The problems that bedevil our nation today have deep roots; in fact, few are aware of just how deep they really are.  The rioters rampaging in Portland and elsewhere didn't spring out of nowhere, nor did they come together spontaneously out of outrage at America's alleged "systemic racism."  The hatred for President Trump, as heated and hysterical as it is, also has precedents and root causes that go back generations, as do the controversies over tariffs, immigration, and international agreements that have marked his tenure as president.  Few people, however, know the historical background of all this, which mars their understanding and analysis of current events.

It is perfectly understandable that most people wouldn't know this background.  American history has been de-emphasized in the government-run schools.  Democrat-socialists are terribly afraid Americans will learn from it.  A society that is well versed in history is an obstacle to the left's ongoing determination to make Americans ashamed of being American.  So with control over the schools, the left portrays our history as an unbroken record of racism, slavery, white supremacism, colonialism, imperialism, and an assortment of other fashionable leftist sins (George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were no doubt also guilty of transphobia and misgendering).  There has been precious little pushback from patriots who still remember when standing for the National Anthem was taken for granted as good and right, and everyone knew, and was even taught in school, that America is the best country in the world: the most free, the most humane, the most decent.

It was even widely understood, in less enlightened days than those in which we have the privilege to live, that America's prosperity was a result of her decency: the fact that there was no culture of corruption among the political class, the respect for the Constitution on both sides of the aisle, and the determination of at least one political party to secure equality of rights for all people, even during the darkest days of the Jim Crow era.

Historian Robert Spencer, author of The History of Jihad and numerous other books, harks back to that earlier understanding of America's history in his new book, Rating America's Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster.  This is much more than just a survey of the occupants of the Oval Office; it is a repossession of American history from the left, and a thoroughgoing and comprehensive repudiation and refutation of the idea that America's chief defining characteristics for nearly two centuries now have been racism and inequality.

It is also a sort of travelogue into a different world, into an America that has vanished, and an introduction to the old controversies that have not only shaped America's character as a nation, but also influenced the political landscape, rippling forward to today.  For example, Spencer shows that the controversy over tariffs, one of the key issues dividing President Trump from his foes today, goes back to the earliest days of the American Republic.  "Before the Civil War," Spencer writes, "the North generally preferred high tariffs in order to protect its nascent industries; the agrarian South, on the other hand, called for low tariffs so it could sell its cotton in Europe without an undue tax burden.  Reasonable high tariffs protected wage-earning American laborers from competition from slaves and virtual slaves in other nations; the South, since its economy was built on slavery, didn't see this as a problem.  Thus, high tariffs become more clearly an America-first position after the Civil War, when slavery no longer was any part of America."

Slavery is long gone, contrary to leftist mythmaking, but it remains true: high tariffs protect American workers, while low tariffs offer the immediate gratification of lower prices while harming American industries to the extent that those low prices become a devil's bargain.  Just as Trump today warns about the dangers of outsourcing American industries to China and flooding the nation with "Made in China" products, so also during the long forgotten year of 1888, Spencer points out, supporters of the high-tariff candidate Benjamin Harrison held aloft banners saying, "Cleveland Runs Well in England" and "We Are Not Going to Vote Away Our Wages."  They argued, just as Trump does today, that low tariffs would mean the end of American prosperity.

The historical resonances and precedents don't end there. Rating America's Presidents is positively loaded with them.  But the most valuable aspect of this book is its demonstration that Trump's America-First principle, however maligned and misunderstood, has always made for a stronger and more prosperous America whenever it has been applied.  Likewise, when it has been ignored, America and Americans have suffered.  That makes this book a useful primer for today's controversies, and a refreshing restoration of American history as that great story should be told.

Chris Salcedo is the host of The Chris Salcedo Show on Newsmax TV.  He is the author of the Ayn Rand–style novel Liberty Rises and the executive director of The Conservative Hispanic Society.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.