The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

by Greg Grandin

Turner’s sequence—nature, settlement, labor, society, security, trade, trust, more trade, which leads to more security and trust, and then government—is important in that it crystallizes a number of uniquely American ideals about the relationship between the economy, rights, and sovereignty: Labor mixed with nature creates property. Property creates virtue. Private property–based virtue exists prior to the state. And the state’s only legitimate function is to protect virtue, not create virtue. It’s a sleight of hand, this sequence, for, as Turner wrote in his notes, “government came before.” But it was, and remains, a powerful move, one that premises the virtue of freedom as existing independently of the state and restricts the role of the state to only guarding virtue. That premise makes possible the ongoing refusal of the United States to accept the legitimacy of social or economic rights. Individual, inherent rights, found in nature—to have, to bear, to move, to assemble, to believe, to possess—were legitimate, as was a state that protected them. Social rights—to receive health care, education, and welfare—made possible by state intervention were perverse.