A Free People's Suicide E-Book

Os Guinness

• Herausgeber: IVP
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 361

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A Logos Book of the Year "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." Abraham Lincoln Nothing is more daring in the American experiment than the founders' belief that the American republic could remain free forever. But how was this to be done, and are Americans doing it today? It is not enough for freedom to be won. It must also be sustained. Cultural observer Os Guinness argues that the American experiment in freedom is at risk. Summoning historical evidence on how democracies evolve, Guinness shows that contemporary views of freedom--most typically, a negative freedom from constraint-- are unsustainable because they undermine the conditions necessary for freedom to thrive. He calls us to reconsider the audacity of sustainable freedom and what it would take to restore it. "In the end," Guinness writes, "the ultimate threat to the American republic will be Americans. The problem is not wolves at the door but termites in the floor." The future of the republic depends on whether Americans will rise to the challenge of living up to America's unfulfilled potential for freedom, both for itself and for the world.

Leseprobe

A Free People's Suicide

Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

Os Guinnes

www.IVPress.com/books

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com E-mail: [email protected]

© 2012 by Os Guinness

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®.niv®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Every effort has been made to credit all material quoted in this book. Any errors or omissions brought to the publisher's attention will be corrected in future editions.

Published in association with the literary agency of Walgemuth & Associates.

Cover design: Cindy Kiple

Images: Stained American flag: © Hande Guleryuz Yuce/iStockphoto

Declaration of Independence signatures: © Duncan Walker/iStockphoto

eagle: © Alisher Burhonov/iStockphoto

ISBN 978-0-8308-6682-3

To Bud and Jane Smith,

dear friends and great American patriots

Marcus Tullius Cicero

The preservation of the republic no less than governing it—What a thankless task it is!

—Speech, November 6, 63 b.c.

But our age, having received the commonwealth as a finished picture of another century, but already beginning to fade through the lapse of years, has not only neglected to renew the colors of the original painting, but has not even cared to preserve its original form and prominent lineaments.

For what now remains of those antique manners, of which the poet said that our commonwealth consisted? They have now become obsolete and forgotten, that they are not only cultivated, but they are not even known. . . . For it is owing to our vices, rather than to any accident, that we have retained the name of republic when we have long since lost the reality.

—On the Republic

Augustine of Hippo

Suppose we were to define what it means to be a people not in the usual way, but in a different fashion such as the following: a people is a multitudinous assemblage of rational beings united by concord regarding loved things held in common. Then, if we wished to discern the character of any given people, we would have to investigate what it loves. . . . Surely it is a better or worse people as it is united in loving things that are better or worse.

—City of God

Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

Just as all human things come to an end, the state of which we speak will lose its liberty; it will perish. Rome, Lacedaemon & Carthage have in fact perished. This state will perish when the legislative will be more corrupt than the executive power.

—Spirit of Laws

Benjamin Franklin

Nothing brings more pain than too much pleasure; nothing more bondage than too much liberty.

—Poor Richard’s Almanac

John Adams

A memorable epoch in the annals of the human race destined in history to form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or abuse of those political institutions by which they shall in time come to be shaped by the human mind.

—Letter in 1826 on the outcome of 1776

George Washington

It is yet to be decided whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered a blessing or a curse: a blessing or a curse, not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn Millions be involved. . . . At this auspicious period, the United States came into existence as a Nation, and if their Citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own.

—“Circular to the States,” Newburgh, New York, 1783

James Madison

Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power.

—The Federalist

Alexis de Tocqueville

[We should not comfort ourselves] on the supposition that the barbarians are still far from us, for there are people who allow the light to be snatched from their hands, and there are other peoples who stifle it under their own feet.

—Democracy in America

Abraham Lincoln

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up among us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

—“Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum,” Springfield, Illinois, 1838

Lord Moulton

The greatness of a nation, its true civilization, is measured by the extent of its obedience to the unenforceable.

—The Atlantic

Theodore Roosevelt

We must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.

—Speech, July 4, 1886, North Dakota

Albert Camus

Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh no, it’s a chore . . . and a long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.

—The Fall

Dwight D. Eisenhower

How far can you go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?

