Romney, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Misinformed

The recent hullabaloo over a Romney adviser stating that Romney understands better than President Obama the special relationship between Britain and the United States demonstrates a total lack of historical understanding of what the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ means.

What uninformed people do not realize is that long before the term was usurped by ignorant racists such as the KKK, it was used to describe a political system that is the basis of the English-speaking world.  

 As I explain in my book, Liberty Inherited, Britain, and specifically England as an island nation, developed much differently than mainland Europe. As early as 500 A.D., with the Anglo-Saxon invasion led by the Germanic brothers Hengist and Horsa, we can identify the beginning of a cultural--not racial--character that continues to this day. As Churchill explains in the History of the English-Speaking Peoples, the Saxons created a “strong strain of individualism based upon land-ownership [private property]” that was to “play a persistent part in the politics of England.” In The English Constitution and Legal History Colin Rhys-Lovell explains that as early as 800AD the Anglo-Saxons considered themselves a commonwealth of freemen.  This was reflected in their laws and government, which established that

• All decisions in the selection of leaders had to be with the consent of the people, preferably by full consensus, not just the majority.
• The laws by which they were governed were considered natural laws given by divine dispensation.
• Power was disbursed among the people and never allowed to concentrate in any one person or group. 
• Primary responsibility for resolving problems rested first of all with the individual, then the family, then the tribe or community, then the region, and finally, the nation.
• They were organized into small, manageable groups where every adult had a voice and a vote.
•  They believed the rights of the individual were considered unalienable and could not be violated without risking the wrath of divine justice as well as civil retribution by the people’s judges. (Incredibly, as early as 800AD the Anglo-Saxons had the legal practice of trial by jury)

This highlights what Walter Russell Mead writes in God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World, “The Anglo-Saxons in the seventh and eighth centuries were free people, and that England owed its liberty and its most important institutions to these ancient traditions.” 

Thus, based on its Anglo-Saxon heritage, England became the birthplace of the principles that are (or were) the foundation of liberty—liberty the English-speaking world now takes for granted.  Additionally, it is the foundation of what was to become known as ‘Liberal Democracy.’

In fact, I argue that there would be no such thing as human rights if not for the Anglo-Saxons since their principles of individual rights, rule of law, and the limited power of government were alien to the system of government that developed on the continent or anywhere else in the world. It must be noted that at the time the system of government that was established on continental Europe evolved from the absolute rule that the Roman Emperors enjoyed. Under that system an all-powerful prince owned everything including all the land and the people within his realm.  (Note: this is why England (Britain after the unification of 1707) never has had a Napoleon, a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Franco or a Stalin.  It is contrary to their culture.)

Additionally, which may surprise many of us in the English-speaking world, much of the non-English speaking world sees the glaring similarities rather than subtle differences between our countries.  In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the United States and the British Empire were often jointly referred to as the “Liberal Democracies” or the “Anglo-Saxon powers.” (Note: Liberal in this case refers to the authentic Classical Liberalism, not the faux-modern liberalism of today)  Even as late the 1960s, French President and World War II hero Charles de Gaulle always referred to the United States and Britain jointly as “les pays Anglo-Saxonnes” (the Anglo-Saxon countries) and the term is still used by such enemies of liberty as Iran’s Ahmadinejad.

So, in it original form, “Anglo-Saxon” is a political—and not racial—term that describes nations that are based on the Anglo-Saxon principles of limited government, individual rights, private property, and free-market economics.  With President Obama’s contempt for most, if not all, of these principles and his scorn for the anything remotely English it is hard to believe that he would have a deep understanding of the special relationship that exist not only between the U.S. and the U.K., but also between all the English-speaking nations that comprise the Anglosphere. 

It is regrettable that the Romney adviser stated that Romney’s understanding of the ‘special relationship’ was due to his “Anglo-Saxon heritage” (as opposed to his worldview) since it denotes the commonly, yet ill-informed, understanding of the term as being racial.  Otherwise, what he said was 100% on target!