After Eight Years in America, A Troublesome Greeting

I remember it like it was yesterday: a gentleman of a strong stature closely studying my Russian passport with a physiognomy of careful suspicion. At last, after keeping my twelve year old self anxiously waiting for ten or fifteen minutes, the man smiled, stamped my passport, and said “welcome to America!” Excited to finally see the land of liberty and freedom, I hurried my parents outside the airport. It was there, when for the first time in my life, I saw a proud American flag of a proud American people.

What happened to our wonderful society? It has been some eight years since I immigrated to the United States from the Russian Federation; and I cannot help but notice that the same political principles that caused the suffering, starvation, and poverty in my motherland are now gaining traction in American political discourse.  Have we learned nothing from experience of human history in which my country sadly occupies a large and bloody chapter?  Have we forgotten what it’s like to be American, and to uphold liberty and freedom over social equality?

Modern American progressivism poses an interesting challenge to those who still keep a copy of the Federalist Papers by their bedside. Primarily, it manages to cleverly evade the topics of political philosophy by distracting us with social issues that often don’t belong on a national political arena in the first place. Meanwhile, an average American citizen slowly notices how his/her liberty is being kidnapped by an ever growing central state. Clever isn’t it?

This sort of expansion of government power or statsim, as some philosophers have called it, is not a mode of social existence that we ought to venerate. When warning about the dangers of Marxist statism, Mikhail Bakunin accurately observed that “If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.” Frédéric Bastiat also famously referred to the state as “a great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.” Both men, of course, could not have been more accurate in light of the historical events that followed these predictions.

Therefore, though I appreciate the progressive attempts at trying to make me feel like I’m still in my politically oppressive home, I insist on a lighter – more American – greeting.