During a speech at the Reagan Library, Pompeo argued that the GOP’s future must be built on an honest assessment of the country’s vices and virtues.
Simi Valley, Calif. – During a speech at the Reagan Library on Monday night, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo leaned alternately on American history and Christianity while outlining his vision for a conservative response to the racial essentialism ascendant in today’s Democratic Party.
True to the theme of the Reagan Library’s “Time for Choosing” speaker series on the future of the GOP, Pompeo offered a prescription for Republican dominance in the years to come that centers on a frank acknowledgement of America’s past sins.
The former secretary of state and CIA director covered the gamut during his hour-long speech: He touted the foreign-policy accomplishments of the Trump administration, warned of the threat posed by China, and emphasized the need to confront the accumulated power of big tech. But he never strayed far from his central thesis: his belief that an optimistic vision of America, which nevertheless recognizes its faults, will win the day against forces that seek to divide the nation along racial lines for purely self-interested reasons.
Taking head on the criticism that Republicans are interested only in serving up hagiographic treatments of American history, Pompeo argued that the GOP’s future must be built on an honest assessment of the country’s vices and virtues.
“Today all of us stand upon a promontory from which we survey our nation’s history. The good, the bad, the fair, and frankly the unjust,” he said. “We don’t shy away from any of it, not a single aspect of it, not any part of it. Nor are we ashamed because we have overcome. We have prevailed, and we have foresworn that which is corruptive of America’s most relevant ideals.”
As is typical of a rising politician thought to have his sights set on the White House, Pompeo avoided specific policy prescriptions. Instead he attacked in broad strokes the Left’s conception of America as built on white supremacy, appealing instead to Christian conceptions of redemption. Channeling — but elevating — the populist rhetoric of his former boss, he lashed out against “the politburo of false virtue” — a conglomeration of media, international corporations, and Democratic politicians — which, he said, embrace false narratives about America’s past to excuse their own failures and misbehavior.
“Rather than seek truth, which is hard work, those who seek power demand subservience to stories promulgated by disingenuous elites and skewed by unscrupulous politicians enabled by the Internet,” he said. “The result is a nation separated from truth but bound by narratives that superficially support the dispossessed.”
But every time he extolled the virtues of the “Shining City on the Hill,” Pompeo tempered the Reagan-esque rhetoric with an acknowledgement of its sins. Surrounded by Reagan memorabilia, red, white, and blue bunting, and a crowd which no doubt assembled to hear an ode to American greatness, Pompeo broached the foundational sin of slavery.
After discussing the debt of the gratitude that modern Americans owe to the boys who died serving in the Continental Army, he quickly pivoted to the “proud mother of two daughters who perished establishing a new route for the underground railroad.”
In his telling, 21st century Americans owed it to this woman and those who suffered alongside her to preserve America’s founding ideals, rather than abandon them.
“What would this courageous woman have not given to see her children raised in the freedom and opportunities of today rather than the life of burden that she knew. We owe it to all Americans, all Americans who lived and died under the yoke of oppression to celebrate what we have,” he said. “To have gratitude, for in doing so we honor their memory and their sacrifices. For a nation is not forged in perfection but evolves according to its people and, of course, here in America, according to its principles.”
He then fast-forwarded to the world wars, but not to the boys who stormed the beaches of Normandy, as Reagan once did. He opted instead to celebrate the Choctaw Code Talkers, who fought the Germans despite their country’s failure to fully include them in its democratic great experiment.
“Aware from his elders’ oral history of the broken treaties and grievous losses suffered by his people, and knowing that Native Americans could not yet vote in our national elections, this incomparably selfless man used his tribe’s unique language to confound the German force before him, becoming one of our nation’s first code talkers,” he said.
Careful to acknowledge America’s past sins, Pompeo also cautioned against treating them as exceptional. He questioned why, for instance, American students are now steeped in the illiberal ideology of Antonio Gramsci, but have never heard of Norman Borlaug, who saved countless lives in the developing world by inventing high-yield wheat-harvesting practices.
Borlaugh, Pompeo explained, “didn’t see race or religion, he asked a simple question ‘do these people have enough food’” and then set about making sure they did.
Speaking with National Review after his speech, Pompeo endorsed the recent push by state legislatures to ban critical race theory from public-school curricula. He was careful, though, to insist that students should learn American history, warts and all, while being spared political indoctrination.
“We want to teach about the history of American slavery,” he said. “It’s important that we understand the failings of our nation as well. But they’re not teaching these as a theory, they’re teaching it as the behavioral model and that is just unacceptable. And states could easily craft legislation that took that component that says ‘you will not teach this as normative.’”