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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
Logos Bookstore Association Award World Magazine Book of the Year The hour is critical. The American republic is suffering its gravest crisis since the Civil War. Conflicts, hostility, and incivility now threaten to tear the country apart. Competing visions have led to a dangerous moment of cultural self-destruction. This is no longer politics as usual, but an era of political warfare where our enemies are not foreign adversaries, but our fellow citizens. Yet the roots of the crisis are deeper than many realize. Os Guinness argues that we face a fundamental crisis of freedom, as America's genius for freedom has become her Achilles' heel. Our society's conflicts are rooted in two rival views of freedom, one embodied in "1776" and the ideals of the American Revolution, and the other in "1789" and the ideals of the French Revolution. Once again America has become a house divided, and Americans must make up their minds as to which freedom to follow. Will the constitutional republic be restored or replaced? This grand treatment of history, civics, and ethics in the Jewish and Christian traditions represents Guinness's definitive exploration of the prospects for human freedom today. He calls for a national conversation on the nature of freedom, and poses key questions for concerned citizens to consider as we face a critical chapter in the American story. He offers readers a checklist by which they can assess the character and consequences of the freedoms they are choosing. In the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville, Guinness provides a visitor's careful observation of the American experiment. Discover here a stirring vision for faithful citizenship and renewed responsibility for not only the nation but also the watching world.
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LAST CALLforLIBERTY
HOW AMERICA’S GENIUS FOR FREEDOM HAS BECOME ITS GREATEST THREAT
DOM
And with gratitude to Daniel Elazar,
Abraham Joshua Heschel, Leon Kass,
Jonathan Sacks, and Michael Walzer,
great Jewish thinkers whose work illuminates freedom’s past
as it inspires and instructs freedom’s future
Let my people go!
This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, that you and your children may live.
Remember the earliest of days; grasp the years of generations that have been. Ask your father—he will tell you all; ask the elders of your kind, and they will say.
The citizens chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority, and at length . . . they cease to care even for the laws, written or unwritten. And this is the fair and glorious beginning out of which springs dictatorship. . . . The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.
We can endure neither our vices nor their cures.
A man in a boat began to bore a hole under his seat. His fellow passengers protested. “What concern is it of yours?” he responded. “I am making a hole under my seat, not yours.” They replied, “That is so, but when the water enters and the boat sinks, we too will drown.”
Should any one of our nation be asked about our laws, he will repeat them as readily as his own name. The result of our thorough education in our laws from the very dawn of intelligence is that they are, as it were, engraved on our souls.
Pray for the welfare of the government, for if not for the fear of it, each man would swallow his neighbor alive.
When words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty.
Thus a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.
For so long as one hundred men remain alive, we shall never under any condition submit to the domination of the English. It is not for glory or riches or honors that we fight, but only for liberty, which no good man will consent to lose but with his life.
The best instituted governments, like the best constituted animal bodies, carry in them the seeds of their destruction: and though they grow and improve for a time, they will soon tend to their dissolution. Every hour they live is an hour the less that they have to live.
Free peoples, remember this maxim: liberty can be gained, but never regained.
There is not a more difficult subject for the understanding of men than to govern a large Empire upon a plan of liberty.
The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.
Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.
Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
All projects of government formed of a supposition of continual vigilance, sagacity, virtue, and firmness of the people, when possessed of the exercise of supreme power, are cheats and delusions.
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.
The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.
Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the times in which we live I am ready to worship it.
I have already said enough to put Anglo-American civilization in its true light. It is the product (and one should continually bear in mind this point of departure) of two perfectly distinct elements which elsewhere have often been at war with one another but which in America it was somehow possible to incorporate into each other, forming a marvelous combination. I mean the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom. The rest of democracy in America essentially plays out these themes and their successes, their failures, their weaknesses, their promises, and their threats.
There is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty.
Our political problem now is “Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—forever—half slave and half free?” The problem is too mighty for me. May God, in his mercy, superintend the solution.
I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.
I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here in the place where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live. . . . I have never asked anything that does not breathe from those walls. All my political warfare has been in favor of the teachings coming forth from that sacred hall. May my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if ever I prove false to those teachings.
May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of Civil War, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted on us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has grown. But we have forgotten God.
Responsibility: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck, or one’s neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.
In the strictest sense the history of liberty dates from 1776, for “never till then had men sought liberty knowing what they sought.”
The instructions of a secular morality that is not based on religious doctrines are exactly what a person ignorant of music might do, if he were made a conductor and started to wave his hands in front of musicians well rehearsed in what they were performing. By virtue of its own momentum, and from what previous conductors had taught the musicians, the music might continue for a while, but obviously the gesticulations made with the stick by a person who knows nothing about music would be useless and eventually confuse the musicians and throw the orchestra off course.
Starting with unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.
The American Government and the Constitution are based on the theology of Calvin and the philosophy of Hobbes.
Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea will fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaler.
If there is one fact we really can prove from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.
I believe that each of us today has been instilled with a new consciousness and is more aware of the necessity and fundamentally sacred character of intellectual freedom than in former times. For it’s always that way with the sacred value of life. We forget it as long as it belongs to us, and give it as little attention during the unconcerned hours of our life as we do the stars in the light of day. Darkness must fall before we are aware of the majesty of the stars above our heads. It was necessary for this dark hour to fall, perhaps the darkest in history, to make us realize that freedom is as vital to our soul as breathing to our body.
Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me; these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.
What had happened in the great age of Greece happened again in Renaissance Italy: traditional moral restraints disappeared, because they were seen to be associated with superstition; the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and creative, producing a rare fluorescence of genius; but the anarchy and treachery which inevitably resulted from the decay of morals made Italians collectively impotent, and they fell, like the Greeks, under the domination of nations less civilized than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.
The first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos.
It is indeed a truth, which all the great apostles of freedom . . . have never tired of explaining, that freedom has never worked without deeply ingrained moral beliefs and that coercion can be reduced to a minimum only where individuals can be expected as a rule to conform voluntarily to certain principles.
What is to the one the road to freedom, seems to the other the reverse. In the name of liberty the road into serfdom is trod. To renounce liberty in a free decision counts for many as the highest freedom. Liberty arouses enthusiasm, but liberty also arouses anxiety. It may look as if men do not want liberty at all, indeed as though they would like to avoid the possibility of liberty.
Having lived in Poland and later in Germany, I know what America really means. For generations America was the great promise, the great joy, the last hope of humanity. Ten years ago if I had said to students that America is a great blessing and an example to the world, they would have laughed at me. Why speak such banalities? Today one of the saddest experiences of my life is to observe what is happening to America morally. The world once had a great hope, a model: America. What is going to happen to America?
No one has changed a great nation without appealing to its soul, without stimulating a national idealism.
Yet if the gross national product measures all of this, there is much that it does not include. It measures neither the health of our children, the quality of their education, nor the joy of their play. It measures neither the beauty of our poetry, nor the strength of our marriages. It pays no heed to the intelligence of our public debate, nor the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our wit nor our courage, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worth living, and it can tell us everything about our country except those things that make us proud to be a part of it.
If all values are relative, then, for example it is ultimately impossible to say anything good or bad about slavery or Adolf Hitler. It is only possible to say that one likes or dislikes Hitler in the same way that one likes or dislikes corn flakes for breakfast. To the founders, this view would have cut against the grain of reason and common sense. The choice between democracy and Nazism is not a choice between Cheerios or Rice Krispies, but a choice between justice or injustice, indeed life or death.
Standard works on the history of the politics of freedom trace it back through Marx, Rousseau and Hobbes to Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, and the Greek city states (Athens in particular) of the fifth century BCE. To be sure, words like “democracy” (rule by the people) are Greek in origin. The Greeks were gifted at abstract nouns and systematic thought. However if we look at the “birth of the modern”—at figures like Milton, Hobbes and Locke in England, and the founding fathers of America—the book with which they were in dialogue was not Plato or Aristotle but the Hebrew Bible. Hobbes quoted it 657 times in The Leviathan alone. Long before the Greek philosophers, and far more profoundly, at Mount Sinai the concept of a free society was born.
Freedom is more than revolution. The pages of history are littered with people who won their freedom only to lose it again. The “constitution of liberty” is one of the most vulnerable of all human achievements. Individual freedom is simple. Collective freedom—a society that honors the equal dignity of all—depends on constant vigilance, a sustained effort of education. If we forget where we came from, the battle our ancestors fought and the long journey they had to take, then in the end we lose it again.
The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is. He confuses it with feeling.
Democracy only gives people the kind of government they deserve.
Civilization hangs suspended from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their fall collapses the whole edifice of knowledge and understanding.
Can the West overcome the forgetfulness that is the nemesis of every successful civilization?
Contents
QUESTION FIVEHow Do You Plan to Sustain Freedom?
INTRODUCTION
A NEW, NEW BIRTH of FREEDOM?
With America bitterly divided and American public life sinking into chaos and conflict, may a visiting foreigner be permitted a word?
For admirers of America today, sleep has become fitful. The great American republic is in the throes of its gravest crisis since the Civil War, a crisis that threatens its greatness, its freedom, and its character. As with that earlier time of terrible, self-inflicted judgment, the deepest threat is not the foreign invader but the American insider. The problem is not America against the world, or the world against America, but America against itself, citizens against citizens, government against citizens, one president against another president, and one view of America in radical opposition to another. Americans have become their own most bitter enemies, and even the enemies of their centuries-old republic.
