{"id":84908,"date":"2019-12-18T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-18T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/liberty-collective-individual\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T09:06:12","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T13:06:12","slug":"liberty-collective-individual","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/liberty-collective-individual\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberty: collective &#038; individual"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"Text_Inital-Cap-Text\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" allow=\"autoplay\" frameborder=\"no\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/750453514&#038;color=%23ff5500&#038;auto_play=false&#038;hide_related=false&#038;show_comments=true&#038;show_user=true&#038;show_reposts=false&#038;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Inital-Cap-Text\">F<span class=\"Optical-Kerning\">ro<\/span>m society\u2019s commanding heights, a ruling class of intellectuals, politicians, publicists, industrialists, and bureaucrats, as well as churchmen, has devalued the attachments to God, family, locality, and nation by which Westerners, and especially Americans, have lived, and has purveyed the sense that we are parts of a global political economy run by experts. Contemporary \u201cinternationalism\u201d is part of the larger progressive effort to substitute government by officials, who are supposed to be intellectually and morally superi<a id=\"_idTextAnchor000\"><\/a>or, for government by, of, and for the people. This essay examines the philosophical and practical bases for the American people\u2019s rejection of the past century\u2019s peculiar internationalism, and suggests that the best way of transcending it\u2014to resume control of ourselves as well as of our relationship with other peoples\u2014is to return to the principles practiced by presidents from Washington to Theodore Roosevelt.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">The assumption that human beings are rightly governed only by their betters entered the progressive tradition as an inheritance from France\u2019s<span class=\"Ital\"> ancien r\u00e9gime<\/span> which Napoleon institutionalized throughout Western Europe under the banner of the Revolution. Hegel celebrated state-engineered process as the march of the human spirit. Only in the 1880s did it come to America in the writings of Josiah Strong, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Croly. Ordinary people can hardly imagine the domestic objectives at which progressivism aims. Progressivism\u2019s international objectives\u2014perpetual worldwide peace and the equality of peoples\u2014are even further from ordinary people\u2019s grasp or cares. The administrative state internally, and \u201cglobalism\u201d internationally, are two sides of the same progressive coin.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text pullquote-right month-border \">The century of progressivist internationalism has been a time of war.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">The statesmen of America\u2019s first century managed foreign affairs in tandem with the people\u2019s concerns, using language common to the people and within the Constitution\u2019s provisions for popular accountability, because they believed that the people are and should be in control. By contrast, our progressive ruling class has focused foreign policy on matters beyond ordinary people\u2019s ken and expressed in jargon, in no small part to remove what they do from these peoples\u2019 hands. They believe that Americans\u2019 instincts mix isolationism and militant nationalism, and lead to war. In fact, when the people\u2019s priorities ruled, America enjoyed a century of international peace. The century of progressivist internationalism has been a time of war.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Inital-Cap-Text\">E<span class=\"Optical-Kerning\">ur<\/span>ope\u2019s secular worship of nation-states, which began in the fifteenth century and culminated in the Great War\u2019s paroxysm, never came to America. It is difficult to over-emphasize Americans\u2019 devotion to peace and rejection of international quarrels. When presidents from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt steered clear of others\u2019 wars, they were acting as the American people\u2019s fiduciary agents.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">Who rules, and by what right? Mankind\u2019s default answer is that the strong rule by virtue of strength. Plato\u2019s <span class=\"Ital\">Republic<\/span> disputes this at length on the basis of natural reason. Our Declaration of Independence does so succinctly. It states: \u201cThe laws of Nature and Nature\u2019s God\u201d entitle \u201cone people\u201d\u2014any and all peoples\u2014to a \u201cseparate and equal station\u201d \u201camong the powers of the earth.\u201d How can we know that? We know it because of a \u201cself-evident\u201d truth: \u201call men are created equal . . . endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.\u201d To whom is that truth about the Creator\u2019s creation self-evident? It is self-evident to those who believe in the Creator\u2019s words: \u201cand God created man in His own image, male and female created He them.