Joseph Loconte's Blog, page 8

National Review: What Hong Kong Can Teach the West

This article was originally posted at National Review.

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There is a bitter, Orwellian irony about what’s been happening recently to the cause of freedom in the world. The evaporation of democratic rights in Hong Kong at the hands of Communist China is helping to expose a new malevolence, closer to home. Something of immense consequence is occurring: a civilizational self-loathing, a perverse disenchantment with the concept of government by consent of the governed.

In the two nations that have done the most to advance democracy and human rights over the past century, the United States and Great Britain, political and cultural elites have acquiesced as violent mobs continue to assault the statues, images, and symbols that embody the highest human achievements of our civilization. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Christopher Columbus, and even the abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass have all been targeted in America, while in Britain statues of Winston Churchill and Queen Victoria, as well as London’s sacred Cenotaph war memorial, have been attacked by rioters. No one is safe from the guillotine of rage unleashed by the radical Left. Basic civil liberties — including free speech, academic freedom, and religious freedom — are considered disposable by the new Jacobins of social justice.

Meanwhile, as angry crowds gathered in London, Bristol, and Oxford to denounce Great Britain for its imperial past, peaceful demonstrators in Hong Kong rallied to preserve their civil liberties, with some displaying the Union Jack. As petulant protesters marched in Washington, New York, and other American cities to curse the United States as irredeemably racist, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists were flying the American flag.

“Courage is the first of human qualities,” Churchill said, “because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.” The deficit of courage — the failure to honor and defend the ideals and institutions that have built our civilization — is a harbinger of democratic decline. By contrast, the people of Hong Kong have given the West a lesson in moral courage.

Indeed, China’s decision last week to impose its national-security law on Hong Kong is the regime’s latest attempt to silence the brave voices of democratic dissent. Those voices came to a crescendo in 2019 when a third of the city’s 7.5 million people gathered in demonstrations to thwart Beijing’s effort to extend its authoritarian rule. In the 1984 Sino–British Joint Declaration, China pledged to respect Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedom of speech, of assembly, and of the press. But Beijing has long viewed the former British colony as a threat to its dictatorial system and a sanctuary of Western cultural influence. The new national-security law, which bans “terrorist activities” and “collusion” with foreign actors, effectively terminates Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” of governance guaranteed by international law.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam claims that “the life and property” and “legitimate basic rights and freedoms” of citizens will be protected. But the thousands who have taken to the streets in the days after the new law went into effect do not believe her. Their agnosticism is rooted in their understanding of the nature of the Communist regime and in the dreary facts on the ground. China will now openly embed its security forces in Hong Kong to identify and silence opposition, including public criticism and peaceful demonstrations against the party’s rule. Beijing also has new powers to intervene in Hong Kong’s legal system: The city’s independent judiciary, one of the legacies of British colonial rule, is effectively over. China’s goal is to emphatically crush all dissent and any hint of free speech in Hong Kong. It even seeks to muzzle companies in the West that do business with China and Hong Kong. In other words, Hong Kong’s Western-style freedoms and institutions are coming to an end.

“From now on,” writes 23-year-old Joshua Wong, the best-known face of the pro-democracy movement, “Hong Kong enters a new era of reign of terror . . . with arbitrary prosecutions, black jails, secret trials, forced confessions, media clampdowns and political censorship.” Benedict Rogers, co-founder of the U.K.-based Hong Kong Watch, agrees. “This new security law is the absolute death knell of Hong Kong’s freedoms and autonomy — both in its substance and effect, and in the way in which it was imposed on Hong Kong, without even going through the pretence of a process of consultation locally,” he says. “This is the arrival of Orwellian repression on the very frontline of freedom, and must be met with a robust, united and coordinated response by the free world, or the Chinese Communist Party will not stop at Hong Kong.”

Hence the dark irony. The purveyors of false and hateful narratives about the United States and Great Britain — from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to the New York Times’ 1619 Project to the upper echelons of the taxpayer-funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) — are too obtuse and jaded to grasp it. Twenty-somethings in Hong Kong stand up to tear gas, bullets, batons, arrest, and imprisonment to defend their right to speak their minds. But the editorial mandarins at the Times and other elite journals cannot stand up to the infantile cancel culture in their ranks. Students, writers, artists, and blue-collar workers regularly defy the Chinese security apparatus. But corporate moguls at Apple, Disney, ESPN, Google, and Nike, for example, kowtow like frightened children to the Communist thugs in Beijing. The collective cowardice of leftist elites — in politics, academia, business, entertainment, and journalism — beggars belief.

Thankfully, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has vowed to stand with the people of Hong Kong, offering safe haven to roughly 3 million Hong Kongers (U.K.-passport holders as well as holders of a British National Overseas Passport), who will also have the right to apply to become British citizens after five years if they choose to settle in the United Kingdom. The response from Beijing has been furious and menacing, but Brexit Britain is standing its ground. Johnson, a devotee of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, has adopted a bulldog-style determination in the face of China’s threats, and his outstanding leadership on the Hong Kong issue should be emulated across Europe.

And here in the United States, the Senate has just unanimously passed measures to hold to account Chinese officials and companies complicit in Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong. The bipartisan Hong Kong Autonomy Act sends a clear message to China’s ruling Communist Party that there are consequences for its violation of the rights and freedoms of the people of Hong Kong. Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, put it bluntly in a recent tweet: “China’s goal: Force companies that do business in Hong Kong & individuals who travel to Hong Kong into silence. It’s an assault on free speech in America. American businesses need to stand up to Communist China & lawmakers must take stronger steps to hold China accountable.”

The U.S.–U.K. special relationship continues to be the strongest bulwark in the world against Chinese repression, and it is significant that it is London and Washington that are taking the lead in standing up to the Chinese dragon.

In his farewell address to the American people, Ronald Reagan called for “an informed patriotism” — that is, an understanding of our history that is honest, yet inspiring. He asked, “Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world?” He worried about the answer — about the cultural consequences of neglecting or perverting our history. The same question, of course, is being asked today in the United States and Great Britain. The answer coming from the radical Left, however, is an account of history engulfed in resentment and hatred: a visceral, quasi-religious assault against the achievements of these two great experiments in democratic self-government.

Reagan implored his audience to recover and transmit America’s legacy of justice, liberty, and prosperity to the next generation. His description of the United States applies equally to Great Britain, whose influence over America’s political ideals was profound and enduring: “We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise — and freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs protection.”

Liberty is not self-sustaining: It must be defended. No one understands that truth today better than the citizens of Hong Kong.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: What Winston Churchill Understood about America

This article was originally posted at National Review.

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On July 4, 1918, Winston Churchill chaired a meeting in London to deliver a message to the American people celebrating their Independence from Great Britain: “[We] rejoice that the love of liberty and justice on which the American nation was founded should in the present time of trial have united the whole English-speaking family in a brotherhood of arms.”

Churchill, then serving as Britain’s minister of munitions, had good reasons to be grateful for the United States. After four years of slaughter in the First World War, over 900,000 British soldiers lay dead — and Britain and her allies were hardly any closer to declaring victory than when the conflict had begun. The French army was demoralized, the Italians were in disarray, and the Russian army had collapsed. A few months earlier Churchill warned that the entire Allied cause was in peril. But the arrival of the American Expeditionary Force in France in the summer of 1918 made the defeat of German despotism almost inevitable.

Always the historian as well as the statesman, Churchill observed that the Declaration of Independence “is not only an American document. It follows on the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title-deed” on which the liberties of the democratic West were founded. The Magna Carta (1215), of course, declared that no political leader was above the rule of law. It affirmed the principles of due process and trial by jury. A product of England’s Glorious Revolution, the Bill of Rights (1689) reasserted the concept of constitutional government, that is, government by consent of the governed. These documents laid a new foundation for individual rights in the Western tradition. Together they shaped the fundamental laws of the North American colonies.

Indeed, the American revolutionaries, demanding their rights as Englishmen, drew on these declarations when they did some declaring of their own. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Here, for the first time in human history, a political society comes into being asserting the natural rights and equality of every human being, a claim rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Here is a demand for self-government that builds on the inheritance of the West to launch a radical experiment in democratic freedom.

