JUST GET THE REPUBLICAN LIBERTY RIGHT:

Chesterton came to identify the real greatness of the U.S.A. not so much with effective democracy (like Belloc, he grew to be rather disillusioned with party-politics democracy in the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere) as with egalitarianism. Yet the word and the cluster of concepts it unites need distinguishing into at least four categories that are not easy to harmonize: equality under God (ultimate equality: the equal worth or value of all human beings), equality under the law (political equality; equal access to public goods), equality of opportunity (social-economic equality: "equal chances"), and equality of result, outcome, or condition. It is a commonplace of political commentary that the second and third kinds of equality can be harmonized with liberty but not with the last kind of equality, which from Rousseau to Marx, Lenin, the Khmer Rouge, and Mao Zedong has been the obsession of egalitarian revolutionaries: equality of outcome.

Chesterton came to see the ultimate egalitarian assertion of the American Declaration of Independence and the life, achievement, and model of Abraham Lincoln as the key to the American republic, which he famously called "the nation with the soul of a church." In his 1922 book on America, Chesterton wrote of the relation between democracy and equality that "there is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the Divine origin of man." He had seen throughout his lifetime the grievous flaws and failures of "the drama of atheist humanism," especially in its social-Darwinist/imperialist and Nietzschean forms but also in Bolshevik Russian Communism. In 1944 his first biographer, Maisie Ward, chose to capitalize, in the text of her work, his assertion about the Christian dogmatic basis for any defensible democratic ideal, and she called it "the climax of Gilbert's thinking about America."

Tweet   @brothersjudd