Reflections on the American Experiment

Mount Rushmore 2016

In the past few years it has become generally accepted that the American experiment is over and it has failed. 

The Left points to continued racism and poverty.

The Right points to a loss of the way things used to be.

The Center points to rampant division and discord.

Our friends from beyond our borders point to the loss of American leadership.

It seems almost everyone believes the experiment in “We the people” governing ourselves by the rules of the social contract have come to an end.  I disagree.  It has not failed.  It has not yet been tried in a meaningful way.  We are still waiting for the American experiment to begin.

The phrase, itself, is instructive.  The phrase “The American Experiment” is a fairly recent invention.  It is true that many of the early voices in our history referred to their ideas as an experiment in liberty.  Down through the years, the phrase has been used with rhetorical flourish to highlight the exceptionalism of American Politics, including the high school history book by that name.  In the last 20 years the phrase has become very popular by the alt-right to justify their assault on the perversions of socialism and other forms of liberalism.  But it appears that the phrase “The American Experiment” is mostly used to defend a false narrative that we are a bold people who set out on a unique journey toward human freedom.  The only freedom that we have sought is the freedom to do whatever we wanted as a country.  We have never applied that freedom to “We the people.”

The small group of dreamers who gathered in Philadelphia in 1775 and 1776 had a vision.  It was described in a Declaration of Independence from England.  They believed that human beings could rise above selfishness and prejudice to create a new way of governing.  For the next 13 years they struggled to put their ideas to paper and on September 17, 1787 it was put before the various states for ratification as The Constitution of the United States of America States.  Fearing that the states would not ratify it, a convention was held in New York City in 1789 that added 10 amendments.  It was finally adopted and ratified in 1791.

The original document did not define “We the people”.  It left that little detail to custom and political expediency under the guise of “States Rights.”  In the south, a slave-owning society did not see the forced immigrants from Africa as being included in “We the people.”  In the west and north, the rapidly expanding frontier denied the aboriginal people who owned the land as being included in “We the people.”  The document showed a deep distrust of the remaining “We the people” by limiting their vote to electors for the highest offices in the new country.  The constitution specifically stated the slaves of the South to be property that must be returned if they escaped to another state.

Our founders were unable to rise above their own selfishness and prejudice.  They were unable to extend human rights to “We the people”.  They did not break  the social contract.  They never put it in place.  They feared that the states would not ratify it if “We the people” included Native Americans or people who traced their heritage to Africa.  Political expediency  would not allow the experiment to be started with the Constitution.

Many were still very disappointed by the original Constitution.   They saw that the hypocrisy in the document.  It did little to protect the Human Rights that it so boldly declared in the Declaration of Independence.  They felt that the Constitution needed some additional language to “secure the Blessings of Liberty”.

A Constitutional Convention was called and ten amendments were produced to address the fears of various State leaders.  Most sought to define more clearly the rights of “We the people” in the various states, ensuring that they were protected from the constitutional powers of the new federal government.  None of the states fully extended “We the people” to include all who lived within their borders.  There was no universal suffrage, freedom to move from one place to another, or equality under the law.  The social contract of the founders had not been written.  The experiment failed to get off the ground.

For the next 200+ years amendments have continued to be added to change, clarify, or rewrite this original document.  In all this time we have not created an American experiment.  We continue to live with a deeply amended shadow of the dreams of few men and women from the 18^th century.

What was that dream?  What was the social contract that they sought to create?

We the people… 

The dreamers believed that “We the people” was a real community.  For them, “We the people” had different religious and cultural values.  They clung to life on the rocky shores of a wide open frontier.  They were inspired by the possibilities that their time and place provided.  They shared a common commitment to the well-being of every single person.  They recognized that they were flawed.  Some did not extend “We the people” to include people of color.  But they all believed that “We the people…” existed and staked their individual lives in their defense.  “We the people” was supposed to include all human beings within and beyond their boundaries.  Some states simply declared some people as not human in order to preserve the illusion of the experiment. 

Self-governance 

The believed that each individual had a responsibility to act in the interests of “We the people.”    Self-interest should be set aside when it conflicted with the needs of the many.  Land could be seized, crime could be punished, and taxes could be raised to benefit the common good, or “general welfare”.  The dreamers believed that the collective will of  “We the people” should govern.  Ideally, each person was part of the American Franchise until the states began limiting it to propertied men of means.

Human Rights

All of this grew out of the Enlightenment insights of the Rights of Man, now called Human Rights. These rights were not granted by any person or group.  The Constitution did not give the rights to the people.  “We the people” did not will the rights to the people.   These rights were the from creator, not political structures or oligarchs.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The Declaration of Independence (1776)

These ideas grow out of the writings of John Locke and others in the late 17^th Century. He called them the “Natural Rights of Man.”  They were inalienable and universal and grew out of the older idea of natural law that can be traced back to the Stoics of Ancient Greece.  Locke defined these rights as the right to “life, liberty, and property.”  He argued that these rights could not be limited by any social contract, such as a Constitution.  This idea of rights continued to bubble for the next half century as European society struggled to understand the “social contract” that should govern humanity.  Our American Revolution was one among several that sought to defend the Natural Rights of humanity that were taking place at the end of the 18^th and beginning of the 19^th century.

Unfortunately, over the 200+ years since all this took place, the United States have developed an idea that we are an exception to the rules of history.  Our history is exceptional because we had the wisdom to throw off the shackles of European aristocracy (monarchial oligarchy) and become the first example of a real democracy in the modern era.  Neither the ideas that drove it nor the documents that gave shape to it sprang from any uniquely American genius.  They were part of a flow in human history that lapped over both shores of the Atlantic Ocean.  We are simply not that exceptional.  This exceptionalism found form in the mythology of the American experiment.

I believe that it is time to choose.  We must let  go of our exceptionalism and admit that we are a bigoted, selfish nation doing our best to survive in a complicated, violent world. Or we can embrace the promise held by those 18^th century dreamers. 

If we want to start the American experiment, it is time we…

…acknowledge and respect “We the people…” to include all people.  And, in this case “All certainly does mean all.”  Human rights are the birthright of every human being.   No one owes any gratitude to another for their rights.  The only thing we owe one another is to defend each and every human being’s right to life, liberty and property that enables everyone to pursue their own and their neighbor’s happiness.

…accept responsibility for our country and it’s governance.  We need to hold our leaders accountable to becoming a just government that protects these inalienable rights for everyone, at home and beyond our borders.  We cannot afford to blame our failure on our leaders or those who influence them.  “We the people” have the right and responsibility to be the mistresses and masters of our fate.  They, the government, act on our behalf.  They are the method by which self-government happens.  We must take responsibility for their actions and vote and/or act accordingly. 

… demand that our laws be guided by the rights of humanity, not the rights of the few for purely economic gain.  For over 200 years “We the people” have allowed economic concerns to guide our nation.  We are more concerned about taxation than liberation, trade than human freedom.  If we want to live into the dream of those gathered in Philadelphia in 1775-76, we need to experiment with being a just and fair society, ensuring that all have the dignity and opportunity that is theirs simply by being born a human being.  Until “We the people”  make this commitment, our nation will be just one nation alongside all the rest, unexceptional and destined to suffer their fate.

History will be the final judge on whether this experiment will succeed.  ‘We the people” need to hold fast to our principles and give government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” a chance.  The rest we can leave to history.