Essay: Our United States

Essay: Our United States Joel Christopher Wetzel October, 2009

There are two visions of America. One precedes our founding fathers and finds its roots in the harshness of our puritan past. It is very suspicious of freedom, uncomfortable with diversity, hostile to science, unfriendly to reason, contemptuous of personal autonomy. It sees America as a religious nation. It views patriotism as allegiance to God. It secretly adores coercion and conformity. Despite our constitution, despite the legacy of the Enlightenment, it appeals to millions of Americans and threatens our freedom. The other vision finds its roots in the spirit of our founding revolution and in the leaders of this nation who embraced the age of reason. It loves freedom, encourages diversity, embraces science and affirms the dignity and rights of every individual. It sees America as a moral nation, neither completely religious nor completely secular. It defines patriotism as love of country and of the people who make it strong. It defends all citizens against unjust coercion and irrational conformity. This second vision is our vision. It is the vision of a free society. We must be bold enough to proclaim it and strong enough to defend it against all its enemies. -- Rabbi Sherwin Wine

The fundamental purpose of the United States is to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which explains our determination: 1. to maintain the essential elements of individual freedom, as set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights; 2. to create conditions under which our free and democratic system can live and prosper; 3. to fight if necessary to defend our way of life. Even with no outside threat, we face the great problem of a free society: of reconciling order, security, and the need for participation, with the requirements of freedom. We risk the defeat of our fundamental purpose more from the lack of the will to maintain it than from any mistakes we may make or assault we may undergo because of its assertion. For us there can never be total victory, since freedom and democracy are never wholly attained, but are always in the process of being attained. The prime reliance of the free society is on the strength and appeal of its idea. It feels no compulsion to bring all societies into conformity with it, for the free society does not fear, it welcomes, diversity. Its strength derives from its hospitality, even to competing world views. It is a market for the free trade of ideas, secure in its faith that free men will take the best wares, and grow to a fuller and better realization of their powers through exercising their choice. Our essential tolerance, our generous and constructive impulses, and the absence of covetousness in our international relations are assets of potentially enormous influence. This is our great potential; between it and our capabilities currently being utilized is an increasingly wide gap of unactualized power. The full power residing in the American people can be evoked only through the traditional democratic process. Only a practical affirmation of our essential values can preserve our integrity. This requires, firstly, that sufficient information regarding the basic political, economic, and military elements of present circumstances be made publicly available so that an intelligent popular opinion may be formed. The initiative in this process lies with the Government. Having achieved a comprehension of the issues confronting the Republic, it will then be possible for the People and the Government to arrive at a consensus. Out of this consensus will come a resolute expression of the national will. The democratic way is inherently harder than that of the authoritarian because, in this increasingly complex modern world, it seeks to protect and fulfill the individual and demands a large measure of sacrifice and discipline to achieve understanding, judgment, and positive participation. Authoritarianism does not have to be responsive in any important sense to public opinion. It does not have to consult and agree with any other countries on the terms it will offer and accept. It can influence public opinion in other countries while insulating the peoples under its control. The means employed by the

authoritarian are limited only by considerations of expediency. Doctrine is not a limiting factor; rather it dictates the employment of violence, subversion, and deceit, and rejects moral considerations. In any event, the authoritarian state’s conviction of its own infallibility has made its devotion to theory so subjective that past or present pronouncements as to doctrine offer no reliable guide to future actions. The only apparent restraints on resort to war are, therefore, calculations of practicality. The authoritarian state does not hesitate to use military force aggressively if that course is expedient in the achievement of its design. The United States, however, is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual, who is valued as an end in himself, and required to possess only that measure of self-discipline and self-restraint which make his rights compatible with the rights of others. As a free society we cherish and protect the minority against the majority. From this idea of freedom with responsibility derives the marvelous diversity, the deep tolerance, the lawfulness of the free society, and the explanation of the strength of free men. It constitutes the integrity and the vitality of a free and democratic system in which every individual has the opportunity to realize his creative powers and explains why the free society tolerates even those within it who would use their freedom to destroy it. The very virtues of our system can handicap us in certain aspects of international relations. While it is a general source of strength to us that such relations are conducted on a basis of persuasion and consent rather than coercion, it is also evident that dissent among ourselves can become a vulnerability. Sometimes this dissent has its principal roots abroad, in situations about which we can do nothing. But it often arises largely out of certain weaknesses within ourselves, about which we can do something, weaknesses such as our native impetuosity and our complacency regarding civic duties and participation. The United States is also vulnerable because it is easy for the People to lapse into excesses: • • • •

of faith becoming prejudice; of tolerance degenerating into indulgence of conspiracy and corruption; of unquestioning, uncritical attitudes towards authority; and of resorting to suppression when more moderate measures are not only more appropriate but more effective.

