Buried deep in President-Elect Barack Obama’s speech on Tuesday night was a stunning statement: “That’s the true genius of America: that America can change.” These seemingly innocuous words suggest a profound misreading of — or conscious effort to revise — our country’s history. They are also a rejection of our Founding Father’s tremendous contribution to the enduring cause of liberty.
All countries can and do change. In 1871, Germany became an Empire. In 1918, it changed from an Empire into a democracy. Fourteen years later, Hitler came to power and Germany morphed into a militaristic dictatorship, at war with its neighbors and its own Jewish population. After going through a period during which the country was split in two, half liberal-democratic and half communist, the country united in 1990 and is now a peaceful democracy. These kinds of profound changes take place everywhere all the time. There is nothing unique about America’s capacity to change.
In fact, the Founding Fathers designed our Constitution so as to make it very difficult to bring about significant changes. New legislation requires majorities in both houses of Congress followed by a presidential signature. Constitutional amendments are even more difficult — the easiest method is for an amendment to pass both houses of Congress by two-thirds majorities and then be ratified by three-fourths of all state legislatures. This suggests the Founding Fathers were suspicious of quick and easy change.
The actual genius of America, and what makes our country unique, is precisely the opposite of change. It is that our country was founded on certain timeless principles, laid out in the Declaration of Independence and put into practice by the Constitution. These principles include the conviction that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that governments are instituted among men to secure these rights, and to provide freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and equal protection under the law.
Of course, nobody can deny that the United States, shamefully, has not always lived up to these ideas — but it might never have lived up to them if the ideas themselves had not been enshrined in our founding documents. These documents, and the principles they declared, shaped the course of history in the United States and throughout the world. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, they established a “standard maxim for free society” that could be constantly approximated by future generations — even if the Founding Fathers themselves were not capable of immediately realizing the full liberty and equality for which they laid the groundwork.
There are those who argue that the principles of the founders are woefully out of date — that our old ideals of limited government and individual liberty need to be revised and updated to accommodate the sweeping government intervention that the complexities of modern society demand. But Americans have always believed that our founding principles are not merely the product of a particular society or point in time. The principles are universal and inalienable or, to quote the Declaration of Independence, they are “self-evident truths.” These moral truths have not weakened over time, but rather have been strengthened by our national experience and our advances in social and economic understanding. Free-market capitalism has led not to the oppression and misery of the working class, but to a record of prosperity and a standard of living that are the envy of the world. Our conservative Constitution, skeptical of change and rooted in respect for the tradition of ordered liberty, has not made us inflexible but has rather safeguarded us from the turbulence of political fads and the temptations of radicalism.
Our constitutional structure recognizes the value of stability, and that change can be (indeed, often is) more damaging than uplifting. It acknowledges that existing social structures and traditions are not merely vestiges of an ignorant past, but rather reflect the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors and the evolutionary fruits of centuries of social experimentation. It respects the organic nature of political communities, with their interdependent parts woven together in a web of complexity that confounds even the most well-laid plans of radical social engineers.
It is this steady commitment to founding principles — and not our capacity for rapid change under the influence of a charismatic leader — that distinguishes America. Our enduring principles are the reason that people have flocked to our shores from all over the world for hundreds of years. They are the reason we pledge allegiance to our flag, sacrifice our lives in distant lands, and gather together on July 4th to celebrate our country’s independence. They are what give all Americans a common foundation upon which to build a society of all races and creeds. They are the glue that holds together our nation’s brilliant fusion of liberty and stability, connecting us vertically back to all the generations that preceded us and horizontally to all our fellow citizens. These are the principles that we can and must believe in, in the face of the winds of change.
– Alexander Benard is an attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. Anthony Dick is a second-year student at Stanford Law School. Both were Claremont Institute Publius Fellows in 2007.