John W. Gardner

It is by means of the free society that we keep ourselves free. If we wish to remain free, we had better look to the health, the vigor, the viability of our free society—and to its capacity for renewal.

—Self-Renewal

Joseph Brodsky

A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.

—“The Condition We Call Exile”

Contents

1. What Kind of People Do You Think You Are?

2. Always Free, Free Always

3. Using History to Defy History

4. The Golden Triangle of Freedom

5. The Completest Revolution of All

6. The Empire Worthy of Free People

7. The Eagle and the Sun

Grateful Acknowledgments

Notes

Name Index

Subject Index

About the Author

Endorsements

1 What Kind of People Do You Think You Are?

There is always a moment in the story of great powers when their own citizens become their own worst enemies—not so much in the form of homegrown terrorism as in the form of the citizenry thinking and living at odds with what it takes for the nation to thrive. What follows is a visitor’s perspective on how America is reaching that point today and on what can be done to restore the American republic to its vitality before it’s too late.

The Sifting of History

The day after Christmas would normally have been a quiet day in Washington, D.C., above all on Capitol Hill. But December 26, 1941, was different. It was only nineteen days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and both the Senate chamber and the overflow gallery were packed to hear British Prime Minister Winston Churchill address a joint session of the United States Congress.

With the Capitol ringed by police and soldiers, the lectern bristling with microphones, and the glare of unusually bright lights in the chamber for the film cameras, Churchill started his thirty-minute address with a light touch. “If my father had been an American,” he said, “and my mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have gotten here on my own. In that case this would not have been the first time you would have heard my voice.”

Churchill then rose to his central theme. Britain was standing alone, but reeling. Most of Europe lay prostrate under the Nazi heel. Hitler was well on his way to Moscow. Half of the American Navy was at the bottom of the Hawaiian harbor, and there was little or no air force to rise to the nation’s defense. He therefore delivered a stern denunciation of the Japanese and the German menace, and warned about “the many disappointments and unpleasant surprises that await us” in countering them.

At the heart of the prime minister’s address was a famous question to his listeners in light of the Japanese aggression: “What kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible that they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?”[1]

All crises are judgments of history that call into question an existing state of affairs. They sift and sort the character and condition of a nation and its capacity to respond. The deeper the crisis, the more serious the sifting and the deeper the questions it raises. At the very least, a crisis raises the question “What should we do?” Without that, it would not amount to a crisis.

Deeper crises raise the deeper question “Where are we, and how did we get here?” Still deeper crises raise the question Churchill raised, “Who do other people think we are?”—though clearly Churchill saw the ignorance in the Japanese mind, rather than in his or his hearers’. But the deepest crises of all are those that raise the question “Who do we think we are?” when doubt and uncertainty have entered our own thinking.

This last question poses a challenge and requires a courage that goes to the very heart of the identity and character of those in crisis, whether individuals or a nation. Only in a response that clearly says and shows who they are can they demonstrate an answer that resolves the crisis constructively and answers history’s judgment by turning potential danger into an opportunity for growth and advance.

History is asking that last question of America now: What kind of a people do you Americans think you are? We are now nearly eight decades after the Great Depression, seven decades after Pearl Harbor and World War II, four decades after the tumultuous and influential sixties, two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bipolar world, one decade after September 11 and in the midst of two of the most revealing and fateful presidencies in American history. The sifting of America has come to a head, and the question “Who are you?” or “What kind of a people do you think you are?” or “What kind of society do you want America to be” is now the central question Americans must answer.

Another time of testing has come. Another day of reckoning is here. This is a testing and a reckoning—let me say it carefully—that could prove even more decisive than earlier trials such as the Civil War, the Depression and the cultural cataclysm that was the 1960s. As citizens of the world’s lead society and leaders of Western civilization, you Americans owe yourselves and the world a clear answer at this momentous juncture of your history and international leadership—a moment at which an unclear answer or no answer at all are both a clear answer and a telling symptom of the judgment of history.

There are many reasons Americans must answer the question “Who do you think you are?” The widely watched drama of the recent political crisis over the debt ceiling and the deeply felt consequences of the economic crisis, the continuing unemployment and the mounting social inequities have made them the most discussed issues at the moment—with concerns trumpeted by the Tea Party movement on one side and the Occupy Wall Street protest on the other.

