Independence Day 2011: Life, Liberty, and the Meaning of American Exceptionalism

by Michael Kaplan

Declaration of Independence, by John Trumbull, 1818.  Architect of the Capitol, Wikimedia Commons.

Today we celebrate the two hundred and thirty-fifth anniversary of the birth of our nation, the United States of America, the most exceptional nation mankind has ever created. This year the great anniversary festival (as John Adams called it[1]) comes tinged with sadness for me, as it is the first time I will commemorate it without my beloved mother, whose earthly journey came to an end in May. Mother departed this life full of years, honor, wisdom, and love. She made me who I am and I will love her always. But life does go on and so does the work of studying, teaching, and writing America’s history and securing America’s future.

Americans today tend to take America for granted. We have forgotten the tremendous effort, the blood and sacrifice of lives and property, that was needed to secure American liberty and create an independent republic. We have forgotten what a miracle America is. George Washington, for one, saw the hand of God at work in the course of the American Revolution. He declared in his farewell orders to the Continental Army in 1783, that it was “little short of a standing miracle” that the United States had won the War of Independence against the mighty British empire.[2] Now, on July 4, 2011, the Marist Poll tells us that 42% of their respondents were unsure in what year independence was declared, and 26% were unsure which nation the United States declared its independence from! To say this is very disturbing is an understatement. Were the sacrifices and heroism of the Revolutionary generation and those that followed, whose lives were dedicated to building an exceptional nation committed to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all for nought?

So this Independence Day is a good time to reflect on the origins and meanings of American exceptionalism and the American Dream, and the struggles of those who fought to make the dream a reality. American exceptionalism refers to America’s unique culture of democratic self-government and liberty, rugged individualism, and stubborn, feisty independence. Its motto is “Don’t tread on me.” The late sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset defined the American Creed in five terms: liberty, egalitarianism—which in America means equality of opportunity and respect, but not equality of outcomes—individualism (rugged of course), populism, and laissez-faire economics. To this list should be added the rule of law and justice for all. “The revolutionary ideology” Lipset wrote, “which became the American Creed is liberalism in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century meanings, as distinct from conservative Toryism, statist communitarianism, mercantilism, and noblesse oblige dominant in monarchical, state-church-formed cultures.” This American Creed, in synthesis and creative tension with the nation’s strong religious sensibility and the Jacksonian code of honor, military pride, and nationalism (with its distinct blood-and-soil element), forms the core of American exceptionalism.[3]

Jim Cullen, who teaches history at New York’s Ethical Culture Fieldston School, points out that a distinctive Anglo-American culture with a unique American Dream was born long before Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Its first seeds were planted at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and Plymouth and Boston, Massachusetts in 1620 and 1630. “What happened in the 1770s and 1780s” Samuel Huntington writes, “was rooted in and a product of the Anglo-American Protestant society and culture that had developed over the intervening one and a half centuries.” Colonial America, as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was a society of independent householders bound together in strong communities, which developed habits and institutions of self-government. Religious pluralism, a voluntaristic self-help ethic, a relatively high standard of living, and a belief in individual aspiration to upward mobility, what Alexis de Tocqueville would later call “the charm of anticipated success,” also defined the society of British North America, making it the freest and most prosperous on earth.[4] Jefferson may have invented the term “pursuit of happiness,” but he was merely giving a name to what had long been the driving force in British North America’s society of independent, self-governing householders.

THE CULTURAL ORIGINS OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: BRITISH DISSENTING PROTESTANTISM

It’s no doubt ironic to point out on Independence Day what should be self-evident: that American exceptionalism has its roots in British exceptionalism. American culture began as British Protestant culture stripped of the restraints hierarchy and aristocracy. America derived its ideas and institutions of liberty, representative self-government and the rule of law, the right to be secure in one’s property, and freedom of religion and conscience from the mother country, a tradition going back to the Magna Carta. More specifically it was the culture of British Dissenting Protestantism—Puritans, Presbyterians, Quakers, Methodists, Baptists, and many others—that shaped American exceptionalism. British Dissenting Protestantism encouraged habits of independent and critical thinking. It challenged both religious and secular authority—the authority of bishops and kings. Dissenters, most famously the Puritans of New England, developed autonomous self-governing religious congregations, which prepared them to develop habits and institutions of self-government. “Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit.” Edmund Burke clearly understood the revolutionary nature of dissenting Protestantism when he spoke these words. Dissenting Protestantism, Burke insisted, was a creed built on liberty. In his famous speech to Parliament on March 22, 1775 calling for reconciliation between Britain and the colonies, Burke proclaimed that “the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the protestant religion. This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is predominant in most of the northern provinces.” Dissenting Protestantism, with its spirit of liberty, encouraged ideas of natural rights and human dignity. The mass of common men came to be seen as more than beasts of burden. Instead they could become free men and women with the right to aspire to a better life. British Protestant dissenters had the right traditions for a people who would create societies centered on liberty. They were fully convinced that they could determine what the Bible meant and how to apply its message in the conduct of their lives.[5]