\u201d It is self-evident because God creates all human beings, and because that divine image is single, ineffable. And because each and every human being is naturally sovereign over his own \u201clife, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,\u201d no one may rightly rule him without his consent.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">Biblical revelation of equal creation supports the Declaration\u2019s statements of natural liberty\u2014collective and individual. Hence, all men are naturally free to distinguish themselves collectively among \u201cthe powers of the earth.\u201d Therefore each people, sovereign over itself, exercises its natural liberty to rule itself, and only itself. The <span class=\"Ital\">collective<\/span> right of peoples to have lives of their own and to pursue happiness as they see fit is simply the writ-large version of the equal rights of <span class=\"Ital\">individuals<\/span> that proceeds from their equal creation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text pullquote-left month-border \">As far as America\u2019s founders were concerned, the whole point of government is to preserve the happy coincidence that made America unique.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">Though individual liberty implies collective liberty, the exercise of collective liberty does not necessarily imply the enjoyment of natural human rights, never mind the exercise of civil liberties. In America these liberties happened to coincide, albeit imperfectly, because of a heretofore happy coincidence of a certain sense of nationhood with a certain understanding and dedication to righteous living.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">As far as America\u2019s founders were concerned, the whole point of government is to preserve the happy coincidence that made America unique. John Quincy Adams explained the Founders\u2019 America:<\/p>\n<p class=\"Blockquote_Blockquote\">the people . . . were associated bodies of civilized men and christians, in a state of nature, but not of anarchy. They were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of the gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledged as the rules of their conduct. They were bound by the principles which they themselves had proclaimed in the declaration . . . by all the beneficent laws and institutions, which their forefathers had brought with them from their mother country, by habits of hardy industry, by frugal and hospitable manners, by the general sentiments of social equality, by pure and virtuous morals.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text-Flush\">The people, he said, were to cultivate and show forth a character, commitment, and cohesion peculiar and separate from that of other nations:<\/p>\n<p class=\"Blockquote_Blockquote\">It is a common government that constitutes our country. But in <span class=\"CharOverride-1\">THAT<\/span> association, all the sympathies of domestic life and kindred blood, all the moral ligatures of friendship and of neighborhood, are combined with that instinctive and mysterious connection between man and physical nature, which binds the first perceptions of childhood in a chain of sympathy with the last gasp of expiring age, to the spot of our nativity, and the natural objects by which it is surrounded. These sympathies belong and are indispensable to the relations ordained by nature between the individual and his country. . . . These are the feelings under which the children of Israel \u201csat down by the rivers of Babylon, and wept when they remembered Zion.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">The precondition for preserving the American people\u2019s character was and would remain preserving its independence\u2014its collective liberty to govern itself. Because the habits that come from exercising responsibility, collective as well as individual, are key to that character, making that exercise the foremost priority for all policy is essential. This does not mean navel-gazing. It does mean looking at everything through the prism of what serves America.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Inital-Cap-Text\">I<span class=\"Optical-Kerning\">n <\/span>the century prior to progressivism, labeling any proposal or point of view as \u201cAmerica First\u201d would have been meaningless. Statesmen debated policy within their fiduciary responsibilities\u2019 natural focus. Concern for whatever happens beyond our borders depended on its impact on Americans. But the progressives\u2019 paramount premise is precisely the opposite: that <span class=\"Reduced-Text-Body\">U.S.<\/span> policy\u2019s proper primary concern must be with mankind as a whole, and with America and Americans only incidentally and derivatively. Therefore, progressives have used the label \u201cAmerica First\u201d as an imputation of narrow-mindedness, selfishness\u2014in short, of illegitimacy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">America First, however, may be the most succinct description of George Washington\u2019s statecraft. By telling his fellow citizens \u201cthe name of <span class=\"Small-Caps\">american<\/span>, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation,\u201d he was adjuring Americans to look at the rest of the world through America\u2019s prism. Washington had no doubt that America would soon be powerful. But maintaining peace and independence would depend chiefly on regarding everything from an American perspective. From that perspective, all nations are equal, in that their interests and quarrels are their own, not ours. Our interest is to have \u201cHarmony and liberal intercourse\u201d with all that would have it with us. To do that, we should \u201cobserve good faith and justice towards all Nations.