Published on AMAC
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.