The stock market may soar for the moment, the big-box stores may be packed during sales, and the sports and entertainment machines may hum with their daily headlines. But no one should be deceived. Radical, violent, and antidemocratic movements are being fomented and funded on both the Left and the Right. The Left sees only the danger of the Right, and the Right the danger of the Left, so extremism confirms and compounds extremism.
Political debate has degenerated into degrading and barbaric incivility, and wild talk of spying, leaking, impeachment, governability, the Twenty-fifth Amendment, and even assassination and secession is in the air. American leaders and opinion leaders are at each other’s throats, intent on tearing each other apart. Careless with their insults and their incitements, many Americans are seething with rage over other Americans. America is locked in a mortal struggle for what each side believes is the soul of the republic. Heedless of the consequences, each side thinks the worst of the other, the once-visionary leadership of the free world has ground to an inglorious halt, and the suddenness of America’s decline is shocking as well as tragic to its admirers.
One index of a healthy, free, and democratic society is its ability to deal constructively with differences and disagreements. How then are we to understand America’s much-touted political shift from “loyal opposition” to “resistance,” as one political party opposing the other presents itself in a term used by the French patriots resisting the Nazi occupation, while it fights back in the style of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals? What we are seeing is not politics as usual but political warfare in a dangerously radical style and led by leaders who should know better. For when words break down, conflict and violence are never far away, and even careless talk of assassination is a diabolical form of violence.
The world is witnessing the aggressive spread of a cancer in the constitutional republic that America was designed to be and has been for nearly two and a half centuries. But this deterioration into an extreme political warfare is simply one measure of the crisis of American democracy. Americans from the highest levels of leadership and mainstream press down are transforming George Orwell’s daily exercise of “Two Minutes of Hate” into a twenty-four-hour barrage of negative headlines, ad hominem attacks, insults, abuse, threats, unsupported allegations, and wild conspiracy theories—all of which amounts to a political and cultural hysteria that, for a free society, verges on madness and self-destruction.
The full measure of the crisis can be gauged by the vacuum of leadership at the highest level, for as yet there are many partisans and few statesmen. No Abraham Lincoln has stepped forward to speak on behalf of the better angels of the American republic. If anyone did, their task would be gargantuan, for the present generation has rejected both the vision and the manner of the sixteenth president as decisively as many have rejected that of the founders. There is too little statesmanship to match the gravity of the hour, and too little analysis that goes beyond supporting one side or the other, or that delves down to the real roots of the problem. For the deepest crisis touches on an issue more profound than almost all the present discussion, and as deep to America as the evil of slavery—a fundamental clash over the freedom and the nature of the American experiment that lies at the heart of the republic.
If nations are to be understood by what they love supremely, then freedom is and always has been the key to America. But the question facing America is, what is the key to freedom? The present clash is not simply between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, rich and poor, urban and rural, heartlanders and coastals, or even globalists and nationalists, important though these differences are. The deepest division crosscuts these other differences at several points. At the core, the deepest division is rooted in the differences between two world-changing and opposing revolutions, the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, and their rival views of freedom and the nature of the American experiment.
It could be argued that the clash is simply between the old, classical American liberalism and the new Left/liberalism that emerged from the 1960s. But it is deeper than that. The fundamental clash is between the spirit, the heirs, and the allies of 1776 and the ideas that made the American Revolution versus the spirit, the heirs, and the allies of 1789 and the different ideas that made the French Revolution and seeded the progressive liberalism of the Left (with the later help of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and Michel Foucault).
The pressing clash is therefore a life-and-death conflict between two Americas, two revolutions, and two futures. Following the seismic sixties, when the chasm opened in its current form, a massive floodtide of philosophical, religious, cultural, and political disagreements has swollen into public disputes that now engulf the nation in a second civil war, though along very different lines and for the moment a cold civil war. The outcome is crucial for both America and the world. It calls into question the American republic as it was founded, and it calls into question the United States as the world’s lead society and the champion and exemplar of human freedom for the world. As history underscores, the way of 1789 (aided and abetted by the heirs of 1917, the Russian revolution, and 1949, the Chinese revolution) has led and will always lead to catastrophe for the cause of freedom and a liberal political order, whereas the way of 1776—for all its shortcomings—has led to some of freedom’s greatest successes, however much maligned today.
Restore or repeal and replace?1 That is the question for the American republic as it was founded. There is no escaping the coming showdown, for Americans are fast approaching their Rubicon. Is 1776 to be restored (with its flaws acknowledged and remedied) or is it to be replaced by 1789 (and its current progressive heirs)? The outcome will favor one view of freedom or the other, or perhaps the abolition of freedom altogether. For the two main rival views are far more contradictory than many realize, and with their scorched-earth attitudes and policies, they cannot live with each other forever. The middle ground is disappearing. A clean sweep of the cultural landscape is what each wants, and neither will talk of compromise nor allow anything to stand in its way. Either the classical liberalism of the republic will prevail and 1776 will defeat 1789, or the Left/liberalism of 1789 will defeat 1776, and the republic will fail and become a republic in name only. The American republic divided in this way cannot stand. The United States can no more continue half committed to one view of freedom and half committed to the other than it could live half slave and half free in the 1860s.
