Who Are We?

I just finished watching Ken Burns’ The American Revolution. I urge you to watch it. Like everything he does (The Civil War, Vietnam, Baseball, Jazz, et cetera) it’s a deep dive into the subject. I thought I knew a lot about our nation’s founding but after watching his series on the Revolution I realize I knew far less than I thought I did about that war. 

What was revealing was that the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) was just like any long, drawn out war: brutal, destructive, divisive, much slaughter, and featured both venal and honorable men. The waste of men on both sides, the destruction of homes, towns, and businesses. Loyalist brutality and Patriot brutality. The Patriot brutality to Native Americans. Our heroes were at the same time ordinary men with mankind’s many faults yet they were also heroes who managed to survive and win.

By the end of the war the Patriot side lost maybe 35,000 men from battle, disease, starvation, or exposure. The British side lost about 25,000. When you get to the end of Burns’ series you learn that it that lived up to the saying that “war is hell.”

This is where we came from. First, the hard part: a brutal war of independence. The creation of a nation was the easier part. This is when the intellectuals who studied the Enlightenment took over: Madison, Morris, Hamilton, Jay, Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine. They took the ideas of Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, and Hobbes and wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights which embodied those ideals of limited government and individual freedom. We were the world’s first modern revolutionaries.

It wasn’t perfect but it launched the greatest, freest, most prosperous nation on the planet. I’m not forgetting slavery which survived as a compromise that enabled the formation of our country. It took another brutal war to correct that wrong. 

I know many of you do know our history and the ideals upon which we were founded. But most Americans don’t. They should know that we are not just like any other country on the planet. There are reasons why we became the freest, most prosperous, and most powerful country. The colonists who came to America developed a culture of individualism and self-reliance because of the freedom of benign neglect from the British. They thrived. Jefferson called it “the pursuit of happiness.” The Constitution embodies that culture. 

The current notion floating around today is that we are a divided nation. That may be true politically. But as historians point out, there isn’t a period of time when we can look back to some Golden Age where everyone was in agreement about the way things were headed.

Those of you who have read my column for a while know that there are many things I am uniquely unhappy about: large ineffective government, tariffs, heavy-handed persecution of illegal immigrants, the concentration of executive power, the growing popularity of socialism, confiscatory taxes on wealth, etc., etc. We are free to argue about this.

But… there are things about our culture that endure regardless of partisanship. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s about our unique political experiment (Democracy in America), noted our individualism: our focus on our private life, our family, our self-reliance, a feeling of being equal to anyone, and our personal initiative. In Burns’ documentary, former British officers who came over to our side noted that their men, mostly volunteers, didn’t just follow orders like British soldiers, they had to explain the reason for the orders. I think this attitude still exists. 

We have a culture and a political framework that allows us to do what we want. Government doesn’t order us; we make our own choices about our lives. This culture has unleashed the power of individual incentive and entrepreneurship which led to the prosperity that has uplifted us all. Without the rewards of our (mostly) capitalist system that incentivize entrepreneurial progress, we would be poorer and reliant on government (see, Europe).

Perfect we aren’t. But we are less imperfect than 99% of the rest of the world. That’s why those who have the initiative to escape poverty or autocracies flock here – because of the opportunity our system offers them.

We have gone through many political upheavals over the centuries, but despite that we are better off today than at any other time in our history. So, putting all the rancor aside, we continue to thrive and that’s who we Americans are and we need to fight to keep it that way.