February 22 is George Washington's birthday, and if ever America needed advice from the Founding Fathers, it is now. Fortunately, the "Father of our country" was very anxious to give Americans as much advice as possible on politics, religion, and individual excellence.
As a man of high integrity himself, Washington understood that freedom can only bless a nation so long as the people in it are self-disciplined and honorable enough to prize freedom and use it wisely. If freedom becomes license and is corrupted by selfishness, it will not endure. To be a "free and enlightened People," Washington emphasized, we must have "virtue, moderation, and patriotism."
Alexis de Tocqueville noted when he visited America in the early 19th century that the people of this nation had admirable and exceptional civic responsibility. Their individualist worldview and love of freedom didn't make them more selfish, but rather more ready to take action to better their communities. That is the spirit with which the Founders imbued the people. In our modern era where politicians and activists never stop blabbing about compassion and tolerance, the exceptional civic responsibility that de Tocqueville mentioned is much less in evidence.
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Washington knew that without virtue, all of America's high ideals would become mere empty words. In the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Founders gave to Americans the most noble principles on which a nation ever was founded, but each generation has to fight for freedom. Hence Washington urged during a 1789 address to the Pennsylvania legislature:
The virtue, moderation, and patriotism which marked the steps of the American People in framing, adopting, and thus far carrying into effect our present system of Government, has excited the admiration of Nations; and it only now remains for us to act up to those principles, which should characterize a free and enlightened People, that we may gain respect abroad and ensure happiness and safety to ourselves and to our posterity.
And then came the injunction to take responsibility not only for one's own life, but for the lives of one's fellow citizens, not in the meddling, encroaching, or paternalistic method of the modern leftist welfare state and bloated bureaucracy, but as one free man to another.
Washington eloquently encouraged his listeners:
It should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn. To obtain this desireable [sic] end—and to establish the government of laws, the union of these States is absolutely necessary.
If the United States is not united by a shared love of liberty and justice, our country will fracture as it did during the Civil War and as it is increasingly doing again now (and it is no mistake that the anti-American Democrats were behind both crises). It is up to us whether we shall be again a free and enlightened people or not.
