The World Still Needs What America Stands For

By Daniel J. Hannan

Thursday, January 22, 2026

 

How is this for a pithy summary of what makes the United States special? “A land, perhaps, the only one in the universe, in which political or civil liberty is the very end and scope of the constitution.”

 

How could you not be stirred by those words? Do they not capture the essence of what sets America apart, a creedal rather than an ethnic nation?

 

As Ronald Reagan put it in his final presidential address, “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

 

Here, then, is something that might surprise you. The words quoted in my first paragraph were not written about America. They come from Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, a four-volume treatise published in the late 1760s, which was reckoned to be the most widely read work in the American colonies after the Bible: every attorney was said to carry a copy in his saddlebag.

 

Blackstone was one of those Englishmen, like John Locke or Tom Paine, whose ideas became vastly more influential in North America than in his native land. His words tell us something about the American Revolution that is often forgotten. Most of its instigators had lived their lives as British patriots. They were defending what they took to be their national birthright. When tour guides at Lexington or Concord talk about “the British” lining up over here and “the Americans” over there, they are using language that no one at the time would have recognized.

 

As the firebrand lawyer James Otis put it in 1764: “Every British Subject born on the continent of America, or in any other of the British Dominions, is by the Law of God and Nature, by the Common Law, and by Act of Parliament entitled to all the Natural, Essential, Inherent and Inseparable Rights of our Fellow Subjects in Great-Britain.”

 

Only the eventual involvement of foreigners — French troops on the revolutionary side, German mercenaries for the Crown, which had struggled to raise soldiers from an English population that sympathized with the colonists — began to create a sense of different nationality. Listen to how the Declaration of Independence frames its grievance against George III: “He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny.” Foreign mercenaries: soldiers, in other words, who were not fellow Brits.

 

The American Revolution was a rejection of British citizenship, not of British values. Indeed, it was a clamorous assertion of all the things that, in the eyes of the Founders, had made them British in the first place: personal autonomy, representative government, religious liberty, habeas corpus, jury trials, the sanctity of contract, the rule of law, and constraints on executive power.

 

As Winston Churchill was to put it in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples: “The Declaration was in the main a restatement of the principles which had animated the Whig struggle against the later Stuarts and the English Revolution of 1688.”

 

American visitors to London are sometimes surprised to find prominent statues of six U.S. presidents, including Abraham Lincoln in Parliament Square and George Washington in Trafalgar Square. Yet, even in 1776, the American cause enjoyed widespread support in Great Britain. The most brilliant parliamentarians of the era, Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, and Pitt the Elder, all favored the patriots. So, as far as we can make out, did a majority of the population — though, with a more limited franchise than in the colonial assemblies, that majority was not replicated in the House of Commons.

 

Today, British attitudes to the American Revolution range from the indulgent to the envious. This year will see British ministers and officials swarming to the U.S. to mark the anniversary (we have, I am afraid, already inflicted our lamentable deputy prime minister, David Lammy, on you). We jokily go along with the nationalist tone that sometimes creeps into Fourth of July celebrations but, in truth, it leaves us baffled.

 

The Revolution, after all, was spurred on by a QAnon-level conspiracy theory, widespread on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1760s, namely that George III, that dim, dull, dutiful king, was planning to create a medieval-style absolute monarchy. In the event, both successor states developed along similar lines, becoming more liberal, more law-based, and more democratic. This consanguinity of values became the basis of our alliance from the beginning of the 20th century.

 

Our presumed kinship makes us Brits feel that we have a special stake in the future of the U.S., and that we are commensurately entitled to opinions about its politics. Of course, lots of countries recognize that America carries mankind’s loftier ambitions. We don’t look to Albania or Armenia or Algeria to colonize Mars. But Anglosphere nations feel it more strongly, understanding that what happened in the old statehouse in Philadelphia was a distillation, an intensification, of our own identity.

 

Alexis de Tocqueville argued that the national characteristics of various European countries found their fullest and freest expression in the New World. “The American,” he wrote, “is the Englishman left to himself.” That phrase became truer with each passing decade. The U.S. did not suffer the statism that in Britain followed six years of full mobilization after 1939. Nor did it accustom itself to half a century of Brussels-imposed dirigisme.

 

In consequence, it has maintained (as, to a degree, have Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) more authentically British institutions than Britain. Its government is constrained and dispersed; its public culture is attached to free speech, free contract, and free assembly; its unspoken assumptions are individualist.

 

To put it more briefly, the foundational value of the United States is liberty. I feel slightly silly having to write that, as it would recently have gone without saying. But when lots of young American conservatives are disowning the Founders and writing excitedly about Catholic integralism or the jurisprudence of the Nazi lawyer Carl Schmitt, it bears repeating. Listen to the two presidents whose statues have pride of place in London.

