America faces several existential threats. Two of them – Russia and China – are somewhat ordinary, in that we’ve faced them for years. They remain threats none-the-less, but we know how to deal with them.
Then, there’s debt, huge, multi-tiered layers of debt – federal spending, Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, multiple federal and state pension funds; they represent a nearly inconceivable amount of debt, perhaps 10 times our GDP. Government appears incapable of handling this threat, but the economy as a whole, perhaps if freed from government fetters, might still rescue the bureaucracy and Congress from nearly 100 years of bad economic and monetary theory.
But there’s a fourth threat, one that’s more dangerous than all the others, and that threat lies in the answer to the simple question: What is America?
To a growing number, America is just a country, a place, a nation like any other, defined only by its boundaries and a host of statistics. To others, America is an idea, a concept of government, and more importantly, a concept of nationhood.
If the first is true, then the past is irrelevant, our Constitution is readily malleable, and we can become virtually anything, from a true one person – one vote democracy with no elected officials, where tyranny of the majority rules, to a totalitarian state where the government dictates everything we can and cannot do, what we can and cannot say, what we can and cannot believe, what we can and cannot be.
Or…
The United States was founded on a new idea of limited government, in which individual rights and the pursuit of justice was the central concept, that there would be a long – never ending – effort to continually improve, to develop a nation where people would be free to pursue their own goals, and that government is the servant of the people, not the master.
The seeming paradox is that those who believe America is a concept wish to defend its physical borders, to establish a Sanctuary where the concept of America can grow. Those who view America as a place, wish to ignore its borders and let it become whatever else it might become. But there’s no real paradox. America as an idea requires that those who enter America, those who live here, must believe in the idea of a more perfect union, they must accept that they – individually and specifically – must work towards that idea, that they cannot come and take, they must come and give. Kennedy was right that we must ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country.
Our country – not our government. And that requires embracing the concept that America really is about ideas, and those ideas must be protected.
In an excellent editorial last week Peggy Noonan noted that there’s a great divide in our country and it appears to be getting worse, deeper, and the animosity getting fiercer, with no room for discussion.
Perhaps that divide represents the distance between those who view America as simply a country – like 194 others, versus those who view America as an idea, and an ideal. That would seem to represent a schism that cannot be closed. But I think there is also some room for hope, whether to be found among the millions of hard-working Hispanics who have come to the US and are more than willing to embrace hard work and sacrifice, or even among many who seem to be embracing socialism.
A friend of mine pointed out that one of the issues pushing many millennials into the arms of socialism is the seemingly intractable problem of student debt. For someone freshly out of college this may seem an impossible problem. The incredible increase in the cost of higher education is a direct result of government intervention in education over the last few decades; it seems unlikely that government can readily solve the problem it helped create.
But perhaps it’s time for government to look into restructuring the debt of those who have tried to honor those debts, perhaps there’s a way forward that would allow for debt relief tied to some service to the nation.
For those who accept the notion of individual responsibility, of service to the nation and its ideal, and who believe in the notion of a more perfect union, not simply a piece of dirt – perhaps that’s the common ground the majority can unite around.
Copyright 2019 Arrias
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