The New Road to Serfdom (2 page)

I’m afraid most of us tend, subconsciously, to fit the facts to our opinions rather than the other way around. The present U.S. administration is doing everything it can to win over its detractors. President Obama has traced a cat’s cradle of vapor around the planet, apologizing for American arrogance, pledging his support for carbon reductions and nuclear disarmament, signing up to supra-national conventions, even refashioning the United States’ domestic arrangements to make them
more European. As we shall see, while he is personally popular, none of these initiatives has served to pacify America’s critics.

When the United States defeated Spain in 1898, the British poet Rudyard Kipling addressed a poem to the newest world power:

The burden is now a black man’s, and every friend of America must wish him well. But don’t expect thanks from those ye guard: That’s not how human nature works.

A hundred years ago, my country was where yours is now: a superpower, admired and resented—sometimes, in a complex way, by the same people. We understand better than most that popularity is not bought through mimicry, but through confidence. You are respected, not when you copy your detractors, but when you outperform them.

Until very recently, the United States did this very well. While it may have drawn sneers from European intellectuals, denunciation from Latin American demagogues, violence from Middle Eastern radicals, the populations of all these parts of the world continued to try
to migrate to the United States, and to import aspects of American culture to their own villages.

Now, though, American self-belief is on the wane. No longer are the political structures designed by the heroes of Philadelphia automatically regarded as guarantors of liberty. America is becoming less American, by which I mean less independent, less prosperous, and less free.

The character of the United States, more than of any other country on earth, is bound up with its institutions. The U.S. Constitution was both a product and a protector of American optimism. When one is disregarded, the other dwindles.

This book is addressed to the people of the United States on behalf of all those in other lands who, convinced patriots as they may be, nonetheless recognize that America stands for something. Your country actualizes an ideal. If you give up on that ideal, all of us will be left poorer.

A
merica is different; different for the most basic of reasons. Most Americans owe their nationality to the fact that they, or their relatively recent ancestors, chose it.

This might sound obvious, even trite. But think about the implications. Other countries tend to be defined by territory, language, religion, or ethnicity. What makes someone Japanese or Ethiopian or Swedish? It
comes down, in essence, to blood and soil. But Americans became Americans by signing up to a set of ideals. They were making an active choice to leave behind one way of life and to adopt another.

What characterizes that way of life? The answer has not changed very much over the centuries. It is the reply that the framers of the constitution would have given. It is little changed, indeed, from the explanation that would have been offered by the Puritans as they made their
hejira
across the Atlantic. The essence of America is freedom.

To the earliest settlers, freedom meant in the first place freedom of conscience: the ability to congregate and worship without coercion. But implied in this freedom is much else. John Milton, the contemporary and champion of those pilgrim leaders, understood that liberty in religious affairs was the securest basis for liberty in civil affairs. A society in which individuals regulated their own relations with the Almighty would tend, by nature, to be a society of sturdy and self-reliant citizens. If men were free to interpret the strictures of their Creator without intermediation, they would be equally assertive in politics. If congregations could elect their ministers, towns would expect to elect their magistrates.

It is important to be clear about one thing at the outset. Neither the earliest Americans nor their heirs saw liberty simply as an absence of rules. (This Milton
called “license” and heartily disliked.) Liberty, for them, meant the virtuous application of informed judgment. Rather than an external discipline imposed by prelates and princes, their society would be governed by an internal discipline generated by personal morality. John Winthrop, who led the pilgrims to the New World, drew the distinction in the quotation that opens this chapter.

As long as this form of liberty was secure, government would be constantly improved by the free exchange of ideas: a marketplace of creeds in which, over time, the good ideas would drive out the bad ones. As Milton put it: “Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.”

This philosophy was given concrete form in the earliest North American settlements. Distant as they were from their king, the colonists fell into the habit of organizing their affairs at an extremely local level. With neither an episcopacy nor an aristocracy on their continent, they took naturally to the idea of self-government. When the U.S. Constitution enshrined the principles of decentralization and representative government, it was simply reiterating the long-standing customs of most Americans.

To put it another way, the New World attracted those who sought freedom and independence. The conditions of the early settlements were conducive to these same values. So it is hardly surprising that these ideals
should in time have been codified in the U.S. Constitution.

The United States is the realization of a libertarian archetype—both in theory and in practice. Its constitution, as we shall see, is unique in the emphasis it places on the individual rather than the government. And, unlike some constitutions, it is not simply an abstract or aspirational document. The freedoms it guarantees were very real to its framers and, by and large, have remained real to their successors.

Loyalty to the nation implies allegiance to these ideas. American patriotism is, at least in part, a political statement. This gives it a different timbre to other national loyalties, rooted as they are in place and race.

The Japanese, the Ethiopian, or the Swede might also be a convinced patriot, in the sense that he has a special affinity with his own state and its symbols. And so he should: It is proper and healthy to feel a particularly warm sentiment toward the land that shaped you. But there is, in this patriotism, something unconditional. These countries might be capitalist or socialist; they might be atheist or they might have state churches; they might be monarchies or republics; but they would still recognizably be the same countries. The United States is peculiar in that it is defined by the institutions of its government, and by the philosophy that they represent.

