The New Road to Serfdom Read online

  To put it another way, the New World attracted those who sought freedom and independence. The conditions of the early settlements were conducive to these same values. So it is hardly surprising that these ideals should in time have been codified in the U.S. Constitution.

  The United States is the realization of a libertarian archetype—both in theory and in practice. Its constitution, as we shall see, is unique in the emphasis it places on the individual rather than the government. And, unlike some constitutions, it is not simply an abstract or aspirational document. The freedoms it guarantees were very real to its framers and, by and large, have remained real to their successors.

  Loyalty to the nation implies allegiance to these ideas. American patriotism is, at least in part, a political statement. This gives it a different timbre to other national loyalties, rooted as they are in place and race.

  The Japanese, the Ethiopian, or the Swede might also be a convinced patriot, in the sense that he has a special affinity with his own state and its symbols. And so he should: It is proper and healthy to feel a particularly warm sentiment toward the land that shaped you. But there is, in this patriotism, something unconditional. These countries might be capitalist or socialist; they might be atheist or they might have state churches; they might be monarchies or republics; but they would still recognizably be the same countries. The United States is peculiar in that it is defined by the institutions of its government, and by the philosophy that they represent.

  This doesn’t mean that American patriotism is more valid than anyone else’s. I love my own nation very dearly. I am never happier than when tramping its countryside. I admire the character of my people: brave, morose, taciturn, stoic, drunk, belligerent, indignant at injustice. My feelings have little to do with the political institutions of the United Kingdom. Indeed, as I shall explain later on, I think that there is a great deal wrong with how Britain is currently governed. But it wouldn’t occur to me to live in another country simply because it was more congenially administered.

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  America, as I say, is different. Allegiance to the United States means allegiance to its foundational texts and the principles inherent therein. It means loyalty to the republican ideal: the ideal, that is, of a virtuous, independent, and freestanding citizenry. Those who reject these ideals, who eschew the principles on which the United States was founded, can fairly be described as un-American.

  I know that many people, in the United States and abroad, detest that term, seeing it as intolerant, even McCarthyite. But it is important to remember that America has generally had a civic rather than an ethnic conception of citizenship. The label “un-American” is not affixed to, say, immigrant communities or religious minorities; it is applied to those who want to turn the United States into a fundamentally different country.

  For the avoidance of doubt, the last thing I want to do is excuse McCarthyism. Senator McCarthy was a foul-mouthed bully, and many guiltless Americans suffered as a consequence of his ambitions. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that the hunt for those guilty of un-American activities was prompted by genuine cases of Soviet espionage. High-ranking government officials had been secretly working for an enemy regime. Their aim, as they later cheerfully admitted, was wholly to transform their country, to wipe away nearly two hundred years of constitutional development and subject America to an alien ideology: communism. The term “un-American” was precisely apposite.

  In the hysteria that followed, more innocent victims than traitors were condemned. Committed democrats, who simply happened to hold left-wing views, were treated as agents of a foreign power. Indeed, the ideological persecution that accompanied the search for communist agitators was itself rather un-American, negating as it did the belief in freedom of conscience that had motivated the early colonists. But this doesn’t invalidate the notion that some positions can reasonably be classed as un-American, in that they are incompatible with the vision of the founders as upheld and developed by their successors.

  Because the essence of America is doctrinal, rather than territorial or racial, people around the world tend to take up positions for or against it. You don’t often hear of, say, anti-Colombianism. But anti-Americanism is the credo of those who loathe the values that were built into the bricks of the republic. Anti-Americans take many forms. They can be European intellectuals who see American capitalism as pitiless, crass, and vulgar. They can be Middle Eastern jihadis who fear the Americanization of their own societies. They can be Latin American anti-yanquistas whose hostility to U.S. foreign policy is laced with resentment against the émigrés who throw their dollars around when they return to their home pueblos. They can be apologists for African strongmen, or proponents of an autocratic “Asian way.”

  These disparate groups might disagree profoundly on what would constitute an ideal society. But they agree on what doesn’t. They dislike free markets (“greed”). They dislike unrestrained consumerism (“vulgarity”). They dislike the assumption that all societies are capable of democratic development (“Yankee imperialism”). They dislike the idea that people should be free to choose a different lifestyle from their parents’ (“coca-colonialism”). In short, they dislike liberty, and resent the country that most embodies it.

  The flip side is that there are many more around the world who admire what America stands for, who see the country as a repository of freedom, who exult in its triumphs and regret its failures.

