Poland, Post-Communism, and America the Beacon
By Trygve Olson
In 1995, I said yes to something I didn’t fully understand. A friend at the International Republican Institute asked if I’d go to Poland to help with a get-out-the-vote campaign modeled after MTV’s Rock the Vote. I didn’t have a passport. I’d never been abroad. But something about it — maybe curiosity, maybe instinct — told me to go.
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I sat with Polish college students who wanted to know how our government worked. How campaigns were run. What freedom of speech actually meant. What checks and balances looked like in real life. To them, we were still the Shining City on a Hill — flawed, sure, but aspirational. We were the country that had won the Cold War. The model.
That kind of idealism was contagious. You couldn’t help but feel the gravity of it. For the first time, politics didn’t just feel like a game. It felt like service. Something sacred. Something that mattered beyond elections.
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Today, we’re squandering that legacy.
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