Margaret Thatcher on the Failure of Socialism, November 22, 1990

by Michael Kaplan

This is a brief video excerpt from Margaret Thatcher’s last speech in Parliament as Britain’s prime minister. Thatcher, who served as prime minister from 1979 to 1990, was known as The Iron Lady for her unflinching resolve to defend liberty and defeat communism abroad and socialism at home. Together with her friend and ally Ronald Reagan, Thatcher restored free market capitalism and dismantled a large chunk of Britain’s social democracy—its blue model. This set the stage for Britain’s economic revival, transforming the old Mother Country from the shabby, worn out, post-imperial basket case of the 1970s, to the dynamic, wealth creating, though perhaps too multicultural, “Cool Britannia” of Tony Blair and his successors.

Here is a transcript of the of the speech, parts of which are included on the video. And here is a link to a video of the full speech at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation website, and at YouTube.

In the excerpt shown in the video, Thatcher takes on two Labour MPs who charge her with transferring resources from the poor to the rich, thus making the poor poorer. She responded, in classic Thatcher fashion, by accusing her opposition of wanting to keep the poor poorer so long as the rich didn’t get richer—the essence of socialism:

People on all levels of income are better off than they were in 1979. The hon. Gentleman is saying that he would rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich. That way one will never create the wealth for better social services, as we have. What a policy. Yes, he would rather have the poor poorer, provided that the rich were less rich. That is the Liberal policy. . . .

I think that the hon. Gentleman knows that I have the same contempt for his socialist policies as the people of east Europe, who have experienced them, have for theirs. I think that I must have hit the right nail on the head when I pointed out that the logic of those policies is that they would rather the poor were poorer. Once they start to talk about the gap, they would rather that the gap were that—[indicating]—down here, not this—[indicating]—but—[indicating.] So long as the gap is smaller, they would rather have the poor poorer. One does not create wealth and opportunity that way. One does not create a property-owning democracy that way.

Debates in Britain’s House of Commons have always been much more in your face, substantive, and colorful than the sound bite dribble that’s been the common fare of the U. S. Congress in recent years. Mrs. Thatcher was the undisputed mistress of the parliamentary style. In this The Iron Lady was quite worthy of her great Tory predecessors, Disraeli and Churchill. Indeed, she qualifies as a leader in the Jacksonian mold. As the daughter of a small businessman (a grocer) Thatcher had a clear understanding of the importance of entrepreneurialism in creating wealth and promoting liberty. And she knew that socialism was a dead end. Thatcher conveyed this message to the soon-to-be Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, when she first met him in December 1984. The interchange, pieced together from various sources by Claire Berlinski in her biography of Thatcher, went something like this:

Gorbachev told Thatcher it was time to end the Cold War.

Thatcher told Gorbachev it was time to end communism.

Gorbachev told Thatcher that communism was superior to capitalism.

“Don’t be silly Mr. Gorbachev. You can barely feed your own citizens.”

“To the contrary, Mrs. Thatcher! Our people live joyfully.”

“Oh do they? Then why do so many of them want to leave? And why do you prevent them from leaving?”

After the meeting, Thatcher famously said of Gorbachev, “We can do business together.” But while they could do business together, Thatcher had let Gorbachev know that there could be no moral equivalence between democracy and communism, which was still an evil empire. And this, Berlinski argues in her biography, gets to the heart of Thatcher’s greatness as a leader: her moral imagination, a quality she shared with Reagan. While Thatcher certainly wanted to promote the economic well-being of her people, what really mattered were the moral values—individual liberty, responsibility, the rule of law, and self-reliance—that made economic prosperity possible.