\u201d That, in turn, requires avoiding political connections that would drag us into their quarrels. Taking sides in those quarrels naturally tends to pit Americans against one another: \u201cWhy forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">The 1790s taught Washington that commitments to foreign nations embitter existing domestic partisan divisions. Because each side cites foreign concerns to strengthen its case against other Americans, alliances tend to be sources of weakness, not strength.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">When Washington wrote to the nation\u2019s governors that it was now up to the American people to \u201cestablish or ruin their national Character forever,\u201d he was urging Americans above all to guard their identity as a virtuous people. In the tradition that Montesquieu and Gibbon had transmitted from Livy, Washington repeatedly reminded Americans that, to remain free, they must take care to be virtuous. Never in history had that been easy. Nor would it be now. No power would make up for lack of virtue. Maintaining the integrity of America\u2019s soul was also the reason why John Quincy Adams emphasized abstinence from others\u2019 quarrels, from the temptation to make America \u201cthe dictatress of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">Adams was intimately acquainted with Washington\u2019s teachings and with Hamilton\u2019s, Madison\u2019 and Jay\u2019s reasoning on what it takes to maintain peace, as well as with his father\u2019s application of naval power to maintain it. This, in addition to his having watched as Presidents Jefferson\u2019s and Madison\u2019s neglect of military power forced America into the War of 1812, led him to devote his diplomatic career to defining and establishing the Founders\u2019 foreign policy as a paradigm for future generations.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text pullquote-right month-border \">Adams hoped that acting honorably and respectfully among nations would also help foster honor and integrity\u2014republicanism\u2019s bases\u2014among Americans.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">Expansion of <span class=\"Reduced-Text-Body\">U.S.<\/span> territory in North America, mutual non-interference and reciprocity, and deadly force against pirates and importers of slaves were among his policy\u2019s pillars. Adams regarded the 1819 Transcontinental Treaty that secured an internationally recognized <span class=\"Reduced-Text-Body\">U.S.<\/span> border on the Pacific Ocean, in addition to the accession of Spanish Florida, as his proudest achievement. Earlier, he had successfully argued for military action to destroy bands of British-led terrorists operating out of there. John Quincy Adams\u2019s formulation of the Monroe Doctrine is a perpetual reminder of America\u2019s geopolitical priorities. Since the peoples on our borders and the nearby islands are the agents by which both good and ill may come to us, <span class=\"Reduced-Text-Body\">U.S.<\/span> foreign policy must begin with a defensive focus on them. What is nearest is of dearest concern.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Inital-Cap-Text\">A<span class=\"Optical-Kerning\">da<\/span>ms\u2019s central concern, however, was securing the American people\u2019s exercise of their collective liberty among nations\u2014in a word, self-government. Taking unilateral responsibility for actions vis-\u00e0-vis the rest of the world was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for that. Since any and all commitments to foreign powers comport restrictions on one\u2019s collective liberty, concern for that liberty requires minimizing commitments.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">He also advised minimizing formal commitments a because diplomatic experience had taught him that governments do what they believe to be in their interest regardless of the existence of agreements that command or forbid. Understanding that diplomacy is the verbal expression of realities, he relied on making sure all sides understand how each others\u2019 interests interact. He explained Washington\u2019s insistence on reserving alliances for specific circumstances by pointing out that although sovereign nations\u2019 interests may coincide from time to time, they are never identical. America\u2019s own interest, overriding geopolitics and commerce, is to strengthen its own peculiar, fragile, republican character. Adams hoped that acting honorably and respectfully among nations would also help foster honor and integrity\u2014republicanism\u2019s bases\u2014among Americans.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">Safeguarding self-government and promoting responsible behavior was also Abraham Lincoln\u2019s theme in his 1838 Young Men\u2019s Lyceum address. He too did not fear foreign aggression. Irresponsibility, however, would open the way for men of \u201cthe family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle\u201d\u2014men like Napoleon, who would impose the order that Americans could not or would not exercise on themselves.