This crisis is an American crisis. For those on one side, the classical liberals and the present-day conservatives, the American Revolution launched history’s noblest experiment in freedom, justice, and a liberal political order. The American experiment was undergirded by the Jewish and Christian faiths, and while never perfect and at times far from perfect, it represents an achievement of the human spirit worthy of celebration and emulation. For those on the other side, the Left/liberals, the progressives and the cultural Marxists, that vision of America should be castigated, not celebrated. America has shown itself to be hegemonic, inherently flawed and hypocritical, and at times racist, sexist, imperialist, militarist, and genocidal. These criticisms have been delivered along with an implacable animosity to religion as the enduring source of repression and the greatest remaining obstacle to full freedom, and delivered as part of the war cry of a very different revolution with very different assumptions and ideals.
The present crisis is an American crisis for the obvious reason that it touches the heart of America. It is so in another sense too—there is a long tradition that when Americans are disillusioned with America, they look to European ideas that are fatefully different from the ideas and ideals of the American Revolution. Examples would include Thomas Jefferson’s fascination with the French Revolution in its early stages, John Reed’s attraction to the Russian Revolution, Ezra Pound’s falling for Mussolini and the rise of Italian fascism, and after the 1960s, the many on both the left and the right who have become enamored with ideas such as those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Michel Foucault.
Needless to say, the issues between the different sides are for Americans to debate and resolve. But such are the stakes for all humanity, particularly when the debate turns to the future, that perhaps an outsider may raise some questions. What is freedom, and what are the terms of the American experiment? Which of the two rival views of freedom best serves the interests of human flourishing? Which of the two grounds the vision of a free and just society for all citizens, based on the dignity of every human person and allowing for disagreement and opposition? Which view allows a free people to sustain their freedom under the challenging conditions of the advanced modern world and the global era? How will the American experiment survive in the world of posthumanism? Statements about freedom are often deceptively simple, though profoundly consequential, yet they are the issues at the crux of the American crisis. The outcome of the struggle will determine the future of the American republic. It may also determine the future of humanity itself.
But let one thing be clear from the start, or we will be sidetracked at once as a thousand discussions are now. The present obsession with President Trump, whether supporting or opposing him, is a massively distorting factor for a simple reason: Donald Trump is the consequence of the crisis and not the cause. The “Never Trumpers,” both Democrats and his fellow Republicans, and politicians, journalists, academics, as well as celebrities, have developed such a manic obsession about the president that they cannot see straight or talk of much else. Above all, they miss a crucial fact. The president did not create America’s present crisis. The crisis created the president, and the crisis is older, deeper, and more consequential than any president. Regardless of this administration, its opposition, and its outcome, what matters in the long run is understanding and resolving the American crisis itself.
It is true that character always counts in the presidency and unquestionably it will count in this one. Yet President Trump is not the real issue. He is not the cause of the crisis, as his critics assert. Nor will he be the solution, as his defenders hope. Donald Trump’s election was like a giant wrecking ball that stopped America in its tracks, and it allows space for Americans on all sides to consider where they see the republic now, and where they think it should go. For Americans who are willing to pause and understand, the present moment is an opportunity as well as a necessity. The most crucial issues have little or nothing to do with the president, and they will still be there after he has gone. It is these deepest issues that need to be faced and addressed while there is still time.
Another Time That Tries the Soul
Once again we find ourselves in times that try men’s souls and test the mettle of all convictions—and this time on the grandest scale of global affairs. The facts of our times are there for anyone to see. What matters are their meaning, the issues that they spawn, and the stakes that humanity is playing for as this generation makes its decisions and demonstrates them in its actions. Americans are debating on behalf of their own future, but Americans must never forget that today’s debate about America is also a debate about the future of the world.
The twenty-first century now summons the world’s two leading nations to their greatest hour—the United States and China. How and where will they lead the world in the first century of the truly global era? How will they relate to each other, and how will they avoid the “Thucydides Trap” (the disastrous clash between a ruling power and a rising power)? They are the world’s two greatest superpowers, both have been nations that are empires by any other name, but they now stand in a curious relationship to each other. By far the older nation, China is now the younger in terms of its entry onto the stage of the modern world, whereas the younger, America, now appears the older as its people and their society show signs of extreme fatigue and irresponsibility after leading the world for little more than a hundred years. In their significance for humanity and the world at large, America claims to stand for freedom and therefore carries the hopes of the world’s desired future, whereas China still stands for authoritarianism and the sort of past that much of today’s world desires to leave behind.