Thatcher’s determination to bring down the British welfare state and her unflinching moral commitment to advance liberty, strengthen traditional moral values, and unleash the entrepreneurial energy of the British people to allow them to create prosperity and pursue happiness, put her at odds with the upper-class elite types who dominated the Tory Party leadership. Thatcher was in fact the only American-style conservative leader that contemporary Britain or Europe has produced, and she was repudiated by her party for it. Thatcher’s principled and charismatic style of leadership, like Reagan’s, is sorely needed today. Tony Blair, though he was from the Labour Party, was a principled champion of liberty and capitalism in Thatcher’s mold. From what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think David Cameron, the new Tory prime minister, with his aristocratic background and upbringing (he’s a fifth cousin of Queen Elizabeth), is about to launch a revival of Thatcherism in his party.

© 2011 Michael Kaplan

Thaddeus Russell, “Renegade” Historian: Drunkards, Freeloaders, Rioters, and Prostitutes Were the True Pioneers of American Liberty

by Michael Kaplan

Every once in a while an intellectual rebel stirs up controversy in the staid halls of Academe by challenging politically correct interpretations of history. Thaddeus Russell, Columbia University Ph.D., formerly a professor at Barnard College who now teaches Occidental College, is just such a renegade. His, shall we say, unconventional teaching and writing on American history earned him the name “Bad Thad” from his students, as well as the displeasure of the senior faculty at Columbia and Barnard. Russell recently published his controversial ideas about the critical role of social renegades—drunkards, prostitutes, tavern owners, slackers, pirates, rioters, and many others—in advancing American liberty in a book called, naturally enough, A Renegade History of the United States. The Founding Fathers, in Russell’s version of history, were far from the champions of liberty that Americans have always made them out to be. I’ve posted here a video of Russell discussing his ideas with John Stossel on the Fox Business Network.



Russell does have a point, though he pushes it way too far. The Founding Fathers were primarily interested in political liberty and the protection of property rights. Men like George Washington, John Adams, and the rest, were generally conservative in their social outlook. They wanted to preserve the self-governing civil society of independent householders that already existed in British North America, while releasing it from Britain’s shackles of monarchy and aristocracy. So their first priority was to establish viable institutions for an independent, self-governing republic. But the Founders, as Russell rightly points out, were elitists who wanted to maintain an orderly society in which elite men of property and education would serve as fathers of the people, restrain popular passions, and govern the republic on the people’s behalf. Most of the Founders (Jefferson was an exception) were not prepared for the upsurge of populist energy, popular assertiveness, and social mobility unleashed by the Revolution. And they were certainly not countercultural radicals. (Lately, as I told my class, I’ve tried to imagine how George Washington would react to watching a Lady Gaga video.) Christian morality, the Founders firmly believed, was the essential bedrock of a self-governing republic. Securing the liberty of social outcasts to flout the Protestant work ethic and pursue unconventional lifestyles was definitely not on their agenda.

Here is another video of Russell discussing his ideas, this time with Ted Balaker on Reason.tv.

Two Tributes to Andrew Jackson as the Embodiment of the American Spirit

by Michael Kaplan

The Lion in Winter.  Andrew Jackson in 1840, by Jacques Amans.

Respecting the character of Andrew Jackson and his influence, there will still be differences of opinion. One fact, however, has been established: during the last thirty years of his life, he was the idol of the American people. His faults, whatever they were, were such as a majority of the American citizens of the last generation could easily forgive. His virtues, whatever they were, were such as a majority of American citizens of the last generation could warmly admire. It is this fact which renders him historically interesting. Columbus had sailed; Raleigh and the Puritans had planted; Franklin had lived; Washington fought; Jefferson written; fifty years of democratic government had passed; free schools, a free press, a voluntary church had done what they could to instruct the people; the population of the country had been quadrupled and its resources increased ten fold; and the result of all was, that the people of the United States had arrived at the capacity of honoring Andrew Jackson before all other living men.

—James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, 1860.

Andrew Jackson, more than any other individual, embodied the American spirit in all of its strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions. In life and in death, Jackson was a controversial figure. To his supporters in the Democratic Party, Jackson (like Washington) was Cincinnatus. They celebrated their Hero as the knight-errant of the frontier, tribune of the people, and the champion of democracy. But to the political opposition—supporters of Henry Clay and the Whig Party—Jackson was Caesar, “King Andrew the First,” who abused executive authority and trampled the Constitution under foot.

