Declan Ganley delivered the following address at the Acton Institute’s "Crisis of Liberty in the West" conference in London on December 1, 2016. Sir Roger Scruton's presentation may be read here. A video of the full conference is available online here. – Ed.

The pursuit of “liberty and justice for all,” a cause to which millions of Americans pledge renewed allegiance every morning, has been the idea which has defined not just that country, but the whole of the Western world, in the 70 years since the defeat of fascism.

Ours is a civilization whose great monuments bear witness to our identity as the “home of the free,” from Lady Liberty’s torch raised high above her head at the mouth of the Hudson, to the Freedom monument in Riga where as a young man I first bore witness to that triumphant expression of man’s long struggle to seize for himself control over his own destiny.

Today, the great struggle for freedom is being waged not against enemies without. The West has proved itself superior, time and time again, to those tyrants who would practice Orwell’s vision of a mailed fist smashing a human face.