Few statesmen were as clear-eyed about the triumphs and tragedies of Western civilization. Yet in the history of the English-speaking people, Churchill discerned a legacy of liberty, equality, and justice that eclipsed the failures of Britain and the United States to achieve these ideals. It is in this shared tradition, he said, where people struggling against tyranny can find inspiration to avoid “the shame of despotism” on the one hand and “the miseries of anarchy” on the other.

The thousands who continue to arrive each year in Great Britain and the United States — fleeing political and religious persecution — bear testimony to this simple truth. It is a fact worth recalling in our age of rage.

Indeed, in ways rarely appreciated, American exceptionalism drew its moral strength from British exceptionalism. It is a story of freedom that both countries can celebrate this July Fourth.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: Classical Liberals vs. National Conservatives in the Age of Coronavirus

This article was originally posted at National Review.

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Over the past few years, a small but growing cadre of religious conservatives has decided that classical liberalism — grounded in a belief in the natural rights and freedoms of the individual — is a grotesque mistake. The coronavirus pandemic should prompt this crowd to do a little soul-searching.

Despite their differences, liberalism’s right-wing critics are united in their fierce antagonism to John Locke, whose doctrine of government-by-consent inspired the American Revolution and informed the Founding. According to Yoram Hazony, the Jewish philosopher and author of The Virtue of Nationalism, Locke’s account of human nature amounts to “a far-reaching depreciation of the most basic bonds that hold society together.” Similarly, Patrick Deneen, a Catholic political scientist and author of Why Liberalism Failed, denounces Locke’s theory of consent as “one of liberalism’s most damaging fictions,” a solvent of community, morality, and religious belief. Locke’s vision of human flourishing, they say, was really no different than that of Thomas Hobbes.

All of this talk began before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, which has given most of us a more intimate taste of what it might be like to live under Hobbes’s Leviathan: “For by this authority . . . he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him that, by terror thereof, he is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual aid against their enemies abroad.”

Most states have imposed severe lockdown measures, constraining and disrupting the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Public gatherings — including peaceful protests — have been outlawed. Schools and colleges have closed their doors. Religious services have been banned, and would-be worshippers harassed by local police. Thousands of businesses — in every state — have been indefinitely shut down. Earlier this week, a Dallas woman was arrested, fined, and sent to jail for trying to operate her hair salon in defiance of the Texas governor’s stay-at-home rules. “Feeding my children isn’t selfish,” she said. “I am not closing the salon.”

In Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689), he named “life, liberty, and property” as among the natural rights of man that governments were instituted to protect. By property, he meant much more than a person’s wealth and belongings. “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself,” he wrote. “The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”

Locke’s critics, who often appear not to have read his actual works, see only mindless and clawing consumption at the root of his worldview. But the Second Treatise leaves no doubt about the divine prerogative and the moral obligations that flow from it: Our equality “by Nature” forms “the foundation” of “that obligation to mutual love amongst men” and “the duties they owe one another,” namely, “the great maxims of justice and charity.” Locke then cites the golden rule to insist upon “a natural duty” to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. In a slap at political absolutism, he invokes the authority of the God of the Bible: “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker . . . sent into the world by His order and about His business; they are His property, whose workmanship they are made to last during His, not another’s pleasure.” Locke’s conception of human flourishing ultimately depends upon his belief that every person is endowed by God with creative powers and is called — in freedom — to engage in meaningful, honorable, productive work.

The Leviathan — now embodied in government at all levels — inevitably has other ideas. About 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment since the onset of the coronavirus. The unemployment rate for April is expected to top 15 percent, the highest since the Great Depression. Tens of thousands of small business have been devastated, and many will never recover. The human suffering involved in this cataclysm — drug abuse, depression, suicide, and the delaying of surgeries, cancer treatments, etc. — cannot be calculated. The virus would’ve taken a severe toll on American society regardless of the public-policy response to it, but evidence is mounting that the government’s Draconian pandemic-response measures have played a role in making things worse.

Said measures have been undertaken in an effort to “flatten the curve” and “save lives.” It’s a rationale Hobbes would surely applaud: “And though of so unlimited a power men may fancy many evil consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetual war of every man against his neighbor, are much worse.” Having lived through the English Civil War, Hobbes did not believe that people could be trusted to govern themselves. Aided by a phalanx of medical authorities, neither do many of our political leaders, regardless of the facts on the ground.

Locke took a different view, devoting his political career to the defeat of the authoritarian forces that were trampling basic civil liberties, ruining economies, and destroying the social fabric of Europe. His remedy was a political society designed — and limited — to preserve our natural, inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property.

Government by consent involves risks, but the alternative is a life of dependency, passivity, and servitude. Progressives, ever restless for centralized authority, have tried to negate Lockean ideals for decades. In a recent editorial, “The America We Need,” the New York Times derided classical liberals for taking “an impoverished view of freedom,” and called for a “muscular conception of liberty” that would make government the “guarantor” of universal health care, housing, and employment. What is new, and worrisome, is that some prominent religious conservatives are now singing a similar tune, while blaming Locke’s principles for unleashing selfish individualism at the expense of the common good.

According to Patrick Deneen, classical liberalism has produced “an acquired ability to maintain psychic distance from any other human.” It apparently does not occur to him that Locke’s conception of freedom — rooted in reason and Revelation — might be the best protection against a state, say, forcefully mandating our physical isolation from one another. Meanwhile, conservative Catholics such as Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule want the Church’s theological tenets to guide the state, “because strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate.”

In short, these religious conservatives have sought an approach to political life that would treat Lockean freedoms with contempt. And the pandemic has given us a fearsome preview of what such an approach might look like.

No one should treat the lethality of this contagion lightly: We must do everything feasible to protect the most vulnerable among us. Seventy thousand deaths in a matter of months are a shocking tragedy. But only a rank materialist would disregard the social, moral, and spiritual consequences of the government’s unprecedented efforts to fight the virus. Indeed, the greater tragedy may turn out to be the subjugation of a free, prosperous, and just society by the nightmarish political creature Hobbes imagined, “that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defense.”

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

The Hill: Pandemics and the survival of the fittest

This article was originally posted at The Hill.

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When the influenza virus first struck down a soldier in March 1918 on a military base in Kansas, much of the country was mesmerized by The Black Stork, a silent film advocating the elimination of children born with severe illnesses or disabilities. The eugenics movement — the effort to improve the human gene pool by isolating and sterilizing those considered “unfit” to reproduce — was in full swing. Today, in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, the dominant theme is saving lives, regardless of the economic cost. Yet a century ago, medical and scientific authorities, egged on by religious leaders, supported a violent form of social Darwinism.

Soon after Charles Darwin published his evolutionary theory based on the “survival of the fittest,” anthropologists such as Francis Galton seized upon its social implications: Use the tools of science to improve the human species. “What Nature does blindly, slowly, ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly,” Galton told a London society in 1909. Galton coined the term eugenics — “good birth” — to promote his social vision. “It must be introduced into the national conscience,” he said, “like a new religion.”

Eugenics advocates proceeded with missionary zeal. A year after Galton’s speech, Charles Davenport, a professor of zoology at the University of Chicago, with grant money from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, created a national Eugenics Record Office. The aim: to gather scientific data to support the eugenics agenda. Beginning in 1912, a series of international conferences was held in London and New York, creating a global venue for a burgeoning class of eugenicists and their supporters. They built ties to institutions such as Harvard, Princeton and Columbia universities and New York’s Museum of Natural History. What began as a fringe, pseudo-scientific idea became mainstream thinking in premier scientific and academic institutions.

The 1918 influenza pandemic, despite killing the young and healthy as easily as the old and sick, did nothing to curb enthusiasm for eugenics. In Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu and How It Changed the World, Laura Spinney writes that one of the big lessons of the catastrophe was that “it was no longer reasonable to blame individuals for catching an infectious disease.” That’s not exactly right: The lesson for many scientific authorities was that the racial stock was in grave danger of degeneration.