Old Hickory was a true American original whose life exemplified the values and culture of Jacksonian America. He rose from a childhood of poverty and deprivation to achieve renown as a military chieftain and the supreme political leader of his generation. And Jackson achieved all this through the force of his personality. As historians Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton write: “His was a brutish world in which freedom and violence were so inextricably intertwined that those who prospered did so less by virtue of their social connections . . . than because they were tough enough to strike at potential enemies before they could land the first blow.” Jackson thus made his reputation as a skilled practitioner of the art of violent confrontation: first by fighting duels with his Tennessee rivals, later by defending American liberty and advancing American empire in wars with the Indians and the British. Liberty, as Jackson understood it, meant personal autonomy and the freedom of local interests from federal interference. This was the liberty of white male patriarchs, like Jackson, to lead their families and be masters of their domains. Jacksonian men were first and foremost the protectors of women, children, and the community. As he moved from the local to the national arena, Jackson developed a passionate belief in the unity of the American nation that could not be compromised by sectionalism. A strong union, he believed, was needed to preserve America’s hard won liberty. Building a North American empire through ethnic cleansing of the Indians, in which Jackson played a central role, allowed white Jacksonian men to see themselves as a band of brothers united in the defense of liberty. Unfortunately, Jacksonian nationalism also forged a racially exclusive definition of who was an American and who was entitled to enjoy the blessings of liberty.

James Parton, Jackson’s first major biographer, understood why Old Hickory embodied the American character better than any other figure. Unlike their European forebears, Americans did not passively accept what fate and circumstance handed out. The Jacksonian code of honor valued courage above all else, viewing life as a struggle against those hostile forces conspiring to grind a man down into the dust. On the early American frontier those forces could be savage Indians, perfidious Britons, the capriciousness of nature, or treacherous eastern elites. Yet the Jacksonian American, like Jackson himself, conquered all enemies and surmounted all obstacles, to emerge triumphant as the master of his destiny. As Parton put it, “not only had [Jackson] no such word as fail, but no belief, not the slightest, that he could fail in any thing seriously undertaken by him. And he never did.” Of course not all Jacksonians met success and triumph in their lives; many pioneers on the frontier fell victim to those forces lined up against them. But they did go down fighting. Jackson’s life story was the ideal to which those Americans who shared Jacksonian culture and values looked up to and tried to emulate.

“Zenga Zenga”: Mad Dog Gaddafi and the Hip-Hop Theme Song of the Libyan Uprising

(Music: Noy Alooshe. Lyrics: Muammar al-Gaddafi.)

by Michael Kaplan

Downfall of a tyrant?  A poster of Muammar al-Gaddafi is desecrated in Benghazi.  Tyler Hicks/The New York Times.

The account I have given . . . shews how the abuse of authority, by causing the misery of individuals, becomes eventually destructive to the power of a state; and what we may safely venture to predict, will soon prove, that the ruin of a nation sooner or later recoils on those who have been the cause of it, and that the errors or crimes of those who govern cannot fail of their punishment, even from the very misery and wretchedness of those whom they have governed.

—Constantin-François Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, Travels in Egypt and Syria, in the Years 1783, 1784, and 1785.

The Mad Dog of the Middle East (as Ronald Reagan called him) may finally be meeting his Götterdämmerung. That the world put up with the antics of Muammar al-Gaddafi, the psychopath masquerading as a buffoon, for forty-two years, says much about the sordid workings of international power politics. Leaving aside the horrors he perpetrated on his own people, Gaddafi has more American blood on his hands than anyone other than Osama bin Laden. But since Gaddafi sat on a pool of oil, the rest of the world, including the United States after 2003, was willing enough to do business with him. In September 2009, Gaddafi stood at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly, honoring that august body with one of the most incoherent and downright weird speeches it ever had to suffer through.

The people of Libya, though, never benefitted from their nation’s vast reserves of oil. Instead, Gaddafi, and his equally vile children, used the wealth provided by oil to live lives of gross debauchery and finance armies of terrorists worldwide. One son, the grandiloquently named Saif al-Islam (Sword of Islam), presenting himself as the westernized face of the regime, bought himself a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. In return for his degree, Saif donated £1.5 million to support the work of the LSE’s Centre for the Study of Global Governance on civil society organizations in North Africa. Even British academia, it seems, was willing to play along with the Gaddafi family’s theater of the absurd if the payoff was right.

