The American Struggle

 

The American Struggle

I have read two books that have very similar theses. They are The Soul of America by Jon Meacham and Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson. Both of these historians present American history as a constant struggle between those who support the values of the Declaration of Independence and those who want to discard those values for their own benefit. Both authors consider the beginning of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence to be a statement of the principles on which this country was founded. Those words read: “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 has never actually been part of the law of the United States. Its drafters didn’t intend it to be a legal document. They intended it to be a political document declaring the independence of the thirteen American colonies from Great Britain. Many authors, including Meacham and Richardson, treat it as one of our nation’s founding documents, and I suppose that in a way it is. It is a profound if also problematic statement of certain basic principles upon which we like to think our country was founded.

I say that the Declaration of Independence is problematic because at least two serious shortcomings are either obvious on the face of the document or appear from the context in which that document was adopted. First, the Declaration uses the word “men” to designate those who are created equal. Some might say that “men” is a generic term for all humans, but it is highly unlikely that that’s what the men who signed the Declaration of Independence intended. In their world, women had no rights at all. They were, essentially, first the property of their fathers, then the property of their husbands. They had no voice in public affairs. In no way were they equal to men in that world.

The second shortcoming isn’t as obvious on the face of the document but is just as important. It says “all men” are created equal, but the drafters of the Declaration, including its principal author Thomas Jefferson, did not consider all men to have been created equal. Many of them, including Jefferson, were enslavers of Black men, women, and children. In no way did they consider Black human beings to be the equals of white human beings. Some of the enslavers among them may have had moral qualms about slavery, but few if any of them felt badly enough about owning other human beings as chattel property to stop owning other human beings as chattel property.

Thus, it is possible to romanticize the Declaration of Independence. It is a stirring statement of truth, except perhaps that nothing is really self-evident. Yet this country got off to a start that had little or nothing in common with that statement. The notion that white people are superior to Black people has been in this country since 1619, when the first enslaved Africans were brought to what became Virginia. White supremacy has been a core element of American values from the very beginning. So was androcentric misogyny. Our so-called “Founding Fathers” didn’t think that the First Nations people of North America were really human either. Slavery, the racism in which it was grounded, and sexism are inseparable aspects of the American vision from this country’s earliest years as British colonies until today.

Both Meacham and Richardson see American history as an ongoing struggle between the values of freedom and the anti-values (my word, not theirs) of slavery, white supremacy, and male supremacy. That struggle intensified in the 1850s, when a significant number of northern whites began to demand the abolition of slavery and northern public opinion turned against that diabolical institution. After the 1860 presidential election, the struggle erupted into civil war. The Union, which had begun the war fighting to preserve the Union but came to be fighting to abolish slavery, won.

Right after the Civil War the nation did some good things. It passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which outlaws slavery except as punishment for a crime. It passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which does several things. It provides that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens. It provides that no state shall “abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” whatever that means. And it says: “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Those last two provisions, known as the due process clause and the equal protection clause, are mainstays of constitutional law today and have been for a long time. The Union adopted the Fifteenth Amendment. It guarantees the right to vote to all citizens regardless of race, color, or condition of prior servitude, that is, because a person was once enslaved. It was adopted to give Black Americans the right to vote. It provides that Congress has the right to enforce it by appropriate legislation.

All of which is very well and good, but it certainly didn’t stop Southern white supremacists from creating the system of discriminatory laws known as Jim Crow. Beginning in 1877 with the North’s abandonment of Reconstruction, white supremacists, mostly but not exclusively in the states of the former Confederacy, restricted the rights of Black Americans in every way they could. Richardson calls what they constructed a “hierarchical” system that placed whites over Blacks. Especially but not exclusively in the South, the anti-values of white superiority became the order of the day. Despite the Fifteenth Amendment, Southern whites effectively stopped Black citizens from voting from at least the 1870s into the mid-1960s.