In fact, it appears that the devastating effects of the influenza virus — killing at least 50 million people worldwide in a matter of months — stirred an apocalyptic gloom in educated circles. Book titles in the 1920s tell the story: The End of the World; Social Decay and Degeneration; The Need for Eugenic Reform; Racial Decay; Sterilization of the Unfit; and The Twilight of the White Races. Population planning was promoted by psychiatrist Carlos Paton Blacker, longtime general secretary of the Eugenics Society, who warned in a 1926 book, Birth Control and the State, of “a biological crisis unprecedented in the history of life.”

To many religious leaders, the “science” of eugenics was a “progressive” solution to a raft of social, moral and spiritual ills. Writing in the journal Eugenics, Harry F. Ward, a professor of Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary in 1919, explained that eugenics, like Christian morality, was aimed at “removing the causes that produce the weak.” In a 1928 winning entry for a national “eugenics sermon contest,” Rev. Kenneth MacArthur intoned: “If we take seriously the Christian purpose of realizing on earth the ideal divine society, we shall welcome every help which science affords.” The Rev. W.R. Inge, a professor of divinity at Cambridge University and one of the best-known clergymen of his day, was a devout believer in eugenics. In books, essays, and a weekly newspaper column, Inge complained about “humanitarian legislation” that assisted “these degenerates,” who possess “no qualities that confer a survival value.” They posed a mortal threat to Western civilization, he argued, and should be quarantined and eliminated.

The scientific community used its immense cultural authority to persuade democratic lawmakers to get on board. The American Eugenics Society — founded in 1922 and supported by Nobel Prize-winning scientists — hoped to sterilize a tenth of the U.S. population. California led the way, using its 1909 sterilization law to target the “unfit” and “feebleminded,” i.e., the poor, the infirm and the criminal class. Today, in battling the coronavirus, California has scrambled to acquire more hospital ventilators and even considered the mass release of its inmate population. But in the aftermath of the influenza outbreak, groups such as the Human Betterment Foundation lobbied for the involuntary sterilization of thousands of California residents in state hospitals and prisons. Thirty-two other states adopted similar eugenic policies.

What turned the tide of opinion against eugenics? The racist barbarism of Nazi Germany — the cries of the victims of Auschwitz — revealed to the world the appalling logic of eugenics. Yet there were other voices as well: the conservative and traditionalist Christians who never were taken in by the promises of a human biological paradise. In 1922, the influential Catholic thinker G.K. Chesterton published Eugenics and Other Evils, the only book of its time unabashedly opposed to the movement’s claims and objectives. Indeed, Chesterton anticipated the totalitarian direction of the eugenic agenda, which he derided as “terrorism by tenth-rate professors.”

William Jennings Bryan, an evangelical Christian — often caricatured for his opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial — is also worth recalling. The textbook that Bryan denounced, A Civic Biology, openly promoted the ideology of eugenics. After reviewing case studies of families with significant numbers of “feeble-minded” and “criminal persons,” the book’s author rendered a judgment: “They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.” In his closing argument in the trial, Bryan insisted that he was not opposed to science, but to science without the restraints of religious belief.

“Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals,” he explained. “If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene.”

Perhaps civilization has learned that lesson, at least partially. The heroic efforts to rescue as many people as possible from the current pandemic — regardless of their age, identity or physical condition — is evidence that the teachings of Jesus, the Nazarene, have not been fully forgotten.

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: The Queen’s Speech

This article was originally posted at National Review.

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On this side of the Pond, her sober and steady voice was drowned out by a cataract of fear and recrimination that has sullied America’s national life during the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking on Sunday evening from Windsor Castle, Queen Elizabeth II delivered a message of hope and solidarity to the United Kingdom, even as the nation’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, lay stricken with the virus. “Today we are tackling this disease, and I want to reassure you that if we remain united and resolute, then we will overcome it.” A bare 522 words, the queen’s speech was imbued with quiet dignity, with insight that comes from a life dedicated to a nation’s highest ideals through its darkest hours.

The queen recalled those hours: the beginning of the Nazi blitz in 1940, when the 14-year-old future monarch made her first broadcast to an anxious nation. In a moment of existential crisis, she offered words of comfort for the thousands of British children sent overseas — to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States — to escape the deadly bombing raids on London and other cities in England. “Before I finish, I can truthfully say to you all that we children at home are full of cheerfulness and courage. We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our own share of the danger and sadness of war.”

This threat is different, she explained, and in doing so revealed how a national leader can use an intimate knowledge of the past to offer perspective and wisdom for the present.

The virulent pandemic of Nazism divided the world into warring camps. And it was made more lethal and more sinister, in the words of Winston Churchill, “by the lights of perverted science.” Not so today: Hardly any region of the world has escaped the contagion, and most of the world is united in defeating it. “This time we join all nations across the globe in common endeavor. Using the great advances of science and our instinctive compassion to heal, we will succeed, and that success will belong to every one of us.”

Most Americans, understandably, don’t appreciate the decisive role of the monarch in England’s history of constitutional government: Without a monarchy, there would have been no Magna Carta, no Glorious Revolution, no English Bill of Rights, no Act of Toleration, no triumph over the international scourge of Napoleonic France. When the queen spoke of the qualities of the British people — “the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet, good-humored resolve and of fellow feeling” — she did so as a participant in an institution that has helped to shape the national character over centuries.

Many of America’s leaders, by contrast, have forgotten the purpose of the institutions they inhabit: to serve the common good, especially in times of crisis. Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs, wisely explains the massive breakdown of trust in America’s political, economic, and media institutions. Rather than allowing themselves to be shaped by the moral aims of our institutions, he explains, today’s leaders use them “as a stage to elevate themselves, raise their profiles and perform for the cameras in the reality show of our unceasing culture war.”

For sixty-eight years, from the day she was crowned in 1953, Queen Elizabeth II has resisted that temptation. She has conformed her own desires to the highest purposes of the institution she serves. As a result, she can be trusted. She can remind Britons, as she did on Sunday, that their finest moments as a nation, their unique identity as a people, “is not a part of our past. It defines our present and our future.” We call this an act of statesmanship, made possible by trust.

The collapse of trust in the United States coincides with our near contempt for meaningful, let alone inspiring, political speech. When the queen speaks, the nation listens, because behind her words is a life of substance, duty, faith, and moral purpose: a life that has seen up close how a nation can struggle and fight against a great evil — and not lose heart. When our politicians speak, their vaporous words dissolve like ants in a blazing furnace. Instead of statesmen, we have groomed a generation of vipers. The democratic spirit, unconstrained by virtue, creates a tyranny of egos, a monarchy of megalomania.

The queen ended her speech with a message of hope, rooted in history and memory and tradition. Pity the heart that could not be moved and lifted by it. “We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return,” she said. “We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again.”

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Interest: America Has a History of Pandemic Denial

This article was originally posted at The National Interest.

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Donald Trump wasn’t the first president to misunderestimate a national threat. Franklin Roosevelt played his part in the collective denial and dishonesty of the age—until the “ideology of fascism” contagion came knocking.

FDR, we are told, realized early the threat of Nazi Germany and worked relentlessly to shake the United States out of its isolationist slumber. David Nasaw described in a book review for the New York Times that “almost from the moment he entered office, Roosevelt set out to educate the nation to the fact that the United States was threatened not only by economic depression at home, but also by fascist aggressions abroad.” Likewise, Doris Kearns Goodwin claimed that long before America went to war, Roosevelt could “recognize the future” and sought to prepare the United States for its role as the “arsenal of democracy” against fascism.

This is hagiography masquerading as history. From almost the moment FDR became president, in 1933, he adopted a foreign policy of denial, deception, and indecision: a vain attempt to insulate the United States from a new pandemic—the scourge of totalitarianism—that was spreading around the globe.

Consider that in November of 1933, after less than a year in office, Roosevelt became the first American president to formally recognize the Soviet Union—at a high-water mark of communist barbarism. In 1929, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture, seizing the land and assets of the peasant population. Anyone resisting was sent to labor camps or executed. The result: famine and mass starvation. By the spring of 1933, twenty-five thousand people were dying every day in Ukraine, which was the grain belt of the Soviet Union. From 1929 to 1934, between ten million and fourteen million Soviet citizens perished.

Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher who rejected Marxism and inspired the Solidarity movement, has called this episode “probably the most massive warlike operation ever conducted by a state against its own citizens.” Instead of isolating the communist contagion, FDR extended an open hand: an act of genocide denial. Once he became a wartime ally, Joseph Stalin—a sadistic and murderous psychopath—was transformed by the American president into “Uncle Joe.”

