Is this 250th year of American independence a swan song for the Republic? Or can it be a new birth of freedom?
The Thread of Liberty, a new documentary by Ned Ryun (also available on YouTube), argues that the answer to that question isn’t written in stone. It will be determined by whether Americans themselves pass on an understanding of the Founding Era’s genius and love of liberty for which we are famous.
Ryun, president of American Majority, an organization that trains conservatives to win politically, particularly at state and local levels, produced, directed, and narrated this new film to help all Americans see just how remarkable the American experiment has been.
The success of the United States was never guaranteed from the beginning. The contradictions of slavery almost killed it, and the last century of Progressive manipulations of our constitutional system and education has done great damage to it. But there is still hope.
The film begins with Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman whose 1832 visit to study our penal system resulted in the famous text Democracy in America – something much more than a bureaucratic white paper. Tocqueville provides a startling account of how Americans possessed a dynamic system that put together religious faith and liberty, encouraged vigorous civil institutions, and balanced competing powers in government, all the while encouraging that rarest of civic virtues: self-government.
From Tocqueville’s perspective, the threat to America came not from a brutal tyrant but from the rather undramatic but terrible way in which a wealthy citizenry begins to value comfort more than their desire to be free or do their duty to God and to each other. “Soft despotism” is what the Frenchman called it.
From this starting point, the film moves to the history of the American Founding, a parlous proposition not only because it challenged the greatest power in the world at the time, but also because the Founders wanted republican government despite their knowledge that every republican experiment had failed—and most had been short-lived.
While Ryun does a fine job narrating, the all-star cast of conservative scholars and commentators really improves the film.
The New Criterion’s urbane Roger Kimball has a penchant for expressing things in language that moves from sophistication to punchy demotic slang. University of Minnesota law professor Ilan Wurman seems to almost vibrate with intensity when he talks about the times in history when the Declaration of Independence was contradicted by Southerners such as John C. Calhoun or Progressives such as Woodrow Wilson. It’s a great contrast to the laconic deliveries of Hillsdale historian Wilfred McClay or classicist Victor Davis Hanson. The Conservative Partnership Institute’s Rachel Bovard is both direct and reverent, especially when contemplating how the unlikeliness of American success at the Founding gives one a sense of the Providence to which George Washington so often referred.
That reverence runs through the film, too. Ryun points back to John Winthrop’s understanding of his small Massachusetts Bay Colony as bound not by a mere contract but by a covenant with God and each other. That religious understanding of Americans’ political life continued through the preaching of George Whitefield and others over the next century and a half. Though the generation of 1776 may not have been as theologically orthodox as Winthrop’s hardy band, they too understood that they were building a nation “under God.”
The rights the Founders proclaimed were certainly shaped by their experience as Englishmen who understood themselves to be under both God and the rule of law. Wurman describes the early Americans as inheritors of “English customary constitutionalism.” But in declaring their independence and setting out the natural rights of all men, it is easy to see why so many believed, as did Thomas Paine, that America’s cause was “the cause of all mankind.”
The film walks viewers through the struggle for a constitution that would bind the nation together. It also walks through that great contradiction that was slavery. After all, if the claim that all men are created equal is true, then chattel slavery is a counter-Declaration.
The end of the Civil War, then, was itself a fulfillment of the Declaration’s promise. As Hillsdale College historian Paul Rahe observes, the end of the American Revolution can be thought of as either 1865 or 1964—the freeing of the slaves or the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Lincoln was “renewing the thread of liberty” with the Emancipation Proclamation.
Intersecting with the problems of American racial discrimination was the rise of the Progressive movement that began with the proposition, as Hillsdale president Larry Arnn explains, that Progressives “know better” than their fellow Americans what is good for them. The Constitution, with its separation of powers and limits on all governmental power, was seen as the enemy. Progressives, Roger Kimball explains, made a “full-throated assault on the Constitution.”
Their attack consisted of building up a massive administrative state that would become the real source of power in the nation. Congressional representatives write vague laws that are then made explicit by unelected bureaucrats. “It’s impossible to have a redress of grievances,” the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Steve Simpson explains, “with an administrative state.”
The threats we face from the continuing imbalances in our constitutional order are emphasized throughout the final portion of the film. Even more, what we face is a loss of the understanding of the importance of virtue, which is connected to religious faith, and a sense of patriotism. Our public (and many private) educational institutions rarely inculcate these, and our entertainment industry rarely brings them to life. Too many Americans prefer comfort to the challenges of self-government.
The Thread of Liberty’s 84 minutes provide a great introduction to the story of America that hasn’t yet ended—and, God willing, won’t ever end. While not complete (the Civil Rights Act’s imposition through the administrative state yielded the woke anti-white and anti-Asian racism the Trump administration has been fighting), the story and the message are both coherent and compelling. The brilliant commentators and the multitude of historical pictures and illustrations are accompanied by a beautiful original musical score by Niccolò Hilgendorf.
Both instructive and illuminating, The Thread of Liberty is a great tool for helping people revive or develop that “instinctive patriotism” that Tocqueville found so striking in the America of the 1830s and which is in too short a supply today.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
