The once and future nation

Ben wrote:

Hope you’re having a good Fourth. I am thinking about what America used to be. That’s what I’m celebrating.

Yes. While there are still many good and great things about America to be thankful for, it’s not possible, in the manner of today’s mainstream conservatives, simply to laud and celebrate America as it is. We remain loyal to something that was, and (I devoutly hope and believe) could be again; and even if it cannot be again for the foreseeable future, it can still live in our minds and our hearts, which will ultimately help it come into practical being as well.

By the way, I have a personal tradition, every Independence Day, wherever I am and whoever I’m with, of reading aloud the entire Declaration of Independence. Some paleo and traditional conservatives will no doubt remind me that Jefferson’s hymn to human equality is a big part of what got us into our current mess. I reply, first, that the Declaration of Independence, whatever its flaws, is the way our country began, which must always have a hold over patriot hearts, and, second (returning to a point I first made a year ago), that understood correctly the Declaration is compatible with genuine nationhood as well as with genuine liberty. Consider the first sentence, which is often neglected in comparison with the more famous second sentence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Note the phrase: one people. At the moment of their declaration of their political independence, our forefathers were acting as one people. And this was true, even though they were not creating a single nation-state, but thirteen states, which, though sovereign, from the first instant of their existence as states were constituted as a joint political entity, the United States of America, and as the political expression of one people, the American people.

Newer VFR readers may also be interested in our discussion in July 2002 of Jefferson’s First Inaugural address, in which I (though not others) find an eloquent evocation of the American nation.

Also in connection with Jefferson, here is an excerpt from an unpublished manuscript on “The Spiritual Effects of Multiculturalism,” in which I lay out the national and spiritual meaning of the Declaration of Independence:

In this chapter I have pursued two distinct arguments: that multiculturalism denies objective truth, and that multiculturalism leads European-Americans to betray their own nation, their own children, and themselves. The reader may be forgiven for thinking that the connection between these two ideas is not immediately apparent. The usual view today is that there is an irreconcilable conflict between a belief in objective truth on one side and an allegiance to one’s self or one’s people on the other. To the contemporary American mind, particularly the conservative American mind, objectivity suggests universalism and inclusion, while an attachment to one’s own indicates particularism and exclusion. But this is a false dualism, a product of the reductive modern mindset that fails to see the world in comprehensive terms. Not only do the principles of objectivity, individuality, and nationhood not contradict each other in any ultimate sense, they are the basic, and highly interdependent, components of Western freedom. And that is why the multicultural left must attack all three at the same time.

For Americans, the Declaration of Independence is the classic statement of the unity of these principles. Proceeding on the basis of “self-evident” truths about divine and human existence, the Declaration upholds the individuality of the person when it says that man’s rights to life and liberty are inherent in his God-given nature. Equally importantly (though no longer understood today), the Declaration upholds the individuality of the self-governing people—namely the American people. As the Southern literary critic M.E. Bradford persuasively argued, the American colonists declared independence from Great Britain, not because it was violating their rights as individuals, but because the British king was violating their rights—and threatening their very existence—as a corporate community. The right of a self-governing people to self-preservation and sovereignty is analogous to the right of the individual person to life and liberty, and these rights—of the individual and of the self-governing people—are founded on the truth that man is created by God and subject to his governance.

Multiculturalism seeks to destroy these principles of the American Founding. It erases the individuality of the American nation by defining America as a collection of equal cultures and demonizing its actual culture. It degrades the individuality of the human person by submerging the individual within one of the ethnically defined cultures (all of which have absolute rights, except for the European-American culture which has no rights), and by simultaneously defining the individual as a disordered collection of impulses—just as the nation is defined as a disordered collection of cultures. And in doing these things, multiculturalism undermines our God-given capacity for rational thought oriented toward objective truth and objective values, without which the lawful preservation of individual freedom and national freedom becomes impossible.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 04, 2006 12:04 AM | Send