Archive [July 2000]

On May 23, George W. Bush appeared at the National Press Club to speak on national defense policy. A reporter from Russia asked, “How do you define the national greatness of the United States? Do you think that the national greatness of any country in this day and age should be defined by military needs?”

Gov. Bush began his answer, “The national greatness of the United States is how we love each other, how one neighbor will help another neighbor, whether or not we can educate our children.” He then went on to discuss, among other things, military preparedness: “I won’t let the morale in the United States military deteriorate like it has under this current Administration. I understand it’s important to have a well-focused, well-paid military to keep the peace.”

A fine answer, of course. But what a question: How do you define the national greatness of the United States? I think this merits serious attention; indeed it is worthy of a national discussion.

How many of you have even stopped to think about the greatness of America? At least by his question, the Russian reporter was acknowledging the fact. Scores of nations have arisen and prospered throughout the history of the world. But there hasn’t been one that has come close to the greatness of the United States. That is true in virtually any category — economics, productivity, civil rights, living standards, technological advances, medical breakthroughs, military might, cultural influence, world dominance. It is also true regarding basic creature comforts, making life more enjoyable, at work or leisure. No nation has even been in the same category.

Why? Are the people who have populated this land so unique? Are they superior to, or different from, people who have lived in other parts of the world? What is the secret? Is it our military which has made us great, because it’s kept everybody afraid of us, and deterred enemies and potential enemies from attacking us? Is it our scientists? Our developers? Our inventors? Our industry? What is it?

After all, we’ve only been around for 224 years. Yet in many ways we are more advanced as a civilization and as a society than countries that have been around for thousands of years. We have far greater agricultural programs; our science, housing standards, and hygiene are all superior to countries that have been at it a lot longer than we have. How is it that we have become and maintained ourselves as the most powerful nation on earth?

We’re the nation everybody in the world turns to for leadership. I don’t care where you go — Ireland, the Middle East, you name the hotspot — you don’t solve a foreign relations problem without the United States being involved. And there isn’t any economic area of the world where the U.S. is not a leading participant. Whether it’s Australia, China, Japan, India, Arabia, Israel, Europe, Africa, southeast Asia, no matter where you go, we are involved. In the area of media and communications and all aspects of technology, nobody holds a candle to us. In fact, other nations of the world send their best and brightest to be educated here — and after receiving their education, many stay.

Liberals hate this sort of observation, by the way. It is a truism that the fastest way to enrage a liberal is to declare that the United States of America is the greatest country in the world. Try it sometime, for your own entertainment and amusement. Any liberal will react to such an assertion as if you have just committed a violent atrocity. You will instantly be treated to a hysterical stream of vitriol and name-calling. My advice: Smile broadly, and reiterate, “Well, it is the greatest country in the world.” You will have to peel the liberal off the ceiling.

Why? Remember that statement I often quote from Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: “We very much don’t want to be out there by ourselves as the organizer and the only superpower,” said Albright in April of last year. “People don’t believe that. They think we just want to be king of the hill, but we do not.” Rather, she said, as reported by the Associated Press, the Clinton Administration strives to develop alliances and partnerships “to share the burden of leadership.”

You see? “We don’t want to be the only superpower.” It’s not fair. It’s not a burden that we want. We’re willing to share these things.

My friends, the liberal mindset is guilt. The overriding attitude, emotion, outlook that shapes the liberal existence is guilt. You’re probably saying, “Guilt about what?”

Guilt about our superiority. Liberals feel guilty that we have more. They feel guilty that we’re more prosperous. They feel guilty that we’re more successful. They feel guilty that we’re more advanced. They don’t assign it to anything other than luck.

I saw the best example of this years ago when I was watching “The Phil Donahue Show” one day, and Phil was on a true liberal guilt trip. He was rubbing his hands together, moaning about the accident of his birth. He had a guest on from Mexico, and he was speculating that had he been born in Mexico, he’d be so much less. He was bemoaning the fact that his being born in America just gave him so many unfair advantages that it just wasn’t right.

The liberal way of dealing with these “unfair advantages” is to feel guilty, and embarrassed, and ashamed of the United States of America. Remember, as far as liberals are concerned, the United States is not what it is because we’ve worked hard, because we had a brilliant set of Founding Fathers who wrote a genius document ensuring our freedom, which allowed for the pursuit of excellence. That’s not it. We’re just lucky. We simply have been luckier than other places have been. And the liberal remedy for this is not to spread our way of life around to the rest of the world so that they, too, can benefit from a natural yearning of the human spirit, freedom. Liberals don’t look at it that way. Instead they say, “We must reduce this unfair advantage that the United States has.”

Scores of nations have arisen throughout history. But not one has come close to the greatness of the United States.