This doesn’t mean that American patriotism is more valid than anyone else’s. I love my own nation very
dearly. I am never happier than when tramping its countryside. I admire the character of my people: brave, morose, taciturn, stoic, drunk, belligerent, indignant at injustice. My feelings have little to do with the political institutions of the United Kingdom. Indeed, as I shall explain later on, I think that there is a great deal wrong with how Britain is currently governed. But it wouldn’t occur to me to live in another country simply because it was more congenially administered.

__________

America, as I say, is different. Allegiance to the United States means allegiance to its foundational texts and the principles inherent therein. It means loyalty to the republican ideal: the ideal, that is, of a virtuous, independent, and freestanding citizenry. Those who reject these ideals, who eschew the principles on which the United States was founded, can fairly be described as un-American.

I know that many people, in the United States and abroad, detest that term, seeing it as intolerant, even McCarthyite. But it is important to remember that America has generally had a civic rather than an ethnic conception of citizenship. The label “un-American” is not affixed to, say, immigrant communities or religious minorities; it is applied to those who want to turn the United States into a fundamentally different country.

For the avoidance of doubt, the last thing I want to do is excuse McCarthyism. Senator McCarthy was a foul-mouthed bully, and many guiltless Americans suffered as a consequence of his ambitions. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that the hunt for those guilty of un-American activities was prompted by genuine cases of Soviet espionage. High-ranking government officials had been secretly working for an enemy regime. Their aim, as they later cheerfully admitted, was wholly to transform their country, to wipe away nearly two hundred years of constitutional development and subject America to an alien ideology: communism. The term “un-American” was precisely apposite.

In the hysteria that followed, more innocent victims than traitors were condemned. Committed democrats, who simply happened to hold left-wing views, were treated as agents of a foreign power. Indeed, the ideological persecution that accompanied the search for communist agitators was itself rather un-American, negating as it did the belief in freedom of conscience that had motivated the early colonists. But this doesn’t invalidate the notion that some positions can reasonably be classed as un-American, in that they are incompatible with the vision of the founders as upheld and developed by their successors.

Because the essence of America is doctrinal, rather than territorial or racial, people around the world tend to take up positions for or against it. You don’t often
hear of, say, anti-Colombianism. But anti-Americanism is the credo of those who loathe the values that were built into the bricks of the republic. Anti-Americans take many forms. They can be European intellectuals who see American capitalism as pitiless, crass, and vulgar. They can be Middle
Eastern jihadis
who fear the Americanization of their own societies. They can be Latin American
anti-yanquistas
whose hostility to U.S. foreign policy is laced with resentment against the émigrés who throw their dollars around when they return to their home pueblos. They can be apologists for African strongmen, or proponents of an autocratic “Asian way.”

These disparate groups might disagree profoundly on what would constitute an ideal society. But they agree on what doesn’t. They dislike free markets (“greed”). They dislike unrestrained consumerism (“vulgarity”). They dislike the assumption that all societies are capable of democratic development (“Yankee imperialism”). They dislike the idea that people should be free to choose a different lifestyle from their parents’ (“coca-colonialism”). In short, they dislike liberty, and resent the country that most embodies it.

The flip side is that there are many more around the world who admire what America stands for, who see the country as a repository of freedom, who exult in its triumphs and regret its failures.

__________

And, of course, there
are
failures. Like every nation on Earth, the United States can behave selfishly and hypocritically. It doesn’t always live up to the ideals of its constitution. Indeed, the premise of this chapter needs some qualification. When I wrote that most Americans had consciously chosen their nationality, I might have added that not all were in this category. Some were incorporated into the growing republic when their homes were annexed from Mexico. Some were carried to the New World in bondage. Some had inhabited the continent for many thousands of years, and were never asked whether they wanted to be Americans.

There was, in other words, a gap between theory and practice. Not everyone who lived within the territory of the United States had the same opportunities. While successive governments did in time try to offer everyone the full dignities implied by U.S. citizenship, they sometimes failed. Then again, occasional failure is part of the human condition. To say that the American dream has not always been realized is no more than to say that perfection is not of this world.

This point is worth stressing, because critics of the United States, domestic and foreign, are never happier than when alleging double standards. It is sometimes argued, for example, that the achievements of the American republic are devalued by the fact that it had
displaced an aboriginal culture. But how can we possibly quantify human happiness? Who can judge whether a Native American today, with access to education, medicine, and the full range of modern recreational technology, is better off than he would have been had Europeans never arrived in North America? Or whether, if his quality of life is indeed superior, that superiority justifies the terrible price paid by those of his kin who died as the result of unfamiliar pathogens or lost hunting grounds? And who can say what cost to the indigenous peoples is redeemed by America’s contributions to human happiness, from the invention of the airplane to the defeat of Nazism?

I don’t see how we can comfortably answer any of these questions. What we
can
say with some certainty is this: Having at times behaved very shabbily toward the earlier inhabitants of the continent, the U.S. authorities eventually tried to do the right thing, giving Native Americans a choice between assimilation and autonomy. This record compares favorably enough with other countries where settlers have supplanted less technologically advanced peoples. But, even if it didn’t, it would in no sense cheapen either the motives or the achievements of those Americans who sought over the centuries, and with surprising success, to actualize the dream of a free, egalitarian, and open polity.