Live Free Or Die

America (and the World) on the Brink

Sean Hannity

• Publisher: Threshold Editions
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781982149994
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER America's top-rated cable news host offers his first book in over ten years: a look at America's fight against those who would reverse our tradition of freedom. America is great for a reason. Built on principles of freedom, rugged individualism, and self-sufficiency, no country has ever accumulated more power and wealth, abused it less, or used that power more to advance the human condition.And yet, as America blossomed, leftwing radicalism and resentment festered beneath the surface, threatening to undermine democracy in the form of social justice warriors, the deep state, and compromised institutions like academia and the mainstream media.With the Democratic victory in 2020, we are now at risk for a big step toward full-blown socialism along with the economic dysfunction and social strife that are its hallmarks. With radical Democrats demanding the Green New Deal, socialized medicine, abortion on demand, open borders, abolishing the Electoral College, packing the Supreme Court, and an end to free speech, our great nation will be fundamentally transformed beyond recognition.Ronald Reagan once said, "Freedom is but one generation away from extinction, " and his words have never rung truer. In Live Free or Die, Sean demonstrates why now is an All Hands on Deck moment to save the Republic.

CHAPTER ONE “A Republic—If You Can Keep It”

I begin the book with a brief history of America’s foundation. I start here because if we don’t understand where we came from, how this country was designed, and the principles that founded two hundred years of success, we will never be able to reestablish American greatness. This is crucial.

Sometimes we Americans act like we take our freedoms for granted—as though we’ve lost sight of our history and the sacrifices our ancestors made so that we could be free. Have we forgotten what it means to be free? Have we taught our kids the importance of our founding principles? Have we shown them the direct connection between preserving our Constitution intact and maintaining our liberties? Do they understand why the United States of America is strong and prosperous while other nations aren’t? Have we sufficiently explained the miracles of a free market system and the evils of socialism? I make a point of emphasizing all these things on my radio and television programs day after day and night after night. And I intend to elaborate on them here.

I make no secret of my love for America and for its founding tradition and documents. Americans are committed to the individual as well as the greater good, to liberty, and to virtue.¹ I often quote one of the great founders and pioneers of talk radio, Barry Farber, who recently passed away: No country has ever accumulated more power and wealth, or abused them less, and, I would add, has used them to advance the human condition more than the United States. In the last twenty-five years, global poverty has decreased by two-thirds, largely due to free market capitalism that America has been instrumental in spreading.² Americans generously share our wealth with the world, both through government aid and private charities. America is still the world’s beacon of freedom and the place where everyone wants to come, knowing they can pursue their aspirations and enjoy the guarantee of equal opportunity under the law.

This country paid the price for world freedom by defeating fascism, Nazism, communism, and Imperial Japan, and we are now leading the fight against radical Islamic terrorism. We emerged from World War II with far more power than any other nation in history, with the possible exception of Rome at the height of its empire. We had the world’s strongest economy and a staggering superiority in military capacity, which included a monopoly on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. Positioned to forcibly dominate the world, we instead exercised humble restraint.³

After our costly victory over Nazi Germany, we could have implemented the Morgenthau Plan—a strategy devised by Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. to eradicate Germany’s entire industrial base. Instead, under the leadership of U.S. secretary of state George C. Marshall, America included Germany in the Marshall Plan, providing $13 billion in aid to rebuild European cities, industries, and infrastructure and to stimulate U.S.–European commerce.⁴

America’s critics deny our intentions were altruistic because we were also trying to shield Western Europe from Soviet expansion.⁵ But protecting nations from the ravages of communism—a system responsible for nearly 100 million deaths worldwide in the last century alone⁶—is altruistic. Throughout the Cold War, the United States served as the bulwark for freedom and democratic principles against Soviet totalitarianism and its notorious slave labor camps, mass murder, and famines. Yes, the spread of freedom and prosperity worldwide also benefits us, but that does not diminish the benevolence of our world leadership. “Americans are as self-interested as any other people,” writes historian Robert Kagan. “But for at least 50 years they have been guided by the kind of enlightened self-interest that, in practice, comes dangerously close to resembling generosity.”⁷

