Letters from an Ohio Farmer

Regime of Liberty

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

9-11 changed everything:  so many have said.  But as we reflect on that day, it is good to recall what has not changed in the ten intervening years. 

Seasons have come and gone.  Leaves have turned color in New England's fall; flowers bloomed in the desert southwest with the spring rain.  Snow has piled high in the western mountains and filled rivers and reservoirs.  Drought has beset new areas, as it ended in others.  Torrential rains have brought flood waters; hurricanes have wreaked havoc; earthquakes shaken the West, the East, and points in between.  And the land has brought forth harvest after harvest.

Couples have fallen in love; babies have been born; the young have aged; some of the old, the famous and the unknown alike, have passed away, disease and time taking their toll.  But as always, the population of the United States has increased steadily, by more than 30 million.   Over 11 million people not born citizens became citizens.  All of them, like the millions who have come to us one way or another throughout our history, were drawn by the hope of a better life.

We have held two Presidential elections; over 130 elections to the Senate; over 1700 elections to the House of Representatives; and almost countless elections of Governors, state legislatures, judges, district attorneys, sheriffs, school boards, municipal commissions, and numerous other offices of public trust.  Some of these elections were barely contested, others bitterly fought, all part of the oldest continuing tradition of democratic politics known to history.

All of these events and many others have unfolded since 9-11, following a pattern unbroken since our Republic came into existence.  They manifest the unending concerns of the American people and of the republican government of, for, and by the people that has been ours for over 200 years.

Like floods, hurricanes and droughts, enemies remain part of our life as a people.  Among our current foes are those who oppose us because they do not accept the idea of the sovereignty of the people.  Only God, they believe, can be sovereign or all-powerful.  God must rule, therefore, not the will of the people.  Calling the people sovereign is blasphemous, and blasphemers must be punished or destroyed. 

Americans know that on this earth the rule of God always means only the rule of men, who claim to act in God's name and with his unlimited power and act merely in their own self-interest.  Americans reject such tyranny.  They long ago concluded that an all-powerful God may be disappointed in what His creatures do but could not be threatened by their exercise of his gift of freedom.  We suspect that those who kill and destroy in the name of a supposedly threatened God actually kill and destroy to defend their own privileges or their fragile sense of self-righteousness. 

In attacking the rule of the people, our current enemies are like those we have confronted and defeated before.  Nazis and Marxists similarly disparaged the sovereignty of the people, in favor of rule by a supposed master race or master class.  Not only did these former enemies disparage American principles, they disdained the American people.  They thought us cowards or too soft and divided to defend ourselves.  Our current foes made the same mistake.

It is understandable that our enemies underestimate the resolve and power of the people.  We do on occasion ourselves.  But when we do, we should recall what Thomas Jefferson understood, something else that has not changed.  A regime resting on the sovereignty of the people, a regime of liberty, will release immense energy and creative force.  More important, only such a regime can satisfy the age-old longing for justice—a human longing that will not be denied.  That is the true source of our power and our resilience.  It is in the light of this fact that we should contemplate the demands of peoples across the Middle East, especially the young, for governments based on the sovereignty of the people.  A sign of the weakness of our current enemies, of their impending defeat, is not their death but the rejection of their ideas by their own children.

As for ourselves, we should remember that government of, for, and by the people has never been easy, but it is best.  And it will endure and prosper, as will the people it serves.

Ohio Farmer

Novus Ordo Seclorum

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

America will always have the honor of being the first nation on earth to dedicate itself to the self evident truth that all men are created equal, as it did in declaring independence on July 4, 1776. In that dedication truly was created a New Order of the Ages—a Novus Ordo Seclorum as we say on the Great Seal of the United States. Let us take the occasion of this Independence Day to continue our reflections on what this means. What does it tell us about the foundations, forms, and purposes of American politics? What does it require of us—deserve from us?

Lincoln called the idea of equality the central idea of the American political experiment, from which all its other ideas radiate. It is, he wrote, “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times”; it is a philosophical idea about human nature and the just relations of each human being to all others. The revolutionary and founding generation of Americans expressed this idea of human equality in a variety of ways. The familiar language of the Declaration of Independence is "that all men are created equal." To express the same idea, the Virginia Declaration of Rights (June 12, 1776) stated that "all men are by nature equally free and independent." The Declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (March 2, 1780) stated that "All men are born free and equal."

To say that all men are by nature equal is to say that human beings are not naturally subordinated one to another: Whatever the many differences may be among human beings, no man is by nature a master; no man is by nature a slave. This is what Jefferson’s vivid metaphor meant, which we quoted in the last letter: "the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." Of this revolutionary idea, at the heart of the Declaration and at the heart of the American experiment in self-government, Lincoln wrote on the eve of Civil War, “that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” And so it has proven to be: a powerful rebuke and a stumbling block to every form of tyranny and oppression—whether of race, class, or religion, whether home grown or foreign born—that has raised its head over the past two centuries.

