The idea of America

What are we voting for anyway?

The most important race is, of course, for president. Presidents set the tone by what they say and which policies they endorse. In 1980, President Ronald Reagan turned the course of America from the era of big government to smaller government for the next 25 years. President Barack Obama reignited a new era of huge government control and intervention in 2008 which has yet to abate.

Broadly speaking, what we are really voting for is whether the people we elect will be conversant with the intellectual and philosophical history of what has made the United States of America the most free, prosperous and charitable nation in history and will do everything they can to preserve and defend it ― or they won’t.

A good friend, Dr. Gil Greggs, lectures often at The Institute for the Public Trust. At each session, he points out the American Democratic Republic is an idea that could be blown away in any election or moment in time.

As a cautionary tale to outline the fragility of our government, Greggs lists the following thinkers who came up with specific “revolutionary ideas” that are the nucleotides of American intellectual and cultural DNA. Every citizen should have a working knowledge of them, especially if they are going to serve as elected representatives in government: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Kant and Adam Smith, among many others.

Epictetus, for example, was a freed slave who founded Stoicism in the first century A.D. after service to Nero’s secretary. He was the first philosopher to coin the phrase “all men are created equal,” which was truly earth-shaking in a world where slaves had never been considered as anything but human property to be owned by others who conquered them in battle.

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and George Mason, our founders with great intellectual and writing ability, read all of these ancient philosophers and collated the great ideas together for the first time to produce two texts that will live forever if not in practice — the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

We will either elect a president (and a Congress) who understands and respects American exceptionalism based on the ideas of these thinkers and will work to preserve it — or we won’t.

By contrast, a cursory Google search of Vice President Kamala Harris’ speeches doesn’t yield a reference to John Locke or any of the Western philosophers mentioned above. Neither do any of Obama’s or Joe Biden’s speeches for that matter either.

It is like the great philosophers of Western civilization didn’t exist ― and the American founders should be canceled even though they adopted their ideas of free thought and self-governance. Perhaps leftists ignore them because they were white men, many of privilege. The narrative of the left is selective revisionism of history at best.

It doesn’t matter ― it is the ideas we should treasure regardless of origin.

So much of contemporary “progressive socialism” seems to be made up out of thin air. Obama famously ― or rather, infamously ― claimed Muslims contributed to America’s birth and growth at its core and implied America was founded on Muslim principles instead of Judeo-Christian precepts. “Islam has always been a part of America. Muslim slaves ripped from Africa and brought to the U.S. did not leave their religion at the shore,” as reported in the February 2014 edition of Time magazine.

The only problem with such a statement is he failed to mention that Muslims had established the robust slavery trade routes along the silk roads connecting Asia to Europe long before they were tapped into by Viking and then later European slave traders from Portugal, Spain and England.

If any group of people deserved their fair share of the blame for the slave trade, most assuredly, it would be the Arab Muslims for a thousand years before America was even discovered. And yet, the left blamed white Europeans and newly minted Americans for “starting” slavery.

There is a direct line, albeit at times circuitous, through European medieval, Renaissance and Enlightenment eras between the U.S. experience and the ancient philosophers of Greece and Rome. Ours is not a history derived from the texts of the Ming Dynasty in China, the Ottoman Empire in Persia or any particular tribe or faction in Africa, Australia or South America.

America is exceptional because it is an idea rooted in the highest ideals of human experience derived from the greatest free thinkers over the past 2,500 years. It is an idea that could swiftly pass away unless we vote to keep it, as Ben Franklin purportedly said to Elizabeth Willing Powel at the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.

It is time to revert to the mean, as in return to the common sense America held before 2008.