A quarter of a millennium has passed since the founding of the oldest and most enduring democracy in the world - the USA. Years ago, in the book “New York - the altar of the modern world“ (2011), I reflected on American identity. Being “American“ is not a matter of citizenship, but of values.
The American Revolution at the end of the 18th century laid the foundations of the first modern civil nation, formed not on the basis of a common ethnic or cultural identity, but on shared values. At that time, old Europe was still suffocating from the social structure of the Old Regime. The hereditary aristocracy, like a mold, suffocates social development: if you are the son of a shoemaker or a farmhand, your chances of moving up the social ladder are negligible. The main wealth - land - is a chimera for the vast majority of people, whose lives are subject to merciless restrictions, property taxes, duties and taxes. Religious persecution is a gloomy everyday life. Diseases and epidemics blacken the continent. Against this background, the new land across the ocean captivates the European imagination. There are no class differences ingrained in the social fabric, nor the repressions of the political police and censorship, which are characteristic of almost all European countries in that era. In pubs and intellectual cafes in the cities of England, Ireland, France, the Netherlands and Italy, the stories of the settlers about the high wages and low taxes in the United States are passed down by word of mouth; about the abundance of fertile land, legally accessible to everyone; about the lack of feudal aristocracy and above all - about the democratic order, religious tolerance and religious freedom unseen in Europe. “There are places in Europe - writes the great British historian Paul Johnson - where the annual addresses of the American president are read aloud and eagerly devoured by the people.“ As an Irish newspaper of the time noted: “We read this document as if it had been written for us“.
America is the promised land, in which everyone who has the courage to board the crowded emigrant ships and survive the difficult journey gets a chance for a new life. To break with the misfortunes of the difficult past, with life's failures and trials that everyone would like to be forgotten. Never before has the chance of such a thing happening been so real. The one who does this imperceptibly breaks with the old stereotypes and national attachments. He identifies himself with the interests, problems and values of the new society in which he finds himself.
The aspiration towards America becomes increasingly irresistible in the following decades, when the USA gradually becomes the center of the modern world - with dizzying industrial achievements, with fantastic inventions, unimaginable skyscrapers, bridges, roads and canals, with revolutions in everyday life and entertainment. The American dream is not just a dream of a "little house on the prairie" and quick riches. It is a dream of another social order with more freedom and opportunities for everyone. This ideal is the basis of the social structure in the USA. With all the complexity and contradictions of this society, in which, as everywhere, there is also a sea of injustices and imperfections. But unlike elsewhere, it has a well-structured institutional system and an amazingly vibrant citizenry, filled with the will to overcome even the most dramatic social ills; immune to laziness, resignation, and waiting for someone else to fix things; capable of pushing itself out of the depths of any crisis, bursting with inimitable public energy and a will for change, and emitting far-sighted leaders.
After the founding of the United States, the first American Congress was convened in New York (the first capital), before which the first American president, George Washington, was sworn in. He arrived solemnly after a seven-day journey from his home in Mount Vernon. Everywhere he was greeted with acclamations, solemn assemblies, and spontaneous rallies. On April 30, 1789, on the balcony of the Federal Building, in front of the enthusiastic gaze of a crowded citizenry, Washington took the oath provided for in the Constitution. The President's office (the predecessor to today's Oval Office in the White House) was located in Franklin House in Lower Manhattan. The desk at which he worked still stands there today.
I recall all this because on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the United States, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani sat behind this desk and read a speech that denied almost everything that symbolizes America. He made the fundamental mistake of historical ignorance: to judge the problems, processes, assessments, and desires of people from other eras by today's standards. In essence, he denied Washington's work. He denied a free society and a free economy. He proclaimed hatred of wealth and worship of the state-nursing nurse. This type of thinking - socialist and paternalistic - is well known in the countries of the socialist camp and is what they are because of it. One thing must be clear, however. America cannot be measured by the standards of socialism, which turns the state into a master. Washington did not become a revolutionary because he hated wealth and freedom, but because he rejected the arbitrariness of state power. He did not lead a rebellion against the most powerful military power of the era - the British Empire - in order to increase the role of the state in the lives of its citizens. Quite the opposite. The entire generation of the Founding Fathers rejected any concentration of political power, whether in the hands of a king, a parliament, or a factional majority.
Mamdani's political project today is built on a radically opposite idea of the state. More state control and regulation, redistribution, and an all-pervasive state that tells us how much to have, what to have, how to think, what to say, and what to believe. The Founding Fathers assumed that free people, pursuing their own interests, could create a prosperous society if the state guaranteed rules, not results. And so it did. The political tradition to which Mamdani belongs postulated the opposite - that fair outcomes require constant political adjustment of free choice.
Mamdani's speech sounded ridiculous from behind the desk in Washington, because it is a kind of indictment of America. But History has a habit of refuting such unnatural ideological constructions. American history is an unquestionable confirmation of all this. Because America and all those millions of people who came through Ellis Island in New York and through Angel Island in San Francisco Bay in the 18th-20th centuries, aspire to America because it is a complete negation of what people like Mamdani believe today. They come there not because America was perfect, but because no other country has offered such a great possibility of changing one's own destiny. They do not cross the Atlantic to seek subsidies and social benefits. They go there for a simple idea - that this was the only place in the world where they could unleash their own efforts without the state hindering them with stifling bureaucracy and robbing them with excessive taxes. It was this simple idea that transformed a country of fewer than four million inhabitants at the end of the 18th century into the most powerful country in human history - a center of attraction for billions around the world.
Of course, America has never been without sin. Slavery is a heinous crime. Racial segregation was a reality. There have been economic crises, corruption, exploitation, and discrimination. But American history shows something that Mamdani's speech barely notices. Overcoming these grave social ills is achieved not by renouncing the essence of America and the principles of the republic, but by applying them more and more comprehensively. This is the most specific feature of American history: the most important political and constitutional reforms have almost always been aimed at expanding freedom, not at expanding the role of the state.
Two worlds - History has already decided which one is superfluous. And no, this is not George Washington's world!