Yet does America still really stand for freedom? And if so, what sort of freedom, and how is America standing for it? That is the issue. Freedom is one of the deepest and almost universal desires of humanity. Lord Acton, the great historian of freedom, claimed that “the development of liberty is the soul of history.”2 But there are profound disagreements over how to pursue it. Philosophically, freedom raises the deepest questions about humanity, about our human differences from the animals and the rest of creation, and our responsibility for our fellow humans and for the rest of the universe. And practically, freedom raises the immense challenges of building and sustaining societies that respect human dignity and create freedom for all human beings, whatever their race, religion, ideology, language, gender, culture, or political philosophy—one of the rarest and most challenging achievements of history.
The task before America is therefore plain. America must make clear what it now means by freedom, and which of the two visions it now chooses: 1776 and the classical liberal freedom of its founding, or 1789 and the Left/liberal freedom of today. Along with the gravity of its own internal crises, America also faces a world on fire, the decline of Western civilization, a faltering search for a new world order, a slate of global problems that are unprecedented, and the uncharted waters of the human future troubled by such challenges as artificial superintelligence, singularity, and posthumanism. With such monumental items on the agenda, is America still prepared to shoulder its historic task on behalf of freedom, or is that a luxury it can no longer afford? Will the torch of freedom be handed to someone else or extinguished altogether?
There is no question that for all their shortcomings, Americans have written glorious earlier chapters in the story of freedom. This was supremely so in the generation of George Washington and his fellow founders, who dared to fight for and build such a free republic; in the life and work of Abraham Lincoln that was spent to preserve the republic from tearing itself apart over the evils of slavery that contradicted the founders’ freedom; in the achievements of such leaders as Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, who staved off the menace of totalitarianism in the twentieth century; and in the countless voices of preachers and prophets, such as Martin Luther King Jr., who over the generations have kept on calling America back to its high ideals and noble mission whenever they were slipping or betrayed.
Yet lofty as these accomplishments were, they all fade into the past as the present challenge looms. This challenge does not come from outside America but from within. It represents a threat that may even surpass the menace to freedom of twentieth-century Soviet communism or Hitler’s National Socialism, and a domestic radicalization as dangerous to the republic as the radicalization of Islamic extremists. Hitler was defeated in World War II, but the spirit of Nietzsche still lives on in the American Right. Stalin’s successors capitulated at the end of the Cold War, but the spirit of Marx still lives on in the American Left.
Does America still have the will and the strength to rise to the demands of the present hour, or has its success made it complacent and its power made it corrupt, and have America’s exertions left it tired and unable to carry the torch of freedom as today’s challenges require? Have Americans divested themselves of their historic mission on behalf of freedom, and are they now merely content to live out their brief chapter in history and guarantee their mention in the grand annals of freedom’s past? Do enough Americans even care today, and do they understand what freedom is and what freedom requires? Have they faced up to the deadly double threat posed to America from outside—the post-truth climate of contemporary ideas, and the posthuman rights conditions of brutal conflict on the ground in many parts of the world? And do Americans so take freedom for granted that it is already halfway to being lost?
Such questions abound, for the emotions and attitudes that have flickered across America’s face recently have left even its admirers in dismay. America needs a second Mayflower, it is said, to sail for tomorrow’s new world, but where is this new world to be found? The nation needs another Paul Revere to raise the alarm about today’s clear and present dangers, but how would such a voice be distinguished from the surrounding cacophony of fear and alarmism? It is time for a twenty-first-century Publius to pick up the mantle of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, and set out where their great endeavors have brought us, but how is such seasoned reflection to be heard in the age of the sound bite and the angry blog? America needs an Abraham Lincoln in our day to review how the republic is faring nearly two and a half centuries after its founding, and what it requires to heal its divisions and lead the nation forward, so that its best days truly lie ahead. But is there a Washington, an Adams, a Madison, a Jefferson, a Lincoln, a Roosevelt, a King, or a Reagan in the land?
Questions like these explode in a thousand forms. But anyone pursuing the logic of their thrust will confront a stunning surprise: America’s deepest crisis lies at the point of what has always been America’s greatest strength—freedom. What has long been America’s most stirring ideal, its earliest passion, its noblest and most widely shared value, and today perhaps America’s only nearly universal point of appeal is also the ideal that is at the heart of the American crisis. America’s genius for freedom has become its Achilles’ heel and a leading source of America’s divisions and potential destruction.
Much of the way Americans now think of freedom is unrealistic and unsustainable. And worse, certain movements launched in the name of freedom represent a political and cultural counterrevolution that openly breaks with freedom as the American republic has known it. They claim they are righting wrongs and expanding freedom to ever-new levels, but in the eyes of their critics their “total” or “absolute freedom” is nothing less than “the destruction of freedom in the name of freedom.”3 Which side is right, and which should Americans follow? Those are America’s decisions, but the significance of the question is plain. The chaos of American politics is the outworking of the real conflict of our times—America’s profound clash over fundamental differences about what constitutes freedom and, therefore what constitutes humanity, justice, social change, and the human future.