Roosevelt’s posture of magical thinking stiffened throughout the 1930s as another fearsome “pandemic”—the ideology of fascism—began to threaten the freedom of Europe. Promising to tear up the Treaty of Versailles when he became chancellor in 1933, Adolf Hitler withdrew Germany from the League of Nations. In 1936, the German military occupied the Rhineland, a flagrant violation of the Versailles Treaty. The demilitarized zone in the Rhineland had been established by three separate articles in the treaty: It forbade military forces, maneuvers and mobilizations. Any breach of the treaty was considered an act of war.

The United States had never ratified the Versailles Treaty, and FDR’s response, delivered through his Secretary of State, made clear that Hitler’s intervention was not America’s problem: “It would appear . . . that the action of the German Government has constituted both a violation of the Versailles and Locarno pacts, but as far as the United States is concerned it does not appear to constitute a violation of our treaty of August 25, 1921 with Germany.” Trade with Germany continued apace.

From 1935—37, amid deepening anxiety about the possibility of another European conflict, Roosevelt signed the Neutrality Acts, prohibiting U.S. assistance to either side in a European or Asian war, no matter what the cause. “I have approved this joint resolution because it was intended as an expression of the fixed desire of the Government and the people of the United States to avoid any action which might involve us in war,” FDR wrote. “The purpose is wholly excellent, and this joint resolution will to a considerable degree serve that end.” He would soon regret it.

FDR’s admirers like to draw attention to his 1937 “quarantine speech,” in which he warned about international aggression by nations such as Italy (in Ethiopia), Japan (in Manchuria) and Germany (in the Rhineland). Roosevelt suggested that the democracies join in a “quarantine” of belligerent states:

“It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of disease.”

Isolationists in both parties called it a war-mongering speech, but FDR never explained what he meant, even when pressed by reporters. He swiftly dropped the subject.

Then came the watershed acts of appeasement in 1938. In March, Germany annexed Austria, making it effectively a vassal state. There was no official reaction from Washington. Next came Czechoslovakia. Hitler signaled that he intended to bring the Sudetenland, with large numbers of ethnic Germans, back into the German fold. Tense negotiations between Germany, Britain, France, and Italy were held in September in Munich. At a dinner party, Roosevelt said that any suggestion that the United States would align itself with the democracies was “100 percent wrong.” He sent a personal note to Hitler: “The government of the United States has no political involvements in Europe and will assume no obligations in the conduct of the present negotiations.”

Hitler got the message: there would be no quarantine to check his ambitions. When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to London waving a peace agreement with Hitler—a plan to dismember the Czech Republic—the American president sent Chamberlain a two-word telegram: “good man.” Six months later Germany took over the rest of Czechoslovakia.

In books such as Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life, biographer Robert Dallek writes glowingly of FDR’s “political genius” in confronting national and international crises. Really? Even Jean Edward Smith, in his laudatory FDR, admits that “Roosevelt swam with the isolationist tide” and “kept the army on a starvation budget.”

That’s putting it gently. Roosevelt kept himself, and the American people, willfully ignorant of bitter truths as the catastrophe enveloped Europe. Even after war broke out in September 1939, after Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Roosevelt continued to deny and dissemble. He repeatedly assured the American people that the United States would remain “un-entangled and free.” He persisted with these empty pledges—despite all evidence to the contrary—through the end of 1940, when the German military had conquered much of Europe, bombed London, launched an assault on European Jews, and threatened the survival of European Civilization.

The year 1940, of course, was a presidential election year, and Roosevelt marched in lockstep with the isolationist crowd throughout his campaign. On October 30, he told a Boston audience: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” On November 1, in Brooklyn, it was this: “I am fighting to keep our people out of foreign wars. And I will keep on fighting.” On November 2, he promised voters in Buffalo: “Your president says this country is not going to war.” British historian Max Hastings offers this rough judgment of Roosevelt’s pre-war leadership: “In the absence of Pearl Harbor, it remains highly speculative when, if ever, the United States would have fought.”

If Trump is rightly criticized for his early handling of the coronavirus outbreak and the nation’s lack of preparedness, then the heartbreaking realities of the pandemic have dampened the impulse toward complacency. In addition to a raft of draconian limitations on individuals and businesses, the president has even suggested a quarantine of New York City.

Likewise, the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, cured Roosevelt of his blindness to the gathering pandemic of totalitarianism. FDR successfully converted America’s industrial sector into a war machine. But he waited almost too late, and the nation was totally unprepared: America endured devastating losses against the Japanese in the Pacific and could not stage its D-Day invasion into France until June 1944.

Thus, throughout the 1930s, when the totalitarian disease was spreading globally, the democracies of the West—including the United States—appeared impotent. It was simply not true, as historian Kerns Goodwin claims, that “no one saw it coming.” The evidence of its malicious intent and power was everywhere present. Thus, W. H. Auden called the 1930s “a low, dishonest decade.” Franklin Roosevelt played his part in the collective denial and dishonesty of the age—until the contagion came knocking.

“Virtuous motives, trammeled by inertia and timidity,” wrote Winston Churchill, “are no match for armed and resolute wickedness.” It is a truth that applies equally to natural and man-made evils.

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Interest: The Future of Freedom in the Era of Dictatorial Rule

This article was originally posted at The National Interest.

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OXFORD, England—A portrait of John Locke, considered the father of political liberalism, hangs in Christ Church Hall amid a gallery of honored graduates that includes John Wesley, William Pitt, Charles Boyle, and William Gladstone. But on the eve of England’s Glorious Revolution in 1688, Locke was a political fugitive living in exile, having been expelled from his Oxford University post for promoting “certain pernicious books and damnable principles.”

Despite his rehabilitation, Locke’s principles—government by consent, political equality, religious liberty, and the right to resist tyranny—are as controversial as ever. Indeed, nearly every international crisis today involves an argument between Locke and Thomas Hobbes: a debate over the right to live in freedom vs. submission to dictatorial rule.

Consider the political landscape in places such as Hong Kong, China, North Korea, Russia, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and Venezuela. In each case, Lockean ideas about human equality and self-government are being devoured by the Hobbesian Leviathan. In each case, the rule of law cannot be counted on to protect the rights of minorities and political dissenters. The result—as Locke predicted—is social unrest and revolution. When both sides are armed, the stage is set for civil war. “For when the people are made miserable, and find themselves exposed to the ill usage of arbitrary power,” Locke warned, they will be “ready upon any occasion to ease themselves of a burden that sits heavily upon them.”

Locke’s world was not so different from our own. Over his lifetime (1632–1704) he witnessed populations convulsed by the English Civil War, regicide, religious extremism, show trials, executions, and the suspension of civil liberties. He saw firsthand a campaign of religious persecution that sparked a refugee crisis in the heart of Europe. Ultimately, Locke’s liberal principles triumphed in the West. Yet the story of his achievement, ripe with lessons for our own age, is being neglected.

When Hobbes pondered the realities of European society, he saw a “state of nature” in chaos: a ruthless war of all against all. The only remedy, he believed, was a universal submission to an all-powerful political authority. Locke saw something else: the human capacity for rational self-government. This is the subtext of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), considered part of the canon of Western philosophy. The leading philosopher of his age, Locke nevertheless preferred the reasoning of ordinary people to the “learned gibberish” of intellectuals and religious scholars. “The candle that is set up in us,” he wrote, “shines bright enough for all our purposes.”

Chief among those purposes, Locke argued, was the creation of a political society built upon our natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Unlike Hobbes, Locke envisioned a “state of nature” rooted in a fundamental moral law: the protection of human freedom so that every individual could pursue her divine calling and serve her true sovereign. “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business,” he wrote in Second Treatise of Government (1690). “They are His property, whose workmanship they are made to last during His, not another’s pleasure.” The agents of Leviathan not only violate God’s moral law but “put themselves into a state of war with the people.” The American Founders would take note.

In seventeenth-century Europe, however, political absolutism was sanctioned by religious authorities, armed with hyper-patriarchal interpretations of the Bible. Any progress toward a more liberal, egalitarian society required a theological revolution in the European mind. Locke sought to instigate it.

