By Edward Hudgins
On his birthday, February 6th, I reflected on the relevance of Ronald Reagan’s quote that:
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
We now have three generations whose dogmas and indoctrinations have extinguished the love of liberty in their souls.
But there is hope that we can execute strategies so that this nation, in the words of that other great Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, “shall have a new birth of freedom.”
Three decayed generations.
Consider the three generations from which freedom has fled:
First are the enablers, facilitators, and cowards, the leaders of our media, entertainment, religions, businesses, charities, politics, and schooling. These are the presidents of Harvard, Disney executives, newspaper editors and, of course, politicians and elected officials.
Second are the employees filling lower- and middle-level positions in such institutions. These were the Disney workers in Florida who demanded that their enabler bosses declare war on the state because of its law— inaccurately labeled “Don’t say gay”—that said teachers should not discuss sexual issues with kids in kindergarten to 3rd grade, a war which, sadly, has stoked the other extreme. These are the Washington Post employees who forced WaPo enablers to remove a cartoon picturing a Hamas leader using children as human shields. These are the New York Times newsroom minions who forced the enabling publisher to push out editor James Bennet for publishing an editorial by Sen. Cotton that called for using troops to patrol burning cities after the George Floyd killing—some states already had National Guard doing this—even though Bennet also published “Defund the police” pieces.
Third are thousands of today’s college students—ignorant, intolerant, closed-minded, morally warped—who scream support for Islamists who literally burn and behead babies, call for the extinction of Israel, and are outright anti-Semites. One-third of Americans 18-29 have a favorable view of communism and believe political violence is acceptable. These are just the latest of many manifestations of the erosion of liberty’s Enlightenment foundations. We can’t put this down to “We were all young and stupid at one time. They’ll grow out of it.” The prior two generations didn’t.
Liberty foes on the Right.
The problem is also found in a younger generation that use the term “conservative” or consider themselves on the political Right, but who reject fundamentals of Reagan. Many like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens share with the Left anti-Semitism.
Many identify as “post-liberal,” meaning they reject individualism and free markets in favor of strong government controlling the economy and mandating what they consider traditional moral values. They’re “America First” in ways that hurt Americans. Reagan had it right when he said of those who reject free trade, as most “America Firsters” do, that “We should beware of the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends — weakening our economy, our national security, and the entire free world — all while cynically waving the American flag.”
Realigning to futurist freedom.
But there are emerging communities and groups that reject the negativity and polarization
that infests our culture and are seeing the necessity of freedom to unleash the best within us. Techno-optimists especially are building on the information and communications revolution that as transformed our world in order, for example, to cure diseases and even stop aging itself, and to replace the antiquated one-size-fits-all, assembly line system of schooling with individualized education, with artificial intelligence assistance. And they see freedom as the indispensable foundation.
Reagan saw America as a “shining city on a hill,” the land of opportunity and inspiration for the world. We can ensure that emerging generations fall in love with freedom as they understand that it allows them to transform in our culture and in their own minds the pessimism, nihilism, anger, apathy, and despair into optimism, purpose, joy in achievement, excitement, and hope—a world as it can be and should be!
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Edward Hudgins, Ph.D., is president of the Human Achievement Alliance. He specializes in free market science and technology policy and a culture celebrating achievement. Email him at ehudgins@humanachievementalliance.org.