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">Nothing more clearly epitomizes the contrast between the century-plus of foreign policy focused on America and that which has followed under progressives than the difference in how Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson viewed American power and the Great War. Roosevelt would have warned Germany that America would not allow Britain to be defeated and the Atlantic Ocean to become a hostile German lake. Thus warned, Germany might not have forced Britain\u2019s hand by invading Belgium. The war might not have started. Wilson, by contrast, stated that \u201cthe interests of all nations are our own also,\u201d and committed America to establishing \u201cpermanent peace\u201d as well as \u201ca world safe for democracy.\u201d By thus departing from the American people\u2019s priorities, Wilson helped turn a mere war into a civilizational tragedy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Inital-Cap-Text\">I<span class=\"Optical-Kerning\">n <\/span>1917, the American people did not sign up to try improving the world. They bitterly rejected that notion in 1919 and have since. But neither then nor since have the American people\u2019s preferences outweighed our bipartisan elites\u2019 desire to wield America\u2019s enormous power on the international stage. As they minimized the people\u2019s collective liberty regarding international affairs, they made a mess of things.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">Theodore Roosevelt had synthesized the previous century\u2019s foreign policy in the formula \u201cspeak softly and carry a big stick.\u201d His emphasis on balancing ends and means matched the American people\u2019s appreciation for solvency in personal and business affairs. For him, to \u201ccombine the unbridled tongue with the unready hand\u201d was the most dangerous of habits. Progressive policy, however, has been insolvent, bankrupt, because its words have been such that no amount of earthly power could match them. Foreigners\u2019 belief in American power far in excess of its application has given progressive policy such efficacy as it has had. But endless discrepancies between words and deeds have made American power increasingly incredible. Since words can neither change reality nor cause foreigners whose interests differ from America\u2019s to share in our officials\u2019 departure from it, we should keep in mind that the American people are the only ones whom our officials\u2019 unbridled tongues can deceive.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">Even though the description of progressive <span class=\"Reduced-Text-Body\">U.S.<\/span> foreign policy as \u201cliberal hegemony\u201d dates only to the 1990s, the sense that American power and wisdom entitles, nay, obliges, <span class=\"Reduced-Text-Body\">U.S. <\/span>officials to lead, order, and sheriff the globe has been their lodestar regardless of the public\u2019s very different concerns.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">Because progressives\u2019 transnational or multi-lateral objectives are foreign to the American people, they have largely removed decisions about the people from the people by making commitments through executive agreements or by acting informally. Following Woodrow Wilson, they have pressed their priorities on the American people by pretending that these reflect their allies\u2019 demands. Prioritizing alliances over objectives, they have made it difficult to evaluate those objectives.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text pullquote-left month-border \">This confusion of foreign and domestic affairs, as well as of the public and personal, has corrupted its practitioners in every imaginable sense of the word.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">Progressives have treated international institutions\u2019 norms as if they were international law binding on Americans. Those institutions\u2014notably the United Nations, the European Union, <span class=\"Small-Caps\">nato<\/span>, and the complex of committees thereof\u2014have become ends in themselves. \u201cInternationalism,\u201d too, has become something of an end in itself, as may be seen in a proposal by Germany and France to establish an \u201cAlliance for Multilateralism,\u201d ostensibly directed at no one but aiming to foster a \u201crules-based order.\u201d The proposal\u2019s language hints not at curbing anything that China, Russia, or Iran might be doing, but rather at curbing some Americans\u2019 desire to focus on America\u2019s own interest and identity. Thus do latter-day \u201cmultilateralists\u201d around the world ally with progressive Americans against the American people.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">By the same token, members of America\u2019s progressive establishment have made profitable careers out of advising like-minded foreigners in their public and private affairs, and enjoying foreigners\u2019 assistance in their own private and public affairs in America. The latter includes all manner of help or hindrance in business and political campaigns. This confusion of foreign and domestic affairs, as well as of the public and personal, has corrupted its practitioners in every imaginable sense of the word.