It is true that Locke shared the enlightenment critique of militant Christianity and its capacity to unleash profound wickedness: “All those flames that have made such havoc and desolation in Europe . . . have been at first kindled with coals from the altar.” Yet unlike the enlightenment thinkers who followed him, he didn’t believe the concepts of freedom and equality could be defended on purely secular grounds; they must be anchored in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. “Lockean equality is not fit to be taught as a secular doctrine,” writes political theorist Jeremy Waldron. “It is a conception of equality that makes no sense except in the light of a particular account of the relation between man and God.”

Political philosopher Leo Strauss persuaded generations of scholars that Locke was “a hedonist,” that he did not take man’s religious aspirations and obligations seriously. The opposite was the case: Locke was as much a religious reformer as he was a political revolutionary. In the Christian humanist tradition of Erasmus, a man he greatly admired, Locke argued that a return to the teachings of Jesus—in politics and culture—held the key to a more just and humane society. Hence, one of his rules for a philosophical society he founded in 1688 while in exile in the Netherlands: “Proposing to ourselves and others the example of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, as the great pattern for our imitation.”

This was the moral core of Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), arguably the most important defense of religious freedom ever written and the conceptual basis for the modern secular state. Neither Jesus nor his disciples ever coerced anyone into the kingdom of heaven, Locke argued. Mutual charity, expressed in the golden rule, was their answer to religious diversity. “But that the church of Christ should persecute others, and force others by fire and sword to embrace her faith and doctrine, I could never yet find in any of the books of the New Testament.”

Locke drew conclusions from his case for religious liberty considered utterly radical at the time. First, the church must be “a free and voluntary society,” based on the conscience and consent of each individual. Second, the state must protect equally the rights of every person to pursue his religious obligations. “The sum of all we drive at,” he wrote, “is that every man enjoy the same rights that are granted to others.” Here are the defining doctrines of liberal democracy: government by consent of the governed, equal justice under the law, and the separation of church and state.

These are the political principles that have helped the West to defeat two of its most intractable problems—political tyranny and religious authoritarianism. It is precisely these ideas that are under assault in much of the rest of the world. Nevertheless, while many on the political left ignore Locke’s influence, a growing number of conservatives have rejected it as a “dead end” toward radical individualism and social breakdown. Yoram Hazony, the author of The Virtue of Nationalism, argues that “there is nothing in the liberal system that requires you, or even encourages you, to also adopt a commitment to God, the Bible, family, or nation.”

Nonsense. These voices would cut us off from a vital source of moral and political insight, gained from bitter experience. Like no one before him, John Locke combined liberal political theory with the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. Ultimately, he helped lay the foundation for a society with greater freedom, justice, and diversity than anything Christendom had produced in over a thousand years. It is an inheritance that cannot be guarded too carefully.

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: Tolkien’s Deadly Dragons

This article was originally posted at National Review.

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For its 1937–38 “Christmas Lectures for Children,” the Natural History Society of Oxfordshire announced forthcoming talks on coral reefs, birds, whales, horses — and dragons. The latter topic was taken up by J.R.R. Tolkien, a professor of English literature who had just published The Hobbit, an immensely popular book involving a dragon. Tolkien’s lecture, before an audience packed with children of all ages, tackled a decidedly adult subject: the problem of evil in the world and the heroism required to combat it.

Tolkien began, disarmingly, with a slide show of prehistoric reptiles, including a Pteranodon in flight, to remind his listeners that “science also fills this past with dreadful monsters — many of the largest and most horrible being of a distinctly lizard-like or dragonish kind.” These ancient creatures, he said, embodied legendary qualities found in dragon mythology. The dragons with whom he had an acquaintance “loved to possess beautiful things.” Greed and hatred motivated them. “And how can you withstand a dragon’s flame, and his venom, and his terrible will and malice, and his great strength?”

It probably was not lost on the children present that Tolkien’s mythical dragons sounded a lot like the people who inhabited the real world. The adults might have discerned a more ominous message. Tolkien delivered his lecture on January 1, 1938. Nearly a year earlier, on January 30, 1937, Adolf Hitler had officially withdrawn Germany from the Treaty of Versailles and demanded that its colonies be returned. In August, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, in the midst of “the Great Purge,” authorized mass executions for 750,000 citizens deemed enemies of the Communist revolution. In December, Benito Mussolini, after brutally invading Ethiopia, pulled Italy out of the League of Nations.

Tolkien’s analysis went deeper still. Drawing on the epic English poem, Beowulf, he said that the English people had a special insight into the moral significance of dragons. In the poem, Beowulf defeats the demon Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a fearsome dragon — but at the cost of his own life. Tolkien was fascinated by such tales, with their portrayal of the persistence of wickedness, the danger of pride, and the value of heroic sacrifice for a noble cause. “One might say that the chief morals that such stories teach, or rather awake in one’s mind, are all shining in this story,” he told his audience.

These were not popular themes in a post-war England awash in pacifism and moral cynicism. In 1933, for example, students at the Oxford Union Society had famously approved the motion “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” A veteran of the Battle of the Somme during the First World War, Tolkien nevertheless rejected the disillusionment that seized the minds of many in his generation. He loved England and its cultural achievements without glorifying war or exalting nationalism.

A few months before Tolkien delivered his dragon lecture, his publisher asked him to produce a sequel to The Hobbit. Tolkien was reluctant. “I cannot think of anything more to say about hobbits,” he replied. But of course, Tolkien would have a lot more to say about hobbits, in part because the world around him seemed threatened anew by the appearance of dragons.

Soon after Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings, the story took on a profound sense of foreboding not seen in his earlier work. “But last night I told you of Sauron the Great, the Dark Lord,” Gandalf the Wizard explains to Frodo Baggins. “The rumors that you have heard are true: he has indeed arisen again. . . . Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.” On October 13, 1938 — barely two weeks after the Munich Agreement, which effectively delivered Czechoslovakia into Nazi hands — Tolkien confessed to his publisher that his new story was no bed-time fable: “The darkness of the present days has had some effect on it.”

In the perpetual fight against dragons, Tolkien suggested, modern weapons would not be decisive; something else was required. “Dragons can only be defeated by brave men — usually alone,” he said. “Sometimes a faithful friend may help, but it’s rare: Friends have a way of deserting you when a dragon comes.” Politically speaking, those words would become something of a prophecy: After Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, triggering World War II, Britain’s chief military ally — France — abandoned its treaty obligations and signed a peace agreement with Germany.

Many have assumed that Tolkien drew from the events of the 1930s and ’40s for his story about the battle for Middle-earth, an epic struggle between good and evil. Under this view, the Orcs represent Nazi stormtroopers and the terrifying dragons of Nazgûl are like the German Luftwaffe at the Battle of Britain.

But Tolkien disliked allegory. The truth is that the catastrophic rise of fascism and communism merely confirmed his insights into the human condition: the nearly irresistible appeal of the demagogue, the schemes for a utopian future, the insatiable will to power. “For the dragon bears witness to the power and danger and malice that men find in the world,” he said. “And he bears witness also to the wit and the courage and finally to the luck (or grace) that men have shown in their adventures — not all men, and only a few men greatly.”

However dark the modern world might appear, Tolkien could never give up on the older concepts of virtue, valor, duty, sacrifice, and grace. As he told his audience: “Dragons are the final test of heroes.” If Tolkien is right, then what does that say about us? The lust to possess and subjugate is as strong and widespread as ever; dragons continue to roam the Earth. We seem to have a terribly difficult time, however, finding authentic heroes to fight them.

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Affairs: Two Revolutions for Freedom

This article was originally posted at National Affairs.

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Shortly after the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris on July 14, 1789, the English political theorist Edmund Burke wrote a letter to Lord Charlemont, the first president of the Royal Irish Academy. It is Burke’s earliest known statement about the French Revolution:

The spirit it is impossible not to admire; but the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner…if it should be character, rather than accident, then that people are not fit for liberty, and must have a strong hand, like that of their former masters to coerce them. Men must have a certain fund of natural moderation to qualify them for freedom, else it becomes noxious to themselves, and a perfect nuisance to every body else.

