THE FREEDOM PRINCIPLES

Corporate attorney France offers a call for preserving the foundational principles of the United States.

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.