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My father sometimes liked to play a little trick on people.\u00a0 And it was amazing to me how many of them \u2014 adults, as well as children \u2014 often fell for it.<\/p>\n
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\u201cDoes Canada have a Fourth of July?\u201d he would ask.\u00a0 And a surprising number would reply that, no, only America has a Fourth of July.\u00a0 \u201cActually,\u201d he would then point out, \u201cCanada does<\/em> have a fourth of July.\u00a0 It comes right after the third of July, and just before the fifth.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Today, of course, is<\/em> the Fourth of July.\u00a0 Which makes it Independence Day in the United States of America.\u00a0 It\u2019s a day of celebration.\u00a0 It should also, I hope, be a day of remembering and of reflection.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been disturbed, over recent years, by a decline in appreciation for what we might call \u201cthe American project.\u201d\u00a0 Such a decline, in my experience anyway, is especially pronounced among younger people.\u00a0 (I\u2019ll probably reserve my thoughts on the mounting distrust toward our national political institutions for another occasion.)\u00a0 There are many reasons for this decline in appreciation.\u00a0 I think that they include the general climate of popular culture, as well as cynicism resulting from the traumatic war in Vietnam and the controversial recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.\u00a0 I suspect, too, that attitudes among contemporary American educators and educational materials \u2014 at all levels, including elementary schools as well as colleges and universities \u2014 have played a pivotal role.\u00a0 We commonly hear that America has been an oppressive place \u2014 racist, rapacious, misogynistic, patriarchal, imperialist, homophobic \u2014 and, to a very great degree, an actual force for evil.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I lament this trend.\u00a0 I think it deeply misguided.\u00a0 I even think it dangerous, not merely for the United States of America but for the world.\u00a0 As Ronald Reagan famously pointed out during the Cold War, \u201c\u201cIf we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Does this mean that there are no other free places?\u00a0 Obviously not.\u00a0 Canada, for example, is free.\u00a0 Crossing the border into Canada, one notices no obvious or immediate major differences with regard to personal liberty (nor, for that matter, with regard to much of anything else!).\u00a0 In fact, there are plenty<\/em> of countries where people are free.\u00a0 As will be apparent to anybody who has followed this blog, I love Switzerland \u2014 for many reasons.\u00a0 But one of those reasons is its fierce commitment to its own independence and to the freedom of its people.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n And how long would such freedom and such independence survive without the United States?\u00a0 And I\u2019m not speaking only or even primarily about American military power \u2014 although the aggressive authoritarianism of Putin\u2019s revanchist Russia and the ambitions of the People\u2019s Republic of China (that is, by the way, still its official name) continue to probe and to challenge our military and would be delighted at its absence \u2014 but about a loss of American self-confidence and resolve.\u00a0 If we no longer believe in the value of the American experiment, will freedom and independence continue to flourish elsewhere?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 I\u2019m uncertain, and I would rather not make the test.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Germans are free.\u00a0 The French and the Italians are free.\u00a0 The Japanese are free.\u00a0 Scandinavia is free.\u00a0 Belgium and the Netherlands are free.\u00a0 But within still-living memory, they were not.\u00a0 Along with much of the rest of Europe, Germany was controlled by the monstrous evil of the Third Reich \u2014 and then, after the fall of Hitler, a substantial part of Germany fell under the equally monstrous evil of Soviet and Soviet-directed Communism.\u00a0 (Here, I recommend the superb, Academy-Award-winning 2006 German film Das Leben der Anderen<\/em>, which is available in English as The Lives of Others<\/em>.)\u00a0 Within still-living memory, France and Norway and Denmark and Belgium and the Netherlands were under Nazi occupation, Italy was under the control of Mussolini\u2019s Fascism, and Japan served as the base for a lethal militaristic tyranny that operated in global league with the Nazis.\u00a0 America was vital to their liberation.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Residents of the United Kingdom are free.\u00a0 But at the end of the 1930s and in the early part of the 1940s, they were seriously threatened by the forces of Hitler\u2019s Germany.\u00a0 Without the assistance of the United States, how would they have fared?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n