So we must give away our nuclear secrets. We must give away our prosperity. We must share all that we produce with the United Nations. Otherwise, we are guilty of hording all of these wonderful things, and the rest of the world suffers because of our greed and selfishness.

In a matter of a few paragraphs, I have just given you more than you’d learn about liberalism in four years of college. If you’ve ever wondered what motivates liberals, now you know. And I am right on the money — it’s up to you to face the truth.

It explains why Elian Gonzales had to go back to Cuba. It explains why you hear how wonderful Cuba is — you know the mantra: 99 percent literacy rate; everybody has health care; they just have a different system than we do, who are we to condemn, since the Cuban people have chosen it. (No, they haven’t.)

It explains liberals’ appeasement of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It explains why liberals have no compunction about giving away our secrets to the Chinese. “Well, that’s only fair. We really haven’t done anything to deserve our possession of those secrets.” You could probably find a liberal who’d say, “If we hadn’t stolen Germany’s brain trust after World War II, if we hadn’t engaged in unfair tactics to get German scientists to come here, they might have chosen to go to China anyway.”

No, to liberals, it’s just the unfairness and the inequities of America’s bounty that has led to America’s greatness, and so this unfair greatness must be balanced and atoned for by giving it away.

Which is why, when Third World countries show up at the United Nations and demand that we pay them this and pay them that, liberals are more than happy to give our money away to the IMF or the World Bank. And why liberals are more than happy to tax you to the hilt and give it away in foreign aid. These people are running around with the largest amount of collective guilt you’ll ever see. They do not stop to consider that America’s greatness has been earned, that America’s greatness is deserved, that America’s greatness is the result of brilliance and hard work. To them, it’s just unfair.

Do you still doubt me? Go back to Richard Gephardt discussing tax cuts a few years ago. He described those in America who have been successful as “winners in life’s lottery.” The successful. He said that instead of the eeevil rich life’s-lottery-winners, “we’re going to have tax cuts for working families.” What’s a “working family” in Dick Gephardt’s world? Turns out, a “working family” is limited to a blue collar union household doing manual labor, making less than $60,000 a year. But if you happen to be from a family that produces a family income of, say, $100,000, in Gephardt’s world yours is not a “working family.” Your family has somehow come by it unfairly. You might have had connections. Your father might have known somebody who recommended him for a high-paying job. No doubt the result of the hated, dastardly, dreaded “old boys’ network.” And even if you didn’t steal your income or inherit it, you obviously still had some kind of unfair advantage.

I’m telling you, this is the way they think. It’s guilt, folks — profound guilt.

But the fact remains, no matter how much the left may despise this reality, the United States of America is without peer. Which brings me back to my question: What is the secret of America’s national greatness?

Have you ever stopped and thought about this yourself? What is it about this young country that sets it so above and apart from everybody else? What is it that defines our national greatness? This is a hanging curve ball that should be knocked out of the park.

As I have said many times, the first key to what has made America great is freedom. That’s essential, and obvious. But I want to take it further — because there’s a bit more to it than that.

Examine the human beings who live in the United States and compare them to the human beings who live anywhere else. Take a Western socialist democracy such as, say, France or Great Britain. Are we somehow superior to them as human beings? Of course not.

So why, for example — and I’m not trying to be funny — is their plumbing so bad? How long has Great Britain been around? Thousands of years. But the thing that struck me when I visited that country was how old-fashioned and backwards the plumbing is. And yet here’s the United States — we’ve been around for, at the time I was there, just barely over 200 years. Yet we run rings around people who’ve been trying to improve their plumbing for thousands of years. Why? What is the explanation?

Its not just plumbing, of course. This superiority manifests itself in every facet of life, from grocery stores to medicine to computers.

Of course the basic explanation is freedom, but I think you’ve got to take it a little bit deeper than that. It’s not just freedom but it is the structure of this country. The men who founded this nation and wrote our Constitution were indeed among the most brilliant who’ve ever lived. And were it not for the setting up of this nation with their recognition that freedom is the natural yearning of the created human spirit, created by God — not something granted by government— had it not been for that, then this experiment would not have worked. Long before you and I were born, this country would have changed and would have become much less free than it is.

One essential element that helps us is our unity. In Europe there are all these little nations, and these places may not really cooperate. We have states, but we’re united, with the resources of America. Kansas does not have to get into individual trade agreements with Nebraska and Missouri. There is reciprocity. We combine all the natural resources that we have.

George Washington made much this same point in his 1796 Farewell Address:

The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now near to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquillity at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize … The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together. The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts, of common dangers, sufferings, and successes … Here every portion of our country finds the most commanding motives for carefully guarding and preserving the union of the whole.

