This Fourth, as I take up my annual Independence Day reflection on hopeful realism at Hang Together as I have over the years, who says the American experiment is on the way out?
It’s not on the way out, it’s on the way over – to Asia.
Here, we seem determined to learn the hard way, through suffering rather than through wisdom or tradition, that there are no viable alternatives to classical liberalism. We may learn the lesson in time, and live, or we may learn it only by dying. But whatever happens here, it remains the case that there are no viable alternatives to classical liberalism, because only classical liberalism is actually willing to face the question that matters: How can we share a civil community – a home in the fullest sense – given that we do not agree, and are not going to agree, about the things that matter most in life?
And there are still plenty of classical liberals. They happen to live in Asia. Perhaps a generation from now we’ll be talking about the Korean experiment or even the Taiwanese experiment.
An entire continent, not least the oppressed Chinese people themselves, now grapples with the totalitarian monstrosity of communism as represented by the Beijing regime. The fighting spirit of the amazing people of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, India, Japan and many other places is astonishing to behold. We, alas, are not doing much to help them – our moral spirit sapped by our own failure to grapple with the Great Question of how to live together.
Their spirit draws on many sources, of course. But among these, only one offers a serious theoretical justification: Lockean liberalism.
In the current emergency, Tsai Ing-wen, the president of the Republic of China – known as “Taiwan” to the uninitiated, and “the rightful government of all China” to the wise – has thrown open the doors of her land to the oppressed people of Hong Kong. Truly this is the new “Golden Door,” a title we have forfeited by our failure to find a common good without a common god. Meanwhile, the Republic of China has become the Tom Doniphon of Asia.
When Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo died, Tsai challenged Beijing to commit to peaceful reform, “so that the Chinese can enjoy the God-given rights of freedom and democracy.”
Hong Kong protesters have even been so gauche and unwoke as to fly American flags. With all its rips and tears, the Stars and Stripes is still the international symbol for “the God-given rights of freedom and democracy.”
Perhaps not for long. John Quincy Adams wisely warned that America was a friend of freedom everywhere, but the custodian only of her own. That is right, so long as both sides of the formula are given due weight. Our national character, the essence of the American experiment, demands that we must be the friend of freedom everywhere, or we are not who we are. And friendship comes with moral obligations.
In 1989, an earlier generation of Chinese protesters crafted a statue in Tienanmen Square modeled after Lady Liberty – the “goddess of democracy.” We were then, as we are now, the international symbol for “the God-given rights of freedom and democracy.”
We failed the Chinese freedom fighters then, too. Heed the closing comment of Allan Bloom’s Harvard address on The Closing of the American Mind, which, like the book itself, is a modern masterpiece of wit and wisdom:
Much greater events occurring outside the United States, however, demonstrate the urgency of our task. Those events are epitomized by the Statue of Liberty erected by the Chinese students in Tienanmen Square. Apparently, after some discussion about whether it should be altered to have Chinese rather than Eurocentric features, there was a consensus that it did not make any difference.
The terror in China continues, and we cannot yet know what will become of those courageous young persons. But we do know the justice of their cause; and although there is no assurance that it will ultimately triumph, their oppressors have won the universal execration of mankind. With Marxist ideology a wretched shambles everywhere, nobody believes any longer in communist legitimacy. Everywhere in the communist world what is wanted is rational liberal democracy that recognizes men’s natural freedom and equality and the rights dependent on them. The people of that world need and want education in democracy and the institutions that actualize it. That education is one of the greatest services the democracies can offer to the people who live under communist tyrannies and long for liberty. The example of the United States is what has impressed them most, and their rulers have been unable to stem the infection.
Our example, though, requires explanations, the kind the Founders gave to the world. And this is where we are failing: the dominant schools in American universities can tell the Chinese students only that they should avoid Eurocentrism, that rationalism has failed, that they should study non-Western cultures, and that bourgeois liberalism is the most despicable of regimes. Stanford has replaced John Locke, the philosopher of liberalism, with Frantz Fanon, an ephemeral writer once promoted by Sartre because of his murderous hatred of Europeans and his occasional espousal of terrorism.
However, this is not what the Chinese need. They have Deng Xiaoping to deconstruct their Statue of Liberty. We owe them something much better.
The only thing that has changed since those words were spoken is that the execration of communist brutality is no longer universal. Because Marxist theory collapsed so long ago, communist tyranny is somehow no longer felt to be “really” communist (there is general agreement among hoity-toity respectable persons that the Bejing regime is actually capitalist), and therefore it is not a tyranny. Besides, China was victimized by colonialism, therefore we have no right to speak out for the million Chinese Uighurs currently awaiting execution in concentration camps, or for their wives who are being systemically raped and sterilized.
The American experiment can fail. That it is an experiment entails this. The Riddle of the Sphinx was not solved by the very first intrepid soul to dare it – whoever that was, for no one remembers his name.
But if we fail, the Riddle will still be there: “How can we share a civil community – a home in the fullest sense – given that we do not agree, and are not going to agree, about the things that matter most in life?” The incentives to solve it will still be there. And, unlike Oedipus, the next intrepid soul can face it having learned lessons by observing our failed attempt.
How arrogant would we have to be to think that the Riddle can’t be solved if we can’t solve it – that the science can’t go on if our own lab happens to blow up?
In “No Country for Old Men,” an aging lawman on the brink of retirement feels guilty for society’s slide into chaos. If he and the other lawmen of his generation could only live up to the standard set by their forefathers, he feels, the world wouldn’t be falling apart. After agonizing silently about this for most of the movie, he finally confesses his sense of guilt to an even older, long-retired lawman who had been a colleague of his father’s.
The older man is aghast.
“You didn’t think all this was waiting on you?”
Silence.
Then, gently but firmly: “That’s vanity.”
Coda: “Into the Unknown.” See you in a year.