China is fortunate its one-couple, one-child policy, written into its constitution in 1978, was never an inescapable mandate. For it would have produced, in two generations, a nation with one grand-child in the labor force for every four grandparents. Already, writes Longman, China is “rapidly evolving into what demographers call a ‘4-2-1’ society, in which one child becomes responsible for supporting two parents and four grandparents.”81
Eberstadt points to another consequence of this birth dearth. China’s “key manpower pool” of young workers aged fifteen to twenty-nine is expected to fall by 100 million, or about 30 percent, by 2030.82
Yet, psychologically, it may not be easy to wean Chinese couples off the one-child policy. The Post quoted a woman from China’s human resources administration, herself an only child. “We were at the center of our families and used to everyone taking care of us. We are not used to taking care of and really do not want to take care of others.”83
Across the Taiwan strait, the fertility rate has sunk to one child per woman and the government is offering a $31,250 prize for the Taiwanese citizen who comes up with the best slogan to make people want babies.84
WHY THE WEST IS DYING
The reason the West is dying is simple: children are no longer so desirable. The child-centered society has been succeeded by the self-centered society. The purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure, not the sacrifices required in the raising of children.
Freed from the moral constraints of Christianity, European and American young wish to enjoy the benefits of matrimony without the burdens. Society and science have accommodated them with contraceptives, the pill, the patch, sterilizations and abortion on request. And the social sanctions against sexual indulgence and the single life have largely disappeared.
Children are also less desirable because they are more expensive. In the first half of the twentieth century, one in five or one in ten children went to college. Young men left home in their late teens, married, and created their own families. Girls married young. Today, if parents wish to provide their children access to the good life, they must subsidize sixteen and often nineteen years of education for each child, the cost of which has soared into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, far beyond the means of most of the middle class.
Women are putting off having children to enter a labor market where their talents are rewarded and their social and economic independence can be won. Why get married and have babies and be tied down for years and fall behind? If one wishes to know the experience of motherhood, it can be had with a single child.
For those educated women who want the good life, a law degree or a doctorate is the way, not a husband and two kids. Many families can no longer get by on one salary. But when the wife goes to work, she often never goes home again. What was glamorous yesterday, the big two-parent family, is no longer so. The Huxstables of The Cosby Show and The Brady Bunch long ago gave way to Sex and the City.
For two generations, the West has known the sweet life. Now the bill comes due. With a shrinking pool of young workers due to the birth control practiced by and abortions submitted to by baby boomers and the follow-on generation, Europe no longer has the tax revenue to sustain the welfare states to assure the sweet life. A time of austerity is at hand. And from the riots across France to the anarchist attack on Tory Party headquarters in London to the garbage left piled and stinking on the streets of Marseille and Naples in the fall of 2010, Europe is not going gentle into that good night. But go she shall.
Yet some see the bright side. There is a growing school of thought that the fewer children one has, the better a global citizen one is, especially in America, where the per capita carbon footprint on Mother Earth is so high. Says Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, “Probably the single most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the lights or driving a Prius, it’s having fewer kids.”85
The logic of Revkin’s argument is irrefutable. By having one child, which means a more rapid death and disappearance of Western man, Western man thereby serves mankind. Greater love than this hath no man.
6
EQUALITY OR FREEDOM?
Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization.1
—JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
Utopias of equality are biologically doomed.2
—WILL AND ARIEL DURANT, 1968
Inequality … is rooted in the biological nature of man.3
—MURRAY ROTHBARD, 1973
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” wrote Jefferson, in one of the most quoted sentences in the English language. On the Gettysburg battlefield in 1863, Lincoln hearkened back to Jefferson’s words: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In our civil religion this is sacred text.
Barack Obama invoked the creed in his inaugural: “The time has come … to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.”4
Americans are taught that, unlike blood-and-soil nations, ours is a “propositional nation,” an “ideological nation,” built upon ideas.5 What makes us exceptional, what gives purpose to our national existence is that America has been dedicated from birth to the advancement of equality and democracy for ourselves and all mankind. From 1776 on, said Lincoln, we have been “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
So our children are taught. To question the belief that America is and has always been about equality, democracy, and diversity is to mark oneself down as almost un-American. Yet this rendition of American history is a myth as great as that of the Aeneid, where the surviving hero of the sack of Troy sails the Mediterranean in exile to become founding father of Rome.
