As we look toward an inauguration on January 20, I think of Robert Altman’s movie Nashville (1975) and its leadoff song: “We must be doing something right to last 200 years.” Can we say the same thing this year as we celebrate our 250th anniversary of the American Revolution’s start in 1775? Maybe not, given our deep national divide, but it’s worth thinking about what we have done right, what we’re doing wrong, and whether we can get back on track.
What we’ve done right was summarized well by Abraham Lincoln: America was “conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” America, in a sense, was a liberty theme park where all would enjoy the thrill rides of building families and careers. All would be free to wave their arms as long as they did not hit the noses of their neighbors. Lincoln at Gettysburg spoke of an America “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
The first three words of the U.S. Constitution are “We, the people,” but the big experiment in the 19th century was whether the “we” would include millions of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. George Washington advanced America’s religious expansion when he wrote to a synagogue in 1789, “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants … everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Some Protestants fought the idea, but by the end of the 19th century the consensus was clear: “We the people” included Catholics and Jews. The “We” included blacks from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the end of Reconstruction in 1877, but they had to wait for four score and seven years after that to gain voting rights and other civil liberties. America did expand the “We” in the 1880s whenever ships full of immigrants passed the brand-new Statue of Liberty and docked.
The big 20th-century experiment was whether the “We” could include different racial groups and immigrants from all over. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Immigration Act eventually allowed millions of old and new citizens to sit in safety under their own vines and fig trees, with—for the most part—a common understanding of what it means to respect liberty and justice for all.
In 1973, though, an issue that had always lurked in the background, abortion, came to center stage. In his 1992 Caseydecision, Justice Anthony Kennedy issued a non-viable philosophical concept: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Those 27 words launched a thousand mocking quips. William Bennett criticized its “open-ended validation of subjectivism” and Michael Uhlman pointed out its “almost infinite plasticity.” First Things applied a label that stuck: the “notorious mystery passage.”
But Kennedy was on to something important. Liberty in an earlier America meant live and let live, but live within a common reality that does not include file cabinets marked “my facts” and “your facts.” Post-Kennedy and within postmodernism, we often live in our own bubbles and don’t recognize inconvenient facts. Internet algorithms feed users only news they want to see. The rise of opinion journalism along with the decline of street-level reporting intensifies tendencies to isolate ideologically.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a smart policy analyst who became an unusually thoughtful senator, once said: “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” That’s not true now. “One’s own concept of existence” includes the right to define what existence is. Pesky alternatives? They’re pests: Fumigate them!
In 1988 I wrote a book, Prodigal Press, that criticized the media world I had grown up in, where most major cities had one newspaper that offered stories from a liberal perspective, as did the two major national news magazines, Time and Newsweek. I looked forward to a new news order in which thousands of flowers would bloom as writers sent stories directly to readers’ home computers.
I forgot how important editors are, though. The old liberal order buried many stories but at least gave everyone some common reference points. Now we learn about the character of our leaders largely through what we read and view, which means we don’t learn about it—or we see only what propagandists want us to see. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby nearly a century ago told us about the danger of trying to create our own reality, but Anthony Kennedy said the Constitution guarantees our right to do just that—and many agree.
America, though, has never established a democracy of desires—and America’s founders were not fond of democracy in general. After all, when a bystander asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of political system the Constitutional Convention had hatched, he famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” He didn’t say “a democracy,” because he and others knew how hard (and maybe impossible) it is to keep one of those.
Readers who remember this may also recall what they learned in a high school civics class, if they encountered that dying breed. Civics courses are largely extinct, so here’s a brief review: America’s founders, because they understood our human tendency to lord it over others, did not like democracy by itself. They thought it would lead to “mobocracy,” rule by crowd psychology and the passions of the moment. (A century later, Lord John Acton would say, “It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.”)
Of course, the fighters of 1775 also did not like monarchy, because it could lead to tyranny, nor did they like aristocracy, which could result in feudalism. They eventually created a federal government incorporating all three modes of organization and building in checks and balances. They made the president a type of constitutional monarch with a four-year term. They created a Senate they hoped would be a meritocracy, short-leashed to minimize aspirations toward feudal lordship. They created the House of Representatives as the voice of democracy, expecting that other branches would offer protection against mobocracy.
The founders also foresaw a time when the executive and the legislative branches might join forces to preserve their own power, at the expense of liberty, so they encircled the triangle they created with a Supreme Court that would prevent or at least curtail such grabbing. They threw another circle, state legislatures, around their construction, with the goal of providing a further defense against tyranny. And, as I explained in teaching journalism history to a generation of University of Texas students, they hoped an independent press would be one final rope around the whole.
America’s founders also created a system where we would vote for people we knew. We’d vote for state representatives we knew. The state legislature would select a senator its members knew. We’d vote for members of an Electoral College we knew, who would then select a president they knew. We’d vote directly for members of the House of Representatives, but the districts would be small enough so we’d have some personal interaction with our reps, who would live among us most of the year and often serve only one term.
But that was then. We’re much bigger now, and maybe badder.
To have lasted 200 years, the United States did much that was right, but we are straining at 250. The Center for the American Experiment—located in Minnesota—remains my favorite name for a think tank, and with a new inaugural upon us, the experiment will intensify. In an age of identity politics and with all the controversy regarding refugees and immigrants that was the centerpiece of so much campaign advertising, can America still be a melting pot, with the Many becoming One? Or will we have to settle for a chopped salad?
I’m very curious as to whether Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric becomes a ruling reality after January 20. I also wonder whether we can find a common definition of what virtue is. My book on 18th-century America, Fighting for Liberty and Virtue, came out 30 years ago, yet I think the title still summarizes the two revolutionary goals that often push up against each other. Their interrelation will be fascinating to watch during the next four years.
