Mr. Bradford is well known as a writer, speaker, and business organization consultant. He now lives in Ocala, Florida.
Where in the world would I rather live, than in the United States of America? This is a question that I have been asking myself rather frequently of late; and I always come up with the same answer: Nowhere!
I have asked it also of a good many much-traveled friends who are of conservative persuasion, like me; and after an initial startled look that fades fast into thoughtfulness, they invariably give me the same reply: Nowhere.
There is something significant in this, for the world has many beautiful and interesting places. It has been my own privilege in the past dozen years or so to visit 42 countries of this wobbly world, some of them several times. Nearly all offered features that I liked: the people, the climate, the scenery, the music, the language, the food — something good. There is hardly a land I have visited that does not occupy a warm corner in my memory. I think of them often.
England — vast, noisy London, the smoky midlands, the lovely lakes, the fine people. Scotland —the ruined abbeys, the Trossachs, and especially the Castle glooming over the reeking chimney pots of "Edinbur-r-ry" in a misty twilight. Italy — not the highly organized Tourist Trap, but the rugged home of a fascinating people. Greece… palimpsest of the ages. Thailand, country of fabricated, fragile beauty. Argentina, southern twin of the United States. Chile, the Italy of the New World. — You name it, and I’ll love it… for some fondly remembered thing: a white cone of mountain rising from a misty lake — like Osorno… or Fuji; a sea-pierced gorge, like the Kotar Gulf of Yugoslavia; the mighty gash of the Corinth Canal; a glimpse of the Corcovado Christ looming through the clouds high over Rio; a fisherman’s dinner beside the Tagus in Lisbon; a surprising bit of wine, like the Tsara of Baalbek or the resin-flavored Retsin of Argolis; or maybe a simple act of human kindness — as when the young Scotch woman who shared our compartment south to Keswick, seeing that we were much burdened with baggage and no porters at hand, left her baby on the seat and came trudging down the corridor after us, lugging one of our heavy bags!
Yes, always there is some good or beautiful or gracious thing to remember. Always, or nearly always, I would like to go back.
But to live? Which country would I choose above my own? And the answer is: none. Literally, none. Partly, I suppose, this is due to the love, the accustomed to-your-face feeling that we all have for our native place. We are somewhat like O. Henry’s Cosmopolite, who was largely and magnificently tolerant of the whole world — until somebody happened to disparage the two-by-four village in which he had lived as a boy.
But aside from such geographic preferences and nostalgic prejudices (I ask myself, and of late I ask my friends) — aside from all that, think it over carefully, and say which country you would prefer to the United States as a place in which to live. I have yet to find an American who said he would choose to live elsewhere. I know there are such, expatriates by choice, for one reason or another that seems good to them — but I have never met them.
A Disturbing Trend
The occasion for these musings is this: For a good many years I have been concerned with the direction my country is going. Like many other Americans, I have been opposed on principle to the idea of a deficit economy, not because I worry about an occasional year in the red (which is ordinary experience in business and even in private, domestic life) but because I have seen the devastation that can be wrought by an extended application of the fatuous spend-borrow-and-never-pay aberration. It is easy to list a number of modern nations whose middle class — the saving and investing element that provides much of the capital for industrial and other development — has been sold into loss and bankruptcy by that fatal philosophy. When I see my nation headed the same way, I protest, I cry out, I argue—I even denounce. I get all hot under the collar! And so do a lot of other people who share my conservative views on the philosophical, as well as the fiscal, need for solvency in our national affairs. And we get all the hotter when left-wing devotees of progress-through-inflation accuse us of being "concerned only with money" — as though we had neither fiscal sense, political wisdom, nor social vision!
As a result, we become easy targets for the scornful shafts of the disciples of debt, compulsion, and superstatism, who call themselves "liberals." They accuse us of wanting a "static" economy, of looking backward, and especially of being always against things, never for anything. All this, of course, is a lot of nonsense. We have a positive, not a negative, program. We are for a number of things that are fundamental to the long-term welfare and safety of all the people. We want the economy to be active and healthy; we want production and employment; we want everybody to earn and save and invest and enjoy security and comfort. We want the American dream, as expressed in the American Constitution, to be fully realized in the prosperity, the freedom, and the progress of the American people. We believe that the Constitution provides both the safeguards and the opportunities for such progress; but if, in our developing society, conditions arise that were not foreseeable when the Constitution was written, then we want the Constitution amended by the process provided, and not nullified by bureaucratic manipulation or set aside by judicial dictate.
