By contrast, the other existing countries in the 1700s around the world were based on the fact that the right to rule was the property of a royal family. The property was passed down from one generation to another.
Because the United States was built on concepts, instead of on bloodlines, discussions of words like ‘justice’ and ‘liberty’ are central to the nation and its history.
As the first truly self-governing citizenry, it belongs not only to national history, but to world-historical history, to describe and analyze “what happened to the people of America once they governed themselves.” The word ‘experiment’ is often used as a label for the U.S. Constitution’s concept of a government composed of freely-elected representatives, and for the ‘e pluribus unum’ of American federalism.
The American Revolution owes some of its distinctive features to the un-revolutionary heritage that it borrowed from England. Americans applied concepts that had been formulated by British political thinkers like John Locke and Edmund Burke. The innovation was that the Americans applied these concepts more thoroughly and consistently than the British themselves had.
From Rhode Island’s 1652 abolition of slavery, under the leadership of Roger Williams, to the 1688 German Quaker petition against slavery in Pennsylvania, the nation’s ideals were largely in place prior to the 1776 creation of the nation. The Americans codified and clarified these ideals:
They fought a revolution to preserve an existing culture of self-government and further distinguished themselves by proclaiming their shared ideals. They governed themselves under a Constitution designed to put those ideals into action. When tested by slavery, expansion, immigration, and the challenges of democracy, Americans made the constitutional order work. When their brethren rebelled in order to create a government on a different basis, Americans preserved the system of ordered liberty as understood by the Founders.
The world of the mid 1700s disappeared with technology, industrialization, and changing global connections between nations — as other nations began to reinvent themselves on the American model.
The once-unique framework of a republic governed by freely elected representatives, a structure which made the United States a one-of-a-kind innovation among the nations of the world, would within two or three centuries become a common system of organizing a government. At the time of America’s founding, it was the only country to have elections in the significant modern sense. Now, many nations have elections.
The challenge of each new decade is to see how the United States will apply its founding principles to new situations. If it fails to find a way, then not only would the nation lose its identity, but the world would lose the hope which these principles offer to all people. “American political culture withstood the challenges of modernity and the various forms of totalitarianism that grew in response to it,” as Stephen Tootle notes.
How the United States applies the timeless axioms of its founding to contemporary situations is, Tootle argues, not only determines its domestic policy, but rather also becomes its foreign policy, as America allows the rest of the world to observe the ongoing experiment in empowering citizens to vote into existence their own government.
“The most important aspect of American foreign policy is proclaiming rights and demonstrating self-government,” Tootle concludes. Creatively and innovatively, Americans applied their founding principles to concrete situations, and in the process, offered tangible examples of liberty to the rest of the world: Theodore Roosevelt’s hosting of Booker T. Washington at a dinner in the White House in 1901; Calvin Coolidge’s affirmation of civil rights for African Americans, as the first sitting president to deliver a commencement address at a Historically Black College in 1924; Eisenhower’s determination to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
The United States demonstrated that, by keeping government weak and limited, a society can work toward those things which all people desire: freedom, prosperity, peace, and justice. America showed that property rights and free markets are the necessary preconditions for liberty, equality, and opportunity.
