Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
We don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone.
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin
Freedom is like that. It’s like air.
When you have it, you don’t notice it.
Americans are blessed beyond measure! Whatever other virtues and challenges we are born into, we inherit a hard-won and harder-sustained personal liberty that is unique. Throughout the world today and across human history, such liberty is exceedingly rare.
Our ability to become full and legal adults, possessed of the widest scope of personal choice, has inestimable intrinsic value. In most historical and contemporary societies, common men as well as women, children, and chattel were and are, at best, treated for their whole lives as we treat minor children, beholden to the stewardship of their betters.
By the economic law of supply and demand, scarcity boosts value. Freedom would be precious today simply because of how uncommon it is. Imagine each human soul awaiting conception and birth. What are the odds that a soul would have of being born into a body with the freedoms we enjoy?
In Ancient Egypt, only one man in four million had agency. The Pharaonic God-King alone had the ability to boldly chart a course. In practice, the successful ones carefully chose their moments to go against the constraints of tradition. Otherwise they ended up remembered as failures, like the world’s first monotheistic ruler, Pharaoh Akhenaten.
Ancient Athenian Greece was unusual in its participatory Democracy, allowing all citizens to partake in decisions that shaped their society. But, since only native-born men were citizens, this comprised only about 20% of the city-state’s population. The remainder were women, children, foreign emigres, and of course slaves. Still, Athenians had far greater odds in their proverbial “birth lottery” of being born as a decision-maker.
In most societies from before Akhenaten’s 14th Century B.C. through the writing of our Constitution in the late 18th Century A.D., the odds of being born empowered to make important choices was tens or hundreds of thousands to one, against.
When our Federal Constitutional Republic was first established in A.D. 1788, citizenship was far from universal. This was wise!
Our Founding Fathers restricted the franchise to propertied men of European stock because such men were part of the only group who were educated and accomplished enough to make wise and prudent choices. As government by and for the people is always an ongoing experiment, testing whether a critical mass of citizens will exchange their liberty for a demagogue’s false promises of security, it was important to begin our Republic with a few generations of citizens who were most capable of resisting such blandishments.
Even in our Republic’s earliest decades, the odds of being born into freedom suddenly became greater within the United States than anywhere else on Earth. In the decades leading up to our Civil War, property restrictions were systematically eliminated. Soon, all men over 21 who were not slaves, foreigners, or felons were enfranchised.
While poorer European-American men were being wooed by politicians, they were fortunate that those who already possessed the right to vote were willing to share it.
We Americans then fought our most sanguinary war between the states, in part to determine whether we should follow the British Empire in freeing all slaves. While initially interested in expanding Liberia as an African home for freed Black slaves, Abraham Lincoln was moved in part by the willingness of Black men to die for the Union during the war.
Instead of repatriation, slaves would be given emancipation. Under Reconstruction, former slaves voted and were elected to office. However, when the former Confederate states regained home rule about ten years after the end of the Civil War, these rights were effectively withdrawn in a welter of “Jim Crow” laws.
From the 1870s through the 1950s, genuine citizenship was withheld. Only with the passage of the Civil Rights Law of 1964 was citizenship finally restored across the entire United States to the descendants of slaves.
When most descendants of slaves were finally emancipated, they were fortunate that those who already possessed the right to vote were finally willing to share it.
Modern Feminists found their ideology on an essential falsehood; that women were singled out for oppression. In reality, most men throughout human history were also denied even meritocratic opportunity, let alone something akin to legal citizenship. Even today, being born to serve is by far the global norm for both men and women.
Yet, those Enlightenment concepts of liberty and natural rights inspired the English-speaking peoples to expand our definition of fully human personhood to include females. While today’s Feminists like to give Suffragettes the credit, it was men voted into office by exclusively male citizens, who gave women the vote. This was accomplished in many U. S. states as well as in the British Empire before our 19th Constitutional Amendment in A.D. 1919.
When women began to exercise their liberty as citizens, they were fortunate that those who already possessed the right to vote were eager to share it. No, Leftist warpers of historical memory, such citizenship rights were never seized. They were granted, willingly, by those who already possessed them.
This is critical! Demagogues of identity politics stoke rage against the mainstream of American voting society, which for a good part of our history were exclusively European-descended men of Judeo-Christian faith. The outrage is because America then did not have the same notions as the most radical Americans today.
Contrary to their narrative, that white Christian men are and were always the enemies of human liberty, it was precisely such men who were inspired by notions of natural rights to share our freedoms with ever-expanding types of people.
The proper response to this generosity, the wise and sane response, is gratitude.
