Republican Perspective

This is an interesting article by Arthur Herdman of the Hudson Institute. We can get this done.

I would suggest that the key (to rebound America) can be found in the virtues that brought the first Europeans to the shores of North America, despite the risks and uncertainties — namely, the Vikings. The virtues that sustained those intrepid explorers, traders and settlers, in the world’s most dangerous waters, are precisely the ones Americans will rediscover in 2023.  

First, the spirit of entrepreneurship, which led the Vikings to venture out and roam around the world, and brought Leif Erikson and his family to North America, and other Vikings as far as the Black Sea and Baghdad. In a more violent and primitive age, that energy took the form of robbery and pillage.  

Later, however, it was channeled into an appetite for settlement and trade, making them the original harbingers of globalization. In addition, the harsh conditions of their Scandinavian homeland made them the original intrepid pioneers, committed to carving a life for themselves and their families out of bog, ice and forest. That was the perfect skill set when their Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish descendants arrived in this country.   

The opportunities for entrepreneurship are very scarce today, but they are still there. All it takes is the willingness to climb into our long ships with the crew we trust, and row out to the far horizon.  

Second, the instinct of workmanship, which Norwegian-American sociologist Thorstein Veblen defined 100 years ago as the human instinct to constantly improve and perfect the things we make. That characterized Viking culture when it came to making a ship, a sword, a farm.  

Today, it’s the instinct to make a technology or app better, as a regular workday habit. At a time when we have 7 million prime working-age males sitting idle on the sidelines, the heroes of 2023 America will be the men and women at their jobs every day, in order to build better lives for themselves and in the process rebuild the nation. 

Third, commitment to family, community and nation: given the harsh conditions in which they chose to live, the Vikings found that solidarity and loyalty to family and community were essential to survival. That’s truer today than ever where our ties to family and local communities — what Edmund Burke called life’s “little platoons” — are the perfect antidote to the social distancing and isolation that COVID-19 and lockdowns imposed.  

This is what families of Loudoun County, Virginia, found out last year, when they banded together to push back against the CRT taking over their schools. In 2023, that discovery will spread, as we learn these local commitments will be the secure building blocks for rebuilding the American nation, i.e., that by thinking small we can start to go big.  

Fourth, meeting all challenges with agility and bold innovation. The Viking response to danger wasn’t to run away, but to meet it head on. Instead of the paralysis and passive victimhood imposed by COVID-19 and wokeness, this means our future depends on directing our energies toward bold and proactive solutions to our biggest issues, whether it’s illegal immigration, runaway crime in our cities, fentanyl in our home towns, or economic recession looming on the horizon.  

In other words, there’s change in the air, change for the better. And the virtues the Vikings used 1,000 years ago to make themselves masters of their environment, and then their world, are the ones that can shape a post-COVID-19, post-woke future for America and for freedom around the world.