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The original American ethos, forged in the Founding era, centered on individual liberty as a God-given, inalienable right—not a grant from government. It held that people are created equal in their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments exist solely to secure those rights, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. This produced a culture of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and suspicion of centralized power: citizens were expected to govern themselves through virtue, industry, and voluntary association rather than top-down coercion.
At its core was a belief in ordered liberty under law—republican self-government where free men could speak, worship, trade, innovate, and bear arms without arbitrary interference. It prized merit, experimentation, and the “pursuit of happiness” through one’s own efforts, while viewing tyranny, whether monarchical or majoritarian, as the eternal enemy. This wasn’t utopian equality of outcome or ethnic nationalism, but a radical confidence in the capacity of ordinary individuals to build prosperous lives if left largely free.
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