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  And, of course, there are failures. Like every nation on Earth, the United States can behave selfishly and hypocritically. It doesn’t always live up to the ideals of its constitution. Indeed, the premise of this chapter needs some qualification. When I wrote that most Americans had consciously chosen their nationality, I might have added that not all were in this category. Some were incorporated into the growing republic when their homes were annexed from Mexico. Some were carried to the New World in bondage. Some had inhabited the continent for many thousands of years, and were never asked whether they wanted to be Americans.

  There was, in other words, a gap between theory and practice. Not everyone who lived within the territory of the United States had the same opportunities. While successive governments did in time try to offer everyone the full dignities implied by U.S. citizenship, they sometimes failed. Then again, occasional failure is part of the human condition. To say that the American dream has not always been realized is no more than to say that perfection is not of this world.

  This point is worth stressing, because critics of the United States, domestic and foreign, are never happier than when alleging double standards. It is sometimes argued, for example, that the achievements of the American republic are devalued by the fact that it had displaced an aboriginal culture. But how can we possibly quantify human happiness? Who can judge whether a Native American today, with access to education, medicine, and the full range of modern recreational technology, is better off than he would have been had Europeans never arrived in North America? Or whether, if his quality of life is indeed superior, that superiority justifies the terrible price paid by those of his kin who died as the result of unfamiliar pathogens or lost hunting grounds? And who can say what cost to the indigenous peoples is redeemed by America’s contributions to human happiness, from the invention of the airplane to the defeat of Nazism?

  I don’t see how we can comfortably answer any of these questions. What we can say with some certainty is this: Having at times behaved very shabbily toward the earlier inhabitants of the continent, the U.S. authorities eventually tried to do the right thing, giving Native Americans a choice between assimilation and autonomy. This record compares favorably enough with other countries where settlers have supplanted less technologically advanced peoples. But, even if it didn’t, it would in no sense cheapen either the motives or the achievements of those Americans who sought over the centuries, and with surprising success, to actualize the dream of a free, egalitarian, and open polity.

  The
same argument applies with regard to slavery. This needs to be said because, of all the weapons in the anti-American arsenal, the history of slavery is the one most worn with use. Make the argument that the American Constitution is a uniquely benign document that has served to keep an entire nation prosperous and free, and you will sooner or later be told that it was a slaveowners’ charter that valued some human beings at three fifths of the worth of others.

  There is, of course, some truth in this accusation, which was leveled at the time both by abolitionists in the United States and by British and American Tories who opposed the project of independence. “How is it that we hear the greatest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” demanded the most eloquent British Tory of his generation, Dr. Johnson, in 1775.

  Once again, though, it needs to be remembered that Man is fallen. There isn’t a country on Earth that hasn’t done things in the past that, viewed from the vantage of the present, are shameful. The fact that a nation doesn’t always live up to its ideals, or justify its self-image, doesn’t mock those ideals or invalidate that self-image. On the contrary, it can spur the nation to greater effort. And, in the case of slavery, this is more or less what happened.

  It is perfectly legitimate, when discussing the U.S. Constitution and the vision of its authors, to draw attention to the persistence, first of slavery, then of codified racial segregation, and then of unofficial discrimination. Well into the 1950s, supporters of segregation, led by the veteran Georgia senator Richard Russell, cited the Constitution and repeated Supreme Court decisions in support of their position. But it is only fair to give the full picture. If we want to bring up slavery, we must refer, also, to the anti-slavery campaign, and to the huge price its adherents were prepared to pay in pursuit of their objectives, including death on the battlefield. If we are determined to remember segregation, we should likewise recall the civil rights campaigners. If we want to discuss racism, we can hardly ignore the fact that, in 2008, Americans elected a mixed-race president.

  American patriots, including those who didn’t vote for Barack Obama, should nonetheless take pride in the fact that his victory in some measure wiped away the stain of slavery and segregation. Those who believe in collective sin must also accept the logic of collective redemption. If all Americans, including those who never owned slaves, were diminished by the fact that the institution survived for as long as it did, then all Americans, including those who voted for McCain, are elevated by the fact that they live in a country that has moved in the space of forty years from the formalized exclusion of black voters to the election of a black head of state.

  Indeed, the worst losers in the 2008 presidential electorate were arguably the dinosaurs of the black power movement, who found that their narrative of race relations in America had been falsified overnight. It is no surprise that Jeremiah Wright and Jesse “I wanna cut his nuts off” Jackson seemed so determined to sabotage Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. They understood that his election would put them out of business, spectacularly belying their main contention, namely that American democracy is closed to minorities, and that there are limits to how high an African American can rise.

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  The election of Barack Obama gave America’s external critics, too, a moment’s pause. For the first year of his administration, some anti-Americans reexamined their prejudices. If a mixed race candidate who had opposed the Iraq war could be elected in Washington, perhaps America was not quite the sinister plutocracy they had imagined.