We know the rest of the story. The French revolutionaries proved themselves to be unfit for liberty. Barely a decade after executing their hated monarch — and after years of political instability, social chaos, and the remorseless violence of the guillotine — the freedom-loving revolutionaries installed an emperor to replace him. Napoleon Bonaparte, dictator for life, would become a perfect nuisance to the rest of Europe.

Burke’s fullest assessment of events in France, his 1790 letter Reflections on the Revolution in France, written while the revolution was still unfolding, reveals a mind quickened by its moral insight into human nature and the nature of free societies. In his Reflections, Burke warned of political revolutions that despise everything that came before them: “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”

The impulse to damn with indifference the wisdom of an earlier generation is no longer confined to the French avant-garde or the cultural left. It is taking root in ultra-conservative circles in the United States, where a revolt against the core tenets of liberal democracy is underway. A small but growing cadre of Christian conservatives — mostly Catholic — has decried the American experiment in self-government as a fool’s errand: a quest for the fully emancipated self, unconstrained by the ties of custom, tradition, family, or faith. Classical liberalism, argues Patrick Deneen, Notre Dame political scientist and author of Why Liberalism Failed, was based upon a “fundamental commitment to the liberation of the individual…from nature’s limitations.” Its malicious strategy, he claims, is to enlist an omnicompetent state to enable “the greatest possible pursuit and satisfaction of the appetites.”

This conservative — and, at times, conspiratorial — critique of liberal democracy is sustained by a grievous conceptual mistake. It is the failure to grasp the profound differences between the two great revolutions for freedom in the 18th century — between the events of 1776 and those of 1789. Not unlike the radical left, a vocal wing of the religious right seems contemptuous of the achievements of the Anglo-American political tradition.

Intoxicated by visions of a truly egalitarian society, the revolutionaries in Paris took a wrecking ball to the institutions and traditions that had shaped France for centuries. Virtually nothing, including the religion that guided the lives of most of their fellow citizens, was sacrosanct. “We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic,” warned Maximilien Robespierre, “or perish with them.” Their list of enemies — past and present — was endless. The men who signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, by contrast, did not share this rage against inherited authorities. Although the Americans, in the words of James Madison, did not suffer from a “blind veneration for antiquity,” neither did they reject the political and cultural inheritance of Great Britain and the Western tradition. They did not seek to invent rights, but rather to reclaim their “chartered rights” as Englishmen. From both classical and religious sources, the American founders understood that human passions made freedom a vulnerable state of affairs: Political liberty demanded the restraints of civic virtue and biblical religion.

America’s deepening political crisis is not, as some claim, the inevitable result of its liberal-democratic ideals. Rather, we are witnessing a culture war waged by the defenders of two radically different revolutions, two competing views of human freedom.

TO BUILD A FREE SOCIETY

On one side we have the republican project of the American founders. Their revolution for freedom was grounded in a Lockean understanding of natural rights, in the moderate Scottish Enlightenment, and in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. “We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by…morality and Religion,” wrote John Adams. “Avarice, ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.” On the other side is the French project, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Francois-Marie d’Arouet (better known as Voltaire), by the most radical strain of the Continental Enlightenment, and by a supreme confidence in human reason to chart man’s destiny. “Man is born free,” Rousseau declared, “but he is everywhere in chains.” One of the first chains to be cut was the authority of the Christian churches.

The fundamental assumptions of these competing visions are widely divergent. The architects of the French Revolution believed that the task of establishing a free society was straightforward. In Rousseau’s 1762 work The Social Contract, a secular bible for the revolutionaries, “the general will” of political society was easily discoverable by every citizen. In their version of a democratic state, there would be “no incompatible or conflicting interests; the common good makes itself so manifestly evident that only common sense is needed to discern it.” What is more, every citizen would gladly submit his own interests to the common good. In the early phase of the revolution, the concept of the general will was elevated into a nearly infallible national conscience.

The confidence of the French philosophes in a beneficent human nature is perhaps the most striking note in their writings. It animated the thought of Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, one of the most influential French philosophers of his day. Here is how he summarized it in his 1772 book Common Sense:

The human mind, confused by its theological opinions, ceased to know its own powers, mistrusted experience, feared truth and disdained reason, in order to follow authority. Man has been a mere machine in the hands of tyrants and priests, who alone have had the right of directing his actions. Always treated as a slave, he has contracted the vices of a slave….To learn the true principles of morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or gods: They have need only of reason. They have only to enter into themselves, to reflect upon their own nature, consult their sensible interests, consider the object of society, and of the individuals, who compose it….

This sanguine — and thoroughly secular — view of human capacities underwrote the inevitability of their political project. In their democratic society, all of the base and cruel passions would be enchained, while the sentiments of generosity and brotherhood would be awakened by the laws. According to the French intellectual vanguard, a new age of political nirvana was on the horizon. “Let France, formerly illustrious among the enslaved lands, eclipsing the glory of all the free peoples who have existed,” Robespierre wrote, “become the model for the nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the world — and let us, in sealing our work with our blood, see at last the early dawn of universal bliss — that is our ambition and our goal.”

This was an anthem to political utopianism the likes of which had never been heard before in Europe. The Americans rejected it as dangerous nonsense. Instead, the founders articulated a hopeful but deeply sober view about the prospects for republican self-government. Indeed, a major concern of the Federalist Papers, one of the most significant reflections on the nature of political societies ever written, is the problem of human self-interest. Though defending, along with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, the American Constitution, Madison identified the threat of factions as the “mortal disease” of popular government:

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society….So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.

In the view of the founders, the fearsome reality of factions — what today we might call tribalism — was too deeply rooted to be solved by the mere presence of prudent political leadership. “It is vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good,” Madison wrote. “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”

This belief in the dark propensities of human nature was the mainstream view among the founding generation, reinforced by the pulpit oratory of the day. Indeed, the urgent need for moral and spiritual awakening was a drumbeat theme throughout the Protestant churches of colonial America. An evangelical sermon preached in May 1776 by Reverend John Witherspoon, the only minister to sign the Declaration, was typical: “I do not blame your ardor in preparing for the resolute defense of your temporal rights,” he said. “But consider, I beseech you, the truly infinite importance of the salvation of your souls.” Whatever the precise theological beliefs of the founders, the biblical concept of mankind’s fall from grace was firmly embedded in American culture. “What is the present moral character of the citizens of the United States?” asked Benjamin Rush, another signer of the Declaration, in 1791. “I need not describe it. It proves too plainly that the people are as much disposed to vice as their rulers; and that nothing but a vigorous and efficient government can prevent their degenerating into savages.”

Thus, one of the great objects of the American Constitution was to “break and control the violence of faction.” Could it be done? Not even Thomas Jefferson, in his most intoxicated mood about their accomplishments, expected the arrival of the kingdom of heaven. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” he wrote, “that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Benjamin Franklin, as he emerged from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, knowing the kind of government the delegates had created, was circumspect. “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” he was asked. “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.”

In the American and French revolutions, we encounter starkly different journeys toward freedom: two conflicting visions of human nature and the nature of political societies. A republic — if you can keep it — or the dawn of universal bliss.

TEMPLES OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Near the heart of the divide between these revolutions was their view of religion and religious authority. To be sure, the political leadership in America and France agreed that the lust for power was often concealed under the cloak of piety. They saw the national, monopolistic churches of Europe — either in Catholic or Protestant form — as a major obstacle to a more democratic and egalitarian society. But they drew opposite conclusions about the relationship of biblical religion to liberty.

The French revolutionaries were as vicious in their attacks on the Church as they were on the monarchy and the nobility. A program of “de-Christianization” was launched with a fury. “We will strangle the last king,” they said, “with the guts of the last priest.” In 1789, the National Constituent Assembly nationalized Church property and turned the clergy into salaried government employees. The following year, the assembly approved the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which, among other things, ordered all Catholic ministers to take a loyalty oath to the revolution. Half refused, further dividing French society. Some bishops removed their episcopal hats and put on a cap of freedom, declaring that the only religion of a free people was that of liberty and equality. Churches were vandalized, and the clergy were physically attacked. By 1794, only 150 of France’s 40,000 parishes were openly celebrating Mass.

