Dissent of the Governed
America almost didn’t happen. When the framers gathered in Philadelphia in the sweltering summer of 1787, the future of American nationhood rested on nothing less than a furious, impassioned brawl of ideas. In the wake of a hard-fought revolution, where thirteen, loosely bound colonies unshackled themselves from the oppressive yoke of the British Empire, a group of businessmen, farmers, slave owners and future presidents came to Independence Hall, to debate the means by which they would now be governed.
Well studied on the mechanisms of the ancient Roman Republic, and students of enlightenment philosophers from John Locke to Baron de Montesquieu, the delegates who convened to draft what would eventually be known as The Constitution, were committed, at least in the general sense, to the idea of self-government.
Yet the idea of self-government was just that: an idea. What would the ideas of self-government entail? How would the ideas, which were divided along regional, racial, economic and ideological lines be drawn? The creation of any successful democracy would only be as strong as the durability of its ideas, and while America has endured as the most viable form of self-government in the past 243 years, the Constitution was nearly not ratified. By way of vicious disagreement, wearying debate and most important, compromise, a young nation forged its blueprint, however flawed, toward some semblance of freedom.
The fervent and essential need for disagreement in a democratic society is the raison d’être of America. Ideological, political, and especially cultural fault lines, in our own overheated time, often feel irreconcilable, even insurmountable. But America has forever been its own burbling potion of ideas, a veritable cauldron where the most noble of ideas have often been blended with toxic and unjust notions which violate its essential faith. Now more than ever, or at least since The Civil War, our ostensibly united land feels more polarized and less capable of democracy’s crucial lifeblood: engagement.
To be sure, our current morass isn’t simply to lay blame on liberals or conservatives. Across the ideological spectrum, self-appointed warriors, at once righteous, dogmatic and unwavering, remain at loggerheads with each other. Our political culture, and by extension our nation, has always been an example of what might be called frustrated dynamism. Indeed, as the American experiment has advanced through its history, our aspirational notions of equality and freedom have been met by the forces of reaction. Still, the friction, the interplay, and the forging of our “better angels of our nature” as Lincoln so eloquently put it, has been our source of our strength. Our framers worried about what they called “factions,” and Washington, in his farewell address, famously warned that partisan schisms would threaten the health and viability of the nation. In our own era, this need for debate, for honest sparring, but for most of all, bonafide civic engagement seems at best, futile, and at worst, nearly extinct. America was born of revolution and its origins are distinctly ideological. But the bending of seemingly inflexible wills helped reconcile differences to a chart a course for our successful self-governing democracy. In an age of hyper-polarization and self-righteous grievance, our past recipes for success must not only be cultivated, but replicated, yet again.
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