  President Obama immediately set about reinforcing the idea that he was different from his forty-three predecessors, withdrawing foreign garrisons, signing up to a number of international conventions, committing America to climate change targets, and attempting a series of domestic reforms, above all in health care, aimed at making America more like Europe. We shall look at these policies in detail later on. For now it is enough to note that it didn’t take long before the anti-Americans were playing their old tunes again.

  “There isn’t an American president since Eisenhower who hasn’t ended up, at some point or other, being depicted by the world’s cartoonists as a cowboy astride a phallic missile,” prophesied David Aaronovitch in the London Times shortly before the 2008 election. “It happened to Bill Clinton when he bombed Iraq; it will happen to Mr. Obama when his reinforced forces in Afghanistan or Pakistan mistake a meeting of tribal elders for an unwise gathering of Taliban and al-Qaeda.” It didn’t take long for this prediction to be fulfilled. Before President Obama’s first year was out, crowds in Afghanistan and Pakistan were chanting “Death to Obama!” in response to NATO military actions.

  Nor were other anti-Americans appeased for very long. At the Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez raged: “President Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize almost the same day as he sent 30,000 soldiers to kill innocent people in Afghanistan!”

  A survey of international attitudes by World Public Opinion in July 2009 suggested that, while Barack Obama was personally popular with foreigners, attitudes to the United States had barely been impacted by his victory. The United States was still liked by her traditional friends, still loathed by her old foes. A majority of respondents in fifteen of the nineteen nations surveyed believed that the United States was coercing other states through superior force, and a majority in seventeen of the nineteen nations complained that the United States flouted international law.

  There are certain positions that any U.S. president, if he is sensitive to public opinion and to congressional majorities, must take; and these tend to be the positions that make anti-Americans detest him. The fact that the facilities at Guantánamo are still open, for example, has prompted rage, not only in the Muslim world, but in Europe. Likewise, the refusal to publish photographs from Abu Ghraib. And, come to that, the fact that there still are American soldiers in Afghanistan.

  “World’s Hopes Dashed by George W. Obama,” was the headline in the Financial Times Deutschland when the closure of Guantánamo was deferred. The Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung, in an editorial titled “Obama’s Great Mistake,” commented: “Obama’s people certainly imagined things differently, but reality has caught up with them. … Bush light, so to speak: Obama is discrediting both himself and the United States.”

  To get a sense of what Europeans don’t like about the United States, glance through some of the headlines that have appeared in Der Spiegel since Barack Obama’s inauguration: “From Mania to Distrust: Europe’s Obama Euphoria Wanes,” “Torturing for America,” “American Gays and Lesbians Feel Betrayed by Obama,” “GM Insolvency Proves America’s Global Power Is Waning,” “American Recession Food: The Fat Crisis.” (This last, if you’re wondering, was all about how low-paid Americans had been driven by the downturn to subsist on McDonald’s, which was making the country even more obese and diabetic.)

  Here is the veteran British commentator John Pilger, writing in the New Statesman in December 2009:

  Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania [the American superpower in George Orwell’s 1984]. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize—winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies.” He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the United States has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”

  Presidents come and go. But the fundamentals of U.S. foreign policy do not. The things that anti-Americans dislike cannot be expunged by executive decree.

  Critics of the United States are not, as a rule, actuated by opposition to a particular policy or a particular administration. It is the entire package that they reject: free elections, small government, private property, open competition, inequality of outcome. They will not be appeased by the cap-and-trade rules, or by state health care, or by higher taxe
s, or by the abolition of the death penalty. Their hostility is existential.

  This book is not aimed at convinced anti-Americans. It is aimed, rather, at those within the United States who have become blasé about their transcendent political inheritance. As Edmund Burke observed, constitutions that grow up over centuries can be torn down in weeks. The freedoms enjoyed by Americans today are the fruit of seeds transported across the Atlantic centuries ago and scattered in the rich humus of the New World. It is not accidental that the United States enjoys dispersed jurisdiction, limited government, strong local democracy, low taxes, and personal freedom. These things came about through design: the brilliant design of extraordinary men.

  It follows that fundamentally altering that design will make America less American. This generation, like any generation, is entitled to opt for a different model: to embrace state intervention, higher taxes, federal czars, government regulation. But have no doubt about the consequences. Changing America into a different country will mean forsaking the most successful constitutional model in the world. It will mean abandoning the vision of your founders—a vision that has served to make your country rich and strong and free. It will mean betraying your ancestors and disinheriting your posterity. It is, in the narrowest and most literal sense, un-American. Before taking such a step, it is worth pausing to consider what you would lose.

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  AMERICAN DEMOCRACY WORKS

  Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.