These issues pale, however, when compared with the challenge facing America at the prospect of the ending of the five-hundred-year dominance of the West and the emergence of an Asia-led world. And all these issues together are just the beginning of a mounting sea of problems engulfing America from many sides. But this book addresses a neglected issue that may prove the deepest and most urgent of all, if only because it is intertwined with so many of the others: the gathering crisis of sustainable freedom in America.

At his inauguration President Obama faced a scale and range of problems that were unprecedented in recent memory. What was less noted and more important was that most of these problems raised questions that go to the heart of the American republic, and foreign admirers of America are disappointed to see America failing to live up to its past and its potential in these problem areas. In short, the state of the Union is at stake.

Let me introduce the claim that America’s deepest crisis is the crisis of sustainable freedom by setting out a number of simple points that have converged to make it urgent.

America’s Glory and Supreme Love

First, sustainable freedom is urgent for America because freedom is, and will always be, the issue of all issues for America. In today’s world, it is customary to assess nations in terms of the size of their population, the strength of their economy, the power and reach of their armed forces, the state of their information technology, the prestige of their research universities and so on. But there is a deeper classical way to see things: it was once understood that every nation has its own special character, its own animating principle, and can be understood and assessed only in that light.

Augustine of Hippo argued that the best way to define a people is by their “loved thing held in common,” or what it is they love supremely. A people can be judged as better or worse according to what they love, and their nation can be assessed as healthy or unhealthy according to the condition of what they love. Freedom is unquestionably what Americans love supremely, and love of freedom is what makes Americans the people they are. Thus the present crisis of sustainable freedom raises questions about the health of the American republic that must be taken seriously.[2]

Freedom is so central and precious to Americans that it might seem odd, and even outrageous, for an outsider to challenge Americans over their freedom. But this book is not a sour foreign attack on American freedom. I am a long-time admirer of the American experiment and of the place of freedom in America. Unquestionably freedom is, and will always be, America’s animating principle and chief glory, her most important idea and her greatest strength.

But unless sustained, freedom could also prove to be America’s idol—something trusted ultimately that cannot bear ultimate weight. Assessing the condition of freedom is therefore central to the promise and peril of America in the advanced modern world, just as it was to the success of the American Revolution.

For one thing, freedom is the special glory of America, the chief boast of Americans and the central reason for the importance of America for the democratic project, for the modern world and for humanity. From its very beginning, the United States was blessed with a sturdy birthright of freedom. It was born in freedom, it has expanded in freedom, it has resolved its great conflicts in a “new birth of freedom,” it has won its spurs as a world power in defending freedom, and it now stands as the global colossus of freedom offering its gift to the world and announcing that, as freedom spreads, it will herald an era of peace between freedom-loving nations on earth.

Due largely to America, freedom is at the very heart and soul of the modern world, especially in its Western forms. In all the world’s free-thought, free-speech, free-choice, free-vote, free-market societies, freedom is today’s highest virtue, its grandest possibility, its last absolute, its most potent myth and—with the power of love limited to the private world—its only self-evident public truth. How else are modern people to be themselves other than to be free?

Freedom as the dream of ever-expanding emancipation, ever-multiplying liberation movements and ever-deepening fulfillment is being pushed from behind by the memory of a thousand oppressions and pulled from ahead by the promise of unrestrained choice and unhindered creativity leading to unlimited possibilities (“infinite in all directions,” as the futurist cheerleaders say). Unfettered freedom could prove to be the Achilles’ heel of the modern world, dissipating into license, triviality, corruption and a grand undermining of all authority, but for the moment the world is still both thrilled and enthralled by the great Age of Freedom. It is the Western world’s most stunning success, and the United States is its proudest exemplar.

No self-respecting American will ever be opposed to freedom any more than to love. And it is incontestable that, in American history, whoever represents “the party of freedom”—sometimes the Democrats, as under Franklin Roosevelt, and sometimes the Republicans, as under Ronald Reagan—has always prevailed over any who appear to be standing in its way.

