Defining freedom: The old/new lure of socialism

On this July 4th weekend, we ponder the origins of American exceptionalism and consider the warnings of the founders about democracy.

We hear a lot about the death of democracy at present. But it’s worth noting that the Founders feared pure democracy. They saw what – from antiquity on – could happen when public life was dominated by the unstable will of mere majorities. So they put together republican constitutional structures that would both allow for popular input, but channel it through differing offices – executive, legislative, and judicial – that would regulate one another.

As Number 51 of The Federalist Papers formulated it:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. (Emphasis added.)

Human Dignity and America’s 250th

This old/new lure of socialism is antithetical to what we stand for in these United States, a nation founded under God. But for a growing number of “fiery progressives” in New York City, Washington DC, and Oregon, socialism will solve all our problems.

Kristian Niemeitz‘s book warrants our read:

Socialism is strangely impervious to refutation by real-world experience.

Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Venezuela. All of them have ended in varying degrees of failure.

But, according to socialism’s adherents, that is only because none of these experiments were “real socialism”. This book documents the history of this, by now, standard response. It shows how the claim of fake socialism is only ever made after the event. As long as a socialist project is in its prime, almost nobody claims that it is not real socialism. On the contrary, virtually every socialist project in history has gone through a honeymoon period, during which it was enthusiastically praised by prominent Western intellectuals.

It was only when their failures became too obvious to deny that they got retroactively reclassified as “not real socialism”.

Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies

The word freedom is a simple concept, at first, anyway.

• Definitionally, we think of ‘being free from’ and being ‘free to’;
• Historically, America’s promise to its citizens that we are  equal in our right to pursue happiness
• Politically, today’s Americans couple personal preferences with the rule of law 
• Socialism is ascendant; necessarily, capitalism is pejorated.

“The author of the Declaration of Independence did not understand “happiness” in the same way many moderns do, to be a passing emotional or hormonal contentment,

For Thomas Jefferson, classically trained in the liberal arts: Cicero, Seneca, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, happiness meant peace of mind for the virtuous man. .

…he credited a passage from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations as the epitome of his philosophy of happiness.

For Cicero, the happy man possesses peace of mind through moderation, consistency, and the classical virtues (see Cicero, Disputationes Tusculanae, IV.XVII). Simply put, the happy man is the virtuous man.

And it is for this reason that our nation was founded: that we might have the security of nation to pursue a way of life founded on and ordered to virtue—a life ordered to the pursuit of happiness.

A Toast: To the Pursuit of Happiness

During the last eighty years, socialist programs have increasingly encouraged dependence upon the government. Along with the denigration of businessmen and women, of work itself, and the lauding of governmental subsidy and control of business, socialism is a necessary consequence. Reading Niemitz’s book revealed my socialist ideals.

Huh?

As a Hospital Director, I surely didn’t consider myself anti-business nor socialistic. After all, I was responsible for a massive budget and knew well the ridiculously narrow profit margin of academic medicine. And yet, the associations of many people when thinking of the concept of capitalism quoted in Niemitz’s book, Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies, mirrored my own: ‘greedy’, ‘selfish’, ‘corrupt’ and ‘divisive.’

Money was something I needed to pay bills but unseemly to desire for its own sake. Here are a few of the prejudicial attitudes I held toward business and capitalism.

• Salespeople are universally deceptive.
• The desire to become a millionaire if not evil, is at least suspect, perhaps even sinister.
• Unlike my motives of working to reform health care which I believed were altruistic, although I enjoyed the benefits of each paycheck.
• Mostly though, I relied on ideology and its proponents, just like the “firery progressives” of today.

My personal experience, which consisted of successes and failures in business…home business [ gasp] network marketing, caused a total turnaround. In fact, I was so excited about my new understanding that I wrote several self-help books on these subjects.

There are four primary reasons for that turnaround:

• I converted to Catholicism.
• I read an article stating that no single individual was worthy of becoming a millionaire. But that we were called to be good stewards of our money, using it for some greater purpose.
• I began to study sales under the business model of network marketing.
• The very real fact that practical experience always trumps ideology.

No one can express the persistent lure of socialism and the Western incapacity to accept its failures better than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

In different places over the years, I have had to prove that socialism, which to many Western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as “we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology.” The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion.

From The Gulag Archipelago: (Italics added for emphasis.)
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?….

In pondering American freedom,

let us recognize its true origin: God, not the government.

WHEN in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the
political bands which have connected them with
another, and to assume among the powers of the
earth, the separate and equal station to which
the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle
them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the
causes which impel them to the separation.

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. That to secure these
rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of
the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is
the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it….

Archbishop Fulton Sheen published his brief and brilliant book, A Declaration of Dependence on July 5, 1941, as war thundered through the world.

He begins by explaining that “The spirit of revolution” has three chararteristics: irrationality, violence and atheism.

To be rational means to think before acting. We do not just suddenly find ourselves standing in a telephone booth; a reason preceded and determined our presence there. As St. John expressed it, “In the beginning was the Word” — first the Word, the Idea, the Thought, Reason: then the action, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14). The irrational is just the contrary. It is the primacy of action over idea: first you act, and then you think why you did it. As Goethe put it: “In the beginning was the Deed.”

Twenty years ago, Somalian immigrant  Ayaan Hirsi Ali grabbed my attention and respect with her books Infidel and Heretic. Her meditation on this holiday, Weeding the Garden of Liberty,: A Call for Restoration is packed with practical insights.

Because of our inherited freedom, we need to push back against ideas undermining American exceptionalism. America is creative, innovative, and still free. Among the many good qualities of the American people, I appreciate their problem-solving skills and curiosity. Some Americans turn that curiosity into innovation, which, 90% of the time, means going down rabbit holes we haven’t heard of before. But every so often, someone takes an idea to the next level. I love the story of Elon Musk coming from South Africa, going to the US, and coming up with idea after idea. America is an environment that lets him grow and create the value he has. He is the giant of these creators, but many people in America do this, unlike in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada…

In light of this, if I had to write new Founding Papers in the 21st century, I would not add anything new. I would dust off the existing ones and rewrite them for today. People think they can embellish or improve them, but I don’t believe we can. Our job is restoration, not invention. Unlike AI or other technologies, where we constantly seek new solutions to new problems, these foundational documents already solve our problems. The only problem left is managing human nature and ensuring we do not destroy the framework we inherited.

Concretely, this means the 21st century must be about restoring these works and recapturing our institutions. There is no alternative but to confront infiltrators, subversives, and their ideas directly. For example, after 2016, Bernie Sanders, an independent, gained a massive foothold because Hillary Clinton lost. He ushered in a wave of disciples and the bad idea of so-called democratic socialism, which is just socialism with communist traits. To recapture the Democratic Party, the task is to remove Bernie Sanders and his ideological followers from the organization. Similarly, the Republicans…

A Call for American Restoration

“We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”

Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, Dec. 1, 1862 in Roy P. Basler (ed.), Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln.