Before You Curse America

Liberty produces unequal outcomes because men are unequal in talent, judgment, appetite, luck, family, and will. Unequal outcomes produce comparison. Comparison can turn into envy. Envy is then made into an oppression story: you are not behind because life is hard and people differ, you are behind because a class of people is doing this to you. That story turns grievance into a flame. The flame becomes revolution. Revolution concentrates power in the hands of the people who organized the anger. Concentrated power becomes tyranny. Tyranny eventually cracks, sometimes under another rising, sometimes under invasion, sometimes under its own rot, and men start talking about liberty again. The one constant is human nature.

Athens built one of the earliest and most influential experiments in rule by free citizens, and the word they used was eleutheria, freedom understood first as the opposite of slavery. A free man was not owned. He spoke in the assembly. He voted. He was expected to take part in the life of the city. That freedom was real and it was not all inclusive. Women, slaves, and resident foreigners were outside of its scope.

Athens provides a strong starting point for the argument that a free political life begins there, publicly, among men who defined freedom against the condition of being owned and refused it for themselves. Plato, writing after Athens had torn itself through war and faction, described how regimes decay. Oligarchy, built on wealth, breeds a mass of men who feel shut out. They overthrow the rich in the name of freedom. The new democracy then feeds on an appetite for more freedom until any limit looks like oppression, and the people raise up a champion who promises to protect them from the better off. That champion becomes the tyrant. Plato put it in Book VIII of the Republic: "This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector."

Polybius, a Greek hostage who studied Rome from the inside, applied Greek constitutional theory to the political world he observed. In Book VI of The Histories he described what became known as anacyclosis, the cycle of constitutions. The best men throw the tyrant out and rule as an aristocracy. Aristocracy fattens into oligarchy. The people, inflamed by the injustice of the few, take power as a democracy. Democracy loosens into mob rule. Out of the wreck a strong man rises and the sequence starts again. Polybius said anyone who sees this clearly may miss the timing and still be right about the stage. He also said mixed government, power divided so that each part checks the others, was the only way he knew to slow the rotation. He thought Rome had built that mix. He also thought Rome would decline anyway, because all mortal things do.

By the late second century before Christ the republic was already cracking over land, debt, and the gap between citizens who still had farms and citizens who did not. Tiberius Gracchus tried to reclaim public land from the rich and settle the landless on it in 133 BC. He broke custom to pass the bill. He was beaten to death with his supporters. His brother Gaius tried a broader program a decade later and died in street violence, with thousands of followers killed after. From that point Roman politics learned to settle arguments with clubs, lists of the condemned, and armies loyal to men instead of to the republic.

A century of escalating political violence and civil wars later, the settlement of 27 BC left Octavian holding decisive military and political power while the Senate gave him the name Augustus. The forms of the republic remained, but in practice it was gone.

Marx later gave the oppression story its most systematic modern theory, turning class conflict into the engine of history and revolution into a duty. He did not invent the appetite. He organized it and told millions that history itself was on their side. He misrepresented the problem by placing class and material conditions at the center when the deeper problem was human nature itself.

The West did not jump from Athens to Philadelphia. Liberty was built in steps that deserve their credit on the path to the greatest human experiment ever created. In 1215 English barons forced King John to seal Magna Carta, a feudal bargain that still planted the idea that even a king is under law, that a free man is not to be imprisoned or stripped of his own except by the judgment of his peers or the law of the land. That charter did not abolish monarchy, did not free the unfree, and did not create a republic.

In 1689, after another century of English blood over crown and church and parliament, the English Bill of Rights bound the monarch to parliament, condemned cruel punishment, and protected speech inside the legislature. The Dutch Republic, fighting Spain in the late sixteenth century, showed that a people could abjure a king and write down rights as the ground of a political order. John Adams, while serving in the Netherlands during the American Revolution, praised the spirit of liberty he found there and viewed the Dutch Republic as a natural friend of the American cause.

Those were real achievements and gigantic steps toward liberty, yet they left a king, or an established church, or a hereditary rank, or a people who were free in law only if they already belonged to the right body.

France attempted a revolution to liberty. In 1789 a bankrupt monarchy, a privileged legal order, and a hungry capital produced a revolution that spoke the language of the rights of man. Bread prices, tax exemption for the privileged, and a state that could not pay its debts were facts. Within four years the king was dead. From 1793 into 1794 the Reign of Terror made suspicion grounds for arrest and, for thousands, a path to execution. Historians put the executions, prison deaths, and killings of that official terror in the range of tens of thousands, with far more dead in the Vendée and the related civil war.

In November 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte ended the Directory and took power as First Consul. In 1804 he crowned himself emperor. A movement that opened in the name of liberty closed by concentrating authority in one man.

Russia, China, and Cambodia ran the same experiment in their own ways. The Bolsheviks rejected waiting for a slower democratic transition and pushed for an immediate revolutionary seizure of power. They dissolved Russia’s elected Constituent Assembly, built a party dictatorship, created the Cheka in December 1917, and in 1918 made terror official policy. China after 1949 organized peasant grievance into land reform and class struggle. Serious estimates of those early campaigns run from the high hundreds of thousands into the low millions dead, and the later Great Leap famine of 1959 to 1961 is reconstructed by demographers at roughly thirty million excess deaths. Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 also believed in a revolution. The Khmer Rouge emptied the cities to build a classless agrarian order. Yale’s Cambodian Genocide Program puts the dead at about 1.7 million, around a fifth of the country. Vietnam removed that government by invasion. The revolution rarely ends with a people rising into freedom.

America did not invent the idea of freedom, the Founding Fathers attempted the greatest human experiment of liberty the world had ever known. The Declaration of Independence in 1776 stated that rights come before government and that government exists to secure them. The Constitution written in 1787 and set in motion in 1789 did not trust a king, a church establishment, a titled nobility, or an unbraked assembly. It enumerated powers and split them. It built a constitutional system, completed by the Bill of Rights, that went past Magna Carta and the English settlement: no federal establishment of religion, no titles of nobility, speech and press protected against federal abridgment, arms in the hands of the people, due process and jury trial written as limits on the new government. Free peoples have existed for thousands of years before America. What the American founding created was a form of liberty never before assembled in the same constitutional combination.

The American founding gathered an extraordinary measure of political liberty into a single written constitutional system and then kept that constitutional frame standing. James Madison knew what he was building it against. In Federalist No. 10 he wrote that the causes of faction are sown in the nature of man, that unequal faculties produce unequal property, and that the most common and durable source of faction is the various and unequal distribution of property. You cannot abolish liberty to abolish faction without killing the thing you meant to save. In Federalist No. 51 he wrote a powerful truth: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." Government is the greatest of all reflections on human nature. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition because the men who will hold office are still men. John Adams said the same thing without gentleness. Absolute power intoxicates despots, aristocrats, and democrats alike. The passions are the same in all men under every simple form of government. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men never have.

The Constitution that followed our Declaration of Independence has been in operation since 1789 and remains the world’s longest surviving written charter of government. The reason society is fragile is not a secret class of villains. The reason is human nature. Envy is in us. Greed is in us. The wish to feel clean by locating all the rot in someone else is in us. Those traits do not vanish with the next revolution.

It is easier to live in denial. If the bad thing is not in you, then you are not the kind of person who has to restrain it. That comfort becomes a huge social cost. Before you decide to be ungrateful of the United States, spend some time learning about humans, civilizations, and the true meaning of liberty.