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Foreword by Victor Davis Hanson

Robert Curry believes that the roots and traditions of the Founding Fathers should once again become common knowledge to contemporary Americans. These are strange times in which all too many citizens are confused about their present culture and government. Ignorance of our own past is largely the cause. A broad cluelessness also exists about how America’s creation has been deliberately massaged for contemporary political purposes in ways antithetical to the views of the Founders.

In truth, present political agendas seek to remake or obliterate the American past. Even many of those who are familiar with the contours of the American Revolution and the founding of the republic, especially in academia, journalism, the arts, and politics, believe that the late eighteenth-century birth of America was either morally problematic or has—and should have—little relevance for the contemporary United States. Twenty-first-century America, then, to the degree that it is exemplary, powerful, and influential abroad, owes its good fortune more to natural luck—a huge land mass, abundant natural resources, and a large population—in the manner of, say, Brazil, China, or Russia. Even if a nation’s customs and traditions do count, our history is largely the story of an establishment of white males who thrived through the oppression of minorities, women, indigenous peoples, and immigrants, and whose founding principles still can reflect those class and racial prejudices.

Curry believes that the causes for this epidemic of false knowledge are explainable by the decline of classical liberalism. It once championed the liberty and unfettered expression of the individual, but was absorbed and corrupted by modern liberalism. The latter counterfeit doctrine immodestly assumed the state’s right of almost limitless power over the individual to ensure an equality of result, largely by using government capital and power to change the nature of man. In other words, the Founders’ promotion of the unfettered intellect to appreciate how divinely endowed freedom is innate to the human condition gave way to a government creed embracing secularism, atheism, and agnosticism. Only the supposedly pure reason of self-appointed experts could explain all the mysteries of man’s physical and spiritual existence.

Each succeeding cadre of intellectuals would render obsolete more of the Founders’ stale admonitions. These later generations were the products of a technological, sophisticated, and “improved” age of rapid social, material, and ethical progress, scarcely recognizable to the reactionaries who drafted the Bill of Rights.

In contrast, Curry emphasizes three forgotten pillars upon which the American idea was birthed and nourished. One, the creators of the American ideal drew on earlier and contemporary European free-thinkers for the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. But their particular intellectual fonts were decidedly the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers and, to a lesser extent, their counterparts in Britain—but not so much the French Enlightenment of Voltaire and Rousseau, who were hostile to religion, favored mandated equality over constitutionally protected individual liberty, and believed in the malleability of human nature.

Classical liberalism—the confidence in the individual to think and function freely apart from government coercion—was quite different than modern liberalism. The former accepted that free choice and reasoning at times might result in inequality, but assumed that society’s institutions and man’s nature—religion, charities, human kindness and brotherhood—were the correctives of a humane society. Modern liberalism, in contrast—especially under Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—did not trust either the intelligence or the maturity of the individual citizen. Modern liberals instead assumed that only properly coached and powerful elites and their technocrats could curb unhelpful personal expression and misguided individual choices to achieve more cosmic goals of equality and perceived collective fairness.

Second, a key American virtue was common sense realism, but not what later became known as intellectual pragmatism. Left to their own, largely agrarian families, self-reliant and autonomous, would bring their first-hand knowledge of nature, hard work, and human fallibility to participate in consensual government. In other words, their common sense knew well what men were and were not capable of. Basic truths of human nature and the building blocks of society were “self-evident” to the vast majority of citizens of all classes and backgrounds. Early Americans, both the public and their architects of the American system, were not late nineteenth-century utopians. They were not willing to embrace any convenient or popular creed if it supposedly offered some short-term utility in the real world—especially if it were antithetical to centuries-old intellectual, religious, and practical canons about the innate forces that motivate and admonish people.

Third, Curry assumes that the Founders are so often ignored not just because they supposedly represent a particular ossified cadre of old white privileged males, but also because their wise advice and sternness are unpalatable to the modern age of growing government. They now appear bothersome scolds and absolutists that are unhelpful for state guided and relativist social progress. The danger to personal freedom arises not just from clearly identifiable totalitarian and barbaric ideologies like Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism or Joseph Stalin’s communist super state. Rather, the avatars of all-encompassing government are far more insidious and subtle in assuring always increasing state services and support, and more compassionate and egalitarian group think—in exchange for the individual’s surrender of inconvenient rights of free thought, obstreperous speech, and obstructive independence as envisioned by the Founders.

Finally, Citizen Curry does not offer an academic review of the origins of the American experiment. Rather, he writes and cites primary sources in an easily accessible way, offering a handbook designed, as he says, to appeal to the proverbial average citizen. Given that neither the schools nor the media, in disinterested fashion, teach us the history and purpose of America’s founding and guiding principles, it remains the duty of citizens like Robert Curry, the writer, and we the readers, jointly to rediscover who we were and are—and how we once again can become the Americans that the Founders once envisioned.

Victor Davis Hanson

Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow

The Hoover Institution, Stanford University