Now, as Gaddafi goes down in flames, pledging to take as much of his country as he can down with him, his own words have been turned into the theme song of the rebellion. Noy Alooshe, an Israeli musician of Tunisian heritage, took the phrase “zenga zenga” from a rambling, gibberish-filled, 75 minute speech delivered by Gaddafi on Tuesday February 22, and set it to a hip-hop vibe. Gaddafi, dressed in brown robes and a turban, spoke from what appeared to be the residence damaged in the 1986 bombing raid ordered by Ronald Reagan. Alooshe overlaid the video with footage of a scantily-clad woman dancing to Gaddafi’s trance music riff. The video, posted on YouTube, has gone viral throughout the Arab world and has captured the spirit of the Libyan uprising. The irony of an Israeli artist creating the theme song for an Arab fight for liberty is something we should all ponder. Here is the video.

You know a tyrant’s days are numbered when the people who had lived in absolute fear of his wrath can turn around and assault him with mockery. The speech itself was classic Gaddafi. The self-styled “Leader and Guide of the Revolution,” proclaimed his defiance of those who sought his downfall, blaming the uprising on everyone from Al Qaeda to American agents drugging Libyan youth with LSD-spiked Nescafé. More ominously, he threatened to unleash his security forces on all rebels, declaring that “when I do, everything will burn.” Rambling on, Gaddafi issued a call to his people: “Come out of your homes, those who love Muammar Gaddafi. Women, men, girls, boys, those who side with Muammar Gaddafi and the revolution. . . . As from tomorrow, no, as from tonight, actually, people in Libyan cities and towns . . . chase [the protesters], arrest them, hand them over to the security [forces].”

“The American people are no longer on the defensive”: Ronald Reagan’s Statement of Traditional Jacksonian Values at CPAC, 1985

by Michael Kaplan

“So, let us go forth with good cheer and stout hearts—happy warriors out to seize back a country and a world to freedom.”

Throughout the course of his political career, Ronald Reagan was a firm champion of the traditional values of Jacksonian America. These included an unapologetic nationalism, veneration of the symbols of American patriotism, belief in limited government and rugged individualism, traditional religious faith, and a belief in the greatness and goodness of the American people and America’s exceptional role in history as the champion of liberty in the world. These ideas defined Reagan’s conservatism and they were a major source of his ability to connect with the aspirations of the American people.



Reagan had two overarching objectives when he took office as president in 1981. First, he wanted to dismantle the blue social model (the progressive welfare state) and unleash the entrepreneurial dynamism of the American economy. And just as important, Reagan wanted roll back the Aquarian social and cultural revolution of the 1960s and restore the primacy of traditional Jacksonian culture in American life. Reagan feared that the unrelenting assault on Jacksonian America by the Aquarian counterculture was undermining the American people’s belief in themselves and in their nation. He stated this quite eloquently at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 1, 1985.

The new conservatives made anew the connection between economic justice and economic growth. Growth in the economy would not only create jobs and paychecks, they said; it would enhance familial stability and encourage a healthy optimism about the future. Lower those tax rates, they said, and let the economy become the engine of our dreams. Pull back regulations, and encourage free and open competition. Let the men and women of the marketplace decide what they want.

But along with that, perhaps the greatest triumph of modern conservatism has been to stop allowing the left to put the average American on the moral defensive. By average American I mean the good, decent, rambunctious, and creative people who raise the families, go to church, and help out when the local library holds a fundraiser; people who have a stake in the community because they are the community.

These people had held true to certain beliefs and principles that for 20 years the intelligentsia were telling us were hopelessly out of date, utterly trite, and reactionary. You want prayer in the schools? How primitive, they said. You oppose abortion? How oppressive, how antimodern. The normal was portrayed as eccentric, and only the abnormal was worthy of emulation. The irreverent was celebrated, but only irreverence about certain things: irreverence toward, say, organized religion, yes; irreverence toward establishment liberalism, not too much of that. They celebrated their courage in taking on safe targets and patted each other on the back for slinging stones at a confused Goliath, who was too demoralized and really too good to fight back.

But now one simply senses it. The American people are no longer on the defensive. I believe the conservative movement deserves some credit for this. You spoke for the permanent against the merely prevalent, and ultimately you prevailed.

