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Most excellent. Thank you, gentlemen.
DITTO – IN SPADES! Very Enjoyable!!
Excellent podcast.
As for America as an idea – I would allow myself to lift the quote from Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Haggada essay on “The Universal Story”:
“In his 1849 novel White-Jacket, Herman Melville made clear how much the American dream owed to the story of Israel:
We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people – The Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours…
We owe to Robert Bellah the idea that America has a “civil religion” a a set of believes and a shared narrative, a faith, that underlie its public and political life. In their inaugural addresses, American presidents… talk of divine providence and sovereignty of God. They refer to the covenant and the moral bonds by which societies are sustained…”
The reason classical liberalism is dying is because Woodrow Wilson et. al. centralized the government for no good reason, and the Fed has been too easy the whole time. Under these conditions, graft, dependency, and rent seeking are the rational options until the government runs out of money. Then things get more complicated.
I just read Jonah Goldberg’s response to this, and I agree with much of it. But I guess whether or not I would love an America with different ideals probably depends on whether I’m imagining that it changed today or that it had always been different. If I grew up knowing nothing else, I would love my country like most everybody does. But like Jonah, I think if it changed today I would mostly love the America that was. I also think I’d become much more attached to my home state than the country at large. It’s hard to love strangers from places I’ve never visited, but home is always home. It would come to feel much more like we lived in a bunch of different countries, like the EU.
I read Jonah’s article also, along with Charles Cooke’s slight rebuttal.
For all her fault’s, America is still the closest country to classical liberalism in the World. However, if it became a communist state, or if another country took a giant leap toward freedom and surpassed our country, my loyalty would end there.
I don’t love our country because we have a Grand Canyon. I love it most importantly because of it’s ideals. I may be disappointed on how much we are sticking to those ideals currently, but I don’t see a better alternative.