Townhall Celebrates America 250

America All Honor to Jefferson Two-hundred fifty years after the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson continues to embody America In June of 1826, the citizens of Washington, D.C. invited Thomas Jefferson to their celebration of America’s 50th Independence Day. His health failing, the Sage of Monticello sent his regrets: I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government. Stirring words. The more so since, as every schoolboy knows (or used to know), their author would not live through the end of that Fourth. Jefferson’s death, twinned with that of John Adams just a few hours later, immediately passed into American legend. More than a striking coincidence, this was nothing less than a divine benediction on our republican experiment. And in the decades following, something else remarkable happened—or rather, failed to happen. When other Founders shuffled off this mortal coil, their influence on public life tended to quickly recede. Many were honored, of course (deified, in the case of Washington), but behind museum glass, as relics and reminders of days gone by. Not so Jefferson. The body was barely cold before the wrangling began for his mantle. The Jacksonians pressed the first and most compelling case, making Jefferson’s enthusiasm for popular democracy and abhorrence for privilege central elements of their political creed. “The Jackson press constantly circulated his writings,” one historian relates, and “Democratic politicians developed the habit of answering their opponents by squirting Jefferson’s opinions into their eyes.” But the Southern radicals who defied Jackson on the tariff question also had a claim. Was not Jefferson a lifelong opponent of centralization? And did he not himself write the celebrated Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which asserted the right of states to nullify federal law? (It is a great irony of history that the occasion at which Jackson gave his famous toast—“Our Union, it must be preserved”—and Calhoun his less famous reply—“The Union, next to our liberties most dear”—was a dinner celebrating Jefferson’s birthday.) Even some Whigs, those noted defenders of privilege, wielded Jefferson’s republicanism against the purportedly dictatorial rule of “King Andrew.” In the lead-up to the Civil War, both fire-eaters and free soil men repaired to the standard of Jefferson. Dixie enthused over his states’ rights views, his lifelong ownership of slaves, and his endorsement of a people’s prerogative to sever its existing political bonds. In seceding from the Union, Jefferson Davis claimed, the Southern states had “merely asserted a right which the Declaration of Independence of 1776 had defined to be inalienable.” Of course, the “all men are created equal” line stuck in some Southern craws, with Davis’ vice president proclaiming the Confederacy’s foundation “upon exactly the opposite idea” in his notorious Cornerstone Speech. Among Northern Republicans, it was precisely that articulation of universal equality that resonated most powerfully. As Lincoln wrote in 1858: All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. As the years wore on, our third president would remain a political touchstone accessible to most sides of most issues. When America underwent its first spasm of overseas expansion, Jefferson was trotted out by anti-imperialists like William Jennings Bryan, who quoted his statement that “conquest is not in our principles [and] is inconsistent with our government” in a speech to the Democratic convention, and by imperialists like Teddy Roosevelt, who assured his own party’s convention that “the parallel between what Jefferson did with Louisiana and what is now being done with the Philippines is exact.” New Dealers invoked Jefferson’s solicitude for the common man to justify their construction of a welfare state (FDR was a frequent visitor to Monticello, and took a personal interest in the creation of the Jefferson Memorial). Their Republican opponents, naturally enough, fought back with the great man’s criticisms of overweening federal power. During the ’50s and ’60s, segregationists made what they framed as Jeffersonian arguments for racial hierarchy and “local institutions”; the civil rights movement, more powerfully, appealed to what MLK called the great “promissory note” of the Declaration. And around the turn of the millennium, the popular image of Jefferson became that of an “American Sphinx” (to filch from Joseph Ellis), the enigmatic embodiment of all the country’s bundled hopes, disappointments, and paradoxes. Recent years have been harder on Jefferson. His involvement with slavery was brought to the forefront in the 2010s, gradually occluding almost every other element of his legacy. He came in for cancellation during the Great Awokening—schools were renamed, statues toppled, and a damnatio memoriae pronounced. Today’s Democratic Party seems to have utterly sundered its 200-year connection with him. Republicans, meanwhile, have more use for historical figures with fewer compunctions about the exercise of executive power (Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon are the presidents of choice). But the high tide of woke is receding, and the right will eventually rediscover the virtues of Jeffersonian restraint. If the past is any guide, Jefferson will be back in vogue sooner or later. He is simply too compelling, too interesting, too fundamental. Much ink has been spilled to explain this unique appeal. As his political afterlife suggests, much of it stems from the sheer range and diversity of Jefferson’s thought, together with his unparalleled eloquence and talent for expression. Contradictions that would have driven lesser minds into muddled incoherence are by his genius held in productive, fascinating tension. There is also the attractive richness and multifariousness of Jefferson’s character—his intense sensitivity and sentimentality, his successes in pursuits ranging from lawmaking and diplomacy to architecture and agriculture, his insatiable curiosity concerning essentially every dimension of the human experience. Here was a man who defied easy characterization; who could, as Henry Adams once observed, “be painted only touch by touch, with a fine pencil.” Then we have his practical record: literally articulating our national creed; defending democracy, civil liberties, and peace against a Federalism that would have destroyed all three; doubling our national territory. Any one of these achievements would have been enough to secure everlasting fame: the three together vault him into the pantheon. All of this has enabled Jefferson to encompass and represent as much of our national promise as it is possible for one person to embody. On our 250th anniversary, we may still say with one of his early biographers, “If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.” The post All Honor to Jefferson appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Lose the Battle, Win the Century Iran doesn’t have to be America’s reckoning. Washington is once again in the throes of a postwar autopsy. Did the United States win in Iran? America’s latest military operation was launched, seemingly, to achieve regime change and permanent denuclearization. It ended with a messy ceasefire, a still-defiant adversary, and a war powers debate Congress will never resolve. By the standards Washington set for itself, the campaign did not deliver. Tehran’s government did not collapse. The Strait of Hormuz blockade dragged on for months. And it was a negotiated ceasefire, not the final collapse of the Iranian regime, that brought the conflict to an end. Iran, a middle power, stood its ground against the mightiest military on Earth. The declinist argument that these results have inspired many to make is worth taking seriously. In its strongest version, this argument frames the memorandum of understanding that stopped the fighting as a surrender document: Iran financially rewarded, decades of sanctions architecture in ruins, and U.S. credibility seriously undermined.  Yet on closer examination, the notion that this setback significantly changes America’s global position does not hold up. Consider what happened after previous military debacles. The Vietnam War ended in a genuine strategic defeat. Saigon fell, an ally was abandoned, and American credibility took a real and lasting hit. The Iraq War cost over a trillion dollars and thousands of lives, all to produce a fractured state subject to enduring Iranian influence. And the Afghanistan War ended with the Taliban retaking Kabul faster than the Pentagon’s worst projections. Any clear-eyed observer would call those failures. But what is also true is that 15 years after the fall of Saigon, the United States had won the Cold War. And the same country that had defeated American arms became a trading partner courting American capital by the 1990s. The 2000s and 2010s, despite Iraq, produced the iPhone, the shale revolution, and the rise of Amazon and Google. The 2020s, despite the Afghanistan debacle and the Covid-19 pandemic, produced an American economic recovery most of the developed world envied. “America always bounces back” sounds like a cliché. It also happens to be true. The reason is not mysterious. American prosperity has consistently come from its resources, technology, capital markets, and demographics. None of those run through the State Department or the Pentagon, and battlefield setbacks do nothing to change them. Start with our energy situation. America’s energy independence has been one of its most underappreciated strategic assets. When we fought in Kabul and stalemated in Tehran, we did so as a net energy exporter, largely shielded from the vulnerability to foreign suppliers that had bedeviled earlier generations of policymakers. The 1973 oil embargo was not just an economic problem. It was a demonstration of how energy dependence could hold foreign policy hostage. That leverage is largely gone. Of course, this doesn’t mean America is entirely immune from energy shocks. The closure of Hormuz sent prices at the pump higher despite increases in domestic production, for the simple reason that global markets price