The Need for Law and Order
We believe that when Congress was empowered to coin money and "regulate the value thereof," it was intended that the value of that money should be protected and maintained, and not diminished or destroyed, and that it is the present duty of Congress to thwart, rather than aid and abet, those policies and persons that are systematically undermining the strength of our currency, and thereby lessening the security of our people.
We believe that "law and order" is something more than a phrase. Life and liberty can be realized and protected only in a society that has adopted rules for its conduct, and for the conduct of the people who are members of that society and live under its form of government. We are not interested in punishment or retribution as ends in themselves. We are content, indeed, we desire, that justice shall be tempered with mercy — a humane concept that is pretty well guaranteed by our jury system. Few indeed are those who look upon law enforcement as a mere matter of vengeance. But no society can long continue unless its laws are enforced; the alternative is anarchy and the destruction of social and political values that have been the foundation of that society. Therefore, when we see the laws openly disobeyed in the name of "protest"; when zealots for this or that cause announce that they will determine for themselves which laws they will obey and which ones they will flout; when we see riot, arson, and murder condoned and even defended by high officials of our government, we are appalled, we are angered — and we are frightened.
When we read that a Justice of the Supreme Court, attending a procommunist conference, compared the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 with the American Revolution of 1776 and advocated "forceful revolution" as the only way to correct the "intolerable conditions" under which he said 85 per cent of the world’s people live —when we read such things we are outraged — and again, we are frightened. When we read that the High Court, in decision after decision, seems to show greater concern for the legal rights of admitted criminals than it does for the rights of their victims; when we see the Attorney General of the United States, our highest law enforcement officer, go on national television to let the world of riot and arson know that he favors a "soft line" in dealing with their depredations—then, however much we may favor and support the human and civil rights which the rioters are pretending to espouse, we begin to ask ourselves what is ultimately going to happen when the law is so weakly regarded and so feebly enforced by those who are hired and paid and sworn to defend it?
Evil Must Be Opposed
When year after year goes by with no effective action on the part of government officials to bring expenditures into balance with receipts; when there is a constant proliferation of the Federal bureaucracy, always at the expense and seldom to the benefit or service of the taxpayer; when we see the idea of compulsion becoming more and more the main reliance (in everything but law enforcement, that is) of the controlling political methodology; when we learn to our dismay that nearly 48,000,000 people are now the recipients of regular monthly checks from the state and national governments — confronted with all this, what choice have we but to be negative? How can we avoid being "against" such things?
What we are for is a great and growing and free society in which every citizen shall have opportunity for the highest degree that he can attain of comfort and security. What we are against are the policies and projects and practices that weaken, that jeopardize, and that may destroy that society. And since such destructive policies are being constantly advanced and cleverly promoted, it follows that there is a lot to be against.
And we owe nobody an apology for being "against" such things. Indeed, the outcry that conservatives are always against and never for things is a rather slick device of the radical Left. Unfortunately, many conservatives have let themselves be bamboozled by it. They, too, often say, "Yes — that’s a very bad thing — but we can’t say so. We mustn’t be negative!" To be negative has come to be a kind of public relations sin. It sounds better to be "for" things; it seems positive and affirmative — and these, in current semantics, are "good" words. By an extension of this never-be-negative logic, if you were to learn that I planned to burglarize your house, you shouldn’t do anything so negative as to notify the police and get me into the clutches of the law. Dear me, no — that would mean you were against something! It would be negative! Your proper procedure would be either to keep still, or else to offer a positive alternate suggestion — such as that I should rob your neighbor’s house, instead. Or better yet, that I should rob a bank, which might help in effecting a much-needed redistribution of the money which the bank had (no doubt, wickedly) amassed!
Reviewing the Ideal
So much for a few of the things we are against. So much for the central vision that we are for. And so much, in brief and perhaps inadequate declaration, for the reasons that impel us to our faith, and to our espousal of what we believe are the necessary conditions for freedom and progress.
