Things are so bad in America that the only solution is to burn the whole system down, and start all over again.” That radical-sounding statement came from a student at Cal Berkeley, but a young woman who in fact was far from radical or revolutionary, and quite different from the stereotype of the Berkeley student. Did she know she was echoing Saul Alinsky’s words, “Burn the system down!” from the opening page of his Rules for Radicals?1 Most probably it was her own student summary of the multiple crises in America today, and she said it with a tone of weary cynicism. All the political answers she had been taught had been weighed and found wanting. Each one was forlorn or a sham, and none of the ideals that she and her friends had grown up with could be counted on to do better.
Her generation, some of her fellow students argued, knows it has nothing constructive to offer and feels it is all the wiser for not having to pretend otherwise. All the grand political visions from Plato to Machiavelli to Madison to Marx had argued their case to the world and had been riddled with bullet-hole objections in their turn, so there was no point in presenting yet another vision to be instantly struck down. No belief can hope to carry the day. Beliefs are simply fated to be piñatas for scholars and radicals to smash, and the faster each one falls to the ground the better. The safer course is to realize that you cannot defeat the system with any belief that can hope to carry the day, so to join in the fun and treat all ideas with irony and detachment and watch to see their fate exposed in their turn. How else can anyone maintain their sanity in a world gone mad? Idealists are foolish to expose their hearts. Realists are wise to shield themselves. Cynicism and jaded irony are the ultimate shield against vulnerability. The canny way is to play life like a game of poker and cover your cards with a wink, a quip, or a put-down.
I have encountered several varieties of such cynicism among young Americans. Sadly, they tend to prize their suspicion as the fruit of their hard-won wisdom, when in fact they are merely captives to the spirit of their age, for postmodern thinking and advertising reinforce their suspicion and cynicism at every turn. The post-truth world was hailed by Nietzsche in the 1880s, championed by Michel Foucault in the 1960s and 1970s, and trumpeted by The Economist in 2016, as if its first pioneer and worst villain was Donald Trump. Needless to say, the post-truth problem is far older and goes far wider than any current controversies, and Americans have yet to address some of the worst damage it has caused—including the widespread American proneness to what Rabbi Heschel warned of as “the escape to suspicion.”2
The problem of power is only the most obvious of the problems of post-truth thinking. Thanks to Nietzsche and to later depth psychology, post-truth thinking breeds suspicion and cynicism because it calls into question all motivation. Neither truth nor goodness nor any other ideal are ever pursued wholeheartedly and for their own sake alone. Humans always have mixed motives. We do things for ourselves and for our own self-interest.
That point is clearly part of the Bible’s realism too, but without the principles that accompany it in the Bible, it causes irreparable damage. The result, Heschel notes, is that “suspicion is the shortest way to the understanding of human nature. This it seems is the modern version of the Golden Rule: Suspect thy neighbor as thyself.”3 Suspicion breeds suspicion, just as conspiracy theories breed conspiracy theories. Foster them both in the incubator of the social media, and it sets off a massive chain reaction and destroys the honesty and trust that are essential to freedom.
Such post-truth suspicion hits America particularly hard because the American republic is expressly a nation “by intention and by ideas.” Suspicion by default poisons all integrity and compromises all idealism. No one, it argues, is ever simply and straightforwardly honest, patriotic, and a lover of freedom. Advanced education delivers us from such naivety. Everyone has their price, and for everything there is always another reason. We know too much now to be fooled, and only a simpleton or a child can still believe innocently in nursery tales about “the land of the free.” Rabbi Heschel continues:
The hysteria of suspicion holds many of us in its spell. It has not only affected our understanding of others but also made us unreliable to ourselves, making it impossible to trust either our aspirations or convictions.