crude oil as a single commodity. But there is a difference between consumers paying more for gas and a government being forced to the negotiating table because it cannot keep the lights on. The first is painful. The second is potentially existential. On capital, the picture is similarly encouraging. Funds kept flowing into U.S. Treasuries and equities through Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. There is little reason to think Iran alters that equation. De-dollarization efforts, central bank gold accumulation, and China’s slowly deepening bond markets are real trends worth watching, but they are nowhere close to creating a rival system. Nothing can match the liquidity, legal infrastructure, or sheer demand that U.S. Treasuries command. The clock is running, but it has a long way to go. Another positive sign is that allies are hedging, rather than defecting. NATO did not dissolve after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Gulf states did not abandon Washington after Hormuz reopened under blockade rather than victory. The G-7 backed the ceasefire agreement, albeit with some implicit reservations. While not exactly a ringing endorsement, these developments suggest that most of our partners are still content to live in an American-led order. The most serious concern is China—and here the declinist case is strongest. Beijing, having already forced a tariff climbdown by cutting off critical mineral exports, is now probing U.S. resolve on Taiwan. It is alert to America’s vulnerability to economic disruption, and the belief that market reversals inevitably force U.S. retreat may lead to a more assertive Chinese strategy.  The fact that Iran withstood America’s military onslaught hands Beijing a useful propaganda message. Washington’s behavior is erratic and its guarantees are unreliable, the argument runs, so hedge toward China. Partners across Southeast Asia and the Pacific will receive that message. Some may act on it. The question is whether they act on it in ways that are lasting or provisional, and whether Beijing can actually convert a propaganda advantage into strategic realignment. History suggests that turning such an advantage into lasting strategic gains is harder than it appears. The Soviet Union made a similar case in the late 1970s, when the fall of Saigon, the oil shock, Watergate, and stagflation made the United States look weaker than at any time since before World War II. By almost every measure, the United States was then in a worse position to compete with its superpower rival than it is today. Yet 15 years later, the USSR collapsed—not because of battlefield humiliation, but because its planned economy could not sustain a contest increasingly defined by consumer prosperity and technological dynamism. China’s own fragilities deserve the same unsentimental assessment. Its property sector is still deleveraging. Youth unemployment is high enough that the government stopped publishing the numbers. Demographic decline is arriving faster than in any major economy in modern history. And Beijing is forced to keep restrictive capital controls in place, because otherwise Chinese funds would flee the country. This is not to say that China is a paper tiger—far from it—but it does suggest that the conversion of a propaganda advantage into real, strategically decisive results is not guaranteed.  A superpower that loses a regional conflict is not the same as one whose underlying sources of power have eroded. America can move on from defeat in Iran. What would be harder to recover from is an overcorrection, a declinist panic that needlessly surrenders the advantages we still hold: technological leadership, a free and open society, and a belief in the future.  The argument for American resilience is not an argument against accountability. It is an argument against mistaking a limited military setback for a civilizational verdict. The United States emerged from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan not because it insisted loudly that it had won, but because the sources of its power endured and continued to grow. Iran does not have to go down in history as the war that broke America. As was the case after the far worse defeats of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, we have it in our power to mitigate and repair the damage. Whether we pull that off will depend less on the specific terms of the peace agreement and more on what Washington does with the next decade. The post Lose the Battle, Win the Century appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Foreign Policy Restraint Is an American Promise The national character is to work to bring our words and deeds in line. Hours before Iran’s national soccer team took the pitch in Seattle for its group-stage match against Egypt, the U.S. Central Command announced further strikes against the Islamic Republic. This sequence was without obvious precedent. A World Cup host nation had never bombed a participating country during the tournament. Fortunately, FIFA had already provided the punchline by awarding President Donald Trump the FIFA Peace Prize just over six months before the tournament’s opening kickoff.  