Liberty Matters
The Expansion of Liberty makes America Great
David Boaz was a committed libertarian; he saw freedom both as a means and an end to improving the human experience. No one who knew him could honestly doubt the strength of his convictions or principles. Although he could be dogmatic, he was intensely and incessantly curious. David was also, as many learned the hard way, bitingly honest. He called events and ideas as he saw them.
To his great credit, David would revisit papers, essays, and ideas he and his colleagues at Cato had written to see if they held up to the scrutiny of hindsight. He was as unsparing in these reflections as he was of any poorly thought-out idea that came across his desk. While he was more often right than he was wrong—and would say so—he called on others’ perspectives when he recognized his previous view had been incomplete.
Like many American liberals, David deeply admired the nation’s founders and wrote often about their insights and accomplishments. He was critical of those to his left who were quick to call the founders “racists,” thereby minimizing their achievements and the American project, and downplaying—if not flat out ignoring—the expansion of freedom over two and a half centuries. Yet David also recognized the limits of valorizing the founders—particularly for those of us who can trace our heritages not to Plymouth Rock or Ellis Island, but to property records—because of founding compromises to accommodate slavery:
[T]oo many of us who extol the Founders and deplore the growth of the American state forget that that state held millions of people in chains…[I] want to address libertarians who hate slavery but seem to overlook its magnitude in their historical analysis.If you had to choose, would you rather live in a country with a department of labor and even an income tax or a Dred Scott decision and a Fugitive Slave Act?
David could have left it there, allowing the contrast of relative unfreedom to speak for itself. But perhaps remembering the writings of Frederick Douglass, who wrote that slavery was corrosive to everyone who came into contact with it, David continued:
I said that white Americans probably considered themselves free. But in retrospect, were they? They did not actually live in a free society. They were restricted in the relations they could have with millions of their—I started to say "their fellow citizens," but of course slaves weren't citizens—their neighbors. They lived under a despotic power. Liberalism seeks not just to liberate this or that person, but to create a rule of law exemplifying equal freedom. By that standard, even the plantation owners did not live in a free society, nor even did people in the "free" states.
David understood that true freedom is universal, and that despotism against some impinges on the freedom of all. The story of how America came from a tainted beginning of liberty to embrace equal rights for African Americans, women, and myriad others who faced social and legal discrimination is a triumph of liberalism, not something to be ashamed of or played down because it may reflect poorly on some American heroes or contemporary American liberals. David wrote:
I've probably been guilty of similar thoughtless and ahistorical exhortations of our glorious libertarian past. And I'm entirely in sympathy with [the] preference for a world without an alphabet soup of federal agencies, transfer programs, drug laws, and so on. But I think this historical perspective is wrong. No doubt one of the reasons that libertarians haven't persuaded as many people as we'd like is that a lot of Americans don't think we're on the road to serfdom, don't feel that we've lost all our freedoms. And in particular, if we want to attract people who are not straight white men to the libertarian cause, we'd better stop talking as if we think the straight white male perspective is the only one that matters. For the past 70 years or so conservatives have opposed the demands for equal respect and equal rights by Jews, blacks, women, and gay people. Libertarians have not opposed those appeals for freedom, but too often we (or our forebears) paid too little attention to them. And one of the ways we do that is by saying "Americans used to be free, but now we're not"—which is a historical argument that doesn't ring true to an awful lot of Jewish, black, female, and gay Americans.
But the current presidential administration is making a point to whitewash the past, to sanitize the evils of slavery, segregation, subjugation, and oppression, in the name of “making America great again.” Removing the achievements of Black veterans like Jackie Robinson and the Navajo Codetalkers from Defense Department websites demeans Americans who served the country honorably, despite their mistreatment. These brave men and many others are now widely recognized as role models for future generations: Americans who believed in the promise of America despite so much evidence in their own lives.