The self-suspicious man shrinks from the light. He is often afraid to think as he feels, afraid to admit what he believes, afraid to love what he admires. Going astray he blames others for his failure and becomes more evasive, smooth-tongued and deceitful. Living in fear, he thinks that ambush is the normal dwelling-place of all men.4
More than half a century after Heschel wrote those words, American public life has degenerated even further, led by ambush journalism, feet-of-clay tabloids, and the weaponizing of suspicion through psychiatry. Most appallingly of all, in post-truth America, power allied with suspicion has led to the politicizing of psychiatry or the psychiatrizing of politics. Groundless accusations of mental instability and senility were once the diabolical tools of repression wielded by Soviet and Chinese tyrants. Now they are the shameless, run-of-the-mill accusations of American liberals and journalists who do not realize what they are doing.
Fortunately, there is still a world of difference between such post-truth powermongering and the attitude of the radicals who would truly like to burn America down. The latter are a Taliban-like attempt to sandblast history and remove all traces of America’s original sin of racism and its impurities. As I write, the immediate targets of the extreme Left are Confederate statues and memorials, but some of America’s new Jacobins are baying for more aristocratic blood. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are among those currently in their sights, and among non-Americans whose statues have been already vandalized are Father Serra, founder of the Californian missions; Christopher Columbus; and even the French heroine Joan of Arc. To be consistent, of course, they should blacklist the Democratic Party itself, for its role in the defense of slavery, and even in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, is undeniable. But then, if anyone and anything at all is to be left standing, there must be a better way to deal with the crooked timber of humanity and the sins and evils of the past.
Fortunately again, however, both of these “burn America down” attitudes are a long way from the majority of Americans. But the many current crises show that American shame and negativity have gone far deeper than many suspected, and they have swept up some surprising recruits at a surprisingly high level. Robert E. Lee fought for Virginia rather than for slavery, but it was a Virginia senator who called for Lee’s statue to be removed from the US Capitol and replaced by that of Pocahontas. Clearly, mainstream America has been pushed onto its back foot, and many of its responses are confused and uncertain as it waits for a Lincoln-like champion to stand up for its best while acknowledging and remedying its worst. But together, all such responses raise the second question on the checklist: Do enough Americans care enough about freedom to think through its significance in the present turbulent crisis? From a visitor’s perspective, it is increasingly hard to be sanguine, but the question must be raised because it is the citizens’ response that counts.
Doubtless many Americans would simply prefer to keep their heads down, avoid all controversial questions, and hope that they and the country will survive the storm. Others, maybe, are raising and (without realizing it) answering the question: Are the arduous requirements of responsible freedom worth the price? Without realizing it, they are all opting for happiness rather than freedom as they try to lessen the demands of freedom and avoid (a.k.a. “appease”) the ugliness of the extremes of those already rejecting it. But there is a simple reason why no type of denial will work. Freedom is inescapably central to America, and so long as freedom lasts, the struggle for freedom and the adventuring on behalf of freedom are unending. Like the future, freedom is open-ended and conditional, and its challenge is posed freshly every day to every generation and with ever-new questions raised. The “errand into the wilderness” does not stop, even if the terrain of the wilderness changes. The “frontier spirit” cannot rest, though today’s frontiers are quite different from those facing the pioneers. Open-endedness and conditionality are a constant challenge for freedom, and no generation can claim immunity.
This means that there are always two moments of special danger for freedom. The first is when any generation is tempted to think it unfair that their ancestors committed them to the arduous task of sustaining freedom. Why should they bear the price? Aren’t they entitled to enjoy the fruits? The second and obvious danger is when freedom grows complacent, when a free people settle down and are tempted to believe that freedom has arrived and is now assured. Their victories and their monuments in stone are the proof of their lasting success. When this happens, a free people shifts mentally from the challenge of open-endedness to the presumption of certainty and lulls itself to sleep with the assurance that they know why their success is guaranteed and permanent.
That happened to ancient Israel, Michael Walzer observed, when the “conditionality,” the “if-then mutualism,” or the “if” and “if not, not” of the original Sinai covenant was transformed into the surefire guarantee that God was behind King David’s royal house, regardless of how the Israelites behaved.5 The most common way Americans make an equivalent shift is through a false reliance on “American exceptionalism,” as if that claim were a guarantee from history that America is decisively and permanently different from other nations, and its freedom would last forever.