The Grand Paradox of Freedom

Second, sustainable freedom is urgent for America because freedom is far more difficult to sustain than most Americans realize. We live at a time when words such as freedom, progress and values are bandied around endlessly, yet few people stop to ask what they mean, now that the last generation has seen them emptied of almost all content.

Needless to say, America’s espousal of freedom has never been pure and undiluted. Jefferson hailed the United States as the “empire of liberty” or an “empire for liberty such as she has never surveyed since the creation.”[3] Yet from the start, the empire of liberty was built at the expense of African slaves, American Indians and American women. But the perennial challenges to sustainable freedom go well beyond these long-standing contradictions so amply explored by historians since the 1960s.

The glory of freedom should never blind anyone to its immoderate nature and therefore to the stern requirements that surround it. For at the heart of freedom lies a grand paradox: the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom. Throughout the course of history, freedom presents an inescapable and tightly coiled conundrum that sums up the challenge of why it is so difficult to sustain. Stripped to its core dimensions, the conundrum may be stated as follows:

For a start, freedom always faces a fundamental historical challenge. Although glorious, free societies are few, far between and fleeting. In the past, the high view of human dignity and independence that free societies require was attained by only two societies with world influence: the Greeks with their view of the logos, or reason within each person, and the Jews with their notion of the call of God to each person. The Roman ways owed much to the Greeks, of course, just as contemporary humanists owe everything to the Jewish, Greek and Christian ideas from which they come and on which they depend.

Today’s worldwide explosion of freedom is therefore rare and cannot be taken for granted. If the hundred-centuries clock of civilization is compressed to a single hour, today’s interest in freedom and democracy appears only in the last minute or so before midnight, so to take it as the norm is folly.

Further, freedom faces a fundamental political challenge. Free societies must always maintain their freedom on two levels at once: at the level of their nation’s constitution and at the level of their citizens’ convictions. The formal structures of liberty and the informal spirit of liberty—or the fundamental laws and the fundamental “habits of the heart”—are both essential to freedom, though in different ways. If the structures of liberty are well built, they last as long as they are properly maintained, whereas the spirit of liberty and the habits of the heart must be reinvigorated from generation to generation. Conversely, whatever the strength of the structures of liberty, they may always be overrun in the end by the will of the people. Put differently, a nation’s constitution is like a covenant, and there are always at least two parties to a covenant. A nation’s constitution may therefore remain strong and clear, yet still be nullified by the citizenry failing to uphold its side of the covenant.

This distinction between the structures of liberty and the spirit of liberty—or between the laws and the habits of the heart—was less important to the Greeks because, as James Madison observed, theirs was a “pure democracy.” There was no clear-cut difference between society and state, and their democracy consisted of “a small number of citizens who assemble and administer the government in person.”[4] There was no Athens, only “the Athenians”—the entire citizenry in assembly, at war or in the creation of their immortal works of art such as the Acropolis and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles.

But as the greatest European commentators have underscored, all societies in the modern world have a significant gap between society and state, so it is possible to be free at the constitutional level in terms of the structures of liberty but to lose freedom and become servile or anarchic at the citizens’ level in terms of the spirit of liberty. Conversely, though less common, it is possible to exercise the spirit of liberty at the level of citizens without enjoying liberty at the level of the constitution. In Montesquieu’s words, “It can happen that the constitution will be free & the citizen not” or that “the citizen will be free & the constitution not.”[5]

Finally, freedom always faces a fundamental moral challenge. Freedom requires order and therefore restraint, yet the only restraint that does not contradict freedom is self-restraint, which is the very thing that freedom undermines when it flourishes. Thus the heart of the problem of freedom is the problem of the heart, because free societies are characterized by restlessness at their core.

Such a claim sounds pious, but it was argued by thinkers who were far from pious. Machiavelli, for example, rooted political restlessness in the fact that human appetites are by nature “insatiable” because human beings are “able to desire everything” but unable “to secure everything.” As a result, “their desire is always greater than the power of acquisition.”[6] Similarly, Montesquieu, who followed John Locke, who in turn followed Blaise Pascal, Pierre Nicole and Augustine (though with no interest in the theological concerns of the last three), described political restlessness as a chronic uneasiness that gives freedom-loving people an “uneasy spirit” and leaves them “always inflamed.”[7] And all this in a day long before modern consumerism stoked the restlessness even further.

