Washington, D.C. – The founders believed they had presided over the creation not just of a new nation but a new nationality: tougher, simpler, perhaps more violent, and less refined than their European forebears. These new Americans would be animated by the challenge of conquering first an Empire, then a continent, imbued with a spirit of what 19th-century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson would refer to as “self-reliance.”

As virtuous as the exposés of muckrakers like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell might seem to us looking backward, when they were published they added fuel to the progressive fires already undermining the values of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson’s use of the phrase “pursuit of happiness” – borrowed from British philosopher John Locke, who, in developing the idea of a social contract between the citizens and their government, referenced “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property” – is not meant to convey an image of joyful post-colonialists chasing pleasure throughout their new nation. It instead refers to a continuing state of social and civic good that it is the duty of every American to reinforce in our daily actions. 

Broadly expressed, that can be taken to mean our national ideal is based on the idea of “looking out for the other guy” and their interests while chasing your own share of the American Dream. We are not so much “communitarian” as we are a community, something de Tocqueville expounded upon perceptively in his landmark study “Democracy in America.”

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