Blog: Liberty, Equality, and Independence

Statement

It's Independence Day. Take a few minutes to re-read the Declaration; I marvel at how fresh it seems every time I do. This year, the line that jumps out at me across the centuries is the indictment of King George III for having "erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance."

But also this year, I have been thinking that there are two contrary mistakes one can make about independence. One is the mistake characteristically made by rulers; the other is the mistake characteristically made by the ruled.

In Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill recounts how Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of practically all of continental Europe, was genuinely surprised when the Spanish people resisted his attempt to install his brother Joseph on the throne of Spain. Churchill writes that Napoleon "conceived himself a liberator, as indeed he was in many parts of the Continent. He could not understand a people who preferred misgovernment of their own making to rational rule imposed from without." (Book Nine, Chapter Twenty-One, "The Emperor of the French.")

Napoleon's mistake was the mistake of thinking he was just better at governing other people than they were at governing themselves. That is, as I have said, the characteristic mistake of rulers. History's Napoleons often fail to understand that there is a virtue in making one's own decisions and living with the consequences. That is the value of independence, and it is what makes self-government qualitatively superior to other kinds of government. It is the value we celebrate this day.

For the second mistake people make about independence, let's turn from Winston Churchill to Jon Stewart, who recently interviewed Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson on The Daily Show. Around the 3:01 mark, Stewart contrasted the marathon-running, Everest-climbing Johnson with ordinary people "who like Doritos." He then asked, "Do Libertarians put too much trust in us?"

Stewart's question is based on a mistake that is the mirror image of Napoleon's. Napoleon thought he should govern because he was better at governing other people than they were at governing themselves. By contrast, Stewart's question implies that there must be someone out there who can govern us as well as Napoleon thought he could. But fallibility afflicts governors and governed alike. The Napoleons of the world eat Doritos, too.

Independence is the ideal that corrects both Napoleon's mistake and Stewart's. The value of independence comes--self-evidently, Jefferson said--not only from our natural liberty but from our natural equality. Just as we are equally capable of choosing for ourselves, we are equally responsible for the choices we make. As G.K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, self-government is based on the contention that government is not a thing to be left to experts ("like playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole . . . , being Astronomer Royal, and so on").

It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. . . . In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves--the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state.

We prize liberty and we prize equality. The independence we celebrate today is based on both. And history teaches us we will lose it all unless we accept the responsibility that goes hand in hand with our freedom.

So this day and every day, in honor of our independence, get out there and do something. If you're not registered to vote, register. If you've been staying home on election day, stop it. If you've outsourced your political thinking to party strategists, cable news anchors, or both, it's high time to declare your independence and take charge of your own affairs again. The fact that we deserve to govern ourselves may be self-evident as Jefferson said, but it wouldn't hurt for us to prove it.

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