Open-endedness means there is no ducking the questions that Americans must continue to face. The American story is neither a fairy tale (the American revolutionaries defeated their colonial oppressors and lived happily ever after) nor does it have to be a classical Greek tragedy (in its soaring triumph, the United States inevitably came to suffer from hubris and brought on its own nemesis). Open-endedness is intrinsic to freedom, and America’s freedom has to be shouldered constantly in two senses: America has a foundational commitment to both the “American project” and the “American experiment.”
In the case of the American project, the challenge to freedom stems from the fact that America is a nation by intention and by ideas, and freedom is America’s central idea. The project therefore poses its question directly to American citizens and addresses their ongoing will and ability to create and sustain a free society. Freedom is a project because it is never a given but an ongoing task, so the question posed by the American project today is, Are you up to the task in your time, and are you still committed to the mission? No other nation can answer that question for America, and each generation of Americans must shoulder their responsibility for the task in their turn.
In the case of the American experiment, the question posed is slightly different and raised before a far larger gallery of spectators in light of the grand record of history. America has made grand claims about freedom to the world, both at its founding and throughout its story. It must therefore answer for those claims and do so honestly. Is the great American experiment in freedom thriving, and on what grounds does it still hope to succeed when all previous experiments in freedom have so far failed?
Either way, the truth stands. American freedom is open-ended by definition, and its challenge is unending. This open-endedness will continue for as long as the project and the experiment thrive, and it will end only by their failing. Freedom can succeed by triumphing over one enemy after another, expanding into one area after another, or including one new oppressed minority or group after another. Each advance would signal a genuine triumph, but America can never pronounce that freedom has succeeded once and for all, only that it has thrived so far. There can be no announcement of “Mission Accomplished” on the deck of any warship. It was George Washington himself who called America “the great experiment,” but the awareness of the open-endedness goes back far earlier than the founders—to the New England Puritans and their “errand into the wilderness,” and behind them to the Jewish Torah and Israel’s exodus from Egypt and journey to the Promised Land. Seeing themselves as living before God and bound in their different ways by their freely chosen covenants, both the Jews and the Puritans understood the ongoing responsibility of freedom and the significance of the choices they were making. Freedom was an ongoing task and a continuing mission.
Separated by many centuries, the Jews and the Puritans in their turn each believed that they were created by a free God and called and covenanted to be a free people, so they were capable of choice and were responsible to choose between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, and responsibility and irresponsibility. And because their choices were open-ended, they could always choose to bring down on themselves a curse as easily as a blessing, and disaster as well as success. In the Torah, this was the choice Moses presented to his people in his last great speech before his death. “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, your and your descendants” (Deut 30:19).
This solemn commitment to the covenant and its choice was originally enacted for the Jews between the lush and fertile Mount Ebal and the barren and desolate Mount Gerizim. One was the dramatic symbol of the blessing they could choose and the other the symbol of the curse they might bring on themselves. Would they live up to their calling and define themselves according to their national distinctiveness and thrive? Or would they follow the natural course of the nations around them, many of them far greater and more glorious, and decline and die? The choice was theirs and the choice was consequential. So also is America’s choice today.
We talk today of cutting a deal, but the term comes from “cutting a covenant.” Those who bound themselves through the covenant passed between the two halves of sacrificial animals laid on the ground. That act symbolized how the cutting in two of things normally united spoke of the binding together of parties previously divided. It also symbolized what the parties solemnly chose to be their own fate if they violated the agreement. They understood that the covenant was conditional, consequential, and costly. Centuries later, John Winthrop spelled out the same elemental terms, the same basic alternatives, and the same essential responsibility of freedom as he preached on the rolling deck of the Arbella in the Atlantic in 1630. He and his Puritan colleagues, he reminded them, were free to obey the terms of their new covenant with God and each other and so be “a City upon a Hill,” or to break their covenant and become “a story and a byword through the world.”6
The current parties to the American covenant have multiplied by many millions, but the same conditions, the same open-endedness of the project, and the same challenge of the experiment confront Americans today as they did the Jews and the Puritans earlier. Choose freedom and live in the light of all that freedom requires, and Americans and their freedom can hope to thrive and endure—potentially, forever. But live another way, neglecting what freedom means and what freedom requires, and Americans and their freedom will decline as surely as the sun sets in the sky and nations decline and fall in time.
