America at 250: An Overripe Old Age

In 1987, in a speech at the annual convention of Kiwanis International, in the context of arguing for his proposed Economic Bill of Rights, Ronald Reagan reiterated his famous remark from twenty years earlier, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It has to be fought for and defended by each generation.” How many people in attendance when Reagan delivered that speech in 1987, would have believed it if you had told them that less than forty years later, a month shy of its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, The United States of America would already have normalized that extinction of freedom to which Reagan alluded as a warning?

And yet here we are on the other side of that hypothetical collapse Reagan referenced — and by “we” I mean the happy few around the world who still remember when America was, in spite of all its flaws and contradictions, the definitive achievement of modernity’s defining revolution in political philosophy, the most concrete embodiment of the great theoretical arguments for practical liberty manifested in specific realizable goals: constitutionally limited government; civic moderation sustained by each citizen’s self-interest, rationally understood; and a firm political foundation of private property viewed not as a mere “economic model” but as a natural right without which no other rights would have any substance, and without deference to which all talk of limited government would be nothing but palaver. Today, Reagan’s words, much like Abraham Lincoln’s similar observation — “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” — have lost all their comforting veneer of rhetorical flourish, and have become instead, at least for the happy few, an all too poignant “told you so” from wise men of the past.

For the current U.S. adminstration, the one which will preside over the nation’s peculiarly bittersweet semiquincentennial, is led, if I may use such an ill-suited word, by the crystallized realization of every suicidally self-corrupting danger that practical liberty, to the extent it is achieved, engenders: property viewed increasingly pragmatically, which is to say not as a natural moral force of mutual respect and restraint between citizens, but merely as goods to be grabbed for oneself by whatever means avail, which today includes even the plunder of all men’s privacy and intellectual product by means of universal digital theft; moderation mocked as a sucker’s game, which is to say the redefinition of the good as immediate gratification of any kind, and of happiness as winning in the crassest and most vulgar material terms; and government elevated (aka debased) to the status of a beneficent god and a weapon to be openly wielded against one’s neighbors/rivals, with all former notions of constitutionally limited power as a bulwark against universal oppression now subordinated to the same old tyrannical fantasy of “one great man” standing astride the nation as a universal provider and protector, all institutional guardrails, rule of law, and principles of individual self-governance by reasonable, responsible citizens, be damned.