But there is a danger in such advocacy. We hear much these days of alienation, the scholar’s term for a sense of rejection, of not belonging. We, too, we who warn of danger, are threatened with a kind of alienation — of separation from the dream, from the political and socio-economic structure, that is our nation! When we see so much that may injure, and that is injuring, that nation, so much that we know is wrong and dangerous, we are apt, all unconsciously and without intent, to make a fatal substitution — the thing contained for the container; the bad policies about our country for the country itself. "They" are doing so many things that are economically dangerous and morally indefensible that in our complete withdrawal from them we are in danger of separating ourselves, imaginatively, from the physical territory, the political government, the economic structure and the social concept that is the United States of America. And this would be suicidal — for us, I mean; for it would convert us into emotionally stateless persons; and without the spur of patriotism —though it is no longer fashionable, and in some quarters is considered bad taste to use the word — without its stimulus our lives, and especially our efforts to preserve freedom, would have little purpose.
After all, why do we concern ourselves over inflation, or crime, or injustice, or bureaucracy rampant, or the trend toward compulsion and the lessening of freedom? Is it because we love liberty? Yes, of course — but it is also because we love our country! Oh, we are no longer mere jingoistic patriots. We are capable of self-analysis and self-criticism. We do not think our country has always been flawless. Our statesmen have made grave blunders. Our policies have often been unwise. We have been, on the whole, a somewhat violent people. In common with other industrial nations, we went through our period of exploitation. We know all that. But we know, too, that our transgressions have been no worse than those of contemporary nations. Like most of them, the American people and the American State were the product of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with all that this implies in the way of nobility — and venality. We can lay the record of our country alongside that of any other great power, confident that we shall come off well in the comparison. If this is not a basis for pride, neither is it an occasion for shame; and our current critics in England, France, and Germany, not to mention Sweden and Switzerland, may please take notice.
So Much to Approve
But at the mere suggestion of our "alienation" from the United States, theoretical speculation abruptly ceases and we face facts: One, we are inseparable from the United States, physically and emotionally. Two, we wouldn’t live elsewhere if we could. Three, squirm and wriggle as we may over admitting to emotionalism, we love our country! And we love it, aside from habit and the compulsion of instinctive filial devotion, because it is still, despite all we have done to stifle initiative, the land of opportunity. With all the ridiculous and hampering restrictions we have placed in the way of individual growth and development, it is still the land of the free.
The picture of America, as presented to the world and to us Americans, by the press, television, books, the theater and the movies, has been a sadly distorted one. If you read current bestselling books or look at top-rated movies, you will get the impression of an America of free love, sex deviation, self-indulgence, and violence. If you follow TV news releases you see only violence —mobs, marches, "protests," riots, arson, looting. But these things are not normal. The very fact that they are not normal is what, under the code of the newsmen, makes them newsworthy!
The Path to Progress
Consider riots. (And let it be here recorded that the writer of this article is a supporter of the rights of all minorities, and is against discrimination because of race or religion. He is also a longtime advocate of slum elimination, both as a humanitarian measure and a social and economic necessity.) Well, the riots have been bad and bloody. But what is the obverse of their gloomy medallion?
On the one hand, you see fire, smashed windows, looted stores, flaming Molotov cocktails, screams of hatred — a grim and ghastly picture. That is the dark side — the side that is flaunted to the world. But in all the cities where racial rioting occurred, not more than a few thousand persons took part. The participating whites, of course, were negligible in relation to the total white population. But what of the Negroes? Surely not more than twenty thousand, all together. A large number of rioters? Yes — but there are twenty million Negroes in this country!
There is no doubt that they have a grievance against the American society. They have been discriminated against, mistreated, degraded. This we know, as they do. But they also know that the white-dominated society that has wronged them is making a sincere effort to redress that grievance. And of the 20 million Negroes, despite their frustrations, probably less than one-half of one per cent have taken any part in riots. The others, conscious that America has not been fair to them, realize, nevertheless, that their best hope is with this country. They, too, in spite of all, love it. It is their country, too. They want no part of senseless violence. And this is one of the good things about America.
Over-publicized Hippies
A minor occasion for dissatisfaction with the American scene as currently presented has been the advent of the so-called hippies, and especially the spate of mawkish stuff that has been written about them. Seldom have so few had so much written about them by so many, and rarely have such efforts been made to magnify the minuscule and glamorize the unsavory. They have been portrayed as heralds of a new religious concept, symbols of a divine discontent. Seeing them, and reading about them, one grows a little sick. Is this America? It can’t be — and yet this is being hailed as "the hippie generation."
