More than sixty years ago, a man asked a nation whether it still trusted freedom, still trusted itself. That question has come due again, on our own ballots.
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Do we still believe in the free individual? Or have we begun, quietly, one election at a time, handing ourselves over to those who promise to run our lives for us, in exchange for the freedom to run them ourselves?
Don’t take that as a hypothetical. The evidence is in front of us.
This year, an organization that calls itself “democratic socialist” crossed 120,000 members, the largest socialist organization in this country’s history. It elected the mayor of our largest city, unseated a sitting congressional caucus chair, and knocked off a fifteen-term incumbent in Colorado. It’s now on the ballot for governor in Wisconsin and mayor of our nation’s capital.
Let’s be honest about how they won. In this year’s New York primary, the citywide Democratic turnout was just seventeen percent. One winning candidate took her congressional seat with roughly thirty-seven thousand votes out of four hundred fifty-six thousand eligible voters. Another unseated a sitting committee chairman with about seven percent of her district voting. That is not a mandate. It’s what happens when a free people stay home and a small, organized faction shows up anyway.
History does not require large numbers to change a nation’s fate. Fidel Castro landed on the shores of Cuba with eighty-one other men, aboard a leaking boat called the Granma. Most did not survive the first ambush. What remained of that small, disciplined faction took the island within three years and held it for more than sixty. A hundred twenty thousand members is not insignificant. Neither was eighty-two men.
They are winning because millions of our neighbors are hurting, angry about rent they cannot afford and wages that do not stretch, and they are being offered an answer while the rest of us stay home.
That answer is that the individual cannot be trusted to build a good life on his own terms, and that the solution is to place more of that life in the hands of planners who promise to distribute what freedom could not.
I understand the anger. I do not accept the answer. It was another president who said the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” That warning was never about a bureaucrat’s intentions. It was about what happens once you hand someone else permanent authority over your life in exchange for a promise. I did not read about that exchange in a book. I grew up inside it.
I come from a communist country, where that promise was made with total sincerity and kept with total control. The state that guaranteed your bread also decided what you could say and what your children would be taught to believe. The ration card, the informant, the loyalty oath were not abstractions. They were Tuesday.
I lived it, and left everything I knew to stop living it.
That is why this is not an abstract debate for me, and I suspect not for many of you either.
This is not a choice between compassion and cruelty. Free people have always cared for one another. It is a choice between two theories of who is fit to run a life: the individual, imperfect as he is, or a well-intentioned government that claims it can judge better for him.
I have made my choice. I believe in the individual, not because people are perfect, but because they are capable of building, failing, and building again in a way no central plan has matched.
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Self-government is not easy. It asks citizens to participate, not spectators waiting to be managed. That is a harder path than the one on this year’s ballot. It is also the only path that has ever kept a free people free.
A free people does not lose its freedom to the loud and organized. It loses it to the silent and comfortable, in the seventeen percent who show up while the rest assume someone else will carry the weight. Liberty has never been preserved by people who meant to get around to it.
So I am not asking for your outrage tonight. I am asking for your presence. Your vote. Your name on a ballot too many neighbors decided wasn’t worth the walk to the mailbox.
This country was not built by people who stayed home. It was built by men who signed a Declaration knowing it could cost them the gallows, by women who marched for a right their husbands mocked, by immigrants who crossed oceans believing freedom was worth the risk. None of them thought it would hold itself together while they looked away.
I know which country I want to hand to the next generation.
Not one where power drifts upward because too many of us were too tired, too busy, or too disillusioned to stop it.
A country where citizens show up.
Where neighborhoods organize as fiercely for freedom as any faction organizes for control.
Where the ballot box is never surrendered to whoever wants it most.
A country where power is built from the ground up, by citizens.
Or a country where power is handed down from above, in exchange for the trouble of governing ourselves.
I know which one built this nation.
I know which one is worth defending.
And I know it will not defend itself.
The moment is here, America.
Not in some future election. This one.
On these ballots, with these names, in these cities and these states, right now.
Rise.
Register.
Show up on a Tuesday in June when it is inconvenient, and again in November when it matters most.
Talk to your neighbor who has stopped believing his vote counts, and remind him it counts most precisely when he thinks no one is watching.
Do not leave the field to the disciplined few because the many could not be bothered.
Stand for the individual.
Stand for the freedom to build your own life, and the responsibility that comes with it.
Stand for a Republic where citizens govern themselves.
Because the alternative, however kindly it is offered, has never once in human history ended in more freedom than it started with.
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This is not someone else’s fight. It was never going to be.
It is ours, or it is no one’s.
The moment is here, America.
The time for choosing is now.
Image: Tony Webster