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">While abjuring war as a tool for securing national interests, progressives have used the tools of war in the name of ideals. Dealing with matters of the utmost seriousness, they have acted un-seriously.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">The <span class=\"Reduced-Text-Body\">U.S.<\/span> armed forces are the world\u2019s largest and, by many measures, the world\u2019s best. And yet the United States has lost its wars since 1945. The \u201cwar on terror,\u201d having cost some eight thousand of our military dead and five times that number crippled, plus perhaps six trillion dollars, leaves us with multiples of the number of terrorists arrayed against us than when it started. That is because our progressive establishment is mismatching forces and objectives, ends and means, as it has been doing in every military confrontation since 1950. Its refusal to defend <span class=\"Reduced-Text-Body\">U.S.<\/span> territory against missiles, especially from Russia and China, leaves no doubt that <span class=\"Reduced-Text-Body\">U.S.<\/span> nuclear policy is bluff advertised as bluff, and that our nuclear forces deter only ourselves.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">Most important, the <span class=\"Reduced-Text-Body\">U.S.<\/span> government squandered the American people\u2019s trust. America is left over-armed and insecure, over-allied and increasingly opposed. Americans now are subject not to men of \u201cthe family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle,\u201d but to self-indulgent bureaucrats, as presumptuous as they are incompetent.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Inital-Cap-Text\">T<span class=\"Optical-Kerning\">od<\/span>ay\u2019s progressive establishment, having pursued its dreams with plenary power, yet seeing those dreams turn into troubles it had not imagined, now focuses its energies on maintaining its prerogatives against an increasingly assertive public. Specific issues of policy having become of secondary importance; power itself\u2014who rules\u2014is the issue.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">In our time, the progressive establishment\u2019s substantive causes are a pale reflection of themselves in their heyday. Nobody today would refer to the United Nations as \u201cthe last, best hope\u201d of mankind. Not in a half century has anyone in authority suggested that it might be possible to eliminate war. Yet these were the mid-twentieth century\u2019s tropes. Bureaucratic inertia sustains feeble attempts at \u201carms control,\u201d as well as occasional references to \u201cnuclear non-proliferation.\u201d Today, nobody would bet his money that any nuclear power might be persuaded to \u201cde-nuclearize.\u201d And yet, the idea that nuclear weapons were in the process of being dis-invented animated the Clinton, Obama, and both Bush administrations. Who, today, would recite George W. Bush\u2019s 2005 inaugural with a straight face? Who would argue that alliances must determine missions rather than the other way around? The \u201cArab Spring\u201d was all the rage in Washington. And then it raged. The European Union is a done deal\u2014that is in the process of undoing itself. Not so long ago, the notion that this progressive project would be the other end of a \u201cdumbbell\u201d of transatlantic power was catnip among the great and the wise. Now it just looks dumb.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">How does one earn the label \u201cpopulist\u201d? It seems by not being quick enough to disassociate himself from descriptions of Americans and America such as those of George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. And what do populists want? The exercise of collective liberty is populism\u2019s quintessential, defining demand: \u201cwe the people\u201d get to rule ourselves. \u201cInstitutions\u201d have no right to rule. Neither does social position or group identity confer any such right. If there is such a thing as a crime against popular government, government by the people, it is the presumption that some are more equal than others.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Text_Text\">If there had been doubts that, at least in America, the exercise of collective liberty is the precondition for exercising individual liberty, our progressive establishment\u2019s vindictive presumptions should settle those doubts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><i>On the singularity of the U.S. political system.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2346,"featured_media":120428,"template":"","tags":[895,1024,927,2057,1918],"department_id":[563],"issue":[2909],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":33,"value_formatted":33,"value":"33","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page Number","name":"page_number","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"number","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","min":"","max":"","placeholder":"","step":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"page_number","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"<i>G. 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