Once more, David French has lifted up the torch of classical liberalism — or the American Founding or the American Way. I would like to make a few general comments about his many critics.

Some of them are more candid than others. Some say, in effect, “Yes, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the problem, and I want them out of the way. I want more of a Franco state than an American republic.” Others are annoyingly coy.


One of the things I most appreciate about PJB — Patrick J. Buchanan — is his candor. He does not pussyfoot around (to borrow George Wallace language). He says things like this: “To much of the world, America has become the most secularized and decadent society on earth, and the title the Ayatollah bestowed upon us, ‘The Great Satan,’ is not altogether undeserved.” And this, about the Hungarians: “They have used democratic means to elect autocratic men who will put the Hungarian nation first.”

Etc. Pat does not go in for coyness. He says, frankly, that “the populist-nationalist Right” is “moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy to save the America they love.” I appreciate clarity, from any quarter. Would that Pat’s confrères — all of them — were as forthright as he.

Another point:



When I was coming of age, there were lots of commies about — I mean, real commies, not people we say are commies in order to get clicks and such. This was the real McCoy. And one thing I always resented about them is that they were using the means of liberal democracy — the rights and freedoms of liberal democracy — to campaign against liberal democracy. To annul it. I feared this was a flaw of liberal democracy, an Achilles’ heel. “The Constitution is not a suicide pact!” I would repeat.

The same thing burns me about David’s opponents, or some of them: Blessed by liberal democracy, they work to do it in — as liberal-democratic freedoms allow. That strikes me as dirty pool. There are plenty of authoritarian states we can move to — military dictatorships, theocracies, “people’s republics” — if those are more to our liking. Why can’t America remain America?

Last, I think of Donald Rumsfeld — who often talked about “people who want to tell you what to do when you get up in the morning: how to live, how to be.” There will always be such groups, of sundry ideological stripes: people who demand that you conform to their way of life, rather than pursuing your own.



In politics, there is something like a Golden Rule: I will allow you freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, and so on. Will you do the same for me?

David writes, “Classical liberalism is the frame, the structure through which a pluralistic society makes competing arguments for the common good and the Highest Good.” I think of America — or any free society — as a place where you can “work out your salvation with diligence,” or, if you like, “with fear and trembling.” It is a place where the state leaves you alone — Don’t Tread on Me — and where you are free to be the fullest you possible.

(Just don’t harm anyone else in the process, okay?)


Many people around the world — I have heard this from personal friends of mine — say, “I was born in the wrong place! I’m really an American, just stuck in another country.” I wish we who are lucky enough to be here, already, could appreciate what we have as much as many onlookers, and admirers, do.

* “The Open Society and Its Enemies” was taken. Of course, you could have gone Spanish: “Frenchistas and Anti-Frenchistas.”