President Wilson called for “a world safe for democracy.” President Kennedy called for “a world safe for diversity.” Such are the confusions and contradictions surrounding freedom in America today, and its damage to the cause of freedom throughout the world, that it is time to consider what it would mean to call for “a world safe for liberty,” and whether there is an American leader with the courage and wisdom to sound that call and set out that vision.
Same Word, Different Meanings
America means freedom, and Americans are sure of that, but what does freedom mean? Americans are not so sure about that, and many of their fights are over different ideas of freedom. So the world has to listen to America boasting about its freedom while also fighting over it and undercutting it without realizing it. What Americans need, to echo Lincoln, is a new, new birth of freedom.4
That terse comment by a United Nations diplomat sums up a surprising and mostly overlooked challenge facing America today: the crisis of freedom. In a dangerously divided America, freedom is just about the last thing that both sides still appeal to. But do they stop to ask what they actually mean by freedom? Do they recognize they have entirely different views in mind? Are their views of freedom sustainable, or are they unrealistic and fated to wither and die? What might a “new, new birth of freedom” actually mean, and what would it take to bring it to birth? Is it possible that American freedom has degenerated beyond recall?
As so often, Lincoln saw the crux of the problem clearly in his day and addressed it resolutely. Speaking at a fair in Baltimore in April 1864, he referred to rumors then swirling about a massacre of three hundred black troops in Tennessee. Behind the incident, he said, lay a bitter clash, but not just of arms. The North and the South were both fighting for freedom, but with two entirely different conceptions of freedom.
The world has never had a good definition of liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in need of one. We all declare for liberty: but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labors.
“The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat,” Lincoln continued, “for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.”5
We all declare for liberty: but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. Lincoln’s comment is even more true today, when once again American differences over freedom have become pronounced and damaging. Most twenty-first-century Americans never stop to ask if they have a good definition of freedom, whether they are in need of one, and whether their notions of freedom are solid and sustainable.
The clash of competing freedoms may be viewed in historical terms, as in the differences between the North and the South. It may be viewed in international terms, as in freedom fighter against terrorist. It may be viewed in moral terms, as in prolife against prochoice. It may be viewed in sexual terms, as in those who believe in a natural or created order (male and female) and those who believe in an order that is only socially constructed. It may be viewed in the differences between liberals who would tighten government control of economics but loosen government control of social issues, and conservatives who would do the reverse. Or, as we shall see, it may be viewed in civilizational and ideological terms as in the difference between the 1776 view of freedom, which has long animated America, and the radical 1789 views of freedom that are now part and parcel of postmodernism and being promoted all around the world.
In these and countless other conflicts in which freedom is viewed quite differently, the differences make a difference, including differences in the way in which the differences are fought out. It is therefore vital for freedom’s sake to disentangle the various differences, to see that the differences are handled openly and deliberately, and to see how the different choices have dramatically different consequences. If Americans fail to do this, the differences, whether open or submerged, will increasingly divide and weaken America, and freedom itself will be the loser.
Throughout his lifetime, Lincoln reflected long and deeply on freedom. Most famously, his Gettysburg Address called for a “new birth of freedom” for a nation that had been “conceived in liberty” but had almost destroyed itself in the Civil War. He delved into its most profound issues, such as the ultimate question of how a nation that has won freedom can sustain it, when the fact is that never before in history has freedom lasted. (“As a nation of free men,” he warned in a speech at the Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, in 1838 when he was only twenty-eight, “either we shall live free for all time, or die by suicide.”6) But Lincoln’s thinking was also unafraid to begin at the beginning, starting with the elementary question of defining freedom clearly, so that freedom is not confused, fought over, and lost. These three kinds of issues are America’s challenge today: the elementary issue of what freedom means, the ultimate issue of how it is to be sustained, and the practical issue of how it can be restored when it has been nearly lost. All three issues are raised by the confusion and clash over the definition of freedom that underlies many of today’s conflicts in American public life.
There is no question that urgent and controversial problems are now bristling on America’s national agenda and debated fiercely in countless elections and across a thousand forums. At the end of the Bush and Obama administrations, for different reasons, the United States stood with its international leadership called into question. Having squandered the historic opportunity of its unipolar moment following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States is weaker now than it has been since before the beginning of World War II. But more importantly, the United States is facing a heaving sea of problems at home: hollowed-out beliefs and weakened ethics; declining trust in institutions and leaders; self-enriching elites; cancerous racism; pay-for-play and dirtbag politics; politicized criminal justice; crony capitalism; blinkered higher education; collapsed civic education; biased mainstream press; journalistic collusion with political interests; politicized corporations; decaying infrastructures; crippling national debt; a surveillance state spying on its own citizens; porous borders; a demographic time bomb; failing inner cities that are the equivalent of failing states elsewhere; fractious culture warring; a toxic madness of gossip, suspicion, cynicism, and conspiracy theories; open talk of states’ secession; an epidemic of opioid addiction; a swollen prison population; widespread symptoms of social stress, anxiety, and loneliness; a rise in suicides; and now a deadly attempt by both Left and Right to undermine each other’s legitimacy as American and democratic.
