We are ceaselessly reminded of the high stakes of the pending election. Pundits and candidates warn of stark consequences for energy policy, taxation, defense budgets, immigration, and reproductive rights. No one speaks of the highest stake, and greatest threat, of this election: the fate of the social compact that binds our nation.
When most people speak of social structure, they nearly always refer to the laws and official institutions which determine how the government relates to you and me — but for the most part they don’t determine how you and I relate to one another. Our daily lives are primarily defined by norms of behavior based on truth, virtue and mutual respect for persons and property, more integral to our society than the voluminous codes our government has imposed on us.
These social norms are inextricably linked to America’s exceptional nature; indeed, they define it. Many years working globally have taught me that while we share certain values with other western countries, there is something very special about the character of America and Americans. It is too complex to capture with one simple label, but it has much to do with honesty, morality, industriousness, gratitude, and cheerful self-reliance. Our exceptional nature was not a gift from a political party, nor the product of government, except to the extent that government stayed out of the way and let it flourish.
Our norms were never codified — at least not since the Ten Commandments — but the Founders gave us what might be considered a negative template. More than a few of them, including James Madison at first, thought it unnecessary to delineate inalienable social norms in the document that was focused on federal government structure, but fortunately Madison shifted his perspective, and the country was blessed with the Bill of Rights, The Bill of Rights in this sense can be seen as a manifesto of individual liberty, underscoring the need to assure the government did not interfere with our social compact. Because it states legal constraints, they are phrased negatively, but they reflect the fundamental rights between citizens the government must not limit, and the profound social significance of those rights. The prohibition on restraining freedom of speech, for example, was an acknowledgment of the vital importance of free speech among its citizens. The ultimate distillation of these rights, taught to earlier generations, was “your rights end at the tip of my nose,” meaning you may enjoy your rights as long as you don’t interfere with mine. No one ever argued with this expression of our social compact, which seemed perfectly obvious because of our shared values. Everyone also knew that a key element of the Constitution was its separation of powers within government; just as important to our lives was a more fundamental separation, the separation of government from our private lives
But we have been yielding these values to leftist leaders, elected and otherwise, whose interests are served by ignoring both separations, who conflate legal rules and social norms and pretend we have no rights except those they bestow on us. We have accepted steady erosion of our social compact because it is too arduous to reason with the unreasonable, too frustrating to speak calmly with those who shout, too uncomfortable to speak over the screams of the nihilist tribes. We have stood by in silence as the fabric of our society unravels, tacitly engaged in a dangerous appeasement with the left. In the last century, appeasement of tyrants led to the eventual loss of millions of lives and disintegration of entire nations. The cultural appeasement we have been enduring could likewise lead to catastrophe.
Robert Huffstutter