Human beings, then, are naturally free as they are naturally equal. It is from this human equality and freedom that the founders derived the idea that government could only be justly founded on consent. Because human beings are not by nature subordinated to one another—that is, because they are equal and free—their consent must be obtained before any human being may rightfully exercise authority over them. It is the voluntary consent of the people that gives authority to government. Only a being possessing reason—a being who can distinguish right from wrong—is capable of voluntary consent. This is why the deepest root of American politics is in the fact, as Thomas Jefferson put it in the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, “that Almighty God hath created the mind free.”

Government among free and equal men is formed, the American Founders would say, by social contract or social compact. In the words of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780: "The body-politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people." The American body-politic is a voluntary association begun when, in the last words of the Declaration of Independence, "for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge[d] to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." This is the political community that new citizens enter into when they become citizens. To take on the responsibilities of such citizenship, it is necessary—for citizens old and new—to understand the principles on which this citizenship is based. So it is a useful tradition, as the Fourth of July comes around each year, to reflect again—and again—on the American political principles famously declared to the world on the original Independence Day.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote late in life, in drafting the Declaration of Independence he had not meant to proclaim any "new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of," but merely to express "the American mind." The Declaration contains a stunning summation of the principles of free government; but it was only because the American people already understood these principles that it was possible to establish a government based upon them. Similarly, only if we are capable of understanding these principles will we be able to preserve and perpetuate, maybe even to strengthen and improve, the free institutions—the Novus Ordo Seclorum—that began to arise from them in 1776.  For our own sake and for the sake of the cause to which our country was dedicated on that original Fourth of July, let us take this occasion to renew our dedication to that cause and its noble principles. No one else can do it for us. It will do a world of good. And it is a cause worthy of the last full measure of devotion.
Happy Fourth.

Ohio Farmer

A City Upon a Hill

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

 Is America exceptional? Is it unique among the nations? If so, what makes it so? And what are the implications of the fact? These are not policy questions, but questions about ideas and historical circumstances that are at the foundation of policies. They are the kinds of questions, it seems, that you and other elected and appointed public officials are often compelled for no particularly good reason to answer, as was the president a short time ago. Perhaps this may sometimes seem a tedious requirement of your job, especially when journalists asking the questions have no interest other than ginning up a headline. And so it is understandable if on occasion you reach for plausible sounding formulas in the hope that they will not cause a headline of an undesirable sort. But your answers can matter a great deal. They can be an opportunity to shape the public’s sentiments and opinions in a way that helps free government remain good government.  Answering such questions—even when they haven’t been asked—has in the course of our history given an opportunity for America’s greatest statesmen in small or large ways to strengthen the capacity of their fellow citizens to govern themselves. On the other hand, there is hardly a greater mischief that can be done to the people than to give them bad answers to such questions.

In my last letter I took the liberty of questioning the notion, recently espoused by some leading public officials, that America is exceptional because its principles give it a special right and responsibility to lead. This is a confusion, I argued, if an understandable confusion, of a genuine American exceptionalism that is older than America itself—namely, the idea of America as an example to the world—“a city upon a hill,” as John Winthrop said to the future Massachusetts Bay colonists.  By 1776, when the thirteen colonies assumed their separate and equal station among the powers of the earth as the United States of America, they did so proclaiming principles that made America truly exceptional.  “We hold these truths to be self evident,” they declared, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights,” including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No people on earth had ever based the authority of their laws on such an assertion. So the historic effort to establish government upon this principle was in truth an unprecedented and exceptional—a then unique—experiment in self government.

As Thomas Jefferson put it in his last surviving letter, written just before he died fifty years to the day after July 4, 1776, the American idea of equality meant “that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” America was exceptional in founding our politics on what is least exceptional about us, on what we share with all other human beings at all times and in all places, rather than on any accidents of birth or circumstance that separate us.  For this reason, Jefferson thought that the principles proclaimed in the Declaration not only gave hope to all Americans but were “grounds of hope for others,” everywhere and always.

The experiment of living up to these principles is the American experiment—the effort generation after generation to rise to equality, as Lincoln put it. So long as America remains America, it will be the country first dedicated to this proposition that all men are created equal, and ever aspiring to rise to its demands. Lincoln, echoing Jefferson, called the American idea the “principle of ‘Liberty to all’—the principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and, by consequence, enterprise, and industry to all.”

The American experiment claimed to be an exceptional experiment not only because of its principles, but because conditions here in America were more favorable to the experiment in self-government than anywhere else in the world. The Founders’ America really was a land of opportunity as had never been known in the world before. The United States, as the saying then had it, became “the best poor man’s country on earth.”  Ordinary people, secure in their equal liberty and therefore full of hope and enterprise, could farm their own land and enjoy in peace the bread of their labor; and for the first time in human history, they or their children could aspire without limit to great things—even to the Presidency of the United States. If the experiment in self government fails here, our Founders thought, that failure might be taken as a strong proof that, contrary to American assertions, human beings are not made to govern themselves.

Just as Jefferson and Lincoln hoped, the example of America has helped spread the blessings of liberty to other peoples. Many countries now claim equality as the principle of their politics.  May they live up to those principles, as we hope to do ourselves!

