With the revelations of the Epstein files, the nation’s current institutional establishment is undeniably shown as a corrupt population. People from all political sides, all types of institutions, at the highest levels, were at least knowingly tolerant of Epstein’s sins, all too often active participants, and all inured to the idea that their indulgence or advantage outweighed basic morality.
This portrait poses a fundamental challenge to America’s founding.
America was conceived in a creed of unalienable personal rights equally endowed in all, and of government that exists to secure those rights. The idea of rights endowed by a Creator, prior to any human agency, implies that people, in their nature as a species, deserve these rights, that their exercise of free will has an end that is somehow, in some unspecified but essential way, of some merit.
Further, the idea of a nation founded in a creed differs from any that had come before; any polity by and large is still based on ties of blood, soil and divinity. This nation, at the time divorcing the sources of those “normal” ties, takes its existential premise from the idea that a creed of principle can displace those older binders.
A society of rights is an abstract aspiration, which will not exist in full form in any given moment, but lives for progress toward realizing that ideal. To make progress in this world, such a society requires viable institutions of society and state. Both that tangible vessel and the aspiration it carries depend on individual constituents’ embrace, corroborating conduct, and trust in each others’ commitments.
While the Declaration’s creed is not per se a commitment to “Liberalism,” its focus on personal rights is liberal in concept. Columnist Ross Douthat notes a tension between Liberal governance as “a thin canopy beneath which people can pursue their own thicker conceptions of the good life,” and people’s apparent proclivity to act as selfish, “atomized,” individuals. Means to address this tension include, as Douthat notes, religiosity among the people of a liberal society – a voluntary embrace of virtues and values. He also notes the implausibility of getting a “diverse and divided American public to vote for a politics of faith and virtue.” Another path has been, roughly, an effort to make the governance canopy thicker. This has led to a paradox cited by diplomat-philosopher Bruno Macaes – this thick “liberalism had been so extraordinarily effective at specifying the conditions of a free society that it could produce an answer to every political question … (but) the whole point of a free society was to let people decide important questions in their own lives … by the point an individual was ready to start living, every important question would already have been decided. Not on substantive grounds but as part of a detailed specification of what needed to be the case if people were to be free to decide how they wanted to live.“ Both of these approaches were meant to solve the same problem, to regulate people’s selfish proclivities as anomalies rather than deep essence of human nature. Now, not only are “the people” seen as subject to dissolution, but the so-called leaders of this society show themselves as self- indulgent, craven, and abusive.
Is it possible, then, that the idea that rights and free will have some basic moral value, is wrong?
Whether or not Americans can keep the nation viable in its rights-based conception was clearly going to be tested in perpetuity. The rhetorical flourishes that call us an experiment refer, at bottom, to this testing. And the results ultimately arise out of what we do.
Can America reset its course? If so, how? The only starting point will have to recall the founding tenets, to take them seriously rather than as rhetoric for partisan contest, and to build comity on them, subordinating the politicized differences in interpretation to the common ends they voice.
Common Conviction 