American thought is frequently characterized by two underlying conflicts: one of tendency, the other of philosophy.
On the tendency side, there is a deeply ingrained skepticism of authority that springs from the jealous safeguarding of personal liberty. This liberal tradition, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, can be found across the political spectrum. Whether it's marrying whomever I want to marry, keeping a personal safe filled with guns and ammunition or attending church in the middle of a panemic; Americans hate to take orders.
On the other hand, there is a similarly ingrained puritanical desire to tell other people what they should be doing. You must wear a mask. You must not wear a mask. You can only water your lawn 2 days week! You can't say that! You must say this! How dare you kneel during the anthem! How dare you play the anthem! You can't bring a Bible in here! Like a rampant HOA ruthlessly enforcing its by-laws, Americans yearn to issue petty orders to each other.
In short, Americans love to impose authority but hate to abide it.
Philosophically, American thought is underscored by the ancient tension between equality and liberty. We often repeat liberty and equality in the same sentence but they are two conflicting principles, the former requiring an absence of authority while the latter cannot exist without it. Where unrestrained liberty rules, equality dies. Where ruthlessly enforced equality dominates, liberty dies.
You can find this philosophical tension underlying many of our political arguments but they are not unique to American thought. Strains of it can be found from the French Revolution to the late Roman Republic. Humans love to be free but they also want what that other guy has. In fact, anyone who has been to a dog park will immediately recognize how important one stick is in a sea of other sticks should one dog decide to take it.
All four of these particular instincts have their place in individual circumstances. There are times when Americans must follow orders. Think of a burning plane and the trained flight crew barking orders to conduct an orderly evacuation. Not following orders in such a scenario can endanger not only your own life but the lives of those around you.
Speaking of that, I am always struck by the story of flight 93 where the passengers who learned of what happened in New York took a vote on whether to overthrow the terrorists flying the plane. The democratic urge in American culture is so deep that passengers on a doomed plane took the time to take a vote before acting. I wonder if citizens of some other nation or culture would have conducted themselves in a similar fashion. But I digress.
There are areas of life where the government has no business at all. The government should not trouble itself with my personal food choices, entertainment choices or employment choices. Such examples are evaporating far too rapidly in an American populace obsessed with the behavior of our neighbors.
There are times when inequality can be destructive to a nation. The obstinance of the Optimates in the face of crippling inequality across Rome was at least part of the reason why the republic died. We could be approaching a similar crisis in America, though I would argue that the perception of the evil of inequality plays a far greater role than the actuality of it.
Too many people conflate their concern for the poor with their envy of the wealthy. A social safety net becomes redistribution which in turn becomes confiscation. It isn't about helping the poor guy nearly as much as it is about screwing the rich guy. It's hard to help the needy, it's easy to soak the rich. Further, too many conflate the state with charity, despite the mountains of evidence against such an absurd notion. We are $28 trillion dollars in debt and poverty continues to exist. As the Reverend Ebenezer Baldwin of Danbury remarked about Britain:
“The present involved state of the British nation, the rapacity and profuseness of many of her great men, the prodigious number of their dependents who want to be gratified with some office which may enable them to live lazily upon the labor of others, must convince us that we shall be taxed so long as we have a penny to pay, and that new offices will be constituted and new officers palmed upon us until the number is so great that we cannot by our constant labor toil maintain anymore.”
Wealthy people do not hoard their wealth in secret vaults like Scrooge McDuck. They invest that wealth in other businesses that benefit consumers and the economy. To nakedly confiscate that wealth is to destroy that wealth wholesale, as the French learned in the late 1780's.
Powerful populists, recognizing this ignorant spirit of envy, exploit it for the purposes of augmenting their own power. Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump are two prime examples of this. Neither give a fig about the homeless guy on 34th street. They have no incentive to care about the disadvantaged, they merely have an incentive to appear to care about them, or in Donald Trump's case, to "fight" for them.
Alexis de Tocqueville recognized the American (and human) obsession with equality:
“The passion for equality penetrates on every side into men’s hearts, expands there, and fills them entirely. Tell them not that, by this blind surrender of themselves to an exclusive passion, they risk their dearest interests: they are deaf. Show them not freedom escaping from their grasp whilst they are looking another way: they are blind, or, rather, they can discern but one object to be desired in the universe.”
Further, equality of outcome (equity in modern parlance) vs. equality under the law are distinct goals. Taxation with a goal of redistributing wealth is evil while taxation with a goal of funding the necessary mechanisms of the state is a required part of the social contract.
Theodore Roosevelt captured this distinction:
“We should be false to the historic principles of our government if we discriminated, either by legislation or administration, either for or against a man because of either his wealth or his poverty. There is no proper place in our society either for the rich man who uses the power conferred by his riches to enable him to oppress and wrong his neighbors, nor yet for the demagogic agitator who, instead of attacking abuses as all abuses should be attacked wherever found, attacks property, attacks prosperity, attacks men of wealth, as such, whether they be good or bad, attacks corporations whether they do well or ill, and seeks, in a spirit of ignorant rancor, to overthrow the very foundations upon which rests our national well-being."
However, even when necessary, the pursuit of equality must come at the expense of some liberty. You must perform jury duty, you must pay taxes to fund the existence of courts and legal mechanisms to defend your freedoms, the state must take money to fund a military that will defend the nation against outside aggressors and police who will enforce the law in your community. Equality under the law is not free and without a state to perform these functions, the citizen is left to a chaotic social Darwinism where freedom is available only to the strongest. The rest become slaves.
The American answer to balancing these complex tensions is Madisonian federalism - restrained and competing powers contained within the state. The design, by nature, places consensus over factional supremacy. In other words, no single faction can wield power for very long without the continued consent of the American people. Much of the authority to resolve local issues remained local even after the scrapping of the Articles of Confederation.