The struggle between the values of the Declaration of Independence and the hierarchical values of those who opposed them took on another form in roughly the 1880s and 1890s. At that time, large corporations like Standard Oil and several others controlled both the American economy and the American political system. A very few men became immensely wealthy while those who worked in their factories lived in poverty and squalor. The humane values of the Declaration of Independence rose up to oppose the defenders of that system. President Teddy Roosevelt became a “trust buster,” breaking up monopolies in various fields. Efforts began to improve the lives of the working poor. Frances Perkins was a leader of that movement. She later became FDR’s Secretary of Labor and was a major architect of FDR’s New Deal. In opposition to the New Deal, many who Richardson calls advocates of hierarchical national structures turned to fascism. There were a lot of American fascists in the 1930s, and they came closer to taking power than most of us are aware of.

Declaration of Independence values asserted themselves after World War II. Black and Indigenous Americans who had fought for the country in the war began to demand that the government protect their rights. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others led the Civil Rights Movement. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through Congress and signed them into law. The country seemed to be moving in the right direction.

But then. Then came Richard Nixon. Employing what he called his “southern strategy,” Nixon appealed to Americans who opposed the expansion of civil rights that had been taking place since the 1930s. He pandered to Southern racists, and he won. That he did was bad enough, but then came Ronald Reagan. For most of American history, the federal government has been, at least to some extent, the defender of civil rights and the agent of constructive change in the country. Reagan told people the government isn’t the solution to your problems, it is the problem, a statement that Reagan may or may not have believed but that was demonstrably false. In 1980 this country inexplicably made this former B movie actor president. We haven’t recovered yet.

The hierarchical forces in this country, to use Richardson’s term, have now reached a zenith of power and prominence in the MAGA movement led by Donald Trump. That movement is clearly fascist in a way no American movement with any hope of electoral success ever has been. Adherents to that movement are looking to give up their liberties in order to be ruled by a strongman who, he promises them, will restore white men to the positions of exclusive power in this country that they once held but have been losing at least since the 1960s. Trump and his MAGA movement do not believe in democracy. They do not believe in civil rights for Black, Brown, and other non-white Americans. Trump wants to be an American Vladimir Putin. He wants absolute power. He wants everyone who works in the federal government to swear loyalty to him not to the constitution. Declaration of Independence values are threatened today in a way they have not been since 1860. Donald Trump is the greatest threat to its better angels that this country has faced since South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter.

Will Declaration of Independence values reassert themselves? Can they defeat Donald Trump and his mobs of violence-prone supporters? Can they even survive at all? I wish I could say with confidence that the answers to those questions is “Yes.” I can’t. Trump has whipped up such a large number of American fascists and fascist supporters that he may well win the 2024 presidential election and be back in power. If he does, he will try to establish himself as an authoritarian ruler on the model of Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. His doing so would be radically anti-American, but it is what millions of Americans apparently want him to do.

I cannot fathom how bleak my country’s future will be if Trump wins in November. I don’t expect him to build an American Auschwitz. I don’t expect him to commit genocide, though he is now talking about building camps to house the enormous number of people he says he will arrest and deport, something that is at least a faint echo of Hitler’s death camps. I do expect him to destroy our relationships with NATO and other American allies. I expect him to gut the federal government, claiming that he is eliminating the “deep state” of anti-American people who, he claims, have infiltrated every aspect of that government. I expect him to nullify every environmental and worker safety law he can and to try to get Congress to nullify the ones he can’t. I expect him to continue his campaign of turning the federal judiciary into rot by nominating ideologues not good legal minds for federal judgeships. I expect women along with racial and sexual minorities to lose much of what they have gained in recent decades in their respective liberation movements.

I believe that our only hope of surviving another Trump presidency is that Declaration of Independence values may rebound against oppressive forces the way they have in the past. Those values have survived concentrated assault from American fascists and fascist types before. That those values are still alive among us gives us, I guess, a ray of hope.

But those values have never faced anything like the voting power of the MAGA movement. And of course, Trump doesn’t have to win a majority of the popular vote to become president again. The way most of our small population states will vote for anyone with an R after their name can give Trump an electoral college victory even if he loses the popular vote. That’s what happened in 2016. The back and forth of American history between Declaration of Independence values and anti-American values may give us some hope. I sure wish I felt more strongly that that hope could overcome of hatred and fear of the MAGA movement. May it be so.