Keepers Of Our Republic
Americans Coming Together In One Nation, Never One Way
Keepers Of Our Republic
Americans Coming Together In One Nation, Never One Way
A Declaration for Interdependence
Twelve score and eight years ago, our Founders “brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”. Now we are living in a critical time, “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
– Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, 1863
“We, the People…do ordain and establish this Constitution…”
– U.S. Constitution
In the Declaration of Independence, our Founders agreed that self-evident truths and inalienable rights allow people to reject oppressive authority and govern themselves. Twelve years and a war later, after finding the first attempt at a Confederation insufficient, the Framers wrote our present Constitution. This document was designed to be a flexible blueprint for a government that reflected the principles of the Declaration. It also addressed the new Nation’s critical need of a common defense and economy for the People of thirteen vulnerable and competitive states. These two founding documents create an apparent dilemma at the core of our Republic, expose our Nation’s greatest sin, and help explain how our American Experiment has lasted so long.
The apparent dilemma is that the Declaration’s inalienable right of citizens to liberty seems to conflict with the Constitution’s authority to limit that right. The greatest sin is that the Constitution excluded so many people from participating, either by ignoring them or by considering them less human. It ratified unjust and often brutal practices that contradicted the principles of both documents. In those times, the creation of our Nation could only be agreed upon because the Founders consciously ignored these sins of omission and put off dealing with them. They recognized that their Constitution wasn’t perfect.
“…laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind… and keep pace with the times”
— Thomas Jefferson
Despite its imperfections, our Republic is among the longest lasting ever of this type of government. One reason is that the apparent dilemma at its core isn’t really a dilemma at all. It’s actually more like a car battery, and that car is the American Experiment. Look at it like this: the two poles of a battery (+ and -) may be contrary, like parts of the Declaration and the Constitution, but they work together to provide power. In our Republic, the dynamic tension between these poles (the positive right to liberty and the grounding limits on that liberty) provides the spark that’s continuously powering our quest for a more perfect Union. The process uses both poles, and continues unless the Republic disconnects from either one of them.
That power isn’t meant to produce a perfect result, but just to continuously pursue a more perfect one. It energizes a process that can adapt to the ever-changing balance between the individual and society, between our freedoms and our responsibilities to each other. Our Republic has never been and will never be perfect because things change. It will always be a work in progress or it dies. Our duty as citizen/owners isn’t to just pledge allegiance to it, but to also make it better into the future. We do that by self-educating, participating, working together, and contributing our different perspectives. That’s how we continuously recharge the battery.
“…the division of the republic into two great parties…is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil.”
— John Adams
The civic duty of the People is to make our collective wills known, and to conserve the virtues of American self-governance while making continual course corrections to the path we’re on. Individual citizens may lean more toward either conservation or correction, but holding both conservative and progressive perspectives at the same time is vital. It’s vital not just for the Republic’s continued existence, but for the psychological balance of the individual citizen as well. Healthy citizens make a healthy republic. Blindly defending one perspective while blindly attacking the other disconnects us from ourselves, from our fellow citizens, and from the power that enables our process of self-government. It short-circuits both change and balance, and the Republic begins to sputter and die.
Here’s the bottom line: it’s how we act, not what we think, that best defines the American Way. It’s the process itself —not any past, present or future manifestation of it—that we swear to defend against all threats, foreign and domestic. We need to identify and marginalize the threats to that process, and domestic threats pose the far greater danger because they can metastasize, unnoticed, inside our defenses.
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
— Walt Kelly
In this current time, just a few examples of these domestic threats include: citizens’ civic illiteracy, apathy or cynicism; uncompromising party politics and self-serving agendas; elected representatives who dare call themselves leaders and yet bend to the will of powerful private interests; the influence of money and faction infecting our elections, corrupting the political process and invading our private lives.