The climax of the French Revolution’s assault on religion occurred at its most famous cathedral, Notre Dame, on November 10, 1793. For more than 600 years, Notre Dame had been a symbol of the Catholic-Christian identity of the nation of France. It was the place where marriages were sanctified, children were baptized and brought into the faith, and people confessed their sins before a Holy God. But now it was viewed as the great opponent of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The priests were banished, the saints desecrated, and the altar removed, replaced by the Goddess of Reason. The cathedral was renamed the Temple of Reason. This was the logic of the radical Enlightenment.

The American Enlightenment, by contrast, was a Lockean Enlightenment: Faith and reason were staunch allies in the quest for a more just and democratic society. Scottish theorists such as Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith — both of whom drew heavily upon the Bible — were favorites in early America. Yet, in establishing a tight bond between liberty and the Judeo-Christian tradition, no thinker had a greater influence over the founders than English philosopher John Locke.

Locke’s 1689 Second Treatise of Government was devoured by educated Americans, who agreed with his theological basis for the natural equality and freedom of every human being: “[F]or men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure.” Most of Locke’s readers probably would have recognized his allusion to the book of Ephesians: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Similarly, Locke’s argument in 1689 for religious freedom, A Letter Concerning Toleration, helped to establish liberty of conscience as a natural right, perfectly consistent with reason and with the ethics of the Gospel. “Toleration of those that differ from others in Matters of Religion, is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine Reason of Mankind,” he wrote, “that it seems monstrous for Men to be so blind, as not to perceive the Necessity and Advantage of it, in so clear a Light.”

Freedom, reason, and revelation formed a conceptual trinity in the American Revolution because the colonists were heirs of the Lockean tradition. This outlook was exported to America in a legal sense through the English Act of Toleration of 1689, which offered protection to Protestant minorities dissenting from the Church of England. The principles of the Act of Toleration were applied to the American colonies either by charter or by instructions to royal governors. Meanwhile, the Lockean approach to freedom was also validated by the pluralism of colonial society: the waves of Protestant immigrants who brought with them every strain of European Christianity. Alec Vidler, in The Church in an Age of Revolution, describes the effect:

But just as the early colonists had been political and religious radicals who had wanted not to transplant European traditions and institutions but to escape from them, so the subsequent waves of immigrants were mostly dissatisfied seekers after a better kind of life and a better kind of religion than Europe had afforded them.

Unlike the French philosophes, Americans considered religious belief and expression an intrinsic aspect of human nature — a natural right that must be enshrined in law and culture. Thus, Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance, a 1785 tract against church-state alliances and probably the most important defense of religious liberty ever written by an American, captures the consensus of the founders: “Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.” For the founders, our fundamental and prior obligations were to the Creator, and these obligations could be fulfilled only in a political society that honored the aspect of human nature that houses our spiritual yearnings. Religious freedom — the right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience — became the cornerstone of our civil liberties.

Following Locke, the founders established the legal separation of church and state; there would be no national or established church. This, they reasoned, was the safest way to uphold justice, protect the independence of religion, and ensure its moral influence in society. This last objective, strengthening the attachment between religion and republican virtue, was crucial in the American context. In contrast to the enlightened intellectuals in France, no revolutionary leader in America imagined that freedom could be sustained without civic virtue, which in turn required religious belief.

In his farewell address as president, for example, George Washington took a swipe at the French philosophes: “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education…reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” In a letter to Benjamin Rush, John Adams called religion “essential to morals” and doubted that skepticism could produce an ethical life. “I never read of an irreligious character in Greek or Roman history,” he wrote, “nor in any other history, nor have I known one in life, who was not a rascal. Name one if you can, living or dead.” Reverend Witherspoon — president of the College of New Jersey and mentor to a generation of future colonial leaders, including Madison — reinforced the prevailing view: No form of government could prevent social breakdown if virtue and piety were in short supply. “What follows from this?” Witherspoon asked. “That he is the best friend to American liberty who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion.”

CHRISTIANITY AND EMANCIPATION

It is true, of course, that the founders embraced these principles while condoning slavery and the African slave trade — the greatest moral evils of their day. Few acknowledged a sharp contradiction between the teachings of the Bible, with its themes of emancipation and redemption, and the practice of chattel slavery. The framers of the Constitution, desperate to establish national unity, made their peace with the institution of slavery. Nevertheless, to the most enlightened Americans, slavery in any form was, in the words of Benjamin Rush, “repugnant to the Genius of Christianity.”

This conviction that Christianity was an emancipatory religion was largely absent from the political debates in revolutionary France. Although the French Republic officially outlawed slavery in its colonies in 1794, it would soon be reinstated. More important, the French intelligentsia never viewed the Catholic Church as a force for liberation. The French state could make use of a subservient religion that shared its aims — a civil religion whose doctrines supported “the sanctity of the social contract.” Toward this end, the philosophes concluded, Christianity could contribute nothing. “Far from attaching the hearts of the citizens to the state, this religion detaches them from it as from all other things of this world,” Rousseau wrote, “and I know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.” Rousseau spoke for many when he denounced Christianity as an ally of oppression: “Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits by such a regime.”

It’s not hard to understand the rationale for such skepticism. The Catholic Church enjoyed a privileged legal position in France’s national life, militantly enforced by the state. Four years before the English Act of Toleration was established, the French monarch in 1685 revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had offered limited toleration to Protestants. Thus, the Church thoroughly integrated itself into the political and economic power arrangements of pre-revolutionary France. As Vidler observes, “It was said that they administered more provinces than sacraments!” The Catholic Church was undoubtedly a pillar in the ancien regime, viewed as one of the great opponents of democratic reform. Like the other supporters of the old order, it would be swept away in the maelstrom of the revolution.

Having rejected the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus, the revolutionaries in France turned toward other deities: liberty, equality, fraternity, and “the rights of man.” Ironically, it was a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, who confirmed Burke’s worst fears about the events in France. “Because the Revolution seemed to be striving for the regeneration of the human race even more than the reform of France,” he wrote, “it lit a passion which the most violent political revolutions had never before been able to produce.” The revolution, he said, took on the appearance of a religious crusade. “Or rather, it itself became a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion, it is true, without God, without ritual, and without life after death, but one which nevertheless, like Islam, flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles, and martyrs.”

With this messianic mission in view — ”the regeneration of the human race” — the democratic zeal of the revolution, epitomized by the radical Jacobins, turned with fury against its alleged heretics. The Catholic Church in France only ever partially extracted itself from the debris of the revolution’s discredited political theology. Despite the French Republic’s professed commitment to religious liberty, the idea of Christianity as a collaborator in the struggle for equality and human rights never resonated in French society. Freedom of religion has meant freedom from religion, and a pervasive secularism characterizes French society to this day.

THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

There was a completely different result, of course, in the American experience. The genius of the founders was to learn from the wisdom, and the folly, of their ancestors. In The History of Rome, Titus Livius drew this sage conclusion: “The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see: and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.” The architects of American democracy studied the classical threats to liberty, as well as the resources for sustaining it over time. Perhaps their singular insight was in how they conceived of the role of religion in preserving democratic freedom.

In Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, his magisterial analysis of American culture written more than half a century after the American Revolution, we find a stunning description of American exceptionalism with regard to the progress of religion in democratic society:

The philosophers of the eighteenth century explained the gradual weakening of beliefs in an altogether simple fashion. Religious zeal, they said, will be extinguished as freedom and enlightenment increase. It is unfortunate that the facts do not accord with this theory. There is a certain European population whose disbelief is equaled only by their brutishness and ignorance, whereas in America one sees one of the freest and most enlightened peoples in the world eagerly fulfill all the external duties of religion. On my arrival in the United States it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck my eye….Among us [the French], I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions. Here I found them united intimately with one another: they reigned together on the same soil.

To Tocqueville’s surprise, every priest and minister he spoke with pointed to the Constitution, to the separation of church and state, as the reason for the vitality of the faith communities in America. By taking away government support for religion, Tocqueville observed, “one came to increase its real power.” This is precisely what the American founders intended.