The scene is absurd, but the paradox is typically American. As we reflect on the anniversary of our independence, we may confront the fact that America has always struggled to reconcile words and deeds. We are an ambitious country littered with contradictions between the tales we tell ourselves and the actions that we take.  An interesting array of questions points beyond war in Iran, the semiquincentennial, and who lifts the World Cup Trophy. What does it mean for a republic to celebrate its independence while its government drifts in and out of a war without popular support, congressional consent, or any plausible theory of victory? The Founders repeatedly and emphatically warned against ensnaring the young republic in conflicts overseas. Furthermore, having heard less, of late, regarding “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none,” what might we make of restraint’s standing as a foundational principle?  Looking back from the quarter-millennium mark, it is evident that we won our independence by revolting against an empire before assembling one of our own. Madison designed a constitutional system suspicious of executive war-making before leading the country into a bitterly fractious and uncertain conflict in 1812. Monroe inveighed against European interference, a doctrine that soon morphed into the proposition that our anti-imperial republic should manage the Western Hemisphere. Polk maneuvered troops and Congress into a war of territorial acquisition. We later acquired colonies, built a global navy, fought world wars, and collected allies and bases around the globe.  It would be impossible to conclude from this record that America is naturally restrained.  Yet the United States is a country of grand philosophical ambition. This nation was founded on the promise of liberty, self-government, consent of the governed, constitutional boundaries, and opposition to arbitrary power. At times, we have failed to live up to those claims or fundamentally violated them. But our failure to reach our loftiest goals is not dispositive of our aspirations. The existence of slavery does not render equality un-American. The emergence of Jim Crow did not consign civil rights to the dustbin.  To that extent, restraint is one of the promises we made to ourselves at the Founding, and one we have regularly broken.  There is a corrective thread running through the suspicion of standing armies, the constitutional power of Congress to declare war, and Washington’s warning against permanent alliances. It animates John Quincy Adams’s insistence that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” the anti-imperialists, and Wilson’s reelection on the strength of “he kept us out of war.” It moved the men and women who marched against war in Vietnam and Iraq and informs the present vexation with our latest war of choice. Note the company we’ve kept: Founders and Progressives, Cold War Republicans, and legions of the New Left. This is not a partisan inheritance. This tradition of restraint is embedded in our civic rituals. It echoes with every recitation of Washington’s Farewell in the Senate, in Eisenhower’s warning against the military-industrial complex, and in the repeated success of candidates who promised to keep war from consuming the republic. This is partly due to the material reality of our geography. We escaped the Old World and its rivalrous monarchs to establish a new country the size of a continent and bordered by two oceans. This gave us the unusual opportunity to engage the world without being governed by its conflicts. For much of our history, the question posed to Americans was not whether we should trade, travel, evangelize, or project our cultural influence abroad. To the contrary, we demurred from foreign quarrels lest they warp the shape and character of our republic. But the distance between people and policy is not simply a matter of maps and globes. After the Second World War, the United States routinized key aspects of wartime mobilization. Signed into law by President Truman in 1947, the National Security Act created the modern bureaucratic structure of a national security state. War, once conceived of by the Founders as a state of exception that required public deliberation and congressional consent, became the province of the executive branch and its array of classified bureaucracies. The result is a republic that often uses force while rarely choosing war.  We gather this July Fourth to celebrate more than the memory of our founding. Our present moment demands an understanding and appreciation of the obligations our ambitions impose. Can a nation founded on the principle of self-government constrain its own power with prudence, courage, and wisdom?  Restraint has rarely been America’s habit. But it has always been part of America’s promise. Let us recall that our highest aspirations still have claims on us. The post Foreign Policy Restraint Is an American Promise appeared first on The American Conservative.

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