Common Conviction

The premise of this blog is that the Declaration’s creed gives Americans a fundamental, unified national identity.  So political contests should serve as deliberations over means, best courses for America to reach toward our overarching national purpose.  Endorsements should be irrelevant in this discourse.  Unfortunately, something needs to be said in 2024.

Today’s politics make up a polarized non-dialogue between cultural, even identity camps.  Deliberation becomes a naïve hope and most serious issues go unaddressed except as mutually hostile rhetorical zingers. Or it might serve both sides to ignore, say, the burden of national debt servicing costs.  More on this potential catastrophe another time.  

Even in our political polarization, partisan positions, for the most part, could all be compatible with the core national purpose.  The actual ideas that can be gleaned from each side’s rhetoric do have rationales that fit reasonable principles of sense, justice, or need.  This holds for the most intractable issues.  The dominion of a woman over her body and an unborn child’s right to life are both valid; the political dispute over abortion is actually about where we enforce which over the other.  In a spirit of comity, in confidence that everyone sees it as tragedy when mother’s and child’s rights to end up in conflict, we should be able to hold civil, deliberations, however heated.  No answer will satisfy all, or possibly anyone, everyone would recognize this, and we would all seek the least bad solutions together.  If such comity were a part of normal public discourse, then most people could view elections as just that process of discovering what the people see as the best course for a nation of rights. 

The two main presidential candidates this year are, in policy terms, little more than avatars for the cultural camps.  Their polarizing language and overriding focus on hostile competition needs no elaboration.  Both tickets only know to push their sides’ agendas. 

Both sides will accuse the other of violating the Declaration’s creed (if they even bother), and both will continue their long-running degradation of our grasp of that creed, along with any feel for what is actually a shared national identity.  In this sense, the tickets give us little to choose from, except as the voter may have taken allegiance to one or the other sub-culture.

What America really needs is not one side or the other to win, but a new political discourse, and a deeper realization, in people’s minds rather than political doctrines, that we actually share an identity that is deeper and higher than left and right.

That said, Donald Trump must not be the President of the United States.  

This statement is no endorsement of Kamala Harris, whose tactics leave very reasonable expectations that she will push a leftist agenda as radical as the MAGA idea.  This blog should not have to make endorsements, and in fact makes none.  In particular, Harris regularly refers to Trump as a threat to democracy, but as Peggy Noonan notes, if she believes this, she should treat it as a national emergency.  For such an emergency she should be trading off partisan policy stances to pull conservatives and centrist into a coalition, to forestall the end of freedom.  While, say, Liz Cheney has put democracy ahead of political positions to join her, Harris has taken no such steps.  So it is not unreasonable to believe that the left’s “movement” is actually more important to her, with “democracy” just a potential weakness in Trump’s campaign.

Our creedal identity commits us to unalienable rights, equally endowed in all, and to government dedicated to secure those rights.  An abstract creed never gets fully realized in life, so our commitment is to further that principle, by our best lights, while also doing our best to assure that our institutional vessel is safe, sound and functional.  That vessel, in major part, exists in the Constitution, promulgated by the same “We” that holds the Truths of the Declaration.  Like any vessel of any social ethos, it rests on a social contract, and each American knows not to violate others’ rights, so that all may best live by their own lights.  Our politicians misuse these principles as fodder for their partisan rhetoric, but the principles in fact stand above the rhetoric and underpin our nation.

Donald Trump, specifically in his 2020 effort to overturn that election, showed a unique and explicit disrespect for the letter of the Constitution and the principle of social contract. There is no reasonable dispute that he did.

True, the Democrats have mounted unreasonable challenges to elections.  Hard adversarial monitoring of a close vote is one thing, general accusations of “irregularities” as voiced by Warren Christopher in 2000 and the subsequent litigation are another.  Democrats’ desperate reach for material on which to impeach Trump after 2016 was also unreasonable.  As cynical as the efforts were, as polarizing as the partisan left showed their political practice to be, though, they did go through the legal and constitutional procedures that govern us.  Those cases were raised in acceptance, however grudging, of the social contract. 

Donald Trump aimed directly to suborn or bully election authorities, endorsed fraudulent attempts to replace duly chosen electors, and, of course, encouraged a physical attempt to stop constitutional certification of the vote.  This conduct goes beyond distasteful personality.  It is unacceptable for anyone who seeks to carry the public trust.

To be sure, whatever the outcome of the election – and of almost inevitable disputes over the result – we will still have to contend with a bitter partisan politics, and with immense dangers to which they impede solutions.  Either side, in the White House or out, may mount unreasonable, even illegal efforts to damage the other, and those will require legal constraint, which will deepen our divisions.  Against this backdrop, the necessity of establishing some comity in America will get harder.  All the while, the world will be watching.  For billions, the idea of government dedicated to their rights is a dream.  How we conduct our self-government can either prove the idea a fantasy or reaffirm human hope.