The North, in an unrestrained intercourse with the South, protected by the equal laws of a common government, finds in the productions of the latter great additional resources of maritime and commercial enterprise and precious materials of manufacturing industry. The South, in the same intercourse, benefiting by the same agency of the North, sees its agriculture grow and its commerce expand … The East, in a like intercourse with the West, already finds … a valuable vent for the commodities which it brings from abroad or manufactures at home. The West derives from the East supplies requisite to its growth and comfort…

While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in union, all the parts combined can not fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations, and what is of inestimable value, they must derive from union an exemption from those broils and wars between themselves which so frequently afflict neighboring countries not tied together by the same governments…

In this sense it is that your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other …[R]emember especially that for the efficient management of your common interests in a country so extensive as ours a government of as much vigor as is consistent with the perfect security of liberty is indispensable. Liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian.

This notion of the unity of the nation was perfectly and elegantly balanced with the rigorous defense of individual freedom. The notion that the individual human being, left alone, pursuing his dreams and aspiring to be the best that he or she can be based on his or her desires, is what defines greatness.

The Founders understood — and this cannot be overemphasized — that freedom is not something granted by a government or by a sovereign. Freedom is granted by God. The Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments to the Constitution beginning with freedom of speech, the Founders said were not things they created. These were not things they were inventing. These were things they recognized to be the natural order, by virtue of God’s creation.

The Founders said: Man’s desire to speak freely is something with which he is created, and we are simply going to codify it. We are not establishing it, we are not creating it, we’re not inventing it, we’re recognizing it.

The brilliance of the men who founded this country, and the moral character of, especially, the early presidents, George Washington and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, enabled America to be born in liberty. It’s amazing and when you stop and think about it, how precariously balanced this freedom is. How precariously balanced this country was in its early days. How precariously balanced it remains, in order for our national greatness to be the envy of the world.

And it’s not because the people born here are superior to anybody. It is that the people born here, by virtue of the acknowledgement of the God-created yearning for freedom that exists in each one of us, can aim as high as their dreams.

Unfortunately, the human beings who are born here take this for granted. The vast majority of us have not lived under the oppression or tyranny that historically have been the common condition of mankind, and which are the conditions people elsewhere around the world live under today.

The simple fact that the human beings born here are allowed to be the best they can be is the simple explanation for America’s stellar achievements. There’s no greater testimony, no greater evidence of the greatness of God and the greatness of freedom, than the flourishing of the United States of America. Especially when compared to the oppression that people in other parts of the world are forced to live under.

I mentioned plumbing and hygiene. We take it for granted here and we make fun of it elsewhere. But I, for one, marvel that Americans, when they were growing up, had a desire to excel in plumbing, or the science of waste treatment. Throughout our history, there have been tinkerers motivated by the best incentives of capitalism, who have improved every aspect of that and every other field. Without them, what squalid conditions we would live in! With the freedom that human beings in this country have, we have no dearth of commode manufacturers making them the best they can be. Some might consider that quirky and odd. But thank God there are people who want to do that. Thank God there are people who want to do it better than anybody else does.

In other parts of the world, those jobs are assigned to people. So you end up with people doing them not because they love it, not because they want to do it better than anybody else, because it’s a punishment. In Communist countries, for instance, it was always the arrogant party elites who would decide who and how many would do what. In a command economy, it is the central planners who usurp freedom and assign tasks, plan production, and dictate economic decisions. The result is, poor quality everything, no correlation between supply and demand, and perpetually unfulfilled labor.

But because of the freedom that we all have in this country, people have had the opportunity to pursue all kinds of jobs. And free people have always freely filled nearly every possible niche in the economy — as an exercise of free will.

Do you realize that in virtually every walk of life in America, we are superior to the world? One reason is that whoever does whatever they do in this country, wanted to be the best at it. Those who are the best, those who are the leaders, those who own their market, wanted to be the best at what they did. And they achieved due to the freedom that they had as human beings to explore it.

People in this country are free to pursue a plumbing career. By the same token, this country also offers the freedom for people to go into quantum physics. It’s a much smaller field, with fewer people qualified, but still those who care deeply about it can pursue it to their hearts’ content here.

In other parts of the world, government testing in elementary school determines those who are chosen for elite career tracks, and dregs jobs are assigned or apportioned as punishment. In America, however, most everything is pursued because somebody has a passion for it, the freedom to pursue it, and want to be the best at it.

When you understand this and appreciate it, any attempt to limit this freedom will just boggle your mind, as it does mine. It disturbs me greatly. All the wonders around you, produced, invented, improved upon by your fellow Americans, to the world’s great benefit, are the direct result of a national acknowledgment of God-given rights and freedoms. Still, people will tell me, “No, you’re wrong, Rush; it’s our government programs that have made this country great.”

That couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s such a simple concept; yet it’s a secret fewer and fewer Americans understand: The Founders limited the role of the government, in order for the people’s dreams to be unlimited. The first ten Amendments restrict the freedom of the government; they do not limit the freedom of the people. They protect God-given freedom, the secret of American greatness.