The Social Inheritance of Liberty Must Be Seized and Maintained Every Day Against "Remnant" Resignation.
Despair is not discernment. And blaming others is not a strategy.
Interviewer: “Then I suppose you had been reading Harrington or Sidney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty?"
Patriot Veteran: "Never heard of 'em. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts's Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanac."
Interviewer: "Well, then, what was the matter? And what did you mean in going to the fight?"
Patriot Veteran: "Young man, what we meant in going for those red-coats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.
- in “John Adams, the statesman of the American Revolution;
with other essays and addresses, historical and literary”
by Mellen Chamberlain, published 1898
In the 1840s, when Mellen Chamberlain interviewed Captain Levi Preston about why Preston fought at Concord in 1775, Preston was an old man but still ready to talk about the American Revolution. Chamberlain asked the aged Revolutionary War veteran about the Stamp Act, the tea tax and about the intellectuals like Locke that folks maybe focus a bit too much on when we talk about the common American of the 18th century. Preston was unbothered by the specific taxes as he didn’t pay the stamp tax and did not drink tea. And he did not read Locke or the other eggheads. He was an American born British subject with the inheritance of being a freeman. Inheritance, legacy. He did not need to read Locke, he had his Bible and his heritage. He was born free and meant to keep on being free. That is the American spirit, the fulfillment of English liberty. And folks are killing it with induced passive resignation.
There was a time when saying the West was falling felt like prophecy. Now it feels like branding. For over two decades, maybe more at this point, a certain class of so-called conservative intellectuals has made a career out of cultural grief. The decadence is obvious, they say. The institutions are hollow. The elites are faithless. Their solution? Circle the wagons. Protect the household. Brace for collapse. They speak as if they are revealing something. But it is not revelation. It is repetition. A script. One that sells books, fills conferences, and offers a generation of exhausted readers the bittersweet comfort of surrender that feels like realism.
I am not sure if the chorus of retreat is rising or if it is just an aging track on repeat. But it sure is tiring. Yes, America is in decline. Its ruling class is decadent. Its institutions are, shall we say less than optimal. No serious person denies it. But there is a difference between identifying a disease then building a life around it and applying a cure. At some point, the prophet becomes a performer, repeating laments not to warn, but to maintain the brand they cannot grow out of; marketing rather than thinking.
That is what this has become: the performance of sorrow in place of strategy. Individual, personal, retreat may bring comfort to the soul. But it is no foundation for a civilization. Someone has to get out there and do something, preferably the mass of someones. This country was not built by a passive people. America has known despair before. But it has never rebuilt from withdrawal. The Great Awakenings were, well awake, not asleep. And it is worth asking: who benefits from this sleepy chorus of decline? Not the poor. Not the hollowed-out towns. Not the children in schools where no one teaches virtue, grammar, logic, rhetoric or heritage. This despair industry comforts another class entirely: the well-read, well-positioned, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, performative exiles engagement farming with overseas fantasies. Those with just enough distance to avoid risk, and just enough resentment to monetize it.
Collapse has become an aesthetic. A stance. A brand. But it is not a mission. And that is why it cannot help. But it sure grabs attention. The American tradition is not naïve optimism. It is resilience. How do you think some of us survived Jim Crow? It acknowledges evil, but it also remembers that despair, especially the kind that flatters its audience, is a form of cowardice when it becomes an excuse to do nothing. Do not mistake disengagement for virtue. The mentality of self-government will not be recaptured by men who have convinced themselves that surrender is a moral posture.
This sort of disengagement, by inducing forms of passivity, can morph into submission to irregular authority and conformity with power; power that appeals with illusions of comfort or security. Over time, this posture of retreat begins to shift. It no longer resists power. It adapts to it. What began as “preservation” becomes accommodation. This is how the performance of disengagement becomes the habit of submission. Self-government requires active engagement: agency and work. The man who theoretically withdrew to preserve his freedom reemerges to find himself answering to an alien authority: the new gods of passive, resigned men. Someone to govern him, because he will not govern himself. Self-government is hard, being ruled is easy. The performance of rule requires a target on which to enact power. Theater. Internal enemies at home or unnecessary enemies abroad where bellicosity dresses itself in appropriated philosophical language, quoting the “Thucydides Trap” as if it were a special insight of inevitability rather than a choice. The dragon we must slay is our own resignation not the red one across the Pacific. Cultures of defeat ultimately become cultures to be ruled by passions and appetites, not disciplined self-governing people.
