Two and a Half Cheers for America!
America and its Enlightenment liberal democratic republic is the best that flawed humans have managed to do in the world’s entire history. Don’t attack it for not creating utopia. Reform it to make it
A lot of people these days like to tear down America. It’s absurd.
I have no patience for those who bury criticisms or hide its faults, but I love America and everything it represents.
I don’t mean I love it in a blood and soil kind of way. This patch of land isn’t special. We aren’t an inherently better people. I do love this crazy place. I adore our rich and peculiar culture, from football games, to Hollywood cinematic universes, to diners, to state fairs, to the insanity on social media. I’ve got my problems with America like everybody, but this country is a pretty awesome place and we Americans are a pretty awesome people. Still, that isn’t what I mean when I say I love America.
I also understand there are places in the world that do some things better than we do. I’ve seen the gleaming infrastructure abroad, then landed home to a dingy airport surrounded by crumbling roads. Our health care financing stinks. We have too much crime, and now our stores lock up shaving cream in glass cabinets. Our government often isn’t competent or responsive. We don’t get as many vacation days as Europeans. Our companies treat employees like widgets to be discarded despite years of loyalty. Our middle class is embattled. Our democracy is classified on some global democracy indexes as “flawed.” America truly is number one at a lot of things, but only a fool believes we’re doing everything right.
The reason I love America is because I believe in the modern Enlightenment democratic republic. I believe in representative democracy, checks and balances, and a market-based economy. I believe in the idea of a free people engaging in self-government, a legislature beholden to its people, judicial independence, and a president who is just a citizen and not a king. I believe in inalienable rights, citizens who don’t have to ask for permission to build and change things, the freedom to be yourself, and the ability for everyone to compete on a level field to chase their dreams.
America means the idea, philosophy, spirit, and form of government that has led to more prosperity, joy, stability, creativity, opportunity, adventure, and human flourishing than any other idea for organizing society that humanity has yet invented. This idea of the Enlightenment liberal democratic republic, which we invented here and then saw it race across the world to unlock the best that humans can be, is the most important development in the history of the human race.
I know all about the injustices, crimes, cruelties, and hypocrisies of America. I’ve read accounts of bodies piled up, blood leaking into the soil, of former slaves murdered by former masters who couldn’t tolerate their liberty and equality. I know FDR locked in concentration camps Americans who committed no crime just because they were Japanese, and that the Supreme Court blessed it as Constitutional. I know about the unconscionable betrayals of our treaties with Native American nations, and the death march of the Trail of Tears. I know Hoover’s secret policemen collected blackmail and even helped LBJ bug civil rights leaders at the 1968 Democratic National Convention to make sure they couldn’t unseat a slate of segregationist delegates. I know Woodrow Wilson locked up Americans for opposing the draft, including putting labor leader and Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs in prison for an anti-war speech. I know about the signs that said “Irish should not apply,” the abuses of Chinese workers, and the papist conspiracies that Catholic convents were kidnapping Protestant women to use as sex slaves. I know about the sweatshops, child labor, illegal monopolies, and shady cold war foreign policy overthrowing governments. I know about the corruption, abuses, and official lies. I also know this list is just a pebble atop a great mountain of national failures.
Many Americans throughout our history, citizens and leaders both, failed America. They did evil in America’s name. They betrayed our ideals or failed to carry out our promise. Many Americans suffered and struggled when they shouldn’t have. They were abused, crushed, and pushed around while nobody in power stepped in to protect them. That doesn’t mean the idea of America isn’t worthy or good.
The standard by which we judge a society is not, and cannot be, perfection. Every society is managed by humans and humans are imperfect. The measure by which you judge a society isn’t how many failures happened under its flag. You ask how many abuses it prevented. How many of the horrors that normally happen in societies run by people did it stop or channel away, and how many good things that normally would have been stifled did it unleash? By that standard, the modern Enlightenment liberal democratic republic that America represents is the best the human race has managed to do.
The human default experience isn’t utopia. It’s cruelty, misery, and deprivation. Most societies everywhere and at every moment of history run rampant with oppression, cruelty, and greed. Rulers indulge in tyranny. Violence lurks in every nook. Those who can abuse those who cannot resist. The wolves of deprivation are always circling: hunger, cold, thirst, disease, and wild beasts. For most of history, life was brutal and unfair, joy was fleeting, and few had any chance of pursuing dreams.