Put differently, the shining principle of the consent of the governed is at the heart of democracy and is crucial to both freedom and its legitimacy. But it is also beguiling because it masks a challenge. In a democratic republic, the rulers and the subjects are one and the same, so freedom depends constantly not only on the character of the nation’s leaders but also on the character of its citizens.

Yet such are human passions and the political restlessness they create that the self-renunciation essential to the self-restraint needed for sustaining freedom is quite unnatural. It goes against the grain of humanness—especially in peaceful and prosperous periods, when there is no requirement to rise above private interests and remember the public good, and very especially in bitterly anxious times such as the present, when so many citizens contradict rather than consent to the government-that-is-them. We have now reached the point where no sooner do Americans send their representatives to Washington than they turn on the Washington that they claim no longer represents them.

The core problem can be expressed like this: Such is our human propensity for self-love—or thinking and acting with the self as center—that the virtue it takes for citizens to remain free is quite unnatural. America today is a republic in which the private trumps the public, consumerism tells Americans, “It’s all about me,” and citizens constantly tell the government to “get off our backs” when the government is their own justly chosen representative and it supposedly governs only with their free consent. In such a world, self-love will always love itself supremely, love itself at the expense of others and love itself without limits.

Thus, in Montesquieu’s words, the self-renunciation needed for freedom is “always a very painful thing.”[8] The natural bent of self-love is toward domination, not self-restraint, so the will to power at its heart will relentlessly seek to expand unless it meets resistance. Freedom therefore thrives on freedom and, mistaking power for freedom, expands naturally to produce the abuse of power that throttles freedom—that is, unless freedom is checked and balanced strongly, wisely and constantly.

If freedom is not checked in this way, and worse still, if it is defined only negatively (as freedom fromconstraint, as it is in much of America today), then assertive freedom will refuse to be checked by anyone and anything outside itself. It will then press instinctively for freedom from all outside constraints, whether from social conventions, long-standing traditions, rational criteria, moral standards or divine commandments, for they are all external constraints that hamper freedom so defined.

To be sure, only a few wealthy American egotists have both the arrogance and the means to live out untrammeled freedom to the full. But the virus of the idea is contagious, and it weakens the authority of the checks and balances that society needs if freedom is to be durable. Such unrestrained freedom—freedom that bows to no one and nothing outside itself and recognizes no external constraining standards—is disordered and deranged. Worse, it is nihilistic, in that there is absolutely nothing on the horizon—above, behind or around—to command the chooser’s obedience or hamper the chooser’s will.

To be fair, in the United States the will to power that is active in disordered freedom deals mostly in the small-souled currency of wealth, success and celebrity, and thus of human vanity. There is no power-hungry Caesar waiting to cross the Rubicon. Equally, America’s nihilism of untrammeled freedom has so far been a soft and banal nihilism that flowers and fades harmlessly within the confines of the consumer paradise of the shopping mall, the online catalog and the video game. Besides, no one is fully consistent to his or her own philosophy, and there is always a long stretch of the downhill slope from the adolescent stage of soft nihilism to the delinquent and then to the decadent.

But such ideas in such a society will always have consequences, and when the causes of disordered freedom also spread to such vital spheres of American society as the government, the economy, law, education, medicine, science and technology, the consequences will at some point become lethal and unstoppable. The gap between the lightning and the thunder may be delayed, but such disordered freedom will one day prove disastrous when taken to the very end. It is literally irrational and irresponsible, for untrammeled freedom has no need to justify itself either by rational criteria or by any moral standard outside itself. It just is, an untrammeled will to power that is self-evident, self-justifying and self-destructive, and a mortal menace to the society that harbors it.

The conclusion for American freedom is inescapable. It is not enough to espouse freedom as the essence of America and to keep mouthing its matchless benefits. Freedom must be guarded vigilantly against internal as well as external dangers. However soft and however banal it is, unbounded freedom simply cannot restrain itself by itself, and in the end its self-destructive tendency will show through.

