Eighty years ago, on Sept. 2, 1945, the Japanese surrender ceremony aboard the mighty U.S.S. Missouri formally ended history’s deadliest war and inaugurated what would be called the American Century.

It was less than four years since the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor shocked America out of its complacent isolationism and military torpor. By war’s end, we were the world’s greatest power — the only war-weary nation with cities, factories and economy that were intact and flourishing.

Instead of retreating, we realized we could no longer count on two vast oceans to protect us in the nuclear age that we had created. Instead, we helped to revive the defeated Axis powers as flourishing democracies.

We created the United Nations, a world forum to promote peace. Our Marshall Plan generously rehabilitated a ravaged Europe. We helped build a new world economic order to keep military conflict at bay.

We devoted a small part of our national wealth to health, nutrition and the advance of democracy in poor Third World nations. We became the backbone of NATO, the free world’s bulwark against Soviet aggression.

Facing up to racism, finally

At home, we finally took on the pervasive racism that was slavery’s legacy and the great fault line in our society. Racism persists, but no longer under the color of law.

All that progress was not merely enlightened self-interest. But more importantly, it bespoke a moral consensus, transcending domestic political differences, that they were the right things to do.

America became great because America was good.

A MAGA ball cap at a rally in 2019.

Few doubted either part of that equation until Donald Trump came along to declare that we needed to be made great “again.”

Trump’s trash talk worked — with the paradoxical effect that the U.S. has turned away from just about everything that built the American Century after World War II.

Eighty years hence, if Americans reflect on the U.S. as it was on Sept. 2, 2025, they will see a nation on the cusp of dictatorship dominated by a president who detests every virtue that made us great, starting with constitutional government itself.

Taking our country back

That doesn’t have to be. A renaissance of national pride and spirit could take our country back and truly make it great again.

If that doesn’t happen, the future is ominous.

If nothing changes, in 2105 this is what people will look back 80 years and see:

— A president who’s not satisfied with defeating his opponents but who seeks to destroy them, who has turned his political party into a soulless personality cult, molding it into an armed occupier of Democratic cities.

— A president who abuses emergency powers to saddle the world with steep and randomly punitive tariffs, imposing a hidden tax on U.S. consumers and paralyzing long-range planning by governments and businesses worldwide. This is warfare by nonmilitary means, with the U.S. as an aggressor.

— A president so fatally obsessed with the short-term welfare of the oil and coal industries that he sabotages solar and wind power at every opportunity, despite overwhelming evidence that fossil fuels worsen the climate and threaten the eventual survival of the human race.

— A president who willfully appointed a dangerous quack to oversee the nation’s health, who has no use for the conscientious scientists who saved America from the COVID pandemic.

— A president with enablers who decimated the government willy-nilly, without logic, ending the careers of hundreds of thousands of workers essential to emergency response, national parks and other vital functions.

— A president who, with his enablers, declared a spiteful war on unauthorized immigrants instead of working with Congress to belatedly reform immigration laws in desperate need of change.

— A president who didn’t think slavery was so bad and means to erase any effort at building a more inclusive society.

— A president who respects no limits on his power — whether the independence of universities, corporations or local governments.

— A president who admires foreign dictators like Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Vladimir Putin of Russia, and who lets them spin him like a top.

— A willfully ignorant president who displays clear signs of dementia.

Future Americans will also see a useless Congress and the most harmful Supreme Court since the one in 1857 that amplified slavery and brought on the Civil War.

Nothing in America’s past, not even that, is as dangerous as Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion excusing any crime a president might commit in the course of his duties.

The painful lesson of our times is that the best Constitution is no better than the devotion of those responsible for upholding it.

Alexander Hamilton wrote that the Electoral College would protect the nation from someone like Trump — and perhaps it might have, had it not become a mere rubber stamp almost from the outset.

What we see when we look back 80 years from now will depend on whether more people understand what Trump cannot grasp: That greatness can only come from goodness.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. Contact us at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2025/09/01/america-really-was-great-and-can-be-again-editorial/