How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

Ben Shapiro

• Publisher: Broadside e-books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780063001886
• eBook ISBN:
  9780063001893
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

A growing number of Americans want to tear down what it's taken us 250 years to build—and they'll start by canceling our shared history, ideals, and culture.

Traditional areas of civic agreement are vanishing. We can't agree on what makes America special. We can't even agree that America is special. We're coming to the point that we can't even agree what the word America itself means. "Disintegrationists" say we're stronger together, but their assault on America's history, philosophy, and culture will only tear us apart.

Who are the disintegrationists? From Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States to the New York Times' 1619 project, many modern analyses view American history through the lens of competing oppressions, a racist and corrupt experiment from the very beginning. They see American philosophy as a lie – beautiful words pasted over a thoroughly rotted system. They see America's culture of rights as a façade that merely reinforces traditional hierarchies of power, instead of being the only culture that guarantees freedom for individuals.

Disintegrationist attacks on the values that built our nation are insidious because they replace each foundational belief, from the rights to free speech and self-defense to the importance of marriage and faith communities, with nothing more than an increased reliance on the government. 

This twisted disintegrationist vision replaces the traditional "unionist" understanding that all Americans are united in a shared striving toward the perfection of universal ideals.

How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps shows that to be a cohesive nation we have to uphold foundational truths about ourselves, our history, and reality itself—to be unionists instead of disintegrationists. Shapiro offers a vital warning that if we don't recover these shared truths, our future—our union—as a great country is threatened with destruction.

Chapter 1
The American Philosophy

The American creed is simple.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Our founding fathers pledged their lives, their duty, and their sacred honor to these principles. So did the soldiers who fell at Gettysburg, the civil rights heroes who stood for their fulfillment, the men and women who brought freedom to billions across the globe. The Declaration’s ringing endorsement of equality, individual rights, and democracy has lost none of its power, despite being the subject of cliché, or despite deliberate misinterpretation.

The words of the Declaration of Independence still represent a singular, bedrock viewpoint. More than that, the theme of the Declaration represents a continuous through-line in American thinking. Ex-slave and second founding father Frederick Douglass found in the Declaration of Independence the halcyon call to freedom—Douglass endorsed its “great principles of political freedom and natural justice”—and a brutal rebuke to the toleration of slavery in the United States.1 Abraham Lincoln saw in the Declaration of Independence the philosophical axis mundi of the United States:

Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began—so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.2

Martin Luther King Jr., more than a century later, saw in the Declaration of Independence a promissory note yet to be fulfilled. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—the site built to honor the president who died in his own attempt to fulfill the words of the Declaration—King called for the completion of that task. “This [promissory] note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” King thundered. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”3

The words were not cataclysmically new, nor were they meant to be. They were meant to embody very old principles—principles rooted in Greek and Roman philosophy, in Judeo-Christian values, in English tradition. As Thomas Jefferson would write in May 1825, a year before his death, the goal was to embody eternal ideals: “Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.” The Declaration of Independence aimed at providing an “expression of the American mind,” synthesizing “sentiments of the day” drawn from both contemporaneous writing as well as “elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney . . .”4

So, what exactly was that “expression of the American mind”? Why does it remain relevant today?

The philosophy of the United States centers on three central principles, as articulated in the Declaration: on the reality of natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that preexist government; on the equality of men before the law; and on the notion that government is instituted only to protect those preexisting rights and equality of men before the law.

The philosophy of the Declaration of Independence remains the ideological glue that unifies us. Without it, as the Civil War demonstrated, we collapse. It is a philosophy of high ideals—unreachable ideals, perhaps, but eternal ones. We abandon it at our peril.

We Have Individual, Natural Rights

The Declaration of Independence posits that rights are self-evident, and that all individuals are bestowed those rights by Nature and Nature’s God. But what are our rights, and how can we know them? Why should human beings have rights?

These questions, as we will soon see, are quite open. They stand at the center of our current political conflicts. Some suggest that rights come from government, and that government therefore has the power to remove such rights. Some suggest that rights are merely utilitarian constructs—that rights are a handy way of thinking about “stuff other people shouldn’t do to us,” but can be overridden if the concerns of the many outweigh the concerns of the few.

