The American ideal and the challenges still ahead

I read the headline “America’s Last Hurrah” with an excited curiosity. Sounded like somebody might understand history in general and our history in particular.

Mr. Rallis’s letter started well: “Change is a constant and no amount of make-believe can stop it …” I was pleasantly surprised to find the writer remained above narrow-minded nationalism: “If it’s any consolation, no one nation or empire remains the best forever. Some last longer than others, but history has proven there are no exceptions.”

Through study of the rise and fall of civilizations, I have learned each civilization is accidentally on purpose founded on an idea and grows as the idea develops. When the idea stops developing, the civilization begins to die.

Western civilization was founded on the idea that the source of a human being’s value is not in relationships of family, tribe or community. The source of a human being’s value is found in himself as an individual. America’s chapter in this Western story is this individualism developed into the idea that the individual human being has the right to live a life free of interference by any other human being.

However, Tom Paine in “Common Sense,” makes clear an individual’s freedom remains undeveloped as a solitary (can’t have a family, can be killed by any other guys who decide to gang up on him), while an individual’s freedom is developed by the opportunity to cooperate with other human beings — Paine uses cabin-raising by frontiersmen as a model. By cooperating in cabin-raising, each frontiersman gained the opportunity to do other tasks.

“Opportunity is a set of circumstances which makes it possible to do something.” Opportunity does not guarantee outcomes. An opportunity only provides the possibilities of success and failure.

America was to be a voluntary society of individual white men whose scope for success or failure was expanded or restricted by his access to opportunities. Unequal access to opportunity could only result from interference of one individual’s freedom by another individual.

A great benefit of an equal opportunity society would be that success or failure would reflect the individual’s merit and only the individual’s merit.

Of course, that’s not how America started nor are we there yet. However, from the start, equal opportunity has inspired, guided and evaluated our progress. In the beginning, there was equal opportunity for political participation, economic independence and social mobility, but only for white men, over 21 and who owned property. We had stolen enough land, so that any white man had the opportunity to own property, if he had the physical strength, courage, and work ethic.

Even though equal opportunity was restricted to white men by race-slavery, patriarchy and family — compared to the autocracies, monarchies and aristocracies of the time, America was the experiment in equal opportunity.

As late as 1890, 75 percent of the American people lived on family farms. Despite bankers’ best efforts to seduce family farmers into debt, the majority remained economically independent.

In other regards, we had a long hard row to hoe. Race-slavery’s exclusion of African-Americans from the opportunities of a citizen had to be removed at the cost of a long and terrible civil war. Jim Crow would again restrict the opportunities gained by an enormous amount of death and bloodshed. Religious prejudice would retard our growth by restricting opportunities for Catholics until 1960 and still restricts opportunities for Jews and Muslims. While reduced in institutional power by women’s suffrage, family planning, civil-rights legislation and higher education, male chauvinists still work hard to maintain inequities of political and economic opportunity for women.

The most important result of identifying equal opportunity as the American idea is the ability to evaluate policy as either advancing or retarding American growth.

Examples:

1. Physical equal opportunity is a set of circumstances in which all people are equally able to live as healthy a life as their body and free will permit. Health care of equal quality available to all Americans would be American health care.

a. Health care by purchase gives the wealthy American a greater opportunity for physical health than the middle-class or working-poor American; health for the wealthy is an aristocratic system of health care.

2. Economic opportunities are expanded by higher education. Bernie Sanders’ idea of equal access to a college education is the American system of higher education.

a. Higher education by purchase reserves economic opportunity to the wealthy; this is an aristocratic system of higher education.

3.Equal opportunity in the legal system is found in the ideal of blind justice — no respecter of persons, all people are equal before the law.

a. We have two justice systems, one for the rich and one for the poor; this is a Babylonian system of justice.

At present the two greatest threats to equal opportunity are threats to the opportunities of the yet unborn — the national debt and climate change.

The windows of opportunity on both are closing fast. Interest on the debt is now and is projected to continue being the fastest growing area of federal spending in the coming years, outpacing even Medicare or Social Security. In 2015, the U.S. spent $223 billion, or 6 percent of the federal budget, paying for interest on the debt.

Rising sea levels, drought, flood and melting icecaps are already affecting immigration and disaster expenses. Our generation is consuming energy at levels which interferes with the unborn’s freedom to live a life they have a right to live.

For us to recognize that we have created an America where, for there first time, the next generation can expect to live with fewer opportunities than the last generation and then do nothing about it is un-American in the worst of un-American ways.

When new opportunities are created and old opportunities are opened up to more and more Americans, America grows. When new opportunities are not created and old opportunities are closed to more and more Americans, America goes into decline.

American history cannot escape its founding inspiration — I would call it God’s reason for our being — an experiment in equal opportunity for all individual human beings. How well we succeed or fail at achieving this mission will be how we will be judged by our Creator and our grandchildren.

I hope that, by shining a light on this most and once American ideal of equal opportunity for all, Americans can see how we can begin to grow again.

America can grow again, not by going back and doing our childhood over again. If we recommit to growing a society of more and more equal opportunity, we can turn things around. It won’t be easy.

Conservatives like preaching to their choir about individual freedom from interference. Progressives like preaching to their choir about equality no matter what that does to opportunity.

Conservatives and progressives need to stop preaching to their choirs and start listening to each other with respect for the other’s half truth....

Example: Deficit spending. Conservatives have their half truth: Individual welfare in general and entitlement programs in particular are to blame. Progressives have their half truth: tax cuts for the wealthy, corporate welfare in general and defense spending in particular are to blame. Whole truth: All are to blame for deficit spending.

Host is a resident of Kalispell.