At the end of President Trump’s first term, the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission Report noted that understanding American principles
requires a restoration of American education, which can only be grounded on a history of those principles that is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and enobling.’ And a rediscovery of our shared identity rooted in our founding principles is the path to a renewed American unity and a confident American future.
Both the founders and David likely would be skeptical of, if not disturbed by, a required nationalized education ethos in support of any idea, let alone any specific identity. It is likewise hard to imagine a just rationale for removing American literature from military academies’ libraries. Do American servicemen and women really need to be protected from Toni Morrison?
People around the globe flock to America because of the possibilities its freedoms provide, not some magic or innate Americanness—though pride of becoming an American often comes naturally. Indeed, it is curious that this administration’s counter to the ‘identitarian’ left is a nationalism based, in part, on a version of history that diminishes decades of freedom’s expansion, to say nothing of this administration’s work to vastly reduce the number of aspiring Americans across economic strata.
This is not to imply that, generally speaking, our country teaches history well. (Or reading or math, for that matter.) At the grade school level, much of history instruction requires memorizing dates and events, providing—at best—a surface understanding of what the events mean in retrospect, and rarely examining how those events were interpreted by the people who lived through them at the time. Schools should teach history better, but that’s not the same issue as instilling shared civic values of a pluralistic society. It is these values—not “unifying” sanitized views of historical figures—that make America great.
These values include:
1) The rule of law. In pieces marking Thanksgiving, David often listed the rule of law first among several aspects of being an American worth treasuring:
Perhaps the greatest achievement in history is the subordination of power to law…No longer can one man … take another person’s life or property at the ruler’s whim….[Americans] may take the rule of law for granted, but immigrants from China, Haiti, Syria, and other parts of the world know how rare it is.
2) Civic equality. As David wrote in one Thanksgiving piece, “In America some people may be smarter, richer, stronger, or more beautiful than others, but ‘I’m as good as you’ is our national creed.”
3) Freedom of conscience. We don’t need to agree on whether or not Thomas Jefferson and Washington were good men; nor do we want a national religion; nor must we agree whether America is a fundamentally fair or unfair country. Our beliefs are our own.
4) Unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps the core libertarian principle: so long as each respects the rights of others, every person should be generally left to build the life they wish. Although these words are etched in our national history, their meaning transcends the man who wrote them and even the document from which they came.
The current administration’s focus on the past—and the insistent reclaiming of some lost greatness—mirrors a false libertarian argument that yearns for a freer era gone by. David argued vehemently against this idea, writing, “In 1776, 1950, or now, there’s never been golden age of liberty, and there never will be.” He well understood that freedom is precious, and that it is the unending job of the liberal to protect it and to work to expand it to any places and to any people who currently lack its benefits.
Indeed, David explained in 2003:
Limited government is a great achievement, a recent achievement in the sweep of history, and history teaches us that it can be lost. Appreciating where it came from and how rare and fragile it is will help us to preserve it.
A greatness narrative based on national identity threatens liberal freedom; it doesn’t support it. The American expansion of freedom to former slaves, indigenous peoples, women, immigrants, and people whose sexuality and gender identity were once punished socially and legally has been a remarkable victory for pluralism. The administration’s idea of who qualifies as a great American is, by contrast, a narrow one.
Moreover, the assumption of American exceptionalism based on a nationalist worldview is both exclusionary and provides a false sense of safety from traditional threats to liberty: an overweening centralized authority. Although much of the current administration’s actions are made in the name of limiting government, they have, in fact, enlarged the executive's influence and power. Protecting and preserving liberty requires more than invoking “smaller government” through executive decree.
We must not yield to whitewashed versions of history that effectively bowdlerize the past in the name of unity. America’s imperfect development over two and a half centuries is a testament to its greatness, the triumphs of liberalism, and the benefits of pluralism; it is not a reason to turn back the clock and remake the mistakes of years gone by. The expansion of American liberty—not an exclusive collective identity—is what made this country great.
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