Here in America, when we succeed in living up to our principles, we do something more important than establishing our right to lead.  We establish our worthiness to lead, whenever our interest guided by our justice should require. To rise to these principles, we must understand them. And since we are not born understanding them, we arrange as best we can to learn them from one another—sometimes by listening to our politicians talk about our country—and to hand them down to our children. Can there be a more propitious occasion to refresh our understanding than the annual approach of the Fourth of July?  Let us return to these themes next week.

Ohio Farmer

America and the World

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

America, on the president’s orders, has intervened militarily in Libya; the president has given a speech explaining the intervention and the manner of it; the country and the world debate the matter as events unfold; the outcome remains uncertain.  In his speech, the president insisted that, because the Libyan people faced "the prospect of violence on a horrific scale," America had a responsibility to act. "To brush aside...our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are.” 

These letters are particularly concerned with “who we are” as a people and what this requires of our politics, domestic and foreign. So I leave aside for now the many other interesting and important questions swirling around the president’s words and deeds, including his deference to the United Nations and his neglect of the United States Congress. 

What does “who we are” tell us about how we should act toward the rest of the world? The president doesn’t say much about what it is that makes us who we are, though he seems now to be affirming, on behalf of our fellow human beings, a kind of American exceptionalism, about which he had been studiously ambiguous in the past. We might begin to think about who we are by considering the two most important ideas in American political life.  The first is found in the Declaration of Independence, which was cited in the last letter and will surely be cited often in future letters—the idea that “all men are created equal.” The second is derived from this idea and is found in the opening phrase of the Constitution: it is the idea of consent expressed in the familiar words, “We the People of the United States.”  These are words and ideas, not to conjure with, but to consider carefully as events demand our attention and action at home and abroad. As long as Americans are Americans, these ideas will certainly continue to be essential ingredients of who we are. So what do they tell us about us? 

The immediate practical purpose of the Declaration was to establish the right of the colonists to separate from the British Empire and its hereditary monarchy.  In this case, declaring all men equal meant that God did not give one man or his family a divine right to rule other men.  Human equality meant that government derived its powers justly only from “the consent of the governed.”  The claim that men were equal meant that not the accident of birth but the deliberate consent of men—“We the People”— was the only rightful basis for government. 

The Declaration had a larger purpose, a broader reach, than the dispute between Great Britain and the United States of America.  Its declaration of human equality denied not only a right to rule based on birth but a right to rule based on race or religion.  Declaring all men equal meant that a common humanity was more fundamental than the accidents of race or religion that separated human beings.  

The universality of this founding principle explains something of the claim the world has on American sympathies.  Having based our national life on the equality of all men, we recognize that in principle any human being is a potential citizen of the United States. We feel an affinity with people around the world, especially those struggling for freedom or stricken by natural or manmade disasters.  In our common humanity, we believe somehow that our hopes and fortunes are tied to theirs.  These feelings can give rise to a sense of obligation that seems to be what President Obama has in mind—our “responsibilities to our fellow human beings,” which he invokes when he says it would be a betrayal of who we are if we didn’t intervene in the way he chose to do in Libya. 

But in fact, of course, only Americans are American citizens.  Our revolution began with a universal claim about human equality, but it culminated necessarily in the establishment of a particular nation.  “We the People of the United States” are distinct from the other peoples of the world not by birth, race, or religion, but by the deliberate act of establishing ourselves as a different people.  By this act of consent, the people of the United States committed themselves to each other, as distinct from all the others who live outside the bond of citizenship.  In a world where freedom was scarce and tyranny commonplace (a world, in this respect, very like the one in which we continue to abide), we committed ourselves to establishing our own freedom and preserving the blessings of liberty in the United States, not to assisting the democratic aspirations of others or their recovery from disaster, however sympathetic we may be to the plight of our fellow men and however eager we may be to help them. 

No model or mathematical formula can help us strike the proper balance between what we owe to our fellow men and what we owe to ourselves.  Such balance is a matter for judgment and deliberation, as circumstances arise.  This judgment will take into account the diverging claims of equality and consent, the former what Americans share with other peoples, the latter how we distinguished ourselves from them.  These two American principles temper each other as we deliberate about how we as a people should act in a dangerous world of potential fellow citizens. 

Our deliberations will be well served by reflecting that the American founders thought the best thing Americans could do for the rest of the world was to succeed in our own experiment in freedom. As the founders thought of it, the American cause—the cause of liberty— is the cause of mankind.  If we could show by the success of our experiment that free government could be good government, this would be the greatest gift Americans could give to their fellow human beings—our own political well being would be a constant act of philanthropy.  America’s success would be cause for all men to rejoice. By the same token, failure of the American experiment in freedom would “deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.”  

From this point of view, Americans should want to know how our intervention in Libya enhances the prospects of the American experiment. If it does, the world will be a better place. If it doesn’t, it betrays America’s primary responsibility to our fellow human beings.

Ohio Farmer