We pretend otherwise, but this bleak world is always lurking just out of sight and reach. As lost hikers, the residents of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, or the people fighting in Ukraine and Gaza today all know well, we’re always less than a day from all the safety and comfort we take for granted being snatched away. At any time, someone could bash our door in and steal our lives, and we’re always but hours from plunging back into hunger, cold, cruelty, and fear.
The true measure of a society is therefore how many of these natural miseries it takes away. How well does it provide food and shelter? How much lurking violence does it prevent. How many abuses does it stop and punish. How much cruelty does it thwart? How little does it let the wealthy and the powerful get away with, and how much dignity and respect does it give to those not among the privileged order-givers? By clearing away these horrors, how many great things does it empower people to create and build? How much opportunity does it unleash? How many people under its umbrella get to experience love, pursue passions, chase dreams, and thrive?
For all its failures, America and its modern Enlightenment liberal democratic republic has gotten closer to achieving a just, fair, prosperous, and abundant society than anywhere else at any time in history. America isn’t perfect. How could it be, run by humans who aren’t perfect? It’s still the best we have yet to do.
Which is why I’m committed to defending and reforming this astonishing system so it lives up to its promise and thrives.
This is why I get deeply frustrated by this spread of ignorant anti-American, anti-democracy, anti-market, burn-it-all-down utopianism. This is the best the human race has yet managed to do. If we lose it, the damage will echo for generations. Real human lives will be poorer, more desperate, more scared, more exploited, and more unjust, perhaps for centuries, because of our careless failure to maintain our lucky inheritance. We shouldn’t be playing around with tossing out the best society humanity has yet managed for untested dreams. We should repair and strengthen this republic to make it work for everyone.
There’s no room at the present moment to indulge the silly idea that because flawed people failed America, the idea of America failed. Until somebody comes up with concrete proof humanity can do better through another system or idea, this is the one we should be defending. It’s not enough to conjure a utopia in a book, because a book can make flawed humans behave any way you want. You can ensure they incorporate your values, sacrifice, cooperate, and obey your laws and rules. They won’t entrench themselves in power, secure advantages for their children, take out rivals, lie, cheat, or steal. Perfect worlds exist in books because the puppet masters writing them make the people living in them not act like people. It might be best not to toss away the best humanity has actually done in the world of real humans for a mirage.
It's also unwise to hope other liberal democracies will pick up the slack if we break it here. If we lose our republic in America, republican democracy will be damaged everywhere. America isn’t the only free and prosperous nation on earth, but as the birthplace of the idea of Enlightenment liberal democracy it’s modern democracy’s heart. I’m often surprised at how many Americans don’t even know our Founders aren’t just the founders of America, but the founders of every modern democracy on earth. These blacksmiths of Enlightenment democracy, operating in an age of monarchies, invented the modern republics we now take for granted. While they pulled ideas from the Greeks and Romans and other Enlightenment philosophers, they ultimately invented all the structures and institutions and legal frameworks every modern democracy has copied from scratch. That’s why the entire world honors them as great leaders and philosophers. It’s not because they happened to found our one nation, but because they founded every free and fair and prosperous nation around the globe.
It's also why modern democracy and Enlightenment ideas are more entrenched here than anywhere else on earth. Europe has a lot of modern democracies, but they’re mostly just decades old after the dictatorships of World War II. World War I was still mainly fought amongst rival kings. The democracies of Asia are mostly new, and the ones in Latin America often suffered years in dictatorship. America, as the birthplace of these ideas and the grandfather of democracies, is the bedrock. We have a duty as inheritors of this torch to keep the beacon alight for all humanity.
I’m far from saying everything is right in America. I’m not saying we should be complacent, accept failures or injustice, or stop pushing for better. Things are not going great and they’re certainly not good enough. I’m saying the opposite. We need serious reform. We need to adapt our republic for this new era of history. The path to fixing things, however, doesn’t lie in the denigration or dismissal of what America stands for and has achieved. It lies in reembracing the American idea and demanding with uncompromising cries that it live up to its full promise.
The task of national reform is to make our republic work again. Fix what isn’t working, adapt to the new world, and force our leaders and society to live up to what America is supposed to be. We need to shore up this amazing republic so it can thrive and help hundreds of millions of Americans pursue their dreams.
Two and a Half Cheers for America!
But if anyone tells you America is not good, our system must be replaced, and our society is irredeemable, tell them to move along and we’ll do the work without them. They are not on team reform.