America Endures

‘I f destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher,” Abraham Lincoln prophesized in his 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum. “As a nation of free men, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

This famous excerpt from a speech replete with famous excerpts came to mind during a recent conversation on The Editors podcast. It was prompted by a solicitation from Rich to predict the fortunes of the United States as it is presently constituted — a continental republic dedicated in broad strokes to classically liberal governance, and a great power on the world stage — over the next century or so. I expressed optimism, but Rich posited an important caveat: If the United States became embroiled in a great-power war that it unambiguously lost, that could compel it to retreat inward and forget its character.

He’s right. Lincoln might still be correct about the degree to which a foreign army would struggle in the “trial of a thousand years” to conquer America’s vast tracts and pacify its wonderfully ungovernable people. But technology has progressed to the point that our geographical advantages (and with them, our nation’s very self-conception) have diminished. And if a disastrous calamity abroad fundamentally altered the American compact, we would still be the authors of that misfortune.

The conditions that might catalyze a sense of national capitulation are limited only by our powers of imagination, but it would still fall to us to execute the terms of a suicide pact. And we don’t have to look far back into the annals or consult works of fiction to envision what a national resignation would look like. We can look to the fate to which the Soviets consigned their own nation for an idea of what we’d be in for.

So many factors contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union that it is folly to place too much emphasis on any one in particular. But one factor that doesn’t receive the credit it is due is the work that the Baltic states’ representatives to the Congress of People’s Deputies did to open up the Kremlin’s archives. In the process, they exposed the modern Soviet origin myth as a lie.

The collapse of Soviet communism in Poland over the course of the 1980s — slowly at first, then all at once — yielded a political thaw that produced incontrovertible evidence that the USSR’s invasion of Poland in 1939 was the byproduct of the infamous Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviets and the Nazis. Popular independence movements in the Baltics were already gaining steam when Estonian representatives to the Congress sought information about the 1939 agreement. The Kremlin denied the existence of that information, but Eastern Bloc academics had already uncovered it in America’s national archives.

In June 1989, Russian and Ukrainian deputies aligned with the Baltic states in the pursuit of their own sovereignty, to which exposing the existence of the 1939 non-aggression pact with Germany would only contribute. By December of that year, despite much protest, the Politburo acknowledged the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and the Congress subsequently declared its terms legally invalid.

The Soviet officials who objected to the recognition of these documents were fully aware of their implications. If the non-aggression pact was invalid, so, too, were its provisions that led to the absorption of the Baltic states into the USSR. More than that, if the Soviet Union itself owed its existence to an agreement with the Nazi government, the foundational assumptions of the Soviet state itself would be left in ruins. In the immediate post-war years, anti-fascism replaced the promotion of international communism as the USSR’s primary national identity. Anti-Nazism became the Soviet Union’s foremost mechanism for the reinforcement of internal cohesion, and it remains Moscow’s raison d’être even today. If the Soviet state was based on a lie, that made it all the easier for its constituent republics — Russia, foremost among them — to declare an end to it.

Unlike the Soviet Union, America is not founded upon a lie. But there are many forces at work today advancing a narrow, propagandistic reading of American history that contributes to the conclusion that the United States is wholly illegitimate.

The trappings of this revolutionary movement are by now familiar. Its enforcers retail narratives about how the Republic was founded solely to protect the institution of slavery. They traffic in tales of how America’s private and public institutions were built upon rotten foundations, and virtually every system of American governance erected upon them is thus suspect. These stories have become fashionable to the point that even the current president of the United States lent them credence. “We all have an obligation to do nothing less than change the culture in this country,” Joe Biden told a rapt audience in 2019. “This is English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture. It’s got to change.”

The same contempt for the nation’s foundations shines through every one of today’s faddish progressive denunciations of America. “This country was founded on white supremacy,” says Beto O’Rourke. “To me, capitalism is irredeemable,” says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written,” says the much-fêted 1619 Project.

If destruction be our lot, not only will we be its authors, but these words will be its preamble. We are far better positioned than the Soviet Union to avoid that fate, because the truth is on the side of those who recognize the providential legitimacy of the American experiment in self-government. But the truth may still not be enough. Those who mistake cynicism for sophistication bombard Americans with revisionist histories designed to delegitimize the Founding. Defending against this unceasing onslaught is exhausting. If exhaustion prevails, national euthanasia may well follow.

But while it is terrifyingly plausible, I don’t think this course of events is likely anytime soon. The story told by America’s defenders is just more compelling than the one its detractors are retailing, and it has the inestimable benefit of being historically accurate. This is a dynamic country, but its legal foundations are constant. That is what the critics, from the president on down, resent the most. The Founders in their wisdom baked into it an implacable resistance to the adoption of fashions in law. Its representatives are not wholly unresponsive to faddish diffidence; they’re only human. But the obstacles to substituting sentimental ephemera and sophistry for eternal moral precepts and legal principles are durable.

This is, of course, not the first generation of ersatz revolutionaries so besotted with their own pretensions that they appear set on breaking down those obstacles. One day, they might even get their way. Until then, though, the Republic as it is presently constituted will endure, and we who love it will persist in its defense.