It is hard to imagine two revolutions for freedom so different in their core beliefs, in their conduct, and in their results. Most Americans perceived this long before the French Republic collapsed into tyranny. By 1800, when Napoleon began dismantling the last vestiges of representative government, the verdict was in. As John Quincy Adams put it in a letter to Prussian leader Friedrich Gentz: “It cannot but afford a gratification to every American attached to his country to see its revolution so ably vindicated from the imputation of having originated, or having been conducted upon the same principles, as that of France.”

Nevertheless, these salient and long-established facts appear to have eluded America’s conservative critics. Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism, likens the United States to Napoleonic France: “an ideologically anti-religious, anti-traditionalist universalistic power seeking to bring its version of the Enlightenment to the nations of the world, if necessary by force.” Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule argues that the classical liberalism of the founders would “betray its inner nature” were it to respect the institutions of family and faith. “Both politically and theoretically, hostility to the Church was encoded within liberalism from its birth.” Patrick Deneen denounces America’s Lockean liberalism as “a catastrophe for the ideals of the West,” based upon a “false anthropology” that exalts “the unleashed ambition of individuals.”

It is difficult to see how such views can be maintained with anything like intellectual honesty. These critics are correct, of course, to lament the radical individualism that defines much of modern liberalism. But in their feverish denunciations of the many ills afflicting liberalism, they have failed to treat seriously the actual origins of the American experiment in self-government: what Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., gratefully called “the sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage” and “those great wells of democracy” dug by the founding generation.

At times, these intellectuals appear nearly blind to the remarkable achievements of the Western political tradition, expressed supremely in the American project. The freedom of religion, speech, and assembly; the campaigns to defeat racism and human slavery; the elevation of the status of women; the vast improvements in the workplaces of modern industry; the lifting of millions of people out of desperate poverty; the establishment of a vibrant civil society, energized by churches, synagogues, and faith-based charities of all kinds — none of these accomplishments are conceivable without a foundational belief in the God-given freedom, equality, and dignity of every human soul. Indeed, this was the theological lodestar of classical liberalism.

To belittle these achievements is to contribute to the great divorce between religion and republican self-government. “Collective freedom — a society that honors the equal dignity of all — depends on constant vigilance, a sustained effort of education,” warns Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. “If we forget where we came from, the battle our ancestors fought and the long journey they had to take, then in the end we lose it again.” Both liberals and conservatives would do well to consider Burke’s brutal critique of a political revolution untethered from the permanent things, from the transcendent truths that guided earlier generations:

In some people I see great liberty indeed; in many, if not in the most, an oppressive degrading servitude. But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.

Virtuous liberty — ordered liberty — is the only kind of liberty for which the American republic was designed. And it cannot be sustained without religious belief. Unlike in France, this was the settled conviction of the founding generation. More than that, it was a doctrine considered axiomatic for political and civic life. “Every just principle that is to be found in the writings of Voltaire,” concluded Benjamin Rush, “is borrowed from the Bible.” Nevertheless, many ignore our debt to biblical religion. The result is liberty without wisdom, the path of folly and madness. Many Americans, indeed, are discarding the duties and the blessings of revealed religion for the empty promises of a counterfeit and degraded freedom.

Herein lies the source of the current crisis: the willingness to trade the legacy of the American Revolution for that of the French. Social thinker Os Guinness, author of Last Call for Liberty, summarizes it this way: “There is a long tradition that when Americans are disillusioned with America, they look to European ideas that are fatefully different from the ideas and ideals of the American Revolution. Once again America has become a house divided, and Americans must make up their minds as to which freedom to follow.” Tocqueville anticipated the danger. He concluded Democracy in America with a warning about the responsibility of the nation’s citizenry to remain true to their principles: “It depends on them whether equality leads them to servitude or freedom, to enlightenment or barbarism, to prosperity or misery.”

What path will we take? Perhaps the welfare of the City of Man really does depend, after all, on our belief in the City of God. Perhaps no political society can survive for long when it excludes those spiritual truths that alone can judge, inspire, and transform our earthly politics. Maybe, more than anything, we need a recovery of faith in what C. S. Lewis called the “far-off country,” a renewed quest for the virtues and ideals of that bright Kingdom that lies beyond the Sea. “Because we love something else more than this world,” Lewis wrote, “we love even this world better than those who know no other.”

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

The Hill: An immigrant’s journey to US citizenship rebukes extremists in immigration debate

This article was originally posted at The Hill.

When the United States began sending troops to Europe during the First World War, European and Latino immigrants living and working in America — often amid intense discrimination — were given a chance to prove their patriotism and civic worth. If they joined the U.S. military and survived the trenches of France, they would be put on a fast track to citizenship. My Italian grandfather, 23-year-old Michele Loconte, was one of them.

Like the vast majority of the roughly 2 million Italians who arrived in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, my grandfather was looking for a better future. He found it in Brooklyn: a world away from his impoverished, small-town roots in Bitritto, a village outside of Bari. Like so many other immigrants, his journey toward citizenship — his love of country, commitment to family and entrepreneurial spirit — offers a rebuke to the extreme voices on both sides of the immigration debate.

In the years leading up to the Great War in 1914, my grandfather moved from job to job, across the United States, wherever he could find work: at an automobile assembly plant in Michigan; at the Hoover Dam in Nevada; in the vineyards of northern California. It could not have been easy. Southern Italians endured vicious stereotypes and discrimination. Referring to the influx of Italians at the turn of the century, a New York City newspaper complained: “The dam is washed away. The sewer is unchoked. Europe is vomiting!”

The influential immigration study by the congressional Dillingham Commission, released in 1911, concluded, among other things, that various types of criminal behavior “are inherent in the Italian race.”

My grandfather never played the victim. He was an exceptionally hard worker and felt lucky to be in the United States. But he also was an unskilled laborer with little education and meager English-language skills. Today, under the White House plan to favor immigrants with “professional specialized vocations,” he probably wouldn’t make the cut.

Yet my grandfather loved America. When war came, he could have chosen to serve in the Italian army, but instead he enlisted in the American Expeditionary Force, was attached to the 91st Division, and sent into some of the fiercest fighting of the conflict, at the Meuse-Argonne. He rarely spoke about the devastazione — the devastation — which he must have witnessed in France and Belgium. But his war experience deepened his attachment to his adopted country, and America made good on its promise: A hundred years ago, on Sept. 13, 1919, Michele Loconte became a U.S. citizen.

Conservatives often talk as though most of the people trying to make America their home are indolent, tribalistic and uninterested in becoming part of a larger political community. Like many recent Italian arrivals living in New York City, my grandfather found community with relatives and other Italians in his neighborhood, typically from his hometown. His parish priest was Italian. Conte Farms, the egg-butter-and-cheese delivery business, was a family affair.

But his loyalties shifted. After the Dodgers left Brooklyn, he cheered for the Mets. More importantly, he cheered for America. When Benito Mussolini seemed to be successfully modernizing Italy, many Italian Americans admired him. Once he brought fascist Italy into an alliance with Hitler’s Germany against the United States, however, Mussolini became persona non grata. When my grandfather heard Il Duce’s voice over the radio, he would holler back, “Il bugiardo!” — the liar — among other epithets.

For all of its contradictions and injustices, the American melting pot did a remarkable job of transforming millions of immigrants — often poor, uneducated and unfamiliar with stable, democratic government — into productive citizens. How, within a single generation, did it succeed?

Many liberals seem to believe that protecting our national borders is a hate crime and that upholding clear standards for citizenship is a form of cultural imperialism. But the historical record suggests just the opposite: Good policy reinforces democratic norms which, over time, convert immigrants into patriots. A 1948 graduation message from the principal at my father’s public high school in Brooklyn, printed in his journal, put it this way: “You, as graduates of P.S. 10, in an era of peace, have a great responsibility in the further building of an America of which we can continue to be proud. You will be the new car-makers, the new engineers, the new statesmen, the new voters. I hope that you will develop the good traits of character and citizenship that you have learned here.”

It was the same basic message of opportunity — and responsibility — that countless immigrants absorbed from the moment they arrived at Ellis Island.

Of the more than 1 million American soldiers deployed in Europe in 1918, about a quarter of them were foreign-born. Like my grandfather, many had seen enough of the world to believe that the future belonged to the United States. They were the kind of people that America’s leaders always expected the country to attract. As George Washington expressed it: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com