These kinds of threats, and many others of the modern age, have exaggerated our differences and obscured what we have in common. They’ve made us enemies of ourselves. They’ve eroded and then created distrust of a system of government designed to be our best defense against the rule of despotic authority. They’ve allowed unnecessary restrictions to curtail our liberties. They’ve infected what is good about our nation and blocked attempts to heal it. These malignant cancers have undermined our Union both now and in the past, and they’ve profited both legally and illegally from its decline.
Many of us look away from these threats or are indifferent to them, or worse. It’s easier to let something fall apart than it is to maintain it, and easier still to dodge responsibility altogether. But, it’s always we, the People, who are ultimately answerable for this Republic’s condition. Even if it’s derelict, it’s ours; we’re its landlords; we’re responsible for its health. Symptoms of decline are all around us, but our efforts to deal with these symptoms can feel futile. Even our natural differences of opinion about which symptoms pose the greatest risk are shamelessly exploited to fan flames of political passion, to increase ratings, and to create a confrontational stalemate in the American Process. We are both victims and accomplices in this exploitation.
“…the clamors of… factious men are often mistaken for patriotism.”
— Alexander Hamilton
In this current time of polarized paranoias, our political differences are also radicalized by true believers of every kind. These citizens race toward the extremes, demonizing each other and threatening to obliterate the center. They weaponize our opinions to attack rivals who share their codependent pathology, but who choose to blame different scapegoats and wave competing banners. They hijack our concerns and misuse them as fuel for their fire. Feeling themselves righteous, they (and those who choose to support them) don’t see or don’t care that the Republic fails if any extreme prevails.
No perspective is immune to such addictive extremism, because extremism isn’t measured by the content or the intensity of our convictions; it’s measured by how unwilling we are to co-exist with other people’s convictions. It isn’t determined by our views, but by whether our interactions with each other undermine or support the American Process. We can see our differences as a battlefield where we fight our fellow citizens, or we can see those differences as tributaries of the shared strait and narrow course of a self-governing Union. This is a choice each of us must make. It’s also the challenge bequeathed to us by our Founders. Will we meet that challenge?
“Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
“A Republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”
– Benjamin Franklin
We must each decide if we are willing to restore, preserve and advance the healthy civic functioning of our Republic. If we are, then we must harness our love of country and use its power to reinforce the center. This mission will be accomplished by altering behavior, not by changing opinions, so we will rely on the respect and support of fellow citizens who may or may not agree with us politically. Our common cause is to give our primary allegiance to the integrity of the American Process, not to our own interests. The Founders’ word for this most respected attribute of citizens was Virtue. Our fellow citizens who still value that virtue, regardless of party, are our true compatriots. We need to re-learn how to recognize each other.
In this Process, we will strive to make ourselves worthy of our citizenship. We will maintain our own unique perspectives and yet allow them to be flexible. We will seek what is valid in others’ opinions and acknowledge the limitations of our own. We will contribute productive support or loyal skepticism as needed. We will replace combative with collaborative communication and prioritize finding areas of agreement, not of conflict. We will abide our fears. Together, we can find the courage and the strength to do this.
Fighting each other is easy, dramatic, exciting and addictive, but it creates nothing. It just adds fuel to the fire that consumes the fighters, endangers the rest of us, and serves only those who benefit from the distraction. Fighting each other subverts the American Experiment in self-governance. Working together reclaims and restores that Experiment. Those citizens who choose to keep our Republic into the future, especially those we elect to serve us in this government we own, will take the more difficult path and reclaim the purpose of our Founders. We will calm down, unite despite differences, trust each other to moderate each others’ excesses, and celebrate interdependence as the only way that allows us to chart a common course.
Our willingness to do so is the measure of the sincerity of our patriotism.
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained…”
– Declaration of Independence
Therefore, in this critical time, recognizing that it is only the power of our Interdependence that can preserve our Independence, we reaffirm our support of the American Way we hold in common by re-pledging our allegiance to this Republic, one Nation with liberty and justice for all, and further resolve that we shall “have a new birth of freedom”, so that this “government of the People, by the People, for the People, shall not perish from the earth.”
– Lincoln, Gettysburg, 1863
E PLURIBUS UNUM