My liberal facebook friends are all into puppies (and horses), but children… not so much.
I think that speaks volumes…
The American experiment was never supposed to be an experiment in how much responsibility could be transferred from citizens to government. It rested on almost the opposite proposition: that a free people could govern themselves, care for their communities, solve problems locally, and voluntarily cooperate without waiting for direction from a distant bureaucracy. Alexis de Tocqueville recognized this as one of the most remarkable characteristics of America when he traveled the young nation in the 1830s. Americans, he observed, were extraordinary association-builders. When they wanted a church, school, hospital, road, charitable organization, civic improvement, or political reform, they formed a group and did something about it.
This dense network of families, churches, voluntary associations, businesses, towns, and local institutions created a civil society strong enough that government did not have to occupy every corner of life. The American experiment was always about self-rule, otherwise known as self-sovereignty.
Volunteerism builds citizenship because people retain both responsibility and agency. Big government progressively replaces both. The American experiment depends not merely upon elections and constitutional language, but upon preserving a people sufficiently independent, prosperous, cohesive, and self-reliant to govern themselves. Once citizens become clients of the state and communities surrender their functions to centralized bureaucracies, we may retain the outward machinery of a republic while losing much of what made the republic possible in the first place.
But a culture must first understand the principles of volunteerism and the importance of governing itself. Self-government is not simply a constitutional arrangement. It is a learned behavior, passed from one generation to the next.
Ronald Reagan may have articulated the fragility of that inheritance best when he warned, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Liberty does not perpetuate itself. A nation is only as capable of self-government as its people are willing and able to assume the responsibilities that self-government requires. Citizens must understand that freedom comes with obligations: to family, neighbors, community, local institutions, and ultimately the nation itself. When those habits disappear, government (and in particular, the courts) inevitably moves into the vacuum.
This is also why immigration and immigration policy cannot be separated from culture. America has historically absorbed enormous numbers of immigrants, but successful immigration required something more than crossing a border and finding employment. It required assimilation into the American experiment.
Orderly immigration gives a nation the ability to decide how many newcomers it can successfully absorb and provides newcomers the time and institutional structure necessary to learn the language, laws, history, customs, and civic expectations of their new country. That means they must want to become Americans and participate in the American experiment.
Flooding a nation with newcomers faster than assimilation can reasonably occur is something fundamentally different. Many immigrants may be admirable, industrious people seeking better lives, but they cannot reasonably be expected to arrive already understanding Tocqueville’s America: voluntary associations, limited government, local responsibility, constitutional restraint, private property, individual liberty, and the expectation that citizens govern themselves rather than look automatically to the state. Those ideas are culturally transmitted.
If immigration occurs faster than the receiving society can transmit them, America risks importing populations without successfully creating Americans in the civic sense. The issue, therefore, is that the immigration wave became so large and rapid over the past fifty years that the American experiment itself has been diluted before newcomers have even had the opportunity to understand it.
In the terrible days after September 11, 2001, Americans were reminded of something we had begun to forget: what it meant to be American. For a brief time, the labels that divide us mattered less than the country that united us. Flags appeared on porches, strangers helped strangers, churches filled, and firefighters, police officers, soldiers, and ordinary citizens became our heroes.
We remembered that America is more than a government or a piece of land. It is a shared inheritance of liberty, courage, sacrifice, and responsibility to one another. Perhaps the lesson of 9/11 worth remembering today is that we should not need another tragedy to remember who we are.
“And I proud to be an American…" God bless the USA”
Let’s see who figures it out first!
JGM
Lots of giggles today even on this somber 25th anniversary. God bless America and may our great country continue to thrive under patriotic leadership and not fall into the hands of RADICAL DEMONrats! 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
Trump