A Surprising Moment Of Real Patriotism -- And Civic Sanity -- On Trump's Fox Favorite
It turns out that America is more than its blood and soil, even on President Donald Trump’s favorite show. All three Fox & Friends co-hosts delivered monologues on Monday detailing why they are proud to be Americans — and in each case, they highlighted core civic values that bind us together as a nation rather than embracing European-style nationalism.
Lawrence Jones described the United States as “the one place where your outcome isn't set the day you are born” and pointed to the protections for freedom of speech and worship provided by the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment. Ainsley Earhardt likewise highlighted how in America, “your dreams do come true with hard work, a positive attitude, and the grace of God,” and “we can worship how we choose and say what we want.” And Brian Kilmeade discussed the “belief among Americans that we can accomplish whatever we set out to do.”
Their litany is incomplete. America’s determination, constitutional safeguards, and economic mobility and vitality are all treasured aspects of our national story. But we are not commemorating the 250th anniversary of our defeat of the British Army, or the signing of our Constitution, or our national economy becoming the world’s largest. In America, we date our nation’s birth to the ratification of the Declaration of Independence, and the America 250 celebration officially commemorates its signing.
America has spent the last 250 years struggling and often failing to live up to the Declaration’s essential promises of equality, liberty, and democracy. But the revolutionary sentiment behind the document is powerful, and its language has been invoked by generations of civil rights leaders who sought to extend the American creed to those who had been excluded from it by pointing to what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. termed “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”
These values of equality, liberty, and democracy went largely unaddressed by the Fox hosts, beyond the invocation of the First Amendment’s protections.
But their monologues nonetheless effectively reject the work of right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson, who have tried to replace the foundations of American greatness — its existence as a creedal nation defined by shared principles like liberty, equality, and democracy — with the blood-and-soil nationalism of poor European countries like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
“If I were advising a politician, I would say — the first thing I would do: ‘What is America?’ ‘Well, America is a physical place. No, it’s not an idea,’” Carlson said in a 2022 speech. “Anybody who says ‘America is an idea’? Please. It’s not an idea; it’s a place. I live there. I don’t live in an idea. I don’t live theoretically. I get out of bed and there’s like a ground underneath me. There’s, like, soil.”
Carlson’s vision of America as simply “a place,” one populated by “legacy Americans” like himself and the white nationalists who celebrate him, is impoverished and ahistorical — and not even the hosts of Fox & Friends can abide it.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