Other internal risks include: • • • • • • • • • • •

serious espionage, subversion, and sabotage, particularly by concerted and well-directed enemies; prolonged or exaggerated economic instability; internal political and social disunity; the adoption of measures contrary to our fundamental purpose; inadequate OR excessive armament; inadequate OR excessive foreign aid expenditures; an excessive or wasteful usage of our resources in time of peace; lessening of prestige and influence through vacillation or appeasement; lack of skill and imagination in the conduct of foreign policy; shirking world responsibilities; development of a false sense of security.

Every institution of our society is a potential instrument for use against the purposes of freedom. The doubts and diversities that, in terms of our values, are part of the merit of a free system, the weaknesses and the problems that are peculiar to it, as well as the rights and privileges which free men enjoy, are all opportunities for opposing forces to do their evil work. Those that touch most closely our material and moral strength are obviously the prime targets: corporations, legislators, law enforcement, labor unions, civic enterprises, schools, churches, and all media for influencing opinion. The goal would be not so much to make them serve an enemy’s ends as to prevent them from serving our own, and thus to make them sources of confusion in our economy, our culture, and our body politic. In coping with enemies acting in secrecy and with speed, we are vulnerable in that the democratic process necessarily operates in the open and at a deliberate tempo. Weaknesses in our situation are readily apparent and subject to immediate exploitation. With natural vulnerabilities, our free society cannot afford to operate on a narrow margin of strength; it must maintain clearly superior overall power in the most inclusive sense. The United States, confronted by a threat to its basic values, will take such action, including the use of military force, as may be required to protect those values. The integrity of our system will not be jeopardized by any measures, covert or overt, violent or non-violent, which serve the purposes of

frustrating an authoritarian design, nor does the necessity for conducting ourselves so as to affirm our values in actions as well as words forbid such measures, provided only that they are limited to opposing authoritarianism and not so excessive or misdirected as to harm the people rather than the evil that would enslave them. The difference between our fundamental purpose and that of an authoritarian is reflected in our respective attitudes toward and use of military force. We are limited in our choice of means to achieve our ends. For us the role of military power is to serve the people by deterring an attack upon us, defeating any aggressor, while we seek by other means to create an environment in which our free society can flourish, defending our integrity and vitality. Compulsion is the negation of freedom and is permissible only when the basic rights of individuals are threatened or when a malevolent entity seeks to unilaterally impose its will. It is a dangerous act for a free society, warranted only in the face of even greater dangers. The necessity of war must be clear and compelling; it must commend itself to the overwhelming majority as an inescapable exception to the basic idea of freedom. Otherwise, the regenerative capacity of freedom after the act will be endangered. Military victory alone would only partially and perhaps only temporarily affect the fundamental conflict, for although the ability of unilateralism to threaten our security might be for a time destroyed, the resurgence of its forces and the re-establishment of such a system or its equivalent would not be long delayed unless great progress were made in the fundamental conflict. The idea of slavery can only be overcome by the timely and persistent demonstration of the superiority of the idea of freedom. War is not only a last resort for a free society, but it is also an act which cannot definitively end a fundamental conflict in the realm of ideas. In our shrinking world of polarized power, which faces perpetual warfare, it is not an adequate objective merely to check evil designs, for the absence of order is becoming less and less tolerable. The risks crowd in on us so as to give no choice, ultimately, between meeting them effectively or being overcome by them. Defeat at the hands of authoritarianism is total defeat. Our system can light the path to peace and order through freedom and justice, as contemplated in the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, and the Charter of the United Nations. We must, through international relations, seek to create a world society based on the principle of consent. Its framework cannot be inflexible. It will consist of many communities of great and varying abilities and resources, and hence of war potential. The seeds of conflicts will inevitably exist or will come into being; to acknowledge this is to acknowledge the impossibility of a final solution. Not to acknowledge it will be fatal.