Machan's Musings - Taking Stock of America
by Tibor R. Machan
It is a tradition to take stock at year’s end, so I am going to follow, seeing it is useful to do this now and then. After a hectic year, with a very nasty election campaign behind us, with a war that is utterly futile and yet keeps raging along thousands of miles away, it may serve a purpose to remind ourselves of what is really so great about America—or at least its promise.
How can I do this without thinking of my own history, which involved coming to these shores from communist Hungary, after a brief stay in Germany, way back in the 50s? The contrast back then was stark, at least when one considers the ideas that defined the two societies.
Communists believed that government needed forcibly to prepare the population for a revolutionary change, one that would remake human nature from its individualist phase to a fully mature collectivist emancipation. They thought the idea of individual liberty is a shallow bit of self-delusion, one that can serve a mere temporary purpose of boosting the economic power of a society. After that, socialism would take over, with government managing everything for some vague notion of the general good. In time communism would arrive, in which everyone automatically works for a common goal, the supposed public interest.
Such a one-size-fits-all vision is what the few genuine commies cooked up, while opportunists, who made up the bulk, simply used this phony idea to get control of society and oppress everyone for their own purposes, ones that amounted to nothing more noble than those of the Mafia. In contrast, what was associated with America, even if the reality fell far short of it, had to do with the truly revolutionary idea that individual human beings matter most—not society, not the tribe, not the ethnic group.
This notion, that you, I, they, everyone in fact, matters most, not collectively but individually, was the main message of the American Founders when they so enthusiastically affirmed the discovery that every individual person has unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Those rights, and what followed from them, would become, in a just society, legally protected obstacles to all who would attempt to rule other people’s lives. They would, if properly heeded and firmly secured, serve as the inviolable borders around every human being’s life so that it is he or she who governs that life, not others with the sorry excuse that they are being helpful and mean to do good for those they undertake to boss about.
There is no other contrast that is more stark in the history of political thought than that between those who want to rule others, with a myriad of excuses that at times sound tempting, and those who would unwaveringly acknowledge everyone’s fundamental sovereignty. Even when we find some folks who lack the full capacity to be sovereign, they would gain support from volunteers, not from political bosses who would invariably abuse the power over the helpless so as to impose their idea of how everyone ought to live.
In this American vision of society—the one most folks identify with this country as being unique to it (for America also involves lots of bad habits from the Old World)—the legal authorities have one primary job, namely, to secure our rights. Like referees at a game, they are to stick only to that job and what’s needed to do it right, but not venture out on various missions of power venting.
This idea is the special contribution of America to the history of world politics, and some of it could even be experienced here and there, used to actually set people free. Even African Americans, who at first didn’t benefit much from these notions, eventually found their liberty affirmed specifically because of what the Founder’s made clear in the Declaration of Independence: No one is to rule another, not for good or for ill, without that other’s consent.
This idea has always been true but for too long tragically suppressed by the monsters and petty tyrants who loved running roughshod over the rest of us. And today the idea is once again becoming neglected.
In our recent presidential campaign the idea that people ought to be free to run their own lives, for better or for worse, however fortunate or unfortunate they may be, gained hardly any airing. Even President George W. Bush’s invocation of the concept of the "ownership society" amounted to little more than empty rhetoric.
Such is the sad state of affairs at the end of 2004 and beginning of 2005. Perhaps with a few more thousand outspoken citizens making it abundantly clear that it is indeed American individualism that requires vigilant defense, the revolutionary vision of the American founders could be rekindled. It certainly deserves to be.
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