Since the end of the Cold War, Americans have widely debated our rightful place in the world. Writing in 1998, Kagan observed that our generosity seemed to be fading—not due to arrogance but “because some Americans have grown tired of power, tired of leadership, and consequently, less inclined to demonstrate the sort of generosity that has long characterized their nation’s foreign policy. What many in Europe and elsewhere see as arrogance and bullying may be just irritability born of weariness.”⁸

Republicans are split on this question today, as many have indeed grown weary of America’s protracted wars. President Trump reflects these tensions—he’s no isolationist, but he clearly wants to reduce our global military footprint and prioritize our national interest in his foreign policy. As I’ve said many times, the president is tired of our country doing all the giving and getting little in return. He’s tired of our brave soldiers sacrificing everything and other nations failing to contribute their fair share toward their own security, let alone ours. He is second to none in wanting the strongest possible military, and he has acted on his promises to rebuild our defenses. But he wants to use them wisely and efficiently. “Great nations do not fight endless wars,” he said in his 2019 State of the Union address. “I got elected on bringing our soldiers back home.”⁹ Still, as shown by his victory over ISIS and his strike on Iranian archterrorist Qasem Soleimani, Trump doesn’t hesitate to use military force when it directly strengthens our national security. And once again, these actions also benefit our allies and other nations.

America has been and continues to be exceedingly generous compared to any other nation in history. But according to the political left, nearly everything America does is selfish and oppressive. From John Kerry’s slandering our troops in Vietnam during Senate testimony in 1971 to Barack Obama’s world apology tour, they blame America first and undercut this country at every opportunity. They are consistently trying to diminish our power and military.¹⁰ They reject our nation’s heritage, its values, and its very founding. They want to dilute our sovereignty by subsuming us in a larger international collective and by eradicating our borders.

This is the key to understanding the left today. They don’t merely oppose specific American policies, they oppose our long-standing societal values, and they resent the institutions and culture that arose from those values. They have little use for liberty because it limits their ability to impose their political vision. They want to take more of your money and spend it on their priorities. And they want to dictate the most minute details of your life, decreeing what kind of straws you can drink from, what kind of lightbulbs you can use, and what kind of power your home can use.

The founders wisely worried that future generations might take liberty for granted. Going well beyond that, the left seeks to redefine liberty as selfishness. If you drive a car, or eat meat, or take a long shower, or fly to visit your relatives, or own a gun, you’re not exercising your freedom, you’re now sinning against our whole society. It’s not easy to turn a nation against its founding ideals, but with its relentless assault on our liberty, traditions, and values, that is exactly what the left aims to do. This is a fairly new problem. Americans have always taken pride in this country’s exceptionalism and its unusual goodness. But the left seems to be on a mission to erode our natural patriotism. As a result, Democrats increasingly denounce America in ways we’ve rarely heard from our leaders, such as New York governor Andrew Cuomo declaring that “America was never that great,”¹¹ former attorney general Eric Holder claiming, “This notion of [America’s] greatness never in fact really existed,”¹² and Michelle Obama saying, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country.”

AN “INFORMED PATRIOTISM”

In his farewell address, President Ronald Reagan addressed the resurgence of national pride during his tenure in office, what he called the “new patriotism.” While he was gratified that patriotism was rebounding, he knew that for this positive attitude to endure it must reach deep into our national soul. He clarified that patriotism is not blind love of country or a stubborn sense that your country can do no wrong. “This national feeling is good,” he said, “but it won’t count for much, and it won’t last unless it’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge. An informed patriotism is what we want.”¹³

This makes perfect sense. To maintain national cohesiveness, our citizens should unite in their love for the country based on the ideals that set this nation apart. Until relatively recently, this was not controversial. Immigrants seeking U.S. citizenship have to learn about our Constitution and our legal system so they’ll develop an informed patriotism that ensures their loyalty to the values that underlie and guarantee our liberties.

