This is what we do. It's what's made us a great country. Running ideas into the ground gave us the Apollo program and rock and roll. It took computing, something that was once the sole province of statisticians and engineers, and made it a ubiquitous, and essential piece of daily life. This tendency to run ideas into the ground also gave us the Civil War, mass incarceration, and an unending rotation of saccharine, common-denominator-driven-packaged-for-export bubble gum culture.
America takes ideas, invented or appropriated, and exhausts all possible avenues of thought and action. The deep complexities of Mexican food becomes the Seven-Layer-Crunch Taco. The Star Wars trilogy, an original and successful idea, is expanded into spinoff movies, prequels, sequels, and billions in ancillary marketing opportunities, royalties, and other enterprises. We create great cacophanies of media, volumes of thought, and litanies of inventions, for better or worse. It's what we do.
Another big American idea is Freedom. American Freedom has been an essential source for the world's oft-exhausted reservoirs of hope and optimism. It's inspired nations to better themselves, and it's expanded global prosperity. In the century after the nation's founding, the idea of American Freedom helped to end the unquestioned rule of monarchies, and went on to spend much of the last century defeating several distinct forms of tyranny. But this is a new century now, and we're not done running the idea of American Freedom into the ground. We now believe in freedom to shop for both chemotherapy and assault weapons. We believe that bankers and oil companies should be free to dump their debts and detritus onto the public trust. We believe that individuals should be free from the social burdens of living in a complex society; free from universal public education, free from paying for someone else's health care, free from making any sacrifice to our short-term livelihoods for the greater good, or even to improve our own long-run chances. We also believe in other nations' freedoms to trade with us on our terms, and to run their governments according to our notions of Freedom. We apply our cultural proclivities, often noble and hard-fought, to all of human nature. It is in this way that American Freedom will one day run itself into the ground.
America takes ideas, invented or appropriated, and exhausts all possible avenues of thought and action. The deep complexities of Mexican food becomes the Seven-Layer-Crunch Taco. The Star Wars trilogy, an original and successful idea, is expanded into spinoff movies, prequels, sequels, and billions in ancillary marketing opportunities, royalties, and other enterprises. We create great cacophanies of media, volumes of thought, and litanies of inventions, for better or worse. It's what we do.
Another big American idea is Freedom. American Freedom has been an essential source for the world's oft-exhausted reservoirs of hope and optimism. It's inspired nations to better themselves, and it's expanded global prosperity. In the century after the nation's founding, the idea of American Freedom helped to end the unquestioned rule of monarchies, and went on to spend much of the last century defeating several distinct forms of tyranny. But this is a new century now, and we're not done running the idea of American Freedom into the ground. We now believe in freedom to shop for both chemotherapy and assault weapons. We believe that bankers and oil companies should be free to dump their debts and detritus onto the public trust. We believe that individuals should be free from the social burdens of living in a complex society; free from universal public education, free from paying for someone else's health care, free from making any sacrifice to our short-term livelihoods for the greater good, or even to improve our own long-run chances. We also believe in other nations' freedoms to trade with us on our terms, and to run their governments according to our notions of Freedom. We apply our cultural proclivities, often noble and hard-fought, to all of human nature. It is in this way that American Freedom will one day run itself into the ground.
It bears repeating that our penchant for running ideas into the ground did the world a lot of good. The American idea of Freedom was more popular and successful than the competing ideas of Soviet Communism. The American idea of democratic rule inspired the defeat of sclerotic, kleptocratic governments the world over (even as we sponsored others). The good we did came with our own extreme ideas around the purity of markets, and ignoring the ancient hierarchies and power struggles that prevent poor, women, and minorities from exercising their own freedoms on equal footing. We fought the cold war on such absolutist terms that we sponsored Apartheid, right-wing death squads across Latin America and Africa, and the persecution of our own citizens for their beliefs at the hands of the FBI and congress itself. We intervened in the Middle East in order to foster democracies in places that were unprepared and uninterested in following our leads. At home, we grew to believe that any state intervention in the economy is a harbinger of total annihilation of our values.
It seems very likely that like all American ideas, good and bad, American Freedom will have to be run into the ground before we can evolve. After all, we couldn't end slavery here without a bloody conflict that nearly destroyed the country and leaves scars across our culture even today, long after the war itself departed the realm of living memory. Now it is this modern American idea, itself an exaggerated mirror image of prior bad ideas like communism and the divine right of kings, that is left standing. At some point in our future, possibly very soon, the moderating forces against a total political adoption of American Freedom will no longer be in place. Some day soon, we will run this idea of American Freedom into the ground. And the world will have to live with what comes next, for better or worse.
Winston Churchill famously said that, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." And that's just what we're doing. It's what we do.
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