by Edward Ring
The path to national renewal begins when Americans unite around common sense instead of division, decline, and perpetual crisis.
With midterm elections just around the corner, both major political parties are themselves coping with divided constituencies. The Democratic Socialists vie for dominance against more moderate Democrats. MAGA Republicans confront disaffected libertarians and neocons. And outside all these polarized factions are millions of voters that don’t find any politician or political agenda credible enough to earn their allegiance. But there is a common thread shared by most disillusioned voters. They believe that America’s ruling class has abandoned its fellow citizens.
They’re right. Notwithstanding notable recent defections, America’s elites view ordinary citizens as no longer necessary. Because of globalism, they are replaceable. Because of automation, supercharged by AI, they are superfluous. Because of environmentalism, they are unsustainable. A plurality (at the least) of America’s elites have decided the nation’s middle class is disposable, and this is the real reason they continue to push woke degeneracy and extreme environmentalism, designed to lower birthrates and reduce standards of living.
It’s hard to imagine how these elites could get things more wrong. Their transhuman and transnational vision is provoking a clash of civilizations at the same time as they are destroying the human foundation of their own civilization. Nations where nationalism or religion remains the prevailing ideology are not about to emasculate their populations and eviscerate their economies. But there is good news. The elites who have betrayed their own people are not invincible.
While America’s tradition of assimilation is under attack by an elite-driven obsession with racial segregation and mutual resentment, marketed as multiculturalism, America nonetheless remains the robust product of more than 250 years as a successful melting pot. America’s historical legacy has built a cultural unity and resiliency that should not be underestimated. Moreover, America’s Bill of Rights offers protection to people still fighting for the values of faith, family, and freedom—values that are not as easily undermined as they are in other Western nations with less explicit constitutional safeguards.
Winston Churchill titled the third volume of his World War II memoirs The Grand Alliance. It described an alliance against a threat more obvious and imminent than the one we face today, uniting partners more intrinsically opposed than those who need to join together today. Instead of Western democracies uniting with communist Russia to fight fascist dictatorships, we have merely to unite those millions of Americans who want to save their nation from an elite that has declared war on their way of life and their future.
This isn’t as hard as it seems for two reasons. First, most Americans don’t want to live in a divided nation, and they don’t want to live in a culture that has devolved to cater to society’s lowest, most abnormal, deviant, hedonistic, psychotic, sociopathic, dishonest, crooked, lazy, defiant, bizarre, militant cohorts of individuals, regardless of the fact they’ve become politically organized and demand equality of outcome in every imaginable context. Most Americans understand the inherent necessity and benefits of nuclear families, hard work, and immutable standards for achievement and recognition.
Second, America’s culture of common sense and unity is threatened by a fractious coalition of fanatics and lunatics who are relatively small in number and who harbor an innate antipathy toward each other that is only held in check by rivers of money flowing to them from globalist billionaires, opportunistic corporations, environmentalist pressure groups, and government unions. Their resources are money and anger. They win elections because all that money, and all that anger, is used to brainwash voters into thinking that tolerating decadence and chaos is compassion, that people who oppose extreme tolerance are bigots, and that recognizing the indispensability of fossil fuel is, somehow, “fascist.” Trump’s victory in 2024 is proof that this brainwashing, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, is wearing thin.
The only thing normal Americans have to do in order to bring America’s alienated voters back to the side of common sense is to promote an attractive vision. It is not enough to just explain how bad things have become. Politicians trying to overcome woke insanity and “climate” fearmongering must express a new vision for America.
This is a tremendous opportunity. Conveying an optimistic political agenda complete with explicit policy priorities will attract millions of voters who have abandoned the parties that have abandoned them. Although such an agenda would still be declared extremist by elites who would see their plans endangered as never before, in reality, it could form a new political center. It would be an irresistible force.
Vivek Ramaswamy, currently the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, during his campaign for U.S. president in 2024, repeatedly asked the question of what it means to be an American. His positions are unequivocal. There need to be clear limits to what we define as normal. Meritocracy is the only equitable way to deliver equal opportunity to everyone. Freedom in America, as embodied in the Bill of Rights, must be defended. The prerequisites for prosperity include clean fossil fuel, and that is nonnegotiable.
These are unifying issues because they reject the establishment’s manipulative narrative of anger, resentment, fear, and perpetual crisis and instead envision a future of growth and greatness.
Consider the wondrous possibilities a healthy political coalition could express to an electorate desperate for hope. Imagine a political platform centered on deregulation and infrastructure investments to deliver abundant and affordable energy, the foundation of all prosperity. Imagine a foreign policy oriented to helping all nations achieve these gains, instead of being limited to “renewables” that condemn them to poverty, famine, tyranny, and war.
During the final decade of the Cold War in 1984, President Ronald Reagan was reelected by a landslide. His “big tent” approach brought together fiscal conservatives, neocons, and conservative Christians. Scarcely a generation later, in 2004, George W. Bush also won a decisive victory by unifying these same factions. But the model that worked then will not work today. Conservatives who claimed to favor smaller government have to answer for their failure to stop a bipartisan public debt binge that started in 1980 and has gotten progressively worse. Neocons have to answer for a foreign policy that has, among other things, destabilized the Middle East, created a surveillance state at home, and delivered endless wars with no exit strategy. As for conservative Christians, the Left has unfairly but successfully defined them as anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-“trans,” and is using them to stereotype all conservatives as dangerous extremists.
