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The Freedom Principles: America's Promise at a Crossroads
Thomas France
January 2025DESCRIPTION:
"A rousing aspirational
assessment of American values." - Kirkus Reviews
This book is part memoir, part family history, and part discussion of American politics, history, and culture, but it mostly is a celebration of America's promise of freedom and democracy. This promise empowers us to infuse our lives with meaning, fulfillment, prosperity, and happiness, but it is at a crossroads, stalemated by fear, anger, and division that has swamped our public life. Nearly 250 years into America's audacious experiment, the divisions that are the natural byproduct of our national soul threaten to overwhelm us.
Our current American stalemate does not require a political or cultural revolution. What we need instead is a better understanding and appreciation of the fundamental principles that empower our freedom and bolster our democracy:
- Fairness, the foundation of freedom;
- Responsibility, the price of freedom;
- Engagement, the inspiration for freedom;
- Enterprise, the engine of freedom;
- Discipline, the conscience of freedom;
- Opportunity, the product of freedom; and
- Morality, the soul of freedom.
This book explores the impact each of these Freedom Principles has had on the author’s life and illustrates how they can inform and guide our individual lives and help manage and support our collective relationships. The Freedom Principles provide a platform of common understanding and values that can help us better navigate our differences and disagreements and make them more a source of strength than a seed of disintegration and destruction. Embracing the Freedom Principles gives us the strength to resist fear, anger, and hate; it allows us to solve problems and find success; it enables freedom to be a way of life, not just a slogan.
With a renewed personal commitment to these Freedom Principles, we can overcome our fears, begin to heal some of our divisions, become more comfortable trusting ourselves and our fellow citizens, and work more purposefully and effectively in pursuit of our individual happiness. We can write a new chapter of the American story that recognizes freedom and democracy as our shared American value.
EXCERPT:
The United States of America was founded on an audacious promise, boldly proclaimed in its Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
This bold Declaration, radical for the time in which it was made, promised that the United States of America would ensure the right of Americans to be free human beings and to collectively have the ultimate voice in preserving that right. America’s founding promise forever linked freedom and democracy.
As the Declaration of Independence recognized, this promise is powerful and inspirational because it reflects fundamental truths. Freedom unleashes our human potential by incentivizing us to maximize our spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical potential, and democracy is the only viable means for free people to collectively give their consent to be governed. Together, freedom and democracy are our guiding light.
REVIEWS:
The author’s nonfiction debut was inspired by his reflections on the hardships faced by his parents (“solid, quiet, down-to-earth, unpretentious people” who came from “humble, at times desperate, beginnings”) and grandparents, as well as on the many opportunities he enjoyed while growing up and going to school in the United States. He blames himself and other members of his generation—he was born in 1970—for not teaching younger generations to value these opportunities. “If America’s promise of freedom and democracy does not endure,” he writes, “it will not be the fault of our young people who lacked faith in that promise”—it will be the fault of older Americans not doing enough to teach young people about it. Interweaving many scenes from his own life (including moving memories of losing first his mother, then his father) with broader observations about the nature of the United States, France breaks down the country’s promise of freedom into a handful of “freedom principles,” including engagement, opportunity, responsibility, fairness, and morality. However, he also consistently warns readers about what he sees as signs of serious deterioration in American political systems—sounding a tone of warning that tempers the sunniness of much of the book, and when he asserts that “One of the parties has been infected” with an “authoritarian spirit…and the other party has become so weakened in much of the country by its ideological purity that it is incapable of building a strong national coalition in support of freedom and democracy.” Some readers may feel that this has created a situation in which many Americans care little about “freedom principles.” However, the author addresses this by condemning passivity and apathy, effectively expressing a sense of faith in American people as individuals; this gives the book a feeling of infectious optimism that makes the book a bracing read: “Ordinary Americans live life with gratitude, empathy, respect, responsibility, discipline, strength, determination, sacrifice, courage, and faith; they make America strong; they make America good.”
A rousing aspirational assessment of American values.
Kirkus Reviews