It’s not exactly a novel thesis at this point, nor an obscure one (thanks, Tucker!), and I make no claims to originality. But a few weeks ago, I wrote a short essay responding to the prompt, “What are the most significant challenges and opportunities for the future of freedom?” I decided to articulated, as briefly as possible, my objections to the insidious idea that “America is an idea.” For reasons of space, I focused much more on the “challenges” part of the question than the “opportunities.” Here it is.
Every error contains a grain of truth, and the most dangerous errors contain enough true grains to seem persuasive even to the well-informed and best-intentioned. The most significant challenges for the future of freedom derive from the error that “America is an idea.”
This error is plausible for several reasons, including: the highly intellectual roots of our nation (not only at the Founding but also in the Pilgrims), the significance of philosophy for our most important documents (not only the Declaration but also the Federalist and Lincoln’s speeches), and America’s role in ushering in the information age. And this error is seductive, for at least two reasons. First, it tempts us with an easy solution to the aspiration, E pluribus unum: if only we assent to these propositions, we will overcome our deepest divisions. Second, it flatters intellectuals: if America is an idea, then those of us who specialize in ideas are the most important members of society!
But it is an error, and a dangerous one. Nations are not ideas. America is located in a particular place, textured by particular geographic conditions, populated by particular persons with particular backgrounds, habits, and beliefs. And it is dangerous, because it collapses the difference between the necessary particularism of politics and the inherent universalism of philosophy. This error inclines us toward utopian schemes of remaking the world—culturally, socially, economically, and politically—into a “universal and homogeneous state.” This mentality also aids the acute crises we observe in the denigration of the human person to a “ghost in a machine” and of the home, town, state, and nation to outmoded loci of prejudice rather than sources of formation and meaning. This results in the delusion that—with the aid of technology—we can remake ourselves, our society, and reality itself in accordance with our sovereign wills. In the meantime, this project empowers the managers, academics, and consultants who staff major corporations, nonprofits, and the administrative state, who appeal to their expert credentials (rather than the consent of the governed) as legitimating sources of their oligarchic authority, and thus undermine self-government in our federal republic.
The most significant opportunities for the future of freedom are found in recovering the truth about America. An accurate study of our creed and culture, ideas and history, as well as a charitable interpretation of the populist revolt against the ruling class, reveals that we retain great potential for local self-government; that we retain the “manly firmness” of our patriot forebears; that we retain the adventurous, can-do spirit of the American pilgrims and pioneers, engineers and entrepreneurs. Innovations in the use of power—in local and state government as well as private-sector actors—to restrain every enemy of liberty, whether D.C. or Disney, are a promising start. The classical school movement demonstrates that we still have Tocqueville’s art of voluntarily associating. Americans are remembering what the Founders knew: that not only the right ideas but also the right, courageous spirit is required to secure the blessings of liberty.
One (Manentian-inspired) comment: all of western politics is an ongoing effort to conjugate two things: the common and the truth; the universal and the particular. Therefore, I worry about throwing away the bathwater with the baby.
The only way forward is indeed manliness. Otherwise, everything is an idea: Place is an idea, the person is an idea; creed is an idea, culture is an idea; history is an idea, too.
The open secret in America is, nobody cares about ideas, they just want to get certain things done, & that requires passive consent, which an audience can give to a speech.
Active consent &, indeed, human action--what a mountain, what a climb, & how few people who wish to have the commanding view of things... Yet, as you say, it's somehow possible to see in the transformation of education a desire for something more human, as well as in other shows of spirited resistance to despotism.