would render obsolete more of the Founders’ stale admonitions. These later generations were the products of a technological, sophisticated, and “improved” age of rapid social, material, and ethical progress, scarcely recognizable to the reactionaries who drafted the Bill of Rights.
In contrast, Curry emphasizes three forgotten pillars upon which the American idea was birthed and nourished. One, the creators of the American ideal drew on earlier and contemporary European free-thinkers for the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. But their particular intellectual fonts were decidedly the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers and, to a lesser extent, their counterparts in Britain—but not so much the French Enlightenment of Voltaire and Rousseau, who were hostile to religion, favored mandated equality over constitutionally protected individual liberty, and believed in the malleability of human nature.
Classical liberalism—the confidence in the individual to think and function freely apart from government coercion—was quite different than modern liberalism. The former accepted that free choice and reasoning at times might result in inequality, but assumed that society’s institutions and man’s nature—religion, charities, human kindness and brotherhood—were the correctives of a humane society. Modern liberalism, in contrast—especially under Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—did not trust either the intelligence or the maturity of the individual citizen. Modern liberals instead assumed that only properly coached and powerful elites and their technocrats could curb unhelpful personal expression and misguided individual choices to achieve more cosmic goals of equality and perceived collective fairness.
Second, a key American virtue was common sense realism, but not what later became known as intellectual pragmatism. Left to their own, largely agrarian families, self-reliant and autonomous, would bring their first-hand knowledge of nature, hard work, and human fallibility to participate in consensual government. In other words, their common sense knew well what men were and were not capable of. Basic truths of human nature and the building blocks of society were “self-evident” to the vast majority of citizens of all classes and backgrounds. Early Americans, both the public and their architects of the American system, were not late nineteenth-century utopians. They were not willing to embrace any convenient or popular creed if it supposedly offered some short-term utility in the real world—especially if it were antithetical to centuries-old intellectual, religious, and practical canons about the innate forces that motivate and admonish people.
Third, Curry assumes that the Founders are so often ignored not just because they supposedly represent a particular ossified cadre of old white privileged males, but also because their wise advice and sternness are unpalatable to the modern age of growing government. They now appear bothersome scolds and absolutists that are unhelpful for state guided and relativist social progress. The danger to personal freedom arises not just from clearly identifiable totalitarian and barbaric ideologies like Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism or Joseph Stalin’s communist super state. Rather, the avatars of all-encompassing government are far more insidious and subtle in assuring always increasing state services and support, and more compassionate and egalitarian group think—in exchange for the individual’s surrender of inconvenient rights of free thought, obstreperous speech, and obstructive independence as envisioned by the Founders.
Finally, Citizen Curry does not offer an academic review of the origins of the American experiment. Rather, he writes and cites primary sources in an easily accessible way, offering a handbook designed, as he says, to appeal to the proverbial average citizen. Given that neither the schools nor the media, in disinterested fashion, teach us the history and purpose of America’s founding and guiding principles, it remains the duty of citizens like Robert Curry, the writer, and we the readers, jointly to rediscover who we were and are—and how we once again can become the Americans that the Founders once envisioned.
Victor Davis Hanson
Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow
The Hoover Institution, Stanford University
WHY YOU WANT TO READ THIS BOOK
“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
We have heard and read this sentence all our lives. It is perfectly familiar. But if we pause long enough to ask ourselves why Jefferson wrote it in exactly this way, questions quickly arise.
Jefferson chose to use rather special and very precise terms. He did not simply claim that we have these rights; he claimed they are unalienable. Why “unalienable”? Unalienable, of course, means not alienable. Why was the distinction between alienable and unalienable rights so important to the Founders that it made its way into the Declaration? For that matter, where did it come from? You might almost get the impression that the Founders’ examination of our rights had focused on alienable versus unalienable rights—and you would be correct.
In addition, the Declaration does not simply claim that these are truths; it claims they are self-evident truths. Why “self-evident”? The Declaration’s special claim about its truths, it turns out, is the result of those same deliberations as a result of which, in the words of George Washington, “the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined than at any former period.”
If a friendly visitor from another country sat you down and asked you with sincere interest why the Declaration highlights these very special terms and where they came from, could you answer clearly and accurately and with confidence? That friendly request for answers would I believe be challenging for most of us for the simple reason that we no longer conduct our politics in the language of the Founders. We simply no longer think politically in those terms. Except for ritual observances on special occasions, “unalienable rights” and “self-evident truths” have gone missing from American politics. Though familiar in one sense, they have the unfamiliarity of special items only brought out for special occasions. In day-to-day politics rights are often invoked—civil rights, gay rights, constitutional rights, even human rights, but very rarely or almost never unalienable rights. Political arguments are not advanced on the basis of self-evident truths; political debates feature the conflicting results of a torrent of policy studies and pronouncements by supposed experts instead.
Americans on all sides of the debate agree that something has gone wrong in American politics. Many Americans believe that we have lost our way because we no longer guide ourselves by the ideas of the Founders. But guiding ourselves by the Founders seems to be easier said than done. Could it be that part of our difficulty is that we no longer use, or even really understand, the language the Founders used or why they used that language? And if so, how did that come about?
This book is dedicated to the proposition that we need to understand the language of the Founders if we want to understand the ideas of the Founders.
It will also tell the story of the systematic effort to bury the ideas of the Founders.
Along the way we will consider “the Pursuit of Happiness” and “We the People” and other jewels of the American idea in the light of the Founders’ original understanding.
As is so often the case, Lincoln said it best. Lincoln said the Founders gave us government by, for, and of the people. In America, government is in our hands.
Consequently, in the American idea of government, everything ultimately depends upon America’s citizens. But citizens are made, not born. The gift of government by the people brings real responsibilities. Not the least of these is the citizen’s responsibility to understand the American idea.
And in addition to understanding it, citizens in general must be dedicated to that idea if the nation is to thrive, or even to function at all well. That is the reason government officials from the President on down swear an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, America’s charter of self-government.