This commentary was written by Paul L. Kendall, a retired corporate and not-for-profit executive who lives in Braintree.
In his Sept. 1 remarks to the American people, President Joe Biden presented his belief that our nation’s “soul” and its democratic traditions are threatened today by the power and influence of MAGA Republicans. Some commentators, while also decrying the mob-like aspects of former President Donald Trump’s MAGA acolytes, have attempted to shift the focus from the president’s perceived threats to democracy to those left-leaning politicians and government employees whom they perceive are threatening the rule of law. I believe that Biden’s perspective more accurately addresses our nation’s real threat than does that of these commentators.
Much has been made of the fact that the word “democracy” does not appear in our Constitution and that our Founding Fathers were as distrustful of democracy as they were opposed to monarchy. As opposed as they were to accepting a monarchy with its inherent rule by an aristocracy, their schooling in the classics of ancient Greece and Rome had shown them that democracy (majority rule) had the tendency to become rule by the mob.
What we seldom admit, however, is that the government our Founders created for us was in several respects an aristocracy with a democratic “fig leaf.”
First, the Founders did give to the public the right to democratically elect its Congressional representatives, but they narrowly defined that public to exclude women, slaves, indentured servants, Indigenous persons, criminals, aliens, minors and many who did not own any property. Second, the Founders reserved the authority to select federal senators to the then elitist state legislatures, and they established the Electoral College, also controlled by state legislatures, as the method for electing the president. Only after two centuries of struggle to adopt the Constitution’s 13th, 14th, 15th, 17th, 19th, 24th and 26th Amendments has our nation become more truly democratic.
President Biden said, “America is an idea” built upon the full palette of ideals so eloquently phrased in the Declaration of Independence and in the Preamble to the Constitution: liberty, equality, justice, and the general welfare. It has been the ceaseless quest of “We, the people” ever since to have our government actually honor these ideals that he referred to as “the soul” of our nation. What is threatening our nation today, however, is an imbalance among these four ideals: the exaltation of individual, personal and unlimited liberty above the other three.
While liberty is in many ways the source of our nation’s greatness, when my liberty is more important than your liberty; when pursuing my liberty is more important than respecting your civil rights; when insisting upon my liberty is more important than advancing the general welfare; or when upholding my liberty is more important than obtaining justice for others, then liberty becomes the nation’s Achilles heel. Battling against this kind of excessive liberty is, I believe, the battle for the soul of our nation today.
Perhaps the commentators’ attempts to shift the focus of discussion, from the president’s concern about threats to the nation’s soul to their preference for focusing upon threats to the rule of law, might be considered a diversionary tactic, an attempt to change the subject.
Threats to the rule of law are indeed real and present dangers to our democracy. The examples given of such dangers include President Biden’s canceling of student loan debt, the EPA attempting to regulate air pollution and a state seeking to limit concealed weapons — all of which are presented as threats to personal liberty. This may be, but they do reflect reasonable efforts to balance liberty with equality of opportunity and to protect the general welfare.
What makes such threat-to-the-rule-of-law arguments even more suspicious is their tendency either to favor an established and advantaged group of white, male property-owners or to protect the special privileges enjoyed by the property-owners’ corporate enterprises. In such cases, these arguments are actually undeclared efforts to maintain or to re-create a 21st-century version of the Founders’ aristocratically-flavored elitism. We have seen such arguments in several recent decisions of the Supreme Court.
Finally, attempts to shift the discussion from threats to the nation’s soul to threats to the rule of law may also reflect a disregard for the most recent national statement of our fundamental values. The Pledge of Allegiance that we make at virtually every Town Meeting both affirms and updates the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
We do not and cannot honor this pledge if we do not recognize that it implies a concern for the welfare of persons besides ourselves. For history and common sense tell us that neither liberty nor justice can exist without a commonly held concern for the general welfare and for the equality of opportunity for all Americans.
Whether one is a Republican or a Democrat, whether one is a believer in God or an atheist, our affirmation of the Pledge of Allegiance commits us as citizens and as voters to work for the realization and protection of liberty and justice for all. The battle for the soul of the nation is not an argument over legalisms. It is a reaffirmation of who and what “We, the people” are.