Thank God For July 4th! No, There's Nothing "Normal" About America

Happy Independence Day!

Saying Grace, 1951

Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina

In America, Wang [Huning] wrote, “it is not the people who master the technology, but the technology that masters the people.” This had lessons for geopolitics: “If you want to overwhelm the Americans, you must do one thing: surpass them in science and technology.”

"I'm obsessed with the mess that's America.” — Marina and the Diamonds, “Hollywood.”

In my last piece I considered the question of whether or not the United States was becoming a normal country and whether that might be a good thing at least on social matters like abortion and guns, which are increasingly used to divide us in a sort of war of all against all.

That earlier piece was a provocation but then I have always been a provocateur. That, too, is American. Was it not that meddlesome Englishman — Thomas Paine — who called it Common Sense that free men and women America might be their own nation and indeed already were? America was a people long before she was a nation.

The private responses to the piece included the son of Turkish nobility and a Jewish gangster, among others. Each of them has a claim on the American dream and to some extent, has already realized it. And if they have not, certainly their sons have and will. What country is this that the sons of mobsters and of intelligence officers might someday serve next to one another? I submit to you that in America there is the hope of the world. This nation of extremists, of radicals, of pretending conformists and conformist pretenders has a lot to offer the world. If America didn’t exist we’d have to invent her.

I have wrongly been smeared as a “white nationalist” — Tocqueville rightly understood America as a nation of white, black, and red, which each a claim — but I am an American imperialist — a believer in what we once called the American creed — of e pluribus unum. Out of many one. I fear the all seeing eye on at the top of the pyramid and pay it appropriate fealty notwithstanding the irony of Americans never bowing to a crown.

I am well traveled outside the United States but I never miss an occasion to drive in my British sports car, top down, soaking up this wondrous place and people. I inhale books like American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard and Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer.

It is fetishizing to self flagellate about America’s perceived faults. Yes, yes, we were naughty to blacks but then so were blacks themselves. Yes, yes, we could have been a bit better to the Native Americans (and yet no other empire affords its indigenous peoples as many rights). Yes, yes, it is dreadful that we didn’t allow poor whites and women to fully participate in our body politic but we got on it as soon as we could and before nearly everyone else. And yes, there are quite a number of things that do need fixing — a rapacious militarism that divides the world into autocracies or democracies (us versus them), a lack of care for our environment, and civic health, among many others.

But every American knows the truth about America. If she’s broken, mend her. If she’s fallen, pick her up. If she’s lost, find her and put her on the better path. There’s something downright participatory about the whole thing, which is, of course, by its very design. We have only ourselves to blame for her lack of excellence.

To borrow the phrase of one of our superheroes — “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.” We teach a lot of nonsense to our children but this, at least, has permeated deeply into our culture in one of the few shared experiences we all still have — going to superhero movies.

And yet our love of superheroes notwithstanding it is our very ordinariness that makes us great. It is for that reason that I am not afraid of the vestiges of American society — our courts, our free(ish) press, our town meetings, and neighborhood watches. I believe that there is no town in America where — if you are truly in trouble — that your neighbors wouldn’t ultimately ride to your defense. I think, of course, of my great uncles who infiltrated the Klan, or who stood guard, shotgun at the ready, over their Native American neighbors against those very white neighbors who wanted to steal their land.

I was the last student of Harry Jaffa and unlike some of his ill tempered students who are now under investigation by the Department of Justice, I took seriously what he was teaching me. A republican form of government requires virtues.

I take seriously the obligations that come with being American nobility — of the descendants who signed the first term sheet for America with their blood and who maintain all the way hence from Gettysburg to the waters of Honshu Island.

Like Joe Lewis (and Harry Jaffa), I, too, am happy my ancestors got on that boat.

We are, of course, engaged in great psychological warfare against the masters who brought us The Art of War and who rose from the gangsterism of Eastern Europe to the Knesset or Kremlin. Whether this transnational organized crime shall succeed in putting us all back in chains is, in some sense, very much a live issue.

But let me offer a bit of optimism that this extraordinary nation, this unlikely people, might go on and indeed, must go on.

As I see it America’s biggest challenges come from an alliance of our faux elites with the hostile elites of other polities. But most of all our threats come from within — from indulging our vices at the expenses of our virtues. We have in our own hands — often literally in the case of the iPhone, designed in America but manufactured in China — the tool of our liberation or enslavement.

We are in need of reform, yes. Rather than enabling our American greatness, much of Silicon Valley smacks of a Chinese op designed to addict us and destroy us.

Can we defeat the individualism implicit in the iPhone?

But I have faith in America.

No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped.

Calvin Coolidge got a lot right. I literally wrote the book on him. It was called Why Coolidge Matters: Leadership Lessons From America’s Most Underrated President.

We will take on those enemies of spiritual renewal.