Today’s egalitarian drive to make us all equal is no fulfillment of the vision of the Founding Fathers. Indeed, it is the thesis of this chapter that America is embarked on an ideological crusade to achieve a utopian goal, that we will inevitably fail, and that, in the process, we shall ruin our country.
WHAT THE FATHERS BELIEVED
The Founding Fathers did not believe in democracy. They did not believe in diversity. They did not believe in equality. From what Jefferson wrote and the fathers signed it is clear that the only equality to which they subscribed, as an ideal and an aspiration, was an equality of God-given rights. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Governments, wrote Jefferson, are formed to secure these rights, and when they fail to do so, they render themselves illegitimate, and the people have a right to rise up, overthrow those governments, and institute a new government based upon the consent of the people.
[T]o secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.
This is the idea that has inspired mankind.
To extract “all men are created equal” from the context in which it was written and assert it as an endorsement of an egalitarian society is to distort what Jefferson wrote and what the men of Philadelphia believed. Lest we forget, this was a declaration of independence! And in its closing words the Founding Fathers tell the world what they and the war are truly all about:
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress Assembled … do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Indepen
dent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.
What made these men heroes was not Jefferson’s phrase about an equality of rights but his blazing indictment of the king as a tyrant on the order of Ivan the Terrible and his assertion that Americans no longer owed him allegiance. The men of ’76 put their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on the line to overthrow British rule. Many would pay with their fortunes and lives for this act of treason.
From birth, America was the Party of Liberty. Egalité, on the other hand, was what the French Revolution claimed to be about. No American war was fought for egalitarian ends, postwar propaganda notwithstanding.
The War of 1812 was waged against the mother of parliaments in de facto alliance with the greatest despot of the age, Napoleon Bonaparte. It was about vindicating the rights of our citizens and seizing Canada. The Texas war of 1835–1836 was fought for independence from an autocratic and Catholic Mexico. How could it have been about equality when the Lone Star Republic that emerged from that war became the second slave nation in North America?
No one would suggest the Indian wars were about equality. They were about conquest and subjugation. As we shall see from Lincoln’s own words, the Civil War was about restoring the Union. The Spanish-American War was fought to avenge the sinking of the Maine and drive the Spanish out of Cuba. It ended with our annexation of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines. In the Philippines we conducted the most unjust war in American history to deny Filipinos, who had trusted us, their right to be free and independent.
World War I was not fought “to make the world safe for democracy” but to crush the kaiser’s Germany. We did not declare war until German U-boats began to sink our merchant ships carrying war materiel to Britain, and America, herself by then an empire, fought as an “associated power” beside five empires: the British, French, Russian, Japanese, and Italian. At war’s end, the German and Ottoman empires and their millions of subjects were divided up among the victorious imperial powers—with Woodrow Wilson’s blessing.
As for World War II, how could we have been fighting for democracy when we did not go to war until Japan attacked us and Hitler declared war on us? Our ally who did most of the fighting and dying was the Soviet Union of Stalin, Hitler’s partner in starting the war and a monstrous tyrant whose victims before the war began outnumbered Hitler’s one thousand to one. Were Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki about bringing democracy to Germany or Japan, or annihilating the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan?
WAS AMERICA ABOUT EQUALITY?
The Constitution and Bill of Rights are the foundational documents of the republic and the organic documents of American union. And the word “equality” does not appear in either. Nor does the word “democracy.” Can these be the ends for which the United States was established if they are not even mentioned in the nation’s founding documents?
To determine if Jefferson believed in equality, let us set his words alongside the views he expressed and the life he led. Could this young Virginian truly believe all men are created equal when he presided over a plantation of slaves whom, with the exception of the Hemings family, he did not even free on his death half a century later?