Put these three components together—the historical, the political and the moral—and the force of the paradox of freedom becomes clear. Neither law alone nor virtue alone can sustain freedom, because freedom always generates an abuse of power that endangers freedom. So law alone will override freedom by its very lack of self-restraint and by its inherent drive to compensate by replacing virtue with regulations. Virtue alone will always be too weak to sustain freedom, yet sometimes virtue alone will be too strong, in the sense that an excess of virtue can itself be an abuse of power.

Thus, like any free people, Americans should never be naive and can never trust in freedom itself, for freedom alone cannot bear the weight of freedom. This is why freedom has a chronic habit of undermining and destroying itself. Again and again, more is less, and too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing in one of three ways:

When freedom runs to excess and breeds permissiveness and license.

When freedom so longs for its own security that its love of security undermines freedom (“The dangers of life are infinite,” Goethe said, “and among them is safety”).

When freedom becomes so caught up in its own glory that it justifies anything and everything done in its name, even such things as torture that contradict freedom.

Strikingly, the last decade has displayed clear examples of each of these corruptions writ large in American culture and in American foreign policy.

All Issues Point to Freedom

Third, sustainable freedom is urgent for America because many of the crises facing the United States have a direct bearing on freedom. The debt crisis is the most obvious. The question “What kind of a people do you think you are?” has been raised savagely by the grand financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that followed it. These two events were of world significance because they created the first global crisis in history that was caused principally by the United States, and they raise major questions for the republic. The first concerns the link between debt and freedom; the second concerns the mounting inequities between America’s super-rich and everyone else; and the third concerns the place of money in national life when more and more of politics is “up for sale” and the United States resembles a plutocracy as much as a democracy.

The blunt fact is that America’s grand promotion of debt- leveraged consumerism has stood Max Weber’s famous thesis about the rise of capitalism on its head. It has scorned the early-American stress on hard work, savings, thrift and delayed gratification, and turned Americans into a nation of perpetual debtors who are now chided even by the Chinese and the Indians for their irresponsibility and “addiction to debt.”[9]

America’s fabled economic dominance has masked the fact of its dire financial indebtedness and therefore of the severe constraints on its real freedom. Few, if any, superpowers in history have been in deeper debt than the United States today. Whereas the British Empire in its heyday was the world’s largest creditor, and Japan and China have that distinction today, the United States is both the world’s dominant power and the world’s largest debtor—with the debt going to finance consumption rather than infrastructure investment.

Thus, with the United States shifting from producing to consuming, with American citizens consuming more than they save and with the government spending more than it earns and promising to spend still more, America’s household debt, government debt and international debt are all growing rapidly. Post–World War II America, it is said, has been driving forward on debtcraft, deficitry, and debtmanship.

The chickens are now coming home to roost, though so far most warnings have been dismissed as Chicken Little alarmism and the spending goes on. The George W. Bush administration, for example, financed the Iraq War through loans held by the Chinese rather than through taxes shouldered by the generation that declared the war. And the Obama administration has plunged the country even deeper still. Indeed, as many observed in light of the Iraq and Afghan wars, the tax cuts, the Wall Street bailouts, the stimulus packages and the new health care provisions, never has one generation spent so much of its children’s wealth in such a short period and with so little to show for it.

But that was only the beginning of the Alice in Wonderland logic of the wider financial crisis. Huge gains on Wall Street kept going to individuals, while the huge losses went to the American public. Successes were well rewarded, and failures often went unpunished. Those who had been part of creating the problem were often the only ones deemed clever enough to remedy it.

“Happy is he who owes nothing,” says a Roman proverb, for taking on too much debt is a rash bet against the future, the odds of which not even the Masters of the Universe can pretend to know. And needless to say, the deeper the debt, the less the freedom and flexibility. Some observers thought that this stark truth would prove the silver lining in the Wall Street crash of 2008 that would bring America to its senses. But did it? A huge spending tsunami had long been gathering speed and rolling fast toward shore. Then, compounded by the greed, hubris, dishonesty, myopia, corruption, careless lack of regulation and reckless folly of the housing bubble, the subprime derivatives and the crony capitalism of Wall Street and Washington, the crisis has shown the dire extent of American debt and the widespread bankruptcy of American trust and ethics in relation to free markets.

