Making our way to a better future
Where our greatest hope lies
The United States may be among the oldest constitutional democracies, but as a multigroup democracy, we are quite young and still finding our way. It is therefore fitting that the Democratic party platform, released at the Democratic Convention last week, opened with a simple question that goes to the heart of our current troubles:
“What kind of America will we be?”
That is the 16.3 trillion dollar question, based on the 2023 US budget setting our priorities as a nation. How we answer that question will determine whether our democratic republic goes the way of the Roman Republic in 27 B.C.E.—or learns from history and changes the odds.
This post and the next one explore how we can answer that question together—and together build a multigroup democracy that can meet the demands of the twenty-first century.
Remembering the forgotten road to now
This quest of ours to coalesce around who we will be, as a nation and as a people, has travelled a long, bloody road marked by conflicting visions of America.
It began in the 1600s and early 1700s when abolitionists and slave owners fought over the nascent slave trade. Most of us have heard about the introduction of slavery to Jamestown in the 1600s, but few of us know that as early as the 1600s, Black and White people fought to abolish slavery. In 1688, German Quakers in Pennsylvania drafted a petition against slavery that proclaimed: “to bring men hither, or to rob and sell them against their will, we stand against [it].” In 1739, Edward Oglethorpe fought the efforts of South Carolina merchants and land speculators to bring slavery to Georgia, arguing: “If we allow slaves, we act against the very principles by which we associated together.” At around the same time, enslaved and free African peoples living in Massachusetts petitioned the colonial government for their freedom, claiming it a natural right belonging to all men and women.
The question of what kind of America we will be has a long, contentious history reaching back to our founding as a nation.
With no resolution in sight during these earliest of days, slavery grew ever more entrenched in the southern economy, becoming a multi-million dollar business some dubbed “Black Gold.” By the time delegates gathered at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, efforts to end slavery threatened to derail the convention, and a core group of delegates crafted a tortuous compromise to salvage the effort: In return for prohibiting slavery in the Northwest Territories, the Constitution would retain slavery in the South, add a fugitive slave clause, define slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of state representation, and prohibit Congress from ending the slave trade until 1808.
The compromise passed, and 41 of the original 55 delegates ratified the Constitution. As soon as pen met paper, the animating idea behind slavery—that there is an innate, God-sanctioned social hierarchy—was set free to permeate our legal system, our economic structure, our culture, and our psyches.
Still, the conflict over slavery refused to go away. As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, a growing group of abolitionists, Black and White, agitated for southern slave owners and their northern partners to free the slaves powering their profits. The ensuing stalemate led Congressional leaders to propose and pass a series of increasingly desperate compromises, none of which could reconcile two incompatible visions of America: one in which all people were born equal with liberty and justice for all; the other in which people are ranked and sorted by birth along a social hierarchy with those of African descent at the bottom, legitimating their status as chattel.
By 1858 the growing fissure prompted Abraham Lincoln to utter the oft-quoted line: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He continued with words that speak to us today:
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year, since [The Kansas-Nebraska Act] was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.
As Lincoln predicted, our divided house could not stand, half slave and half free. And so two years later, a civil war broke out to determine, once and for all, what kind of nation we would be. That war lasted four years and cost 700,000 lives yet, despite all the carnage and a decisive Union victory, the question of who we want to be survived. With the assassination of President Lincoln, and the removal of Union troops from the South after yet another compromise, pro-slavery forces regrouped in an effort to keep their Black neighbors separate and unequal by spreading Jim Crow laws across the land.
Instead of going back, however, these Black neighbors—now citizens—went to court. In Litigating Across the Color Line, Melissa Milewski meticulously documents how hundreds of Black people sued for their rights in civil courts across the South between 1865 and 1950, winning 59 percent of the 980 suits brought across eight states.
In the 1950s, these early litigants passed the baton to the next generation, and the Civil Rights movement took up the fight. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, hundreds of thousands of Americans working together across race and faith pursued the cause of equal rights, culminating in a series of federal statutes that protected the rights of all people, not just some.
Those laws transformed our nation into a multigroup democracy
in which all groups have a seat at the electoral table.
Sadly, though, laws and elections alone cannot change hearts and minds. Nor can they determine who we want to be or choose to be as a people or a nation.
So once again, we are confronted with the remnants of this centuries-old identity crisis. As mainstream and social media remind us every day, these remnants continue to pollute our culture and our politics, threatening our economic prosperity and putting our democracy at risk.
It is too early to say what you and I will make of today’s turmoil. The only thing we can say for sure is this: Our survival—as a nation, a democracy, and a planet—depends entirely on what you and I do make of it.
Building on our history to make a better future
We Americans tend to ignore, forget, or simplify our history.
But if you look closely at how our history unfolded, you can see that people of all colors and faiths, from different generations and economic classes, within rural and urban communities have always banded together to fight for a more just and free nation.
People like you and me paved the forgotten road to now. Despite setbacks and reversals, our nation has always moved towards greater liberty and justice for all. At times, progress has been painfully slow, erratic, and marked by violence. But as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. predicted, the arc of the moral universe has moved towards justice.
And that is for one simple reason:
Throughout our history, We the People have fought for it.
That is our heritage.
In the days ahead, let’s remember that, because on that heritage we can build. Now that we are a multigroup democracy we can—and we must—learn how to fight alongside one another for something rather than simply fighting against one another to oppose something.
To see how, stay tuned for the next post. In the meantime, consider these words spoken almost two-and-a-half centuries ago by our first president in his final address to Congress before voluntarily stepping down.
“[H]appiness is ours
if we have a disposition to seize the occasion and make it our own . . .
“It is [the people’s] choice and depends upon their conduct,
whether they will be respectable and prosperous
or contemptible and Miserable as a Nation.
This is the time of their political probation:
“This is the moment when the eyes of the whole World are turned upon them—
This is the moment to establish or ruin their National Character for ever—"
– George Washington’s Final Address to the States, June 1783