Americanism and Human Equality

The Center for Human Equality, founded by Russell McAlmond, occupies a distinctive place in contemporary American discourse. Explicitly nonpartisan, it declines to serve as an instrument of any political party or electoral faction. Its purpose is instead to conserve and advance a deeper inheritance: the political philosophy of Americanism that emerged with the founding of the United States and has been refined across subsequent generations.

Americanism rests on the self-evident truth, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, that all human beings are created equal and are endowed with unalienable rights. From this axiom flow the practical arrangements—limited government, secure private property, and free markets—that have proven uniquely capable of enabling what John Locke described as the conditions for individual human flourishing.

The Center’s contribution is to articulate the relational philosophy of Ethical Individualism that follows directly from this equality of value, insisting that individual rights cannot be subordinated to claims of class, race, or any other collective category.

Americanism is not a static creed frozen in 1776.

It is a living political philosophy whose core principles—human equality, individual rights prior to government, and the economic corollary of capitalism grounded in private property—were first systematically articulated by the American founders drawing on English and Enlightenment sources, especially Locke.

Locke argued that individuals enter civil society to secure their natural rights to life, liberty, and estate, and that legitimate government must be limited precisely so that persons, rather than classes or estates, may exercise their productive and creative capacities. The founders translated this insight into a constitutional order whose design deliberately constrains majority power and governmental ambition.

Subsequent improvements—the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the franchise, the civil-rights statutes that dismantled legal caste systems—have consistently aimed at more fully realizing the original promise that government exists to protect individuals, not to assign them to hierarchies of group privilege or grievance. Americanism therefore improves itself by returning, again and again, to the horizontal equality of persons: every human being possesses an infinite value simply by virtue of being human, arrayed equally along a single plane of dignity rather than ranked in vertical hierarchies of class or identity.

Ethical Individualism is the human-relational philosophy that makes this political equality livable in daily life. Derived from the same premise that appears in the Declaration—“all men are created equal”—it holds that each person is a unique and irreplaceable bearer of infinite value. Because that value is equal and horizontal, no one may be judged, preferred, or penalized solely on the basis of group membership.

Character, action, and individual agency are the proper criteria of evaluation.

This stance is not an abstraction; it is the practical antidote to the collectivist habit of reducing persons to representatives of race, class, sex, or ideology. The Center advances Ethical Individualism precisely because Americanism’s political success depends upon a culture that refuses to compromise individual rights for the sake of group claims. Where group rights are elevated above individual rights, the founding logic is inverted and the conditions for creative and economic flourishing are narrowed.

History supplies the comparative evidence.

No other political system has matched the sustained record of Americanism in expanding the material and cultural possibilities available to ordinary individuals. By limiting the power of the state and securing the right of private property, the American order unleashed the productive energies of millions of unique persons. The result has been unprecedented economic growth, technological innovation, and the progressive extension of opportunity to previously excluded groups—not through the engineering of outcomes by group, but through the removal of legal barriers to individual effort.

Locke’s insight that government should be structured so that individuals, rather than classes, can flourish has been vindicated by the comparative poverty and stagnation of theocratic and totalitarian regimes that subordinated persons to divine, racial, or class collectives. Those systems invariably limited both human rights and creative capacity; Americanism has expanded both.

Because the Center is nonpartisan, it does not prescribe electoral allegiance. It does, however, insist that any political party or movement that abandons the core of Americanism—human equality understood as equal individual value, the inviolability of individual rights against group claims, and the economic framework of capitalism and private property—places the country on a trajectory back toward the theocracies and totalitarian states that have historically constrained human flourishing.

The continual improvement of Americanism is possible only so long as its foundational principles remain the measure of political legitimacy. When parties treat persons primarily as members of contending groups, or when they seek to replace limited government and secure property with collective control, they forfeit the advantages that have made the American experiment uniquely successful.

The Center for Human Equality therefore serves as a nonpartisan custodian of this inheritance. By promoting Ethical Individualism as the relational expression of the Declaration’s equality, and by recalling the Lockean and founding commitment to individual flourishing under limited government, it works to keep Americanism both faithful to its origins and open to further improvement.

The alternative is not a different path to progress; it is a return to the older patterns of hierarchy and coercion that Americanism was invented to overcome.

In preserving the principle that every human being is created equal and possesses infinite, horizontal value, the Center defends the only political philosophy that has consistently demonstrated the capacity to secure rights, unleash creativity, and generate widespread human flourishing.