Last week, a distinguished British blogger took issue with a January 19th posting in which I said that, “Inaugural addresses invariably remind us of America’s historically unmatched commitment to popular sovereignty and individual liberty…” I’d like to respond.
The blogger was Max Atkinson and his challenge is here.
As he wrote:
My point is not to criticize the particular form of democracy and freedom that’s been developed in the USA. Nor is it to claim that we in the UK (or any other European country) have a come up with an even better version of democracy. But it is to register a complaint about this implicit criticism of other countries’ democracy and freedom that’s so regularly trotted out by American politicians.
By way of background, Atkinson is a former Oxford professor of anthropology. In the 1980s he became interested in how audiences respond to speakers. He focused first on analyzing structures of language that trigger applause. This interest led him ultimately to leaving academia and becoming a highly successful consultant on public presentation. His clients are political and corporate leaders, primarily in the UK and Europe. He has written two excellent books on speechwriting and presentation development, most recently Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need To Know About Speeches And Presentations (published in the US by Oxford University Press, 2005).
Saying we in America have an historically unmatched commitment to the combination of popular sovereignty and individual liberty is no more than stating a simple fact. Switzerland is occasionally cited as an example of earlier popular rule, but Switzerland of the late 18th and early 19th centuries (before the Napoleonic occupation) was an authoritarian realm under patrician families — nothing like the U.S. from the hour of its independence.
It is true that Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 established the standards for law and liberty that became the foundation of the American experiment. Our revolutionary generation considered themselves (correctly) heirs to and perfectors of the British achievement. Part of that perfecting was introducing rule by the people to a degree the British would not come close to equaling for decades.
Atkinson criticizes Ronald Reagan for saying, in his Time for Choosing speech of 1964, “If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth.” He might as well have taken on Abraham Lincoln, who, in his 1838 Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum speech, observed that the US “for the last half century, has been the fondest hope, of the lovers of freedom, throughout the world” and who, in his 1862 Annual Message to Congress, termed the American nation, “the last best hope of earth.” Lincoln knew — and the world of his time knew — that something unprecedented and as yet unmatched had happened here.
Many countries have followed since, including, of course, the UK. But when Reagan spoke in 1964, the mix of individual freedom and popular sovereignty was still far from framing the world’s standard. It was the middle of the Cold War, and it was no exaggeration to assert that, given the geopolitics of that era, if America were to fall, all other centers of freedom and popular rule would follow us down, just as they had followed us up.
Directly put: The modern move of nations to personal liberty in the context of popular sovereignty originates in the United States — and, even with the beating our global image arguably took in recent years, America remains a internationally animating example of that ideal to a degree that no other country equals. As part of the task of “maintaining the vigor of our national life and the constancy of our national purpose” — a task that, as I said, is among the functions of each inaugural (and that President Obama in his inaugural fulfilled admirably) — it is legitimate, appropriate and even essential to return to this truth. It is not chauvinism. It is in no way a dismissal of other democracies. It is simply right.
