America is breaking down into two parties.
I’m not speaking of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
I’m speaking of the American Exceptionalist Party and the bipartisan Grievance Party.
The former believes in American exceptionalism, that America is awesome, that we have historically been awesome, and that we will be awesome again if we do the hard things that we must do.
Conversely, the Grievance Party believes America is not awesome, never was awesome, and will only be awesome if we fundamentally rewrite the American bargain — and also retreat from the world for our great sins.
That battle between the American Exceptionalist and the Grievance Party — Left and Right — will define our future as Americans.
And right now, that battle is being fought over Iran.
The American Exceptionalist Party may argue over tax rates. We may argue over the prosecution of particular wars, whether it’s to do them or how to do them. But we generally agree that America has the best constitutional system, the strongest and best free-market economy, and the most powerful military in all of human history.
We know that America, in order to preserve the freest and most prosperous nation in world history, sometimes has to do the tough stuff — but doing the tough stuff is part of what makes America great.
Then there are the members of the Grievance Party. They’re on the Left, and they’re on the Right. They’re the people President Trump calls “low IQ,” and they’ve become largely indistinguishable from one another, from Hasan Piker on the Left to Tucker Carlson on the Right.
They seem to believe that America’s constitutional system is a mockery and a sham, that our free market economy is actually a rigged oligarchy created by nefarious and evil elites at the expense of the poor, that our military is a gigantic terrorist operation, and that the world would somehow be better off if America abandoned the international playing field.
The Grievance Party is gaining adherents because the world feels chaotic.
And when the world feels chaotic, there is comfort in grievance.
When you feel like nothing is in your control, it is easy and politically productive to blame mysterious forces beyond your control. That also happens to be a recipe for failure, both individually and nationally, which is what the propagandists for the Grievance Party members are openly rooting for. They root for the United States to fail in its battle to stop the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, Iran —an apocalyptic death cult that cries “Death to America” — from obtaining nuclear weapons.
They want America to lose. They want America to give up power to China and to Russia. They openly say so.
But here’s the thing: America is not losing. And that is because American Exceptionalists know that in a chaotic world, the only answer is to stand up for American values and to do that without apology, with strength, and with courage.
President Trump is doing that right now in Iran.
If you listened to the low-IQ Grievance Party propagandists and their left-wing legacy media counterparts over the course of the last week, you might have thought that President Trump was caving in, that the ceasefire was Trump chickening out, that it was TACO time.
But it wasn’t.
Over the weekend, it turned out some of us were right, and some people were wrong, because he didn’t cave in.
And now, he is holding Iran’s feet to the fire, and they have really, really serious problems.
The United States still has a lot of cards left to play. We could embargo all of the oil that is coming out of Iran. We can blockade it. We could also just blow up Kharg Island and create a permanent problem for Iran. The Israelis could do a special operation and grab the nuclear materials right now.
And, as the Iranian economy collapses, the regime is in very, very serious trouble.
This raises the only possibility Iran has left, and that is to convince members of the Grievance Party that if they complain loud enough, the president will stop.
The reality, always and forever, is that Americans don’t like wars until we win them. That’s it. Even the wars that we do like at the very beginning, if we start to lose them, Americans don’t like them anymore.
Americans like winning. And we don’t like losing. It is that simple.
Americans are willing to undergo this for a temporary period of time, as they have said over and over and over.
But members of the Grievance Party refuse to understand any of this, and spend all of their time trying to trot out the propaganda of our enemies.
There are many pragmatic questions we can ask about whether particular measures in an intervention are good or bad, productive or unproductive, or even counterproductive. But the main difference that we are seeing emerge in American politics right now — and this will decide the future of the country — is between the American Exceptionalists, who believe that America was good, is good and will be good again, and the people who believe that America was never good fundamentally, gave up the ghost decades ago, and that the only cure for the United States is, as Barack Obama once suggested, fundamental change.
This has been a battle long in coming. The fact that it has infused a little part of the Right, a splintered fragment of the Right, is not a great shock in a time of social media brainwashed algorithmic nonsense.
But it is the fight. It is the fight.
And President Trump has no intention of losing.
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