What nonsense! By their own wildest claims, the hippies number not more than 200,000 of all kinds. But the age group — the "generation" — to which they belong numbers over 15,000,000! A thing wrong with America is that even one per cent of our youth are socially maladjusted, or incorrigible, or hooked on drugs — or just plain silly. But the other side of the coin, the thing that is right about America, is that 99 per cent of our young people are not that way.
Of course, some of them invite criticism, too. That young people should take a keen and critical interest in the educational institutions they attend is well and good. It is their future that is involved, and their opinions should be heard. But when they follow mob tactics, halt classes that others wish to attend, seize buildings, destroy property — then they have forfeited any right to consideration.
This spring we had the spectacle of Columbia University being forcibly taken over by a small group of illegal entrants. After that act of vandalism, the issues which the students and their friends claimed to represent became irrelevant. They were superseded by a new issue — the maintenance of authority and the observance of the law. If the students had been ten times right, they had no license to become lawbreakers.
The trend toward hooliganism in colleges, very marked in the past year or two, is one of the things that is wrong with America. But here, too, there is a bright side — a right side. It is found in the fact that these student mob actions are nearly always perpetrated by a small, minority group. At the University of Denver (where prompt and courageous action by the school authorities put an end to the attempted seizure) only 40 students were reportedly involved. At Columbia something less than 700 joined the mobsters, while over 17,000 refused to have anything to do with it. The ratio in the Berkeley insurrection was about the same. The law-abiders, the respecters of authority, far outnumbered the mobsters. There is always more good than bad.
But at this point it may be objected that the great majority should "do something about it." It may be asked, "Why do they allow a handful of their numbers to get away with such outrages?" But what should they do — become lawbreakers themselves, and engage in bloody battle with the offenders? They have a right to assume that the discipline of the school will be asserted and maintained by the school authorities, and that criminal acts will be dealt with by the police. The only way they could rout the lawbreakers would be to become lawbreakers themselves. No — they are correct on both counts, first, in not joining the rioters, and second, in not starting riots of their own to suppress the other rioters.
The Challenge
All these contrasts of what’s wrong and what’s right with our country present part of the challenge we must face—"we," in terms of this article, being those who, under various names (conservatives, libertarians, constitutionalists, traditionalists) want to advance and protect the interest of the American people by emphasis on solvency, safety, and self-reliance, rather than on debt, economic adventurism, and socialistic intervention.
Our job, while not hesitating to expose the bad, is to offer the positive alternative of proclaiming, and trying to preserve and extend, the good. The miracle of modern times is not only our high levels of production, employment, and earnings, not only our economic and social achievements, but also and primarily the fact that our economy has had the stamina to withstand and survive the handicaps of debt, taxation, and restrictiveness that have been placed upon it in the name of progress. Our power to create, and produce, and distribute, and consume, though shackled needlessly, is of enormous consequence. When this is coupled with widespread academic training and high intelligence, plus the willingness to work, a very tough mechanism for survival is provided. Our job is to teach the possibility of that survival, even against the odds we ourselves, we Americans, have imposed. Our job also is to proclaim and explain the reasons for our great achievements, even as we carry on the battle to remove conditions that are a constant long-range brake upon the continuance of those achievements.
And especially we need to hold fast one central conviction that is easily demonstrable — namely, that the United States is incomparably the earth’s greatest nation, rich in freedom, opportunity, and accomplishment — and that our aim, our dedication, is to keep it that way!
We do not look backward. We look forward — with apprehension, yes; but also with confidence. We know what great things have been achieved by self-reliant people in the past; and we also know that it is precisely such self-reliant people who are continuing to build a great society here in our America.
There are those who would shackle that society with debt, taxes, inflation, and the restraints of supergovernmentalism. These we must resist with the power of opposing ideas, because they are negative thinkers, with their eyes fixed upon the outmoded statism of the seventeenth century. They are the backward-lookers, who must be taught the lessons of freedom. We must counter their negativism, not with counsels of despair nor the pessimism of doom-saying, but with the aggressive faith of those who are deeply convinced that freedom, given a chance, will work!
And if at times we grow despondent and wonder if the game is worth the candle, we can rekindle the lamp of our belief by asking ourselves….
Where in the world would I rather live than in the United States of America?
…. and getting the answer: NOWHERE!
***
Civil Liberty
The notion of civil liberty which we have inherited is that of a status created for the individual by laws and institutions, the effect of which is that each man is guaranteed the use of all his own powers exclusively for his own welfare. It is not at all a matter of elections, or universal suffrage, or democracy.
WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883)
