We're having a big political debate in this country. Well, I don't know if debate is the right term; it seems more like a brawl. But, what is the brawl over? What are we fighting about? Well, we're fighting about America and the future of America. But which future?
It sometimes seems like we are the party of America, and the other side is anti-American. We sometimes hear that rhetoric, and I've used the rhetoric myself. It's not entirely precise because it's not that we are for America, and they are against America. We really want and are fighting about two very different conceptions of America.
A couple of years ago now, I debated Bill Ayers, the former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, the far-leftist Bill Ayers, at Dartmouth College, and we were debating what's so great about America. And you might expect that Bill Ayes would have taken the position, "Well, America's not great." And he sort of did, but he did it in an interesting way. What he said was, "Yes, America is great, but it's not your America, Dinesh. It's not the things that you care about. The Founders, they weren't that great." He said, "Oh, the guy who was really great was the Seminole leader Osceola who fought a guerrilla campaign against the US government." He goes, "What's great about America is the anarchists, the anti-war protesters, the social activists, Emma Goldman, the Iraq War press protesters, Cindy Sheehan."
So I realized this is Bill Ayers's America. This is the America that he is excited about, and this is the America that he is patriotic about, and this is the America that he wants to foster.
So, it's almost like we have an America and our America is the America of Columbus, and the Fourth of July, of entrepreneurial innovation, a country founded on Christian beliefs. The America, you will, of the Boy Scouts, at least the old Boy Scouts; parochial schools, traditional families, flag saluting veterans. So this is our America; this is what we care about. But the Left has its America, as the Bill Ayers example shows. Their America is the America of social entitlements, wealth redistribution, affirmative action, abortion, gay rights, transsexual rights, gay marriage. This is the America that they want to foster.
Now, in thinking about our America, the America that we're fighting for, and of course, we have Trump's slogan Make America Great Again. But what America is Trump talking about? What is the America that we as conservatives are trying to conserve? I've said before, and I say now, that it's the America of the founding. It's the principles of the founding. Obviously, the founding occurred in 1776, the Declaration of Independence, 1789, the Constitution, that was a different world. America was then an agricultural country. It's not as if we're directly trying to bring that back, but what we are trying to bring back are the principles of the founding. We're trying to make sure that those principles drive the America of the future. So we are the champions, you might say, of American exceptionalism. Exceptionalism why? Because the Founders believed that they were building a new country, a Novus Ordo Seclorum, a New Order for the ages. And this was, as they conceded, an experiment.
Now, interestingly, I'm going to focus on one man, and oddly enough, he's a Frenchman. We think of the French as being slightly foofy. This is a non-foofy Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville. I'm going to sort of Americanized his name, Tocqueville. Interestingly, he's de Tocqueville, a little bit like I'm D'Souza. So here you have these sort of visitors or outsiders who have come to America. Tocqueville, of course, was a visitor; he didn't emigrate here. He actually spent only nine months in America. He came in 1831, about May of 1831. He stayed until 1832. But in these nine months, he observed America. Now the key point about Tocqueville is he saw the America that the Founders built.
Now, this is a key point because when we think back to the Founders, we go, "Oh, the Founders, obviously the Founders built America!" Yes, but the America of the Founders, the America that the Founders lived in, wasn't their America. Think about it; the Founders lived in a world that had been shaped by the British, by British parliaments. And that America, colonial America, you might say, had started really in the 17th-century and continued for 150 years. So, the Founders lived in somebody else's America. In fact, they rebelled against that America. They wanted to build a new America that would break with the British, that would depart from the colonial tradition, a new America, you might say, inside of America.
Now, the founding itself was a charter, a blueprint. You can almost think of it as an architectural blueprint for a building. But the founding, apart from the act of revolution of breaking from the British, was essentially a parchment. It was words; it was the creation of institutions. But those institutions naturally would take time to play themselves out, to create an actual new country. And that new country took 40 or 50 years to build. In other words, the Founder’s America only came into being. The blueprints only generated the house several decades later, and it so happened that by about 1830, this is by the way 40 years after the founding, along comes this non-foofy Frenchman, Tocqueville, with a very clinical detachment.
What I love about Tocqueville is he brings this outsider point of view, but at the same time, he's sympathetic to America. Although descended from aristocrats, he doesn't take the haughty view, which you get from a lot of Frenchman today, "Oh, those silly Americans!" No, Tocqueville's view is that there's something very exciting, something very important, something providential, in fact, the future of the world is being made right here in America, and "I am blessed, I am honored to be able to see it and describe it."
Interestingly now, Tocqueville is writing for the French, for his home country. He's writing about America for other Frenchmen. We've got to keep in mind his audience. But amazingly, his book "Democracy in America," two volumes, is must-reading. It's very important to get an idea of America, the kind of America that we're defending and trying to protect.
Isn't Tocqueville's America, the underlying principles of it, the life that Tocqueville saw, not just a blueprint, not just the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, but, you may say, the Constitution in action. The Constitution as embedded in the lives of Americans.
Tocqueville goes here is an amazing, interesting society, a society that's not only the society of the future but one that will dominate the world. Tocqueville was prophetic in seeing America become the world's sole superpower, an example to the world, a magnet for the world. Tocqueville saw all of that. That's the America we want to make, we want to recover, to make America great again.
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