Much of America’s financial strength is mortgaged to foreign investors, much is dependent on foreign sources of energy, and much is part of an exorbitant bill for health care, social security and the toxic subprime mortgages. During the Wall Street crisis, Warren Buffet was reported as saying, “You never know who is swimming naked until the tide goes out.”[10] The current crisis mercilessly exposes the denuding of the American founders’ wisdom about the need for leadership with character, freedom with virtue, business with integrity and trust, the rule of law with the cultivation of habits of the heart, education with an emphasis not only on grades and credentials but on the meaning of life, and medicine with human and ethical values as strong as the drives of science and technology.

Challenges from Around the World

Fourth, sustainable freedom is urgent for America because the recent global groundswell of disapproval of the United States has included very specific criticisms of American freedom. Each charge requires its own response, but Americans would be wise to consider the criticisms in light of the deeper issues to which they all point: the character and condition of freedom and the challenge of sustainable freedom as the founders understood it.

One criticism is that the current American vision of freedom is naive, with its blithe equation of freedom, democracy and free markets and its neglect of the cultural foundations necessary for them—or worse, that the Bush-era boasts of the New American Century were universalistic, messianic and utopian, with their dream of American-led democratic freedom ending tyranny on earth and ushering in peace among democratic nations.

Recent critics commonly cited four texts. One was the 1997 statement on behalf of the Project for the New American Century, because of the signers’ later role in the policies of the George W. Bush administration. Another was “The National Security Strategy of the United States” presented to the Congress by the White House in September 2002, with its claim that there is “a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.”[11] The most important were the younger Bush’s second inaugural address in January 2005 and his “State of the Union Address” a few weeks later. These offered a myriad of references to America’s destiny in bringing freedom to the world, with “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”[12]

According to the critics, such celebrations of the American trinity—freedom, democracy and free markets—are more than the latest spasm of American exceptionalism, a passing neoconservative conceit or a misreading of America’s “unipolar moment.” They are a form of hubris and utopianism that is unwelcome in the world and disastrous for America. American-led, ever-unfolding freedom, widening democratic peace and never-ending prosperity are three of the last great expressions of the Enlightenment faith in a universal civilization—to be ushered in by the United States. America, Hegel wrote, is “the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself.”[13]

The critics’ charge is that this grandly inflated claim has become untethered from the prudence of the American founders, as well as from the Christian realism of earlier generations, not to speak of more recent realpolitik. It has the following effects.

It conflates America’s uniqueness and her universality.

It forgets that nothing is more unexceptional than claims to exceptionalism. (Historians remind us that all of the world’s seventy-odd empires have proclaimed it in their turn.[14])

It resembles the unfounded confidence in reason, freedom and progress of the ideologues of the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. (George W. Bush’s rhetoric was an eerie echo of the French revolutionary cry for a “universal crusade for liberty.”)

It contradicts the American founders’ clear preference for a republic rather than a democracy and for ordered liberty rather than mere freedom.

It ignores the fact that there are essential preconditions for freedom, different paths to freedom and different ways to be modern.

And it so underplays the place of irreducible conflict in the global era that it is rapidly becoming America’s version of Kant’s “perpetual peace” and Comte’s “religion of humanity” all rolled into one.

In short, in the global era, George W. Bush’s more exaggerated claims for freedom are a dangerous delusion that America cannot sustain and the world cannot afford.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Another criticism from abroad is that American freedom is in danger of becoming too much of a good thing and that, as always, too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Claims to rights and entitlements without duty are destroying the cultural soil in which all rights and freedom itself have to be nourished; unregulated free markets are destroying America’s social bonds; an excess of democracy is undermining the carefully crafted republic of the American founders; and an increasingly corrupt form of American freedom is causing a shift from constitutional liberalism to democratic illiberalism, and in the process damaging America itself.