Reagan gloried in his role as knight-errant of the Jacksonian folk community, much as Andrew Jackson had in his day. It also drove his liberal progressive opponents into fits of outrage. Reagan could express, in coherent and powerful language, the resentment of Jacksonian populist conservatives toward their liberal elite antagonists. For much of the twentieth century Jacksonian America had been on the defensive; its culture of patriotism and faith mocked as reactionary, its people derisively condemned as boobus americanus. The humiliation of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 drove conservative Christians into political exile, perpetuating an image of Jacksonians as eccentric primitives. Reagan gave focus and leadership to the Jacksonian revival which responded forcefully to the excesses of the Aquarian counterculture.

However, despite Reagan’s presidency, indeed because of it, the Aquarian counterculture was here to stay. The Aquarian lifestyle could only take root and flourish in a society of mass abundance. People engaged in the struggle for bare survival could not afford to follow their bliss. Ironically, it was Reagan’s own economic policies, by unleashing the animal spirits of capitalism and creating wealth on an unprecedented scale, which enabled Aquarian values to be incorporated into mainstream America. The Reagan years saw the birth of the bohemian bourgeois, or “bobo”—David Brooks’s term—the newest incarnation of the technocratic elite which combined an aggressive meritocratic work ethic with an Aquarian style and hedonism. There would be no return to the 1950s in the 1980s. Jacksonian America, too, was to a certain extent, “aquarianized.” As Brink Lindsey writes:

Capitalism’s vigor was restored, and the radical assault on middle-class values was repulsed. But contrary to the hopes of the New Right’s traditionalist partisans, shoring up the institutions of mass affluence did not, and could not, bring back the old cultural certainties. Instead, a reinvigorated capitalism brought with it a blooming, buzzing economic and cultural ferment that bore scant resemblance to any nostalgic vision of the good old days. Here then was conservatism’s curious accomplishment: it made the world safe for the secular, hedonistic values of Aquarius.

(Lindsey, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture [New York: Collins, 2007], p. 229.)

This raises a question which perplexed the Founding Fathers. Can those traditional American values which create abundance—Jacksonian values, of hard work, self-discipline, delayed gratification, and a strong sense of national identity—survive the very abundance they create? Does the American people’s pursuit of happiness sow the seeds of their destruction should happiness ever be found?

© 2011 Michael Kaplan

Straight Talk from Chris Christie on Public Sector Sacrifice

by Michael Kaplan


New Jersey Governor Chris Christie confronts defenders of the blue model at a Town Hall Meeting, January 26.

“I am sorry I’m the guy who’s got to be here when the party’s over.”

Below is a video from a town hall meeting held on January 26 by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie at VFW Post 2179 in Middletown, NJ. Christie spoke about the need to cut public sector salaries and benefits to bring them in line with those in the private sector.

Governor Christie, more than most politicians, understands just how serious the crisis of the blue social model really is, and has spoken out on it without pulling any punches or sugar coating it for the public. He has tried to find workable policies to phase out the blue model in the public sector and bring it to as soft a landing as possible. Inevitably he has faced fierce opposition from the public sector employee unions and Democrats in the state legislature. Christie recently accused the legislature of paying lip service to his proposals for rolling back public sector pensions and civil service reform but taking no action on them. “They've done nothing on this issue,” he said. “It is nothing but two-page press releases with bullet points. That’s not how you fix the big things in New Jersey.” Perhaps it does take a man of Christie’s considerable size and stature to overwhelm those who would defend the blue model to the death.

At the January 26 town hall meeting, Christie took on the delicate issue of cutting pensions and health care benefits for the police force. Summing up the dilemma facing the blue states, Christie said “Other politicians made you promises they couldn’t keep.” The governor then challenged the crowd, asking “Why are you mad at me? Because I’m the one who’s telling you the truth. The numbers are the numbers. I’m trying to fix it. I am sorry I’m the guy who’s got to be here when the party’s over.” While Christie has had some heated confrontations with teachers and their union at previous town hall meetings, many of which are posted on YouTube, the governor now had to spell out the facts of economic life to New Jersey’s men and women in blue. When state corrections officer Sean Kelly, sounding more than a bit pissed off, asked how he was expected to pay for one-third of his health insurance premiums, the governor responded with typical Christie bluntness:

Kelly: With a 2% cap on a raise per year, how am I going to afford $8,000 to pay for medical benefits?