In the bill of indictment against George III, Jefferson wrote: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
Did Jefferson believe that Native Americans, these “merciless Indian Savages,” were equal to his countrymen, or should be made equal? Not until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 were Native Americans made full citizens. Not until this writer was in college did Indians in all states get the right to vote.
In that same indictment of George III, Jefferson describes the soldiers the king has sent across the ocean to put down the rebellion: “He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.” Clearly, Jefferson believed that English soldiers were superior to “foreign Mercenaries” and the King of England, as “Head of a civilized nation,” ought not to behave like some barbarian ruler of ages past.
Among the evils the king visited upon his people was capturing colonists and impressing them into military service to fight fellow Americans and “become the executioners of their friends and Brethren.”
“Brethren” appears repeatedly in Jefferson’s declaration. For one of the great offenses of the king was that he was doing all this not to foreigners or “merciless Indian Savages” but to people of a common blood. Again and again, Jefferson invoked the ties of kinship and blood. “Nor have We been wanting in attention to our Brittish brethren.” We have “conjured them by the ties of our common kindred,” but they “have been deaf to the voice … of consanguinity.” Hence, Jefferson writes, we must sever our bonds. No longer are the British brethren. “We must … hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.”
Jefferson was saying that that the coming separation from England would not be simply a political separation. It would be the sundering of a nation, the dissolution of a people who belong together, as they are “brethren.” In author Kevin Phillips’s phrase, the Revolution was a “Cousins’ War.”6
In Notes on the State of Virginia, often cited as an illustration of his opposition to slavery, Jefferson wrote of the men and women who worked his plantation:
Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior; as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.7
Can one read a brutal passage like this and still maintain that Thomas Jefferson believed as literal truth that “all men are created equal”?
In 1813, Jefferson wrote John Adams, once his rival, now his friend:
I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.… The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?8
Jefferson is saying that he agrees with Adams that nature did not make all men equal. Nature made us unequal. And we should be thankful for that “precious gift” of a “natural aristocracy” of virtue and talent that “creation” has provided for us. For the aristoi, the best, have been conferred upon us by nature to lead and instruct us. Not only are some individuals superior, there are superior peoples. “The yeomanry of the United States are not the canaille of Paris,” Jefferson wrote to Lafayette in 1815.9
Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers saw themselves as belonging to an aristocratic elite in whose custody the republic was best entrusted. Jefferson never recanted these views. In his autobiography, written forty-five years after the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was still writing of “the aristocracy of virtue and talent which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society.”10
On Jefferson and equality, Bertrand Russell observed: “In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not
downwards.”11
THE SILENCE OF MR. MADISON
Remarkably, the Constitution not only does not mandate equality, it does not mention equality. Writes Yale professor Willmoore Kendall, a mentor of William F. Buckley Jr.:
The Framers … did not so much as mention the topic of equality in the new instrument of government—not even in the Preamble, where, remember, they pause to list the purposes (a more perfect union, the blessings of liberty, justice, etc.) for which We the people ordain and establish the Constitution, and, where, if nowhere else, one might expect them to recall that first proposition of the Declaration, under which and for which, remember, they had just fought a great war.12
In the Constitution James Madison largely drafted in Philadelphia in 1787, there is no reference whatsoever to the most famous words of the Declaration of Independence that his Virginia neighbor had written in Philadelphia in 1776. Nor is equality mentioned anywhere in The Federalist Papers of which Madison was principal author. Nor is equality mentioned in the Bill of Rights, the ten amendments to the Constitution Madison introduced in the first Congress, although the Virginia Declaration of Rights, in which Madison surely had a hand, “begins with at least a courtly bow to equality.” Writes Kendall, “Publius … has a way, if I may put it so, of clamming up whenever (as does sometimes happen) the topic of equality heaves into sight.”13
Publius was the pen name shared by Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay in The Federalist Papers. How can America have been dedicated from birth to the equality of all men when her birth certificate, the Constitution, does not mention equality, five of her first seven presidents, Madison included, were slave-holders, and the Supreme Court, seven decades after the Constitution was ratified, declared that slaves could never be citizens?
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