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The American Ideal is easy in principle…
“We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness… that governments are instituted among men to secure these rights…”
… however, although most Americans profess to believe the above in principle, things fall apart in practice. Because of this disconnect, America is marching in ignorance toward the cliff of socialism.
If the Founding Fathers came back today, they would be horrified. I can see John Adams thundering at us: “Fools! You are living under tyranny and you don’t even realize it. You have lost the liberty we secured for you because you have been duped by demagogues and their promises of 30 pieces of someone else’s silver.”
Jefferson’s eloquent and glorious words in the Declaration of Independence, about the equality and rights of man, would have been nothing more than great prose, if the Founders had not also established the conditions for fulfilling that promise.
The idea that all men were created equal and had inalienable rights to their own lives, liberty, and property — and should therefore be free to pursue their own individual happiness — was a revolutionary concept at the time. Only a small percentage of people would have agreed with that in 1776. Up until that moment, people had always been ruled in one form or another.
The founding principles of America were the ideals of the Enlightenment more than anything else. They evolved over thousands of years in the struggle for liberty and against oppression.
To fulfill the promise made in the Declaration, the Founder’s generation had to fight a long and bloody war against the most powerful army on earth (and later, fulfilling that promise resulted in an even bloodier Civil War).
All of the men and women who founded this Republic had much to lose, but they pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” for the cause of liberty and independence. After the war, John Adams said:
Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.
In order to secure the moral principle of individual rights in practice, they designed a unique structure of government with strictly limited powers. The Constitution and Bill Of Rights form the foundations for political liberty, designed to secure the sovereignty of the individual, not the sovereignty of the government.
It was this political liberty that was responsible for the astounding achievements, discoveries and wealth creation of America in its first 150 years. When men were finally freed from the chains of statist oppression, it unleashed a torrent of human intelligence and energy, the likes of which the world has never seen before or since.
In roughly one century, the Americans, along with the English, and a few countries in Western Europe, advanced mankind to a far greater degree than had been done in all of the 6000 years prior.
It was the promise of Liberty and the idea that your life, your work, your destiny, and the fruits of your labor were your own that resulted in the rocket explosion of success that was America in her youth. It was the promise of Liberty and the guaranteed right of property that drew millions from all corners of the world, seeking the American Dream.
Sadly, Liberty and the American Dream were not to last.
For the past century, we have been moving steadily away from America’s founding principles, due to the influence of collectivist ideologies and the subsequent increase in the size, scope and power of government.
We have now almost completely abandoned the Constitution and there is virtually no limitation placed on government whatsoever. Individualism has almost been completely replaced by Collectivism and we live under a pseudo-dictatorship imposed by majority rule. We’re not “on the road to serfdom,” anymore. We’ve arrived.
This has happened because of a tremendous lack of knowledge by Americans of their own heritage, the principles of liberty, and how they are actually applied in practice. It’s also happened due to misconceptions about what rights actually are in a political context and an inability of those who say they value American Ideals to defend them on moral grounds.
But we can reverse this trend. The gods of the sky and the state die hard. But truth and freedom die harder.
In the worlds of Ronald Reagan..
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children what it was once like in the United States when men were free.
–TJM