On November 12, 2020, The Atlantic published I’m Not Yet Ready to Abandon the Possibility of America, a “Story by Barack Obama,” which is “an adapted and updated excerpt from former President Barack Obama’s new memoir, A Promised Land.” The subtitle of the article is
I wrote my book for young people—as an invitation to bring about, through hard work, determination, and a big dose of imagination, an America that finally aligns with all that is best in us.
Here are a few excerpts from the excerpts, with italics added by me::
I’m painfully aware that a more gifted writer could have found a way to tell the same story with greater brevity (after all, my home office in the White House sat right next to the Lincoln Bedroom, where a signed copy of the 272-word Gettysburg Address rests inside a glass case).
Do we care to match the reality of America to its ideals? If so, do we really believe that our notions of self-government and individual freedom, equality of opportunity and equality before the law, apply to everybody? Or are we instead committed, in practice if not in statute, to reserving those things for a privileged few?
I don’t know. What I can say for certain is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America—not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind. I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide. In that world—of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity—we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish. And so the world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.
First, let me say that I am pleased to hear talk of American ideals and an American creed. I am glad to see America referred to as “a promised Land. I am glad to read that the “the possibility of America” applies to “all of humankind.” Americanism is a philosophy that applies to all people, because it is grounded in the most solid foundation possible, in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God.” (For a thorough understanding of why and how this is, see America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson.) For the Founding generation, facts and truth mattered.
But what is this creed? And does Obama get it right? The excerpts cited above indicate that he does not. After citing Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln refers back to the Declaration of Independence, Obama refers to “our notions” that separate self-government from individual freedom and equates equality of opportunity with equality before the law.”
So let’s be clear. Since Obama refers to America as an “experiment in democracy” rather than what it actually is, an experiment in a new form of republican government, Constitutional Republicanism, I think we can accurately infer that by “self-government” Obama means democratic majority rule. Constitutional Republicanism limits majority or democratic rule, by creating for every individual a safe space, individual rights, which shields individual liberty from electoral political power.
But to the Founding generation, self-government and individual freedom are synonymous. Self-government refers to individual self-government, secured by unalienable individual rights; that is, the freedom of each individual to govern his own life, without interference from others, including elected legislators and government officials. The Founders also understood “equality of opportunity and equality before the law” as antipodes.
Equality before the law refers to equal protection of individual rights. But equality of opportunity does not exist in nature because each individual is unique in myriad ways. To the Founders, the purpose of individual rights is to protect each individual’s right to whatever life outcomes he can achieve based on his own unique opportunities that his myriad individual attributes and personal circumstances afford him. In other words, equality of individual rights protects the individual inequality inherent in human nature, as imposed by the Laws of Nature. To attempt to equalize opportunity would be to obliterate equality before the law.
Obama’s version of America’s ideals, creed, and promise is not the genuine version. Elsewhere, Obama famously lamented “a fundamental flaw that the Founding Fathers ‘allowed’ into the U.S. Constitution and that continues to this day…the failure to establish the means for bringing about ‘redistributive change’…or ‘economic’ and ‘political’ justice.” But that “flaw” is one of the Founders’ greatest achievements, protecting property rights, which they saw as fundamental to protecting individual rights more broadly.
Nonetheless, the very fact that Obama recognizes America as unique and born of revolutionary ideals that are applicable to all human beings everywhere is welcome. I take Obama’s book as a kind of refutation of frauds like the “1619 Project”, which denies Americanism altogether and accuses the Founders of intentionally creating a slave state, not a free society.
Related Reading:
America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson.
Obama's Antipathy Toward America's Constitution Boils Over
A New Textbook of Americanism edited by Jonathan Hoenig
1776 Unites: A counterpoint to the 1619 Project
The ‘1619 Project’ Fraud Begins its Poisonous Infiltration into American Politics
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