Christie: You’re not. You’re not gonna afford it. What’s gonna to happen is you’re gonna have to make choices among medical plans. And have more choices than just 3 choices which you have now, and only the Cadillac plan. You’re going to have to make choices, like everybody else is making choices in this economy. [...]

A whole bunch of politicians who came before me on the local level and the state level made you promises that they couldn’t keep. And they knew they couldn’t keep them when they made them. So, I understand you being angry. But I suggest to you, respectfully, don’t be angry at the first guy who told you the truth.

Not satisfied with Christie’s answer, Kelly went on: “I received a 2% increase in my salary 2 weeks ago, and my medical benefits started to come out. Do you know how much my check went up Sir? $4. How am I supposed to live with that?” Christie then elaborated on his previous points:

Here’s the difference. You’re getting a paycheck. And there are 9% of the people in the state of New Jersey who are not.

And if their property taxes continue to go up to continue pay for higher and higher salaries in the public sector, they’ll lose their homes.

And so, I have to tell you, I understand your frustration about not getting a higher raise. But you go around this room and talk to people who are in the private sector who haven't gotten raises for years, if they’ve been able to keep their job at all. This is the economic reality we live in now. I wish it was different, but it isn’t.

Christie went on to warn Kelly and the audience “If the public sector unions continue to be resistant to wanting to be part of the exchange, they're going to lose jobs. They're losing them already.” In a dire forecast of things to come, Camden, the city with New Jersey’s highest crime rate, laid off 45 percent of its police force in January, when city and police union officials were unable to agree on pension and benefit cuts. None of this impressed the thirty-nine-year-old Kelly, an eight-year veteran of the force, who left the meeting with the governor saying, “I appreciate his honesty. His proposals just don't fit into reality.”

Governor Christie was telling Officer Kelly that this is the new reality. Public sector employees, including police officers, are going to have to work harder and produce more for less money, fewer benefits, and less job security, just as their private sector counterparts have been doing for the past thirty years. Jacksonian populists, including Tea Party supporters, have called for extensive cuts in public sector spending to bring down state and federal debt. But while Jacksonians have no problems with teachers or bureaucratic paper pushers making sacrifices for the public good, they resist imposing austerity on policemen, firefighters, and emergency personnel. Jacksonians venerate police officers and firefighters as the domestic equivalent of the armed forces—men and women who put their lives on the line to protect the folk community. Those who made the ultimate sacrifice on 9/11 have already earned a place in America’s pantheon of sacred heroes. Jacksonians make up the bulk of the state and municipal uniformed personnel, just as they do in the military. It will be a tough sell for Christie to convince the Jacksonian public that the police should sacrifice even more.

Since taking office last year, Chris Christie has been telling the people of New Jersey some hard truths that all Americans need to hear. America is indeed a land of affluence and abundance. But that abundance cannot be taken for granted. The creation wealth involves continual hard work, struggle, and effort; the work, struggle and effort of millions of Americans pursuing happiness in a free market and a free society. The government, Christie was reminding his audience, cannot guarantee your success in that pursuit. Nor can the government create wealth. It can only redistribute the wealth already created by individual Americans in the private sector. Howard Dean, staunch liberal progressive defender of the blue model, may argue that the government’s raison d’être is to redistribute wealth: that “the purpose of government is to make sure that capitalism works for everybody, not just for the people who can run roughshod as they often do in Washington by throwing—and as the Chamber [of Commerce] has—by throwing money around.” But in reality the government can’t ensure that capitalism works for everyone. No system or society devised by human beings can work equally well for all its members. In a free society there will be winners and losers, from billionaire plutocrats to minimum-wage burger flippers, and ideally with a large self-sufficient middle class in between. Government can only provide the structure of laws, policies, and institutions that enable individuals to pursue happiness and create wealth on their own in freedom and in security of life and property. Policemen like Sean Kelly make their contribution to society by providing that security.

Christie also reminded the audience that it is the wealth created in the private sector that funds the public sector. The struggling taxpayers of New Jersey and the forty-nine other states, can no longer bear the burden of funding a public sector that has grown too big and too dysfunctional; that demands too much from the taxpayers and returns too little. So let’s hope that Chris Christie becomes a model for other governors, who can work to find creative solutions to avert a disaster in public finance, and give the American people the well-functioning and responsive public sector they need and deserve.

© 2011 Michael Kaplan