On Sunday night, Hollywood delivered its latest verdict on American character.
The Academy Award for Best Picture went to “One Battle After Another,” a film portraying border agents and conservatives as neo-Nazi caricatures while casting violent progressives as moral heroes. The standing ovations and gold statues delivered an unmistakable message: Conservative America is not just wrong but morally grotesque.
That message is nothing new from our cultural elites, and it has found its audience. A first-of-its-kind Pew survey this month revealed that 53% of Americans view their fellow citizens as morally bad, with the perception far worse among Democrats (60%) than Republicans (46%). Why wouldn’t it be?
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It is the inevitable outcome of the left’s campaign to paint traditional values as oppression. It’s what happens when universities peddle moral relativism and identity grievance, when legacy media portrays law and order as fascism, and when Hollywood casts conservatives as bigots or—as in this Oscar winner—as cartoonish, mustache-twirling villains.
This campaign of moral confusion has degraded the shared standards of right and wrong that once allowed us to presume basic decency in one another. Notably, it appears to be a uniquely American phenomenon.
Of the 25 nations surveyed in the Pew poll, the United States was the only country where a majority held negative views of national morality. In Canada and Indonesia, for example, 92% viewed their fellow citizens as morally good.
America has its moral problems, but this is more a crisis of perception than reality.
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Our people still lead the world in goodness and character by most available metrics. We give to charity at a per capita rate about twice as high as Canada and three to 15 times that of other developed nations (with Republicans giving the most). We also lead most Western peers in helping strangers, volunteering time, donating blood and other measures of generosity.
Yet perception is still revealing—not only of how our cultural institutions drive hatred, but of how severely our civic life has eroded.
It clarifies the disastrous consequences of replacing traditional sources of connection—faith, family and community—with political obsession and online life. Social media has siloed us into alternative moral universes, demolishing our shared convictions and trust in one another.
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That problem will grow worse until it is stopped. Without a common moral vocabulary rooted in American tradition and common decency, we cannot sustain the republic. Polarization will harden into hatred.
What, then, are we to do?
A good place to start is to take time to stop and observe reality. Goodness and virtue still bind most communities together, if not our social feeds or national discourse.
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In a town near us, a preschool teacher recently lost her home in a house fire. The outpouring of support was swift and overwhelming, including from those who had very little to give. No one asked her political affiliation before helping. That is the America that always was—and still is.
But in our public and civic lives, we must also undertake the hard work of moral restoration. And conservatives must lead it.
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We must demand an education system that teaches the classical virtues—honesty, courage, hard work, responsibility—rather than replacing them with trendy relativism. We must strengthen families and faith communities as the first and best schools of character. And we must refuse to let Hollywood or the media define the American people by their worst caricatures.
Already, many Americans reject the narratives of our cultural elites. “One Battle After Another,” despite being showered with awards, flopped spectacularly at the box office. Meanwhile, audiences flock to those occasional films that celebrate national pride and values—such as “Top Gun: Maverick” or Clint Eastwood films. Hollywood refuses to receive the memo, to its own detriment.
Similar stories can be told of progressive media outlets shedding viewers, or even the migration of students from the Northeast to Southern state schools, choosing a traditional college experience over the political activism of elite universities.
The American people know who we are. We crave not just unifying values, but moral normalcy. When we can’t get it from Hollywood or our institutions, we must find it in each other—and build it with our own hands and hearts. That is how we’ll reclaim our shared morality and prove that our virtues endure.
Rob Noel is a speechwriter who serves as president of Washington Writers Network.
