Harry Truman, one of the great Presidents, was a student of Western history, going back to the Greeks and Romans. He gave a lot of thought to leadership, and why and how some people rise to it while others don’t. His view, with which I concur, gets to the essence of our American democracy, in which all men are created equal—but that doesn’t translate into all men having equal outcomes in their lives.
(Parenthetically, I hope no one takes offense at my phrase “all men,” which is straight from the Constitution. I hope you all know that I would have written “all men and women” except that phrase is cumbersome and I try to keep my words simple.)
Here’s what Truman observed, as published in “Where The Buck Stops,” which consists of excerpts from his diary, as edited by his daughter, Margaret Truman Daniel: “Leadership…comes about naturally. You can start a bunch of youngsters off in any program you desire, whether it’s a local civil government [or] local organization [or] any other thing you want to do, and there’ll be certain men of talent who come to the top naturally. It doesn’t make any difference what it is…somebody has to have the brains to lead. This isn’t an aristocratic viewpoint. In our form of government, the ordinary fellow has the same opportunity to rise in the world...The poorest of poor men have gone straight to the top because of our type of government and philosophy. Any man from the bottom to the top of the financial ladder can become a leader if he has the abilities.”
Notice that Truman did not say that government has the responsibility to give financial assistance to the poor in order to help them go “to the top.” Truman certainly believed in a modest form of welfare, as did Franklin Roosevelt, but Truman never took the position, as do the radical progressives of today, that government must ensure equal outcomes in all performance by all people. Truman believed that such a belief is counter to common sense and to human nature. He thought that ambition, as such, was good, because it acted as a spur to encourage the individual to behave in ways appropriate to the American Dream: stay in school, obey the law, respect others, have great goals and work your tail off to achieve your dreams. Truman would have been shocked and offended by the modern progressive assertion that anyone who fails to succeed must automatically have been the victim of racism or any other ism. He would have argued, as John F. Kennedy did, that life isn’t fair, but that the American system makes life fairer than any other system ever devised in history.
This is the problem with progressives, and it’s a fatal one. Their insistence on equal outcomes runs contrary to the spirit in which this nation was founded. Progressives, of course, argue that the problem with the American theory of equality is that people of color, especially Blacks, have been, and still are, deliberately held down by racist beliefs on the part of the majority White population. However, this is an increasingly preposterous position. America is less White than it’s ever been, and still a majority of the population believes that individual effort, not government assistance, is the path to success.
People are fed up with the racial grievances expressed by radicals such as Carroll Fife and Pamela Price. There is no conspiracy to hold anyone down. We all want everyone to succeed. But, as Truman observed, people are held back, not by the resistance of others, but by the absence of ability. If the “ordinary fellow” fails to rise in the world, he has no one to blame but himself.
Steve Heimoff