In what he bills as a ‘thought experiment,’ senior editor for the Atlantic Monthly Uri Friedman asks us to consider what the U.S. in particular and the world in general would be like today if we’d lost the American Revolution.
I launch all Democracy Cafe dialogue projects out of a spirit of optimism and an abiding faith in the wisdom and capacity of ordinary people to do extraordinary things in the name of making ours a more thoughtful, reasonable and inclusive world. But I do so not in a pollyannish sense, but out of a clear-eyed assessment that some telling and important things are amiss, and that it’s up to ‘we the people’ to remedy what ails us.
So rather than toy with a thought experiment that, for practical intents and purposes, lacks rhyme or reason, it instead prompted me, in Socratic fashion, to ask this arguably more pertinent and unsettling question: What if we in fact have, in respects, lost the Revolution?
Consider: As I pointed out in my Huffington Post blog announcing the launch of the Declaration Project, a measly 19 percent of Americans today believe they are being governed with their consent. A paramount reason American patriots risked their lives, fortunes and sacred honor, against bleak odds, way back when was because they believed they were being governed without their consent — and that is precisely what most Americans believe today.
As if that wasn’t dejecting enough, nearly three-fourths of my fellow Americans believe that our founding fathers and mothers would be ashamed of what we’ve wrought today — the pervasive sentiment is that our democratic republic would be unrecognizable to them, and not in a good way.
So might one make of this? What does it mean? Well, that we won the American Revolution, but that maybe we’ve lost it since then, in the sense that we’re no longer doing all we can and must to build on the laurels of our original patriots, but instead allowing their grand experiment in creating an unrivaled sort of open society to unravel on our watch.
American history has shown time and again that when we need to make aright something that has gone woefully wrong, we tend to write new declarations of independence that are modeled and adapted from our original — that this often proves to be a vital first step in sparking Americans to awaken the Spirit of ’76 within them and make our founders proud by wresting governance from those who would be heedless of the voice of the people and insisting in creating a form of government that is truly of, by and for the people. This requires self-governance, constant vigilance, and a willingness to risk it all — or at least a great deal — to achieve a greater or higher good.
On January 17, 2009, three days before his inauguration, President-elect Obama said that “while our problems may be new, what is required to overcome them is not.” Rather, he asserted, “What is required is the same perseverance and idealism that those first patriots displayed. What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives – from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry – an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.” (Bold italics mine.)
I have written repeatedly to the President, on his personal Twitter page, asking him what this new declaration he had in mind would look like. He’s been pretty responsive these days to requests from alternative ‘media’ and such, so I’m not giving up hope that he’ll reply — and I’ll keep after him.
Meanwhile, if you wrote a new declaration, what would it look like? Why not take some time to consider, and then post it on our site, in the MyDeclaration section?
Who knows, it might be the essential first step in galvanizing you to take action, and do all you can and must with your talents to make our nation all it can be — and in the process, make sure that we continue to win the American Revolution.