The founding fathers, however, based their belief in rights in the framework of natural rights. Why? Because rights that spring from human beings aren’t rights at all—they’re privileges that may be dispensed with at any time. Rights that emanate from a higher source are indeed unalienable: they cannot be given away, taken away, or infringed upon, because they come from a source higher than power alone.

This philosophy did not spring full-blown to the minds of the founders. It had a long and rich history. The birth of natural rights came, in turn, from natural law philosophy. Natural law philosophy was rooted in two traditions that gradually fused into the belief system of the founders: Judeo-Christian morality, or Jerusalem, and Greek reason, or Athens. Judeo-Christian morality posited that human beings had inherent value; the Bible’s ringing statement of human equality in Genesis 1:27 provided fruitful ground for the most basic rebuke of caste systems: “And God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” This language served as a direct contrast to other ancient civilizations, which invested leaders alone with the image of God.5

Meanwhile, Greek philosophy suggested that what made man unique was his ability to use reason. Human beings, the Greeks believed, were not innately malleable or changeable. We were crafted by nature to use our minds; it was that capacity that separated us from the animals. Plato asserted that the purpose of the human soul was “managing, ruling, and deliberating.”6 Aristotle suggested that “the work of a human being is an activity of soul in accord with reason.”7

When the key Judeo-Christian premise—the inherent value of mankind—was added to the Greek belief that what made human beings different was their ability to reason, the concept of natural law was born. The philosophies of Jerusalem and Athens became the poles of Western civilization; at some times, Jerusalem reigned victorious, at other times, Athens. For centuries, Jerusalem and Athens actually pulled in the same direction. When Greek thought was revivified in the Christian West at the beginning of the second millennium, it led to an explosion in learning, particularly at universities sponsored by the Catholic Church. Famed theologian Hugh of Saint-Victor (1096–1141 CE) stated, “Learn everything, later you will see that nothing is superfluous”8; Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 CE) explained, “An error concerning the [science of creation] ends as false thinking about God.”9 Religious conflict didn’t tarnish the draw of natural law—it burnished it, providing the basis for a universalism absent in religious sectarianism. No wonder Hugo Grotius, the famous philosopher and jurist, appealed to natural law in the aftermath of the barbarous Thirty Years War, and in the aftermath of the transformative Peace of Westphalia, praising the “dictate of right reason which points out that an act, according as it is or is not in conformity with rational nature, has in it a quality of moral baseness or moral necessity; and that in consequence, such an act is either forbidden or enjoined by the author of nature, God.”10

Natural law thinking led to the development of natural rights. If human beings had a nature, and if that nature was reason, then man had a right to exercise his reason—and to exercise his will so long as he hurt no one else. As Hugo Grotius stated, “God created man free and sui iuris [under his own dominion], so that the actions of each individual and the use of his possessions were made subject not to another’s will but to his own.”11

Natural rights thinking reached its apex in the writings of John Locke (1632–1704). Like Grotius, Locke believed that because human beings have the ability to reason—because that is our nature—and because we all have inestimable value as creations of God, we have rights. Locke argued that in a state of nature, human beings had certain rights, rights that preexisted government. As he stated, “The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.”12 So, what were man’s rights under the laws of nature? The rights to life, liberty, and property. Human beings have a right to self-defense inherent in their very survival; they have a right to liberty of thought and action so far as they do not violate the rights of others; and they have a right to the property they accrue through their labor.13 Adam Smith, widely considered the philosophical expositor of free markets, took this view as well:

[T]he obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. . . . 14

Man’s nature was to reason; man was entitled to ...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The American Philosophy
• Chapter 2: Disintegrating American Philosophy
• Chapter 3: The American Culture
• Chapter 4: The Disintegrationist Culture
• Chapter 5: The American History
• Chapter 6: Disintegrating American History
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by Ben Shapiro
• Copyright
• About the Publisher