As mid-term elections approach, a reflection on what’s at stake is in order. In the year we marked the 250th anniversary of independence, it would seem appropriate to recall that this nation conceived itself in personal rights and government by consent of the governed. Others have embraced democracy and liberal values, but exist as nations on other bases, usually tracing to blood and soil. They can choose other value systems and remain the nations that they are. We cannot renounce the unalienable rights, or government committed to securing them, and still be America.
The point is not to moan how we are undermining our founding – our politicians will tell us how the other side is doing that. Rather, we need to recall that we are unusual in this national identity based on a principle. We can also recall that this idea of a nation was unique at our founding, and are still highly unusual. As such, we bear a burden of proof, that this odd nation can really work.
Proof, above all, lies in our ability to keep faith with our founding creed, for which we need to maintain our self-determination. And as our sovereign is ourselves, “We the People of the United States,” it falls on us, person by person and as a society, to keep both. If we can’t or if we don’t, then this novel and odd idea of nation will be proven a fantasy. The old tenet will again be taken as truth, that humans need to be ruled by higher power, as creatures of need and fear and selfishness. We are a perpetual experiment, and every turn of life presents a test.
Elections, cast in this light, might be treated differently than candidates, media, pollsters, and indeed voters do. It does appear that events have led to some dilution of our two party polarization in public discourse – “double haters” now get headlines. Perhaps we are not sheep, passively picking from the menu presented by the machines.
Or aren’t we? At least some of the evidence suggests that much of Americans’ impatience has to do with health care costs and credit card interest rates. And maybe food and fuel prices and maybe educational outcomes. As columnist Janan Ganesh discerns in affluent democracies, “Voters reject policies – however objectively necessary – that cost them anything.” Evidence abounds, in the “huge levels of government debt” and the “flaying alive of almost any leader who tries to fix this or almost anything else.” Are free voters’ claims of right and justice any more than rhetorical claims for animal wants?
Is this also true among Americans? Even if third parties can gain traction in the electoral process, will they do anything to point toward our principles, or to refute the old tenets, of material motivation – and blood and soil?
The only thing that will elevate our politics, and our governance, will start with what we, each in our own lives, wants for America. And the nation has lived up to its premises, in exceptional fashion, before. As columnist Gerard Baker reminds:
“My parents owed their freedom and even their survival in significant part to the sacrifices Americans made in defeating the fascist tyrannies of Europe and Japan. I owed my liberty to the steadfast determination of the U.S. in a long struggle to face down communist Russia … You couldn’t fail to be impressed at and grateful for the triumph of American power. But most of all, you were overwhelmed that America had exercised that power not so it could impose its writ on us or to exact tribute, but to enable us to live as we wanted … No nation on earth, no society in history has ever combined such power with such a willingness to use it for good. … Even (our wrongs) were done in pursuit of the higher ideal—seen as means justified by the end of making the world safe for freedom”
Furthermore, Baker notes, “This virtue aligned neatly with American strategic interests.” It also aligned with George Kennan’s invocation of “America’s best traditions” at the end of his “Mr. X” article. Our deepest strategic interest and our best traditions are baked in to our nationhood. We exist for the sake of rights, equally and inherently endowed in all.
No doubt, the governing agents we elect must be accountable for mismanagement of public life, not excluding health care costs and fuel prices. And no doubt, elections must serve to keep them accountable. But underneath the particular complaints, we should remember that our actions need to align with our virtues. And those come from our identity of principle, on which we premised our very national existence. Politicians will, and do, raise rhetoric – more now assembled by AI – about the Declaration and our freedom. But, in the end, we the people need to hold them accountable to principle, ethics, and our national purpose, in their doings, in their personas, and in their commitment. While electoral menus usually don’t have that accountability on the menu, the more we, each and all, keep that in mind, the more likely that ambitious politicians will figure out how to play to that.