In short, contrary to the founders—and in ways they do not realize themselves—Americans today are heedlessly pursuing a vision of freedom that is short-lived and suicidal. Once again, freedom without virtue, leadership without character, business without trust, law without customs, education without meaning and medicine, science and technology without human considerations can end only in disaster.

When exported abroad, the same rampant American freedom often undermines the traditional ways of life in other countries through its licentiousness, permissiveness and passion to transgress. Witness the vile inhumanity of American gangsta rap and the puerile antics of American stars such as Michael Jackson and starlets such as Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, and a nation’s bizarre obsession with such decadence.

Thus the American Way, far from the last best hope for the world, is becoming a riot of indulgent freedom that is anything but positive and liberating. “License they mean when they cry liberty,” John Milton warned in words that are widely echoed today.[15] After the younger Bush’s second inaugural address, a Middle Eastern leader said to a friend of mine, “Every time the president says freedom, I see license.”

One last criticism is that American freedom has simply become an ideology—a set of high-sounding ideas used as spiritual weapons for America’s real interests, such as maintaining dominance or protecting America’s ravenous need for resources such as oil. Freedom, in other words, is the shield behind which America uses force in yet another attempt to remake the world in its own image—or as it imagines itself to be. (“With God’s help,” U.S. Senator Kenneth Wherry declared of Chiang Kai-shek’s China in the 1940s, “we will lift Shanghai up and up until it is just like Kansas City.”[16])

Freedom, after all, has already been used to accompany and justify many of the darkest stains in America’s history, starting with the evils of slavery and the near-genocide of Native Americans and reaching down to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

Crisis of Cultural Authority

Put these four points together—and they highlight the significance of the present crisis of freedom. At the very least they demonstrate the danger of complacent inattention to the character of freedom and in particular to the indispensable notion of sustainable freedom that is the key to the founders’ design of the American experiment.

More seriously still, these four points add up to the fact that freedom has become America’s Achilles’ heel, and the American republic is undergoing a profound crisis that has been variously described as a crisis of faith, a legitimation crisis, a crisis of civilizational morale and a crisis of cultural authority. The center no longer holds; the core has lost its compelling power; the moral and social ecology of the nation has been contaminated; the different spheres of society are undermining each other; and the escalation of the extremes is underway.

There is a straightforward reason why the United States is vulnerable to such a crisis of cultural authority. As the world’s first new nation, America is distinctively a nation by intention and by ideas. Unlike most other nations, the core beliefs that make up American identity and character do not trail off into the mists of antiquity, and they are not the product of centuries-old habits of the heart. Taking off from their sturdy seventeenth-century beginnings, they arose in a sunburst of brilliant thinking and daring institution-building by a generation whose vision charted the course of America’s meteoric rise to greatness. Yet the very clarity and centrality of those beliefs create unique problems for the United States when they are called into question, as they have been recently.

In the 1960s, the student protests in particular and the counterculture as a whole represented an earlier expression of the crisis of cultural authority. Today’s crisis of cultural authority is far deeper, though the movements expressing it in public are far weaker. The Tea Party movement is the carrier on the right and the Occupy Wall Street movement is the carrier on the left.

In terms of style, these two movements are similar. Each owes much to the hi-tech advances of the Internet era, which they also share with the highly diverse movements that in early 2011 made up the “Arab Spring”—for example, in their common use of SADNs (self-assembled dynamic networks) to link their adherents and promote their causes in public.

In terms of substance, however, the two American movements could not appear more different. The Tea Partyers on the right are protesting the crisis of dysfunctional republicanism, citing the bloated growth of unchecked statism and lamenting such dire crises as the profligacy of debt spending. The Occupy Wall Streeters on the left are protesting the crisis of dysfunctional democracy, citing the savage inequities between the super-rich “1 percenters” and the rest—the “99 percenters”—and lamenting the heartless face of economic reductionism and unfettered capitalism and their consequences for the poor and for the earth.

Republicanism, democracy and capitalism—apart from the faith communities, there are no institutions whose character and crises are so foundational and decisive for America. Seen this way, the very different concerns of the two movements are in fact closer than many people realize, for knowingly or not, each addresses a key aspect of the crisis of cultural authority that must be resolved if the democratic republic of the United States is to thrive again.