July 4th - the 246th since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. How should one tell the story of this experiment? I'm partial to the way Jill Lepore narrated it in These Truths in 2018. The idea of equal freedom and dignity for all human beings was better and more far-reaching than its originators could imagine. Their failures and hypocrisies need to be recognized as we strive for a more perfect union, but also so that we recognize that the idea might be better and more far-reaching than we can imagine, too. It's a heartbreaking but thrilling story, and an unnerving one. We know of profound historic exclusions and how right it was that they were overcome -n and how difficult their overcoming...
And the story hasn't finished: the future, if the idea is allowed to realize itself, will be different again than what we can imagine. But of course that's true about democracy all the time, or should be - we entrust the future to a process of which we are just a part: we deliberate, debate, and cast our votes but defer to the articulated wisdom of the majority. What a leap of faith!
It goes without saying that a significant part of the country is no longer willing to make that leap. It looks backward rather than forward, in many cases fetishizing the moment, two and a half centuries ago, when a bunch of propertied English colonists inspired by Enlightenment ideas (and most of them enslavers of Africans) decided to take their story into their own hands. "All men are created equal" was the idea, but they couldn't imagine that this related also to the men whose land they had invaded or the men whom the majority thought they could own, or, for that matter, the men of other continents being colonized by Europeans. Not to mention women: Lepore reminds us that until 1920, the majority of the population had no vote. (When I was growing up, Betsy Ross's sewing of the flag was the beginning and end of women's participation in the story.) The idea was a lot bigger than they knew.
Among those unwilling to make the leap of democratic faith today, many believe the founders where men of Christian virtue whose vision of the world we are bound to, or should be bound to. They don't just ignore the enshrinement of slavery in the Constitution until amendments made possible only by a wrenching civil war, but ignore the exclusion of women's voices in anything articulated by American lawmakers for more than 2/3 of our 246 years. And yet (the Supreme Court's "originalist" decisions on reproductive rights and freedom from fear of being shot tell us) we should defer to historical precedent, the older the better? The farther back you go, the fewer Americans had a chance to contribute to the wisdom of democratic majority - the less, yes, democratic these judgments were. Greater participation doesn't "replace" but completes us.
Unless we are forward looking - unless we dare to be - too easily corruptible American institutions drag us backward. (Arguably, the founders recognized this, initiating a process of constitutional amendment they imagined would continue regularly into the future, keeping the document and its ideals alive in changing circumstances.) Unless we understand the history as one which points beyond the limited vision of any generation, starting with the first and continuing generation after generation, we won't keep alive the ideal we're so privileged to inherit.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
