“…the clamors of…factious men are often mistaken for patriotism.”
— Alexander Hamilton
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…”
In their Declaration of Independence, our Founders agreed that self-evident truths and inalienable rights allow people to reject oppressive authority and govern themselves. Eleven years and a war later, after deciding that the new Nation’s first attempt at a Confederation was inadequate, the Framers wrote our Constitution. This document was designed to be a flexible blueprint that reflected the principles of the Declaration and established the initial framework of our government. These two founding documents create an apparent dilemma at the core of our Republic; they expose our Nation’s greatest sin; and they 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 Framers ignored these sins of omission and put off dealing with them. 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 together they create a spark. In our Republic, the spark between these two poles (the Declaration’s “positive” right to liberty and the Constitution’s “grounding” limits on that liberty) ignites the power that drives us toward a more perfect Union. The process needs both poles, and continues unless we disconnect from either one of them.
That power isn’t meant to produce a perfect result, but 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; that’s what makes it so unique. It’s the American Process. 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, working together, contributing our different perspectives and, above all, paying attention to what’s going on. 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
A primary civic duty of the People is to conserve the virtues of American self-governance while continually correcting our course toward what makes it better. 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 isn’t healthy. It disconnects us from ourselves, from our fellow citizens, and from the power that enables our process of self-government.
More and more these days, our two major political parties feed this bi-polarization by using a common playbook against each other, with the same kinds of combative tactics, accusations and defenses. The parties simply reverse positions depending on which of them has control of the political football. The partisan game these parties are playing, both in their never-ending electioneering and in their antagonistic daily governing, turns E Pluribus Unum into a partisan sports contest with smug winners and sore losers. In fact, there are actually few winners outside the halls of our government. The game makes all the People losers because it short-circuits both change and balance, and our 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 Process; and it’s that 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 threats to the process, and domestic threats pose the far greater danger because they 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: too many citizens’ civic illiteracy, apathy or cynicism; media outlets and politicians that manipulate or ignore objective facts to promote partisan ideology; uncompromising factional 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) have exaggerated our differences and obscured what we have in common. They’ve made us enemies of ourselves. They’ve first eroded and then created distrust of this system of self-government that’s our best defense against the rule of despotic authority. They’ve allowed unnecessary restrictions to curtail our liberties. They’ve attacked what is good about our nation and blocked attempts to defend it. These malignant civic cancers have undermined our Union now and in the past, both legally and illegally.
Many of us look away from these threats or are indifferent to them. It’s always easier to let something fall apart than it is to maintain it. Ever since our Revolution, we’ve also had citizens who oppose our kind of self-government, undermine it, abuse it, or threaten it with unpatriotic tantrums. Despite these obstacles, it’s always us, the People, who are ultimately responsible for this Republic’s condition. Even if it’s derelict, it’s still ours; we’re its landlords; if it’s failing, it’s because we haven’t kept the bsttery charged.
Currently, symptoms of failure are all around us, but our efforts to deal with these symptoms can often feel overwhelming or useless. Even our natural differences of opinion about which symptoms pose the greatest risk are shamelessly exploited to fan flames of political passion, increase ratings, and create a confrontational stalemate in the American Process. We’re 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 opposite extremes, demonizing each other and threatening to obliterate the center. They weaponize our opinions to attack rivals who share their codependent pathology, both sides waving competing signs and using each other as scapegoats. Whether they are in the streets, in the shadows, in the churches or in the government, these extremists hijack our concerns and use them as fuel for their fire. Feeling themselves righteous, they and their supporters don’t see or don’t care that the Republic fails if any extreme prevails. Extremism is a huge domestic threat because it can actually become a domestic enemy. It can gain enough power to actively subvert our Constitution and/or cripple any of our three branches of government.
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’s determined 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 on-ramps onto the shared strait and narrow course of a self-governing Union. This is a choice each of us makes. 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’re willing to restore, preserve and advance the healthy civic functioning of both our Republic and ourselves. 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 changing our behavior, not by abandoning our 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 civic integrity of the American Process and then, secondly, to our own political interests. This is as true for us today as it was for the Founders. Their word for this most respected attribute of citizens was Virtue. Our fellow citizens who still value that virtue are our true compatriots, regardless of party, class, education or appearance. We need to re-learn how to recognize each other.
Fighting is easy, dramatic, exciting and addictive, but it creates nothing. It just adds fuel to the fire that consumes the fighters and endangers the rest of us. It only serves those few who, like pickpockets in a marketplace, incite and profit from all the distraction. Fighting each other subverts the American Experiment in self-governance. Working together reclaims and restores that Experiment.
Those of us who choose to keep and improve our Republic into the future—especially those we elect to serve us in this government we own—will take the more responsible path, reclaim the purpose of our Founders, and work to restore our Nation’s civic integrity. We will calm down and sober up, unite despite differences, trust each other to moderate each other’s excesses, and celebrate interdependence as the only way that allows the People to chart a common course.
In this Process, we will strive to make ourselves worthy of our citizenship. We can maintain our own unique perspectives while allowing them to be flexible. We can find what is valid in other people’s opinions and acknowledge the limitations of our own. We can contribute productive support or loyal skepticism as needed. We can replace combative with collaborative communication, and look for areas of agreement rather than conflict. We can abide our fears. The common cause we seek is hiding in plain sight: it is this Process, this grand Experiment, this American Way. Together, we can find the courage and the strength to defend it.
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