5/6/2020 A Country Is a Country | The Point Magazine

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A Country Is a Country
by Michael S. Kochin (https://thepointmag.com/author/mkochin/)

A country is not for this or that. A country is not a chess club or a cra
brewery; it is not for playing chess, brewing beer or making money. A country is
a place where people form and try to ful ll their own purposes. Some of those
purposes we give ourselves, some we pick up by chance or habit, some are given
to us by nature or nature’s God.

To uote Donald Trump, “A country is a country.” To think about America, our

country, we have to think about what a country is, abstracting from the history,
culture, geography and ethnography of any particular country. What is it to live
together in a country? A country is a place, inhabited by a people. ose
inhabitants have an attachment to a place and its people that goes beyond or
stands alongside their desire to form and ful ll their own purposes. ey see
their fellow inhabitants as something more than guests in the same hotel. ey
want to succeed in their purposes, but they also want to have their success
recognized by people whose recognition they value.

A country is a home, in Robert Frost’s sense that “Home is the place where,
when you have to go there, / ey have to take you in.” When you are in the U.S.
citizen line at immigration and customs, the only thing the o cials check
before admitting you to America is whether your American passport is real and
that it is yours. But if they have to take in everybody, or if people are getting in
without obeying any rules at all, it won’t be your home, or anybody’s home, for
very long. Four strong walls and a sti door that can be locked when you choose
aren’t all that it takes to make a home, but you can’t have a home without them.

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America is a place, mostly between two other places, two other countries, called
Canada and Mexico. e people who live there are called the “American people.”
Not everybody who lives in America is, or wants to be, part of the American
people. Some are foreigners, who see themselves and are seen as belonging to
another people whose place is elsewhere. Some people in America are what
Americans call “Native Americans,” because those people see themselves not as
descendants of settlers and immigrants who became Americans but as the
descendants of those Mohawks, Creeks or Lakota from whom those settlers and
immigrants took the land they call America.

When did the Americans become a people? Americans called themselves a

people in a Declaration that took e ect July 4, 1776, which proclaimed that it
was necessary for “one people,” the Americans, to dissolve the political bands
which had connected them with another, their “British brethren.” e
Declaration of Independence lists the Americans’ reasons for no longer desiring
to be ruled by the British people. But the Declaration of Independence does not
try to explain what makes the American people one people and the British
people another. Whatever accidents of history, of shared origin or religion or
culture, made the Americans a people, Americans thought, was of little
importance compared with the facts that they were now a people and that they
could and should rule themselves. e Declaration is the rst political act of the
American people, but it is not what made them a people. What made the
Americans a people? e o cial answer of the Declaration seems to be “Who
cares?”

e Americans won’t say what made them a people, but they

go on to give reasons for the rst action they are undertaking

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as a people. e reasons that the Americans o er for

dissolving the tie of monarchy that connected the American
people to their British brethren come down to a principle,
“that all men are created e ual,” and their e uality is an
e uality in “inalienable rights.” ere is, according to the
Declaration, no superior race, caste or class born or bred to
rule, or inferior race, caste or class made to be ruled. e
Declaration rests on “the palpable truth,” as Je erson said,
that “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on
their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to
ride them legitimately.”

But is it enough to accept the principle of e uality to be an

American? Lincoln said at Gettysburg that the American
people were a “new nation … dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created e ual.” Yet Americans do not, even in
the moments when they are most certain of their
exceptionalism, believe that they are the only people so
dedicated. Other people, too, can share American principles.
ey can, because these principles are, or rest upon, self-
evident truths.

When David Hume was asked by a friend and fellow Scottish

subject of George III, William Mure, to write an address to
the king to support harsher measures to hold the Americans
to British bondage, Hume replied, “I am an American in my
principles, and wish we would let them alone to govern or
misgovern themselves as they think proper. e a air is of no
conse uence, or of little conse uence, to us.” Despite (or

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because) Hume was an “American in his principles,” he could

see that the Americans were “them,” the British were “us,” and
that “we” should let “them” govern themselves.

Hume was not an American, except in his principles. So to be

an American it is not su cient to accept American
principles. Purposes can come from or give rise to principles,
but just as shared principles are not enough to make a people,
shared purposes are not either.

