If You Only Read One July 4th Essay. . .

Make it this one, by Charles C. Cooke, ex-British, American author for National Review:

I Complain about America Out of Love — and Fear for the Future

. . . Today, on July 4, I will celebrate the United States as if I had just come out of a Soviet prison. I will sing, and wax lyrical, and drink, and clothe myself in red, white, and blue. This year, I shall make fewer jokes about King George III than I did the last, and I shall find the celebrations more familiar in turn. And then, on Monday, I shall go back to griping like a whisky-sodden curmudgeon. As Americans well-versed in the vernacular might ask, “What gives?”

The answer is simple: I gripe so vehemently about America because I fear for her future. If, as seems possible at the moment, we were to lose the United States as a bastion of classically liberal values, we would in effect be losing classical liberalism per se. And then there’d be nowhere else to go. In no other country do political debates begin from first principles: “Should the state be doing this?”; “How does this affect the individual?”; “What does this say about us?” In no other country have the beautiful principles of the Enlightenment been written down and set above the government’s reach — there for the people to demand if they dare. In no other country is power so effectively fractured as to give the dissenters a fighting chance when the mob shows up at the gates. America is sui generis. It is eccentric. It is historically without equal. It is our one shot at freedom. . .

Sometimes it takes someone from the outside to see the value. Read the whole thing.