Cheer Up Already, Republicans

For a few weeks now, I’ve been trying to determine the shape and meaning of the amorphous reflex that has been rattling around my brain whenever I engage with contemporary politics, and, at long last, it has come to me in the form of an injunction: “For God’s sake, Republicans, Cheer up.”

Honestly. Could we not get some optimism back into the Republican Party? Over the last few years, the American Right has become so unbearably, habitually, self-indulgently depressing — morose, even. It’s all panic, all the time. In speech after speech, the United States is cast as a disaster area, full of “American carnage” and backsliding and moral decay. The past is cast as a utopia; the present as a trip on Flight 93; the future as a crapshoot. Nine, ten, eleven times a day, I am asked by too-online edgelords if I know “what time it is,” as if, rather than living in the greatest country in the world in the greatest time in history, I am living in Poland in the summer of 1939.

About the Author

Charles C. W. Cooke

Charles C. W. Cooke is a senior editor at National Review and the host of The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast.

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For a few weeks now, I’ve been trying to determine the shape and meaning of the amorphous reflex that has been rattling around my brain whenever I engage with contemporary politics, and, at long last, it has come to me in the form of an injunction: “For God’s sake, Republicans, Cheer up.”

Honestly. Could we not get some optimism back into the Republican Party? Over the last few years, the American Right has become so unbearably, habitually, self-indulgently depressing — morose, even. It’s all panic, all the time. In speech after speech, the United States is cast as a disaster area, full of “American carnage” and backsliding and moral decay. The past is cast as a utopia; the present as a trip on Flight 93; the future as a crapshoot. Nine, ten, eleven times a day, I am asked by too-online edgelords if I know “what time it is,” as if, rather than living in the greatest country in the world in the greatest time in history, I am living in Poland in the summer of 1939.