Promise #4: Secure Our God-given Individual Right To Enjoy The Blessings Of Liberty

The Declaration of Independence famously asserted the belief of America’s Founders that “all men are created equal” and endowed with God-given rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

“The pursuit of Happiness” is central to America’s heroic experiment in self-government.

“Pursuit of Happiness” is “pursuit of Blessedness.”

An individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish.

Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought. This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like.

Many find happiness through their work. Think of dedicated teach- ers or health care professionals you know, entrepreneurs or plumbers throwing themselves into their businesses—anyone who sees a job well done as a personal reward.

Religious devotion and spirituality are the greatest sources of happiness around the world. Still others find themselves happiest in their local voluntary communities of friends, their neighbors, their civic or charitable work. The American Republic was founded on principles prioritizing and maximizing individuals’ rights to live their best life or to enjoy what the Framers called “the Blessings of Liberty.”

It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776. They resent Americans’ audacity in insisting that we don’t need them to tell us how to live. It’s this inalienable right of self-direction—of each person’s opportunity to direct himself or herself, and his or her community, to the good— that the ruling class disdains.

The next conservative President should go beyond merely defending America’s energy interests but go on offense, asserting them around the world. America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem; they are the lifeblood of economic growth. American dominance of the global energy market would be a good thing: for the world, and, more importantly, for “we the people.” It’s not just about jobs, even though unleashing domestic energy production would create millions of them. It’s not just about higher wages for workers who didn’t go to college, though they would receive the raises they have missed out on for two generations.

Full-spectrum strategic energy dominance would facilitate the reinvigoration of America’s entire industrial and manufacturing sector as we disentangle our economy from China. Globally, it would rebalance power away from dangerous regimes in Russia and the Middle East.

It would build powerful alliances with fast-growing nations in Africa and provide us the leverage to counter Chinese ambitions in South America and the Pacific. Locally, it would drive billions of dollars of private investment to the communities that have been hammered by globalization since the 1990s. And it would clarify our intentions to Beijing that the next President can ensure that a large part of America’s reindustrialization is in the production of the equipment we will need to dissuade future foreign meddling with U.S. vital interests.

With the Declaration and Constitution, our nation’s Founders handed to us the means with which to preserve this right. Abraham Lincoln wrote of the Dec- laration as an “apple of gold” in a silver frame, the Constitution. So must the next conservative President look to these documents when the elites mount their next assault on liberty.

Left to our own devices, the American people rejected European monarchy and colonialism just as we rejected slavery, second-class citizenship for women, mercantilism, socialism, Wilsonian globalism, Fascism, Communism, and (today) wokeism. To the Left, these assertions of patriotic self-assurance are just so many signs of our moral depravity and intellectual inferiority—proof that, in fact, we need a ruling elite making decisions for us.

But the next conservative President should be proud, not ashamed of Americans’ unique culture of social equality and ordered liberty. After all, the countries where Marxist elites have won political and economic power are all weaker, poorer, and less free for it.

The United States remains the most innovative and upwardly mobile society in the world. Government should stop trying to substitute its own preferences for those of the people. And the next conservative President should champion the dynamic genius of free enterprise against the grim miseries of elite-di- rected socialism.

The promise of socialism—Communism, Marxism, progressivism, Fascism, whatever name it chooses—is simple: Government control of the economy can ensure equal outcomes for all people. The problem is that it has never done so.

There is no such thing as “the government.” There are just people who work for the government and wield its power and who—at almost every opportunity—wield it to serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second. This is not a failing of one nation or socialist party, but inherent in human nature.

We see the same corruption expressed on an individual level whenever billionaire climate activists, who want to outlaw carbon-fueled transportation, fly to A-list conferences on their private jets. Or when COVID-19 shutdown politicians like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and California Governor Gavin Newsom were caught at the hair salon or dining at fancy restaurants after moralizing about how everyone else must stay home and forgo such luxuries during the pandemic. For socialists, who are almost always well-to-do, socialism is not a means of equalizing outcomes, but a means of accumulating power. They never get around to helping anyone else.

The Soviet empire was a social and economic failure. Even socialist Senator Bernie Sanders’ home state of Vermont was forced to repeal the state’s single-payer health care system just three years after creating it.

By contrast, in countries with a high degree of economic freedom, elites are not in charge because everyone is in charge. People work, build, invest, save, and create according to their own interests and in service to the common good of their fellow citizens.

There is a reason why the private economy hews to the maxim “the customer is always right” while government bureaucracies are notoriously user-unfriendly, just as there is a reason why private charities are cheerful and government welfare systems are not.

It’s not because grocery store clerks and PTA moms are “good” and federal bureaucrats are “bad.” It’s because private enterprises—for-profit or nonprofit—must cooperate, to give, to succeed.

So as the American people take back their sovereignty, constitutional authority, respect for their families and communities, they should also take back their right to pursue the good life.

The next President should promote pro-growth economic policies that spur new jobs and investment, higher wages, and productivity. Yes, that agenda should include overdue tax and regulatory reform, but it should go further and include antitrust enforcement against corporate monopolies. It should promote educational opportunities outside the woke-dominated system of public schools and universities, including trade schools, apprenticeship programs, and student-loan alternatives that fund students’ dreams instead of Marxist academics.

The next President should crack down on the crony capitalist corruption that enables America’s largest corporations to profit through political influence rather than competitive enterprise and customer satisfaction.

America is not an economy; it is a country. Economic freedom is not the only important freedom. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the freedom to assemble also represent key components of the American promise.

BEST EFFORT

Ultimately, the Left does not believe that all men are created equal They think they are special. They certainly don’t think all people have an unalienable right to pursue the good life.

They think only they themselves have such a right along with a moral responsibility to make decisions for everyone else. They don’t think any citizen, state, business, church, or charity should be allowed any freedom until they first bend the knee.

This book, this agenda, the entire Project 2025 is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.

Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right.