Countering America's counter revolution
How to reclaim Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness for all
Rob Smith is the author of Primal Fear: Tribalism, Empathy, and the Way Forward. Drawing on stories and research, Smith’s book explores the evolutionary roots and contemporary drivers of the fear fueling today’s counter revolution. Smith also shows how, by cultivating empathy in ourselves and each other, we can overcome this revolution of hate and reclaim life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.
What is going on with America?
This division, anger, destruction and flaunting of our government’s separation of powers strikes at the very core of our democratic system. It is a political and cultural counter-revolution run amok.
America’s founders launched our nation with a revolutionary proposition 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.
That proposition ignited a worldwide revolution in how we view the rights of the individual and how they impact the liberty of the larger community.
Our founders went on to write: That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
So, while the rights of the individual were “unalienable,” government and the consent of the American people were viewed as essential in securing those rights.
From the start, a counter-revolution challenged that revolutionary assumption about universal rights. For some Americans, liberty meant the right to enslave another or to take their land if they were not white or European.
Nevertheless, for over 200 years our government continually expanded those rights: universal free education, Social Security, Medicare; and expanded those rights to Blacks, Women, Native Americans, and Gay citizens.
So, at a fundamental level, what we see today is not new. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the KKK, the Know Nothings, and anti-immigrant groups sought to deny those universal rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to Blacks, Catholics, Germans, Asians and, of course, women. This counter-revolution, from before the civil war to today, has challenged whether our government has gone too far in diluting the liberty of the individual, to accommodate the more diverse rights of the larger community.
Immigration helps farmers . . . mandatory childhood vaccination protects the school community . . . affirmative action levels the employment playing field . . . but others argue that they are being left behind or left out.
This tension is not all together a bad thing, provided that the tug and pull is carried out within the confines of the rule of law and the informed consent of the governed.
Fast forward to today
Today’s counter-revolution has been hijacked by Donald Trump.
In Donald Trump, we see the demagogue feared by our founders: populist, self-serving and autocratic. Yet today, far beyond our Founders’ worst nightmares, this counter-revolution is carried on a wave of conspiracy theory-fueled social media, extremist libertarians and powerful oligarchs, overflowing the levees of the rule of law and manipulating the consent of the governed. They have swept away the intended checks and balances within the Constitution and twisted beyond recognition the traditionally cautious wisdom of the governed.
This is no longer a political debate over the definition of “liberty,” but a human tragedy akin to the later days of the French Revolution, ushering in chaos, destruction and autocracy.
Recapturing the consent of the governed
There are no simple or easy political options to recapturing our democracy before it slips through our fingers. But I believe that the Founders would have suggested that if we recapture the consent of the governed, the rest will follow.
That is no easy task in a society where truth is hard to grasp. But without that consent, we are lost. Meeting that challenge requires us to make three heavy lifts:
Educating the electorate on the negative impact on their lives of this hijacked revolution. In the spirit of Radio Free Europe, we need a Social Media Free America.
Making empathy and understanding our political currency. As hard as that may be, it is our single most powerful weapon against hate and toxic division.
Our party and our leaders must paint an aspirational portrait of an America dedicated to making Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness a universal right, with no one left behind. That message needs to go on tour everywhere, 24/7.
Given the political intensity of the moment, this approach will be difficult for many of us to accept. But it rests upon the founders’ belief that in a democracy, we must trust our fellow Americans, and we must win the argument about who we are as Americans.
That trust in our fellow Americans rests upon the founders’ belief that if we tell the truth, show respect for each other, and provide the opportunity to bring America closer together, they will seize it. (Those founders knew what they were doing when they established E pluribus unum as America’s motto.)
Lastly, we must demonstrate (not just tell) our elected leaders that their constituents want cross-party respectful discussion, compromise and agreement.
What we can each do now
A small, but symbolic place to start might be for each of us to reach out to those with whom we politically disagree, to open our hearts and minds to their concerns, and see if we can begin to reach agreement on one or another problem facing our nation.
Our expectations should be modest, our hopes ambitious, as we identify two to three issues on which Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals, can find some points of agreement. Examples abound where citizens across divides have succeeded in doing just this.
If we can come together on a one-to-one basis, we might formalize our successes by asking those who find common ground to report their success by signing a written Pledge for a More United America to be sent to their Congressional Representatives.
It may be just a beginning toward securing the consent of the governed for a less divisive America, free of the current threat to Democracy.
When one million of those pledges reach the United States Congress, our country will change . . . because the people will have demanded and then demonstrated that we ourselves can make our democracy work.
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