‘Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil,” wrote Thomas Paine in Common Sense, the essay that became the American Revolution’s manifesto.
The pamphlet that inspired the anti-British rebels thus spelled the American future’s organizing principle: liberty, both national and personal.
Yes, liberty as the American founding fathers understood it was flawed. Women were relegated to society’s margins and blacks to its basement (though not by Paine).
Even so, American leaders already shared a quest to secure freedom of speech, association, and religion. That is why George Washington said in his farewell address that “government, with power properly distributed and adjusted,” would be liberty’s “surest guardian.”
That same quest, to mold a paragon of freedom, is what made Thomas Jefferson portray the future United States as “an empire of liberty,” and that is what made poet Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) hail an America that he thought was “by heaven designed… to renovate mankind.”
That was then. Now liberty is on the defensive – in America, in Europe, and also in the Jewish state.
THE AMERICAN founding fathers hoped to inspire mankind, but had no intention of changing it themselves. On the contrary, for more than a century, Washington’s successors fulfilled his political will, that the US “steer clear of permanent alliances with any part of the world.”
And even after that pattern was broken in 1917, when two million American soldiers descended on Europe and decided the First World War, the US turned to isolationism, effectively saying that tyranny, while deplorable, is the business of its victims. Even after the Second World War, when the US built a vast alliance to block communist tyranny, it did not try to actively spread liberty.
Sometimes, the US watched passively even as nations tried to resist tyranny, most memorably when the Hungarian people revolted against the Soviet Union in 1956, and when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. In other cases, the US actually struck alliances with despots, like Spain’s Generalissimo Franco and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet.
However, such pacts were excused as compromises of, not retreats from, the American ideal of liberty.
That rationale, formulated by Reagan-era ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick, was to distinguish between “authoritarian governments” if they are pro-American, and “revolutionary autocracies,” which are intrinsically anti-American. Accommodating authoritarian regimes, she believed, would be useful not only strategically, but also morally. Cozying up to Latin American dictators would bring their countries closer to democracy, she thought, and in due course she was indeed vindicated.
Now all this legacy is being thrown out the window.
Liberty is on the defensive in America, Europe, and Israel
First, in the war between a tyrannical Russia and the democratic neighbor it molested, the president of the US took the side of the despot. Worse, he publicly berated and shamed the beleaguered democrat.
Then the free world’s leader launched negotiations with the world’s most destabilizing tyranny, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Then, in those talks, his emissary ignored the ayatollahs’ ongoing oppression of their people.
Then the successor of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Woodrow Wilson said of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a man who personally and systematically dismantled a functioning democracy, “I happen to like him” and “I have great relations” with him. This was said hardly 30 days after Erdogan, threatened by his main rival’s popularity, had him arrested.
Add to this record the American president’s previous waltzing with the world’s most notorious dictator, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and you have to conclude that America, once the free world’s emblem, inspiration, and engine, is now being led by a man for whom liberty means nothing.
This is the backdrop against which Middle Israelis, while celebrating their state’s 77th birthday, watch with trepidation liberty’s status at home and abroad.
ONE MAJOR victim of liberty’s crisis is the Middle East. The chances that freedom fighters in Iran, Turkey, Kurdistan, and across the Arab world will get any help from Uncle Sam during the next four years are zilch. As far as today’s White House is concerned, all the strongmen surrounding us are perfectly legitimate, as are the crimes some of them habitually commit.
How authoritarianism recovered despite liberty's march to global victory
The big picture is that liberty’s march to global victory first seemed imminent, then was blocked, then faced a counterattack, and now the counterattack is reaching the inner sanctum of the free world.
It was but yesterday, hardly 35 years ago, that Liberty seemed ready to take over the world, as the Berlin Wall’s collapse was followed by democracy’s sweep of Central Europe, Latin America, South Africa, South Korea and Taiwan.
But authoritarianism recovered, quickly and impressively. What began in China, with the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, was followed a decade later by the rise of Vladimir Putin in Russia, and then proceeded to Turkey with the rise of Erdogan in 2003.
Turkey was on the free world’s outskirts, but the challenge to liberty then marched on, to the thick of Europe, where Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban quelled the judiciary and the press. Then the assault on liberty proceeded to America, and also to the Jewish state, whose leader assaulted the judiciary and allegedly tried to use secret police to fight demonstrators and obstruct his trial in court.
“Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent,” wrote Paine. “Selected from the rest of mankind,” he observed, “their minds are early poisoned by importance.”
The Americans who read those lines understood. They understood that their king, like ours, has waged war on them – a war on liberty, justice and pride; a war they must fight, endure, and win. As must we.
www.MiddleIsrael.netAmotz Asa-El’s new book, Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), will be launched at 4 p.m. next Tuesday, May 6, at the Hartman Institute, 11 Gedalya Alon Street, Jerusalem. To register, please click https://hartman.tfaforms.net/4720292