Hoover said too much interference would mean economic normality would not return. Rugged individualism meant people were expected to overcome problems and succeed by their own efforts. They were not to depend on help from the government. Hoover thought aid would encourage idleness and damage morals. He was a self-made millionaire and expected others to be self-reliant.
Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman to refer to the disasters of Hoover's administration, during which the stock market Crash of occurred and the Great Depression began. A more rugged version of American masculinity is hard to find on screen. He called out the conformism hiding in the pose of rugged individuality. But what both men had in common was a streak of rugged individualism , stubbornness, and personal vision. By sticking to the variation you hold by, there is individualism.
Certainly there are no five miles equal in rugged grandeur to those beginning just below and ending above West Point. And then we must admit that rugged individualism has had real enemies who have sought to undo it and replace it. The Progressives, in particular, have fought rugged individualism on at least two grounds. Either they have sought to attach it to the Old West and open frontiers, rendering it irrelevant when the country was settled and people began to live together in cities; or they have shrunk it down to a set of selfish economic motives of the robber barons of yesterday, or the top 1 percent today, and have sought to attack it as unworthy of America.
Americans need to be reawakened to rugged individualism as more than a John Wayne cowboy of the West or a robber baron of the East. It is foremost a starting point of analysis for our unique society. America did not begin with the church or the state or the king as the center of things, but instead the individual. It is the individual who is the unit of analysis in America and everything else proceeds, as a series of choices, from that starting point.
We may choose a government or church or a particular kind of society, but those choices are made by Americans as individuals. We must not fall asleep on that core dimension of rugged individualism. We must also be reawakened to the centrality of individual liberty, or individual rights, that are at the core of rugged individualism.
The Declaration of Independence declares those individual rights and the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, protects them. Such rights are not anachronisms from another time, but are active and vital today. As Herbert Hoover warned when he returned to the United States from war-torn Europe, we must never give up our unique freedoms to the various totalitarianisms that were sweeping the Continent. We must be ever alert to the danger that government stands ready to limit our individual freedoms in favor of some other good—be it government takeovers of education or health care, or diminution of our freedoms of religion or speech, or allowing individual liberty to become a mere abstraction.
We must be reawakened to these cornerstones of rugged individualism in each generation. As Jefferson said, the world belongs to the living, and each generation must work out its own understanding of things. We should neither have a blind veneration for the past Federalist No.
As mentioned earlier, efforts to regulate the size of soda beverages was one such moment when people recognized that the government was going too far. But the real problem was the invasion of individual liberty—after all, who should be deciding what size beverage cup people buy? Surely not the government.
Another such missed opportunity came when the government declared millions of individual health insurance policies to be illegal because they did not contain all the protections government thought should be there. It turns out that many of those missing provisions had nothing to do with the health of the individual purchasing the policy—maternity care for young men, for example—but were one more super-sized government regulation to try to make the economics of federalized health care work.
Once again, this was a liberty moment and, in addition to denouncing the misleading government promise that if you liked your health care you should keep it, critics should have gone deeper to identify the attack on individual liberty. These efforts could help make individual liberty less of an abstraction and more of a priority for a younger generation so accustomed to big government. Then, in the words of the Scripture, we must strengthen and protect what remains. The Founders thought that the several checks and balances and separations of power in the Constitution were important to protect individual rights, especially against the passions of the moment and the power of government.
So rugged individualism, even today, relies on that very constitutional system for protection. Calls to break down the federalism structure—whether by strengthening executive power, or turning to some kind of parliamentary system, or allowing the courts to take over our social and economic decisions—are a kind of declaration of war against individual rights.
They are packaged more seductively, of course, as evolutionary steps in the development of a complex republic or as ways of breaking down barriers to government action. But now, as then, we need our federalist structure to protect American individualism.
On every issue we should continue to ask a vital set of questions: Is this something the government should do? If so, which branch: executive, legislative, or judicial? And which level: federal, state or local? These are the protections our constitutional system affords to individualism and liberty. In other words, the individual should again be the starting point of analysis, not the government. As one example, governments lined up to ban hand-held phones in cars, even though there was evidence that the real problem was not the physical distraction of holding a phone, but the driver inattention caused by talking on the phone.
Government reaction to the economic crisis, despite evidence that government policy frequently worsens the economy, is a larger example.
In the case of Obamacare there were policy options that would have helped the uninsured that did not inhibit the liberty of individuals to buy their own policies. The economic argument—that the funding only worked if everyone was in it together—has certainly not played out to be accurate, with a huge uninsured population despite massive investment in a misguided program. In an effort to do something, government often ends up doing the wrong thing. We must halt this notion that government is responsible for everything and must, in every case, do something.
Putting the public back into public policy would mean exploring what individuals, nonprofits, communities, businesses, and other nongovernmental entities might do, as well as government action. And even within the realm of government solutions, these schools focus primarily on national and international solutions to problems, not local approaches that may be more effective. In effect, schools of public policy are institutionalizing the mistaken approach of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and other Progressives that if only we had the right national experts or enlightened administrators able to run the federal system, things would be better, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
Improving civic education in America would also strengthen the spirit of rugged individualism. Polls consistently show that young people cannot name one of their home state US senators, nor do they understand basic elements of the Constitution. Without an understanding of the American system—or worse, with a kind of distaste for American history from misguided high school textbooks—young Americans will be hard-pressed to champion constitutional governance or protect individual rights.
With federal funding for civic education eliminated in , and only resumed in , and with the major emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math STEM , civic education has taken a back seat. Civic engagement has become a battle cry in education, which is fine—but it needs to be preceded by civic education.
The states need to get busy requiring courses in civic education and schools of education should make sure their graduates understand enough of the content of the American system to teach it effectively.
Finally, we need to be open to new formulations and partnerships for rugged individualism. As Tocqueville pointed out, American individualism was never a purely selfish, inwardly focused kind of individualism. Americans combined their individualism with a volunteer spirit, a tendency toward forming associations, and other practical qualities.
Hoover, who coined the term rugged individualism, said that in America it was always combined with equality of opportunity. So what new associations or qualities might make rugged individualism stronger and more a part of American life without losing its essential character?
For young people, especially, rugged individualism combined with a strong sense of community may seem attractive. Their commitment to community service and civic engagement reinforces this modern combination. Even the pioneers of the West often banded together to help one another build houses and communities, so this notion of rugged individualism combined with community could increasingly become what American individualism looks like.
Should it continue to be part of the formula? Dictionaries use words like toughness, determination, durability, and strength to define rugged. Are Americans still rugged today? Do we need to be?
Recent books suggest that it is still an important part of American character and success. Indeed, young people today will need to be resourceful to have the kind of future that they want. In a rapidly changing world, with difficult economic and national security challenges, resourcefulness, even ruggedness, will be needed to survive and prosper.
One would hope that there would at least be room for this understanding in the ongoing description of American character. Our book does not primarily concern the psychology or sociology of individualism, but rather how government policy affects rugged individualism.
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