“I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on steady advance.” – Thomas Jefferson. Died July 4, 1826.
250 years ago, a group of optimists put their names to a
remarkable document, stating that the King, God’s representative on Earth, had
lost the right to govern by his own corruption, tyranny, inattentiveness and
incompetence. The Declaration of Independence claimed that human rights came
not from the grace of monarchs and emperors but were instead inherent and
God-given. The only reason the King, or any government, existed, was to secure
those rights, with the consent of the people. And if a government did not
secure those fundamental rights, the people had the right, indeed the obligation,
to rebel and to institute a new government. The Declaration of Independence
then set out, in detail, what the King had done wrong, from levying taxes
without consent, to withholding his assent to laws that would help the Colonies,
to restricting immigration to the Colonies. It was truly radical stuff, and those
who signed it did so knowing full well that it could mean ruin or death.
The Declaration of Independence is the founding document for
a new nation, not just a new country. This new nation, from its very beginning,
brought together people of disparate backgrounds. It is a myth that the United
States was ethnically or culturally homogenous in 1776. Religiously, the
country was religiously divided between High-Church Anglican, Low-Church
Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Anabaptist, Puritan, Quaker, Catholic, and
Jewish faiths. Within living memory of the Revolution, people were killing each
other over those distinctions. Boston would not see its first public Catholic
mass until 1788. Since the Act of Supremacy in 1534, Great Britain had been
torn apart by religious conflict, most spectacularly in the English Civil Wars
(yes, wars. Three of them). Great Britain wouldn’t stop fighting about religion
until 1746, only 30 years before the Declaration of Independence.
It is also a myth that the colonies were ethnically
homogenous. Other than the Africans who were kidnapped and brought here against
their will, there were French, French-Huguenot, and a considerable population
of Dutch and Germans, the latter of whom Benjamin Franklin though were a bunch
of shiftless layabouts. Even talking about “English” settlers ignores the
considerable numbers of people who identified as Welsh, Cornish, Scots, Scots-Irish,
and Irish. William Shakespeare, in Henry V, tried to get these disparate
peoples to see themselves as part of one British nation. He didn’t succeed, and
considering the current state of Northern Ireland, and the electoral success of
Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Nationalist Party, nobody else has managed to do
so in the intervening 400 years. Amazingly, the United States was able to
cohere as a nation in a way that the United Kingdom never will. The genius of
the United States was to make a nation of nations, not with appeals to ancient
history, or appeals to a common language or religion or set of customs, but
with a small set of ideas that anybody could choose to believe.
While we currently fret about the instability of the
American experiment, it’s amazing that it has lasted a quarter of a millennium.
Since the Declaration of Independence, France has had either two or three monarchies
(depending on how you count them), two Empires, five Republics, and one fascist
dictatorship. Each of these forms of government began and ended violently. Over
the same time-frame, Germany had a period where it was a bunch of independent
states under one loose empire, a period where those states were French puppet
states, a period of fewer, larger independent states, an empire pulled together
by and ruled by the most humorless of those independent states, two Republics, a
twelve year period that they’d prefer not to have to talk about, and this
45-year period where everybody was half-expecting the country to be destroyed
by World War III. In Russia, the 250 years since 1776 have largely been
characterized by lots of people trying to stop being seen as Russian and
instead seen as Polish, Finnish, Latvian, Ukrainian, etc. Italy spent about 500
years as a vague idea before finally uniting. Spain had a civil war that makes Gone
with the Wind look like You’ve Got Mail. Argentina in some ways had
a similar starting position to the United States, and yet it had a century of
tragedy and misfortune that it will take a long time to recover from.
The durability of the American experiment is because these
United States are bigger than the ego, desires, or vision of one man. The
Founding Fathers did not agree on what the country should look like, but they
left behind a form of government where people of wildly differing opinions
could find a way to govern themselves. We still talk about Alexander Hamilton
and George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson, not because they
agreed with each other, but because we’ve found a way of synthesizing the thoughts
and beliefs of each of them, in a way that they were never able to manage.
Of course, that does not mean that our country didn’t make
mistakes, or that it always lived up to its potential. Slavery and Jim Crow
were evil, and hypocritical. Genocide of Native Americans was evil. Our
imperial adventures were evil. But what sets this country apart is our
willingness to discuss that evil. It is the official position of the Turkish
government that the Armenian Genocide never occurred, and you can be sentenced to
up to two years in prison for saying that it did. Japan still isn’t fully honest
about its crimes in China during World War II. Poland hasn’t quite reckoned
with antisemitism, past and present. Russians have racist terms for Ukrainians,
especially amazing considering that some of the same people who use those slurs
also claim that Ukrainians are Russian. I point this out not to excuse the evils
that America has committed over the years, but to note that we are constantly
airing our dirty laundry in a way that other countries don’t.
I hope I live to see the tricentennial, 50 years from now. In
those next 50 years we need to keep a few things in mind. First, America has
been in some tight spots before, and in our own blundering, uneven, and often
non-ideal way, we have found a way forward and emerged the better for it.
Second, America is not great because it is rich and powerful, but because it is
a set of ideas that are so radical, that much of our national struggles are in
fact struggles to understand what they mean. Third, America does not belong to
you, or to me, but to all of us. We will succeed, or fail, together. It’s not
perfect, but it’s what we’ve got. Let’s try to improve it. Fourth, get the hell off social media, turn
off the TV, and go out and talk to people. Media is there to encourage,
exploit, and magnify the grotesque and outrageous, rather than magnifying real
life.
We are going to make it. God Bless America.