The importance of an informed patriotism among our citizenry is one reason why I oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants and believe strongly that for America to retain a robust national identity, immigration should be a controlled and orderly process. The left, however, depicts this type of patriotism as racist and border enforcement as anti-American. They say a border wall contradicts who we are as a people. We should be an open refuge to all people at all times. Border enforcement advocates reject that notion outright, seeing the United States as a melting pot of different peoples united behind shared ideas—that is, assimilation.

A person does not have to be born in America to become American. Dinesh D’Souza became a citizen in 1991. Though born in India, he rightly considers himself American. He notes that an American could live in India for forty years and even become an Indian citizen, but he could not “become Indian,” and Indians wouldn’t consider such a person an Indian. Being an Indian, he says, “is entirely a matter of birth and blood. You become Indian by having Indian parents.” And that’s the norm throughout the world, but America is unique because “becoming American is less a function of birth or blood and more a function of embracing a set of ideas.”¹⁴

National pride is a natural, wholesome, and even necessary sentiment. Our national security depends on our common love of country—our collective commitment to the American idea and our firm recognition that America is worth defending precisely because it is exceptional. When you abandon the rule of law and grant amnesty to those who are here illegally, you undermine the legal and orderly flow of people into this country, their assimilation into our culture, the adoption of our shared ideas, our common commitment to our national interests, and our shared willingness to preserve and defend those interests.

But while our national ideals are universal in their truth, American patriotism involves more than a consensus about a set of principles, no matter how noble. It involves embracing our national identity as well—our history as a nation. “We must know… not only our creed but also our culture,” wrote historian Wilfred McClay. “We need to take aboard fully all that was entailed in our forbears’ bold assertion that all human beings are created equal in the eyes of the Creator and that they bear an inherent dignity that cannot be taken away from them. But we also need to remember, and teach others to remember, the meaning of Lexington and Concord, and Independence Hall, and Gettysburg, and Promontory summit, and Pointe du Hoc, and Birmingham, and West Berlin, and countless other places and moments of spirit and sacrifice in the American past….”¹⁵

Already in the 1980s, President Reagan was distressed by the inroads being made by “blame America first” types. He lamented the dissemination of anti-American messages in our schools, culture, and media. “Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world?” he asked. He noted that people thirty-five years of age and older “grew up in a different America.” A love of country and for its institutions was instilled in them. “If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio,” or even from the popular culture. “The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties.”¹⁶

Reagan continued, “But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed.” Younger parents, he said, weren’t sure that it was right to teach their children to appreciate America in the same way. In the popular culture, “well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise.” Freedom, he noted, was the exception in history, not the rule, and it must be nurtured and defended. “Freedom is special and rare,” he said. “It’s fragile; it needs protection.”¹⁷

Yes, patriotism must be based on something more than a reflexive loyalty to country, and our appreciation for freedom must be cultivated. That’s why I’ve spent considerable time on my radio and television shows focusing on history and explaining the importance of our founding documents. I’m grateful for this opportunity because I am fascinated by our nation’s origins and subsequent history. I am convinced that the more information Americans have about our actual history—not the revisionist version spewed by leftist writers and academics who want to tear down this country—the more they will appreciate America. I want to help set the record straight to promote our informed patriotism.

As I’ve said repeatedly, we must fight harder to protect what makes this country great: our Constitution, our values, the equal application of our laws, and the American people, who work hard every day, pay their taxes, and love their country.

While President Reagan is correct that freedom has been rare historically, it is at the crux of our own founding. It is who we are and what we’ve always been. It is a major part of our uniqueness. The colonists came to this land in search of religious and political liberty, and they established free, self-governing colonies. They eventually broke from the British not as rebels or revolutionaries but to recapture the freedom that Britain had previously afforded us through its “benign neglect” of the colonies. After the War of Independence, they were determined to form a government under which they could prosper as a free people. Throughout our history, preserving our liberty has been the bond that has united us as a people. Our ancestors sacrificed their lives to ensure they and their descendants would live in freedom.

I now want to take a closer look at why America is exceptional. Let’s review how the colonists orga...