On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

James Madison praised Americans for building their new republic without “blind veneration of antiquity.” That is the attitude we should apply to the Founders themselves. Emulating them means transcending them. They were historical actors, not memory pets. They took a risk in declaring independence. Seventy-six years later, Frederick Douglass reminded Americans of that. “There was a time,” he said, “when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men.” It is perverse to celebrate a past fight for freedom while accepting tyranny in the present. Each epoch demands a courage specific to its challenges. Speaking in 1852, Douglass was addressing slavery, into which he himself was born: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” Two hundred years after the Founders signed the Declaration of Independence, some cousins rang a bell on a farm in Clinton County, Ohio. My younger brother, who was five, was also in the line. My youngest brother, who was three, had to be helped to pull the rope. It is fine to celebrate prosperity and the American Dream. I love the recollection and the family and the farm, and I would not have become myself or written this book without them. But we will not ...