The antidote is the active ownership of society’s good by the public themselves. Political agency as we know it was born out of the Reformation’s insistence on the individuals responsibility to workout their salvation in fear and trembling and it is perhaps not for nothing that those who submit to maladministration most readily are those who reject the legacy of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. Both Catholics and Protestants emerged from the 16th century with a newly energetic faith that shaped the Scientific Revolution, Baroque Art and Classical Music.
Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain. Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. Likewise you also should be glad and rejoice with me.
- Letter to the Philippians chapter 2 verses 12-18
In the same speech where John Quincy Adams said America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy” he also called us back to the legacy of agency inherited from British history and the Reformation. (I have added emphasis below.)
The corruptions and usurpations of the Church were the immediate objects of these reformers; but, at the foundation of all their exertions, there was a single, plain, and almost self-evident principle-that man has a right to the exercise of his own reason. It was this principle which the sophistry and rapacity of the Church had obscured and obliterated, and which the intestine divisions of the same Church itself first restored. The triumph of reason was the result of inquiry and discussion, Centuries of desolating wars have succeeded, and oceans of human blood have flowed for the final establishment of this principle; but it was from the darkness of the Cloister that the first spark was emitted, and from the arches of an University that it first kindled into day. From the discussion of religious rights and duties, the transition to that of the political and civil relations of men with one another, was natural and unavoidable… —July 4, 1821, John Quincy Adams
The chorus of cultural despair has grown old and stale. Civilizations do not collapse from sin alone, or there would be none, but from unrestrained appetite, mismanaged strength, and the refusal to own failure. Germany in 1914 had everything it needed, except wisdom. Americans should learn from that. Before we talk about decline versus greatness, let us recall what true power looks like: competency, sovereignty, and restraint. The idea that one can simply retreat and build a parallel moral order ignores the psychological and social necessities of confronting failure and disappointment directly; and of knowing when to be satisfied with work well done and accepting of balance. The United States has the population and resources it needs for self-strengthening and renewal. The despair, anxiety, and barely repressed envy are choices.
Bismarck understood the genius of being satisfied. He made Germany strong and by being restrained he made France look crazy. French overreaction to losing Alsace-Lorraine isolated France, the territory is only 5,000 square miles and the French made revenge over a war they started the personality of the Third Republic. Germany captured almost the whole French Army in 1870 and only took 5,000 miles! Europe wanted France to calm down and have a drink or something. Germany was fine.
It was not being satisfied that ruined Germany. Lack of contentment, the refusal to tend its garden and make it bloom. Germany was strong enough to be safe from conquest but not strong enough to try and conquer Europe, and it did not need colonies because Germans were more productive than the French. It was unified enough, and had the enviable space to focus on itself and benefit from the world market. And chose not to. It provoked the British and Russians into siding with the French.
Think of how badly you have to plan your actions to get the British to side with the French.
The age after Bismarck was the age of denial and the undoing of his work. Bottom line Germany got beat in the Great War by France with American, British, and Italian help. Just as France wanted, and it too paid the price of its lack of restraint. But, Germans could not accept this and took to blaming others including their Jewish fellow Germans. That was dumb cope. Fascism and antisemitism in Germany were acts of extreme, delusional, suicidal denial, combined with sadism. People were empowered to prey on Jews and others in order to feel bigger than they were. Then they started another war, got beaten worse, and the result was the destruction of German unity. Germany was re-divided for two generations; and it has still not recovered. East Germany remains a mess after twelve years of Nazism followed by forty-five years of Sovietism. That is three generations raised in Hell. The AfD is a reflection of what that gets you.
If there are some lessons from this for Americans it is do not pick fights you do not need, focus on your own sovereignty, not mastery over others, and do not be a weak passive by blaming others for your own mistakes and screw ups. Be better. There is power in competency and ownership of your life choices. You can make different choices, tap into your potential or develop the potential you do not yet have. Be stronger, more honest, and wiser. But turning to hate and resentment is cope, self-defeating cope. And those who sell it are defrauding you of your independence. That is what you should resent. American freedom is dependent on Americans seizing the day, everyday. With your neighbors and not against them.