected the poorest people in the nation. The regressive members of the current far-left, would much rather call out the worst moments of our nation’s past to argue that we are no better than the Salafis of the Middle East, the militant nationalists of modern day Russia, or the totalitarians of Xi Jinping’s China. They say that we too easily support our own culture and are too harsh on other cultures and yet they fail to realize that democracy, republicanism, personal rights, their own wealth, and yes, even feminism grew out of Western culture. Every idea that leftists hold so dear, sprouted out of the Western world at some point, and yet for some reason, they seem very eager to let the Western World die.