As Lincoln foretold at Chicago, most Americans alive today

are not descended, except in their principles, from those who
rst fought to realize American principles in America. e
late political scientist Peter Schramm explained how his
family decided to emigrate to escape the failure of the
Hungarian Revolution against Soviet despotism by recounting
this exchange:

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My mother tells me, though I don’t remember saying this,

that I told my father I would follow him to hell if he
asked it of me. Fortunately for my eager spirit, hell was
exactly what we were trying to escape and the opposite of
what my father sought.

“But where are we going?” I asked.

“We are going to America,” my father said.

“Why America?” I prodded.

“Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the

wrong place,” he replied.

People “born Americans, but in the wrong place” might want

not only to be recognized as American in their principles but
also to be taken in by Americans as would-be Americans. One
of those American principles is that a legitimate government
is a government of laws, as opposed to a government of men—
if the laws are good laws they treat e ual men e ually,
whereas men will favor some men over others, according to
their whims. Americans thus have to demand that would-be
Americans try to become American in a manner that
conforms not merely to American principles but also to
American laws. To be true to their own principles of e uality
and government limited by law, Americans have to insist that
those who become Americans do so according to the forms

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and procedures established by law. eir admission should not

be exceptions to the law granted as favors by rulers who see
themselves as above the American people and above the laws
that the American people and their constitutionally
appointed representatives have made.

One can also be an American (by birth or naturalization) and

deny, or resist, American principles, though Americans
should accept and promote those principles. All men are
created e ual, but not all principles or purposes. Americans
used to claim that Americans could engage in “un-American
activities,” and that indeed some did, working for the triumph
of caste or class or race supremacy. Un-American activities are
not the same as illegal activities: indeed, Americans believed
then and believe now that American principles re uired that
Americans had the right to make and hear the case against
American principles. When formulating the Internal Security
Act of 1950, which re uired “communist organizations” to
register with the “Subversive Activities Control Board,”
Congress made explicit that the law would not prohibit
Americans from advocating communism by constitutional
means or even joining communist organizations:

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Nothing in this Act shall be construed to … limit or

infringe upon freedom of the press or of speech as
guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States and
no regulation shall be promulgated hereunder having that
e ect. … Neither the holding of o ce nor membership in
any Communist organization by any person shall
constitute per se a violation of … this section or of any
other criminal statute.

e only business of the laws, Americans said, was to ensure

that the debate was conducted fairly and honestly, which
would itself ensure that the self-evident truths at the bottom
of American principles would be manifest. Americans had
faith, as Lincoln said at Cooper Union, “that right makes
might”: because American principles are right, American
principles should and would prevail.

American principles are not merely for Americans, but

Americans professed to believe that, since their principles are
derived from “self-evident truths,” all people ought to accept
them. Whether those foreigners accept them or not, is,
however, their a air, except insofar as any of their actions in
violation of American principles threaten the ability of
Americans to live according to those principles. America does
not have a purpose, and thus one cannot say that the purpose
of America is for Americans to spread American principles.

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Americans have never engaged in “foreign wars” in search for

glory. A few days before the 1940 election, as war raged in
Europe, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised the mothers of
Boston, “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign
wars.” When FDR did take America to war against foreigners
—the Japanese and the Germans—it was because a er Pearl
Harbor the war was no longer “foreign.” Rejecting war for
foreign causes, Americans have been willing to forward “the
cause of the United States” by carrying war into foreign lands:
for virtually their entire history Americans have fought, more
successfully than most and no less viciously, at any point on
the globe from which they have perceived a threat to their
future as Americans.

Because Americans profess to believe that American

principles are true for all, Americans have tended to believe
that anybody who wants to be an American should be an
American. Because Americans endorse the right of their
fellow Americans to uestion or even deny American
principles, they are uncomfortable with the notion of
in uiring into whom among their fellow Americans actually
shares American principles, and so they are uncomfortable
with the notion of examining would-be immigrants too
closely as to whether they wish to be American or merely to
live in America. American laws are thus stricter than many
Americans feel comfortable admitting. is is why many
Americans are all too comfortable with the notion that these

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laws should not be enforced fully and fairly, heedless of the

damage done to the American principles of e uality and the
rule of law.

What is America for? at is a uestion better asked, not of

Americans or foreigners, but of God, who made Americans
“His almost-chosen people.” But as long as Americans work
freely together at achieving their shared and varied purposes,
America will be the inspiration for those who share American
principles, whether they are American or not.

anks to Julie Ponzi. – MSK

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