All that, and American society is more divided—politically, economically, racially, ideologically, culturally, and religiously—than at any time since its house was divided and nearly fell in the Civil War.7 Distinguished America scholars, such as Robert Putnam and Charles Murray, have written trenchantly on the different crises that call into question the “American dream” and “what makes America America.” Yet few Americans have focused on how these crises are rooted in conflicting views of freedom, and how these conflicts affect the daily experience of freedom for Americans themselves.
Uncle Sam’s Tutorial
The grand significance of freedom in history, and for America, is plain. “Let my people go!” From the ringing cry of Moses to Pharaoh; to the heroic stands of the Greek warriors at Thermopylae, Marathon, and Salamis; to the shouts of “Libertas! Libertas!” by the assassins of Julius Caesar with their blood-soaked daggers still in their hands; to Magna Carta wrung from King John in 1215; to the great Revolutions of 1688, 1776, 1789, 1917, and 1949; and right down to the courageous and sustained victories over Hitler’s “master race” and Lenin and Stalin’s “master class,” freedom has been a prominent and irrepressible feature of world history and certainly of Western civilization in a thousand ways. Freedom is an idea and an ideal that lights the human mind and far outweighs the might of the chariot, the tank, the missile, and the jackboot. Millions of people, some well known and many more unknown, would second the great Scottish cry in the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, the Scots’ own declaration of independence and their first national covenant: “It is not for glory or riches or honors that we fight, but only for liberty, which no good man will consent to lose but with his life.”8
Such an affirmation must be balanced. Freedom may be the glory of humanity and a bedrock essential if human beings are to express their significance and be themselves, but there is another side to the story. The history of freedom also includes the story of missed targets, tarnished hopes, broken promises, shabby failures, and dark and despicable contradictions. If the entire history of human civilizations were to be squeezed into a single hour, freedom and free societies would enter only in the last few minutes. And all too often many of the noblest stands for freedom had to be fought against the terrible denials of freedom inflicted by freedom-loving people on other peoples and even on their fellow citizens.
France’s “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” ended in the Reign of Terror, the massacre of the Vendée, and dictatorship, while Marx’s “triumph of the proletariat” led to Stalin’s terror famines in Ukraine, the mass slaughter of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia. Most recently, the world has watched appalled as the heady hopes of the Arab Spring spiraled down to the savage cataclysm of jihadi barbarism and brutality across the Middle East. And of course, many of the American founders owned their own chattel slaves even as they penned their stirring declarations about freedom. Once again Lincoln was both penetrating and more consistent: “He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.”9
Nothing except love and justice fires the human heart like freedom. But the glorious and seemingly irresistible blaze of freedom has left in its wake a trail of burnt-out ideals. Liberty, hypocrisy, and cynicism have never been too far apart. The gap between desiring liberty and delivering liberty can grow wide and deep. America itself, historians say, is shot through with paradox: an “empire of liberty” built by anti-imperialists and the “land of the free” built on the backs of slaves.
Does that mean that might outweighs right on the great scales of history, that lasting freedom is a will-o’-the-wisp, and that free societies are always fated to be rare, fleeting, and corrupted? If even the glory of Athens, with its brief, bright blaze of liberty degenerated so miserably and so fast, what hope is there for other cities and other nations? Why is it so hard for any people to sustain freedom? Why have certain nations been able to achieve freedom for their citizens but have found it difficult to perpetuate freedom from one generation to the next?
Plainly, freedom poses questions that get harder as they go farther, and the nations that have attempted to answer them become fewer in the rarified atmosphere of the high-altitude challenges of history. The simple fact is that stable societies that respect human dignity for everyone are rare, challenging, and a remarkable accomplishment. So the elements of history that come together in a grand crescendo to trumpet what America has achieved are unique. The United States is the world’s first nation that has attempted to make freedom its supreme love, and place it at the center of its political order and its entire way of life. When it comes to the core of American national character, America stands and falls on its record of freedom. All of which is why America’s choice over freedom will be so decisive and consequential today—America’s identity, character, and future are at stake.
