America is Not Either Or, It's Both And

Bill Clinton once shot back at black incitement to violence against whites, and wore it as a badge of a non-extreme third way ever thereafter. His critics would say his sincerity was on full display in Waco and Kosovo.

The founders had already discovered a third way of their own, however, and had called it America:

The third model of human nature is found in the thinking of the American founders. “If men were angels,” wrote James Madison, the father of the Constitution, in Federalist Paper No. 51, “no government would be necessary.” But Madison and the other founders knew men were not angels and would never become angels. They believed instead that human nature was mixed, a combination of virtue and vice, nobility and corruption. People were swayed by both reason and passion, capable of self-government but not to be trusted with absolute power. The founders’ assumption was that within every human heart, let alone among different individuals, are competing and sometimes contradictory moral impulses and currents.


Thanks to one of those contradictory moral impulses, the American Revolutionaries shot back using real bullets when Redcoat extremists came to assert the absolute power of the Crown, not unlike the Korean Americans who took to the rooftops in Los Angeles in 1992 to defend their property against rioters. Americans at their best recognize that sometimes absolutism must be met with force, and don't lie about it or apologize for it.

Don't miss the rest of "Human Nature and Capitalism" here.