Kerby Anderson

How should we define America? Should we define it by its triumphs or its failures? While there are certainly some dark chapters in American history, we don’t truly tell the story of this country if that is all we teach the next generation. James Robbins appears in a recent PragerU video with the arresting title “Goodbye America.” He was on my radio program a year ago to talk about his book, Erasing America. I recommend his 300-page book as a great resource that provides the foundation for his video. If you look at many of the nation’s textbooks today, you would find that America is described in five ways: racism, sexism, income inequality, police brutality, and imperial wars. He concludes that is the narrative you find in most high schools, colleges, and the media. It is also the description that comes from many progressive politicians. George Orwell once wrote, “The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” The history of America is being revised significantly, and that’s a problem. After all, history tells us who we are. If all you know about this country was what you read in these textbooks, would you have any respect for this country? Would you be very patriotic? James Robbins explains that until the last few decades, liberals and conservatives shared a common understanding of America’s origins, its history, and its mission. But all of that changed in the 1960s with what has been called the “progressive narrative.” This new narrative sought not to uplift, inspire, and unite but instead attempted to demean, degrade, and divide. His book and video remind us that there could be time in the future when there are no monuments to heroes and no stories to praise them. That is why we should be concerned about what is taught in the classrooms and what is proclaimed by politicians.