Reclaim the living Constitution
This piece by Ryan Goodman called “Will no one defend the American republic?” has gone viral and for good reason. He lays out all the dysfunction in our current political environment in vivid, at times harrowing, detail. (Some of it might even make your hair stand on end.) I might quibbel with a few things but for the most part I think he’s right on.
But I think what is making this piece so popular is his prescription to cure the problem:
Is there any alternative? I think the best example of what might be called critical patriotism is provided by Abraham Lincoln. As Garry Wills writes in his brilliant book on the Gettysburg Address, in that speech Lincoln quietly altered the popular understanding of the Constitution as being at least tolerant of slavery and skeptical at best of democracy and majority rule.
Lincoln is here not only to sweeten the air of Gettysburg, but to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt. He would cleanse the Constitution—not, as William Lloyd Garrison had, by burning an instrument that countenanced slavery. He altered the document from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant stuff of that legal compromise, bringing it to its own indictment. By implicitly doing this, he performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.
Lincoln even more or less declared his intention in advance. In an 1854 speech in Peoria, at the end of a frankly rather slippery argument that the Constitution and the founding generation were against slavery and thus would support his efforts to limit its spread, he said: “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it … If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.”
Lincoln always had an acute sense for the grubby realities of power, but this wasn’t mere political cynicism; it was part of an act of political will. His strained (though not wholly dishonest) arguments about the founders and the Constitution were part of an effort that hugely changed the actual character of the country. He seized on the parts of American institutions and history that were useful to his purpose of destroying slavery, and downplayed the parts that were not.
Lincoln was thus able to convincingly claim political legitimacy (backed up by a massive national organization) as leader of the country and defender of freedom, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, and lead the country through a horrendously bloody war that actually did destroy slavery. It was, in a sense, a successful political prophecy. Then he used his unparalleled rhetorical gifts to cement the meaning of that sacrifice, and he and his party heavily revised the text of the Constitution and laws—with sweeping reforms to the currency, banking system, higher education, land, and more—to cement that new reality.
The histories of all nations have many threads, and many of America’s are dark indeed. But it is simply inaccurate to say that there is nothing worth defending or being proud of in there. Eradicating slavery was a great achievement. Enfranchising four million former slaves was one of the most radical expansions of democracy in world history. The New Deal was, on balance, a massive improvement on the status quo, even for Black Americans. The Civil Rights Movement was a splendid achievement.
More broadly, to put on an academic hat, there cannot possibly be such a thing as a national “essence” that will hold for all time. Political communities are malleable things—its character depends on who wins the inevitable constant struggle between factions.
Obviously I’m not a national leader and so I can’t lay out a political program that will reach the hearts of the masses. But a sketch of one is not hard to imagine. Start by appropriating the good side of the founding generation (centered on the Declaration), the Civil War and Reconstruction, the New Deal and the union movement, the suffrage and feminist movement, and the struggle against Jim Crow. Heroes with some popular resonance abound: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Tom Paine; Lincoln, Grant, Fredrick Douglass, Thad Stevens, and Harriet Tubman; Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt; and Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, and Rosa Parks. (Dozens of others could be added, of course.)
That stuff would serve as the propaganda and ideological glue to hold together a mass movement in favor of democracy and economic reform—the latter being critical so as to demonstrate the functioning of national institutions, as both Lincoln and FDR knew instinctively. One reason why faith in national institutions is collapsing—just 7 percent of Americans have confidence in Congress—is that they are so pathetically helpless in the face of enormous problems, from cancerous medical cost bloat to constant mass shootings of children to climate change threatening human civilization as a whole.
Plainly the Constitution is going to have to come under scrutiny in any such movement. In my view the Electoral College and the Senate are going to have to go, and the House be reformed to allow multiple parties (and thus diffuse escalating two-way mutual hatred in several directions) to have any prayer of the country functioning at all again. But even the Constitution has some good stuff, like the Bill of Rights and the Reconstruction Amendments, and defending at least its legacy of elections and the peaceful transfer of power against violent right-wing assault is a powerful rhetorical stance.
This will require people to be able to hold two ideas in their heads at once: the document that allowed egregious compromises on slavery and disenfranchisement of all but white male property owners also contained some brilliant, powerful, universal appeals to human rights and freedom. That is not our current vibe, to say the least. We’re in a time of not only throwing out the baby with the bathwater, we are throwing out the bathtub and all the plumbing as well.
But he’s right.
And maybe, if we survive the next little while without losing everything, there will be a realization that there is something of value in that old document and that it is written with the idea that it will evolve and progress over time. The “originalist” nonsense on the right is the biggest clue that this is the way forward.