 

“Interwoven as is the love of liberty with every ligament of your hearts, no recommendation of mine is necessary to fortify or confirm the attachment,” said George Washington in his Farewell Address. Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg defined the nation as having been “conceived in liberty.”

 

What does liberty mean? It means that the people in power can’t boss others around. It means that politicians are servants and not rulers. It means that private property and free contract are respected, that the coercive force of the state is a last rather than a first resort, and that the people in charge don’t get to make up the rules as they go along. It means, in short, a government of laws and not of men — a phrase attributed to John Adams, although, demonstrating my point about the Founders’ British identity, Adams was quoting the 17th-century English radical James Harrington.

 

How, by these lights, is the U.S. doing at 250? It has become the most powerful, wealthy, and successful country on earth. Fifteen years ago, living standards were comparable to those in Western Europe. Since then, the U.S. has grown two-thirds faster than the EU, largely because it has stuck to the successful formula of low taxes, light regulations, and cheap energy. Even the immigration crisis is a relatively good crisis to have. Trust me, you wouldn’t want to live in a country with an emigration crisis.

 

America’s success is rooted in its constitutional structures, whose very longevity is extraordinary. Most Latin American republics became independent between 1810 and 1822 and consciously adopted versions of the U.S. Constitution. But whereas they have been through more than 300 constitutions in the intervening years, the U.S. is still on its first.

 

The three documents that hang alongside one another in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. — the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights — have become what sacred olive groves were to the Greek city-states, what holy relics were in medieval Europe. The genius of the U.S. was to teach its people to be loyal to ideas rather than to factional leaders — no small achievement in a tribal species.

 

Calvin Coolidge explained the miracle precisely a century ago:

 

Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken.

 

Officeholders, rather than the general population, swear oaths to that Constitution. They are its servants, there to defend it above everything else, even their own constituents.

 

Now a hard question. Do people still uphold those values today? Do Americans revere the documents in the National Archives? Are they prepared to elevate process above outcome, to accept that their side sometimes loses, to favor, in their foreign policy, liberty over despotism?

 

I wonder. I find the readiness to cozy up to foreign tyrants creepily un-American. To be clear, I am not talking about isolationism. Pure isolationism, in the sense of “Putin is a bastard but wake me up if he invades Seattle,” I can respect. It’s not my cup of tea, but it is an honorable philosophy. But this fawning over the Kremlin strongman across swaths of the right, this commensurate sneering at Zelensky — they are something other than isolationism. Playing nice with Russia while making aggressive claims against Canada and Denmark is alien to America’s foundational values.

 

“America encourages its political allies in Europe,” says the new National Security Strategy. “The growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.”

 

In other words, the U.S. is backing Marine Le Pen in France, Alice Weidel in Germany, and Tommy Robinson in the U.K. over the parties that upheld the Atlantic Alliance throughout the Cold War. The odd thing is that these politicians, with their blood-and-soil nationalism, are wholly outside the American tradition, as expressed above by Reagan.

 

How secure is that tradition at home? Both parties seem increasingly unwilling to accept results that don’t suit them. There is, again, something creepily un-American about personality cults, about the willingness to contract out your opinions to a father-of-the-nation type, to change your views when he changes his.

 

The Founders would have had Trump down as a “Caesarist,” meaning a man whose personal ambition outweighed his respect for the republic. They would have been appalled, less by his executive power-grabs or desire for a third term — they knew such men — than by the obsequious way in which others encourage him to exceed his authority. They designed America expressly to prevent arbitrary rule.

 

Liberty “can be lost,” said Harry Truman when he inaugurated the National Archives, “and it will be, if the time ever comes when these documents are regarded not as the supreme expression of our profound belief, but merely as curiosities in glass cases.”

 

To understand what Truman meant requires education — not just in schools and colleges but in the wider media and culture. The American republic rests on a series of ideas that do not come naturally and so must be taught. The idea, for example, that we are all individuals, not defined by race or caste. The idea that people we don’t like might be right. The idea that the worth of a proposition is determined by its intrinsic truth rather than by whether we approve of the person proposing it.

 

These things are not being taught, at least not with the confidence that they once were. We went from the collectivism of identity politics, which reached its high point in the demented Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, to its mirror image, what the commentator Konstantin Kisin calls “right-wing woke,” a worldview equally rooted in victimhood, bitterness, and collectivism, and equally intolerant of dissenting opinions, albeit with the good guys and bad guys switched around.

 

Disseminating the idea of individual liberty in a screen-addled, impatient, conspiratorial age is not straightforward. How to teach civic virtue to people accustomed to spending an average of seven seconds on each TikTok video? It is no easy task. But the celebrations that mark the 250th anniversary are an unparalleled opportunity to remind Americans of who they were. Believe me, cousins, the rest of us want you back.