Or, there's infinite strength in America - but you have no idea where it lies
America is the last great hope of the world, because in America a person can be free. Free, but not absolutely free. The constraints upon their freedom under which Americans live are unique in the history of the world. They are not the arbitrary dictats of a hereditary Monarch. They are not the equally arbitrary, but historically far bloodier and more destructive, dictats of an ideologically driven elite (though the Democrats, and never was there a more bitter irony than the naming of that party, are pushing towards becoming that - an ideologically driven elite convinced of their own rectitude and intent upon limiting the lives of others to their own half-assed and bigoted vision of the good life). They are constraints imposed by law, laws decided upon and enacted through public debate and public consensus.
I can remember being a child of four or five years (my memory goes back to when I was three years old) and dreaming of America. I can remember watching reports on the UK television news from Highway 19 in Vietnam. All my life, America has been the backdrop to my consciousness, my will, and my desire. There has never been a time, throughout my 47 years of life, that I have not wanted to be here, have not wanted to be a part of America. I can remember dreams I had when I was four years old, that consisted of nothing but the word 'America' repeated endlessly.
Being chronically short-sighted, utterly flat-footed, and a gimp with only one fully functional hand, I doubt very much that I'll ever be called upon to serve in the Armed Forces of my adopted country. But I can imagine a time in which it might be necessary to defend my neighborhood against armed mobs of raghead insurgents - and should such a time come then both I and Sabrina will be out on the barricades, and we'll kill as many of them as we can before they kill us.
Because America is worth fighting for. And America is worth dying for.
Why?
The Rule of Law. I know of no higher or greater or more noble conceit of the human mind than this: that all men are equal before the law. All men, irrespective of wealth, or social rank, or any other distinction. All men are equal before the law. Because this equality is the birthright and inheritance of every citizen born on American soil, and because America is so vast, and so hugely endowed with natural resources of every kind, so that no American ever needs to be dependent on the largesse of foreign powers, so much so that no American ever needs to fear the malice of such powers, you have forgotten just how precious this political and social and economic endowment is.
No European can say anything remotely similar. The State in Europe, in all its authoritarian excesses, evolved as it has, precisely because no one on that continent could say what every American has always said: we are secure. The State in Europe evolved in the way it has precisely because every State was constantly under threat from every other State. As Europeans we have all lived with the constant knowledge that our neighbours mean us harm - that they mean our destruction.
Not so in America, divided from the rest of the world as it is by two immense oceans. This constant insecurity has led to a cult of authoritarianism, and a doctrine of States rights (fully autonomous political entities that are utterly at odds with the American conception of 'states') that is completely antithetical to the American notion of power constrained by law. This idea of the lawful constraint of power, and it's delimitation according to the will of the people is one reason why America is the last hope of the world. Because this aspiration, that the power of the powerful should be rendered subject to the will of the ordinary people, your average Joe Blow, is a scandal in relation to the development of political philosophy in the history of the the thought of the West: a scandal, an outrage, and something utterly alien to that line of thought that moves through Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Hegel - the line of thought that has dominated Western development, political and social, since the sixteenth century.
No man is above the law. No man. Not the President, not his closest advisors, not his most intimate friends and confidantes. No man is above the law. This idea in itself, utterly revolutionary and utterly radical, is an American creation and is a shining example to the rest of the world - and it is a mark of how far the American people have fallen that they are willing to entertain the idea that there are exceptions, granted under Presidential privilege, to that principle. Scooter Libby should not have been pardoned. Clinton, that adulterous egomaniac, should never have been allowed to 'pardon' his cronies and benefactors.
The more the people of America allow the adulteration of the vision of what America is, the more they prove themselves to be unworthy inheritors of that vision. America is more than you. America is worth more than the value of your prejudices.
All Persons Are Endowed By Their Creator With Inalienable Rights. This is possibly the most revolutionary political precept ever devised by the mind of man. Let me explain. I am a European by heritage. I was schooled in that stream of thought regarding politics which derives from Plato and is more than 5000 years old. And nowhere in that stream of thought is there anywhere any suggestion that the common citizen has any rights which exist outside the will of the State. For the intelligent, politically educated European, the state is the Be All and End All of existence. The State, like God, gives and the State takes away. And the State is invested in blood, and in family. Royal blood and Royal family. The State, in other words, derives its existence from a divinely favored but humanly limited social structure: the Royal Family.
Nothing could be further from the truth, here in America. Here, the State derives from the will of the people and is subject to that will. Whereas in Europe the 'State' is no more than the arbitrary construct of the will of particular persons and does no more than serve whatever end those persons decide it shall serve, here in America the State is a servant, not a master. In today's world nothing could be more antithetical to the idea that our superiors have the right to tell us what we should do. The citizen of the American Republic has no superior. Not because of any innate superiority or ability - but because the law says it shall not be so.
America exists as a nation under law, and a nation formed by law, and as such it is (so far as I know) unique in the history of the world.
While the contemporary situation in Europe has moved away from an unthinking obedience to Royalty, it has not progressed, in its theoretical existence, from an unthinking adherence to and belief in the efficacy of the State to solve any and all problems confronted by the European public at large. Kings solved problems. Now that the Kings are dead, the State is expected to take their place. Here the opposite is true. Since there never were American Kings, the only people left to solve whatever problems we may have is you and I. This is sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad thing. There is a happy medium between total reliance on the self and total reliance on the State. The Genius of America is to point towards that happy medium.
American history points us towards the efficacy of the common man in solving the problems that confront him. As inheritors of that tradition, we can deny the competence of the State to organize our lives for us. Americans don't need to be told what to do, and we are guaranteed the freedom to do what we know to be right by the Constitution. We are neither children nor slaves. We are free.
And the simple fact that we can say so, and back up that assertion through law, makes America and Americans unique in the history of the world. And because we are unique there is upon us a reqirement that is also unique: that we be true to the inheritance with which we are endowed - because that inheritance of freedom, and if necessary bloody-minded intransigence, has never been equalled by any other nation on earth.
We can say 'NO' to power - and compel power to comply.
America is the last great hope of the world for precisely that reason. We can say 'NO' to power, and compel the powerful to comply.
I don't say that America is perfect. I don't say that America embodies her own best principles and beliefs. But I do say that America is the only nation on earth ever to attempt to embody in her practice the ideals of her political vision. If she has so far failed it's because those charged with embodying those ideals are human, and prone to failure. But that does not deny that America is the last great hope of Man, because in her lives the deepest aspiration towards freedom combined with order that the human mind has yet conceived.
God bless America. May she thrive and prosper. May her enemies diminish, and be destroyed.