Liberte Egalite and Fraternite

I recently quoted the assessment of Krauthammer which included his quote, repeated by Will: "America is the only country ever founded on an idea. The only country that is not founded on race or even common history. It’s founded on an idea and the idea is liberty. That is probably the rarest phenomena in the political history of the world;"

It sounds much like Margaret Thacher's  “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy."

It was countered that Liberte Egalite and Fraternite of the French Revolution were similar. I think not.

First, the architects of the American Revolution were students of the Enlightenment and the revolution was a planned and debated event. True, the leaders were pushed a bit by the public but nothing like the French Revolution which was not really led until the killing began to slow and the murders had to be more targeted. The Americans were guided by Locke and his belief in natural rights, rights people were born with. There was a merger that individuals made with those rights in what he called the social contract. This was an organizing structure. The Americans found that structure in the suggestions of Baron de Montesquieu who believed in a separation of powers into three branches (executive, legislative, and judicial). Montesquieu believed they should hold equal power, a crucial idea in the Americans' separation of powers and checks and balances. The French Revolution, unplanned and spontaneous, had the qualities of Voltaire, who was a free speech and anti-church writer, and Rousseau, who was really an anti-Enlightenment thinker who believed in an esprit that united a people, as opposed to a modern social or religious hierarchy. The French Revolution was less a structured event than the outburst of resentment and anger toward a suppressive political and religious system. Both the Americans and the French were angry at a hierarchy but the Americans wanted to build a country afterwards, the French mainly wanted revenge.

And, true to form, after a decade, they got Napoleon.

This points to a crucial difference between the Americans and most other political systems, a distinction that may harm them over time but is nonetheless real. The Americans really believe what they say. No one believed equality and liberty because they are contradictory notions; equality is possible only with restriction of liberty. There is no other option. But the Americans built an edifice that defended liberty, that worked and continues to. It is also very difficult to change. It is conceivable, for example, that technology will make gun ownership a difficult freedom to defend--but it will be debated and argued over in its proper venue, at least for Americans: Liberty. When that lynchpin goes away, when it surrenders to comfort or practicality or superficiality, that idea that made America will go too.