American history

On March 23, 1775, a month before the first shots would ring out at Lexington and Concord, Patrick Henry entered Saint John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia to deliver a bold conviction. “The war is actually begun,” he said, “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” Henry’s rallying cry remains one of the most iconic speeches in American history and is one of my personal favorites. Indeed, multiple times since we moved to northern Virginia in 2021, my family and I have made the drive south to see Henry’s speech reenacted. The message remains as compelling as ever, and this year, on its 250th anniversary, I believe it is especially relevant to our current political moment. We are facing a struggle for ordered liberty.

Cockburn is going to get ahead of things and announce it right now: ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is doomed. Accept it, and the pain will be lessened. Over the weekend, conservatives were piqued (as they almost always are) when the track and field athlete Gwen Berry turned her back on the American flag as the national anthem played. How could she dare sully the integrity of the women’s hammer throw in this manner? Dan Crenshaw says Berry should be booted off the Tokyo Olympic team. Ted Cruz asked why the left ‘hates America’. They should have just let it lie. Instead, the GOP has let Berry’s stunt become a multi-day controversy. And in doing so, they have sealed the anthem’s fate.

One of my favorite quotes about America — mainly because it annoys so many people — comes from the historian Robert Wiebe. In his book Self-Rule, he writes: ‘Telling Americans to improve democracy by sinking comfortably into community, by losing themselves in a collective life, is calling into the wind. There has never been an American democracy without its powerful strand of individualism, and nothing suggests there will ever be.’ Cue the yelping from nationalists, socialists, Burkeans, take your pick. Yet Wiebe was less making a political argument than he was observing what was right in front of his nose.

There is no right to burn down your neighborhood, but it’s always an option. Freedom means choice, and real freedom must include the choice of self-destruction — but not destroying someone else’s neighborhood. Especially not when the neighborhood is mostly black and poor. That is what the privileged whites of antifa are doing by instigating disorder and destruction in Minneapolis’s 3rd precinct and elsewhere. Cost-free kicks at black people’s expense: the height of white privilege. Race is the American sickness, and though everyone is sick of it, no one has the cure. The murder of George Floyd and the fact that it took riots before his killer was charged, confirms, should anyone still need confirmation, that Americans are still not equal before the law.