Yes, the future would look brighter if Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were to abruptly retire and spend their golden years reading Friedrich von Hayek's damning treatise on the perils of state planning, The Road to Serfdom. Yes, it would be a far safer country if President Barack Obama were to stop apologizing for the rest of us and put more effort into defying and defeating America's enemies outright and less into wishing them Happy New Year and handing them a stage in federal court.
These are matters that American voters are currently pondering. The policies of the hour do not yet define what America is, or who Americans are. Those basic questions belong to a larger domain and longer history too often obscured by the daily battles in Washington, the latest fad, poll, political gaffe, politician caught with his hand in the jam jar or political appointee videotaped while praising Mao.
Such is the nature of a free society, in which we are used to debates and critiques, to brawling it out in our discourse and hanging it out in our culture. Democracy does not utterly anneal the most troubling aspects of the human condition; it merely offers the best possible chance to cope with them and thrive. As the fictional Mr. Dooley of Chicago observed about a century ago, "Politics ain't beanbag." These days, politics comes at us around the clock, on TV, radio, over the Internet, and via regulations, taxes and plans for modifying our lives in ways no one can even keep track of. There's plenty over which to slug it out.
Thanksgiving is a day to step back from all that, and count not only a laundry list of material comforts, but also the gifts of the spirit. For all the sound and fury, there is no place richer in such blessings, or with more to be proud of, than the United States of America. For more than two centuries, this country has endured and prospered as a free nation, outlasting an array of despotisms that once loomed large. America of its own volition ended slavery, survived its Civil War and led the way to victory in World War II and the Cold War. In modern times no nation has been friendlier to invention, creativity and the commerce that makes for betterment of life around the globe. America is where the Wright Brothers took flight, where vacuum tubes of the lugubrious early computers led on to the microchips of the digital age and where medicine has made the greatest strides.
Yet with all that has come a sense of guilt and unease. Having led the way out of a 20th century afflicted with totalitarian ideologies and two world wars, America over the past decade has been reviled by many of its own elite for being "unilateral," for overthrowing in Iraq one of the world's worst tyrants, for leading a scientific and industrial revolution in which it produced more carbon dioxide per capita than Laos.
The big question before us is whether America will now bow, scrape, regulate and spend its way into decline. Columnist Charles Krauthammer, speaking in New York at the Manhattan Institute's annual dinner in October wisely argued that decline is not an imminent destiny, but a choice.
Does it matter? What would be wrong with America as No. 2? Yes, it matters for two big reasons. The first is the global problem of who, or what, then becomes No. 1? The list of candidates is not reassuring, and currently some of the worst regimes are also the most enterprising in leveraging power. Not only for America, but for all humanity, there would be monstrous costs to a world led by the governing principles that hold sway in such places as Beijing, Moscow, Riyadh, Tehran, Tripoli or Caracas.
The second is that for America to choose decline would be to break faith with what this country is. America did not set out to become a great power and engineer a system to achieve it. Rather, America is built on principles of freedom that allow its citizens to make the most of their individual talents, energies and dreams. That is what earned America its place as No. 1.
There is nothing in that to apologize for, and everything to be proud of. How to translate that basic truth into action is a matter of individual choice. But here's one place to begin: It's time to luxuriate in patriotism and not be ashamed to spin legends again--not about our current politicians, who are already involved in quite enough spinning, but about American heroes, adventurers, the out-sized figures who years ago, imagined or real, populated American lore. Where is today's Paul Bunyan or Davy Crockett?
Today's U.S. military is full of real heroes who have volunteered to risk their lives for their country and what it stands for. Thousands have died. Yet they remain largely obscure. The big concerns and publicity revolve so often not around these heroes, and the freedoms they are defending, but around such matters as the treatment of the enemies they capture.
If that's what's being hashed out in Washington and dished up in the daily news, set it aside for a day and reach for something more inspiring. I did some foraging on the bookshelves this week (though the Internet will also serve) and came away much refreshed by such classics as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem about the midnight ride of Paul Revere. The verses might not meet the brooding standards of the psychoanalytically inclined critics of our day. But they can still thrill and inspire, as the rider sets out to raise the alarm that the British are coming:
…a spark
Struck out by the steed flying fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet through the gleam and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night,
Longfellow had a marvelous confidence that this spirit would endure. He ended that poem with the lines:
… Borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
The days of legend and valor need not be over. To be American is to be part of an extraordinary and noble adventure on the frontiers of freedom. From that arises the immense bounty for which Americans, over turkey and pie, give thanks. If that seems too proud and simple a message for complex times, it is anything but. It is the real bottom line and rallying point for a better world.