Majority rule is distinct from majority consensus and the latter is the important factor the American system has maintained to sustain the equilibrium between these two competing ideals. If you're going to infringe on American liberties and property, you need to navigate the complicated and often ambiguous waters of federalism, bicameralism and divided powers.
The real power behind such consensus isn't the simplistic notion that all factions agree with whatever action is to be taken but rather, they respect the process by which the decision was accomplished. Al Gore conceding an election much closer than the one Donald Trump fails to accept is an excellent example. This tradition is where we have gone off the rails.
This generation, spoiled by ignorance and luxury, seems to think that if they just throw enough legos around their playpen, they should be able to get whatever they want: free health care, debt forgiveness, rent free living, the president they voted for but who did not win. Is it any surprise that the reality host we elected to be president perfectly embodied this juvenile sentiment when he said:
"I do whine because I want to win, and I'm not happy about not winning, and I am a whiner, and I keep whining and whining until I win."
This is the heart and soul of American dysfunction and it is embodied in the person of Donald J. Trump. And if you think it is confined to the Trump side of the equation, you are ignoring the absurd whining from the left about the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and even the Senate itself. When the left loses, it's because of voter suppression or free speech on social media or secret Russian misinformation campaigns.
The system works just fine, the people are just not accepting the outcomes and they are no longer willing to do the difficult work of maintaining the integrity of those outcomes. We're like a 5 year old sitting in the driver's seat of a Lamborghini banging on the dashboard because we don't know how to start the damned thing.
Rather than pursue the consensus required to accomplish our goals, the answer for too many today is to engage in angry, reactionary and often violent behavior. Don't like a court decision, burn down Macy's. Don't like a statue, rip it down and throw it in the lake. Don't win an election, riot at the Capitol building and threaten the elected representatives. Even before the recall bid failed in California, Larry Elder was pushing election fraud nonsense to anyone who would listen.
Unfettered democracy is like one of those Russian slapping contests on ESPN. If you fail to knock your opponent out on the first hit, you'd better brace for the backlash. Neither side appears to recognize that when they tear down these norms in pursuit of the supremacy of their own faction, they are paving the way for the next election to produce a backlash against whatever they were trying to accomplish. The mob change their mind more than their underwear and frequent elections ensure that the volatile winds of popular emotion are checked and curbed at every turn. See the French Revolution for an example of unchecked factions taking turns repeatedly kicking each other in the beans.
An early example of this erosion of constitutional norms in favor of populist grandstanding was President Obama defenestrating the Supreme Court over the Citizens United decision during his state of the union. It seems quaint now compared to how far we've plunged into the factional abyss but at the time, his decision to whip up a cheering mob of his own party against the court was shocking. Ostensibly, his goal was to move Congress to act but the unspoken goal was to show his own faction that he would stand up to the straw man cartoon villains that the radical base of his faction believe in as articles of faith.
Another Obama example of this was when he told a room full of elected representatives "I won." So did everyone else sitting there, of course. The president is a partner with Congress, not its leader. And yet, Olympia Snow left congress having not heard from President Obama in over two years.
From there, it has been a steep slide. Hillary Clinton urged Joe Biden not to accept a loss in the 2020 election "under any circumstances." Donald Trump harrumphed and blustered his way through four turbulent years of Twittery gesticulating before openly refusing to concede his loss even after the courts rejected his many legal challenges. Even now, he continues to claim that his election was somehow stolen. Joe Biden is going to "run over" governors who get in his way over masks and vaccinations. He pushes legal arguments that he openly admits are specious (eviction moratoriums, vaccine mandates) daring the Supreme Court to outrage the increasingly violent radicals in his own faction.
Republicans recently passed an abortion law in Texas. It isn't the law that is suspect but the enforcement mechanism, stipulating that private citizens sue each other to punish violations. The purpose of this was apparently to confuse the pro-abortion faction's ability to find legal standing to challenge the law. The consequences will reach much further than that little party trick.
In other words, this is a tactical ploy that will do very little for the pro-life side of the discussion but plenty to further undermine the pillars of the American liberal tradition. The consequence is to turn Americans against Americans and it's exactly the kind of divisive, Machiavellian ruse that the right (often accurately) blames the left for engaging in. Like Joe Biden leaving Blackhawk helicopters in Afghanistan, you may count the days until the other side finds a way to wield this stupidity against its own practitioners.
Both liberty and equality are noble and necessary ends for a government to pursue though we must balance the inherent conflict between them. There are times when we must take orders and times when we must reject them. There are times when we must defend our freedoms against the state and times when we must sacrifice some freedom and property in order for the state to properly function.
The immaturity of the American electorate, reflected in the leaders it has chosen, has rendered us incapable of understanding when each scenario applies. Instead, we rely on the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the charlatans we have elected to determine it for us and, as demonstrated above, they can no longer be trusted to put their faith and allegiance into the system they are accountable for preserving. This is how unchecked devotion to faction and party can destroy a nation, as the founders very clearly understood.
Joseph Addison's Cato remarked:
“When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, The post of honour is a private station.”
Perhaps, but if all the honorable men spend their time in private endeavors, who will save them from a rogue state run by fools and scoundrels? It seems we are destined to learn the answer to this question sooner rather than later.
I feel like you took the Baldwin quote about Britain exactly opposite of the way it was intended.
It's not about poor, or "envious", people sponging off the state. It's about nepotism of the privileged. Such as Trump's kids and son-in-law ending up in the WhiteHouse and benefiting from it despite their absolute lack of qualification or merit. "New offices" were literally created for them.
(BTW, there is a great tradition in Britain of clergymen being progressive reformers)