Restoring a positive, powerful, and widely shared American identity will require assembling a new coalition, and there are plenty of new approaches that will bring Americans together again. Ramaswamy offers an example as he promotes the colorblind essence of American values and knows how to express them with clarity and without compromise. His presence, and the presence of politicians like him, will bring millions of ethnic voters into the conservative coalition.
Love him or hate him, another avenue toward centrist realignment is being trailblazed by Donald Trump, whose populist positions on energy and immigration embrace too much common sense to be dismissed. Trump doesn’t hesitate to talk about the stupidity of trying to force EVs onto American drivers before the technology is ready. He defends conventional energy and conventional automotive technology. He tells the unvarnished truth about immigration—when it is unregulated and absent merit-based criteria, it causes nothing but an economic drain on the nation.
Trump recognizes something the leftist leadership of most Big Labor unions deny—the vast majority of their workers love America, believe in traditional values, and want politicians who will first protect them before prioritizing economic refugees that arrive illegally by the millions.
What captured media institutions desperately call “far right” are in fact commonsense reforms that most Americans support. Politicians like Trump and Ramaswamy, along with hundreds of other prominent national politicians in the U.S. Congress, are promoting a pathway to restoring American greatness and a shared national identity.
Joining a commonsense crusade that crosses lines of ethnicity and income are not only members of minority groups and members of trade unions but also civil engineering companies that want to build infrastructure that makes economic sense and academic reformers that want to return K-12 education to the basics and return higher education to uplifting Western values and issuing marketable degrees.
The commonsense crusade can also include members of law enforcement and the judiciary, along with social workers and other public bureaucrats who have the integrity to recognize and reject the special-interest capture of public institutions, resulting in rising crime along with a host of other failed public policies.
Included in this cohort would be so-called Blue Dog Democrats and independent voters, tired of watching every American institution fail, one after another, always spending more and delivering less. Even disaffected environmentalists will join the commonsense crusade, as they realize that environmentalism has been hijacked by financial special interests and is now doing more harm than good to the environment.
With all this potential for unity, and with this deep American reservoir of common sense, who is left? Only the scourge of civilization—that propensity for the powerful to want more power, the timeless reality that power disproportionately appeals to the corrupt, the sad erosion of checks and balances that America’s Founders thoughtfully constructed in what remains history’s finest attempt to preserve a nation that respects and nurtures individual freedoms.
What unites the populist Left and populist Right is a recognition that America’s business and political elite share a vision that abandons normal citizens. They correctly recognize that we have been governed by a donor-fed uniparty, dominated by special interests for whom profit and power are acquired because of failing bureaucracies, punitive regulations, scarce and expensive commodities, a massive dependent class of citizens and noncitizen permanent residents, and corporate consolidation of wealth.
Americans see this reality. The hardships they’re enduring offer clarity, suggesting obvious solutions:
- Drill for oil and natural gas, develop nuclear power, and support any other form of energy production that is commercially competitive.
- Build roads, bridges, and buses before spending countless billions on “light rail” and “bullet trains” that hardly anyone will ever ride.
- Replace 100 percent EV mandates with the freedom to build anything—EVs as well as advanced hybrids, with no transportation technologies excluded.
- Replace ridiculous energy efficiency mandates—that merely guarantee planned obsolescence and poor performance—with reasonable innovations that deliver genuine value to consumers.
- End the war on housing. Deregulate land development and invest in practical enabling infrastructure.
- Restore responsible logging to lower the price of lumber, create jobs, and prevent forest fires.
- Protect the environment without sacrificing the obligation to preserve opportunities for Americans to afford homes and a pleasant quality of life.
- Restrict immigration to merit-based entry and prioritize the patient millions who have been waiting years to come through the front door.
- Put criminals in prison.
- Compel addicts and alcoholics to get treatment; compel homeless people to go to cost-effective shelters.
- Implement school choice, and rescue public schools from the woke mafia.
These are practical, commonsense policies that Americans are ready to support. They represent a consensus that defies and transcends the stereotypical notions of Right and Left, or even Democrat and Republican.
They are pro-capitalist but anti-monopoly. They embrace publicly funded infrastructure if it is practical and yields long-term economic benefits but reject welfare dependency. They support merit-based immigration but reject open borders. They believe in meritocracy but abhor racism. They support free speech while condemning yet permitting hate speech. They support the Second Amendment but demand the deterrent effect of strict law enforcement. They defend traditional culture and want to return it to the mainstream but reject prejudice and bigotry.
If candidates who offer these solutions can do so without compromise and leaven their delivery with firm but friendly optimism, they will get elected. If they keep their promises, they will be reelected. And the new supermajority that will elect them will be impossible to stop, because apart from those members of the elite that remain recalcitrant—few in number, wielding a narrative that has been utterly discredited—everyone will be part of it.
Optimism is contagious.
Imagine a strong and united America beginning to harvest the resources of the moon and the asteroids.
Imagine a culture that celebrates beauty and talent again.
Imagine a generation of youth inspired to work hard so they can play a meaningful part in the brilliant unfolding story of a proud nation in a peaceful world. Imagine good things happening from now on, not out of naïveté, but as the product of practical investment and steadfast resolve.
In these fraught times, there is still reason for optimism. The sooner we join together to save our civilization, the easier the path.
Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also
the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy
Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president.
Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism
(2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California
(2022).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/06/17/principles-for-a-centrist-realignment-the-grand-alliance/
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