In May 1944, Learned Hand delivered a brief but timeless address in New York on “the spirit of liberty.” Freedom, the great 2nd Circuit jurist warned, cannot be safeguarded by constitutions, laws or courts. Nor can there be freedom wherever “men recognize no check upon their freedom” — a road down which it becomes “the possession of only a savage few.”
Instead, the judge said, the spirit of liberty lay in a combination of humility, curiosity, generosity and restraint. It was “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right,” the one that “seeks to understand the mind of other men and women” and “weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.” It was an elusive spirit, one that could exist only “as the conscience and courage of Americans create it.” Yet it was also one “for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying.”
Hand gave his speech on the eve of D-Day. What is — or ought to be — the spirit of liberty on the eve of our 250th anniversary?
It is the spirit of public example, beginning with the character of the president; of presidential character defined by modesty, composure and integrity, which are necessary to offset the vast and sometimes terrifying powers of the office; of leadership that ensures the faithful execution of laws by submitting to them fully, transparently and unto the smallest detail; of statesmanship that never mistakes grandiosity for greatness, or rhetoric for reality, or monuments for meaning.
It is the spirit of personal responsibility; of knowing that the right to make democratic choices requires us to own those choices rather than find scapegoats; of disdain for a victim’s mentality, which is unworthy of a free people and destructive of its character; of the conviction that any person or state that takes credit for success but disavows failure is unworthy of the former and doomed to repeat the latter.
It is the spirit that comes out of the knowledge that we cannot remain free if we fail to understand all that it took to become free; out of the fear that what was achieved at Trenton and Shiloh and Guadalcanal — and at Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall — will ultimately be surrendered if it is lazily forgotten; out of the wisdom that neither hero worship nor knee-jerk condemnation of our founders does justice to the achievement of the men who established a system that allowed posterity to build upon their genius while transcending their flaws; out of the wisdom, too, that the longevity of the world’s oldest continuous constitutional democracy owes everything to the sturdiness of its original design, one we should tinker with cautiously.
It is the spirit that has a bias toward openness — the open hand of a generous nation, the open door of a capacious country, the open mind of an inquisitive people; a spirit that is confident we can be all this and still hold on to our wallets and borders and truest convictions; a spirit that asks us to examine ourselves far more often than we celebrate ourselves; a spirit that gives no preference to the long-established incumbent over the upstart competitor, the recent immigrant or the fresh idea; a spirit that exists not only in social and political spheres but also in economic ones, where enterprise, creativity and labor, rewarded by profit, create abundance and open gateways to philanthropy.
It is the spirit that knows it has foreign enemies, and that to defeat those enemies we need friends who cannot be treated as objects of disdain or allies of convenience or targets of our avarice; and that we will sooner be followed if we prove ourselves worthy of leading, not just through raw might but also perseverance and adherence to principle; and that our enemies typically despise us not for our sins, real or alleged, but because we represent an ideal of freedom toward which their own oppressed people are powerfully attracted; and that the cause of those oppressed people, particularly the brave dissidents who serve as their voice, is ultimately our own.
It is the spirit that sees its domestic enemies not only among self-styled militiamen or Weathermen but also in every self-righteous scold, left or right, demanding that you not laugh at the wrong joke or entertain the wrong thought or utter the wrong word; that knows that the deep purpose of free speech isn’t simply to protect our best or most virtuous thoughts but also our worst ones, so that error may help light the way toward truth; that insists that the institutions of a free society, particularly universities and the press, inculcate habits of wide-open inquiry and free expression, not least by refusing to bend the knee to demands for ideological correctness and conformity of thought.
It is the spirit of becoming; a spirit that asks that our identity as Americans should not be centrally defined by where our ancestors came from or how they were treated on arrival but by who we are and what we aspire to be; a spirit that counsels that our sensibilities about the past, important as they may be, matter far less than our ambitions for the future and our conviction that a free society gives us the agency we need to be the shapers of our destiny.
And it is an optimistic spirit. Not because any of our endeavors are guaranteed success, which they are not, or because our better angels always win out, since they do not. It is because, even in folly and failure, so painfully evident now, we still have the chance to try again — the ultimate spirit of America.
Happy Fourth of July.