In sum, two truths confront Americans in every generation: The great experiment is conditional, and the citizens of the American republic are responsible. There can be no end to the open-endedness of the challenge of American freedom, short of its breakdown. Each generation of Americans must therefore bear their responsibility for freedom in their own time, though none can know how the experiment will end after them. Needless to say, the conditionality is easier of the two because it only needs to be remembered, whereas the responsibility has to be shouldered. Responsibility, or the lack of it, is the fly in the ointment today. Modern America, driven by consumerism, entertainment, and an ever-expanding state, is a society for the servicing of needs of every sort. Rights and rights talk therefore far outweigh responsibility, yet rights without responsibilities are simply politicized self-interests, and they sound the death knell of republican freedom.
We certainly know how other experiments have ended. All history is our teacher—for example, about the failed Athenian experiment in democracy. But in America’s case we simply do not, and cannot, know what will happen until it happens. Hence the wisdom and force of the long-running maxim “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.” Hence the importance of diagnosing the state of the union with relentless honesty. And hence the need to work to renew the covenant of freedom when it has broken down or shows clear signs of disrepair.
No one knows the outcome for America. I make no predictions, though in calling for a decisive choice and for a renewal of freedom, this book is an expression of hope and not a jeremiad. It is written with the same conviction that Winston Churchill expressed in his famous Iron Curtain speech in 1946, after World War II. There had never been a war in all history that was easier to prevent without the firing of a single shot if people had only listened. In the same way, no national decline would be easier to prevent than the decline of the American republic today—if only American leaders and citizens were to pay attention to the wisdom of the ages regarding the character of freedom and what lasting freedom requires.
Will Americans pay attention to the wisdom of history? Statues may be toppled and memorials defaced, but can the enduring problems of the human heart and society be sandblasted so easily? In the hysteria of the present crisis, no one should hold their breath. What is beyond question is that history’s longest-running experiment in freedom and the world’s most public freedom tutorial have both reached a critical stage today. Unless this crisis is addressed resolutely, the American republic will be facing a major time of trial to match such previous times of trial as the Civil War, the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. That is what I mean when I echo Tom Paine and say that these are the times that try men’s souls and that America’s genius for freedom is becoming America’s Achilles’ heel.
Freedom talk is cheap in America today. It often has the tones of complacency, self-congratulation, and (with marketers marketing and politicians running for office) self-promotion. This is not unexpected in an age drunk with its own heady cocktail of individualism, libertarianism, consumerism, and narcissism, when “It’s all about us” and “I, my selfie, and me.” Today, Sherry Turkle writes, we are all “personal brand managers,” and many are suffering from “presentation anxiety.”7 It was not always so. The founders’ generation was braced by their awareness that when they picked up the torch of freedom, it was not just for themselves but in the light of history and on behalf of humanity. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention, James Madison declared, were “digesting a plan which in its operation wd. decide forever the fate of Republican Govt.”8 If the convention were to fail, Benjamin Franklin declared, “mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing Governments by Human Wisdom and leave it to chance, war and conquest.”9
Later, following the success of the convention, Washington set out America’s titanic challenge with an equal sense of moment in his first inaugural address—“the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government” were staked on “the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”10 Walt Whitman stated the same conviction in the nineteenth century: “America is really the great test or trial case for all the problems and promises and speculations of humanity and of the past and the present.”11
The word intentional is overused today, as if life were ours for each of us to control and steer with ease. Yet it is true that, unlike almost all other countries at the time of the Revolution, the United States was a nation by intention and by ideas. It was a “designer nation,” “the first new nation,” at least in the modern world, for the same was true earlier of the Jewish people as they were forged and constituted by their covenant at Mount Sinai. America was nothing less than a freedom project and a liberty movement—which meant two things: First, America was founded by certain people at a certain time, with certain ideas and a certain purpose. And second, freedom was not seen as a given but as an accomplishment that needed to be sustained with resolution and courage.
