There was a short period in my youth when I thought that America wasn’t a great country. That’s simply a side-effect of reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and listening to Rage Against the Machine while your brain is still going through puberty – I can’t be the only one who this has happened to.
Zinn’s book brought to my attention many of the historical and contemporary problems with the US but it is also an overly simplistic analysis and it doesn’t account for the many wonderful aspects of the country and all of the welfare that we have created as a society. Notably, we created a society where millions have the ability to live good lives.
This week we celebrate our Independence Day. We celebrate that we fought for and won the ability to determine our own affairs and manner of governance. What we chose to establish is a system where our natural rights are so deeply engraved into the bedrock of the land, that it didn’t matter who came to power – we were guaranteed the liberties that we needed to pursue our goals, free from excessive interference.
Our declaration of revolt against kings and intrusive parliaments was possible because of the theoretical framework provided by Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and others.
The social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke’s naturalistic conception of rights gave us the ammunition we needed to articulate what was wrong with being ruled by the likes of the British Empire, and therefore allowed us to give ourselves reasons to revolt.
The authority of the British Empire was illegitimate because first, we didn’t stand in appropriate relations of implicit consent with it (social contract theory), and second, because a government’s authority cannot be legitimate if it doesn’t respect values like freedom and equality.
What these theoretical frameworks revealed to us and to other citizenries is that the political entities of the time did not hold up to rational scrutiny.
The power of these Enlightenment ideas cannot be overstated. A few humans decided to sit around and think for a bit about what would be reasonable for individuals to expect from their governments and what they came up with led directly to numerous righteous revolutions and the world we live in today – one filled with western-style democracies where the people can generally live without fear that their autonomy will be interfered with.
Importantly, these ideas are still alive and well. We’ve built upon them and improved them, but they’re still roughly the same ideas that started this whole American experiment. If asked about it, I suspect that most Americans would still claim that they believe that the acts of government should be constrained by the unviolable liberties that we hold.
On this country’s birthday, which was founded on the ideals of constrained rule and of the respect for human rights, a concerning erosion of those ideals is underway.
The current administration is toying with the idea of shipping American citizens to foreign prisons. “They’re not new to our country. They’re old to our country. Many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth. So maybe that will be the next job,” Trump said to the press from his “Alligator Alcatraz.”
This 4th of July, something as fundamental as freedom of speech will be suffering attacks: the Trump administration has launched crackdowns on student protesters, attacked law firms who have opposed him in court, sued media outlets, and deployed the military to intimidate and dissuade people from expressing their displeasure.
Violations of constitutional checks and balances, which we put in place to protect ourselves from government intrusions, will interrupt fireworks and festivities – withholding funding approved by Congress, threatening judges and ignoring court orders, and usurping power from independent regulatory agencies.
Yes, there is quite a bit to be concerned about. But despite many pundits warning about constitutional crises and an unchecked executive, we are not yet at the tipping point. There may not be a tipping point at all. In virtue of being a freedom-loving people, it’s hard to see a future where we have fully succumbed to a lapse in democratic values. We have a lot to celebrate this 4th of July.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.