Nothing less than the ultimacy of freedom has been the bold, proud case that America has presented before the bar of history. On behalf of freedom, America has shouldered a destiny that goes far beyond the bounds of its own shores and own times. And today, when freedom has become almost universally prized but still rare and not easily attained, America stands confidently and defines itself and its mission by freedom alone. More than any other nation on earth, past or present, America celebrates itself as the “land of the free,” the “noble experiment” in freedom (George Washington), the “fairest Field of Liberty that ever appeared on Earth” (John Adams), an “empire of liberty” (Thomas Jefferson) “conceived in Liberty” (Abraham Lincoln), with citizens called to be bearers of “the ark of the liberties of the world” (Herman Melville) and destined to be “watchmen on the walls of world freedom” (John F. Kennedy).10 The motto of the state of New Hampshire might well be America’s motto too: “Live Free or Die.” America, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote, is “the modern world’s decisive articulation of the human quest for freedom.”11 For all America’s evils and hypocrisies, Shelby Steele writes, “Freedom is still our mother tongue.”12
The truth is that many Americans need to be woken up from their slumbers and self-congratulation, and many need to be called back from the chaos of their infighting. They need to recognize the rarity, audacity—and fragility—of what they have achieved, and to see how their present behavior is threatening to squander their great heritage. Above all, Americans must recognize that two competing views of freedom are locked in a mortal struggle. The question is which of the two, 1776 or 1789, is the surest guide to full and lasting personal and political freedom.
For those who are not American, the same point can be expressed more prosaically and in a way that even many critics of America would agree with. It is a simple matter of fact that at the very moment when more and more of the world’s peoples are crying out for freedom, America stands, and can be studied, warts and all, as history’s longest-running experiment in freedom. America is the world’s most public tutorial in the demanding discipline of the politics of freedom. For better or worse, it is not China, India, Germany, Brazil, Canada, Britain or France, Italy or Spain, the European Union, and certainly not Russia or Iran, but America that represents freedom for the world. Like the Greek giant Atlas with the world on his shoulders, Uncle Sam still carries the double responsibility of claiming to be the world’s lead society as well as the pioneer, the precedent, and the pattern for freedom itself.
Do Americans still believe they can succeed where all other attempts at lasting freedom have failed so far? Do they wish to? How is freedom faring in the “land of the free”? What is the real “state of the union” concerning freedom? What does the rising generation, those supposed to be America’s latest apprentices in freedom, show us of the prospects for America’s championing of freedom in the future? Do twenty-first-century Americans measure up to their ancestors’ and history’s best understanding of freedom, and do they match their ancestors’ realism as to why all earlier bids for freedom were short-lived? Will some future generation of Americans know how to respond when the day comes, as come it surely will, when America’s rivalry with other nations grows intense and American freedom begins to decline, as all other nations and their freedoms have in their turn?
Checklist for a Healthy Freedom
My approach here is straightforward. It is time to face the present crisis and use it to concentrate the American mind and to reexamine the character and condition of freedom. What America needs is a virtual “national town hall meeting,” a nationwide conversation to discuss the state of America’s freedom, to debate and vote on the important differences between different views of freedom, and to address the points in which freedom needs to be restored. Extremists on both the left and the right are trying to shut down public debate and prevent such a discussion from ever happening. Equally, the mainstream press and media only cover and review opinions that fit with their own perspective. Yet Americans must not be intimidated and the debate must not be silenced. This national conversation must take place, and it must engage the younger generation. It must take seriously the comprehensive challenges of history, and it must do justice to the astonishing contribution of the founding generation, despite their obvious failings.
What follows is a straightforward call to Americans to consider why this is an urgent moment for the renewal of America’s freedom and what it would require. My approach is simple and straightforward: to set out a citizens’ checklist of ten questions that are essential for assessing the character and health of freedom, and the requirements for its restoration and renewal. Americans must decide where they are, choose which of the two great revolutions best fosters freedom, and commit themselves to what needs to be done to restore a vital and sustainable freedom. The task is great and the hour is late.
In the harsh light of fifty years of fruitless culture warring and the bitter current divisions, the challenge is daunting. Can the present generation of Americans repeat Hamilton’s twin tasks of “reflection and choice,” and do so with an understanding and appreciation for what freedom means and what it requires, especially in the world of today? Contrary to ancient pagan fatalism, as well as to modern forms of scientific determinism, the same beliefs that once grounded and guaranteed the high view of freedom also mean that history is not fate, and the rise and fall of nations is never inevitable. It is time for Americans to remind themselves what gave rise to their freedom, to assess where they stand today, to refuse the seductions of false freedoms, and to decide what they need to do to restore the health of freedom while they can.
Some will say that this focus on freedom is a luxury item in a world burdened by the threat of war, disease, terror, human trafficking, environmental degradation, and nuclear proliferation. That will not be the case for those who understand the place and importance of freedom in America. Freedom is no luxury to America. Freedom is America’s supreme love—and America’s identity, America’s genius, America’s promise, and America’s grand purpose in the world. America stands or falls according to its beliefs and behavior over freedom. Without freedom, or with a changed view of freedom, America would no longer be America. So if America is not to follow Athens and Rome and suffer a fall beyond belief, the unthinkable demands careful thought and resolute decision and action today.