It was this awareness that set America off from most other nations at the time. With the distinguished exception of John Jay, who was a French Huguenot, most of the founders were British, and most of them were English. But England itself was anything but a nation by intention and ideas. Philosopher Roger Scruton captured the difference succinctly. “England was not a nation or a creed or a language or a state but a home. Things at home don’t need an explanation. They are there because they are there.”12 Or as G. K. Chesterton remarked, “We admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons.”13
America’s revolutionary character comes with its own considerable cost. Since America is a nation by intention and by ideas, it will always rise and fall, flourish or falter, according to the strength of those ideas and according to the way it sustains and improves them, or fails to sustain and improve that founding and those beginnings. The United States is different from most families, tribes, and nations on the earth, whose origins recede into the impenetrable mists of time and are defined only by such factors as language and geography. Like the Jewish people, America is a nation created at a specific moment in history and in the full light of day, and expressly shaped by certain specific ideals and ideas, and not others. It therefore has a mission and a task, and so long as freedom remains central to this purpose, American freedom requires freedom’s schools as much as freedom’s armies.
In the famous words of Alexander Hamilton’s first essay in The Federalist Papers,
It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved for the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident or force.14
Historians have observed that in the two decades prior to the Constitutional Convention, “American political discourse was an ongoing public forum on the meaning of liberty.”15 Would that the same compliment could be paid to the rising generation of today’s young Americans, so that they might repeat that achievement in our time. For what is needed today is a rousing national debate about freedom and its requirements, which might lead in to a national reaffirmation and restoration of American freedom, and even to the rejuvenation of freedom for the wider world. No less than that is at stake in our day.
Natural forces such as gravity will always operate in the universe, whether we believe in them or not, and we cannot defy them for long. But a created political order like the American republic is different. It depends on a constant and determined effort to maintain the beliefs that made it what it is, and therefore on constant storytelling from generation to generation. If the day ever comes when the American people cease to tell the stories or divest those beliefs, or the beliefs themselves lose their compelling power, the republic will be in trouble, and sooner or later it will experience inevitable decline and collapse. America’s freedom project would have failed, its great experiment in freedom would be over, and its mission and task would have been aborted. And with that failure would come a wider eclipse of freedom in the world and a return to the age-old human politics of power and the twin scourges of tyranny and war.
Will it be said that freedom was too hard a challenge for Americans to overcome? This, then, is the second question on the checklist that Americans must answer constructively: Do enough Americans care enough about freedom to take stock of where America is today, to think through the significance of freedom in the present crisis, and to debate the choices with the gravity and civility that such grand stakes require?
For a long time, Americans and others have argued that the American way of constitutional governance is the answer to the supposed inadequacy of more traditional nations in responding to the conditions of modernity. The modern world’s “first new nation” was ideally placed to answer the challenges of modernity, it was held. In contrast, societies linked by organic ties, such as African tribes, and nations built on hierarchical power, such as the Chinese, were considered less viable in the open and fluid conditions of advanced modernity. But this claim assumed that America’s constitutional way of governance has navigated the rapids of advanced modernity with assured success. America’s present problems show that is not so. Thus, unless the United States renews its way of governance, surmounts the present crisis of freedom, and once again shoulders its historic mission on behalf of freedom, the world could be facing an unwelcome fact: Advanced modernity has put severe strains on all the major forms of human governance, including the American, so that stable and lasting freedom for all the world’s peoples is as far away as ever.