As we deal with crisis, we must not allow freedom or security to become mutually exclusive ideas.
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Benjamin Franklin once famously said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Since 1776, this has, for the most part, been the unsung motto of the American people. Our desire for freedom, and our willingness to forgo so-called ‘security’ for that freedom, had long been the backbone of society, and our system of governance.
A few days ago, in an article for the Washington Post, Henry Olsen countered Franklin’s above statement with one of his own: “Americans love freedom, but they love security as much and more.”
As a conservative, all I can say to that preposterous statement is: he’s right. Americans today, by and large, will take security over freedom every day of the week.
Where did we go wrong? When did we lose Franklin’s mantra? How can we get back to that love of freedom?
To answer the first question, we must go back to the first Great American Crisis: the Great Depression. As Americans, we had weathered storms. We survived the Civil War. We made it through the Panic of 1893 (a Depression-level economic crisis caused by the Bank of England). We went through World War I and came out on top. We rebelled against Prohibition. In each and every case, liberty triumphed over a false notion of security. Freedom thrived.
But these crises began to take their toll. The American people became weary of their principles. Wilson’s successes showed that Americans were tired of upholding the Constitution to a tee. Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and the “Return to Normalcy” coupled with the economic success of the “Roaring ‘20’s” hid that fact for a decade. But cracks were showing, and all it took was one major blow to fully shatter our faith in our founding document.
That blow came on October 29, 1929, with the infamous Black Thursday.
There is plenty of analysis as to the causes of the Dow Jones crash of October 1929 out there. I don’t want to get off track in discussing the economic nuances required to explain it. What is important to discuss, however, is Washington’s response to the crisis.
As president, Herbert Hoover found himself in between a rock and a hard place. If he went with the popular whims of the people and rapidly expanded government, he would piss off the conservative constituents that supported him because Calvin Coolidge endorsed him in 1928. If he stuck to the Coolidge Model, he was afraid voters would kick him out of office. His compromise? The worst of both worlds.
Hoover was not a strong leader, and he did not stand up and stick to his principles. He endorsed a quasi-Roosevelt package of programs but did not boldly implement them as his successor did. The result was the worst down-ballot landslide loss in American history up to that point.
The American people cast Republicans into political wilderness. Roosevelt’s style of heavy-handed progressivism, re-styled ‘liberalism’ to attract voters, came into full effect. The American people had had it with principled constitutional stances. They wanted action, and they wanted it now. We’ve never gone back.
The national security apparatus born in the aftermath of WWII has grown to blatantly violate our civil liberties. The welfare state born out of the Great Depression and expanded under LBJ/Nixon has continued to grow in size and costs.
And, now, we find Americans calling for authoritarianism from the top. We ask our president to nationalize parts of the economy unilaterally and to criminalize leaving our homes. We cheer when governors do the same. Everywhere we look, the American people repeatedly embrace a sense of security at the cost of their freedom.
Hope is not lost, though. It never is, so long as there are those fighting for our freedoms. There is always a chance to begin restoring our freedoms, and to begin rebuilding American faith in our founding principles.
Reagan once said, “freedom is never more than one generation from extinction.” We are at that point. This may be the generation that lets freedom go extinct. I will fight against that. I hope you will too.
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